You may notice that some of your demos just sit there at the end. They eventually loop back but it takes forever!
If you open up the demo file itself and go all the way to the end you'll probably find a single line with a HUGE delay time. Something like:
54016 31 float 5 FloatMiss
That first number means the demo will pause almost a minute before the demo will loop.
Fixing it is easy. It's right at the end of the demo so just delete the line. Or change the first number to something sane like 50.
I'm not sure about the cause. I *think* it may happen when you don't use /demostop at the end of a demo and just let it stop automatically by zoning or logging out.
Looks like there is a bug in the format demos are saved in. If a chat message includes a " mark, the message will not play back correctly. For instance, if you try to say:
That's his "nice" outfit!
When played back in a demo, this comes out as:
That's his
And in the demo file itself, the text portion of the command will be something like:
"That's his " nice" outfit!"
Blah. What a mess. You should probably just replace the enclosed " marks with one or two ' marks.
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Looks like there is a bug in the format demos are saved in. If a chat message includes a " mark, the message will not play back correctly. For instance, if you try to say:
That's his "nice" outfit!
When played back in a demo, this comes out as:
That's his
And in the demo file itself, the text portion of the command will be something like:
"That's his " nice" outfit!"
Blah. What a mess. You should probably just replace the enclosed " marks with one or two ' marks.
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This is very common in the progamming world. While I haven't tried it myself, you might want to try hacking the file and putting a \ before the " that you want to show up as text.
i.e. "That's his \" nice\" outfit!"
Good idea, but it didn't work. It just ends at the slash. (A pity, we could have stuck in all manner of escape codes in there! 
Finally got a demo edit program in working order! See this thread!
First off, let me say how much I enjoy demos, and your utilities and posts have certainly helped that no end, Zloth.
I've been playing around, picking apart some demos I recorded, looking for cool animations, models, etc. I noticed that the XLU command appears for the Tsoo Ancestor Spirit model, and my guess was that this is used to set the degree of translucency on the model. That was something I really wanted to play around with, but it doesn't seem to be supported when the demos play back--my Ancestor Spirits are now rock solid.
The SEQ seem to be used most notably for "glowies" in missions and for 5th Column Mek Men. Neither of these show up for me in demos, either. I think the SEQ must have something to do with an animated skin being used on some of the models--alternating between a light and dark version of the computer/bodybag/crate to give give the glowing effect. Why this doesn't display correctly in demos is beyond me.
Thanks again for the great utilites, and keep up the good work. 
Ah, disregard, figured it out. Thanks!
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Awesome tools you got here Zloth2. Thanks!
I have a silly question for you, or maybe not. I don't know enough about all of this yet. Is it possible to replace a player with an npc, and if so, how? and vice versa?
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Cheers,
Thanks!
ok, so I was able to turn one of my friends into a Crey Crisis unit in atlas park, which was really neat. The problem is, now, their name is no longer displayed above their head. This makes sense, since I had to turn him into an npc to do it and the npcs do not display names. Is there a way to make them?
Is it, for instance, possible to make my friend a Crey Drama Queen? and have it display that over His head?
Cheers,
Great guide.
Was wondering if anyone had a download link to piggviewer to go with it. They've all gone poof off the boards because of the mods, but it'd still be a useful just for editting demos (being able to look up what's what in order to make changes).
EDIT: I'm assuming here that it will just let me see the code lines which I could edit in the demo to change models, FXs, etc. If piggviewer doesn't do that, then nevermind.
CoH Codex : Demo Models/FX/MOVs : Demo Info
Arc 111022: "Doctor Geist and the Scientific Method"
Thanks!
CoH Codex : Demo Models/FX/MOVs : Demo Info
Arc 111022: "Doctor Geist and the Scientific Method"
For lists of all things you can put in, I go to City of Villians (even though it's made it forever impossible for me to remember how to spell 'villains' without looking at his web site )
As for putting a character name over an NPC, I don't think it can currently be done. The best you could do is change the character's costume/model so he looks a lot like the NPC you are trying to get.
Thanks. I decided to just chuck all names, so I didn't have to deal with it. I was playing around with having someone turn into an npc just as they do the BOOSTUP animation and the healing aura around them. It turned out really great, well, except that I somehow threw off the timing of my own toon. Ah well, still much to learn...
