rec.autos.simulators

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 08:25:03

Somebody emailed today asking for a movie of my sim to see how the physics
worked. I tried to do this with a freeware utility called Cam Studio several
months ago, but it's apparently not designed for this type of thing, as it
crashes my system when the OpenGL window opens. (Cam Studio works well
otherwise.)

How do you guys create those awesome sim movies?

Programmers--- Are the AVI/MPG file formats ***? It seems that you could
create a DC to a file and swap the video buffer into it somehow a frame at a
time... Or is that more trouble than it's worth? (Seems like it would be.)

Thanks for any ideas!

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

My little car sim screenshots:
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

by **Gunnar Horrigm** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 08:45:58

no idea, but I know what I would do: run TV-out through a VCR.

yep.

if you can get single frame picture files, you'll have no problem
creating a movie from them. Adobe Premiere does it for sure. I think
Pinnacle DV Studio will do it too, and I'm positive I've even seen a
freeware thing that could do it. Virtual Dub, perhaps.

--
Gunnar
#31 SUCKS#015 Tupperware MC#002 DoD#0x1B DoDRT#003 DoD:CT#4,8 Kibo: 2
gitaren er en sjingke

by **Alex Smit** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 09:19:31

you could always stick a physics demo on the net? :)

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 10:14:22

Then use something (maybe Virtual Dub) to capture and save it as an AVI file?
I don't have a video capture device though....

Figured..

I just downloaded this and it would work perfectly for this, thanks. Not sure
exactly how to go about making BMP's frame by frame though. Might have to make
a replay mode, a serious PITB. Thanks for the ideas, at least there is a way
to do it now. Was hoping for some magic "hit this button and you're recording"
system, but maybe there isn't anything out there for that.

Thanks, Gunnar.

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

My little car sim screenshots:
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 10:15:12

Hehe... Sounds like that would be a lot easier than making a movie :-)

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

My little car sim screenshots:
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

by **Dave Pollatse** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 10:23:02

If you want to avoid dealing with AVI nastiness, there's a freeware win32
cmdline app somewhere on the net called tga2avi, which will convert
foo###.tga to an AVI. So if you've already written a screen capture routine
into your sim (which is quite easy under DirectX, I assume there's an
equivalent under OpenGL), it's just a matter of making it run in
non-realtime, spitting out each frame to disk. (except for sound of course).
I haven't done much with the DirectShow stuff, but it might not be too hard
to feed your screen captures straight to a codec--the advantages of just
writing out the TGAs is that your sim doesn't become dependent on weird
media dlls/drivers to run properly.

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 11:13:18

<snip>

Thanks, Dave. I'll look into this.

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

My little car sim screenshots:
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 11:25:41

<snip>

As opposed to BMPs, for instance?

Thanks
Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

My little car sim screenshots:
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

by **Morris Jone** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 11:53:19

I have made some very nice DVD's just using my digital JVD Camcorder
shooting the screen then, capturing back throught firewire. Then edit and
burn to DVD. Looks very good.

by **J. Todd Wass** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 12:01:34

A friend of mine has a digital camcorder, maybe that'd be the easiest way.. I
assume you could save this as an AVI or MPG file so someone could download it?

Thanks!

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

My little car sim screenshots:
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

by **Gunnar Horrigm** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 18:09:18

if you have a DV-camera you can stream VHS video through it and get
encoding in real time. :)

--
Gunnar
#31 SUCKS#015 Tupperware MC#002 DoD#0x1B DoDRT#003 DoD:CT#4,8 Kibo: 2
silence is FOO!

by **Kevin Clar** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 18:11:51

> Somebody emailed today asking for a movie of my sim to see how the physics
> worked. I tried to do this with a freeware utility called Cam Studio several
> months ago, but it's apparently not designed for this type of thing, as it
> crashes my system when the OpenGL window opens. (Cam Studio works well
> otherwise.)

> How do you guys create those awesome sim movies?

GPL has the advantage of having custom replay>avi convertors.

I then use Adobe Premiere to stick it all together although you can use
virtualdub (freeware) too.

Why not just get a camcorder and video the stuff on the screen?

Kev

by **Ruud van Ga** » Thu, 12 Sep 2002 22:52:25

You can write BMPs, whichever loader/saver you have. :)
(Uncompressed) TGA's are just so easy to write...

I have an option in my replay code to put out frames at a specific
frequency (implemented as every x ms).
Just use glReadPixels() and push out an image file. Ofcourse, this
requires replays. :)

As Dave said, the easiest thing is to not run realtime, but just run
every step, and at every 'time>nextSaveTime' do an image dump.

Then *afterwards* run something that creates an AVI. Adding this sort
of stuff internally to your sim is quite a bit less flexible, I'd say.
For example, I can create MJPEG movies here on my O2 if I want, or use
some kind of Premiere-type application to generate AVI's. Too much
hassle to put the same amount of options you get with AVI/MPG
generation in your sim code. Waste of time and never as good...

Other people indeed push out a TV-signal, recording that with some
video card. Or put a camera in front of the screen... It's faster that
way.

Ruud van Gaal
Free car sim: http://www.racer.nl/
Pencil art : http://www.marketgraph.nl/gallery/

by **J. Todd Wass** » Sat, 14 Sep 2002 07:07:59

Thanks, Stefano. Your video is the one I saw that made me first attempt this
with Cam Studio :-) Glad you popped in to talk about this.

I am using OpenGL, but am using straight procedural programming rather than
OOP, so I can't use classes anywhere (PowerBasic compiler, not MVC++). PB is
very close to C however, so perhaps the nVidia OpenGL SDK has something like
this too?

What would be involved in doing this with this type of coding style? Are you
able to record the movie in real time?

Thanks!

Todd Wasson
---
Performance Simulations
Drag Racing and Top Speed Prediction
Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.Com

My little car sim screenshots:
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

rec.autos.simulators

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