[VIDEO] Tutorial to make your custom crowd screenshots/videos EASILY

Thank you, Champion.

What location are you placing your avatars in? There are some spots where the game geometry is broken and it hides characters from some camera angles. An obvious one is in The Hive by a large rock. If you email me your output.cohdemo file I'll take a look and see if that's the problem. leandrotlz@gmail.com

It should be using the same graphics settings as when you run COH normally. If that's not the case, you can force a couple of things via command line:

cityofheroes.exe -demoplay output -disable2d -screen 1920 1080 -fullscreen 1 -visscale 4

That plays the demo without the floating 2D elements, forces the screen to fullscale 1920x1080, and sets the render distance to 400%. If you can't display 1920x1080, you'll get an error and it'll default to 800x600 (yuck).

cityofheroes.exe -demoplay output -disable2d -fullscreen 0 -visscale 4

Same render distance but plays in a window, so you can resize it. I use this for drafts so I can quickly switch programs.

cityofheroes.exe -demoplay output -disable2d -screen 1920 1080 -fullscreen 1 -visscale 4 -demofps 30 -demodump

Same as the first but it forces the client to render each frame in the demo (at 30fps) to disk. The frames will be saved inside a folder called "screens" in client_demos. Then you can put those frames together for supersmooth 30fps animation even with 3700 characters; instructions for that in this post.

Not a large enough area is painted red to fit them all. If it's a flat area, you can open the image in a graphics editor and just paint a larger area in the proper shade of red using the pen tool (make sure antialiasing is NOT enabled; it's in the Paint.NET toolbar). Or you can get ingame and run around a larger area to place them. Or, you can open fillmap.pl in notepad to make the characters stand closer together. To do that last one, locate the two lines:

$densitx = 3; # How close characters are together.
$density = 3; # How close characters are together.

And the first one is for how close they are on the east/west axis, the second for the north/south axis. Change the 3s to 2s or 1s to put them closer together, to 4s or 5s to put them farther apart.

But just painting a larger area is probably easier. Remember that makemap.pl will process ALL the demos named "place" with a number, so you don't have to overwrite your first demo: leave it there, start a new demo (place314 or whatever) and run around the area again. Then the generated image will include both your original area and the new one.

Tips on the hashtag things:

* The script processes the demos sequentially: place, place1, place2, place3, etcetera; and it will only keep the last camera lock it finds. So if you want to play with different viewpoints, you can just record a demo with a higher number and say #camera again, and it will lock to that location.

* It doesn't care about missing files. So if you have place, place1, place2 and place3, and you don't like the crowd you added in place2, you can delete it and the script will still process place, place1 and place3.

* #red starts painting the area and it doesn't stop until it sees #black -- even if it's in a different file. So if you say #red in your first cohdemo, forget #black, and record a second cohdemo, the first #red tag will still be enabled. This can be useful if you want to place several crowds facing towards the same way and you don't want to be doing #black and #red every time; just stop the demo, move towards the second place, and start recording a new one. The #red tag with the original facing will still be active.

* Characters placed manually are painted as blue dots with a cyan aura in the output.png. This prevents fillmap.pl from placing characters on top of them; so you can have a large crowd and then a few characters in specific locations, with no worries about the crowd spawning on top of the manually placed characters. How large is the "aura" around them is controlled by then $density/$densitx lines in makemap.pl (the ones in fillmap.pl are for the random crowd).

* Something that I haven't posted in the videos because I don't want to complicate people, is the default emote. It's based on the blue channel. There's this table on fillmap.pl:

$emotes[0] = "READY";
$emotes[1] = "WEPREADY";
$emotes[2] = "EMOTE_CRACKKNUCKLES";
$emotes[3] = "EMOTE_CELLPHONE_CYCLE";
$emotes[4] = "AFK_NEWSPAPER";
$emotes[5] = "PL_PAMPHLET";
$emotes[6] = "EMOTE_PROTEST";
$emotes[7] = "EMOTE_HOLD_TORCH_CYCLE";

By default we have no blue component, so all the characters are using the default pose. If you were to create a new layer with Paint.NET and paint it with blue=7, setting the mode to screen, then the characters in the painted area would be doing the hold torch emote instead.

Or, if you want to change the default for everyone and don't want to mess with the image, you could change the first line so it reads:

$emotes[0] = "EMOTE_HOLD_TORCH_CYCLE";

And then everybody's holding torches (except the manually placed characters).

* Something else I didn't say in the video because, again, it requires editing a file. This line:

$analyze = 0; # Insert default animations for some costume types.

Change the 0 to 1, run fillmap.pl, and all the characters that have wings or rocket boots will be flying in the air. Reading the folder with the characters will take a while, because it has to open every costume to flag it. I can speed this up but I haven't gotten around to it, another reason why I haven't mentioned it in the video.

Also, near the bottom, there are these two lines:

#if (lc($in) =~ /custom_titanweapon/) { $titan{$f} = 1; }
#if (lc($in) =~ /customshields/) { $shield{$f} = 1; }

If you remove the hashtags at the beginning, everybody with the Shields powerset will have their shield out, and everybody with a Titan weapon will be holding it.

I need to modify the script so it can alter the default emote via hashtags you say in local channel, I just haven't gotten around to it.