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Unofficial Guide to using demo_record for Machinimas
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Unofficial Demo_Record Information
In this thread I'm going to pretty much dump all the knowledge I have gained of demo_record. I can't tell you how to operate everything, but I can help you get started with some basic stuff.
Why would you record a demo? Demos let you pause action, change the speed of action, and rethink camera angles after you've recorded, something FRAPS or WeGame can't do. You can sample explosions and impacts at speeds and angles that you may have missed initially, as well as tweak graphics settings after the fact using the debug controller in the player. It's like being a time-travelling cameraman who can be anywhere he wants to be! It also takes up very few CPU resources while logging as it is not actually recording frames, but actions, behaviors, and environments directly from the game engine. You can open and edit the demos with a text editor later and change outfits, scale, coordinates, orientation, and replace actors completely!
How to record a demo:
In the chat window type "/demo_record" and a space after that followed by the name you want the demo to have.
You will get a que on the left-hand side that it is recording. Now jump around and do whatever it is you want to do! When you are done recording the event type "/demo_record_stop" and the action will then be saved to a text file. You may experience a hitch while it saves.
(Note: At this time there is a bug where you may lose the ability to interact with objects while recording)
You may then quit the game. After you quit, start the launcher for Champions Online. On the top of the launcher click options and in the command line type:
-demoplay followed by the name of the demo you made including the .demo extension. Press ok and launch Champions!
The scene will load and you will have a controller on the top-left. You can use this to rewind, play, pause, fast forward, and increase playback speed. The demo opens playing by default. While it is playing or if it's stopped, you can choose to detach the camera from your character and fly wherever you wish to in any position by pressing F2. Pressing it again will snap back to where the camera was when you were recording in the game.
The demo_record control windows will show up while you are recording with an external application, so close any windows you are not using at the time or they will show up in your final footage.
When you have an angle you like, you can play through a piece of the action and activate your external recording application to record the shot happening. You can press Printscreen anytime and it will save a high quality screenshot the same way the actual game does. Now you can capture those exploding barrels perfectly everytime!
Current known keymappings:
(tilde) Call the console. (You can type cmdlist but I can't tell you what any of these commands do.)
Enter Start and stop playback
Leftarrow Slow down time
Rightarrow Speed up time
F1
F2 Toggle independent camera mode
F3
F4 Toggle wireframe view
F5 Call debug window, where you can enable and disable certain models and effects. Some look very interesting.
F6 Display game engine budgets and see how your hardware is being impacted by all kinds of scenes. You can press buttons that function similarly to the F6 button's actions.
F7 Rotate between graphics quality presets of low, mid, high (including XBoX 360 mode?)
This guide is unfinished because it is based completely on discovery. If you wish to contribute I can amend the guide as soon as possible. If I am leaving out something or any part seems unclear let me know by posting below.
UPDATE: h2orat has begun sharing information about how to perform finer actions such as camera pathing. Documentation is available by request
Click here if you are not interested in camera pathing but want to export your work without camera manipulation.
If you would like to see a cliffnotes version of how to create a path.
In this thread I'm going to pretty much dump all the knowledge I have gained of demo_record. I can't tell you how to operate everything, but I can help you get started with some basic stuff.
Why would you record a demo? Demos let you pause action, change the speed of action, and rethink camera angles after you've recorded, something FRAPS or WeGame can't do. You can sample explosions and impacts at speeds and angles that you may have missed initially, as well as tweak graphics settings after the fact using the debug controller in the player. It's like being a time-travelling cameraman who can be anywhere he wants to be! It also takes up very few CPU resources while logging as it is not actually recording frames, but actions, behaviors, and environments directly from the game engine. You can open and edit the demos with a text editor later and change outfits, scale, coordinates, orientation, and replace actors completely!
How to record a demo:
In the chat window type "/demo_record" and a space after that followed by the name you want the demo to have.
You will get a que on the left-hand side that it is recording. Now jump around and do whatever it is you want to do! When you are done recording the event type "/demo_record_stop" and the action will then be saved to a text file. You may experience a hitch while it saves.
(Note: At this time there is a bug where you may lose the ability to interact with objects while recording)
You may then quit the game. After you quit, start the launcher for Champions Online. On the top of the launcher click options and in the command line type:
-demoplay followed by the name of the demo you made including the .demo extension. Press ok and launch Champions!
The scene will load and you will have a controller on the top-left. You can use this to rewind, play, pause, fast forward, and increase playback speed. The demo opens playing by default. While it is playing or if it's stopped, you can choose to detach the camera from your character and fly wherever you wish to in any position by pressing F2. Pressing it again will snap back to where the camera was when you were recording in the game.
The demo_record control windows will show up while you are recording with an external application, so close any windows you are not using at the time or they will show up in your final footage.
When you have an angle you like, you can play through a piece of the action and activate your external recording application to record the shot happening. You can press Printscreen anytime and it will save a high quality screenshot the same way the actual game does. Now you can capture those exploding barrels perfectly everytime!
