NAME

xp-replay - Playback an XPilot session.

SYNOPSIS

xp-replay [-help] [-scale factor] [-gamma factor] [-compress] [-verbose] inputfile

OVERVIEW

xp-replay is a program to view an XPilot recording. It takes record files produced by xpilot(6) and allows the user to replay them and make snapshots of frames.

Options

-help: Prints some help, including commandline options.
-verbose: Prints some information about the record file.
-compress: Save frames in compress format using the compress program.
-scale factor: Sets the scale reduction factor for saving operations. Valid scale factors are in the range [0.01 - 1.0].
-gamma factor: Sets the gamma correction factor when saving scaled frames. Valid gamma correction factors are in the range [0.1 - 10].

If the filename given is `-' then the standard input is read. Frames read from the standard input are stored in memory to allow the user to jump backward and forward through them, however, with large record files earlier frames may be discarded to make way for later frames. This will mean that it may not be possible to jump back to the start of a large recording. This restriction only affects files read from pipes.

THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

When you start the program you will be presented two windows. The first and largest window is the recording view window where you will see the recorded game. The second window is the control window which contains a row of pushbuttons and which shows some information about the recorded game. A third window may be popped up giving access to the controls to save frames.

The buttons in the control window allow you to move through the recording. They are, from left to right: record, rewind, reverse play, play, fast-forward, pause, stop and eject. The symbols on them match the standard symbols seen on tape and CD players.

Just below the buttons is information about the recording. The position of the current frame within the recording, the server the game was played on, the player's nickname and username, the client that the player connected from and the number of frames per second the server was running at.

Playback can be in either of two modes - normal or paused. In normal mode the recording will play back in real time as close to the original frame rate as possible. In paused mode, you can single step through frames.

In addition to the buttons certain keys perform shortcuts.

Buttons

Record: This button pops up a window allowing you to mark frames for recording, and to save the marked frames in either a standard graphics format (ppm) or in the XPilot Record format.
Rewind: In normal mode this plays the recording backwards at 10 times normal speed. In paused mode this button steps backward 10 frames.
Reverse play: In normal mode this plays the recording backwards. In paused mode it single steps backward one frame.
Play: In normal mode this plays the recording forward at normal speed. In paused mode it single steps forward 1 frame.
Fast-forward: In normal mode this plays the recording forward at 10 times normal speed. In paused mode it steps forward 10 frames.
Pause: This suspends playback and switches to paused mode.
Stop: This suspends playback and switches to normal mode.
Eject: This quits the program.

Keys

f, space: Step forward 1 frame.
b, delete, backspace: Step backward one frame.
z: Go to frame zero.
[: Mark this as the first frame to be saved.
]: Mark this as the last frame to be saved.
*: Save marked frames in PPM format.
&: Save marked frames in XPilot Recording format.
q: Quit the program.

Recording

Either by using the keys, or the popup record window, you can mark a section of the playback for recording. To do that, you move to the first frame you wish to save and mark it as the first frame. Then move to the last frame and mark that. Then save the marked frames. When saving in PPM format the frames will be saved in files called xpNNNNN.ppm. Each frame wil be placed in a separate file, and the NNNNN will be replaced by the frame number within the original recording. When saving in XPilot Recording format the frames will be saved in one new file called xpN-M.xpr, where N is the frame number of the first frame and M is the frame number of the last frame to be saved.

Since having a large number of PPM files can be quite costly in diskspace, an option exists to automatically shrink them whilst saving. Use the -scale option to specify a scaling factor, for example, a scale factor of 0.25 on a 768x768 recording would result in the saved frames being 192x192. When a frame is shrunk like that, the thin lines draw by xpilot can appear dimmed. To overcome this, use the -gamma option with a gamma value greater than 1. That should brighten up the saved frames. In addition a -compress option is available to save files in compressed format.

EXAMPLES

The simplest invocation is

: xp-replay test-recording.xpr

which will play back a recording, and save frames at the original size.

To save frames smaller that the original size use something like

: xp-replay -scale 0.5 -gamma 2 test-recording.xpr

which will save frames at half size.

You may want to compress the recording files to save disk space. You can then play them back directly without uncompressing them first using

: zcat test-recording.xpr.Z | xp-replay -

however, this may limit your ability to rewind through the recording.

xp-replay automatically recognizes if a file is in compress format and gzip format. If this is the case then it automatically starts compress -d or gzip -d to uncompress the file before playback.

AUTHORS

xp-replay was originally designed and developed by Steven Singer (S.Singer@ph.surrey.ac.uk). Additional develpoment was performed by Bert Gijsbers (bert@xpilot.org).

BUG REPORTS

Bugs can be mailed to xpilot@xpilot.org.