IMPORTANT: Base Builders: an option for saving bases
By
Acroyear2,
Posted on: 2012-09-21 18:13 in Base Construction
Thanks very much for the step by step, Arcana.
I understand now the answer to my last question. No servers needed for playback.
One more dumb question...
If I want to play back Base B after I've altered the shortcut to play base A... is there an easy way to do that?
or do I need to alter the shortcut to reflect the path for Base B (and every subsequent file I wish to view)?
Also... errm... how to I go about recording and converting the playback for other medium, as you seem to have done for your demo?
Or was that an original demorecord on beta with the camera disconnected?
IOW, does the new camera feature only work in playback mode, or does it work when making the original recording?
Or, am I just over-thinking the whole thing? lol
Maybe I need coffee...
Thanks again.
And BP... this is really really really kewl.
Now I wish I'd looked into doing a little more with the demo feature over the years.
ETA: Yah, I realize that was more than one more question
*starts up the coffee maker*
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I'm sure you are correct that someone has already considered this |
Originally Posted by PKDauntless
I'm sure someone has already considered this but using this tech to capture and create a library of the city zones would be a great way to save another slice of the game. If only the camera were a little faster. Can you imagine trying to pan and fly through IP or Nerva?
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Slowly floating through the zones would be pretty slow. Now, if someone were to run a very fast racetrack through each zone and demorecord that, and you could pause the demorecord at any time and then free the camera at that location, that might be interesting.
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If you edit the shortcut Target to just include -demoplay, you can drag and drop any .cohdemo file onto it and it will play it.|
Originally Posted by Impish Kat
One more dumb question...
If I want to play back Base B after I've altered the shortcut to play base A... is there an easy way to do that? or do I need to alter the shortcut to reflect the path for Base B (and every subsequent file I wish to view)? |
As far as the camera, whatever your camera angles are doing while you are recording in-game is what the default demorecord playback is going to be.
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Now that you mention it, silly me there is a way to do that without using a launcher. In the shortcut, just don't put any name at all. Just add the -demoplay at the end, but no filename. Now, if you drag and drop a demorecord file onto the shortcut, that should launch the shortcut with the name of the file you're dropping onto it as a command line parameter, basically doing the same thing. And I just tested it now and it works.|
Originally Posted by Impish Kat
One more dumb question...
If I want to play back Base B after I've altered the shortcut to play base A... is there an easy way to do that? or do I need to alter the shortcut to reflect the path for Base B (and every subsequent file I wish to view)? |
So make the shortcut with no demofile name, and then drag and drop demorecords onto the shortcut to launch them. That should work without having to constantly edit the shortcut itself.
Edit: Ninjaed!
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Also... errm... how to I go about recording and converting the playback for other medium, as you seem to have done for your demo? Or was that an original demorecord on beta with the camera disconnected? IOW, does the new camera feature only work in playback mode, or does it work when making the original recording? |
So I /demorecord, then I playback while FRAPS is recording, and then I take the FRAPS recording and feed it into Virtualdub to compress it into a nicer video file, and then I go get a sammich and let it do its thing. Ironically my bullet-time Magi is actually ultrahigh res recorded, you can play back full screen at 720 from youtube (the recording is actually even higher than that) and pthhthh I accidentally had the client playing back at low detail for my OGLE captures.
Wegame might be simpler for most people, although I haven't used it in a long while. I'll try to reload it and test it this weekend to see how it works now.
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Eeegggggsssscelllent|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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Now, if you drag and drop a demorecord file onto the shortcut, that should launch the shortcut with the name of the file you're dropping onto it as a command line parameter, basically doing the same thing. So make the shortcut with no demofile name, and then drag and drop demorecords onto the shortcut to launch them. That should work without having to constantly edit the shortcut itself. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
...The floating camera thing only works during playback.