Current known keymappings:
(tilde) Call the console. (You can type cmdlist but I can't tell you what any of these commands do.)
Enter Start and stop playback
Leftarrow Slow down time
Rightarrow Speed up time
F1
F2 Toggle independent camera mode
F3
F4 Toggle wireframe view
F5 Call debug window, where you can enable and disable certain models and effects. Some look very interesting.
F6 Display game engine budgets and see how your hardware is being impacted by all kinds of scenes. You can press buttons that function similarly to the F6 button's actions.
F7 Rotate between graphics quality presets of low, mid, high (including XBoX 360 mode?)
This guide is unfinished because it is based completely on discovery. If you wish to contribute I can amend the guide as soon as possible. If I am leaving out something or any part seems unclear let me know by posting below.
UPDATE: h2orat has begun sharing information about how to perform finer actions such as camera pathing. Documentation is available by request
Click here if you are not interested in camera pathing but want to export your work without camera manipulation.
If you would like to see a cliffnotes version of how to create a path.
Post edited by Archived Post on
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Also, the solution to this is to log out and log back in the character. This stops or requires stopping the demo recording, but at least you can record around the stumbling blocks.
Finally, the "hitch" is dependent on what is recorded. For example, trying to record the Mega Destroid open mission for a relatively short time, or any mission for a long length of time, is potentially multi-minute. On some systems, this can even result in disconnection. This is important to be aware of if that will impact you in the situation where you are using it.
Good to have the info on the function keys, BTW.
...
This heritage from old CoX commands might be one place to look at some possibilities for future discoveries, though AFAIK only the commands and command line options you list are known to be working so far.
Note: You can use a Windows shortcut to the GameClient.exe to specificy the command line options as well. The main benefit is no launcher window, login or clicking besides right clicking the shortcut and picking "Properties" is required, for whatever that is worth to someone's facility with creating and editing shortcuts.
The demo recording tool actually prevents you from interacting with contacts /mission objectives and doors wich is kinda bad but the progress of the missions is still saved if you don,t have to interact with something.
When you click the cryptic clipboard on the playback options window you have the choice to create paths for the camera. there are some pretty interesting things in there.
I was suprised to see the Xbox 360 settings when going through the different video cards settings.
I think that something is wrong though.
When you press play, it looks like it's a bit faster that the game actually is. This, or it's the real speed and I never saw anything but the one I experience (heck, the demo on normal speed is even faster than the trailers they show us... and they are recorded using this tool I'm pretty sure)
Still, I really enjoy the tool and if they have time, I hope they will improve it in some ways (like the issues while interacting with stuff) at least, we can pick up and throw stuff.
anyway, thnaks Brou for this guide. I hope you will continue it for I will probably need it
Things fixed include no longer crashing on cutscenes in the playback, a more functional UI, and as a result of that a clear and direct way to exit the demo playback mode. Also, I don't know if it is just the Vibora content or a general improvement for all other occurences (haven't both recorded and played back affected non-Vibora content using the current PTS build), but NPC 'theatric audio", like speech in cutscenes, is recorded and played back now...the non-Vibora content I had on hand with that was recorded long ago and didn't play back suitable "theatric audio".
Things missing on first glance, without exploring keys or looking at the text in the .demo file, are a file requester, the ability to make the interface completely disappear for recording to video file, and the playback of NPC text bubbles for at least cutscenes. Oh, and various camera occlusion preventing rendering (might be old .demo files missing data? incomplete testing) and animation issues like "standing back up when dead" (still present in new .demo files).
Thanks for your hard work cataloguing this information!
If you hit the right arrow key it will continue to play back but the controls don't reappear. Hitting the F5 key will bring up the graphics debug window and clicking the debug button will bring up some controls (play, pause, and ff).
I have the comic outlining turned off in the game but when I use demo record it is back. Is there a way to turn it off in the demo I recorded?
My main beef right now is the demorecord utility took a step backward with Revelation...(notes below).
The top control bar (which was not very useful anyway, once you figured out how to pause and advance without it) is now permanent. They added a big ugly red "X" in the top corner (not necessary once you learned the tilde interface and the quit command), and as such the top bar is permanent. You can make it "transparent", but it is still largely visible once you proceed to video capture.
I have three questions for anyone on this thread who can help:
1. Does anyone know a way to "turn off" resource messages when enemies are defeated? They are ugly and intrusive both in game and in the demo (and not particularly useful info, you can always review your money after a battle to see what you collected). Some of my best video is ruined with this, because as bosses or other foes are defeated the resource and defeat message flies in and centers itself. Takes several seconds to clear. Also the message hits just before the actual defeat animation starts, so it can pretty much ruin any video of a big boss going down.
2. The new version no longer seems to respond to the arrow controls by default. I can't slow down the time at all once I start to play. The only way they do work is when the camera/point editor is enabled. Once you set that up and clear it to capture video you are forced to use the ugly/dumb controls at the top. Anyone learned any tricks to clear the big dumb buttons up top (which I don't need), and get back to managing the speed/advance of the demo via the arrows without the camera/path editor enabled?
