Recording Mod

[skellitor301]

Hello all, in light of the recent 1.0 announcement I'm excited to get into Rimworld again and possibly do a lets play of. I had an idea for the style of lets play I wanted to do in the form of a more storyteller based series rather than just playing the game An ideal mod for this would be some kind of full map recorder so you can zoom into the map where you need to and not miss anything. this would also make it ideal for timelapse videos. Would this be possible to have mod for the game?

[Jaxxa]

Depends what you mean exactly by a full map recorder.

I don't know of anything that can record video of the full map. but I worked on a project and know about another project dealing with taking a screenshot of the whole map.

[DariusWolfe]

Camera+ will allow you to zoom out to see almost the entire map on medium map settings. You're not going to see much detail, though. If you ask on the Rimworld subreddit, there are people there who can point you toward the tool that will allow you to take full map still images at a good resolution, though.

[Roolo]

I think he means something like you have in games like age of empires and some other multiplayer RTS games, where you can view the entire recorded game after playing. In those games, basically the entire state of the game and how it changes through time is captured, and sent from the host to other players whenever it changes. Given this system, it's not difficult to save this game state and how it changed for each time step. And if you do this, you can recreate the entire game, a.k.a. view the "recorded" session.

Since Rimworld isn't a multiplayer game, how the game state changes through time isn't captured. Implementing this in a mod is very difficult, if not impossible, since Rimworld isn't made with this in mind.

[skellitor301]

Roolo kinda has the right idea, something similar to that but you can have a video of the whole map exported that can be zoomed in with your video editor and retain the video quality. I know this would make the file size huge but it's basically the idea I was going with after a little bit into the idea. But Roolo's version does sound better, because the point I was thinking of was to allow being able to get recordings where you need it after the fact, not during when you're playing the game which can limit any storytelling you can do outside of what you see as you play.

[Jaxxa]

Found the released mod I was referring to here: https://github.com/AaronCRobinson/MapRenderer
I might have a look at updating it to 1.0 soon.
Although it would not be suitable for creating videos as I think that it would seriously tank the framerate.

A replay system would be cool but I dont know that it would be feasible (or at least it would be a very large amount of work).
As far as I know most replay systems just record the player interactions and not every individual unit location and action. This works because most RTS games are deterministic (the same player actions will always result in the same result), but as far as I know Rimworlds random generation is not deterministic, loading a save game can cause a different event to fire next.

[skellitor301]

Well, one way I can think of, and I'm not sure how well this can work in Rimworld as I'm not a programmer, I would record just the important info like player actions, actor behavior, damage dealt, then use the game's framework to reenact this list of commands. This frees the player from recording as the game happens and allow the player to record any part of the session they desire. As I mentioned though I'm not an active programmer so I'm not sure if this could be implemented with the existing framework of the game, or any third party framework libraries out there.