Auto Snapshot

[72o]

Is there a script/has anyone tried to make a script so I can click a button and automatically take a snapshot in chat for every active game? Sure, I'd get a lot of snaps I don't need, but you can never have too many snapshots, right?

[agentcom]

Is there a script/has anyone tried to make a script so I can click a button and automatically take a snapshot in chat for every active game? Sure, I'd get a lot of snaps I don't need, but you can never have too many snapshots, right?

Damn, 72o, that's a great idea. All the other auto-snap tools that I've heard people ask for are like "Can it snap when the game starts?" which isn't possible according to the folks here. But I'd think that this would actually be possible even if it might take a minute to complete all the snaps.

[72o]

Yeah, that's what sparked the idea, then, at least if everyone on the team is using it, we have a pretty good chance of someone catching a snap when the game is initialized and before it starts.

[Chewie1]

Yeah, that's what sparked the idea, then, at least if everyone on the team is using it, we have a pretty good chance of someone catching a snap when the game is initialized and before it starts.

Would definitely help with the 12 hour fog "unofficial" rule.

[deantursx]

Very cool idea.

[72o]

I will buy a year of premium (or $25 if you'd prefer) for the person who makes this script.

[72o]

please

[72o]

revival

[kuma32478]

This is a great idea. Can't it be worked into BOB as an option?

[ender516]

That would be the right place for it, of course, but sadly, I haven't got time to look into this, and anyway, it might be better if the primary maintainer of BOB were to do it.

[agentcom]

I just thought of a rather grace-less solution to this. BOB could have a button that says "Snap for other team." I know that BOB snaps can be read outside of [team] chat. For example, I just posted a public snapshot in this Game 12294725.**

So, given that BOB has this ability, it could also be set (very carefully) to take a snap of ONLY territs that the other team can see. Thus one team before starting their turn in a fog rule game could take a partial snap for the other team. Now, I do recognize that there is at least one deficiency of this:

Territ A bombards B. Territ B one-way attacks C. Team 2, who play second, owns territ A and C. Team 1, who play first, own B. Team 1 has no territs that can attack or bombard A (A is behind the fog). On the turn, Team 1 attacks from B to C.

Snap before turn? BOB would have no way of knowing to "report" or "snap" the ownership of territ A because it has no way of knowing whether Team 2 can even see it. It can't even tell whether to include Territ C in the snap because giving away that Team 1 can see Territ B tells Team 2 that they have C (if no other Team 1 territs can attack B). This of course is not a problem in the given instance, but if A was neutral, then Team 1 would not want B in any sort of snapshot.

Snap after the turn? BOB could maybe check game log and tell that territ C belonged to Team 2 before the turn, but again the question of whether and how to report B remains.

This seems to me like it would be a good thing to put into BOB, as long as BOB checks that there aren't any bombardments possible in the game, but it could cause problems on a map like Waterloo or Stalingrad, and would most certainly be unwise to use in All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Perhaps BOB could error on the side of disclosure, but a warning could pop up: "You are attempting to take a snapshot for the other team on a map that contains bombardments or one-way assaults. Doing so may disclose information that the other team cannot otherwise see. Proceed with caution."

At the very least, this addition to BOB, if used in appropriate circumstances would allow a team to take a turn before 12 hours and not gain (or suffer) a competitive (dis)advantage. BOB already has the capability to determine which territs cannot possibly be seen by the other team (they're the ones with the boxes around them). So, this could theoretically be worked in to BOB.

Other potential problems include people accidentally snapping for other team when they don't mean to. Also, this relies on the other team to take the snap (but the benefit to them is that they don't have to wait 12 hours).



**The way I did this is to disable BOB and copy and paste the "snap:: ....." junk that is in chat when you don't have BOB on.

[ender516]

I think what you are proposing is a fair bit more complicated than what the original post was looking for. Currently, snapshots just record the facts of the map situation. Editing that with respect to what the Map Inspect feature shows could be quite complex. Still, it is an interesting idea which perhaps should be discussed in a topic of its own in this forum.

Also, it would be risky to assume that you could take a snapshot for the other team and proceed to your first turn immediately, because the other team might not use BOB. I prefer the etiquette of players/teams announcing in chat that they have taken their snap or have at least seen the map, thereby granting permission to the first player/team to proceed before the 12-hour period has elapsed.

The original post here was just looking for a quick way to take a lot of snaps at once. Maybe the first step is to add a button to My Games which enters all games at once, either in new tabs or new windows. That by itself might be worth doing, but likely would be rather browser-dependent, so I wouldn't add it to BOB.

[agentcom]

You are right ... depending on the other team to use BOB is another downfall of my proposal.

The other method I thought of I will call the Anti-ChatGlove method ... It would allow you to scroll through games in which you have not posted anything to chat. So when you log in under your New Chat notifier (if using chat glove), you would see "New Games." Any game in which you have not posted anything to chat would be queued up through there.

Still relies on you actually being logged in, but there's probably not going to be a way around that, after all.

[ender516]

Perhaps a coordination between a game watcher add-on and BOB could help, but I'm just spitballing here. I don't use a game watcher.

[72o]

Thanks for the continued discussion here guys. My idea is really to snap every game simultaneously. Please keep kicking this around, I'm sure one of you is smart enough to figure this out.