create movie directly from command line

create movie directly from command line Rate Topic:

#1 lukav

Account: lukav
Joined: 13-February 13
Posts: 0

Posted 13 February 2013 - 11:08 PM

Hi everyone, I did some searching and couldn't find if this was a possibility...

I was wondering if there was a command-line argument to directly invoke running a demo and converting to a movie without opening the UrT GUI.

I'm envisioning a workflow like:

urbanterror --command-only < run_demo.cfg > demo.avi

I'd basically like to dump all my demos to avi and then work on them later. I was hoping for a command-only way of running urt so I run it on a single core and potentially render multiple movies at once.

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Alternatively, is there a standalone tool to convert UrT demos to .avi (or better yet .mp4)?

Thanks for your help, and sorry if this is posted elsewhere please drop a link for a newbie.

Back to top of the page up there ^
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#2 GlaD-don

Account: don
Main tag: GlaD-
Joined: 28-February 10
Posts: 2,640

Posted 14 February 2013 - 10:31 AM

you could automate it with a macro or shell script, but you'll need the renderer running to capture video, and that requires a window to open.

"H:\Urban Terror\ioUrbanTerror.exe" +demo demoname +video

here's an example that works, but UrT opens. as far as I know, there's no way to capture video without the gui open. you can certainly remove the renderer, which will run urt from the command window, and you can play back demos, but there's no graphics being rendered to record. it doesn't seem technically impossible to not spawn a window but still have the game being rendered and recorded (/video is an integral part of the game, not a screen recorder like fraps), but you're probably on your own there. Luckily, the engine source code is available, so you could monkey around with this.

your best bet in terms of effort is to automate this with a script or macro (shouldn't be too complex to conceptualize). if you run it when you're afk, who cares if the gui loads? You won't want to record multiple instances either, unless you have multiple disk drives.
Then you would load multiple copies of urt, with each using an fs_homepath on a different drive. Be aware that, even if you restrict each instance to 1 core, the disk controllers still require CPU resources. /video dumps a lot of data, so they'll be working hard.