play until...

[filbo]

Hi, it suddenly occurred to me that a 'play this tape forward until this timepoint' command would be really useful.

I would want this to be in the interactive game (not a command line flag). Similar to 'play until near the end', but with a user specified meaning of 'end'.

Ideally it would go something like:

[user presses the shortcut or onscreen widget; 'Play until:' prompt appears]
Play until: 5:14 -- plays until the clock shows 5:14 (count-up time)
Play until: 120s -- plays until the countdown timer shows 120s time left
Play until: -2.5s -- plays until 2.5 seconds before the end of the tape
Play until: d-2.5s -- plays until 2.5 seconds before the player dies (by keeping a 2.5s trailing state buffer; or by playing forward from the current point until death, noting that time, then playing forward again from the current point until the noted time)
Play until: -40f -- plays until 40 frames before the end of the tape
Play until: d-40f -- plays until 40 frames before death
Play until: 100t -- plays until player has taken 100 steps (turns), in turn-oriented engines
Play until: -50t -- plays until 50 steps from end of tape

'death' can of course be at the end of the tape (e.g. you were just playing and died); but can also be in the middle of a tape (tape was saved on a different engine and works up to some point, at which player dies due to different random seed or whatever).

Inputs can be 'mm:ss' for count-up clock, '%fs' for countdown clock seconds, '%df' for frames, '%dt' for steps; negative means 'from end of tape'; 'd-' prefix means 'units before death'.

I can think of at least one other named timepoint like 'd': 'e' for 'exit conditions met', i.e. enough diamonds collected, or lightbulbs lit, or whatever. 'e-10s' would mean '10 seconds before exit conditions met'; and 'e+24f' would mean '24 frames after exit conditions met'. 'time after death' doesn't make sense, but 'time after exit conditions' does. There might be other useful named timepoints, I just haven't thought of others. (Well, there could be some for exit sub-conditions, like 'enough diamonds [don't care if enough lightbulbs]', but that seems like too much... :)

There might also be some multi-player nuances, but nothing particularly helpful occurs to me right now. 'd' would mean 'any player dies' since that's pretty much the end of the world anyway...

A later version might also have a nice widgety interface for entering the endpoint (I'd still prefer the typed version, but others wouldn't...)

Once 'playing until ...' is underway, the usual controls for fast forward, warp, etc. would still work; so you could have it play forward in normal gameplay real time; fast; as fast as possible with display; as fast as possible without display. And it would play forward from the current tape point, assuming the tape had already been playing (not recording) when this was invoked. With whatever tape is loaded, which could be user's previous save, a tape loaded from a solutions repository, or the tape that the user was just now creating by interactive play...

All of this is, of course, in service of More Advanced Cheating aka 'optimizing your results' etc.; also, just working towards solutions of particularly hard levels...