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How to deal with really long game sessions?

Discussion in 'Unity Everyplay' started by JeffersonTD, Jul 3, 2016.

  1. JeffersonTD

    JeffersonTD

    Joined:
    Feb 5, 2013
    Posts:
    268
    SetMaxRecordingMinutesLength(int minutes);I'm having some problems with my game as the sessions can get very long. In general sharing works for short videos, but when I try to make an example video on how to play the game well (to try to boost some interest towards my game), I encounter problems. Usually it has happened that the upload just doesn't progress, but now as I tried, it just didn't even open the Everyplay sharing dialogue. I tried again with a short session to make sure I hadn't introduced a new bug, but no, with the short session, the dialogue opened and everything work nicely. The reason why the long session didn't work now could have been that my phone ran out of space, as I unfortunately only had something like 220 megs free (iPhone5), but shouldn't it still be handled some way nicely so that the user doesn't just experience things being broken?

    The everyplay developer documentation says:

    "If a gameplay session is extremely long, the bit rate is optimized by an algorithm depending on device and resolution to create videos at about 4-5MB per minute."

    "There is no set limit for video length, but we recommend keeping videos to a maximum of ten minutes."

    What does this exactly mean? That 5-10 minutes considered "extremely long"? And that one is expected to encounter problems if the session is longer than 10 minutes? Or can

    I didn't check how long my last game session exactly took, but a really rough estimate is 20-30 minutes (I will take time the next time I try). On average the better you play (see https://itunes.apple.com/app/cubendor/id998156617 for the idea) the longer the session, and on the other hand the more nasty it is, if sharing doesn't work, when you've really been having a good, long session.

    So: how should I deal with the long game sessions? Should things always work no matter how long the session as long as there is disk space on the device? Even if the video would be eg. 1 hour? Or will the user experience problems with really long videos? And if running out of space, shouldn't that be handled somehow nicely? Eg. so that only the last x minutes would be in the video? Or first x minutes?

    In general the idea would be to record one entire game session, but the end of the game session is the most important part, so would you recommend just using the SetMaxRecordingMinutesLength(int minutes); method? And would 10 minutes be a good choice for a predefined maximum length? Or should it be even shorter? Also, if using that, does using StartRecording and StopRecording still work normally, so that if the time between StartRecording and StopRecording is eg 5 minutes, then the video will be 5 minutes? And if that time would be eg. 15 minutes, then it would just have the 10 last minutes, before doing stop recording?