Leandro

I missed this whole thing due to my defunct hard disk. I just got my replacement working a couple of hours ago and I come to the forums to find these posts.

I'll be sulking in the corner for a while.

Global Name: @Leandro
Email: leandrotlz@gmail.com
IM's: leandrotlz@gmail.com
Games you plan to move to: no other MMOs for me.
Steam ID: leandrotlz
Favorite Powerset/AT in CoH: Trollers 4eva!
Red/blue?: Blue.
More stuph: Will keep operating cohtube.blogspot.com with more videos coming, I don't know what'll happen to www.savecoh.com but I'm handling that too, I'm @leandrotlz on Twitter but I just made a @cohtube account to post videos.

So long, and thanks for all the badges.

Please note that if you like watching COH videos, you should definitely bookmark CohTube and keep an eye on it even after the game closes. Demo editing does not require the server in order to put things together, and most of the latest Angelus Animi video was made completely offline. There will be more coming, even after the servers shut down.

At the beginning of the month, while working on two COH videos I planned to release this month, I got some disk errors while working with the (very large) video files. It went from pristine status to 3 bad sectors when I had only completed a couple of minutes of each video.



So, since the disk is barely over a year old, I put an RMA request on it. I knew it'd take a while, but then I could hop on the game for the final week and finish at least one video (in a hurry).

Well, I got my replacement yesterday, and left it overnight copying my files back to it from my backup computer (that doesn't have a decent graphics card, so I can't use for gaming). Guess what I woke up to? A write error.



Looks like I just wasted 3 weeks of possible game time waiting for a flawed replacement. Isn't that great?

I guess I'll do what I should have done 3 weeks ago, and put my backup's hard drive on my gaming computer, and hope nothing happens to my data until I get a replacement harddisk again. Darn, I am so annoyed right now.

If you have the NCsoft Launcher installed, all you have to do is make a link to "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\Launcher\NCLauncher.exe" /LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes and it'll redownload if necessary.

I will need to do the same thing myself when my replacement harddisk gets here late Wednesday. It was a really bad time for my harddisk to die on me.

I don't know why this hasn't been posted yet, but have a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP0Um3OHOuo

COHTube link: http://cohtube.blogspot.com.ar/2012/11/thriller.html

Apparently, Black Pebble's worst nightmare is a giant me.

Happy birthday, TheNet!

No halloween down here, so I'll just be dressing up as a geek with no fashion sense whatsoever. Like every other day.

I'll poke him.

Put this on a .cohdemo file:

Well, to be honest I use an script that I can provide with a "timeline" of keyframes, and the script interpolates things and spit out a demo. It's just that it has no user interface, so the whole scene has to be made in a text file. It's MUCH easier than writing a demo by hand, but it still requires manually typing stuff, so it's not ready for normal people.

This is the script in question: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37952257/scene-to-demo.pl
This is a sample scene: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37952257/CMM-01.txt

Now, to explain how it works. The text file has a bunch of lines with tab-separated values. The first line is the map the action will be happening in, the second is the time, and afterwards we have keyframes.

Remember: TAB separated values. Best view to view the file is using Metapad with the tab spacing set to 20 or so, or to copy the file's contents to Excel, then copy the cells back, keeping TAB as a separator.

0 CAM 2560 115 132 2696 79 130
50 CAM 2498 71.64 229.8 2927 98 19 EASEOUT/EASEIN
60 CAM 2498 71.64 229.8 2927 98 19

The camera starts at 2560 115 132 (loc), facing towards 2696 79 130 (I prefer to use facing coordinates instead of PYR, personal preference). The second line says that 5.0 seconds in, the camera should be at 2498 71.64 229.8, facing towards 2927 98 19. Each keyframe is 1/10 of a second, that's why it says 50 at the beginning, for 5.0 seconds. The final bit, EASEOUT/EASEIN, determines the type of camera movement, as explained in my previous post. The two arguments are provided with a slash, in the form CAMERA/FACING. In the example, the CAMERA starts fast and moves slower (EASEOUT) while the point that the camera is looking at starts moving slower and then accelerates (EASEIN). Different combinations cause the camera to move in different ways with the same location/facing values.

The third line says that 6.0 seconds after the demo starts (NOT after the last action) the camera should be at the same location and facing. So basically, move the camera during the first 5 seconds, then one second of pause. All the keyframes are in absolute times.

0 Flambeaux 2530 65.7 208 2530 65.7 223 A_EMOTE_FLIPPINGCOIN_PRE
0 Fusionette 2578.3 67.3 148.1 2569 67.3 147 BOBCAT_ONCOUCH
0 Faultline 2569 67.1 147 2579 67.1 163 GROUNDSIT
0 Radio 2579 68 141 2579 68 200 READY

These lines place actors that aren't moving, so they only have one keyframe each. The actors are pulled from .char files like all my other scripts. The .char files have to be in the same folder as the script.

0 Matthew Habashy 2636 64.2 129 2500 64.2 129 PLAYER_WALK_FORWARD
60 Matthew Habashy 2606 64.2 129
0 Dana Habashy 2635 64.2 133 2500 64.2 133 PLAYER_WALK_FORWARD
60 Dana Habashy 2605 64.2 133

And these are keyframed actors. Just like the camera, they start at one location and move to another, 6.0 seconds in. The camera will stop moving at 5 seconds in, but these actors will keep on moving at the same rate for the whole 6.0 seconds.

This is just a simple example, but the tool is pretty powerful. I used it all the way back in Donuts several years ago, lost the files at some point, and I'm now recreating it. The final goal is to have a graphical UI to place keyframes and render a full demo out of it.

One of the things that I haven't put on this parser yet is to take other entities as facing destinations. So I could, in the facing column, put "Faultline" or "CAM" and then the character would look at Faultline or at the camera, instead of towards a set of coordinates.

Awesome job, CW. I did think of scanning for pointers to the global camera position to see where it was being modified and try to speed up the movement, but it was more of a "maybe by next week" thing. Love how you saved me all that trouble.

The only thing I'd add is a demorecord equivalent, so people can save their camera movement to a file. Just write (ms since last update) CAM POS x z y\n0 CAM PYR p y r\n to a file on every update tick.

Update: Codewalker made a better version of this tool. It allows you to speed up the camera movement while in F2 look mode. Scroll a few posts down for his version.

As you probably know, you can now press F2 while playing a demo and you can get a floating camera, allowing you to fly anywhere in the zone.

The problem is, if you find a particularly interesting sight, you have no way of knowing what your current camera location is.

So, I made a tiny (28KB) program to fix this. It should "just work". If it doesn't seem to do anything, try running it as Administrator.

As soon as you open it, it will start monitoring for the COH process. Once it finds it, it will display the camera location for both the Live and the Beta clients.

This works while running the game normally, too, but remember they are the CAMERA coordinates, not your CHARACTER, so the numbers will not exactly match the /loc command.



It has two controls: a checkbox that makes it stay always on top (if COH is running full screen this will not work; run it in a window) and a scroll bar to control the speed of updates. When the scrollbar is all the way to the right, it updates once every second. When it's all the way to the left, it updates 10 times per second.



Note that I threw this together in literally 10 minutes, so it hasn't been tested much. As far as I know, it works.

The PYR is not accessible this easily, but a simple workaround is to take two POS measurements (one for where you want the camera to go, another for where you want the camera to be looking at) and calculate the PYR for that facing, using my crowdscript or something else.

If you have a memory scanner such as Cheat Engine, you don't need this tool. Just enter the addresses 012DB334,012DB338,012DB33C for the live client; 012DF1F4,012DF1F8,012DF1FC for the beta client. All value types are floats.