Tournament replays

[RThomas]

This was supposed to be a thread hijack of LotusHead but whatever

Has there been a program in the past year or so that's created the ability to replay matches?  For those of you who are poker players you may be familiar with PokerXFactor.com's tournament replayer that replays each hand of a tournament according to the hand history put in. 

Even if this is not possible; perhaps in making a "tournament report", one could replay a game or match or several matches or whatever through something like Magic Workstation.  Use something like Camtasia stuido editor and record it.  Perhaps even going through it with a voice recording and comment on what situations you found most interesting. 

This would certainly make a more interesting tournament report.  I don't see too many problems with this other than you'd have to register Magic Workstation to get out of mirror match mode.  Of course it would take too long and too much effort to record every game, but an interesting game/match would probably be worth it.  Even if it's not a tournament, just a heads-up game between two players and you want commentary on it or something.  Seems like it would point out a lot of glaring inconsistancies in someone's gameplay.

Been trolling the tournament report forum now for a couple years and nearly all tournament reports including mine have traditionally been very dry to say the least, even those with some pictures of the action.  As a free shot to those who post these dull tournament reports, please put more effort into them, especially if you won.  More people read these things if there's something interesting to read about, not just how you donked your merry way through by the skin of your teeth or whatever.

Apologies if this has been touched on before but it seems like an interesting turn.  Perhaps i'm just spewing I don't know.  If anyone's interested in this perhaps I'll give it a try first.

[Anusien]

Camtasia is a great program, and it would be interesting to record a tournament that way and see what happens.  My guess is that it would be fairly uninteresting after the novelty wears off, but it's certainly worth trying.

[Harlequin]

Its a neat idea.  I checked out this Camtasia deal, and it's certainly no peice of 'budget' softwere ($299 is the price that's quoted on thier site).  I'm sure its a nice suite of products including editors, file converters, and other bells and whistles.  But I just wanted to through out that Fraps can do the screen recording part and runs about $10-20 for the full version. 
And if you have some of the Mac video tools, or other products, the editing shouldn't be too hard.

The big problem is going to be getting the decks to behave correctly in MWS.  How would you get this simple play to work?

- I played brainstorm drawing a brainstorm, a fetchland, and a Force of will.
- I put back an Island and Sundering titan.
- I played the fetchland cracked it for an underground
- I played the second brainstorm drawing Yawg, Merchant Scroll, and a Volcanic...

You couldn't really use the shuffler, and there would really be no way to recreate the shuffle effect... am I right?

[Anusien]

Just record the screen.  The thing says, "Shuffles the library."

[Harlequin]

Right but there would be no way to easily draw the right cards... It's not like you could just prestack the deck.

[LordHomerCat]

I think what you're suggesting is some sort of a game simulator, almost like a plug-in or add-on to Workstation or even apprentice.  Theoretically, you could just come up with a simple scripting language with relatively easy commands allowed (like 'draw card_name', 'play card_name', etc.) a la a real basic scripting language.  Then you would have some simple interface (or something like workstation, although you wouldn't really need to bother with something that complicated) which would allow you to load up 2 decks and then script a game, and allow other people to download that same game and walk through it, seeing where they disagree with your plays. 

I'll be honest though, I don't take good enough notes to be able to keep good enough track of game options to really be able to script even a turn or two in most vintage matches, let alone a whole game.  You would almost have to get video coverage of the game and all the actions, and then later go back and transcribe them.  Alternately, you could just use it to present interesting situations (by like starting off the script on turn 8 or something with a bunch of stuff in play) and letting people explain what they would do, kind of like those things Steve did with MDG back in the day.

This would be pretty cool, but I'm not sure how many people would go through the effort to make it a useful tool, since it would be a lot of work.  I wish I could say I'd like to work on it (as a computer engineer and pretty solid programmer), but i personally cant commit any time to it and you would need at least some knowledge of programming to be able to come up with a good scripting language and translate it to a real interface.