3. I have a bug when I capture a demo in an outside zone. My character is always surrounded by the snow globe. I can only turn it off by turning off particles, but that pretty much takes away all game effects.
The camera/path editor work extremely well and you can do some very nifty things with it, but if you can't remove the big ugly bar up top - the whole point of the exercise is largely useless.
One tip: I highly recommend turning off "fog" in the demo, it tends to produce better video, especially when units use stealth bombs. I am getting fairly decent with this tool, so if anyone has additional questions I'll monitor the thread to see if I can answer them.
Thanks but it was still turned off when I went back into the game. I haven't tried demo record since Revelation came out, been working on my video.
Now that it's done, I'll give it another look.
If you want to help with mapping out the scripting language found in demo files, open them in a text editor and experiment! Share your findings, and I'll try to catalog them in the original post.
I am currently trying to figure out "animbits," which seems to be a per-packet assignment of animations. There are more than one animbit entries per packet and I'd like to encourage you to sample some animation from actors. Try swapping animations among actors in the text editor. Did you find any cool ones? List them so we can see
Only way I have found to do this is to edit the .demo file and remove the Messages blocks that look like:
Messages
{
Time 42.549480
Message <&NotifySendWithData 13 "You received 85 Resources." "Resources" "" <\& __NULL__ \&\>&>
Command 65538
EntityRef 4851912
}
If there is no way could we get an FKey that allows us to hide it? I figured out how to make movies and shoot things all right but the top bar always sticks out like a giant eye sore.
I wanted to ask h2orat about this today. I know there's a way to export a frame sequence as he said, but I can see people also wanting to just pull the footage straight off the demo player with wegame/fraps and wanting to suppress the UI for a moment.
After you use wegame or fraps to grab the video, if your editing program of choice does not support cropping, you can get a free program that lets you do this at http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/ .
This documentation tells you how to crop: http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_processing.html
You can click Video then Filters, and click Add to apply a null transform filter(null means it does nothing to the video itself)
I'm sorry there isn't a solution for those who wish to capture via 3rd party recorder at this time. If you would like, you may try this(quoted from the documentation):
This means that capturing via Fraps/Wegame is an unsupported method for exporting machinima scenes. For this, the guide will be changing to reflect the supported export method. It doesn't mean you are wrong to do it, it only means that you won't be able to hide the UI and it's better we learn the official way now.
Does the frame-by-frame render also export any kind of synched audio, or will I have to capture the audio on a normal playback and synch it up in an editing program?
There was one I remember where someone walked up behind ms. Liberty and she got AS'ed.
I can't help put to wonder if this is the same thing.
Yes, people can manipulate the textfile and switch animations, positions, creature ids, and a bunch of other things.
The first half of the text file will typically define the costumes of the entities and grant them numeric labels.
The second half contains positional,animation,and some size data and has a timestamp that I currently do not know enough about, since I do not know how time is measured in the demo environment. Feel free to tamper with the numbers and come up with something wacky.
While working on my next video, of course the outlining appeared again, but not on the first playback. I discovered that when you press the f7 key to switch between different graphic card sets, it also turns on all the default graphic options. So I hit the tilde, then typed in options, and the option screen appeared. Then it was a simple matter of clicking on the video tab and turning off the comic outlining.
I hope this helps anyone else. Life is good again....
You can hit F2 and that will free your camera so you can move it where you need it.
Thanks, but that's not what I'm asking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_view#Lens_types_and_effects
Have you tried F5 and tried ticking off any options? If there isn't an option for depth of field or field of view I can trawl through the console commands until something that looks useful pops up.
(You can also look through this by pressing the tilde[below ESC] and typing cmdlist. If you find something, please share it here)
Does CO through steam still make the launcher appear?
I'm not sure about that...I actually bypassed Steam and just made my own shortcut to the launcher, which does still exist in the folder, even if you get the Steam version. So he should still be able to get at the launcher if he can fish out the EXE.
Already tried that and the regular method with he launcher
Here's a video of the issue,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7wQvP2t7EM&fmt=35
When I load it straight from the EXE it goes through an extra loading screen and then to the login screen, then when I login it doesn't connect.
If I run it through the launcher it acts as if I didn't run it at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gp7KdMCGGw
That looks awesome. What path type did you use?
Wicked i'll try that myself Want to also record in Startrek online game as well.
I tried -demo_movie-save in the demorecord bit but it said not recognized so fraps is the only way.
As most editing software costs to much i'm using ULEAD Mediastudio Pro to piece it together.
Would really like Adobe after effects though unless theres a cheaper program to stick movies onto another movie, say for doing viewscreen stuff.
Word of advice if doing this:
In the path editor untick the show paths box before you record and deselect any camera points you were last editing. Otherwise you'll capture the "coaster tracks." I totally screwed up an 8 minute video once because there was a camera visible with the axis lines in the middle of the road.
I'm developing a tutorial right now.