How to Record Your Game for Analysis and Reporting Bugs or Cheaters

In this little tutorial, I will explain

• why it is a good idea to record your game
  
• how can you benefit from it and
  
• how to actually do it

Motivation

I've seen many people complain about unexplained deaths. While dying on its own can be frustrating now knowing why you died can make thing even worse. How would you learn from your mistakes if you don't know what you did wrong?

If you're angry and don't understand why things happened, it's easy to come to the conclusion, that you did everything right, but the other player shouldn't have killed you. Maybe they were cheating!

Let's see how you can learn from your mistakes and find proof of cheating in the game.

Record Your Game

In the heat of the moment, when adrenaline rushes through your body, when your heartbeat doubles, when you have tunnel vision on your crosshair it's hard to see the big picture and perfectly understand what's happening in the game around you.

Imagine having the ability to take a step back, slow things down and analyze what's going on. While this is impossible during the game, it's perfectly fine after the game. All you have to do just record your gameplay and play it back afterwards.

There are many tools that can capture your gameplay, even more tools to edit videos. You can Google them for yourself.

I'm going to focus on free software in this tutorial.

Open Broadcast Software

For capturing my gameplay I use OBS (Open Broadcast Software)[obsproject.com]. You can follow this tutorial[www.wikihow.com] to configure it. My addition to this is to make sure your capture resolution is the same as your game's resolution. E.g. if your game is rendered in 1920 x 1080 (1080p), use the same capture setup in OBS too. Going lower will miss the bottom and right segments of your gameplay. Going higher will generate black areas where you exceeded the 1080p render resolution, potentially increasing your records' size. And it looks ugly too. :)

You can set multiple rate control in [/i]Output/Advanced/Recording/Rate Control[/i]. I'll show two of these.

Constant BitRate (CBR)

As the name suggests the bitrate is fixed and you can set it to your desired level to control the size of the output file and the quality of the video.

If I set my bitrate to 80,000 then it produces a very nice video at 1080p, not blurry, things are clearly visible what's going on on the screen. The file size for such a 1 hour long video is about 17 GB. So make sure you delete every recording after you're sure you don't need them. :)

Constant Quantization Parameter (CQP)

The quantization parameter controls the compression per frame. It can be set to a fixed number. The higher the number is, the more compressed every frame gets. Thus the file size is reduced. The smaller the number is, the picture is less compressed, more "lossless". Of course, it will increase the output file size.

With a CQP = 23 setting the produced image quality is quite good and the file size for a 1-hour long video is between 7 GB and 19 GB, depending on the scene. Bright maps tend to produce smaller, dark maps tend to produce larger videos.


Note: Thanks to Piglet to point me toward CQP.

Remux

You can use OBS to "remux" recorded video to a more common format, e.g. mp4. Now any video player can play it and you can upload it to any website to share it with others or the developers.

Filmora / Lightworks

I've heard others using Lightworks, so I thought I'll give it a try. Searching for Lighworks now brings you to Filmora[www.wondershare.net], so I just went with the flow. It seems to have way more feature than what I need. I just use the Easy Cutter feature to cut the video.

This is useful so you don't have to upload an hour long of gameplay worth multiple Gigabytes. Just cut the critical seconds that are important when you try to share something with others (e.g. a bug or a suspected cheat).

I've found a limitation with the free version: you cannot set the start and end of the cut section per frame. It's more like the granularity is around 3 seconds or so (e.g. nevertheless what you set, the start and end will be the whole multiple of 3). So adjust your start and end times accordingly.

Tip

If you try to edit the stand and end time of the cut in Filmora, be cautious when you use the Delete key. If you're not editing the time and press delete, it may unload the file you've just loaded and you have to load it again. (Which is a bit annoying if you need a minute or two to load a 17 GB file from the HDD.)

Ok, I've Got My Gampleay Recorded. What Now?

Congratulations. You have just recorded your game.

You can review what happened. Will you spot the enemy hiding in the bushes this time? Did you miss that shadow passing behind the window in the game? Would it have been better to cook your grenade before throwing?

You can think about your gameplay. Look back what happened. Analyze it. Make a better decision next time.

If you find a bug, please report it on the official Hunt website[huntshowdown.kayako.com].

If you have reviewed what happened and you think something is fishy and it doesn't seem like a bug, you can report the suspected cheat (now, with proof in your hands) as described in the How to report cheaters article.

So off you go now. Play the game. Have fun. Learn from your mistakes and get better. And if you spot someone misbehaving, now you have proof to support your claims. :)

How Much FPS Will I Sacrifice?

