Why Stand Alone Movie Programs?

[Feider]

This may be a silly question but I'll ask it anyway. Is there a reason that people don't use the in-game movie capture?
Does it kill performance or is it just that third party recorders have more options?

Thanks.

[Bettysue]

Windows is the reason, the video capture ability is restricted to the Mac client only...

[Feider]

I did not know that. I do play on a Mac and thought everyone had the ability.
thanks for the reply.

[Bettysue]

Not a problem, glad I was actually of some assistance :P

[Multibocks]

Hmm didnt know that Mac WoW had that, learned something new today.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Is the in-client movie capture thingy on Macs a full movie capture or a machinima type capture like Quake used to have? I'd kill to have quake-style movie captures where you could play 'em back natively in the client. :P

[Feider]

I'm not positive what you mean but It just records your screen just as I've seen on other videos uploaded here.

[Coltimar]

Macs are just sick. There is another thread here of people Mac bashing. All I can do is shake my head.

[Bettysue]

Macs are amazing computers and now that the prices are starting to come down to something near what I call reasonable I've been looking into getting one. The biggest issue I have though is all my computer room stuff is black or glass I just can't see a white mac in the room. So the purchase will have to be followed by a paint-job. Luckily I have a nice sprayer and booth in the garage normally used for cars it should leave a nice finish on the computer case :D

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Macs are just sick. There is another thread here of people Mac bashing. All I can do is shake my head.
For me, it has nothing to do with which is "sick." Has everything to do with me being able to use the tool to its fullest extent, which I can do with PCs. Plus, being that I work in the PC market, obvious choice is obvious.

I see people on [this and other] forums all the time talking about getting hacked, viruses, blue-screens, game performance problems, etc. ad nauseum. I just shake my head at people who just can't learn to properly use a complex tool to save their lives.

[Coltimar]

Or switch to a tool that you don't have to use or repair for a living to use.

[Marious]

Agree with you Ugh I have not been hacked yet, well at least I dont think I have :) And all the issues with viruses and what not, I really do not have much of an issue there. I know what I am doing for the most part, been into computers for almost 15 years now and I have not had the kind of issues people always complain about, hell even when I was running Win ME it worked fine for me. Blue screen seen it here and there, but not much of a problem, game performance issues only when I had like 1G of ram and a not so good PC at the time, oh also when my video card and Mobo died I had issues then.

[Niley]

Or switch to a tool that you don't have to use or repair for a living to use.
ive never had an issue with my PC(s), and i built at least 7 for myself(past 8 years, not one issue i can think of).
I have nothing against macs, if they come in pink I might even get one for my girlfriend.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Or switch to a tool that you don't have to use or repair for a living to use.
Exactly! Glad to see you agree.

[Fef]

I made the switch to Mac some two years ago, and all I can say is that I cannot see any reason why I would ever go back, now that Mac are perfectly capable gaming machine (since the introduction of Intel Macs).

The amazing design of the machines is a good thing, but it is balanced by the price premium. What really makes the deal for me is Mac OS. Noone can understand until the tried it (an I'm not talking about 5 minutes at the Apple store)/

(A bit of background : started using computers and coding in 1981, have been putting together my own PCs since 1995. Gamer, obviously, and using computers for a living)

[Moorea]

Nothing against Macs accept that they are owned by Apple.

To all the Mac lovers out there, keep in mind that Apple would have been gone long ago if it had not been for Bill Gates infusing the company with a crap ton of money to keep them going. This was to keep Microsoft from getting branded as a monopoly.

Cheaper to fund to the competition than to deal with the Gov.
$150M is not a "crap ton of money" for companies the size of msft or aapl - funny thing is if they'd kept their stake instead of selling it in 2003 it'd be worth about 7.2B today - that's a nice chunk of change even for those guys

ps: I have both macs and pcs - I use the pcs for gaming - the macs for everything else - iphoto alone is worth the price premium - the new imac display is just georgous - as is the magic mouse and wireless brushed aluminum keyboard.

[Naysayer]

haha this is like one of those stupid mac commercials.

[Mokoi]

I don't know about you guys, but even if this feature was available on the PC version, would we use it?

Do any of you use ANY of the tools that Blizzard has added to their game ripped off from other third-party software?

Threat meter?
Voice communication?
Arena Frames?
Gear Manager?

Which of the convenient addons have Blizzard created which are better than what the community has made for itself?

Alomst none.

Not to say they can't make good stuff, we all know they can, but this doesn't seem to be their strong point :P

[Bettysue]

I would use the feature should it be made available, I doubt it will be in the near future however, because video capture is not something that is easy to accomplish when you have to take into consideration the multitude of video drivers available on PCs.

I don't use the in game threat meter because the announcement feature isn't good enough. Then again I don't use any other threat meter now that tanks are far more capable of holding aggro. KLH and Omen were nearly essential in the 5 sunder days, now threat meters are simply a neat way to show you hit the mob before the tank did. You see they fixed the mechanic vs designing the perfect essential mod for the game.
Voice comm. I would use it if others did, but as a multiboxer I rarely need to explain the fights to myself so it's a bit less useful for me.
Arena Frames are more than just the pretty (or not so pretty depending on taste) pictures. They included the target=arena1-5 macro ability with them. This is something no other addon I know of made possible, and is now something hard to live without.
I use gear manager on a nearly daily basis, it does exactly what every other gear manager did minus the oops I just vendored all my gear "feature" included in many of the other addons.

You see blizz actually listens to the community, and when they see something that is wrong they fix it. Look at the rogue poison addons. They are changing the mechanics so rogues won't have to depend on an addon. How about CTRA how many people remember that being necessary to attend a guild raid let alone a pug? They built the raid frames and warning systems into the base interface. This means you can actually pug a raid now and be effective.

It isn't stealing from the community, it's giving it to the entire user base. They have lightened the load on people who dedicated their playtime to writing addons, so they too may actually enjoy the game. Sure the community addons are pretty and that's what makes the game unique. You can have the feature available and if you like it you can download an external addon and modify it to your wishes. If you choose not to do so, you can still play and not be horribly disadvantaged.

How far along do you think we would be should they have never decided to allow for the creation of addons at all? Do you really think we would have threat meters, raid addons, arena frames, square minimaps on a cool button interface, my guess is no, because the community wouldn't know it could be different or better. They allowed addon creation so the game would and could improve along the lines of community likes and dislikes. They borrow features from the popular addons because they realize it was something they left out at conception.

[Svpernova09]

I don't know about you guys, but even if this feature was available on the PC version, would we use it?

Do any of you use ANY of the tools that Blizzard has added to their game ripped off from other third-party software?

Threat meter?
Voice communication?
Arena Frames?
Gear Manager?



Yes i use the Gear Manager a lot since it stores settings server side, and most addons I tried, only stored settings locally and since I'm logging in from different systems, always having to reset gear sets was incredibly annoying. Arena frames? No I don't, but I don't arena a lot. Voice Communication? No because it's always been insanely low volume and impossible to hear people. Threat meter? No, I much prefer Omen.

So I may not use everything they give us, but once in a while they slam dunk something (IMO Gear Manager)

[Bettysue]

wut? video capture on a pc is hard? wait wut?

I didn't say video capture is hard on a PC, I said writing a well designed program for doing so is, and that is not blizzard's main function with WoW at the moment.

Is it your personal mission to nit-pick everyone's posts to make yourself feel better? You know what don't answer that, just think about it...

[Naysayer]

I didn't say video capture is hard on a PC, I said writing a well designed program for doing so is, and that is not blizzard's main function with WoW at the moment.

Is it your personal mission to nit-pick everyone's posts to make yourself feel better? You know what don't answer that, just think about it...

I just don't think there's anything hard at all about video capture on today's pc, even for beginners.

[Bettysue]

Have you done any programming involving video capture? My experience though probably a bit dated with it was not so nice. I mean I could capture video all day on the screen, but it took quite a bit of work to get it to be compatible with all the video cards, while maintaining a low system profile so as not to interrupt what was taking place on the screen at the time. There are quite a few really nice options now, so it seems as though times have changed a bit, I just don't see blizz going this route for PC users anytime soon.

[Fef]

Threat meter?

Yes.



Voice communication?

No, I don't use any voice communication, it disturbs my immersion.



Arena Frames?


Yes.



Gear Manager?


Yes.