Demodump crashing the demo, no pics

Hi all,

When I run my demo with demodump turned on, it crashes out before making even one image. Turning on demodump 1 within the (working) demo also crashes it. Is there some setting(s) not compatible with demodump? I saw an old post by Zloth in 2009 which describes a similar problem, but his solution was to run the demo in his "Test" version of CoH. Do I need to do that? Is that equivalent to downloading the Beta version?

Airhead

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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Type in the full command line you are using, and whether you're trying to include the UI or not in your shot.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Good idea! Oops.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -fullscreen 1 -screen 1680 1050 -demoplay "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\City of Heroes\client_demos\airheads-edited3.cohdemo"

And no UI is visible when the demo is running, I guess I haven't tried turning that off/on specifically, I'll try from the console now. Also I can only reach this board from the office, so I won't be able to reply again for 14 hours or so. But I will be back

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!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

Okay, word of advice, let's make this easier.

Via the command prompt, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\City of Heroes

Then type:

cityofheroes -demoplay airheads-edited3 -disable2d -screen 1680 1050 -demofps 30 -demodump

(launches the file as demo) (filename) (turns off all text and UI) (sets the screen size) (sets the FPS) (converts to JPGs)

That should work.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

THANK YOU Samuraiko!

I am now buzzing along making animated PNGs in Paint.Net. I then learned that animated image desktops have been eliminated before Windows 7 due to being a security risk or somesuch, so I'll have to make a movie file instead and get a program to show that as a desktop. But at least it's now possible The link below goes to an animated PNG, so will show in Firefox but maybe not IE. It's just a few frames, massively shrunk, and still a 2MB file. My toons animate through their better costumes, with a couple of cameos lurking in the background



Thanks again! You're a gem.

/Airhead

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!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

You're welcome.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

I don't understand the demo dump thing at all but hearing about being able to do a desktop sounds awesome!

I notice ya put TA in the back there looking depressed, it's perfect considering everything. lol thanks for the cameo Airhead.

The -demodump command creates a JPG for each frame of the file. For really short demofiles, it's an awesome way to get the exact frame you want of action.

I use it and then compile all the JPGs into an AVI via the VirtualDub program. Makes for some seriously smooth playing videos.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Oh neat!

What VirtualDub program do you use? Or is that the name? I had never tried doing it that way before. Would fraps not do the same thing with the screenshots?

FRAPS will record what's on the screen - great if you want to include UI, or don't really care about a really smooth video flow.

VirtualDub (the name of the program) takes all the JPGs and compiles them into a vid file of your format preference.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Gotcha!

Thank you for the clarification Michelle

Ooh. VirtualDub is deceptively easy to use. I couldn't figure out the manual, so I just opened the first frame (jpeg) and it knew the rest. I added the latest cameos and shot the video at 800x600, 10 fps. The VirtualDub result was a crystal clear, 200 Mbyte AVI file (full-screen, 30 fps it was 2 Gbytes). Converting to WMV at the same scale was under 3MB! It is very smudgy so I'll keep experimenting for better parameters. For AVI to WMV I used "Any Video Converter" off the CNET site. The thumbnail below links to Youtube; the Youtube can be made a bit bigger than its default size.

Be sure to follow the cameo link to Thor's Assassin's thread gathering heroes for demoediting efforts.

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!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

I tried using demodump years ago but my computer then couldn't handle it. I've always thought that would be a brilliant way to animate mouths and eyes the old-fashioned way. I even did some tests that looked non-terrible. Tedious, sure, but I think the result would be pretty cool.

I just always thought there'd be time to get around to it. Here are a couple screenshots I used as crude tests.

Old school as in King's Quest VIII Yeah, and if you followed that game's paradigm it would only take about 8 passes to get a functionally complete set of phonemes.

Maybe demo hacking and related tech are the short-term future of the game beyond November 30. All these videos Leandro, Samuraiko and others are cranking out seem to be the most effective way of attracting attention to the #SaveCOH effort, so far.

I'd be interested in contributing to the production of such 'page-flips' for what you're talking about and possibly other effects. However, I have had some troubles with editing some texture aspects. The bumpmaps I can usually get working, but reflection maps always seem to get flipped -- so, for instance, the metallic face would have that problem, unless someone knows how to do that properly.