Replay
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Replays are a game tool added in the March 18, 2011 Patch for the Team Fortress 2 Beta, and to the main game in the May 5th, 2011 patch. This game tool is a feature which allows you to record your previous life by pressing F6 (by default) after you have died.
Record
Recording may only take place on dedicated servers which have enabled the feature (look for the filmstrip next to the server name). The game will not allow you to record on a listen/local server.
After you have died and you wish to save a recording of that life, you may press F6. After pressing F6, a message will appear asking you to "Name Your Replay" (by default it will say the map name, date and time). After you have named your replay, a small message will show in the top left saying, "Your Replay has been saved and will begin downloading momentarily." After a period of time, which depends on your connection speed and the length of the replay you are downloading, it will display a new message: "... download complete! click REPLAYS in the MAIN MENU to view your replay."
Replay Menu
If you go to the main menu, under "Manage Items" is the Replays button. Pressing it allows you to see all your saved replays (reminder: they are only temporary). Selecting a replay will show you some info on that replay, such as class played, killed by, length, score, kills and which map it was recorded on. You have the ability to Watch/Edit your replay or save to movie. You may also delete and search for any replay.
Editing
Once a replay has been selected, you can click Watch/Edit to watch your replay from the first person perspective. If you press space (by default), time will stop and a HUD will appear. The HUD shows all the people in the server represented by the icon of the class they are playing. Hover over the class icons to show the player's name, and click on the icon to see their view. On the right you will see a face; click on it to switch to first person view. Likewise, the silhouette will switch to third person view, and upon clicking the icon, the camera will switch to free cam view. In the middle you have a play and pause button, a fast forward button as well as one that will skip forward and one that will go to the end of the clip. The two triangles with the numbers 0 and 1 on them are the in & out points. Click the triangle with the 0 on it to set the "In point." This is where it will start when rendering or viewing. The marker with a 1 on it will set the out point and when clicked will set the point on which the video will stop. In your take, you can change views and, when played back, the viewpoints you used will be retained. Once done with your editing, you may click on the icon in the top left and save the take.
Rendering
When you want to render a take or just the whole replay, select what you want to render and click "Save To Movie." It will ask for a name, the resolution, and the quality of the video. In the advanced options, you may change the quality of motion blur or the entire render. You can also export as raw TGA's/WAV and you may enable or disable glow effects. Click "Go!" and it will render. To find your rendered movie, go to steam/steamapps/[steamusername]/Team Fortress 2/tf/replay/client/rendered
Update history
- Added Replay system that allows you to edit and publish movies of your play experiences (full Mac support in the next few days)
- Show all resolutions available when setting up a replay to render
- Added the ability to specify an output directory from the command line. Running a server with the optional parameter ‘–replayserverdir <dir name>’ will output all replay data to ‘tf/replay/<dir name>’. For anyone running multiple servers out of the same directory, you’ll want to specify a different output directory for each server. This will avoid collisions and potential issues running replay. Look for confirmation on startup – you should see something like this:
- Using custom replay dir name: "replay/<dir name>"
- For admins who have their server(s) configured to server replay data out of a local Web server: the ‘replay_local_fileserver_path’ bug is now fixed. Even if replay_local_fileserver_path pointed to a valid directory, the server would lie and say the directory was invalid.
- Fixed ‘save all’ crash in replay browser
- Fixed ‘save movies now, then quit’ crash
- Movies upload to YouTube now contain a ‘match’ tag, which includes a unique ID for the round during which the replay was saved
- Added check-box on the advanced settings dialog to enable/disable the glow effect while rendering replays (default is disabled)
- Bug and crash fixes
- Added "replay_printsessioninfo <full path>" command for server admins to monitor session files, aid in debugging problems
- UI now saves the "last directory" used for exporting a movie
- Added a specific error message when trying to upload a movie to YouTube that cannot be found
- Fixed a bug where replay recording would stop after feigning death
- Fixed audio and video sync issues
- Fixed a crash when replay filenames exceeded a certain length
- Fixed start-up issues related to library files
- Fixed audio sync issues on the Mac
- Added the Replay feature: http://www.teamfortress.com/replayupdate
- Known issue with Mac replay rendering being blurry will be fixed in the next update
- Added 8 new Replay achievements