Sure, everything needs CPU usage. But recording your game costs way less than you'd think.

On my i5-7600K it takes up less than 3% CPU resource to record a game. It means, that (in theory) the rest of the CPU resources (97%) could be dedicated to the game. (In theory, as there are multiple things running, including the OS, anti-virus, Discord, Steam, and what not. But let's ignore these for the sake of simplicity.)

So if I had 60 FPS normally, the recording would take away 3% of my FPS. 60 x 0.03 = 1.8 FPS. I would sacrifice less than 2 FPS to be able to record my gameplay. I don't think that's a bad deal. :)

It is also a good idea to record your game on an HDD that is not used by anything else (e.g. the operating system is not installed on it, and the game is not installed on it either). This way that storage drive can be dedicated to only one operation: a constant stream of recording of your gameplay. No other read/write requests.

An alternative is to record things on an SSD as it had a higher read/write bandwidth than HDDs.

Below you can see how much CPU power OBS uses while I record my game (about 2%, so indeed, we're below the 3% used in the calculation):

Working with Large Files

As mentioned in the OBS section above, with my settings a 1-hour recording can grow to 17-18 GB in size.

Working with such a large file can be slow if you have an HDD, especially if the conversion via OBS from .flv to .mp4 happens on the same drive.

Filmora can take a minute or two also to load such a large file from an HDD and the cutting takes time proportional to where the cutting starts. I guess it has to read through all the video file to find the starting timestamp.

In these cases having an SSD, especially an NVMe (PCIe) SSD can be beneficial alongside with a strong CPU. If you happen to edit many of your videos, you may want to consider investing in a PCIe SSD. If you need to edit one or two videos a week, probably you're OK with waiting a few minutes while Filmora works.

If you can't afford any of this, you can still speed up OBS a bit if you have a separate HDD dedicated for the .flv files only (no games, no OS, nothing else uses it) and another HDD where the .mp4 files go (again, nothing else uses this drive to allow maximum throughput utilisation).

Game Settings for Recording

Depending on what you want to record, you should consider setting up your game accordingly.

Show Off

If you want to record gameplay and show how beautiful the game is, you want to disable diagnostic information and turn on the graphics to the maximum. Also, you can remove extra UI elements to see more of the game.

Bug Report

If you want to record your game to show/find potential bugs, you better turn on full diagnostics in the opions: set Options/Graphics/Basic Settings/Performance Stats to Detailed.

This allows better understanding of what's going on with your PC performance wise.

Legal

If you play with someone, it's always a good idea to tell them that you are going to record the game including their voice. Some might not be comfortable with this, so allow them the opportunity to leave before the match starts.

Also, remember, that you're recording things. So don't do/say anything you don't want to be on the record. :)

Further Useful Topics

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1573973038
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1551630796
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1546533262

[💜 Jonni]

OH THE IRONY

[Shakaron]

@nasigoreng,

Hunt Showdown is very CPU heavy, so everywhere where we can save work for the CPU we won a small battle.

[Was letzte Preis?]

What about the newly added "NVENC H.264 (new)" encoder? Does anyone have a clear understanding of what the differneces or benefits are?
And regarding CPU load, since NVENC is entirely encoded by the GPU isn't it a given that the CPU load is nothing to worry about?
I have a 5820k/1080 and would love to use standard x264 encoding because it just looks so much nicer - but it just kills my performance, well at least to a lvl where it's not running on a constant 60fps but a range of +/- 20frames around that.

But since there's NVENC not a lot of people are using pure x264 anymore, right? Still looking for ideal settings :)

[Shakaron]

I used Fraps myself, but I don't think the free version allows you to record a lengthy video.

[Anger Manager]

Good effort mate. In the old days we used Fraps. Not sure if it's still a good tool, but it was decent back in the day.

[Shakaron]

Thanks, jarrrrr. :)

[Mr.jarrrrr]

good job on this one my man, i featured it in my profile

[Shakaron]

Thanks, Piglet. I've extended the guide with the CQP settings as well.

Appreciated. :)

[Piglet]

then keep lowering cqp value by 1 until you like the quality
lower value = higher quality

[Shakaron]

Hey Piglet,

I gave a try to the CQP.

The file size is super low. About 10% of my regular file sizes. So that's great.

However, the picture quality suffers. It's not terrible, but it's bad enough to see what was in the distance. Was it someone? Was it a grunt?

Also it makes it hardere to see where you shot (was it a sheadshot)?

I think I'll be happy with the large file sizes and clearer pictures.

But it's definitely a nice setting for lowering file sizes.