I’m working on a behavioral experiment using Unreal where we’d like to revisit the gameplay for further analysis after a user has finished playing.
I’ve looked around the forums and have found that there aren’t great resources for this native to UE. Sequencer I’ve seen can make the gameplay run slow, and recording from Unreal in general can drop the frame rate down severely.
Are there any viable solutions for this?
A thread reply by @Rumbleball mentioned that there was a way to “record a track for the camera to drive along and on record the player is dismissed from gameplay till record is done.” But I’m not sure where to start with this.
If you’re looking for “after action review” type functionality, then look into the networking support. If you’ve built your game as networked, then you can record simply the network packets, which is much less than the full data, and then play them back to repeat the action.
If you want a full screen recording, look into using an NVIDIA graphics card, and the GeForce Exprerience Shadow Play feature. You press a key, and it starts recording a full screen MP4 at full resolution and high frame rate, with zero overhead. As long as you have enough free space on the disk, you can keep recording. Press another key when you’re done, and the MP4 is available in your Videos folder. Works a treat!
It has no overhead, because the NVIDIA graphics cards have built-in video encoding hardware, which can read the screen data straight from the framebuffer, when triggered through the GeForce Experience tool. (And certain specially constructed other software.)
Thanks for your response! Unfortunately, I’ll be using Linux so won’t have access to GeForce Experience software. I’m thinking of using OBS since the recording tools native to UE seem to have a lot of overhead.
When you say “after action review” what do you mean? If I understand it correctly, it wouldn’t be the full video which is what we’re looking for.
“After Action Review” is a process that some kinds of training use, where they go into whatever has happened and reviews what happened to critique and extract learning.
When using computer games for training, this is a common requirement for “recording the action.”
It sounds like you’re doing something else, and just want the video, so that doesn’t matter then!
It’s too bad NVIDIA doesn’t have good support for ShadowPlay on Linux. They have almost all the necessary driver bits already, and even have video encoding support for integrated drivers like the Jetson devices, and the Geforce Experience app seems to be written in something like Electron or NodeWebKit that’s generally quite portable. Just not … quite … there.
I don’t know if OBS has gotten good enough that it’s using the NVIDIA specific driver calls to turn on hardware encoding. If so, maybe it’ll be good! If not, maybe you could look into some hardware HDMI capture solution …
I’ll have to look into the hardware specifics of OBS recording, and will also check out other hardware-oriented solutions. Thanks so much for your replies!