saving in-flight in wc4

luminon

Spaceman
Hi, I'm new to these forums but I have been a wing commander fan for a long time.

I was wondering if it is possible to save in-flight in wc4 (i.e. during a mission) to an AVI so that it can be played with real player or something similar outside of the game.

I used something called hypercam which does video capture and managed to save with sound but when I played it in windows it wasn't very smooth.

Does anyone know of any other way of doing this which will give video with sound and runs smoothly. If it can be done I would be interested in trying to put together a few in-flight videos with some fmv scenes I managed to get using HCl's ripping program.
 
It sounds like the framerate was too low. Screen capturing is often used to demonstrate software in presentations or tutorials, where 15 or even 5 frames per second would do nicely. Maybe Hypercam has a setting somewhere? It should be more around 25 frames per second.
 
I don't know a lot about Hypercam, but there's a program I use for other purposes called Camtasia (full featured demo available on www.techsmith.com. As long as you can run WC4 in a window (which you can with the windows patch, I believe), it should work fine.

If Hypercam has a frame setting though, I'm sure that would also work fine. Understand though that WC4 runs in what... 640x480 screen resolution? To do a fullscreen capture and sustain a good framerate, you'd need a fairly powerful machine.
 
Or find a video card with the standard rgb/svid output and pipe that sucker into a capture pc or video recorder, or use an svga to composite video adaptor on the video card svga output and route the video that way.
 
Thanks for the ideas.

According to hypercam, it is recording 30 fps, but when I play the video afterwards it seems more like 5fps. My processor is only about 1000MHz though, which might be the problem right there.

I tried camtasia but it I have windows ME and it only works in 2k and XP.

One other thing I might try, although I don't know how it will turn out, is to try and use a digital video camera to record the monitor while playing and then saving it onto my computer. If the reason I get bad frame rates is because my processor is too slow then I will probably be better of doing this.
 
Well first thing you will notice if using a camera to record the monitor is the varying vertical retrace running thru the image, this is caused by the difference between the monitor vertical scan rate, and the camera's vertical scan rate. You will recognize this as a large, black bar moving up or downward thru the picture. I dont think using a camera will give you the results your looking for.

You might check your codecs that are installed on your machine, update them if needed. I would imagine these capture programs are using their own little codec to capture the video, but might not be fully compatiable with the codecs your WMP uses to playback the file recorded.
 
I tried fraps and it didn't seem to do anything apart from displaying the fps while playing. I'm not sure if I'm doing anything wrong, but I read in the readme somewhere that it only works in win 2k/XP and I have ME.

However, I did manage to get some descent video captures with version 2 of hypercam which was released recently. Still not perfect, but much better than previous attempts.

I have managed to record a few missions which I consider "important" to the plot and have ripped and compressed almost every scene from the CDs. The only bad thing about the mission recordings is the tendancy for taunts to be repeated over and over again, which can get annoying.
 
Cameras can be synced to the monitor. I don't think EVERY camera can do that, but the pro ones surelly can.
 
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