suggestions for recording gameplay (PLZ???)

[Turd Ferguson]

rather than recording the video output from the video card (which eats GPU cycles), how about letting us record the actual game data as it happens. The ED client can then be used to play back this data and render the scene.

This would allow a player to fly "normally" and perform difficult actions that require first person view and concentration and not worry about fiddling with camera controls or performing the action from a different POV, and then go back and "film" the action after the fact when they can concentrate 100% on camera work.

I see several advantages:

1) better "movies" made by content creators

2) ability to learn from your combat experience by letting you analyze a battle after the fact from perspectives you may not be use during actual combat.

3) makes making great videos more accessible to more players who may not have the coordination (or the controls) necessary to fly and do camera work at the same time

The problem I see is that the file could be exploited to extract information FD may not want to share with the playerbase, but this could be easily solved with encryption. I think most of the pieces to do this are already in the game and it wouldn't take much dev time to create. It also have very low probability of introducing new bugs since it would basically be using existing tools to play back a recorded session through the same tool normal gameplay would use.

We got some really great camera tools recently - how about going a step further and giving us the ability to make the feature really great. Giving us the capability of separating the task of flying and camera work I think would open up some really great possibilities. It would also make recording gameplay much less resource-intensive as we're only recording streams of values which can be rendered later rather than recording the render.

 

[Shadowdancer]

That'd be an immense amount of data (well, it may not be, depends on how detailed you want to get), an immense development effort, and recordings would break on every major update.

 

[Malic]

GTA 5 does this if you edit files to get past the default 30 sec recording times, some people have reports of 25+ GB for 45 sec of game play recording as it is keeping track of everything in the instance. Imagine every X,Y,Z point for every particle, directions of every object in the instance, velocity, landing gear/cargo coop states, movable bits on the ships, planet location and rotations during the clip, etc

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Basically an "instant replay" mode?

Allows you to view the action from any angle?

Ive been suggesting that since I started playing.



Race Driver: GRID had quite a good one.
Not played GTA Vice though

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Shadowdancer]

GTA 5 does this if you edit files to get past the default 30 sec recording times, some people have reports of 25+ GB for 45 sec of game play recording as it is keeping track of everything in the instance.

Yeah, something like that. To make recordings last past updates, you'd have to record, e.g., the position, structure, and movement of every single rock in a ring instance or the complete visible geometry of a planet.

It'd be a nice feature, but I guess a good video capture device comes cheaper than the disk array to store that mess

 

[Turd Ferguson]

you wouldn't have to do that. Example:

if you record the position of your ship and the other ship you don't need to keep track of the cargo hatch. Only that it's open or closed and the engine would render it during playback. If the other ship fires, you don't need to track that shot, only that a weapon fire event occured. The game engine, knowing the direction and orientation of the ships, and any directional changes made, would render the shot in real time, not record it and play it back later, and the damage would be recorded.

on a planet surface, every detail doesn't need to be recorded, they would be rendered during playback. the only things that need to be recorded are the details that are pulled from the server like POI's, shootable rocks, loot and their direction and orientation. since the rest of the background planet is static it can be rendered during playback.

I don't think it would take nearly as much data to record a scene. since the game is already set up to transmit these things to peers (for wings) you can see the bandwidth usage required, and it's fairly low. I bet the system has start points which give initial values to all the relevant objects to be set in motion when the instance loads, and then only record changes, not every every detail at every frame. Like MPEG compression. it only records what has changed since the last frame, but in this case you're not even recording a visual frame, only the relevant data ABOUT the frame so you can render it later. Since you're dealing with known models you don't need to record the actual models, only their orientation, speed, and initial location. Everything else can be calculated on the fly as it would be during normal gameplay. only difference is, the control inputs are pre-recorded as are events and interactions (like how much damage was done).

 

[CMDR GTR2014]

I think the best game to display this would be warthunder. the game actually records every single fight you do ( i think it caps at 30) and let you rewatch it from every perspective (this means you can see the battle from everyone point of view after the end.

[video=youtube;ehxca2xshlo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehxca2xshlo[/video]

 

[Shadowdancer]

if you record the position of your ship and the other ship you don't need to keep track of the cargo hatch. Only that it's open or closed and the engine would render it during playback. If the other ship fires, you don't need to track that shot, only that a weapon fire event occured. The game engine, knowing the direction and orientation of the ships, and any directional changes made, would render the shot in real time, not record it and play it back later, and the damage would be recorded.

on a planet surface, every detail doesn't need to be recorded, they would be rendered during playback. the only things that need to be recorded are the details that are pulled from the server like POI's, shootable rocks, loot and their direction and orientation. since the rest of the background planet is static it can be rendered during playback.

You are assuming that any of those remain stable over updates, which they don't. Projectile speeds have changed, planet rendering has changed, a myriad of little details can change at any time, and they would render all your precious recordings worthless.