Bug Report Game capture with hotkey won't remember captured game

[grocal]

I guess it's a kind of bug or at least major inconvenience.

Let's assume we have 2 scenes. Scene 1 - anything (for example just plain image). Scene 2 - game capture source with hotkey set for choosing game source to capture (F12 is default, right?). Whenever you switch scenes you always have to press hotkey again to choose game source to capture. Can OBS remember what was chosen last time and not disable game capture source every time scenes are being switched (unless last source is gone of course)? This might be a problem for anyone who switches scenes frequently without having OBS preview around (or stream preview on secondary pc/monitor). You have to remember to switch game source hotkey every time you go back to scene with "game capture" source configured to use hotkey. I've kinda lost a bunch of gameplay that way when I chose source with hotkey, switched to scene with "intermission screen" and then back to scene with game not knowing that game source reset itself to nothing.

Tested OBS versions: latest beta and 0.57.05 - all prone to that bug.

Thanks in advance for any reaction.

 

[R1CH]

Did you try adding the game capture as a global source?

 

[grocal]

Nice workaround with adding game capture as a global source, R1CH. It works this way. Thanks. Yet still, I guess, game capture should stick to its chosen game if chosen by hotkey no matter if source is global or not. But this workaround makes this bug (or is it a feature? ;) ) not such a big problem anymore.

BTW, OBS is such a great piece of software so that I've decided to chip in a bit via donate button. Keep up the good work, guys!

 

[8BitCerberus]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I'm having a similar but different sort of problem with the game capture hotkey. So far I've only tested this with Saints Row: The Third so I need to do some more testing with other games, but here is what's happening:

I have Game Capture set as a global source, and a hotkey set. I've added the source to my scene.

I start SR3 and I hit my hotkey and it hooks the game and all is well. However, if I have to alt-tab out of the game, or a background process/notification/whatever happens to want attention for some reason, the output in OBS gets frozen. Alt-tabbing back into the game and hitting the hotkey again does nothing. I have to fully exit out of the game, restart it, and re-hit the hotkey.

I got frustrated enough with that that now I just set up each game as it's own source, that at least allows me to not have to fully exit if something steals focus for a second. The only real frustration with this is that you have to start the game, alt-tab out, then set up the source. It would be awesome if I could set up the source in OBS and just browse to the game's executable, rather than it having to be a running process. But it's a one-time setup, so once it's done it's done and it's not that big of a deal. But I've been doing a lot of one-off streams and it would be nice if the game capture hotkey was reliable enough so that I wouldn't have to go through setting up dozens of sources just for all the one-off games.

Is it a scene thing? Do I need to set up another scene that I would switch to if I need to alt-tab, then switch back to the scene I'm recording with to be able to re-do the hotkey? That's something I hadn't thought about until reading this thread, and I guess it wouldn't be a problem to set up a "pause" screen with an image or something to switch to in that case. Hmm... will be testing this soon.

[edit] Ok, no that doesn't work. Switching away and then back to the scene it still shows the game as if it's frozen. Still have to completely exit the game and go back into it before I can re-do the hotkey to re-hook into the game. I guess I still need to set a source for each game, at least for any games I plan on doing more than a one-off session with.

 

[R1CH]

You say some background notification thing, is another program maybe hooking your game? Once OBS locks onto a target app, it should generally keep capturing unless the app exits, the window changes or something else overwrites the hook.

 

[8BitCerberus]

No, nothing else hooking into the game, what I'm talking about is when something like SpyBot (using this because it's the most recent example that has happened that I remember) wants to run a scan at midnight once a week, or month or whenever it's scheduled to do so. It'll pop a UAC prompt to ask me if I want to allow it to run, and that pulls you out of the game which then OBS is either recording a black or frozen screen with audio, sometimes mouse movements, or it may record the desktop if I have monitor record in the stack. But going back into the game doesn't bring it back into OBS, and hitting the game capture hotkey again doesn't re-hook into the game.

I don't really mind that the game losing focus breaks the hook, that's to be expected. The frustrating part is that you can't re-hook once you're back in the game. You have to exit the game fully to desktop, then start it back up again before you can re-hook with OBS.