News: Online xOTM Replay Utility - Beta

You should be able to. Have you tried and failed?

You should be able to use any modern browser except Internet Explorer.

Performance is dependent on the browser's Javascript engine, so if you want to see the replay animations really whizz through on the fastest speed setting, use Safari, Chrome, Firefox or Opera in that order. And make sure you have the latest version.

 

Umm. Have you tried moving the event log higher? You can drag the yellow title bars to move the panels around, as I was 100% certain that my layout would not appeal to everyone else.

 

I complain about IE standard non-compliance because it's a fact. Regardless of <canvas>. Check out the bake-offs between IE and the other browsers, which show its poor compliance with W3C standards.

When I first started writing the Replay utility about two years ago, <canvas> was supported by all modern browsers but one. I may have been able to use SVG (I didn't try), but that isn't supported by IE either. Silverlight came along later, but that and Flash are proprietary technologies that I prefer to avoid. So MS have had plenty of time to add support for what had already become a de facto standard, but they prefer to push Silverlight and fight a battle with Adobe instead.

Even back then, there had been valiant attempts by independent developers to emulate <canvas> on top of VML. I tried to take advantage of that to support IE, but there was no support for erasing selective areas of the canvas, making animation very clunky. I ended up rendering the animation frames on the server in PHP instead on in the browser. You can still see the vestiges of that support if you try to run Replay in IE.

Since Replay-compatible browsers are free, and only people stuck in corporate straitjackets are unable to install them, I don't see that my non-support for IE is a major issue. IE is the only major browser I can't run in Mac OS X, apart from Chrome which is new and getting there. They don't support me - why should I support them?

 

If it were just HTML, CSS and Javascript, then you could just download it all now, as those files are all sent to your browser anyway. Use the development tools in your browser to see all that, but don't examine my crabby code too closely.

I shall not be offering a tool you can download and run locally. It is based on the compiled C saved game file parser we use for GOTM competition management and security, plus a number of PHP scripts. That stuff stays on our server.

Also, as I have said elsewhere, a web service is infinitely easier to maintain than a downloadable package, as I can fix a problem or enhance the system, and everyone automatically gets the new version next time they use it. It also runs on any platform with a compliant browser.

There's no technical problem that's stopping me from producing a web service that will allow you to upload your own saves to the server and deliver the replay display. I just have to re-factor the system for that purpose, and I'm working on it. But since I also have a life, this work will not happen instantly.

 

The replay event log just includes everything from the file, so I imagine they didn't show up in the save file's log. I'll investigate.

[UPDATE] I did find a script error that was "losing" some events. However, I am not seeing your Pottery discovery at turn 18. It is definitely in the save file log - you can even see it if you click the Replay link in the results table. So I still need to track that one down, but the other techs are now listed.

 

I certainly didn't take it that way. I appreciated your comments, and should have said so, but I was focused on helping you with the problem you had.

 

Thx, that's interesting, Safari 4.0.2 is my primary browser. I guess I need to look harder at how it deals with varying text size settings.