| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Capturing |
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| Written by darkangel | |
| Thursday, 08 November 2007 | |
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Carrying on the tradition from other iD Software related games, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has the ability to capture footage directly from the game for movie making purposes. Unlike previous games utilising the Doom 3 engine, ET:QW has full support for netdemo recording and netdemo capturing. To aid us even further in the pursuit of ET:QW movie making, Splash Damage has also thrown in a few additional features to the ET:QW demo system. These features include free cam support, ability to pause the demo and resume from that same point (while still retaining to the ability to free cam through the map), demo cutting, ability to specify a capture period in the demo, and when the SDK is released, the ability to create scripted cameras.
Like most games that support in-game capturing, the method requires the game to output the footage as individual screenshots at your desired frame rate, and from there you then merge the shots together to create a raw movie file which can then be edited using your desired movie editor. Screenshot Output
Each screenshot outputs in tga format and can be quite large, so make sure you have quite a bit of HDD space free before beginning the process because there will be quite a lot of screenshots.
By default the screenshots folder is located on the system drive along with the demo and config files. The location is C:\Documents and Settings\user\my documents\id Software\base. Handily Splash Damage has made it possible to specify a user defined location for this folder, meaning you’re not restricted to the C drive default location, or the location of your ETQW install. To specify a new location you need to add a new line on your ETQW desktop shortcut command line. Right click the shortcut and select properties, after the command line that points to the etqw.exe, leave a space and add +set fs_userpath “Drive:\folder”. For example, if I had a folder on my external H drive called etqw that I wanted to save everything to, I would add the line +set fs_userpath “H:\etqw”.
Now we have the location sorted, we need to set up the game itself to do the capturing. This can either be done by manually entering the command into the console itself, or by creating a config file which you can then exec when in-game. The cvars we need to set are options for screenshot resolution, detail such as anti-aliasing/anisotropy and method for clearing the HUD. Open up notepad and add the following lines. The values I have entered here are example resolutions, you can set any resolution you please… as long as your PC can handle it!
Seta com_avidemowidth “1024” //width of the screenshots Seta com_avidemoheight “768” //height of the screenshots Seta com_avidemosamples “8” //the amount of fake anti-aliasing applied to the demo screenshots (not proper AA) Seta com_unlockfps “0” //caps frame rate at 30fps Seta r_multisamples “8” //addition of proper AA in game NOTE**** As of 1.2 patch there's a bug where you get overlapping screenshots if your output resolution is different from your in-game resolution. At the moment you will need to set your game res the same as your movie. Bug has been reported to Splash Damage.
The settings above will capture at 1024x768 with 8x AF. Adjust those settings as required. At the moment it’s only possible to capture at a max frame rate of 30fps, the reason or this is client commands (player movement etc) is synched at 30 fps, anything above that will give bugged player movement in the video clips.
Obviously there’s going to be some clutter on the screen, and of course this is down to personal preference, but it is possible to clear the screen completely of the HUD so the viewer can see everything that’s going on. You would also want to have the game look as good as possible for the movie itself, so Hannes of Ultraviolet Productions has supplied me with his detailed graphics and clean screen configs.
DETAILED TEXTURES Screenshot Capturing Ok now we have the game ready to capture and the graphics the way we want them to look, we now have to capture the footage. Q3 engine games used the cvar cl_Avidemo “value” to capture frame output, Splash Damage has built upon this and introduced a new cvar to help with the capping process, rendernetdemo.
Current usage is rendernetdemo <demo name> <fps> <start time in ms> <end time in ms> which is entered into the console from the main menu. This means that as well as being able to specify what fps we would like to capture at, we can also specify a particular time frame in the demo we would like to capture as well. Again the client synch rate is bugged so at the moment I wouldn’t suggest anything higher than 30fps. Specified captured areas use values in milliseconds, so 1sec = 1000ms. An example command for capturing a demo from 1min 40secs to 2min would be rendernetdemo “demo0001 30 100000 120000” If you want to capture the whole demo than all that’s required is demo name and fps value. Once the capturing has complete, navigate to your demos folder located in the main base folder. There will now be a folder in there with the same name as the demo you just captured (in the above example, the folder would be called demo0001), and in there is the screenshots you captured. From there you can now load the screenshots into virtual dub, pjbmp2avi or similar application and create your raw video file to edit.
Like Doom 3 and Quake 4, the capturing process takes a lot longer than Q3 engine games, so if you’re capturing a large section of the demo then be prepared to wait.
Demo Cutting A lot of frags will be contained in demos that are quite long, meaning that the demo files themselves will be quite large. SD has also implemented the ability to cut sections of the demo, and have them as their own independent, smaller file for easier handling. The method involves browsing the demo to your desired points and adding start and end cut markers between the section of demo you wish to cut from the original demo. Current usage is...
Placedemocutstartmarker Placedemocutendmarker
Once you have your two cut points marked, stop the demo and drop back to the main menu. Once there, drop the console and type cutnetdemo <demo name> <new demo name>. Example usage is...
Cutnetdemo demo0001 pwnagefragrun
You should now have a new demo called pwnagefragrun in the demos folder that just contains the frags you wanted. Comment (0) |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 26 November 2007 ) |
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