Recording gameplay

[jeebz]

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?