[Terry]

I'm looking for a utility that'll allow me to record what's happening on my computer screen so that I can put together a video of my game. Websearches so far have either pointed me to spyware tools, which I don't trust, or commercial tools, which I can't afford. Can anybody point me in the right direction towards something free?

I'm using WinXP.
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[Mokona]

Well, one approach I've used in the past was to make the game write out a BMP every frame (numbered), and then use bmp2avi (http://www.divx-digest.com/software/bmp2avi.html) to turn those into an AVI.

Doing it this way has the advantage that you know exactly what you're getting (exactly one frame of video per frame rendered)

[PhyrFox]

Or, if you feel confident enough to use something else, you could include zlib into your program and have it output a *.mng file... Or use a mpeg library and have it output the results there... or embed Windows media player and have it output the results as an AVI or WMV. In any case, there are ways out there. The BMP way works, but it's horribly disk consuming.

I'd recommend lowering the resolution as well; most likely it'll need to be scaled down in some way. The most reasonable way would be a simple mip-mapping technique (combine nearby colors into one pixel to decrease resolution). This could be done on the fly or pre-rendered with a series of conditional compile statements.

Just some more ideas for you...

~= phyrfox =~

[Mokona]

[janus]

I use Fraps or Camtasia for multimedia stuff (Games, video playback) and DemoForge for applications. The first two cost money, and DemoForge offers free licenses to open source developers.

[PhyrFox]

DemoForge sounds nice. I might have to have look into that. After all, I'm all over free (that's why I installed SUSE for no reason other than it was a free Linux that happened to work for my purposes. Which, by the way, if you don't have Linux, have never tried, and are scared to, try SUSE. It's incredible.)

Another idea... Make a player that supports some odd format (I have some ideas in mind) that you can use to support features that would be common to your RPG, such as dirty triangle updates and/or movement/sprite-type commands. You could compress the data far better, and it would probably give you a good cut-scene recorder/player in the process. That's how most demos are done, you know, inside of a game. Just recorded and played back. Then again, you'd have to support the player as well.

Overall, if you want to output the data, I'd recommend either a custom tool or a tool that will convert the data to AVI or another compressed format. Making a folder full of full-screen bitmaps will choke your system faster than you'd imagine (as it was stated earlier, more than about 30 seconds of 60 fps is going to kill your windows system). There's several reasons for the lag, including having to expand the directory's root folder as well as the additional overhead of the file system to generate free space for the files.

And, unless you have a huge drive, you'll eat up the entire thing in mere minutes. I know, because I once tried converting a tape I loved into WAV format, and it took up my entire 560MB hard drive (yes, this was a while ago, but it proves my point). The entire tape was only around 90 minutes or so, but consumed over 300MB of space (and I only got about half-way through, if that). In MP3 format, it would have been less than 100MB for the entire tape.

Compression is always important in any project. Don't listen to others. If you have a large amount of data, users will always appreciate you saving them space. Remember: People are installing more than just your one game, or downloading your demos. You always should respect other's disk space, no matter how much they have. Microsoft has often made this mistake... Anyway, I'm rambling by now, so I'm off. I have to find a compiler for Linux. I'm going to convert my entire project to OGL after all... seems I can't even boot Windows without re-installing it, and... no thank you. I love my SUSE too much.

~= PhyrFox =~