Support video game capture

[Xalaxis]

Perhaps it could be possible for Chronolapse to capture the framebuffer from the GPU in a similar way to OpenBroadcasterSoftware. That way video games would be correctly captured rather than remaining a static frame.

[collingreen]

Thanks for the suggestion Xalaxis - I've thought about that kind of thing before but it isn't really the way chronolapse is built or what it is trying to do. I think using actual video recording software is the best bet for recording video - chronolapse intentionally stays out of the way and only peeks in to take a screenshot at the specified intervals. That being said, I'm not sure why your video games only get a static frame - I have personally timelapsed lots of games (Chronolapse was originally created to timelapse game development competitions!) and I've heard from several different users who have used chronolapse to record long running gameplay or game changes. What are you trying to record that isn't working?

[Xalaxis]

I'm by no means an expert, but I believe when a game switches to 'exclusive fullscreen' mode the output of the game bypasses any non-specialised capture method. Perhaps you and those users were using 'borderless window' (which looks exactly like fullscreen but is technically a window the exact shape of the screen) or windowed display modes? I've briefly tested capturing game footage with osu! and Super Hexagon, and the screenshots show the last frame the game displayed before full screen was enabled. As a matter of course I always use exclusive full screen mode to get the frame latency (the time between the frame being rendered and displayed to the user) as low as possible. This is particularly vital for rhythm games such as osu! which rely on frame-perfect beat hits for the best score.

[Xalaxis]

My intended use case was to start Chronolapse on startup and create a 'Timelapse of a week' or something similiar. A video isn't really suited for the same thing for both size and automation reasons.

[collingreen]

I think you're right and that makes sense the way chronolapse captures images. I expect the most recent code version on mac will work (it uses scrot instead of wxwidgets for screen capture) but that doesn't really help you today :p

I like your idea though -- I'll try to keep this in mind for the next version of chronolapse.

[Xalaxis]

Many thanks. I'll take your advice and see what I can do with videos until then.

[collingreen]

I've also been chewing on an idea for 'plugins' for the next chronolapse version - this might be a perfect way to 'have our cake and eat it too' -- some way for CL to trigger something external at capture time. Food for future thought!

Good luck in the mean time and sorry I don't have more actionable advice!