i found some time today to play some quake live after a long pause … and i have to say i really like the changes they made with the last couple of updates to the stats system as well as to the weapon/damage balance.

i also finally looked a bit deeper into the quake live config system and it’s basically pretty much the same as i know it from quake 3, so re-using my old config shouldn’t be a problem.

i played around a bit and recorded a demo and wanted to export this as video file. unfortunately they didn’t take improvements like the AVI recording function that one might know from  free quake engine modifications like ioquake3. instead it’s only the old stock quake3  functionality of “cl_avidemo”. it basically will export the demo you are playing as screenshots, which you then can use to compile a video out of it. i usually want to have a source material of 90 fps, that would make it 90 screenshots of ~2MB per second… *sigh* i need a bigger hard drive :) i also looked into using screen capture tools like FRAPS, but the results are not really high quality.

so i ended up with this procedure:

• record the demo in quake live. just type “record filename” in the console to start the recording, type “stoprecord” to stop it.
• start quake live in practice mode (against bots), open the console and type “demo filename” to load and play your demo
• when the demo starts playing, immediately type “cl_avidemo 90”. you can change 90 to whatever you want the framerate of the recording/screenshots to be.
  the playback will start to stutter but no worries :)
• when you are ready to stop the export, bring up the console again and type “cl_avidemo 0”
• the screenshots are being saved in %APPDATA%\..\LocalLow\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3\screenshots
• now start virtualdub and first align the framerate to the number you used with cl_avidemo earlier (90 in my example). you can find that setting in virtualdub under VIDEO –> FRAMERATE
• now just take the first screenshot from the screenshots folder and drag it into the the virtualdub screen
• you can now just save it as an AVI. i usually save it without any compression and then use expression encoder 3 to get it into the format i want.

here is a sample of what the output looks like (after youtube down-scaled it again ;)):

video

i will start creating a specific movie config for quake live to bump up the video settings, remove the HUD and add shortcuts for all the console commands i mentioned above.

another problem i have to tackle is getting the sound captured… that will only work with an external tool.