Slashdot Mirror

FRAPS

What exactly are people using to show the FPS on screen while they play games?

Probably Fraps. It is what I use.

Fraps seems to be a capture tool for 3D animated video on Windows, and Shattrath City is an important location in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade which requires rendering a large crowd of high-level characters wearing elaborate equipment (often glowing and/or animated). The poster's video card can accomplish all this at over thirty frames per second.

I will only comment on the game type I enjoy; that is the RTS title of Pacific Fighters. I'm convinced that learning this game is equivalent to learning golf. Yet, while I hate it most of the time I keep going back for more; keep spending mad money on the computer to get more out of the title and download freeware software like FRAPS to get my FPS and record sections for machinima. I've even visited Borders to buy a book about how to do basic acrobatics. It is great fun. However, I am also a sink (single-income-no kids) so I can't speak from the perspective of gamers with baggage. I will venture that a wife and kids would probably be negative mojo on game time.

It can record at 1152x864 (4:3) or 1280x720 (16:9) as a max resolution.

Is there anything comparable to this in the Linux world? This looks like Windows-only software.

I'd love to be able to record some tutorial videos for software I've been writing, but some of it is high-motion video and/or OpenGL. The closest I've been able to come so far is to run everything inside a VNC session and use VNC2SWF to output to flash - but VNC won't let me use OpenGL or hardware accelleration for the video.

I'm not even concerned about resolution, something like 800x600 would be just fine.

Have you looked into FRAPS (http://www.fraps.com/)? It doesn't quite meet your resolution requirements, but still gets you most of the way there.

It can record at 1152x864 (4:3) or 1280x720 (16:9) as a max resolution.

1280x1024 is only about a third higher resolution. Perhaps there is some technical limit that prevents fraps from passing one megapixel per frame (both supported max res are slightly below that mark), and 1280x1024 is 1.3 megapixels. But maybe they just picked a megapixel as an arbitrary ceiling to prevent customer complaints from slow performance.

I don't know anything about the internals of FRAPS, but it seems ideally suited to a dualcore system.

I suggest you contact the FRAPS people and ask them:

1) If a special build can be produced that supports 1280x1024
2) If FRAPS can take advantage of a second core (Game on one, FRAPS on the other) for such intensive recording

The demo videos are impressive. The UT2003 one at 1024x768 is just the intro and title screen, but the 800x600 Doom 3 demo is a minute of gameplay, and it doesn't seem to be dropping any frames.

Easy way:
Use a screen capture tool that (my guess) doesn't care about DRM like FRAPS
Hard(er) way, but usable for all DRM stuff whichever way:
Open the DRMed file with its associated app in your favorite Virtual PC software, then take a snapshot of the window it runs in.

I can't even play the damn game at 800x600 without serious choppiness. With fraps I am getting under 20 fps in most cases dipping down to single digits pretty quickly. I think I am just going to sell the damn thing back on Amazon and forget about it till I can afford an x800 for 150 bucks or so in a year.

I just had a nightmare vision of FRAPS video captures from within Star Wars Galaxies being re-enacted by a bunch of LARPers.

I mean, it'd definitely fit within the Star Wars Canon:

This is not the Holiday Special you were looking for.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
It's worse.
It's a LARP!

The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?

We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)

The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!

You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.

To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.

Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.

T.V. output is typically recorded with a video capture card.. much different in the case of computer game movie making, which can very easily be done with an app called fraps, which can capture anything displayed on screen.

Most games, though, like half-life, have the ability built in (called demo recording, mostly used to catch hackers), and everything can be done software-wise. That's the great advantage, anyone who has a modern computer and a few cooperating friends has the ability to get into this hobby. Doesn't get much more accessable.