Can't capture in OBS?

[Blahblahblah42]

I've been trying off and on to do a Let's Play of this game every few months for well over a year now (I love it that much) but keep running into different problems. When I started this maddening journey, I was new to recording LPs and did about half the game in one go before realizing OBS hadn't recorded any of it. I tried everything I could think of to no avail and ended up buying a completely separate capture program, but never got audio quality to be acceptable in that other program and picture quality was always subpar. Now I'm back to just using OBS, and it works on almost every other game but not this one. Because naturally, it's my favorite game on Steam, why would it let me do an LP? Running Windows 10 on a powerful gaming rig and I've tried this with several versions of the game over the years including the latest one. Here's what I've tried to fix this so far, maybe someone can point out what I'm doing wrong (very little would make me happier at this point):

1. Display Capture, game in full screen, game in windowed mode, game in borderless windowed with help of Borderless Gaming. OBS refuses to accept the keyboard shortcut to start recording the game (this is what happened in several previous attempts to LP it before I realized I should start doing test vids before covering large chunks of the game to dead air) no matter what the shortcut is set to.

2. Game Capture, all of the above, same problem.

3. Window Capture, same problem.

4. Tried starting the recording in another window and then switching to The Cat Lady, this captured the video (finally) but none of the game's audio.

5. Played with all of the settings in the TCL's setup menu. None of them helped.

6. I'm pretty sure during the third attempt I made at recording the game back in 2017 (where I got the first couple parts done before realizing there was no sound) I did a ritualistic dance during a blood moon while chanting "OBS, grant my wish, record The Cat Lady, you little bi--h!"... but I must have gotten the incantation wrong because I'm still here, in may of 2018, trying to record this game.

Thank you in advance for any information you can share with me. I just wanna be able to finally say I accomplished what I set out to do. <3

[markymint]

Hiya, hmm.. well I only have ideas. getting OBS to work with our game is sort of out of our remit...but perhaps:

1. Try another video setting, ie DirectDraw instead of DirectX
2. Make sure you have DX9.0c redist installed
3. Low probability but you might try running it in another Windows compatible mode, or upping/lowering the Color bits its runs in (ie 16bit/32bit)

Checks to make:
Do you know if any other AGS games are capturing, and if so are they built with AGS 3.4.1 (only likely to apply to games released after Dec 2017, so maybe Heroine's Quest... um...all of our other games..)

It captures fine in Xsplit, Corel Video Studio... last time I checked at least. But you're not the first to mention OBS. I'm wondering if it's the game (see below) or AGS on the whole + OBS.

If it really is the game, it could be one of the modules we use, agsblend.dll in particular, or mabye Vsync module, though that doesn't make too much sense to me. agsblend should be fine if DirectX is up to date. Vsync can be turned on/off in the settings but the module may be over-riding that setting. Removing the dlls will probably crash the game on startup.

AGS games generally don't fall into a background process, but I suppose it can happen. Maybe run "taskmgr" and make sure TCL is set to High Priority, especially if on a laptop, so that the laptop knows to dedicate all resources, drivers and graphics capabilities it can to the game.

[ThomasMalton]

I'm not aware of big difference in quality but OBS has some good alternatives like Fraps and nvidia ShadowPlay. So, if OBS doesn't work with the Cat Lady you can consider using one of those.

[Blahblahblah42]

I'm hoping to find a solution that allows me to continue using OBS. I've spent a lot of time and effort (largely due to my inexperience) getting my sound settings just right in that program with plugins and so forth, and it's what I'm used to using. I'll track down heroine's quest and see if it records properly. There's gotta be a solution, I just haven't found it yet.

I found a sort-of partial solution by starting the recording before I start the game and stopping it after I've closed the game, and while this sort-of suits my purposes, it limits them still. I tend to play the games in big multi-hour sessions but I prefer my videos in hour long chunks and that's super easy to do if I can just hit that record button a couple times and then keep going. Like this I need to save and exit the game, then stop the recording, then start it again, and open everything back up. I'm gonna proceed like this for the time being, and I'll probably do the whole playthrough like this, it just seems like if a solution can be found to make it easier on the people who LP it in the future, it's worth looking into.

[Blahblahblah42]

Originally posted by markymint:

Do you know if any other AGS games are capturing, and if so are they built with AGS 3.4.1 (only likely to apply to games released after Dec 2017, so maybe Heroine's Quest... um...all of our other games..)

I tried recording Heroine's Quest and it worked fine. Was able to start and stop the recording while the game was running, so it must be specifically The Cat Lady. And to answer a thing you said earlier in that post, yes I tried the different settings (directdraw, etc), didn't fix the problem. The same thing happens no matter what the settings are set to.

[markymint]

Probably agsblend or agsd3dvsync then, for whatever reason -- The Cat Lady (and Downfall) are probably the only AGS games that uses them. You should try Downfall, which also uses agsblend.dll & agsd3dvsync.dll and see what result you get? Heroine's Quest doesn't use them so that's +1 for the case of it being one of those things. Try some of Wadjet Eye Games or if you can one of ours The Samaritan Paradox, Tales, Fatman ... others that specifically do not use these DLLs. If any or all of those capture fine then I'd say one of those DLL's is the culprit.

[whiteraven1000]

You can record your gameplay with LoiLo Game Recorder. (Just tested it by myself to make sure)

http://loilo.tv/en/product/game_recorder

It's free, easy to use and does the job.

[Blahblahblah42]

Originally posted by markymint:

Probably agsblend or agsd3dvsync then, for whatever reason -- The Cat Lady (and Downfall) are probably the only AGS games that uses them. You should try Downfall, which also uses agsblend.dll & agsd3dvsync.dll and see what result you get? Heroine's Quest doesn't use them so that's +1 for the case of it being one of those things. Try some of Wadjet Eye Games or if you can one of ours The Samaritan Paradox, Tales, Fatman ... others that specifically do not use these DLLs. If any or all of those capture fine then I'd say one of those DLL's is the culprit.

Downfall, strangely, works like a charm. It's just TCL that gives me problems. You have the right idea, narrowing it down by what games do and don't work in association to which DLLs, I think. Tried out some Wadjet games too, like Blackwell Epiphany and Technobabylon, they record fine. TCL and Downfall are the only ones I own from you guys so far, I've been meaning to get the rest at some point when I have the cash. So we're thinking it's gotta be one of the DLLs that The Cat Lady has that Downfall doesn't, cause Downfall works and they're very similar? I don't see any DLL files in TCL's folder that I don't see in Downfall, but that doesn't mean the ones we do see aren't different.