/vr/ - Retro Games

Ok people, just hear me out.

How hard would it be to get (G)ZDoom to convert demo files to video files?
By which I mean, run the demo and dump the video. Render it directly.
Video encoding is worse the faster it has to be done, yes? And it can be slow, and skip frames. Fraps slows the machine down, and GZDoom sometimes has to skip frames to compensate.

Right now it doesn't look like there's a "no frameskip" option. What this means is that when GZDoom can't keep up with 60fps, rather than waiting until it's done drawing the frame, it just skips it. If you try NUTS.wad, the game doesn't slow down. It just has a bad framerate. The speed of everything is (generally) the same. With a video renderer, GZDoom would need an option to draw every frame, slowing the game down while it does so. This would ruin gameplay, but with Demos, the user input is already recorded, so no problems.

If GZDoom were able to render and encode video itself, people could record demos of themselves, then play those demos and turn on the video dump/render thing. GZDoom could take its sweet time rendering/encoding a good, high quality video with high framerate, no tearing, no frameskips, high quality everything, making a really good looking video with good quality/size ratio. (Or, a huge lossless video that can be encoded later by the user with some other program perhaps).

How hard would that be? To me, writing something that just dumps frames into an avi doesn't seem like it should be complicated. The hard part would be the "no frameskip" deal.
I mean, someone could just write a script to take a screenshot every tic. But that would limit the video to 35fps, and you'd have that screenshot message up there the whole time.