Recording GamePlay in a WebPlayer

Hi,

I'm doing some work for a client who would like me to record gameplay in a WebPlayer and potentially allow them to upload their video to our server, so players can share key moments of the game with each other. I've seen that there are multiple plugins that record gameplay but the best ones are iOS/Android only.

I'm under the impression that recording gameplay from inside a WebPlayer isn't possible, for two/three key reasons.

1. File Access is off limits in the WebPlayer, so a video source can't be saved.
2. There's no way to process the video since DLLs can't be used in the WebPlayer.
3. Even if I could save a video, I couldn't access it to upload it because, as I mentioned already, File Access isn't possible.

Excuse me if my knowledge of video creation isn't great, I don't really have much experience with it. I'm sure there are probably other things that would make this even more difficult than I imagine, but does anyone know if it's possible? My client is asking for < 10 seconds of footage if it matters.

EDIT: I've done searches on the internet, and even found threads that loosely talk about this. But generally they were from a few years ago, I don't know if anything has changed in that time.

Thanks,
Chris.

 

Not sure if this approacher is performant enough:
Write all the frames into a Texture2D array and upload the the frames to to the server server and then use a tool like ffmpeg to convert the frames to a video that the user can download / view online.
(Found this interesting)
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/131215/uploading-screenshot-to-server.html

 

Alternatively, capture the camera and player positions, and upload those to a server which runs a standalone version of the game and renders out the gameplay frame by frame.

 

I've just came across this one. Not sure if it helps your case tough, https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/3345

 

EDIT: Ah, wait, reading what you said again I do think I misunderstood what you suggested. We could definitely make this work. I need to do some testing.

Thank you,
Chris.

 

I've actually seen this plugin myself, I was under the impression that it only works in PC/Mac builds and I wouldn't be able to use it in a WebPlayer. Do you know if I'm wrong about that?

Thanks for your reply,
Chris

 

Ok this idea is cool, definitely worth trying, only issue I'm thinking is that there wouldn't be any sound. We could probably live with that though.

And is there a way that you know of that we can use to automatically convert screenshots to video on a web server? I've never tried or heard of anything that can do that but I've never researched it either. I'll need to look into it. I could probably write an application that picks up any shots that have been taken at the end of the day and use someones plugin or something to render them out I suppose. Hmm...

Thanks for your suggestion.
Chris.

 

No you are not wrong about it , not plug-ins in the web-player means not use of this asset. (They are using multiple dlls)

 

Hi,

I'm sorry to resurrect this thread but I have a question about the process. I've managed to achieve everything I need to do what was suggested here. The only thing I'm really not too happy about is the amount of images I'm having to upload to the server one by one.

I've tried stitching them together and uploading a massive texture to our server but the stitching process just seems to take too long to justify itself.

I'd really like to add them to an archive or something so it's just a single file to upload but I've had trouble finding a library that will work in the WebPlayer and allow me to make an archive out of the images stored in an array in memory.

Does anyone have any ideas they can share with me?

Thanks,
Chris.