How exactly do you record demos in this game?

Topic.

So I can assume Ctrl + Alt + ~ to bring down the console and typing record or record demoname has no effect? That's odd if it doesn’t work, I mean all the cheats are just like quake2 so I cant see why this would be changed... sneaky tho of them to hide the console behind the ctrl/alt/~

i'd love to know how to record when i get my hands on the game...

Well -- I have two comments to make.

One, if you put com_allowconsole 1 in your autoexec.cfg (not doomconfig.cfg), console is just `. Yay.

Two -- I have discovered that demo support in this game is HORRIBLE at the moment. I'm sure they will fix it in a patch, or others will figure out how to configure it correctly...

But there isn't any sound, the demo plays back at varying speeds, usually much slower than the actual gameplay, and after I recorded a 20 second demo as a test --

I discovered that it was over 40 megs big!! Can you imagine how big a demo of a 15 minute 1v1 would be? HUNDREDS of megs.

That is ridiculous. I hope they fix it soon.

Yeah, that seems to really suck a lot. Definatly needs a fix :)

A demo of doing the whole game would be bigger than the game itself ? That's pure BS

VinceDSS said:

A demo of doing the whole game would be bigger than the game itself ? That's pure BS

Remember Descent?

Ouch. Presumably the game involves "real" randomness, so simply a recording of player actions isn't adequate, and all it can do is basically record a movie. :((

let's say bye to doom3 demos ? :)
unless it either gets fixed or someone finds a way to compress em
it might take lees space to actualy record an AVI instead

Arioch said:

Remember Descent?

yeah but just tried it for 5 mins, I hated it.
the demos where huge too ?

Well i just picked up the game today and have been playing, adjusting and recording with Game Cam.

http://www.planetgamecam.com/

I haven't tried a Demo yet, but with Game Cam i recorded 30 minutes of play with no sound to a high quality .wma at 400x300 and it's about 313MB, i was playing at a rez of 800x600 at High Quality and it was very playable (sept for the imp gang bang) after tweaking the RAM

im probably totally stupid, but seeing as every save is about 10MB and with all the randomness and what not then in a way isn't a Demo a long string of saves? In a way right? Well whatever yeah it'll be great if they can get it optimized in size and performances

Intel P4 HT 3.00GHz - 800Bus
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe (w/ SoundMAX)
1GB Corsair DDR-SDRAM PC3200
ATI Hercules 9800 Pro 128mb (Cat 4.8 Official Beta)
XP Pro w/ SP1, DirectX 9.0c
200GB Western Digital 7200rpm HD

Game Cam seems to work really nicely with games these days. And it automatically compresses the avi file! :)

HackNeyed said:

im probably totally stupid, but seeing as every save is about 10MB and with all the randomness and what not then in a way isn't a Demo a long string of saves?

With the original Doom engine, a demo was a recording of player actions (i.e. key presses, mouse movements), and the randomness in the game was actually wholly determined by a pseudo random number generator (which would always generate the same sequence if the player's action were exactly the same). This meant that recorded demos had very small filesizes (e.g. a 20-minute SP demo might typically be 100K, and zip to 15K). It also means that you can do far more with the demos than if they are just a movie file.

Of course, that won't work in Doom3 if the program is constantly getting new random number seeds from various places on your computer. It still be a more compact and powerful demo format it if recorded a series of those together with player actions though. Without knowing the inner workings of the game, one can't say for sure.

Thanks Grazza :)

yeah i'd though it might be something like that for the originals but i wasn't so clear till now... i was just wondering about the new D3 engine, im a total lamemen on game engines and any code short of a few toggles in Q3. so a series of saves stats was the best explanation i could come up with, cause the game has so much randomness now.

BTW i tried recorddemo and made a couple minute demo and it was 230+ MB, even though i didn't notice any frame rate loss, compared to some with GameCam, i just cant see how feasible 230+ MB for 2 minutes no hiccups when a video of 30 minutes is only 300+ MB.

OK, I have discovered a "compress demo size" command in the console, but that still doesn't bring back the sound or play the demo at the appropriate speeds.

I emailed id about the whole demo situation very early this morning, but they haven't replied. I suppose as long as they know that people out there are thinking about it, they'll get to work on it. It's not like they don't know that demos are VERY important to the hardcore players.

im ver eager to use some footage in a avi movie aswell.

my issue is that when I do the avidemo command (saves your demo as .tga files to be converted into a avi) the images are 256x256.
but im running at 800x600, the size of the demo/avi I want.

What is going on, any command to change this?