[sldev] Machinima and recording movies/demos in SL

[Kiwi Alfa]

On 1/17/08, Matthew Dowd <matthew.dowd at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> > Machinima in Second Life is currently limited in ways that machinima
> > on game platforms isn't; namely, the ability to record 'demos', which,
> > rather than recording the view from the camera, will record the actual
> > events that happened during the recording.
>
> There is a recording option on the client debug menu which I believe records user events - is this anywhere close to what you need?

Nope; I considered that while pondering this proposal. As you note, it
records user events, but that's only a very limited subset of what
needs to be recorded for a machinima; I've also had problems using it
in the past.

Basically what I'd want to record is all events from the server, so
that I can log into the 'player' server, tell it to load from the
archived event file, and then I would be able to see what the
recording of *everything* that events were sent for during the time of
the recording. As far as I know (which isn't a lot right now, so
someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the SL server doesn't know
what the position of your camera is directly, instead relying on the
client to ask for new objects when it needs to render them, for which
the SL server will then start sending events (presumably until asked
to stop). Again, that's based on the little I know so it could be
wrong, but given that, it should be possible to view the same scene
from different camera angles after having recorded the events to a
file.

Does that make sense?

 - Kiwi.