ContentsMayBeHot

Since the beginning of the semester, Matthew and I have been woking hard on the Replay Parser and Frame Collector. Both of these parts are crucial to the success of our project. With the first Demo of our project done also comes the completion of this first milestone. Parsing the replay exposed some interesting information to us about how inputs are recorded, and therefore how the game sees them. Our original understanding of inputs was that multiple inputs would actually be spread out across multiple frames, however this was not true. It turns out that a frame is followed by a list of events which take place on that frame. We also learned that some human actions translate into multiple inputs. For example: If you are using the control stick to move your character and you hold right on the control stick, your character moves right. One may think that this means the action RIGHT_PRESS is input, in actuality a list of actions is generated. The list may look something l...

Since January, we've been working hard to not only finish writing the Replay Parser and Frame Collector but also totally synchronize them. I'm pleased to report our success. This is an amazing milestone for us because it means that we've surmounted one of our most troubling obstacles. I have also made sure to keep our documentation up to date. So, if you like, you can follow along with this blog post by replicating its results. The Frame Collector uses timed input sequences to start each replay associated with the currently running game version. Then, after waiting a set amount of time for playback to begin, it starts grabbing 1/4-scale frames at a rate of 10 frames per second. The Frame Collector takes these down-scaled frames, which are NumPy arrays, and rapidly pickles and dumps them into the file system. Here's a screenshot of the Frame Collector in action: If you look at the image above, you'll see that each pickle (the .np files) ...