Terrific Screenshots of Cool

I learned how to make and edit a demo last night. I downloaded a couple of tools, a limited demoeditor and a convenient demo player. I also read the help on a wiki. I put together a panorama of my most-played toons, each switching through its favorite costumes every two seconds.

[this will be ancient news for many]: While it's not rocket science, it might not be everyone's cup of tea. However demos can be run offline, without an internet connection. The camera can be moved around, and toons can be put into animations (my scientist below is mixing formula; my shield tank is rocking a villain pose). Other peoples' toons can be added, if they have a demorecording somewhere that captures their costume. But it is nigh impossible to create a new costume this way, and it is very hard to guess the coordinates of your favorite place in the game.

So make at least one demo of each memorable toon, cycling through its costumes, taken in a place you find memorable. /demorecord myheroname, /cc 0, (30 seconds) /cc 1 ... to the last costume. Then /demostop.

The files end up in your City of Heroes installation in the client_demo directory. Don't edit them yet, just back them up somewhere. Even if you don't learn to edit and play demos, someone else can, sooner or even much later. Now all I need to do is turn my demo into an animated picture file for my computer desktop. There are enough instructions out there on the internet, for me to learn tonight.

This was captured at full screen resolution, shown smaller here
I wish I'd known about this sooner, but there's still months of time to capture some great replayable footage of my toons running missions too.

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airhead, that's awesome

How do I add my other characters into the shot? Is it an in-game command while using /demorecord?

I'm on a Mac and there doesn't seem to be a way to play back demos "offline", but I'd be happy if I could just get several of my characters onscreen at the same time for some screenshots.

Thanks Mr Rik! I think the demo editing tool I have tried has some capability to pull objects from one demo script into another, but I haven't pushed that very hard. I open up both scripts in Notepad windows (on Windows) and cut-paste from one to the other.

For running demos on a Mac, I don't know of anything that will help. You could figure out the "properties" to add to the end of the game's startup command line, perhaps someone has done that for a Mac before. I used Windows gadgets by Zloth listed on http://home.roadrunner.com/~scuzzbopper/demos.html . Without being able to run the demo, it'd be a nightmare to try to edit the demo (easier to learn as you can test).

Let's see if it can be explained better by someone else, but otherwise I or someone else could arrange them for you. Capture some demo scripts as described above, ZIP them up and put the zip file on a file hosting site... post a link to it here and see if anyone bites. I will give it a go once I figure out animated pictures, within my free time...

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Okay, wait, so the extra characters are added in after the fact, then? I was hoping there was some way to simply pull multiple characters onscreen at the same time and then record from there.

Yup, I cheated It's still looks real, they "breathe" in that CoH way during the demo play.

If you don't have too many toons you might be able to fake it in-game in the AE, the limit being the saveable filesize there. And not knowing which toons will show up in each spawn Or you fill the AE with friendly NPC versions of your toons and gather them up as you wander around. I like the demorecord option because I can customize the /emotes and use maps not present in the AE, as well as fine-tune the seating arrangements.

Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
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Yeah, I re-created a number of my characters to be allies in an AE mission. It was a blast fighting alongside my other toons.

I played this mission on Justice with my DB/WP guy Capt. Blood. Left to right is Industrielle (Guardian), Tomi Gunn (Virtue), Air Force (Liberty) and Ironik (Guardian).



I haven't done any demoediting in years, but basically it was just trial-and-error to place things properly. Push the camera coordinates a little here, see how it looks, add in another character over there, see how it looks. It was a bit too clunky for me to really enjoy mastering it, but now I wish I had.

A couple simple shots I made way back in 2005 using Zloth's program:

I may go the AE route. My thing is I've created my own personal "supergroups" on each of my servers. Two of those groups are themed "concept" groups:

"The Extracurriculars" is a group of girls who were students at Dahlia Danger's International School for Superpowered Girls, their school was destroyed in Galaxy City, and their teacher (Dahlia) turned out to be working for Arachnos and took off to the Rogue Isles.

"Solar Angels" Is led by Mother Sun, a brilliant biophysicist who developed a method of imbuing ordinary people with super powers. She formed a team, with each member representing one of the planets.

The SGs on my other servers are just loose collections of whatever characters I have there. I'm pretty good at stitching things together in Photoshop and making wallpapers, but I'm not quite good enough to fake a "real" group shot.

Airhead has used shots from the costume creator to combine his characters before I told him of the wonders of demoedit. You can see the excellent combos he's made in the "Favorite Costume" thread. Those mostly require a lot of patience. AE is a nice end-run, but it's sometimes hard to get decent group shots. I actually had two more of my toons in that AE mission, but I never got a decent shot with them all together.

I really like the font you used for Mother Sun. What is that? (I'm kind of a font junkie.) Also, "Notta Planet" is funny. But sad. I'm actually wearing my "Pluto ~ 1930-2006 ~ Revolve in Peace" t-shirt.

As far as my other SG, "The Extracurriculars", I had a whole plan for all their costumes. (Note: the two girls in the lower right were added after I made the wallpaper I linked to earlier. Xioahui is a Fiery Melee/Shield Defense brute from China; Tonya Toronto is an Ice/Ice blaster from Canada).

They started out wearing pretty much what they had on when the meteors hit Galaxy City:


Then at level 20 (only got five of them to 20) they would each design their own individual costumes, reflecting their own taste/style:


At level 30, they would together design a "uniform", with each maintaining their colors (the non-Americans on the team use their national colors), and slight modifications suitable to their ATs, i.e. bigger shoulders on the melee characters. The could choose their own head slots:


And just for fun, beach and club wear:

Not as cool as some... but the first time I've seen this map and... this character does not have fly or hover, only teleport.

Man, that is epic. I haven't been able to get to that map yet. Where is it?

Ssa1.7

I took some picture of my space beam babe Jennie Nova no that same map just last night:





Definitely an awesome map, if you have a space themed character and haven't run SSA 1.7 yet, you should. It starts in RWZ, this is 4 missions in so it takes a bit to get there, and there are elite bosses to beat up on the way, but for me the payoff was taking pictures after. ^_^

I just came across this that I had encountered during the I19 beta and thought was freaking hilarious:

I remember that. I drooled a little. First time I ever went into scrapper-lock before the fight started. I don't remember a lot about the fight except that I started it.

One of my original characters was Mr. Liberty who spawned an alt of the same character: Liberty Incarnate

When the day finally came that the name carried a bit of extra gravity, I snapped this screenie of him discovering this newfound power.

*sigh* Some missions just require too much travel ...



In case you can't read it, the waypoint says my objective is 43,260.81 miles away.

Took some fun shots on that map as well.

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris