Attract mode for a pc,mac game

Does anyone know what approach to record a characters movements to create a Attract Mode for a PC and Mac game?

 

Can you elaborate?

 

He's referring to the demo mode that plays on arcade machines.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AttractMode

It's entirely dependent on the game. If the game is deterministic you can just record player input and play it back through the game. If it isn't then you'd need to record quite a bit more data (transforms, animations, etc) for both the players and any enemies.

I haven't had to implement this for projects (either it wasn't needed or someone else handled it), but if I did I'd probably start with a script attached to every important object that recorded the necessary data and passed it off to a master script for storage and serialization. Playback would involve requesting the data back from that script and feeding it into the object.

 

What Ryiah said. If you've decoupled things well enough it shouldn't be hard to write an input recorder that simply collects a list of sequential presses you can then feed to the objects again. I'd implement recording as a feature of the input handler, so that a list of inputs is built while playing a game, and the input handler would be interchangeable with a playback list handler.

If the game is more randomised it's as "easy" as just implementing a perfect player-replacement AI

 

You could also consider using a capture program like Fraps to record a few play sessions, and then just playing one of those videos as an attract mode. Very little code required doing it that way.

 

Cheap and dirty

Should work well on desktop, where you can expect to have space for some video.

 

+1 for just prerecording videos with a screen capture set up.

If you must capture actual player footage at run time, then I would simply shove every transform into a set of animation curves. My trending project could be used to do this, with a little tweaking.

https://bitbucket.org/BoredMormon/trend.me

 

For that matter it gives you a starting point for a video to upload to each store.

 

That seems interesting any tutorials on how to go about doing this? I've been working with C# for a year now and always learning.

 

None that I'm aware of. I could probably do one up if you are interested, but I can't promise one any time soon.

 

Yes that would help immensley thanks!

 

I'll add it to the list.

 

I would absolutely do this. There's no way I'd design/implement a complex and potentially heavy system when I could just use a video texture.

 

Why have an attract mode if the game is not going to be sitting there idle with no-one playing it trying to attract attention?

 

Now, don't go around applying that logical thinking of yours to everything. Some people are perfectly happy making everything complicated!

 

It could be an excuse to have a play with the Unity AI system, let it play the game and learn as it goes.

Note there was an 80s game called Virus that did this, if you watched the attract mode the cpu player got better and better. Not sure how the developer did this, possibly some sliding scale that limited inputs from perfect to useless.

 

not implementation, but here is a GDC talk about deterministic games and tricks you can do like replaying user input.

 

I'm planning on actually making this run on a micro computer droid like oDroid and plan on exporting a Linux executable to run on a mini arcade box.

 

Yeah, I can see an attract mode being fun for that