As a developer of an action game I often see players saying the following things:
“I just had this bug happen”
“An exploiter just killed me”
“I just did this cool thing, I wish I was recording”
It is usually difficult for players to describe and express what they are talking about. Typing what you saw can be difficult for younger players and screenshots aren’t always available nor do they always tell the whole story. Video on the other hand can be a very strong tool for capturing the moment but that’s only if the video is usable.
Developer uses:
Somebody encountered a bug where the doors of a building weren’t working properly so they recorded a video to show me the bug. I think I could count the frame rate of the video with my fingers and most of the text is totally unreadable. The video does work in this specific case but if I had asked them to show me their F9 client log or show any frame specific problems it wouldn’t be usable.
The moderation team for my game only works with video footage when it comes to dealing with exploiter reports from players since video is harder to fake. For every usable video clip we get we get dozens of other reports are left unresolved because they didn’t record the incident or the video quality was so poor nothing could be made out.
Player uses:
I’ve had a case where players have told me about something exciting they encountered in my game only to say they couldn’t record it or didn’t bother to try since “the video recorder sucks”. These are moments that could have been shared with friends, game communities, on social media, or even just saved as keepsakes.
A while ago I ran a clip contest for Bad Business and we found the only submissions were from people who live stream or make YouTube content. We only ended up with a small handful of clips from the users we wanted to see the most probably because they had no good way to record their gameplay.
Third party software exists to help with this issue but almost none of it is as user friendly or easy to set up as a single button press. Action for action nothing on the market is as simple as opening any Roblox game and pressing a single key to start recording. This feature has existed in Roblox for years now but has been gathering dust in an age where content creation and sharing is at an all time high.
If Roblox were to address the issues with the video recorder it would be a massive help to players and developers. Any user to developer interaction can heavily benefit from video, and any moment a player might want to share would only be a button press away.
Modern recorders often come with “one click” recording or the ability to save the last 5 minutes or so of gameplay to a video clip. Roblox already covers half of that standard and even if the “xbox record that” style clip recording is out of scope than an upgrade to the quality of video recording would go a long way to improve the feature.
I’d like to add from personal experience that the Roblox recorder doesn’t really perform too well. At least for me, when I play on my laptop, it seems like it kills my framerate just to have it on.
Right now I don’t use the Roblox video recorder, because it produces less quality video and reduces my framerate further than just having OBS run recording in the background. It’s a shame to have this feature built in and not be usable half the time on lower-mid end hardware.
An improvement to both the performance and output quality would be much appreciated, and simplifies things to just pressing F12 and letting it do its job.
It is unacceptable how bad it is comparing even to older versions (5-10 years) of open source programs.
I have an i7-7700HQ+GTX1070 setup which can record 1440p videos in OBS with a reasonable quality (60FPS) and almost no noticeable impact without an FPS unlocker.
The moment I accidentally turn on the built in recorder, I notice it immediately just by how hard my FPS drops (from 60 to 30 or even worse) without even looking at the red outline. The output quality isn’t any better.
Support from here, my personal experience with the Roblox recorder and how it works with frames or quality like how we view it isn’t the best performance nor the best for a laptop/desktop in any way possible, using this kills my laptop and my fans are higher than usual for almost 4 ~ 6 years, this needs to be improved.
Anyway, the current Roblox recorder and the performance that has on us developers is terrible, and how it’s supported right now is downright terrible as when I turn or record with the Roblox recorder my framerate/FPS suddenly does down dramatically and causes my CPU fans to go up as well, making my user experience or development experience in all. I use an FPS unlocker and most of my friends do who have much better specs and high FPS on their devices and when they use the recorder, it just drops down the quality and fans go up as well.
With the quality and frames going down, I also going to point out that the file type that Roblox and the Roblox recorder uses is mostly outdated and is downloadable which isn’t the best for most videos as of today but for the games, the lag begins to spike and everything becomes slow from parts merging from ReplicatedStorage to Workspace.
Here is an example of the current Roblox recorder at its state.
Video:
^ This isn’t what it showed when I was recording and playing the game, the outcome of these recorders isn’t the best and the quality as I and others have said is terrible.
It needs to be improved, I have to use OBS studio or ShareX for these types of videos or GIFs to show around the community and to my audience. Having a huge overhaul onto the Roblox recorder would be great for developers and players who can’t download an alternative recorder or simply want to record with a couple of touches inside their game/studio.
For now, users/developers have to use an alternative like OBS studio or Gyazo for little GIFs or long tutorials/videos for an audience or something that they’ll need some point in development.
This still needs to be considered. The roblox recorder is so bad. The frame rate is very choppy, the sound doesn’t match with the video, and the quality is very bad.
The current Video recorder is very outdated with unacceptable quality.
We should be able to choose the Output: File Format, Resolution, Video Quality, etc.
My personal experience with the current Video recorder is quite horrible, because it’s not useful I don’t use it but sometimes I will miss press F12 for F11 and it’s annoying that I have to delete the video after.
coming back to this post years later, even outside of development it’s such a necessary thing to have. For example catching an exploiter in the act is essential to moderate them and opening third party software such as OBS can potentially take too long
I really want to improve the encoder video, ordinary players, when they see a violation, press f12 to record this violation, but when you start watching it, you can’t even make out what’s going on there at all, even to see the nickname, you need to find the perfect frame and look closely.
I also wish there was an mp4 format, since the WMV format doesn’t really support video previews and you have to download the entire video in order to watch it
This problem is not unique to ROBLOX, and with good reason.
Maxis games like The Sims 3 and SPORE have a similar video recorder with similarly bad performance; this also applies to other games that I don’t know of.
The main issue that will impact any game with a video recorder is the game fighting for its own CPU time. Video recording is very CPU heavy, and so are games like ROBLOX. There is no way to run both the video recorder and ROBLOX simultaneously at an acceptable framerate, because both will be fighting for CPU time, and one of them must be prioritised and the other must perform poorly because of that.
The reason why third-party video recorders run at a stable framerate (mostly) is that they run in a separate process with it’s own dedicated threads for managing the recording, which is not fighting with the game for CPU time.
EDIT:
After reading more of this thread, I realised there are other problems with the video recorder that are way simpler to fix. There is no excuse to be recording in the WMV format (which is an outdated, Windows-exclusive format designed to solve a problem that no longer exists), or to use such aggressive compression. I definitely agree that ROBLOX should be fixing those things, because it would be quite a simple problem to solve.
I am frustrated having to use Win + ALT + R to record, I wanna be able to record Roblox Studio’s Viewport instead of recording everything on my screen.