Camera & Screen Capture - Mod Request

from Sins Forums

Some of you might not see a need for this, but hopefully some of you may.

I think it'd be excellent to see a camera based mod for replay recordings in this game, many other PC games(particularly shooters) have mods that do this, such as UT's Rypelcam, and Quakes Q3MME. People who have worked with setting up camera paths in a 3D application may already know how this works. Anyway I dont know if this could be achieved or not, but I thought it'd be worth mentioning, and would be an excellent tool to develop some fantastic cinematic footage.

The second request I had in mind was some sort of a screen capturing utility, unlike Fraps this would work somewhat like a rendering device that you see in many 3D applications out there, it'd capture a screenshot each frame which would ultimately give you of course the smoothest footage regardless of how many objects, and conflicts are on the screen. Perhaps Sins already has this, I dont really know, but many games like Crysis, Quake, and UT, have a similar tool thats triggerd through a number of console commands that'll capture a screen shot each frame.

I dont know if either of these are possible to do within Sins, but it'd be excellent to see, and would be put to good use I'm sure if it were done. :D 

modding
3,969 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
#1 is impossible (we don't have source, SDK, etc), and #2..uh..I hope you have dual 1TB hard drives, as capturing at minimum 30 frames a second is going to take a lot of disk space, esp. because it's unlikely you can compress down to JPG (which usually means .bmp). Any more than a minute or two is going to take up all your HD space. Perhaps you mean it detecting the frames per second, then speeding up the footage accordingly to make it run at a constant speed (wouldn't this mess with audio?)

You should also have a decent rig that can run Sins on "Highest" if you're going to do video in the first place - hell, my laptop can run it on High.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I'm aware of the amount of space #2 would use, UT2004 compresses its frames into bmp which can take up gigs at times.

The great thing about a rendering utility like the ones in the games I mentioned is that it doesnt matter how powerful your rig is or what graphics settings your game is at, thats the point in rendering footage, it'll capture 30 frames a second no matter what, the only thing a faster rig will do is speed up the process at which it renders but the quality will stay the same.

The only disadvantage I suppose to having such a tool would be that u'd capture absolutly no audio, you'd have to deal with that afterwards. But with the mass battles that take place in this game, I dont believe it'd be that important to match the audio up with video considering there would be so many ships firing at once, it'd probably make no difference.

Anyway just as a demonstration, heres a clip of how the rendering commands work in Crysis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaHS-y_mapQ

It's likely that when rendering in a game your bound to drop down to about 10 or 5 fps, but when you compile your footage into a video, the playback rate is perfectly at a smooth 30 frames per second.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Well, I don't see it as a big deal. I don't get drops down to 10 or 5 fps in Sins at any point, esp. when I'm recording at NTSC standard 29.whateverfps and my game normally runs at 60.

On a low-req game like Sins, it's really not worth the effort when we're still waiting for real modding tools, a patch to fix balance stuff, a demo, etc.