I figure I will start using editors once I actually know what I am doing in the file manually. That way, when I run into a problem that the editor can't handle, I will at least have an idea of where to start.
bump for survival
I've been searching around and can't seem to find and answer to this question, so apologies ahead of time if its been covered a million times before.
Is there anyway to remove the player names or stop them from appearing over the player heads in a demorecord? Also anyway to stop the text label of a new city zone from appearing in a demorecord?
Hmm, I don't THINK the FAQ area lets threads expire? Not sure how that works.
You can get rid of player names easily. Just go in to their NEW commands and erase the name. (My demo edit will do it for you, too.) Unfortunately, I don't know how to get rid of the zone name.
By the way - demos made on the Test server right now add four new lines to character models. Three for capes and one for auras. I'll update the demo edit to handle those once it's released (and I have the time to fix it).
[Demos are also doubling chat lines a lot. Bugged it in game.]
I noticed a lot of excellent new MOV commands in the demos I recorded on the Training Room server. I can't wait to play around with having PCs use the TORCH, dig with shovels and picks, have books floating around them, etc. Good, good stuff! 
Got a question for the more tech-savvy among you: I put together demofiles for the film contest, but when I went to make them into AVIs for editing the quality was somewhat lacking. The images were clear, but the action was always slowed down.
I pretty much went through the process using StormKnight's guide, which advocates COHED for demo playback and GameCam as the capture tool of choice. The trouble was, no matter what I did to change the quality levels, things always seemed to suffer a terrible slowdown during capture. I wanted to email StormKnight direct to ask his thoughts, but no email link on his pages. I'm hoping he or some other smarter-than-me folks browse through here.
One odd point: COHED lets you play your demo back in the recommmended 640x480 format of the final product, but City of Heroes cannot run 640x480 in fullscreen mode. This causes it to default to windowed mode, BUT GameCam claims it works poory in windowed mode, creating something of an impasse. As a workaround, I went to 800x600 for both demo playback and capture preference, figuring I could bump it back to 640x480 when I edited in Premiere. The problem was that even fullscreen, the quality issue was crappy. Everything had that "chug-a-chug" stutter quality. You know, when your computer tries to do too much at one time and has to slow everything down? With my specs, though, I don't see how this can be a technical problem. I mean:
PIV 2GHz; 512Mb RAM; 256Mb GeForce FX w/Detonator drivers; 2Gb pagefile
I can play CoH all day at 1024x768 with little to no slowdown at all. So where, I wonder, does my capture problem come in? My biggest regret in all of this is that the technical problem has set me too far back to make the deadline. I wonder if they might consider extending it for late entries?
Errr, not really what this thread is about. This is for discussing the format and commands of the text within those demo files.
All COHED (or any other demo launcher) does is pass a command line to City of Heroes so CoH can play the demo back. You might try asking in the Technical Discussions area.
EDIT: apologies for replying in this thread - I know it's off topic - I didn't look which thread it was before answering. D'oh!
Answer is now over in This Thread
My sincerest apologies - I didn't even realize there was a separate thread for StormKnight's COH editor. That's what I get for being a lazy forum angler and not doing a thorough search. Zloth, your work in this arena has been top notch, which is what drew me here first - I hope you'll keep it up in spite of knuckleheads cluttering up your threads!
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[b]Theres a mission in the game that gives you a Freakshow disguise. This is a power, not a costume change. (It used to be FX Maintained 3 POWERS/ITEMSANDTEMPPOWERS/FREAKSHOWPARTS.FX 0Ebut this no longer works and my old demo now just has me running around without the disguise.)
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I think this may be fixed with Issue 2--I saw someone "freaked out" in Boomtown this weekend, so it seems to be working in game. I shot a quick demo, but haven't looked at the text yet to see if it's using the same command as before.
It's back all right! An old demo I made back in beta still shows it just fine. That's got to be one of the most fun missions in the whole game!
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btw a question... i'm playing back some demos and sometimes the sound cuts out... and sometimes it returns... not really sure what's up there or how i can fix this. any thoughts?
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That's a demo bug. When the Reflections update came out, demo playback got a LOT more stable but the sound now freaks out. I'm sure Cryptic is aware of it but, as demos aren't an officially supported feature, the fix will come when it comes.