[sldev] Machinima and recording movies/demos in SL

Aidan Thornton makosoft at googlemail.com
Thu Jan 17 10:46:35 PST 2008


On Jan 17, 2008 11:35 AM, Kiwi Alfa <sl-dev at theblob.org> 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?
>
>  - Kiwi.

It's a nice idea, with one thing to beware of (above and beyond the
server-side prim culling mentioned by Lawson English) - some
information, such as textures, avatar UUID-name mappings and prim data
for in-world objects is cached by the client and not sent by the
server unless the client asks. Textures and UUID-name mappings should
be easy enough to deal with. The prim data will be the really
interesting bit - if you clear out your cache before starting, it
should work as long as the viewer's cache state remains the same as on
the initial run. Otherwise, you'll have to add some smarts in the
player.


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