Help with demodump

I've recently been trying to capture screen shots from some demo files I recorded (various chars dinging 50), but have been running into problems and was hoping somebody could shed some light on the issue. I usually run my demos by dragging the demo files onto one of several shortcuts I have. The shortcuts are shown below:

[1] "D:\Games\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -demoplay
[2] "D:\Games\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -demodump 1 -demoplay
[3] "D:\Games\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -demodump 1 -demofps 25 -demoplay

When I drag onto shortcut [1], the demo plays correctly and I can issue console commands normally. However, when I issue 'demodump 1' to the console, the demo player crashes.

The demo player also crashes if I drag a demo file onto either shortcut [2] or [3].

I used the same shortcuts and commands to capture screenies pre i12 and that worked ok. The crashes happen on both Vista64 and XP32.

Strangely, I can launch the demo and capture screenies from the start without any crashing using TweakCOH. The downside is, the few seconds I want snapshots of are well into the demo, and with TweakCOH I have to capture frames from the very beginning of the demo. Needless to say, it's not the most efficient way of doing things, especially when the demos are long.

So, my questions are:

<ul type="square">[*] Have the console commands changed?[*] Am I using the wrong commands or shortcuts?[*] How can I achieve this without TweakCOH?[/list]
Thanks lots

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Get hold of TweakCoH that has a built in player for Demo files, never having used a shortcut to play mine that is all the help I can offer.

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As I mentioned above I can use TweakCOH already, the problem is due to the length of the demo I often have to wait for it to capture thousands and thousands of screenshots until it gets to the part I'm interested in.

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:O Missed that bit...

Think Spad was looking at editing the files directly, and I would imagine you could look through the file for the bit you want and delete the rest, but I wouldn't know for sure.

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[ QUOTE ]
As I mentioned above I can use TweakCOH already, the problem is due to the length of the demo I often have to wait for it to capture thousands and thousands of screenshots until it gets to the part I'm interested in.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's been a while since I did any demo editing but could you not delete all the unwanted parts from the start of the demo file? (after backing it up of course)

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Octavian Vanguard
@ohmsEU and @ohms 2

Badging character: Bimble on the Union server, Badgehunter.com and City Info Tracker.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
As I mentioned above I can use TweakCOH already, the problem is due to the length of the demo I often have to wait for it to capture thousands and thousands of screenshots until it gets to the part I'm interested in.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's been a while since I did any demo editing but could you not delete all the unwanted parts from the start of the demo file? (after backing it up of course)

[/ QUOTE ]

^ This.

On the rare times I've done demoediting, I usually either only start the demodump just before the action I want, or I set a text marker by saying something in local, or I look for the event I'm after, such as a specific mob spawn. No need to play the entire demo if I just want a bit at the end of a 2 hour dump.

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@FloatingFatMan

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It should also be pointed out you could create the file from scratch and have each of your characters ding fifty multiple times.

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Heh! Thanks for the tip, LostNinja

Ideally I'd prefer not to have to edit stuff, as sometimes it does mess up the file, and I'd prefer to be able to play demos using the game standalone without TweakCOH.

I guess for now though I can look up the entity names or the fx names for when a char dings 50 and try to prune the text file based on their location in the order of things.

Shame the console commands don't work. I wish I knew what command line argument TweakCOH was using.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone

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