Allowing players to export video files

Hey folks.

I want to allow (PC) players to record themselves in the gameworld, using a “camera” object that is in front of them, i.e. the video like this gets put somewhere in their hard drive.

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too ridiculous - god knows we can’t continue with streamers outputting their shaky double-viewport for their streams. What I imagine is that the camera is floating visibly, and the player can choose to make it start recording. It’ll lower the framerate, I know, but that’ll be a problem for the streamer, not necessarily the audience. I’m making VR software rather than a game by the way.

I have just gotten started with UE and I know about matinee, but am I right in thinking that matinee is only for developers to make movies?

I am willing to put a lot of development time into this if need be. I know it could be done with a separate viewport and FRAPS, but that would be a bit of a hack. It would require the user to take off their HMD, start fraps on their separate viewport, and put their HMD back on. That would be cumbersome, and ideally you wouldn’t even need to show the separate viewport on a computer screen, it would just go straight to the video file.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if it could only do video, not audio.

That might be quite complex, i think you wont avoid use of C++ here. There is twitch streaming plugin which you could use to study how to grab video from UE4, not sure if it’s possible to grab it from invisible viewport.

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/tree/a27ad66f0a075f3b74ef8f68a4b2b0da4882425e/Engine/Plugins/Runtime/TwitchLiveStreaming/Source/TwitchLiveStreaming