In terms of taking the playback and converting it to video that I can youtube, I use FRAPS.... I've found FRAPS to have better performance, particularly when recording higher resolution video. ...you need a separate tool to convert them offline into something more streamlined like DIVX. I use Virtualdub for that. So I /demorecord, then I playback while FRAPS is recording, and then I take the FRAPS recording and feed it into Virtualdub to compress it into a nicer video file, and then I go get a sammich and let it do its thing. Ironically my bullet-time Magi is actually ultrahigh res recorded, you can play back full screen at 720 from youtube (the recording is actually even higher than that) and pthhthh I accidentally had the client playing back at low detail for my OGLE captures. |
Though it does give rise to a couple more questions (sorry to pester).
How do I know/find out/control what resolution I am recording at?
How do I pause the playback?.. 'cuz that bullet-time vid is nifty.
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Depends on the software you use. FRAPS, for example, has two modes: native resolution (which records at whatever resolution your actual demo is playing back at) and half-res, where both x and y are cut in half (so technically, that's a quarter display, but whatever).|
Originally Posted by Impish Kat
How do I know/find out/control what resolution I am recording at?
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Demos playback at whatever settings the client itself last used. So if your beta client is running windowed and at 1180x990 or something, that's what demo playback will use. If it was full screen 1024x768, it'll use that instead.
I tend to play and record in windowed mode. Among other reasons, windowed clients can be resized on the fly. But it can be difficult to know precisely what your x/y resolution is in a window, precisely because it can be resized to anything. If you really want to know, start the client normally and look in SETTINGS with the button at the bottom (you don't even need to log in to a server). The Graphics settings menu should tell you what x/y resolution your game client is set to, even if it is windowed.
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| How do I pause the playback?.. 'cuz that bullet-time vid is nifty. |
Also, P pauses demorecords in both the beta and live clients, so I believe this feature has been there for a while, just undocumented.
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I'm going to leverage this technology to find out who on a trial messes up Master runs.
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Oh, great, Zombie Man, now people are going to come to expect league leaders to be like professional football coaches, reviewing hours of footage each week for strategy.
Task Forces shouldn't need 8 people to start ... it's not fun.
If you are wanting to use this free camera to record a video clip but need faster/slower movement, it may be possible using Cheat Engine's timescaling function.
*Edit: you may need to use an older version (6.0 fi) to pick from the list of running processes rather than launching your target through CE.
Something I found last night shooting a nice pic of Nine Lives 9,
Hitting the "p" key while playing the demo will pause it, and you can then move the camera around to a great angle for a shot... and can accidentally go outside through things in city zones too.
Followed someone's link to info on Demorecord
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_record
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Heads up: I just tried F2 on the LIVE client, and I have detached camera control. No beta client necessary.
P for pause also works.
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Originally Posted by Leandro
Heads up: I just tried F2 on the LIVE client, and I have detached camera control. No beta client necessary.
P for pause also works. |
awesome!
too bad I won't get to use it for a few days...
*grumble grumble* stupid accounting *mumble grumble* freakin' nightmare *growel grumble*
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One oddball side effect, hitting pause seems to cause some functional items to disappear. At least it did on the beta client. I made a nice long demo of one of my characters walking through the base, which gives plenty of time to tool around with the free camera.
I wouldn't be surprised if one could hand-edit a demo file to make it run for longer than its original recording time.
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Well, you don't really need to pause a demorecord of a base since the demo loops automatically and I doubt there's much happening in the base that the looping would be distracting. But if you do want to extend the length of a demo without pausing, you can add commands to the end of the demorecord. A safe one would be to find the last CAM command and append more of them to the end. However, my preliminary experiments suggest you cannot simply add one with a huge amount of time in the time column; above about 3000 milliseconds seems to cause problems. So you would have to add multiple 3000 CAM commands at the end to extend the demorecord about 3 seconds per line. Copy and paste can, of course, exponentially add more time (3 seconds, then 6, then 12, then 24, then 48, then 96, etc, by copying and pasting all lines previously pasted).|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
One oddball side effect, hitting pause seems to cause some functional items to disappear. At least it did on the beta client. I made a nice long demo of one of my characters walking through the base, which gives plenty of time to tool around with the free camera.
