The replay/rewind feature

Moves are being recorded

In all rooms, all tile moves that anyone makes are constantly being recorded. When you take a snapshot, it will allow you to replay any moves made up to that point. Goes without saying that this is for registered users only.

A new recording begins when a room is created or altered

Whenever you edit your room and in any way alter the tile position or tile colors, the recording is reset and begins anew from that point. For example, if you arrange the tiles or when you load another snapshot into your room, all move data prior to that point is discarded.

Snapshots now retain their move history

When you save a snapshot, the move data recorded until that position are saved with it, and the moves can be replayed at a later time. In the gallery, snapshots that have associated move data are indicated with a little filmstrip icon.

Room rewind

When you take a snapshot, you’re first presented with a Preview. You can now rewind to any prior position, and load that position (also called “frame”) into any of your rooms. If you’re taking a snapshot in one of your rooms, and then load any prior position into that same room, you’re effectively rewinding the room, discarding the moves that have been made after that position.

In other words, you can load any position of a room, even if it’s not yours, into another room. Of course, if you took the snapshot in your own room, then you can also load any prior position into the same room. You can do that without saving the snapshot. If you do save the snapshot, then you can later replay all moves associated with that snapshot, even if the original room no longer exists.

Controls

The snapshot page now has a control panel for the replay feature, with transport buttons for forward and reverse play and a progress indicator. When the page first loads, the transport buttons will be grayed out while the move data is loaded. As the initial position of the playback is the last recorded position, the forward transport buttons will not become available until you navigate to an earlier position.

Transport buttons

• Play: Press the play button to play forward, or backwards respectively, through the recorded moves from the current position. The play buttons will highlight green when playing.
• Stop: Press the stop button to stop the playback. Pressing any button other than play/reverse will also stop the playback.
• Step forward/backward: Press “step” to advance one tile move at a time. The animation speed of that tile move will depend on the speed setting.
• Jump to end: Press “Jump to end” to set the play position to either the beginning or the end of the playback.

Progress indicators

The progress bar gives a visual indication of the current replay position within the whole of the recording. This is an interactive element; you can navigate the recording by dragging the playhead, or by clicking anywhere within the bar.

Left of the progress bar is a date/time display that indicates the exact time when the move happened, in CST (Central Standard Time, GMT -6). On the right hand side is a frame counter displaying the current position and how many frames, ie. recorded moves, there are in total.

The speed control is self-explanatory: The higher the speed, the faster the animation of the tile moves. From x32 onwards, tiles just jump to their destination. Depending on how fast your computer is, speeds higher than x32 may not actually cause faster replay.

Show player names and player list

The “Show player names” checkbox works similar to the one in the mosaic rooms. Enabling this feature will display the player names next to each tile as it is moved. Like in the mosaic, and depending on the speed of your computer, the animation off the tiles is somewhat smoother when this feature is turned off.

The “Show player names” also determines whether the player list is displayed next to the mosaic, again similar to how it works in the mosaic rooms. The moves displayed next to each player are being counted from the time you last started the playback. If the playback is stopped, and then restarted, each player’s move counter will reset. It will also count moves when you play backwards, and it useful to get some indication how may tiles have been moved by whom in that section that you were last viewing.

Top five contributors list

The top five contributors list shows the top five players that have the most number of tiles last moved by them. This display disappears during playback, and will reappear, updated, when playback stops.

Loading a snapshot frame into a room

With the rewind/replay feature, you can navigate to any prior position (frame) and load it into one of your rooms.

Please note that loading a snapshot into a room will begin a new recording in that room. You cannot undo this action.

Addressing a particular frame of a snapshot via URL

If you wish to reference a particular frame in a snapshot, for example, to alert admins of something naughty in it, you can simply take note of the frame number and then construct a URL that has this frame number as a parameter, for example:

http://www.thebroth.com/art14989.html?f=6739

Clicking this link will load snapshot 14989, and after loading it will jump to frame 6739. You should see a fish on the left and some writing “it’s fun”.

Note, in the public rooms, there is plenty of naughty drawings going on. Please do NOT notify us of that. As long as there’s a public room there will be swastikas and penises and four letter words spelled out, and thus you’ll find lots of those in public room replays.

In general, the frame addressing is useful when you want to refer to a particular phase of your artwork, for example when you write about it in your blog, or as a blog comment.

Applications

Room rewind effectively puts an end to room vandalism. If bullies have defaced your room, you can use the rewind feature not only to get back to how things were before, but you can also see who was naughty in your room. Make sure to save a snapshot as proof, in case very unacceptable things happened in your room during your absence.

Room rewind also reveals some of the hidden gems that are being produced transiently without you knowing. In particular in the public rooms, sometimes great things are being produced that normally would be lost in space and time. With the rewind feature, you can load any of these promising beginnings or nearly finished masterpieces into your own room and continue to make something entirely new out of it.

Snapshot replay is an amazing tool to see just how the many great artists that have made all these wonderful artworks at TheBroth achieve their masterpieces. It’s very interesting and highly educational. You’ll discover some of the advanced techniques that the “pro” broth-ers use!

Perhaps a bit experimental, but nonetheless interesting, you can use this feature to create “movies” of some sort, such as this one here, made by Gogo: http://www.thebroth.com/art14898.html