FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Record your flight - Camera - Demo mod

This mod enables the player to record a flight path and replay.

During recording, the player no longer is under the influence of gravity and turns with the camera. Acceleration and braking are smooth and gentle, and strafing is disabled. The player will not stop moving by themselves and will go in a straight line. For optimum smooth paths, one should enable cinematic camera control (F8).

The goal of this mod are two fold: First, for entertainment and demonstration purposes. We'd like to show how cool Minetest is, and my goal is to make a "demo" Minetest subgame that can be used to provide a quick way for players to see how interesting and visually appealing Minetest can be.

Second, developers are looking for ways to reliably replay certain maps to do performance testing on rendering times. A fixed map and fixed player movement path are two of the largest requirements to make that doable. With this mod, this is in reach - and we just need an FPS counter to make it a fairly usable test.

How do use this mod?

Start a recording:


Save a recording to file with a name:


Play a previously saved recording from file:


List previously recorded files:


While recording:
- use up/down to accelerate/decelerate
- use jump to brake
- use crouch to stop recording



License: MIT for code

Location: https://github.com/minetest-mods/camera

great news!

I had just come to the conclusion that I need movement along a fixed path to record a nice video and minecart tracks kept sort of getting in the way. I had fiddled with the explore mod but not having to code the movement path but rather record a macro is by far the better idea.

I wonder wether you could also provide a method to add waypoints along a path and then let the mod calculate a nice smoother path along these fixed points. Maybe at these fixed points also the viewing direction could be stored and a time set that is used to calculate the movement speed between individual points.

Now if I could feed that recorded movement into the mapper or translate it to some common vector/geolocation format I might be abble to display my movement on an overview map.

+1 ! Waiting big to test all the things with it :}

twoelk wrote:I wonder wether you could also provide a method to add waypoints along a path and then let the mod calculate a nice smoother path along these fixed points. Maybe at these fixed points also the viewing direction could be stored and a time set that is used to calculate the movement speed between individual points.

This mod is a quick hack, it's choppy and sharp turns are awkward. Changing to a waypoint like system is something I'd like to do.

I'd love to have something like this for rails. Or at least something similar: Let the client check the ground and act accordingly. Instead of carts beeing handled by the server, just let the player walk like on rails.

Sokomine wrote:I'd love to have something like this for rails. Or at least something similar: Let the client check the ground and act accordingly. Instead of carts beeing handled by the server, just let the player walk like on rails.

My thought was actually to add the cart as a bone to the player animation, this way the cart moves with the player no matter what.

sofar, does the recorded scene save somewhere? Not sure if I'm missing something?
If not, is this a feature you might add eventually to this? i.e. save video to...

I really like this mod

TumeniNodes wrote:sofar, does the recorded scene save somewhere? Not sure if I'm missing something?
If not, is this a feature you might add eventually to this? i.e. save video to...

I really like this mod

It currently only records in memory, not to disk. With a little bit of saving/restoring it should be easy to make it write out the recording.

For those of you who are interested in this mod, a few new features are coming. As sofar mentioned in the updated OP, the mod is now licensed under the MIT license and in the minetest-mods organization. Not only that, but the mod no longer uses an item to start or play recordings, but rather uses a single chatcommand (see OP).

Aside from that, recording paths can now be saved to the disk per-player with the /camera command (see OP for specifics). Also, note that after recording, you must do /camera save <name> to save it. When playing back with /camera play, if no recording to play is specified, camera will check the temporary memory for an unsaved recording to play. I do have one warning though, and that is that the mod will not warn you when overwriting another recording.

The main thing that I am working on now is allowing right/left strafing.

Anyways, have fun!

octacian wrote:For those of you who are interested in this mod, a few new features are coming. As sofar mentioned in the updated OP, the mod is now licensed under the MIT license and in the minetest-mods organization. Not only that, but the mod no longer uses an item to start or play recordings, but rather uses a single chatcommand (see OP).

Aside from that, recording paths can now be saved to the disk per-player with the /camera command (see OP for specifics). Also, note that after recording, you must do /camera save <name> to save it. When playing back with /camera play, if no recording to play is specified, camera will check the temporary memory for an unsaved recording to play. I do have one warning though, and that is that the mod will not warn you when overwriting another recording.

The main thing that I am working on now is allowing right/left strafing.

Anyways, have fun!

Awesome!
As this advances, IMO this will end being the absolute BEST tool to do ingame vids.
being able to save the recordings is a huge addition, thanks.

Although I have to admit, I actually liked using the cam inv item to click to record but, I'll get used to using commands instead.

>edit: I was just thinking..., would it be possible to set /home as the default save-to folder, similar to using F12 for screenshots? and save as AVI?
Also, is there not an unused feature button in MT? somewhere within F9-F11 which could be used to turn recording on and off...?
I'm just suggesting these for ease of use on the user end

TumeniNodes wrote:>edit: I was just thinking..., would it be possible to set /home as the default save-to folder, similar to using F12 for screenshots? and save as AVI?
Also, is there not an unused feature button in MT? somewhere within F9-F11 which could be used to turn recording on and off...?
I'm just suggesting these for ease of use on the user end

Saving to /home/<user> would not work unless mod security were disabled and would for that reason be theoretically dangerous if the paths were to mess up (which they could/would) on Mac and Windows. Plus, this doesn't actually record a "physical" video file but saves the path as a table followed by writing it to a file. Minetest doesn't allow to directly save to a video file AFAIK, but if it does at some point, will implement. Essentially, you have to use an external recording program. It would, however, allow for map creators to have cinematic shots.

IDK if there's an unused feature button, it'd be nice if there was. Will look into it at some point.

tl;dr: no, not possible and IDK.