demo watching playlist

[40oz]

I did a few searches for this, but I don't think I got the results I wanted.

I have a computer attached to the TV in my living room by HDMI cable so that I can watch demos on TV. The sucky part is that when there's a demo for every level in a megawad or short episode, I have to get up from the couch, edit my batch file to load the next demo, play it, then go sit down again. Its annoying when the first few levels of a wad take less than a few minutes to beat. I've considered getting a wireless keyboard, but even that wouldn't make everything as convenient as I'd like.

I'd like to be able have demos play one after each other in succession but I'm kind of an idiot at running things from a command line. Is there a way perhaps, I could make a batchfile that plays a demo; then checks to see if prboom is still running; if no, run the next demo?

I've seen pages that explain how you can have a batch file run another batch file, so maybe I could just give every demo their own batch file and end each one with telling it to run the next. But I don't want it to run 20 sequences of prboom at once. So is there any way for it to check if prboom is running, then perform the next action (run the next batch file) when it's not?

[Memfis]

For me (Windows XP) simply putting a few bat files together like this seems to work:

prboom-plus -playdemo oke.lmp
prboom-plus -playdemo heh.lmp
prboom-plus -playdemo ppp.lmp
etc

If I disable the ENDOOM screen I don't have to press anything at all between two demos. Some people say that this should run a few copies of prboom-plus simultaneously but this isn't the case with my system.

[40oz]

yeah that's what I've read, I've got windows 7 here and I think it will run them all at once. I'll have to test it again though.

EDIT: it worked this time, hopefully it works the next! thanks!

[Kotzugi]

I've actually been thinking about something very similar: Shouldn't there be a way to merge demo files? Ideally, although probably difficult to implement, only display a few seconds of the end screen before going on to the next, so as to ensure continuity.

The only option for me so far is to make one big-ass video file and play that, although of course it's a bit of work and the quality suffers.

[Creaphis]

Kotzugi said:

I've actually been thinking about something very similar: Shouldn't there be a way to merge demo files?

Not in Doom. After demo 1 is done playing, the RNG will be queued up to a value that would put demo 2 out of sync right away. For this to work, you'd need a custom-designed source port and demo format that could correctly adjust the RNG at the point of each merge.

Demo joining is possible in Quake and Half Life. I'm not sure how it's implemented.

[Kotzugi]

That was insightful. Thanks. Would be nice to see this implemented some time in the future.