Archives and Game Notation

[utis]

1. I have a desire to study some games of the old masters. But the Warlocks game archive seems to be broken, for a couple of days now. Will it be up again soon? If not, does anybody have a copy?

2. In order to archive my own duels and evaluate my mistakes, as well as for a more focussed study of some games of others, I have been trying to cook up a game notation that is supposed to show all relevant information at a glance, without being too cluttered. The best I have come up with so far is e. g. this:


  os    o       s        s n   [targets LH]
    o     o  o s s   o    s    [targets RH]
DSFWWWFFFSS-SWWPPSDS W W SSC
PSDPPWPPSDFFDDFWWSDP P D WPC
SWDSFFFPSDF-PDWWFWDCPWWWDSWW
SWWSWWPSDDWFFDPWPWWCSWWWWPPS
  o o o   o       o            [targets LH]
   o     s   o     s     ss    [targets RH]
----+----+----+----+---+---
    15   13   13   14  14     [HP warlock 1]
    14   13   8    6   6      [HP warlock 2]


Targets being elf, [o]ther, [n]obody.

I suppose, other relevant information, like when it's a Resist Heat instead of a Cause Light, or wich hand has been paralysed, if it's not obvious, could be kept in a comentary. The notation should be capable enough, though, that this doesn't get too extensive.

The problem arises with monster play. I have come up with something, which, although not exactly beautiful, could keep track of targetting issues, when only one monster is in play for either side, but it utterly fails otherwise.

Does anybody have an idea for that?

Other thoughts?

(Annoyingly enough, the forum software doesn't preserve whitespace even with the 'code' tag. I had to resort to ISO 8859-1 nobreak space characters.)

[succat]

I like where you're going with this. There are times when I want to look at a game and see 'who' did 'what' without scrolling the page up and down to read the 'turn' descriptions while cross referencing that with the 'submitted gestures' block at the bottom of the page. I've only looked at the warlocks archive once or twice - its seems that it's usually not working when I've tried. Also, it's not the most user-friendly interface and I know I don't have the patience to hunt around too long for what I'm looking for ... if it's game I'm trying to find, or something else, and I don't see it, I move on pretty quickly.

[utis]

Thank you for your feedback! When I look at the games of others on ravenblack, I usually click on every turn in sequence (while, of course, skipping the obvious). But I don't like this for archiving the few selected of my own battles where I hope to learn from examining and archiving my mistakes. And it doesn't work with battles in the archive. Since the archive appears to be up again, I started to convert a historic battle to my format. For what it's worth: Below, I also added the denotation for monster play that I cooked up. Both are for my own use only and I doubt that anybody else would be much interested. So, I did a rather hurried and sloppy job, which suits me. Maybe I'll write a script on a lazy afternoon to automatically convert battles from the archives. For now, I have to say, studying such battles is almost as much fun as playing myself.

Ladder Battle 22939 Prioli (A) vs. DeathEx (B)

    1 133        55             [Monsters Warlock A]
    G XGX        GX
      oo2        4
         r
    o o2oo    s  s o4  os o     [targets LH]
   ss  ss  o    oss 4  sl   n   [targets RH]
BPSDFFFFFFPDWWPSFPSDFFDDP->PC
BDSFWSFWPSDF--DSFWPSDSWD>WSSC
o----+----+----+----+----+--x
BSWDSFWFPSDF-DSFFFPSDDSFWFPSD
BSWWSPPPSDDPPSFWPFDPPPSDFWFPW
   o os 3  o   o 54  s os o     [targets LH]
   s 2    s o  s4 o4ss oos o    [targets RH]

      222      4  44    X       [Monsters Warlock B]
      G|X      O  ||    G
      11o         5o
o----+----+----+----+----+--x
     15   14   14   9    8  0   [HP Warlock A]
     14   11   11   10   6  0   [HP Warlock B]


[Notes]
t17: 4 @ 1 HP
t20: A: Mistakenly believing Charm P. would stop the monster
        from attacking (as stated in comment on t22)


****

Monsters:

2    [index]
G    [action/type]
1    [target, e.g. monster 1]


Index: At the turn of its summon, a unique index is
assigned to the monster which it keeps until it leaves
play. This index is used to target the monster in the
following turns. Index numbers range from 1 to 0 (denoting
10). Index numbers are always assigned consecutively,
regardless of whether previously indexed monsters still
exist; i.e. the third in a series of monsters surviving the
turn of its summon (see below) receives the index "3",
regardless of whether 1 and 2 still exist. Index numbers
wrap around. E. g., if the match saw the birth and death of
ten goblins, the 11th goblin gets the index number 1.

If a monster dies on the very turn it is summoned, it does not
receive an index number, instead the notation is slightly altered:

X  [X instead of an index signifies death on the turn of summoning]
G  [as above]
1  [as above]

Action/type: At the turn of its summon, the type of the
monster is signified by a capital letter: G for goblins, O
for ogres, T for trolls, A for giants. A capital X denotes
the monster's demise. A change of targets, without anything
else happening to the monster during that turn, is for the
sake of readability denoted by vertical line: |.

Transference of ownership due to a successful Charm Monster
is denoted by + (on the side of the charming warlock) and -
(on the side of the previous owner). For instance the
successful charming of a monster indexed as 2, would appear
as:

2
-

[... gesture and target rows]

2
+
o


Target: targets are index numbers [for monsters], o for
opponent, r for monster at opponent's RH, l for monster at
opponent's LH. At the turn of its summoning, the target may
be omitted, IF the target defaults to the opponent. In all
other instances, the omission of the target (i.e. when the
monster dies) denotes that the target has not changed from
before.

If anything is too complex for this notation, an asterisk
("*") may be used in any place, exect the gesture rows, to
denote an explicit reference to the comment section. In the
case of more than one monster in play on either side,
multiple monster rows are conceivable, but should be limited
to cases where targetting or multiple summons would require
such references to the comments on a regular basis.

[akhlore]

While I am really new to this I really wanted to give my thoughts.

I really like the tidyness of the notation, I use a similar albeit a less comprehensive one myself. I usually only add turns on top instead of the targets but I believe what you do is better (I also think that you might try adding turns to separete gestures from targets but that might clutter things a bit). To give an idea;


------os
----s-oo
---012345
LH:BDSFW
RH:BPSDF



At least on notepad this looks pretty decent for analyzing specific variations. The only real thing that I might add to this is to use |-|'s or /-\'s for durations of spells. I almost use |-| to exclusively denote invis duration, it makes it much easiear to calculate variations. For example;



---012345678|901|23
LH:BDSFWPPws|SPF|P
RH:BPSDFFDws|SSP|F



I know it is a bit more cluttered and might be bad for archiving but it is a useful thing to do while analizing (at least it helps me).

That brings me to the idea I had a while ago. I have little/no knowledge of programming but I wanted to try and write a small game viewer for this myself. I probably won't have enough time/knowledge until summer. I do the same as you and I just watch the games turn by turn to analyze so I imagined the viewer to do the same; you copy the game from the archives then you watch it turn by turn. That should make it infinitely more simple and more effective to analyze past games.

(btw, I am sorry about my examples, they look really bad, I didn't know how to make them better)