Let's play your game

[Saltwater Taffy]

I wasn't sure if you just meant the video for my LPs or the whole shebang so I included all of it. If there's information irrelevant to your query below then please just ignore it, figured it's safer to just include it all.

1. I use FFMPEG to do surface recording, usually encoded in an intermediate codec.

2. For the audio of the game I capture it via a Pulse connector.

3. I record my voice via Audacity. Once the LP is recorded and edited I also use Audacity to do waveform compression, equalization, normalization and editing.

4. I use Avidemux to edit the videos without re-encoding a single bit of data. I feel this is important as to avoid multiple encoding passes since it'd reduce the quality of the final encode.

5. Once I've edited the video and audio I merge the pieces into parts. These I upload to youtube then encode via x264 for long term storage on my own network.

Hopefully one of those will answer your question.

Oh okay sweet XD yeah I've been wanting to do some Let's Plays myself with some AGS games but I'm pretty ignorant to which screen capture/audio recording programs I will need to pull it off as simply as possible without sacrificing quality. I've tried Hypercam but the playback was mega laggy and it also affected my gameplay sometimes and would just stop recording for no reason and with absolutely warning  . So hours of gaming were instantly lost T__T

[qptain Nemo]

Oh okay sweet XD yeah I've been wanting to do some Let's Plays myself with some AGS games but I'm pretty ignorant to which screen capture/audio recording programs I will need to pull it off as simply as possible without sacrificing quality. I've tried Hypercam but the playback was mega laggy and it also affected my gameplay sometimes and would just stop recording for no reason and with absolutely warning  . So hours of gaming were instantly lost T__T

On Windows I can recommend Open Broadcaster Software. It's pretty swell.

[TFeldt]

Oh okay sweet XD yeah I've been wanting to do some Let's Plays myself with some AGS games but I'm pretty ignorant to which screen capture/audio recording programs I will need to pull it off as simply as possible without sacrificing quality. I've tried Hypercam but the playback was mega laggy and it also affected my gameplay sometimes and would just stop recording for no reason and with absolutely warning  . So hours of gaming were instantly lost T__T

I use Linux so my list of applications will be generally unusable for you. Instead of recommending what I use let's go through some that I've used with windows over the years. Generally it's the same for audio, if you want to record your voice then do so in a separate track so you can clean it up afterwards. For that there's really only one choice, audacity. It's free, open-source, works great in windows too and is an extremely capable waveform editor.

For capturing video in windows I'd probably recommend a hardware solution if you want absolute simplicity of use. Basically you buy a hardware encoder, connect the hdmi/dvi cable from your computer to it, then another identical cable from the encoder to your monitor. Whatever is on your screen can then be captured with the click of a button. No fuss, no bugs, it will always work no matter how new or old the game you're running is. Some examples are the elgato game capture hd, roxio has one and hauppage. I'm not the best person to ask about it but my elgato one seemed to work fine for the few times I used it.

If you're unwilling to buy additional hardware or require a software solution then my go-to windows application has always been Fraps. It encodes the data with an (almost) lossless codec. But you'll need plenty of harddrive space if you use that, and it will generally not work with older games since it injects itself for D3D and OpenGL surfaces.

There's a lot of confusion about fraps slowing down your computer when recording, this isn't actually true. It just requires vertical syncing. VSync works in intervals with your refresh rate. 120, 60, 30, 20, 15, 10, 5. Thus, if your computer is powerful enough to run a game at more than 120 frames per seconds then you'll get 120fps in fraps. If it's only capable of running it at 115 then it'll lower it to 60. If at 59 it'll go down to 30. That last bit is what people mistake as a performance hog because your framerate can vary during gameplay. Sometimes you're at 58, sometimes at 70. But if you at any point dip below 60 then fraps will sync at 30fps, creating the illusion that fraps require so much processing power as to almost halve the performance of your computer. Thus fraps will work fine on fairly modest computer setups and scales all the way up to beasts of machines.

If you plan on uploading to youtube then all of this is fairly unnecessary information anyway since youtube has a hard cap of 30 fps for videos, thus it's pointless to record at more than 30fps if you plan to upload it there.

[TFeldt]

On Windows I can recommend Open Broadcaster Software. It's pretty swell.

Sorry about that, missed your message as I was typing my own reply. Yes, OBS is an open-source and extremely capable application. It has a grip of features not required for making let's plays though since it's designed primarily for streaming. If anyone has any thoughts about both streaming and making regular Let's Plays then it might be better to just start with OBS so you don't have to re-learn a new workflow. It can definitely do both.

[qptain Nemo]

Yeah, I admit I've actually only used it for streaming. But I was impressed by how well it works and how lightweight and fast it is even when streaming, so I thought it's a safe assumption it'd work even better if you're just recording to your harddrive.

Also thanks for posting your linux workflow, may come in handy if I decide to record some games on linux.

[TFeldt]

Just finished the LP for Monty, it can be found at the beginning of this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtrHR3af4aQ0-XThfolNyQ6Zjfmuee_OO

I screwed up with this one. Unfortunately a newly acquired webcam had not just a microphone but a built-in soundcard as well. When I did the original (blind) LP of Monty it kept looping the audio back to my main soundcard, resulting in a horrible, distorted recording. This LP is the result of a second playthrough which isn't blind in any way, shape nor form. I did my best to inject commentary that I knew I made in my original playthrough but it's not quite the same. Fitz, apologies for that.

[TFeldt]

Apologies for vanishing, I'm going to continue my LPing next week. I've got Floaty rog, Art of dying and Captain disaster lined up, likely in that order. The main reason why I stopped posting videos was that my channel was hit by a content id claim. It turned out to be incorrectly flagged and they reversed it after some back and forth. Annoying, but hey, that's youtube for you.

Since we adventure gamers enjoy puzzles (mostly) I figured I'd add the following. I recently received a metallic box secured with a 4-digit combination lock from my grandmother. It came with a rather cryptic note containing a string of numbers. If any of you can figure out the combination then I'd be very thankful, there's details in the video itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIdrX-DTpDw

Happy pi day all.

[selmiak]

Code: ags

int combination = 0000;
while (lock == closed) {
  test(combination);
  combination++;
}

[CaptainD]

0910?