I wouldn't be surprised if one could hand-edit a demo file to make it run for longer than its original recording time. |
Or you could just start the demorecord, go to lunch, come back, and stop the demorecord. They don't take up a lot of space either way.
Incidentally, wegame no longer appears viable for those wanting to make videos. I'm testing a couple of other capture and record programs; I hope to have something like a bake off of them either today or tomorrow.
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So based on my testing, it seems the best alternative I can find to FRAPS+Virtualdub is a program called Bandicam. Its free, although the free version watermarks the videos with their URL at the top and its limited to a maximum recording length of ten minutes at a time. It can record full screen, a specific window, or an aperture - meaning you can draw a rectangle on the screen and Bandicam will record whatever happens within that rectangle. It can also record with various codecs: MPEG1, Motion JPEG, or Xvid for example.|
Originally Posted by Impish Kat
Also... errm... how to I go about recording and converting the playback for other medium, as you seem to have done for your demo?
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For reference, I recorded a two minute segment of a Magi with FRAPS and Bandicam at 1280x720 native resolution. FRAPS generated a two gig file in its proprietary format, and then Virtualdub converted that to a ~150M file Divx file. Bandicam set to its highest quality (q=100) xvid setting generated a ~500M xvid file. Set to a lower but still reasonable quality (q=70) generated a significantly smaller file (~250M).
To be honest, I have difficulty telling the difference between FRAPS optimal and Bandicam q=100. Bandicam with xvid q=70 is noticeably lower in quality, but not dramatically so. Compare for yourself:
FRAPS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdDNEi13Y6s
Bandicam xvid q=100: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wj0z8W5uq4
Bandicam xvid q=70: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVKmRWmIn3s
(note: all three should be played at HD720)
To be fair, this does not contain content best suited to detect encoding differences. Its just what I happened to be playing around with at the time. But it does suggest to me that Bandicam is perfectly acceptable at reasonably high resolutions, if your computer is fast enough to play both the demo and recording software without overloading. Personally, I think if you're going to do this a lot, Bandicam is probably worth the $40. And unless you like manually fiddling with re-encoding video, its probably a superior solution to FRAPS for most people.
PS: my client was running with the highest graphics settings for pretty much everything, so it was having trouble keeping up 30 fps in the demorecord: with either FRAPS or Bandicam recording it dropped to around 20 fps on playback.
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So in light of recent demo record revelations, I decided to record some demos of my characters so I can get good action-screenshots of them for posterity. Salivating at the prospect of pausing and using free-camera to set up shots that I could never get during live gameplay, my patience ran out before the beta client finished downloading, and I discovered something interesting.
Hitting F2 to get detached camera controls, seems to work in the live I23 client during demo playback.
I haven't yet tried it out in the beta client, as it's still downloading even now, so maybe the functionality is superior there, but it works in the live client, and I thought it bore mentioning here in case there are base builders who weren't VIP at the cut-off date, and/or can't get on beta for some other nonsense reason like a 3GB hard drive or something.
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I thank you all for getting the word out on this. It means a lot to those of us who have been building for all these years. I'll be doing this for all of my bases in the next few days, to be certain, along with a few maps of sentimental value.
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Yeah, Leandro mentioned above the camera works in the live client as well, but I will also mention for the record that you can record in any of the three clients and any of them will still play the record back with a caveat. Things that don't exist in that version of the client will obviously not playback correctly. So if you record I24 content that uses new maps in the beta client, that won't work right in the live client because it doesn't have those maps.|
Originally Posted by Teeto_K
So in light of recent demo record revelations, I decided to record some demos of my characters so I can get good action-screenshots of them for posterity. Salivating at the prospect of pausing and using free-camera to set up shots that I could never get during live gameplay, my patience ran out before the beta client finished downloading, and I discovered something interesting.
