[Bf-committers] Screen dump - OpenGL content

[Emanuel Greisen]

> Cool idea!

Oh yeah !, this would most likely result in a boom in tutorial-videos 
(which also serves as good inspiration for the late hours...)

> But...why capture bit-mapped *video* at all? I would assume that  
> users interested in learning how to use blender would actually have  
> blender available to play with. Why not *record the actions of the  
> user straight off* and skip the whole mess of video encoding/ 
> decoding, incompatible codecs, etc? Could the blender timeline/ 
> animation/ and sound systems help here somehow?
>
> What about the idea of building a "filmstrip" that records the actual  
> user's actions--- not images of actions, but the *actual actions*  
> themselves? Learners could then interrupt, and rewind the "action  
> stack"  (much like an undo stack...) to see what happened, or how to  
> do it themselves. I imagine that this would also have the added bonus  
> of paving the way to "filmstrips" in the game engine--- where users  
> could save a "movie" of their game play. Also, (being imaginative),  
> such an action recording could evolve into a history list--- much the  
> way that users can scrub through their history of changes in  
> Photoshop/Illustrator... Oh, and (being more imaginative) don't  
> forget that this might be handy for UI testing too.
>
And even better, if you want to, you can replay your "history" at 25fps 
taking screendumps to files afterwards. This would not run in real-time, 
but who cares, the images will reflect real-time usage (there will be no 
mouse-leaps, huge jumps when rotating geometry, etc. etc).

And the most important of all the things this could be used for..... 
MACROS !!!! Recording of macros is what makes text-editing valuable 
(when editing data represented by text that is). If it was possible to 
record macros edit them and then execute them.... Man that would be nice.

There is already a project that is moving towards this kind of feature 
(as I can see):

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/CommandLine

Some more design-work needs to be done, I think to make the feature 
usefull for the things mentioned here:

- Movie-recording
- Action History
- Recording of Macros
- Saving in-game sequences of the "world"
- UI-testing
- Editable Undo/Redo stack

Ideally this would be integrated into the fileformat, so that you could 
record a "macro"/"action sequence"/"history" or what ever it should be 
called. Then "save" it as an object in your scene, making it possible to 
import these "sequences" from other blender-files, make scene-dependent 
sequences and so on. This would lead to the smaller download size for 
demoes unless the geometry, material, etc. is HUGE.

There is a lot of things that needs to be worked out, but I for one 
thinks that this feature some form would greatly improve the 
posibilities in blender.

./Emanuel