Better replay
 

Hi,
is there any external tool that would be able to do a replay? The in game is pretty basic (I'm very glad it's there, but one can't even go back, smoke/weather doesn't clear up properly etc..)


Cheers,
-smm

The in-game utility is indeed very basic, but still more useful than most games of the era. If you are wanting to jump back into play, it is the only option for such. With the playback facilities they included, it looks like maybe a Rewind function was intended, but that they never did get it activated. It is quite a bother to have to re-start the Replay function also, but it is what it is.

Now, if instead, you are looking to make videos of your gameplay, you can do several things. What I have done before is to record the gameplay from inside the boat with either the MS GameBar, or the AMD or nVidia utility that is similar, specifically for your card (there is also Bandicam along with AfterBurner or FRAPS, among others). As you play, you can "hide" a portion of the control menu at the bottom with the [. / Del] on your NumPad section. When you are finished, "Save" the game and include the Replay stuff in the Save. Start your recording software again, and use different camera angles to get a 2nd camera in your clip library. You of course, are not able to "see" inside the boat anymore with the Replay function. Do the Replay however many times desired though, to get the various camera angles you want. Then build your movie in your favorite app.

Several things to remember about the SH games, and that is the rendering distance of the various aspects of the game, in that "terrain" disappears at about 8-12km. Docks and some other features disappear at about 2.5-3.5km (nothing in the game is documented, so we're guessing). Also, there is a "stage" that the game sets, and it favors where your boat is located, so you are centered in the floor seats of the theatre, and all of the players on the stage are out in front of you. A lot of the display is done like a 2D stage painting, in that if you go too much to the side of the "stage", you might notice that the background "scenery" is shifted to the opposite side of where you are. Also, it being 3D artwork, and is "skinned" for display from the player's perspective, when you go around behind the intended stage view. some items are then "invisible", and you are looking through them. Move your camera view, sometimes just a little, and those items come back into view - sometimes... Weather and time-of-day can also be influenced by Save data errors, which can be difficult to track down... Just be sure especially when you are trying to record something, that you stay in the game, and do not shell-out to the Windows desktop. :salute:

Thanks!



I don't want to record while playing, as it's really a massive distraction. And if I want to tell a story, I want to pick the angle and shot, not to be

restricted by what I can do in game while also trying to do whatever else..


I use OBS to record, and follow the process you describe. As you say, for a game 15 years old, it's very much ahead of its time - all I miss really is rewind and greater granularity of seek. There are some bugs, like the smoke/weather staying, but most of the time I can deal with those.


I was just wondering whether if, in that time, no-one decoded the recording file and managed to put it into something else for replay (getting it into the new Unreal Engine would be so cool... ).


:Kaleun_Salute:
-smm

I have not heard of anyone doing that, and it's actually not a video recording, but rather a database "digit" recording, which is another reason it might not "display" the same way twice when using the replay function. So it definitely uses the game engine to make the display, and that makes it look like it is a "movie" file...

I get that, and there's a few ways of recording this, neither of which involves the game display engine. But ultimately, it translates this into instructions for the game engine. Given that there are models, one should be able to turn those instructions into a properly configured Unreal Engine. But it'd require a lot of work on trying to understand/reverse engineer the replay save format (like the basic data structure(s) saved). Which is possible, but hard slog unless one gets lucky.



So I'm not surprised it wasn't done, but if I don't ask..



-smm