ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I had several rueful experience thinking I should have saved the screenshots earlier. The last time, I was playing a summoner in Maze. Encountered the boss, but I wasn't very serious at first. Several turns later, all my summoned creatures were dead, I was stunned and confused, with only about 85 hp. I guessed there was no hope. I was prepared for death and pressed Num5. Yet, Amazingly, the next moment, the Minotaur was dead and I got 3 hp left. It took me several seconds to figure out that the boss was presumably killed by my "Tooth of the Mouth". I can't exaggerate how much I wanted to get the screenshot of the previous turn. I want it desperately to share it with other guys and say I couldn't believe I have survived this.
I think my experience might be common. Players survived tough battles might want to have recorded them. And stories become interesting at the end, how can people record this stories from the beginning when not knowing its potential values.
So I suggest:
1. Maybe we can have a key to toggle on/off auto screenshots every player's turn. This key can be pressed before tough battles, and hopefully there will be more interesting screenshots.
2. Maybe we can have a replay of the game. Maybe we can do it by save states of previous game turns and put it back onto screen at a certain speed. Make a player's turn 0.5~1 second long, then we can have fun videos. I searched for videos of ToME on youtube, and only found some boring "let's play ToME". A video of someone spend 5 minutes to build a character and 5 to 10 more to explore lv1 of Trollmire is not a good one to attract new players. But a collection of smart players struggling to win hard battles can be.

Ooh, auto-screenshots would be cool.

Yeah... I would absolutely flipping love a replay option. Especially if by some miracle it managed to be fairly low-impact as far as system resource consumption goes. At least less of a resource hog than the actual recording programs that exist.

There's a lot as far as balance and game advice goes that being able to just say, "Here, check it; this is what happened/what you need to do here" would benefit things massively.

Infinite pluses if the replay can be entered by someone else at some point in the thing -- basically a "what-if" mini-scenario. Folks who say "I could survive that" (as I'm occasionally wont to do ) could put their money where their mouth is

+1
+1
+1 ad infinitum

As I understand it, given the flexibility of ToME's engine, replays are impractical.

I'm not entirely sure why...seems like you could have a "replay mode" that preconstructed areas when you entered them, and saved that preconstruct, then just functioned like a macro file plus the areas...but I'm not a real coder, there's probably some reason that wouldn't work. And it would in passing form a more abusable game, so there's that. And of course there's all the RNG rolls you'd have to find some way to fix in passing, and you'd have to do it all in such a way that new stuff wouldn't break it horribly...

I'unno, I'm sure it's possible, in theory, but I'm also pretty sure that, unless some very dedicated coder takes a ton of interest, it won't happen any time soon, and it may drive that poor soul crazy. I'd love to see it happen, but I think DarkGod's more interested in making the gameplay better right now.

Well, one could take a screenshot of every turn at the very moment you press a button (or something) that ends the turn, and then another with the effects at the beginning of the next turn. Then buffer, say 10 of these. In case you want to save, click ESC to "save replay".

Of course, this would be quite static, and lots of activity (instants, inventories, monster info...) would easily go amiss, but it would be something. Memory consumption should be about 20*resolution*RGB, but slowdown shouldn't be that bad - after all, nothing new needs to be computed, just writing existing data in a table.