[sldev] Machinima and recording movies/demos in SL

[Lawson English]

Kiwi Alfa wrote:
> 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?
>
>   
Absolutely. The original Marathon game did this, in a sense. It would 
record all user input into a QuickTime file and use the game engine as a 
playback of that input. Since all actions in the game were controlled by 
keypresses of the player, the file was extremely compact: 100KB returned 
60 minutes of networked game-play of 6 plyers. You could even speedup or 
slowdown the playback, and switch capera views from player t player

What you're looking for is more complicated: the playback of scene 
information, but in principle everything you see could be reconstructed 
from what the client got over a period of time.

One flat in your plan (and its relatively minor, I think): the server 
DOES have some idea of where your camera is and does do some culling of 
the objects sent to the client. This means the range of positions where 
your camera position will show a valid picture is reduced, but I think 
you'll still have SOME mobility of the camera, even if its not sim-wide. 
I might be wrong, of course.

The trick will be to mod the viewer to accept the canned data as current 
and not get upset when certain messages to the server are not responded 
to. Not a clue how to do those mods. I'd talk to the libsl people and 
see if they have any ideas.Maybe there's already a way for SLProxy to 
record that data and play it back from a file. That would be the srart.




Lawson