My new demo - Starchild + Questions

#1

Hi all. Just thought i would share my new demo footage with everyone. Its a puzzle game written in c++ with box2d and glsl. You can find the video’s here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXp6_fGkLLQ&feature=feedu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz_r8M8cjPY&feature=feedu

You guys can find a complete description of the game here (that includes some notes about the main shader)

http://majdakar.blogspot.com/

You guys will notice the video footage is rather low res, because (gasp) i filmed it using a camera. So here lies my question. I need a cheap method to capture my video game footage in HD, at an acceptable framerate. My graphics card outputs vga, and HD, but no RCA. The game is running on a PC and all capture software did not produce any acceptable results while running in parallel with my game. Thanks in advance!

#2

Hey,

Your game looks pretty cool, very nice visual design.

I think some of the problems with software capture solutions are processing time for compression or conversion and also write times for the hard drive. I can think of 3 possible options for you from lowest to highest cost:

  1. Add a feature in your game that allows recording. You could do this by writing your render buffer to memory and then saving to image or video format. The main point is that you want to avoid waiting for a write to the hard drive. You could create a memory buffer and as it fills up write to the HD in separate thread or just wait until the end of the recording. I am not sure how to save the audio though.

  2. Try a solid state drive and whatever screen capture software you were using before (SnagIt, FRAPS, etc.). Maybe your hard drive write speed is slowing you down. Also, try different formatting options to reduce processing time (uncompressed vs different compressed formats).

  3. Try one of these, http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/models/. You need a fast hard drive for uncompressed HD video, but there are hardware compression options for slower drives too. Their software comes with a tool to measure hard drive write speed to verify if your hard drive is fast enough for different recording settings. Personally, I have used the intensity pro card with one computer outputting display via HDMI cable to a second computer with the capture card and RAID setup. It worked very well for 720p video (compressed and uncompressed). It should be possible to output from and record to the same computer, but I have never tried it. I am not sure how to record audio with this method either.

Hope this helps!

#3

Thank you! This is the first comprehensive response I’ve gotten so far. I guess I’m going to try all of your suggestions. Will update when that happens. Thanks again. :beer:

#4

I finally found a solution. Ended up using a Matrox (tried Blackmagic Intensity, had an absolute nightmare trying to get it to work). Here’s the result:

Part1: http://youtu.be/ibA2xTCCm1M
Part2: http://youtu.be/DzRH30F9dyU

Thanks again for the tips and help. :thumbsup:

#5

Interesting visuals…but the music is too much like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and would drive most people insane after a few minutes. My eye was twitching half way through the demo. Either change the music or at least have it only come on during some events for less than a minute.

#6

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