Demorecord space question

[TheOtherTed]

Assuming it's still working, how much disk space does a demorecord file take per hour of recorded gameplay?

[Greycat]

The only answer to that is "It depends." As I'm recalling, a demorecord captures everything - so if as part of your gameplay you go through Atlas with a big costume contest going on, it says to grab Atlas, and then get the costumes of everyone in it.  If you're doing gameplay in Praetoria solo and only see 2-3 other people, it would be smaller.

 

That's from (somewhat hazy) memory, though.

 

That said... I doubt we'd be talking gigabytes of space or anything. Several tens to hundreds of megabytes depending on how long and what was going on?

[AboveTheChemist]

It does still work, and Greycat was on the money. An easy way to estimate would be to go to Atlas (or whatever zone you planned to record in) and record a 1-2 minute demo during the time of day that you plan to make your long recording. Look at the file size and multiply it by 60 (for 1 minute) or 30 (if you did 2 minutes) to give yourself a rough idea of the space an hours worth might occupy. If your plan is to record a costume contest or similar event, then try to do your test while such an event is taking place.

[TheOtherTed]

Thank you for the feedback!  Will try a few experimental records the next few times I'm on.

[Greycat]

So, just for the heck of it, I ran a mission and demorecorded it. One person, going from War Witch in Croatoa to a door mission (same zone,) regular difficulty, probably 10-15 minutes (hunting for a final hostage) - 260kb.

 

Just running around Atlas park for about a minute, 10 people (including me,) one costume change, one of those people being a mastermind - 773kb.

 

(Edit:)

More for the heck of it.

Me going into a small base, hitting demorecord, stopping right away. 14k.

Same character, same base, going through all 10 costumes: 67k. (All 10 different.)

Edited June 30, 2020 by Greycat

[Twisted Toon]

I think that a lot of the space will be taken up with player character costumes.

the more player characters, the faster it will increase, as Greycat demonstrated.

[srmalloy]

18 hours ago, Greycat said:

The only answer to that is "It depends." As I'm recalling, a demorecord captures everything - so if as part of your gameplay you go through Atlas with a big costume contest going on, it says to grab Atlas, and then get the costumes of everyone in it.  If you're doing gameplay in Praetoria solo and only see 2-3 other people, it would be smaller.

This was in fact how Samuraiko (IIRC) collected the data for her video showing the attendees of the Unity rally -- she flew a character through each of the instances of AP that had attendees (all 33 on the main server and the overflow instances on other servers) with demorecord on, then took the character data from all of the demorecord files to make the mass assembly in front of Atlas that the servers wouldn't allow us to do, and recorded a video of a pullback on the assembly.