CN_PPTRM (Clara Nguyen's Puyo Puyo Tetris Replay Manager) is a tool which let
users manage their replays outside of Puyo Puyo Tetris and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2.
They are free to export their replays to separate files, or import them back
into the save to replay at any given time. The entire purpose of this tool is
to get past the annoying 50 replay limit that the game gives PC players. In
addition, players can share their replays by uploading them if they wish.
Replays are stored in the data.bin file.
This is based off of my ppt_replay_tools, which I also wrote to manage replays in this game. I just wanted a nice GUI to do the job just as well (and be a bit more convenient).
- Puyo Puyo Tetris (PC)
- Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (PC)
It stands for "Demo", and I named it that because of how other games (notably Half-Life, Quake, etc) use Demo Recording to record key inputs and capture packets to be able to recreate gameplay at a later time. As of v0.2.0, these files are also compressed with gzip. They happen to compress really well... going from 90.6 KB to around 4-5 KB!
Would you prefer a file of up to 91 KB that contains everything, can be replayed at any speed you wish, and can be recorded at a later time if you wish to put it on YouTube? Yeah, me too! :)
Now, obviously, you're going to have to replay the gameplay and record it to put clips up on YouTube or other video sites. But it's still nice to have the original replay file right?
I haven't looked too much into the format of data.bin, but figuring out how
replays were stored was as simple as making a clean save, making a replay, and
then comparing changes to the file.
Replays are stored in two parts: PREP (replay information) and DATA (key
presses, events, etc). Each of these are of a fixed length. Each PREP
section takes up exactly 360 bytes, and each DATA section takes up
92480 bytes. There is a limit to how large a replay can be. Since they are all
a fixed length, my tool simply jumps exactly to where the data is stored and
dumps the contents to a file. Simple huh?