Implement Recording Functionality to Raise Publicity Profile

[pokute]

The lack of publicity and advertising has always been a problem for AC. Turbine can raise awareness for the game by implementing basic mpeg recording capabilities for mid-level machines in the expansion.

The biggest current road block with AC fan-movie creation is in obtaining the raw mpeg+sound data. Encoding and compression is not an issue due to the myriad of codecs and knowledge that are readily available.

[SteveJobsDT]

aye that'd be sweet.

[Alok]

This is a great example of a guy that doesn't know what he's talking about.

If you think any mid-range (P4 1.5-ish, Geforce 4/Radeon 9800, 512/768MB ram) computer can pull video and sound from the AC client (which is a HORRENDOUS CPU HOG WHILE IT'S ACTIVE) at any resolution above 640x480, then I have to wonder just how much experience you have doing this.

There are already tools that do this, that have had 2+ years of development behind them, that function better, faster, and cleaner than any in-client implementation ever would. Oh yeah, and they don't extract image data to a crap format like MPEG.

Now, I can't speak for everyone, but video below 800x600 is just bloody annoying. I run a 1600x1200 desktop. 640x480 is miniscule. You can't read any of the ingame text, you can't read the coords, you can't read item descriptions. I don't think them wasting 6-12 months developing this tool would do ANY good as far as getting people to play the game. The hardcore gamers are going to go "Well, but it's still the same, boring game. With a recording tool." and the casual guys are all going to go "HEY, WE'RE OVER HERE PLAYING WOW! KEKEKEKE!"

:cool:

[Yula_the_Mighty]

I do not understand why any game designer would want to do what you are suggesting. There are already programs available that do this function. Here is a link to one of them:

http://www.fraps.com/

Yula the Mighty - HG

[pokute]

hmm, i was hoping that capturing to a format with minimal compression, plus game code/thread optimizations might make it feasible on mid-level machines, but i guess not, judging from the responses above :(

the reason i brought this up was because the people who have the time to make intelligent, creative videos are often not the ones with high-end gaming ferraris ^^;

[Yula_the_Mighty]

hmm, i was hoping that capturing to a format with minimal compression, plus game code/thread optimizations might make it feasible on mid-level machines, but i guess not, judging from the responses above :(

A carefully crafted solution with in the client could be provided with lower hardware requirements. It makes no economic sense to provide a special purpose solution. Lets just say that you could get provide such a feature for one staff month's effort (including design, coding, and so on) and that a staff hour costs $50.00 (including benefits). One staff month = 160 hours x $50.00 = $8,000.

You can buy a PC capable of running the AC client and Fraps for a lot less than $8,000. The other thing to remember is that the $8,000 figure is probably very low.

Yula the Mighty - HG

[pokute]

i don't mind ppl saying it's a bad idea
but that is a very poor cost/benefit analysis

let's just say it costs 25,000+ dollars to develop the feature

first, remember that turbine's game engines, despite the differences between generations, are similar enough that, at the very least, development experience in one game client can be used on the graphics cores of other games. and if the planning and design is done right, at least some of the code should be reuseable. it would be utterly short-sighted to develop this feature for only one game, and not seek its implementation in others.

second, this shouldn't be developed just as a useability feature. any company that looks at something like this should be keeping publicity and advertising opportunities in the backs of their minds. naturally contests and perhaps some video hosting for the winners come to mind. turbine could ask for freeformed movies, music videos, event recordings, or even player reenacted teaser scripts and other scripted footage, where some emphasis could be placed on artistic merit and technical manipulation of the footage (with the intent of well... making ac look more interesting than it really is).

there are so many possibilities here that turbine could potentially exploit. one bizzare scenario (and perhaps a problematic one) would be people doing the quests on patch day and uploading their dungeon crawling videos, which could be quite compact because they would only need a fairly rough level of detail. but this is of course, only possible if it's technically feasible.

if it is not... then oh well~ c'est la vie

the second "oh well" is that, knowing turbine, who doesn't exactly do a whole lot of marketing research, i would guess that there probably isn't enough knowledge to judge whether something like this would bring worthwhile paybacks over the next four years.

please don't take this as a flame to your posts
i just wanted to point out that there are a lot of things to consider for any feature, and the possibilities burgeon when dealing with anything that extends the media capabilities of your average player.

(anyone for marshall macluhan?)