I’ve not only been playing, but also playing around with Nexuiz, the open-sourced (free) first-person-shooter with the funny name. Nexuiz… It looks like a German trying to spell the latin ‘Nexius’ in French.
Today, when testing framerates at a colleague’s laptop (Precision M70 w/ nVidia Quadro FX Go 1400) compared to mine (Inspiron 6000 w/ ATI Mobility X300) I discovered how to record demos. Demos are like in-game recordings that you can view in the game engine. You can do this in most games, since it is a useful feature to test how many Frames Per Second (fps) you can push your graphic card to manage. If you’re a die-hard Quake3 fan (especially CPMA) you would have seen rat‘s demos. If God played Q3, that’s how he’d played.
Here’s the set of commands you can use in Nexuiz’ console. The console is accessed by the far-left button next to number 1. On Norwegian keyboards the symbol is §. While you’re in the menu, enter console by pressing Shift + the button you use normally.
Start recording: rec [filename] (before logging onto server)
Stop recording: disconnect (also disconnects from server)
Play recording: ply [filename]
List recordings: dem
The files will reside in <Nexuiz Root>datademos
For a simple auto-record script (Linux or Windows) see this forum thread.
There’s alot of cool stuff you can do while playing the demos.
Set speed: set slowmo # (0.1 is very slow while 5 is fast forward. 1 is normal)
Pause demo: pausedemo
Toggle Chase camera on: set chase_active 1 (3. person)
Toggle Chase camera off: set chase_active 0 (1. person)
Record video: set cl_capturevideo 1; set cl_capturevideo_sound 1
Stop videorecording: set cl_capturevideo 0; set cl_capturevideo_sound 0
Videorecording? Wtf?
This is kind of cool since it’s almost like an export-feature to the demo. With those commands you can record material (pictures and sound) which you can later put together in a 3rd party program (like Windows Movie Maker) and convert it to a media file. If you only use "cl_capturevideo 1" you’ll only get the visuals. I tested this both while playing against bots and playing on the net. Demorecording works fine online or offline since it’s part of the engine (although I got kicked out when the demo file had reached its limit. I got exactly 4mb, which was more than two maps). Videorecording slowed down my online game, but worked nicely when I ran it on demos.
The only problem I had was importing all those images into WMM..
Note: This will increase your geek-factor by several points, since it’s practically useless unless you’re really, really good, and you only end up watching yourself play a houndred times over. I kick ass. Now I’ve got proof.