ComboVid.com

So I've been working on a lua script to add vertically scrolling display, as seen in training mode in some games. This could help make combo videos more educational.



It's for 6-button Capcom games, but it could be expanded to cover other kinds. It currently works in fba, snes9x and gens. I'd like to add pcsx when it gets better lua support. (Maybe frameMAME too??)

Instructions:
Download the script, and a couple of dll files mentioned in the script. Put the dll files with the emulator's exe. Put the image files wherever the script is. (You could move them to a folder called lua or whatever.) Run the emu, open your game, and find Lua scripting in the menu. Browse to the script. It will start automatically or may need to click Run. It should be working now. If the images aren't found, it will resort to ghetto mode, where only text is shown. (That's bad.)





If you idle too long, the next command will clear the buffer, just like in training mode. You can disable each player with the q and w keys. (You can change those keys, the idle time, and other stuff by editing the things above the dotted line.) If you want to totally clear everything you can just reload the script.

Some problems:

• * The images don't show up in FBA's AVI dumps.
  * When I try to dump AVI in snes9x with the script on, it crashes.
  * The images look messed up in gens.
  * If you load savestates, the buffer will not be updated to reflect the new state. I can't fix that until all the emus get a certain lua function.

I believe these things are the fault of the emulators, not me. =P They should all be fixed sooner or later by the maintainers.

Wow!

Hmm, since it's already applicable to FBA is there any hope for nFBA?

Open source?

Arrows and such should be trivial. If you can't steal them from anywhere I'll do them.

It's easy to add support for other emulators... as long as they already have all the lua functionality prepared. There's no standardized base that I know of. Nitsuja developed it simultaneously for snes9x and gens a couple years ago and bits and pieces of it have passed among the tasvideos emulators since then. So someone would have to pluck it out of the source code for one of them. (Lua isn't restricted to TAS usage of course.)

What's nFBA anyway?

About the icons, I'm thinking no smaller than 8x8 or bigger than 16x16, which is the current size. The arrows are OK, but the buttons look muddy and the letters are barely readable. (The letters really aren't necessary.) Maybe a good source would be screengrabs from some Saturn or PSX game. I can't even remember what old game it was that I first saw with this feature.

I think nfba is a version with online play, it would seem counterproductive to add lua support to it.

I don't think anyone would mind if you took event hubs
http://media.eventhubs.com/images/sf3/s ... _light.png
I can rip the sf4 training mode commands if you need me to.

error1 wrote:I don't think anyone would mind if you took event hubs
http://media.eventhubs.com/images/sf3/s ... _light.png

Heh, it's identical to the strategywiki image. I wonder what the original source is?

error1 wrote:I can rip the sf4 training mode commands if you need me to.

That would probably be best, if it's not too much trouble. Thanks.

the ones on eventhubs looked smaller with better quality
anyway here are the ones on sf4, these are captured at the native resolution of an xbox.
There is no start button
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VXQKUCCW

OK, thanks. I updated the first post, and also made some minor improvements to the script.

http://kaillera.movsq.net/?p=2

I'm not sure what happened to the nFBA website but it's basically an expansion of FBA that is able to run/emulate CPS3, among other things.

You should get someone to post this on shoryuken.com, I'm sure some people over there would find it useful.

Sure, I wouldn't mind if this gets publicized everywhere. I put a zip package on the fba-rr downloads page to make things a little easier. I was waiting for mz to release a version with better lua support but that hasn't happened yet. [That's the excuse for my belated reply.] You still need to get lua51.dll separately, for example.

I'm a little concerned that it's still too complicated for the random user, and then when it gets easier and better no one will bother updating, cuz no one updates software, ever. But don't let that stop anyone from talking about it.

if only there was an updated framemame with lua support... Maybe crowbait is waiting for the naomi games being emulated before he updates framemame (I can hope can't I? )