Timedemo recording (not video but game state)

[epi.noah]

Some games (like good old Quake) have an option to record timedemos. You don't record a video, you record what's going on on the screen, the game state. Later, you can play that at whatever setting you set afterwards.

Is there such a plugin to record what's going on on the screen as a separate scene or something? You could just be in VR, with low quality but high performance settings, interacting and recording what's going on (VR hands and everything). Afterwards, it would be possible to just load that and render it to a video with the Video Renderer plugin at the best possible visual quality, high fps, maybe even at 2x fps for slow motion...

 

[epi.noah]

I'm surprised that no such solution exists in a community that makes great videos and would want to capture what goes on in VR. Oh well.

 

[MacGruber]

It's called Timeline and basically everybody uses it? Both the VaM build-in Timeline feature as well as AcidBubbles plugin they both do this. Although usually you would record only a few things at a time, the rewind and record something else while the earlier recorded stuff is playing....repeat. Why? Because you likely don't have enough motion controllers to record everything at once Also you can focus on one thing at a time and do it well. That's how you make scenes, well, at least the simple linear ones.

 

[epi.noah]

That doesn't really do what I'm trying to do.
I'm in VR, watching the action, and interacting with the character using my VR hands. I want to be able to record that. Like taking screenshots, but capturing the action.
(but something I can play back in VaM, instead of a video)

 

[epi.noah]

Even when I possess a person,
1. If there is a female atom running "idle animation" on its timeline
2. And I slap her butt, which makes her move a certain way before she continues her animation
3. and she has plugins that make her respond to that slap (moan, blush, make a sound)
Is there any way to capture that for replay?

Is there any way to capture the user experience for replay apart from video capture?

 

[epi.noah]

So if I

• Possess a person atom
• Set it to record into the main/internal timeline/animation
• set the other person atom I want to record into the internal timeline
• I interact with the other person atom
• AND that other person atom has the timeline plugin giving her an animation etc

The action will be recorded?

 

[MacGruber]

It should be if acid bubbles did everything proper

Timeline only records the positions of the controls you selected. Nothing more nothing less. It does not record the game state (plugins, physics, ...). For a feature like that a game has to be developed from the ground up. Now way to add that to VaM via plugin.

 

[epi.noah]

As far as I understand, the PostMagic issues come from the Unity engine used in VaM.

I have used so many tools from MacGruber, and read many guides to put something complex together. They are like the backbone of my upcoming scene where you can change everything with a single click. I only paid what I could, and I was free to skip doing that too if I wasn't able to. The plugins were superb.

I do refrain from PostMagic because it can't be used reliably in VR in its entirety. But the rest is what makes a lot of scenes possible.

 

[MacGruber]

Ok, this is totally offtopic for this thread...but whatever

Btw MacGruber where you ever able to fix your PostMagic instability issues in terms of destruct it correctly ?
the floating alpha problems, the NAN issues, the 3d UI scaling and instability issues ?

I'm not working on PostMagic because it cannot be fixed. PostMagic has not changed in 3 years, expect for minor updates when VARs were introduced. PostMagic is little more than a UI-frontend making hidden VaM features available. It also rearranges the VaM's render pipeline a bit, to fix the worst UI issues. Under the hood its some super old version of Unity's Post Processing Stack which Meshed happend to ship VaM with. He probably tried to get it working, failed and forgot that VaM was still shipping with it. I just finished that work, with some VaM hacking.

"Fixing PostMagic" would mean updating to a current version of that Post Processing Stack, which isn't compatible with VaM's version of the Unity engine...not to mention that it isn't something a VaM plugin could bring in. You can't do everything from a plugin.
The ONLY alternative would be a complete new implementation of a Post Processing Stack desgined to work with VaM. Thats a 1-2-year full-time job for a team of 5-10 specialized graphics coders. I'm not kidding. I hope you agree that is complete idocy to do for a single person in their free time. Way better to wait on VaM 2.0 which uses a newer version of Unity engine and Meshed can simple use Unity's current off-the-shelve Post-Effect solution....which is probalby just a 1-2 week job for a coder to build a useful in-game UI for.

BTW: NaN issues are your broken meshes, not PostMagic.

Taking Money from others and leaving his on top work in such a catastrophic state isn't really cool

I don't think you realize even remotely how much time went into my work. Usually around 30-40 hours per month. Sometimes 80 hours, if I had vacation to burn. After Patreon fees, payment provider fees, currency conversion fees, 40% income taxes....even at the best times I ended up with about the equivalent of half of minimum wage per hour in my country. That's for highly specialized coding work that would usually cost you like 100€/hour (gross). By the way, my stuff was always available for free after 2 weeks, with a few exceptions where it was 4 weeks. Nobody forced you to pay for it.

Also you appearently missed this thread (and 2 posts on my Patreon and a PM that went to all active Patreons):

Goodbye from MacGruber

Just to make that clear, this is not an early April's Fool post ;) Some probably already suspected this after I had paused my Patreon for the last two months, I decided to stop my engagement in the VaM community for the foreseeable future. But, ...why? I was active in the VaM community more or...

hub.virtamate.com

I guess some Chinese will take your place fast in the future

I announched already in 2020 that I wasn't continuing on PostMagic. Apparently then there wasn't anyone in 2.5 years who managed to pick it up and improve on it. All my stuff is under CC-BY-SA license, everyone can legally making changes and publish them (under the same license). You can do it yourself, if you think it's easy.