Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

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odisseus
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Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by odisseus »

I want to record small snippets of OpenTTD gameplay for illustrative purposes — e. g. to show how train behaviour depends on the signals. I have tried to capture the game window with OBS, but the resulting video was somewhat blurred, which unfortunately is unacceptable for the game's pixel art style.

Can you share any tips to get the pixel-perfect game footage? Ideally I'd want to get GIF files, so that they can be embedded here on the forum.
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kamnet
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Re: Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by kamnet »

I don't have it installed currently, but OBS has worked just fine for me in the past. You'll need to experiment with the frame rates for display from OpenTTD, and capture in OBS, to find the best quality.
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Re: Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by Pyoro »

WebMCam is super simple and nicely suited for the purpose. Gifs are annoyingly huge though with no optimization.
trains.gif
trains.gif (16.19 MiB) Viewed 899 times
Of course you could upload them elsewhere or make use of the more efficient mp4/webm formats that webm also supports.
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Re: Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by Eddi »

recording pixel games is notoriously difficult, because much depends on the exact pixels, whereas video codecs try to blur things to save bandwidth.

there are very few video codecs that support "lossless" compressions, and it's tricky to set them up in OBS, and may not be supported by video players.
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odisseus
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Re: Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by odisseus »

Thanks for the suggestions! I ended up using Byzanz for screen recording and some FFmpeg tricks to crop and convert the video. This yields GIF animations with perfect sharpness and acceptable colour loss.
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openttd.gif
openttd.gif (13.47 MiB) Viewed 849 times
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Emperor Jake
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Re: Help recording OpenTTD to GIF

Post by Emperor Jake »

I use a neat little program called GifCam, but as others said it’s best to keep them short or the filesize gets quite large.
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