Mind is the fear killer

Uploaded a new gameplay video to YouTube. It looks kind of... boring (maybe needs more colors?), but with less than four days to the deadline I'd better work on the music and sound effects now.

I'm developing it on (GNU/)Linux, of course. To create that video, I made the game retrieve the contents of the framebuffer every other frame and (after averaging 2x2 pixel blocks to reduce the resolution) write it as a PPM to standard output. I can then encode the result to MPEG with some command-line tools in the mjpegtools package.

In fact, I can even encode it on-the-fly, with something like this:

game | ppmtoy4m | y4mscaler -O chromass=420mpeg2 | mpeg2enc
-F 5 -q 4 -V 230k -b 7500 -o capture.mpg

Unfortunately, it's a CPU killer. Nice pipeline though. Got to love *nix.

(thanks to "spectre" for this post's title)