Recording gameplay

I wanted to see if people would think this a good idea or not.

I am hoping for some way to record gameplay (not twitch or camtasia style recording).

Valve games like Half-life had ways to record gameplay directly in the game where it would record game data instead of actual video, so when you wanted to replay it you were not limited to the field of view of the recorder, you are able to fly around and view things from multiple perspectives as well as take over the view of other people on the same server.

It would be neat if we could do the same for FFXIV; allow us to record instance play and then replay it somehow. This would help us build guides on how to complete instances and definitely allow us to learn as a community.

Yes, this is an MMO so being able to do this in an open world is not realistic, but if it is limited to instances like Coil and Primals and Dungeons, then I think it could be possible. Since it is not actual video or audio being recorded, just the commands being run and the data behind the graphics etc, it would limit the amount of storage these recordings would take. We would then run a tool on our local machine to play back this data, and it would regenerate the graphics and audio locally.

Any thoughts?

This actually sounds like a really cool idea. Kudos. :)

Also, in the future, you can simply edit your post after you post it to get around the character limit.

Loved how I could record things with the in game console, even had a Team Fortress 2 plugin that triggered recording of any competitive style match I participated in

Would be nice seeing something like that for 14, but this is a totally seperate engine and thus may be hard or even impossible to implement

I'm sure there must be some way. The game client on our end received messages from the game server telling us how to render the game on our end. It's the same concept. Record those "commands" and replay them in to our game engine. Recreate the instance locally and play back what was done during the span of the instance.

They could possibly do something like that. Some other games do it to keep replays light on the data, literally record the inputs and positions of models/enemies/players. Examples of games that did this are Street Fighter 4, Dissidia FF, and Halo 3/ODST/Reach/4.

Would be pretty sweet to have in XIV, though I don't think it would happen, sadly.

Well, at least not for dungeons, trials, guildhests, and raids. PvP however, has a bigger chance of getting a feature like that. Could probably be made to work with other content.

One can hope.

While I wouldn't get my hopes up, I would love to see this. For example, when we got turn 5 world first, instead of just watching through our SCH's POV (which probably isn't want a DPS or tank wants to see), you could essentially "live" the fight through any of the players. It would be incredibly cool.

If enough people show interest, wouldn't it give it a better chance?

If I am not mistaken, when the devs show gameplay footage, was there ever an instance where we jumped from player to player? Could it be that this is what they already use to build the dev previews? I think it's a pain in the ass in general to record using conventional screen recording tools. I can see them building something like this to even help them fix bugs.

Now that I think about it, when and if the add-on API is released, maybe we could see some kind of "PRec" add-on (which is the beforementioned TF2 plugin)

It would be a great idea as an API add-on, but then you would need to find a way to replay it..not sure that would be accessible via the API.