.rec Export Idea

Just wondering...

Would it be possible to have an export for the .recs in marbleblast?

My Idea is this:

The game would go and start playing the demo you recorded. It would stop (pause the video) 30 (this could be changed) times a second to take a screen shot. It would save these screen shots and put them together into a video at the end.

I think this would be possible because (don't quote me on this) .recs record which keys you pressed at each time, so all it would have to do is be able to count time later to know when to pause and take a screen shot.

this is just an idea, so it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work, it would just be good for us people with bad computers that can't record due to the badness of our frames.

thank you for reading!

from nathan

Somehow I feel like there would be four main problems with this:
1) We'd need third-party software to bundle the screenshots into a video file. This is the least of my worries, as I'm sure such software exists.
2) If it takes a quarter of a second to take a screenshot (which is about what it feels like in-game), then it would take eight minutes of high-CPU activity to export a one-minute run. Battlecube Finale would take over an hour.
3) You know how the .rec files from MBG would glitch up on certain operating systems? They aren't entirely impossible to break. I'd be worried that the lag would affect them badly.
4) Even worse, when you take a screenshot, the physics keeps simulating, so even if the lag doesn't screw up the run (remember, there are some runs where you're supposed to screenshot the game to lag it so a mine will hit you in a certain way), it'd only be a 4 FPS video at maximum (if you played it at 30 FPS, it'd be sped up). The only way I can think to fix this would be to pause the game without a pause dialog, take the screenshot, unpause, and repeat that, and that would probably screw up the key presses if they run on a separate timer (I'll try MBG for the heck of it to confirm/refute this possibility).

Still, if someone gets it working I won't be entirely surprised.

It's an interesting idea, but I'd get the sense that older or slower computers would crash and burn if we tried that, lol. Besides, there are plenty of nice free screen recorders out there (hypercam for example).

I actually had the idea a number of years back of an in-game video sharing page on the LBs, but I now know that's pretty much impossible.

Believe it or not, there's actually already a function for this in MBG. Unfortunately, it has an error (forgetting to pass the object ID to schedule()), and when you fix that error, it crashes the game instead.

I'll see if I can mess with it and get it working, though.
EDIT: This is actually a viable method for recording levels as e.g. GIF animations (any good image software, e.g. GIMP, can convert the image output into a GIF). Here's me beating Thrill Ride (sped up as otherwise the GIF would be boring):

can't do screenshots for a few reasons, but i'll list a few.

1. compression

Do you want to fill your hard drive up with raw images? That's a way to do it.

2. Lag

Whirli nailed it. The physics would keep simulating thus causing bad things

3. latency of framerate

Screenshot is hard on the CPU to perform fast, as it has to take into account each and every pixel, and then save it to a file, which file IO on a machine is slow, especially when your doing stuff while a game engine is processing. Not only that, your frame rate would be wrecked, as you can't multi-thread TorqueScript, so that would have to run while the game is rendering, updating the process list, taking key inputs, ect.

@RC yep, you can't transfer binary data to and from the lbs, thanks to old engine limitations (which everybody loves)!

Well, I *did* actually get it working ... sort of. Lag doesn't mess up the physics as much as you think, and it's not annoying as long as you're using a .rec (and not actually playing the game with the code on). You only get about 2 FPS, but for most levels that should be enough to clarify at least that it's a legitimate run (which is what I'd use this for, in case someone with a slow computer broke a record).

exactly, 2fps. That's impressive that this thing works, but that's just terrible frame rate, I want my 30+fps

Wait, it's 2014 and not everyone has game capturing software? (grin)

I always loved the idea of being able to export the obnoxious .rec format into a more user friendly one, like some type of an AVI. If I recall correctly, someone designed such a script that ran in Tribes2 way back in the day (granted it was a much newer version of TGE than the one running Marble Blast).

~Aayrl

Tribes2 was before MB aayrl, it used the V12 engine (pre TGE)...and Tribes2 was TribesScript, slightly different from TorqueScript.

Gosh, hadn't realized people had ever posted here again!

Actually, this was only meant for MBP, because Mac people can't run .recs on MBG at all, as well as the fact that if this worked it would be cool for MBP 1.50, which was coming out in Beta 1 at the time of this post.

elnathan wrote: because Mac people can't run .recs on MBG at all

What do you mean?

I don't think anybody can make .recs in MBG. The only .recs that can be run are the demos that play after a short period. You could add demos, I suppose.

Isn't there a line of code you can put in like $dodemo=true or something to record a demo? Whatever the code line was I remember it doesn't work on the Mac version of MBG, but I might be wrong on this.

Still confused here. $dorecorddemo=1; most certainly works on MBG for Mac. That's how I recorded my WR runs. I sent the .recs to Matan to capture for the SDA video. I can also play back my .recs whenever I want.

Well I suppose you could type in a value into the console, but there's no big red button or anything GUI-based. I thought the code for recording demos was actually made by the MBP team, really.

nope... dorecorddemo is as old as testcheats.

I fail then. I knew of testcheats, but not this. Probably because I never wanted to record anything.

elnathan wrote: because Mac people can't run .recs on MBG at all

Totally not true. To clarify, .rec files can be created by anyone and played on only those computers with the same OS. For instance, Mac .rec files will not work on Windows, but they will on another Mac. I don't know if Linux/Windows or Linux/Mac would be cross-compatible (even the multiplayer coders are confused about that stuff now).

oops hehe I just tried the code Sporlo said and it worked (I'm on mac) sorry about that maybe I should actually look up some coding basics because right now I don't know anything about coding

elnathan wrote: Mac people can't run .recs on MBG at all