For my trailer I want to include clips of gameplay from both Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.
When they came out both games were classed as 2.5D in that the levels and geometry were designed loosely in a 3D space - although not true 3D, for instance one level could not be designed with one passageway on top of or below another. The enemies were all sprite based and were therefore in 2D. They had a front and back and you could either see one or the other.
3D accelerators hadn't been developed yet - at the time there was no need, getting Doom to run on a PC was a pretty amazing engineering feat at the time!
Both games were built on open software so that modders can go in there, design their own levels and change the enemy models and pretty much do what they wanted. Over the years some very dedicated modders have re-written 3D engines that will allow you to play the games using your 3D accelerator card or GPU. This brings with it major benefits of being able to render the game world with much higher detail textures, a higher resolution and more effects - basically make the game look "nice" on a standard HD monitor which nearly everybody uses.
Using these engines the old games actually look more like recent games - well ones from 10 years ago rather than 20 for instance! If I use these newer version in my clips they will look like a better version of the old games which is the premise behind my game anyway.
Duke Nukem has had many different 3D engines and I have used a few over the years. However since it has recently been released on Steam as the Megaton edition for ease I will use this version. It does include an updated version of the engine and higher resolution textures. The game looks pretty much the same as the original - just less blocky. It lacks a lot of the variables and options of the standalone engine builds but for basic gameplay it works well.
Doom has also had a lot of modders create new 3D engines for it. The engine I will be using is GZDOOM.
http://www.osnanet.de/c.oelckers/gzdoom/index.html
I then use a launcher program to organise the mods that I will be using to change and "improve" my Doom experience. I am using the latest version of ZDL Launcher.
https://github.com/qbasicer/qzdl/releases/tag/v3.2.2.2-stable
I also have chosen to use a mod called Brutal Doom which changes some of the weapons around in Doom and basically makes the game even more violent with fatality style executions and more death animations. It includes a reloading feature as well for some weapons which wasn't a feature of the original.
The part that makes it "prettier" so to speak is the high resolution pack that dramatically improves all the textures in the game.
http://dhtp.freelanzer.com/
Lastly, an option I use but is definitely not required is a newer soundtrack whereby bands have covered the original soundtrack and have recreated the songs using actual instruments rather then a synthesiser. To me it's an improvement but it may not be to everybody's tastes.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom/downloads/doom-metal-soundtrack-mod-volume-4
For instruction on how to install all of these for anybody interested there is a guy called Matt Eastwood who wrote a blog on it.
http://www.mattloveswriting.com/how-to-install-brutal-doom/
Now that I have the games installed and running in their new and improved format I need to download and install some video capturing software.
Whilst there are many popular programs for this the ones that I have heard most people using are OBS (Open Broadcaster Service), FRAPS, Nvidia Shadowplay and MSI Afterburner.
I decided to use MSI Afterburner. FRAPS has a free version of it's software but it leaves a watermark on anything it records. Whilst my main PC does have two Nvidia GTX 780 GPU's on it and therefore I could use that to record the gameplay using Nvidia Shadowplay the PC I use for my "productivity" work is powered by two AMD HD 7970's and therefore I don't have access to Shadowplay on this PC. I have no experience at all of OBS but I have used Afterburner for years as an overclocking and GPU monitoring program and since I already have it installed on this PC there seemed no reason not to try it out first. Any issues and I can use Shadowplay on my other PC as I have heard that it works really well.
AMD does have their Gaming Evolved Raptr app which does basically the same thing as Nvidia GeForce Experience (which includes Shadowplay) however I have heard people having a few issues with it in general so I had discounted that as an option initially.
You can get MSI Afterburner from here:
http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm
There are two programs to install - the main Afterburner overclocking and monitoring software and then Rivatuner Statistics Server which will handle the OSD (On Screen Display) and the recording of the gameplay footage.
In order to setup the software for recording purposes you need to access the settings in the bottom right hand corner of the Afterburner application. Then select the Video Capture tab at the top of the pop up window.
I have mine configured as below.
I found that by having the quality at 95% rather than 100% the file sizes were dramatically reduced and the quality level did not drop perceptibly.
To actually record the game play footage I set up a shortcut key to F9. Then when in game I could press this key and the software would start recording the footage. I didn't experience any slow down whilst at 95% quality although there was some noticeable lack of smoothness but I believe that it was just an issue writing a 5GB file to a mechanical driver. Running the game from a different drive to the one you are recording on also makes a difference, I ran the game from an SSD and recorded onto a mechanical drive - it probably would have worked much better the other way round from a performance standpoint as SSD's have much faster write speeds but due to the typically smaller sizes they come in I didn't want to fill up my SSD drive with a lot of video files. In hindsight I probably should record onto SSD a few files at a time and then transfer them to the mechanical drive afterwards. However since dropping it down to 95% quality fixed the issue (by reducing the file sizes and thus the amount of data required to be written to my mechanical drive) I was able to get it working satisfactorily as originally configured.
The results of my recording attempts can be seen in the finished trailer. At present Blogger.com won't seem to let me upload a video (possibly too big) but I will add one if I find a way round it.
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