Another month, another load of Tech questions. Unfortunately not as many this month, although some interesting questions have been posed nevertheless. Again, not all questions have been answered, and I apologize for that.

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I’ve been looking around for a good, free recording device with which I can record with. I’ve tried HyperCam 2, but it slows down my computer so much that whatever it captures is incredibly laggy. – Game Freak

There are various solutions for desktop recording. As I recall, Hypercam is a paid shareware option, which puts an annoying ‘Unregistered version of hypercam 2’ on all videos you record. As well as the performance hit, this is undesirable.

I am assuming that you are using the recording software to record RuneScape in some way. This is a problem in itself, because it means that you have one very draining program running, as well as the recorder. All desktop recorders have a performance hit, and sometimes that can be large, depending on various factors. Coupling that with RS, you’re probably going to have one slow computer.

A recording program I have found that works fairly well is CamStudio. It is free and Open Source, and is available from www.camstudio.org. After installation, make sure you change a few settings:

1. Go Options -> Program and make sure that ‘Minimise program on start recording’ and ‘Hide flashing rectangle’ are both checked.
2. Go Options -> Video Options and make sure that the Cinepak Codec by Radius is the codec that is going to be used.
3. When recording, make sure you’re recording to AVI. It will say either ‘Record to AVI’ or ‘Record to SWF’ in the main screen. If it says ‘Record to SWF’ just click the button that says ‘swf’ on it. AVI is uploadable to youtube and other similar services.

To set up the region that will be recorded, open a browser window with RuneScape in, then in CamStudio, click Region -> Fixed Region and select the region of the runescape applet.

To record, just click the big red round button, move the region to the appropriate place, and click.

Have you ever tried to make a modification (Mod) for any computer game? Is it difficult? – Cowboyofdeath

I have not personally made a mod to any computer game, no.

Some games are difficult to mod, some easy. Some games require complex programming and graphics knowledge, whereas others just require a little changing of ini files; it all depends on the game.

Do you think it will be possible to make a 3D RuneScape with java (in sense of 3D being PlayStation 2 graphics)? – Cowboyofdeath

As far as I know, Java cannot currently use hardware acceleration for graphics – everything has to go through the CPU, which is why RuneScape uses so much processor power. Until Java does have support for hardware-accelerated graphics (using the graphics card instead of the processor for graphics), there isn’t much of a chance of RuneScape getting Playstation 2 standard graphics.

If Java 1.7, or other future versions have hardware accelerated graphics support, then it will be possible. At the moment, though, no.

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Questions for next month can be sent to matthew.rsbandbinformer@gmail.com, or posted in the topic in the Informer Content Generation forum on the RSBandB forums.