Recording a game of NS2, WITH NS2.
Scythe
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
<div class="IPBDescription">A demo</div>I have no idea why recorded HL1 games were named "demos", probably inherited from quake, but the mystery remains.
Regardless, it occurred to me today that there's not been any mention of NS2 having the ability to record matches. I thought of this when I was remembering my attempts at writing an app that read in a demo file and parsed out the locations of all the entities as the game progressed, for the purpose of displaying a 2d map of the level for post-match investigation of tactics and suchlike.
I'd love to do something like this for NS2, but I don't know what format the recordings would be in (I think goldsrc demos were just a dump of the network data received by that client...), if it's even possible to take them.
--Scythe--
Regardless, it occurred to me today that there's not been any mention of NS2 having the ability to record matches. I thought of this when I was remembering my attempts at writing an app that read in a demo file and parsed out the locations of all the entities as the game progressed, for the purpose of displaying a 2d map of the level for post-match investigation of tactics and suchlike.
I'd love to do something like this for NS2, but I don't know what format the recordings would be in (I think goldsrc demos were just a dump of the network data received by that client...), if it's even possible to take them.
--Scythe--
Comments
I like watching demos of games where I commed a winning game to see what aliens did to counter, moves made etc... I learned a lot about the game that way.
HLTV can come in a subsequent point release, but should not be too long after initial release.
One of the pervasive problems with demo systems is the changing version numbers of the rendering engine. It would be really awesome to provide a way to convert any demo playback to mpeg2 without the use of frapps. People can then compress and enhance their mpeg2 into whatever format they want.
This would be nice. I have recently went on a nostalgia binge and I am basically having to trial and error which version each demo was recorded in.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=105100" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=105100</a>
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=104774" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=104774</a>
Would be epic to see the good old Europe vs rusty America game after the release, and get a bunch of specs to see the game
And yeah, we have something like 200 demos from previous seasons.
Really, one reason the competitive scene was able to last so long is because it has been to watch and shoutcast NS games. Its really a great feature.
A video output would be great, but it should be a lossless format (not mpeg2). Either bitmaps (bmp, tga, png) or lossless video (uncompressed, huffyuv, ...). Especially nice would be an extra output for the depth channel, like it's possible in <a href="http://myhannes.info/stuff/movie/Software/TGA_Hook_Latest.rar" target="_blank">Quake 3</a> and <a href="http://hhg-clan.de/hlae/" target="_blank">cs</a> by now - but that's not too important.
And yes, demos/HLTV is a key feature!
The feature is something that allows people to quickly convert a section of a demo to video for upload. However, depending on the library used, it might not be much additional effort to add additional formats like you suggest.
(lossless) bitmaps are braindead simple and one of the best formats IMHO.
The feature is something that allows people to quickly convert a section of a demo to video for upload. However, depending on the library used, it might not be much additional effort to add additional formats like you suggest.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well all <a href="http://ensl.zanith.nl/mc/?r=movie" target="_blank">Movie Competition</a> movies were done using "startmovie" which makes bitmaps for every frame, atleast I strongly believe so. It eats hard disk quickly but provide superior quality.
Having the functionality to make quick videos with some codec would be cool too.
Having the functionality to make quick videos with some codec would be cool too.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm going to second this.
It would also be nice if the demos were a bit more precise than the ones recorded in NS. Right now lag seems to affect the demo quality here and there even if both the teams are from the same continent. As a result you can sometimes barely even see the aliens marines are hitting as the view backtracks heavily.
Proper HLTV controls for free roam camera are a must too if they decide to implement one.