Hey I have Planetary Annihilation since kickstarter and i recently started to have this weird issue. When iI try to record a game with action! recording software, i just get the "pa.exe has stopped working" although when i play the game without opening the recording software, it just runs perfectly. Also, if i open the recorder during a game, it still crashes and it's very annoying :/ All help is appreciated
don't use it, PA has many problems with recording software, use OBS instead, its easy to set up and I think it is much more flexible
As Corang says, OBS is a good choice that works well. I noticed it can have issues with PA when alt-tabbing to/from full screen mode, if you will be doing that it may be better to play in windowed mode with a hidden start bar.
I noticed issues with even OBS last time i tried recording, it would just record black screen with some of the border UI elements. Switched to full monitor capture and it started recording everything. (game capture didn't work) I also have a theory about it. If PA's UI is indeed split into several different executables, it would have potential to make recording software only record 1 of them. Not to mention it would most likely hurt RAM and performance having it split like that.
That sounds likely. The different UI elements, particularly in a live game, tend to have their own process. This actually improves performance due to the way the UI works. It used to be all in one scene, some time in beta they started splitting things up into their own scene.
What you see on screen have nothing to do with what Coherent Host doing. Basically Coherent does render UI panels, but then it's "transfer" results of rendering as bitmap to PA via own DLL. So all results of rendering are handled by same PA process. For example main menu in PA rendered exactly like 3D scene and using exactly same shaders, but there only one layer above and this layer it's basically one bitmap that Coherent rendered. What can be actual problem it's how game recording software trying to intercept what SDL / OpenGL output and there is a lot of ways how such interference might cause issues within game. E.g game recording software are fast in non-desktop mode because it's don't have to wait for OS compositor or window manager so it's use dirty tricks that might be not well tested for OpenGL. Obviously Uber staff can correct me about details, but I pretty sure that I understand this concept properly. PS: And yeah screen recording might also mess up with Coherent Host itself, but it's different issue because it's still can't know that some bitmaps are being made for PA.
Ok, but process to process communication is always slower than if it was done using multiple threads within 1 process. Think of it like multiple layers of bureaucracy within software It doesn't make a very responsive UI overall.
There is overheads, but Google put so much money and engineering work to make Chrome extremely fast and optimized so not likely there is some better software that might handle massive amount of data that fast. Obviously old-style UI solutions a lot faster and have less overhead, but their features are extremely limited which with Coherent everything what web browser support might be used in-game. And yeah it's doesn't really matter how many Coherent processes working here because overhead for communication between PA and Coherent host is always the same.