Hitting F2 to get detached camera controls, seems to work in the live I23 client during demo playback. I haven't yet tried it out in the beta client, as it's still downloading even now, so maybe the functionality is superior there, but it works in the live client, and I thought it bore mentioning here in case there are base builders who weren't VIP at the cut-off date, and/or can't get on beta for some other nonsense reason like a 3GB hard drive or something. |
But, for example, I had no problem playing this demo from 2004 back in the live client. Incidentally, the reason I was specifically looking at that demo was because of 1:20, where you can see some interesting flock behavior of the critter AI from back then.
I notice glitches: since dragon's tail's animation was changed a while ago, playing back very old demos of my MA/SR with the current clients has the glitch that when she uses dragon's tail, nothing happens on screen. All the other attacks animate. But not only does this allow for saving bases, it also allows, with those glitches in mind, replaying very old things people might have demorecorded and forgotten about.
Also, there are older versions of the client "floating around" that can be used to play older demos with better animation fidelity.
But for emphasis: you DO NOT need to record with the beta client. You can record in the live client and still playback in the live, beta, or test clients. There is NO REASON to attempt to rebuild bases on Beta.
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Ah hell missed it. Checked the thread too. :< Redundancy ahoy!
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At this point, I think its still important to try to reach as many base builders as possible, especially those that may not be reading the forums. We have all the time in the world to view and experiment with bases, but if they aren't demorecord captured before the game shuts down, there's no way I'm aware of for a base builder to get that information unless someone else happened to have previously recorded it at some point.
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Originally Posted by Teeto_K
Ah hell missed it. Checked the thread too. :< Redundancy ahoy!
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
At this point, I think its still important to try to reach as many base builders as possible, especially those that may not be reading the forums.
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Good Point.... Has anyone mentioned this on the in-game channel?
BaseBuildersInc. (with the period)
I'd pop over and put a linky in the MOTD, but still enmeshed in accounting paperwork... did I mention that it's a freakin' nightmare? ugh.
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I'm not a member of any of the base building channels that might be out there: the only way I had to get the word out was to PM the few base builders I happen to know and post in this forum. I'm hoping other base builders pass the word out to any who might be interested by whatever means are available.|
Originally Posted by Impish Kat
Good Point.... Has anyone mentioned this on the in-game channel?
BaseBuildersInc. (with the period) I'd pop over and put a linky in the MOTD, but still enmeshed in accounting paperwork... did I mention that it's a freakin' nightmare? ugh. . |
Also, its possible to preserve friends' bases if you're coalitioned to them and can step into their base, but can't contact them for whatever reason. You just need one second of demorecord within the base to capture the base data.
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If you're looking to get an OpenGL dump of your base, you need to be in build mode and get relative close-ups of each room/area. I found that going into an 'above' viewpoint and pausing over each room seems to work the best. the openGL dumps only what it sees, but in basebuild mode, it will 'see' everything that is in the field of view, as in build mode, everything in the field of view gets sent to opengl for rendering.
hope that makes sense.
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If you capture just one second of demorecord, you can use the F2-enabled free camera to fly around your base and see any room from any angle.|
Originally Posted by Hendrake
If you're looking to get an OpenGL dump of your base, you need to be in build mode and get relative close-ups of each room/area. I found that going into an 'above' viewpoint and pausing over each room seems to work the best. the openGL dumps only what it sees, but in basebuild mode, it will 'see' everything that is in the field of view, as in build mode, everything in the field of view gets sent to opengl for rendering.
hope that makes sense. |
See this proof of concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOXiNFhQhU
You don't even need to pause the demoplayback because it loops continuously by default. You could take your time, position the camera exactly where you want, and then OGLE-capture your base or use whatever OpenGL cap tool you prefer. Its this free flight camera combined with the fact that demorecords encapsulate the entire geometry of your base in an encoded block at the start of the demorecord that makes this possible: its what is being referred to in the OP of this thread.
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