Recording gameplay issue (NWjs, youtubers)

Did you manage to get it to work with "Capture Game"? because capture screen and window are working, but they not as optimal for game recording.

I use NWjs 0.18.7 and c2 r239.

Ah, you haven't mentioned "Capture Game" mode earlier. I have black screen with "Capture Game" mode as well.

Icecream Screen Recorder works perfectly.

was this error fixed?

was this error fixed?

This is a more complex issue that cannot easily be "fixed", I think so at least.

There are a lot of factors in play that make it impossible for some game recorders to either detect or record gameplay.

While I personally blame the browser vendors for making things difficult for game recorders,

it's not really up to them to find the perfect recording software to record gameplay.

Professional content creators (YouTube, Twitch etc.) should always use a variety of recording software

to ensure that they're able to record all kinds of games, even the ones that run on weird browser engines.

---

Idea For A Dedicated Topic Which Lists Supported Game Recorders:

I was thinking about creating a topic for this problem specifically.

The topic would basically be a huge list of game recorders including information like:

> Did the game recording work as intended?

> On which version of NW.js and OS was the test run on?

> Were there any workarounds involved in order to get it to work?

> And other recorder specific information...

This topic of mine would be fairly simple, I'd probably create a short google form that people can make use of.

I would also include some sort of template that Steam developers could post in their game-hub (Steam Discussions),

in order to inform content creators about recommended recording software for their Construct 2/3 games.

Would you guys be interested in that, should I create a dedicated topic for supported game recorders?

Apologies for reviving this thread. I don't want to retread something that's already been discussed extensively, but I wouldn't mind clarification on a few things.

1. What are my options for making an executable more likely to be stream-friendly? I saw some suggested additions of "--single-process" and "--in-process-gpu" to package.json, but they didn't make any difference for me.

2. Has anyone tried recording an Electron application? I might give this a go myself if no one else has.

3. Recording works fine with Firefox, which makes me wonder if there's a NWjs-like application wrapper for Firefox. I'm guessing not. (Why not? Firefox is open source, right?)

4. I remember managing to get OBS to work with little issue on an older version of C2/NW (some time in 2015). Was there a particular NW version that started the black screen issues, or has this always been a problem?

I'm a little eager to solve this issue because I'm balls-deep in the development of a game that I think would benefit greatly from streaming. I'm aware that it's a tricky issue though, and it's clearly not Scirra's problem to fix.

Just a quick update of what I've learned from fiddling around:

1. For me, Electron has the same recording problems as NWjs. This wasn't surprising since the problem lies with Chromium, not NWjs.

2. Reverting to the oldest version of NW listed on the Scirra site (v0.11.5, Chromium 38, 5th January 2015) fixed my issue of a black screen when recording through OBS. That's a relief. If this matches other people's experiences, then that means that simply using an old version of NWjs can make a game more streaming/recording friendly.

Would anyone happen to know which Chromium version started the more severe screen recording issues? I'm guessing it was around 50.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=642386

Get everyone to star this. Also maybe a comment should be added that this affects all games exported with NW.js?

-- edit

Game capture works with NW.js v0.13.2 (Chromium 49)

Task manager showed 2 NW.js processes and I was able to see what the other one was with OBS:

Have you tried some Screen Recorder, like TuneFab Screen Recorder? I used to record gameplay so that I move it to my YouTube then I share it to my friend.

tunefab.com/screen-recorder

tunefab.com/recorder/record-gameplay.html

I've been taking a look into this and the last version where recording is possible was 0.13.2 in the Scirra nwjs list, or 0.13.4 if you download it directly from the NWjs website. Unfortunately this version also has a bug where, if the player closes the game, nwjs will still run in the background, which is awful.

Any version after that just won't show up, not only in OBS, but other stream apps I've tried. I've googled a whole lot and it seems to be a bug with how Chrome uses DX11 - but it could be just speculation. One of the workarounds is disabling hardware acceleration, but that will make your game run like complete crap.

This is awful. This bug has been around for not one but two whole years, and apparently no word if it's getting fixed or when.

Edit - It also seems to work with version 0.18.7, using "game capture" instead of window capture. I'm going through some versions right now and testing them.

Another edit - I've ran a few more tests and apparently adding " --in-process-gpu" to the package.json allows the game to show up on OBS, when using the "game capture" option. However, resizing the game window makes the recording freeze and the only solution is to close and open the game again. Still, a pretty good solution! I'm glad I can use the latest version.