My Hammerwatch Doesn't Like to be Recorded.

[bewt]

Hello.

I really love this game. My friend and I are working on a fairly large campaign with new and exciting enemies and environments.

I've been recording the game with MSI afterburner, and it gets really choppy framerates. They are still high 60+ but they stutter back and fourth when I have afterburner turned on.

I don't think it's my hardware. I have a 280x which should be overkill for this game. I'm also recording to a separate hard drive.

I've seen YouTube videos of this game and they don't seem to have the same problem.

Any help or need of clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[MadMan]

Are you writing videos to a USB stick at all? I usually get that weird lag when i record onto a usb, probably because it is writing onto something too slow, or a slow hardrive? I can record to my hard drive fine, but not a usb.

[Hipshot]

I made the trailers and my own recordings using fraps, can't you try something like that?

[Aavak]

Having encountered some odd behaviour while trying to record Hammerwatch myself, I can confirm that it seems to play much better with FRAPS. Thankfully I still had it knocking about from the early days of my LPing, though I was a little dissapointed to have to return to using it, if only because I've become more comfortable with other software since.

Still, the game is certainly worth the effort, and FRAPS seemed to record it quite well

I am curious why it seems other software, such as XSPLIT and OBS have an issue with Hammerwatch though. From what I could observe, when trying to record Hammerwatch using software other than FRAPS it caused the first core on my CPU to max out, while the other 5 cores hung around the 30 / 40 percent mark, however when using FRAPS (which is a significantly more resource hungry pieces of software) all cores seemed to balance around the 60 / 70 percent range.

I didn't do any thorough troubleshooting though, so it could very well be a coincidence at this point, however if anyone else has had similar experiences while trying to record I'd be interested in hearing about them. It may lead to finding a solution

[Nicholas Steel]

Video recording software, including Fraps, need to interfere with the rendering process of the game in order to accomplish what they do. Depending on how they go about doing this it can easily cause the Vsync code to miss Vblank (Causing stutter as a frame is displayed twice as long as it should've been shown for), it's also possible to get in to a racial situation where the code constantly fails to detect Vblank to such a degree that performance literally plummets to single digits.

Another factor is your HDD is too slow for the massive video files that are a result of recording the game, causing the game to stutter as the game tries to load data from a extremely busy HDD that is trying to write the recorded video footage from RAM. HDD's are much, much slower then RAM and with something like Fraps videos can easily ballong to multiple gigabytes for just 30 seconds of footage. Have you tried copying something large like a 8GB game from a HDD to another HDD or similar? It's extremely slow.

Since the recording software can't write footage to the hard drive in a timely manner, it will slow the game down in undesirable ways and potentially mess the game up as a result (Especially games that use something like the Unreal Engine or similar as it features numerous FPS altering mechanics [smooth fps etc.])

What you've described in the original post is pretty much the same issue I have with the VBA-M emulator and Fraps, I can record anything from 5 to 30 minutes of footage and at some random moment during that time frame the emulator will start stuttering and rapidly progress to a point where the stutter is so bad that the game is rendered unplayable. it's kind of rendered my Metroid Fusion playthrough incomplete.