Recording Your Rounds: A How To by DanseMacabre

[Kintsugi]

Ever have an amazing round that was so much fun you wish you could go back and watch it? Or have you ever played in an event round and you want to share what happened in it with people who couldn't make it? Maybe you saw something incredible that you wish you could show the playerbase? Or perhaps you've been caught on the wrong end of a ridiculous player complaint and want to be able to show staff what exactly happened?

 

Record your rounds!

It's simple! It's easy! And if you carefully manage your recordings, not too heavy on your storage.

First thing's first - forget what you learned when you tried to record your Minecraft Let's Plays and Roblox Funny Moments videos in 2011. No FRAPS, and definitely no Bandicam. Everyone these days uses OBS - it's free, it's open-source, and it works like a charm. You can download it here:

https://obsproject.com/

Once you have OBS installed, you can open it up and it'll look like this:

To be honest, I don't use pretty much anything OBS has to offer. Actually, I barely know how to use the program. But thankfully, it's really easy. All you have to do to set it up is click this button, in the sources section:

This will open up a menu. 

From there, all you have to do is click "Window Capture"

You can call it what you want. I always keep it as the default.

Afterwards, it'll bring up this menu.

You'll want to set the "Window" to match what is here (in order to do this, you'll want the server and game client open). Note that with the default options, you can use this method to record other servers, too. If you want to record a game other than SS13, you can just change the window, as well.)

Click "OK" and you're all set!

Once you have OBS open and your window capture properly set up, all you have to do to start recording a round is clicking this button in the controls section. Note: while OBS will only capture this window and this window alone, all of the audio on your computer will be captured, as well as audio from your mic if you haven't muted it. Once you start recording, you can stop at any time, and once you do your recording will automatically be saved to your videos folder.

Now, the one downside to recording your rounds: Videos are fucking big. A full round can be anywhere from half a gigabyte to ~2 gigabytes in size. Usually a normal two-hour round will be 750mb to 1gb for me, but mileage varies. As such, it is good practice to go back and delete your recordings if there's nothing worth saving in the video immediately after round end. If there's only a little bit worth saving, you can use a program like VLC and its "record" function to make a clip, which conveniently will also be saved automatically to your videos folder. If a round is worth keeping, I would recommend uploading it to Youtube either privately or publically and deleting your recording unless you REALLY want to keep your hands on the original, for whatever reason.

 

Have fun and good luck!

Edited February 5, 2023 by DanseMacabre

[ImmortalRedshirt]

Solid guide, overall. However, keep in mind that when the guide says it captures that window and that window only, it really means it. Consoles, popup menus and the like will not show up in the final recording. Plus on some certain servers, this may not capture anything on the right side of the screen. If you're not looking to keep any of that, this is still perfectly fine, but another option is Display Capture

Pros: It captures everything currently shown on the screen
Cons: It captures everything currently shown on the screen, including you tabbing out to your metachat for a split second.

Pick whichever one suits your purposes the most.

Edited February 17, 2023 by ImmortalRedshirt