Recording in game footage

C

ChrisH

Spaceman
Guys, a while back I mentioned that I wanted to put together a 'Propechy' movie, like what was done with Wing 3 & 4. It seems I am having trouble recording the in game footage, though.

I have tried a program called Fraps, but I can't seem to get it to record anything. Possibly I am doing something wrong. I know people have the video footage on Youtube, so it can't be too tricky.

Can someone point in the right direection?
 
Very probably you are doing something wrong. I used FRAPS for my Standoff videos, so it definitely doesn't have a problem with the engine. More generally, Fraps should be able to record anything you use OpenGL or Direct 3D to render. When you run Prophecy, does the Fraps frame rate counter show in one corner of the screen?
 
Fraps is a poor program to record Prophecy with. It uses too much CPU resources, and there are better recorder programs out there. A better bet may be with Hyper Cam 2 or more likely VDSoft's Screen Recorder.

IF you still want to give Fraps a try, just see what the default recorder buttons are. From my experience, the higher function keys(F11 seems to work well on most recorders) seem to be unused by most games so using them for a recorder program should work.
 
My experience using Fraps versus Hypercam 2 when recording several different games is that Fraps uses fewer resources and, far more importantly, records without dropping frames, so you get a much better quality end video. The only real problems that Fraps has is that it uses its own codec, which isn't quite as good as Lagarith, and that it splits files into 4MB chunks (not that these are hard to sew back together in AviSynth, it's just annoying).

Concerns about CPU usage are in any case largely irrelevant when considering recording Prophecy. I could record Secret Ops at 30fps (and there would be no point in recording a game as old as SO at 60fps) using Fraps and a seven years old computer.
 
I have had some issues with Fraps being a bit 'hoggy' on the resources, but the simple solution is to make sure the affinity (in task manager, right click on the process, click affinity) is set to 1 core and the game has the others. I used this fine with Camstudio and Basilisk and Fraps and Interstate76 (which has to have only one core and all sorts of other finicky requirements to even run).

If you're still having issues, make sure that the game is playing off the HDD not the CD (reduce any overhead) and if possible that you're writing the video to a different HDD.
 
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