Camera Overlay is unusable (breaks clips entirely)#1879

I have made around 3 - 4 tickets in the Discord support server over the past year highlighting a certain issue relating to a camera overlay bug.

I originally introduced the issue with the camera overlay feature (when it was in BETA testing) where it bugs out your clip if your camera fps does not match the fps of your recorded clip. It leads to a strong static noise throughout the whole clip and messes with the fps. This deems the clip UNUSEABLE. Since then, I have been told countless times it has been forwarded to the devs and will be fixed SOON.

Now, many months later. The camera overlay feature is in stable release and the same problem STILL persists. There has been no work done on the issue and it has the same problems as always.

I am currently being told that the dev team does not think there is any priority in the feature and that there are not enough resources to get this fixed. I had some understanding towards that situation. HOWEVER, just a few months later, the feature was pushed into stable release and my multiple reports regarding the problem during the beta testing phase were ignored. Why would you push a broken feature into stable release despite knowing that there are issues attached to it? What was the point of me going out of my way to report the issues during beta? Is my feedback not reaching the correct team or is it just being ignored for the sake of “not having enough resources”?

For me, the lack of accountability and disregard for the user’s experience is plain unacceptable. As a heavy user of Medal, even considering to purchase a Medal Premium sub, I expect the program’s features to be functional and my reports to be taken seriously.

Here are clips of the issue:
https://medal.tv/games/osu/clips/129dPOyDsmIQnv/d1337oF1hEu3?invite=cr-MSxJZnUsMzYxOTU5NTQs

https://medal.tv/games/csgo/clips/12ai7KiDTVxGbO/d1337ht0x042?invite=cr-MSw0TFksMzYxOTU5NTQs

(I wish I kept earlier clips to show how long this issue has been around for. I have since deleted them due to their unwatchability)

Hey there. I wanted to personally respond to this as I’m on the team that handles the recorder (in addition to many other areas of the application).

First, I’d like to apologize. It’s a really sucky feeling when you give feedback and and nothing seems to come of it. It just feels like you’re shouting into a void, or getting the corporate response runaround in the hopes you’ll go away. For what it’s worth, this isn’t what has been happening with webcams. Medal has seen several internal team restructures in a very short period of time last year, so this is unfortunately one of the things that just fell through the cracks in the transitions between teams.

For what it’s worth, before that happened, we did also spend a lot of time on trying to fix webcams, but we couldn’t get a fix that felt good to send to users. The fixes we had didn’t work for everyone or wouldn’t work all the time. Eventually we had other things come up that we had to work, and fixing webcams was left behind.

I understand all of this can just sound like a bunch of excuses, so I will say that I do want to fix webcams, especially head of some launches that we have planned for summer where using a webcam will be very important, but I also want to set the expectation that we have some urgent issues that affect a lot of users we need to fix first before we’d be able to do that.

Lastly, I want to thank you for the time and passion you’ve poured into documenting this issue for us. Medal is built on feedback and issue reports from users like you, I went ahead and granted you three months of Medal premium for your efforts.

I hope this helps,

Sean

Hey Sean, thank you for the Medal Premium. As stated before I have been interested in purchasing a subscription so this is would be a great opportunity for me to try out the features. I appreciate your gesture of goodwill.

I want to further thank you for taking the time to respond to my concerns and finally clear up the developer sides of things regarding the issue. I can now understand the challenges the team is currently facing in regards to other areas of development.

I look forward to the progress that the team will make in fixing the camera overlay, I do hope that it will be resolved soon. I was wondering if there is any estimate on when the team will start focussing more on fixing the webcam issue? Would it be looked at further during the upcoming summer launches?

Thank you once again,
Josh

The goal is by end of May, but our team is also responsible for shipping features and fixing almost every other area of Medal, so our deadlines aren’t set in stone if urgent issues come up. I don’t want to give the expectation that this will 100% be fixed by then, just sharing what the plan is.

Hey there, wanted to leave a small update that we are now trying to fix this issue again.

❤️

We are somewhat closer to getting this working. We’ve managed to get the webcam to capture more frames but the side effect of this is that it flickers a lot more. Still working on trying to fix it.