I want to do something with demos I've recorded

[Sephiroth]

You're in a serious moment and a door ends up killing the person you're walking with! A death trap made by placing tons of rebels and one storm trooper killing anyone who steps in front of a ocean of blaster fire! Massively scaled models or npcs going on a animation loop as you enter a room! Hearing water splatter on a fast loop when you get close to it sounds extremely naughty! There's always been moments that we've all wanted to record but, the recording method the game comes with might be a little too complicated when you're all looking at a file type that doesn't exist anywhere else. Here's the latest scoop for you.

 

Now I've got demos I've recorded in the past and I'd love to do even more if I knew of a simpler way to get to the video in a format both computers and the internet understands. You see with my current Personal Computer, recording while playing severely drops my Frames Per Second and makes it seem more forced than seamless. I just don't think the quality is there when I'm battling frame stutters which makes the moment for me feel even less when a discolored, too fast, or out of sync audio (old attempt with Hypercam) is the awesome end result. For some reason, recording a video with the demo feature doesn't hit my computer as much as using recording software so, that's why I've been using the option to record demos.

 

I've just recorded a rather long demo and I just think there's gotta be a better way then recording it with my phone. I know there's a few options like using FRAPS, Camstaisa, Hypercam, and programs like that but, I wanna see if there's maybe a better answer out there for all of us that want to share those one in a lifetime experiences rather than just saying, "Ah! The good ol' days!" Some of the community is still playing with old hardware and don't have machines capable of maintaining even decent FPS in most circumstances so, I'm not being totally unreasonable here. I just personally have my head in the clouds daydreaming about all the silly stuff I wish Jedi Knight Academy could do and I'm sure that I can't be alone in that.

 

The question or even discussion I want to bring up is if there's anything we can do with demos in-game like an extraction command with OpenJK or a mod like JA++? What about out-game like the files they're stored in? Can we somehow reverse code them into some kind of raw video file without the console, game Universal Interface, and controls? Could you somehow make a website for Jedi Academy demos using a video streaming feature? Well... how about making a media player that only plays Jedi Academy demos?? Off the top of my head, saying all this seems silly and yet, I don't know how complicated it really is to accomplish any of the things I've come up with.

 

All I understand and from what I've asked over the two years I've been playing again, everyone seems to say that the way JKA handles demos is so unique that there's no program that understands it to convert whatever the heck it is! To me, I just wish the coding for demos didn't have to be some mystery so, that's why I'm here. So is there anything we can do with demos other than using a record feature from a third-party program? Please let me know or try coming up with a solution for us.

[Omicron]

You need some jaMME in your life. Download from here and read some tutorials to get yourself started here. Good luck.

[Sephiroth]

Thanks for the quick reply. I have it running and gave it a good try. Problem is that it's cutting my output file which only lasts eleven seconds long. I some how manage to create over twenty gigabytes worth of video in what came out of a race of duels I recorded. Do they always come out that large of a size? The output video also runs very slow. I guess I'm going to have to play around with it some. I've been reading some of the tutorials but, they're a bit complicated to find out exactly the basic stable video. Hopefully I'll have been news at some point today.

[ent]

jaMME cuts nothing in the output, it is your video player problem.

The video runs slowly because the captured content is raw and its bitrate is too high and your hardware just cannot handle that. jaMME is not designed right now to capture something and release. It just makes videos that supposed to be used in post-production where you encode them and make proper bitrate and file size.

Anyways a new version of the mod will be released soon where you can capture in HQ but with low file size.

[Sephiroth]

I'm glad to hear that you're still supporting the mod, Ent. I guess I'll wait until that's been released to try again. However, there was one problem.

 

All the demos that I was talking about testing out with this mod are all done in OpenJK with JA++. I was playing one of my last demos I made on OpenJk through jaMME and after a certain point of the recording, half of the things in the demo which would be other players and only half of a line of Kyles ended up disappearing after my character turns around and they don't come back for the rest of the demo. Somehow that got all cut out when playing it through jaMME and I was hoping maybe you or maybe the OpenJK team might be able to explain it. Thanks for your input.

[ent]

If you play your demo back in openjk, does it work fine?

[Sephiroth]

Yes ent. It does work fine when I play it back in OpenJK. I watched it all the way through and it didn't cut out like it did on jaMME. It sounds like a good option along with the new release but, I wanna figure out this problem too.

[ent]

Does it work fine in jaMME if you set mme_demoConvert 0? (Set back to 1 after tests.)

What is your jaMME version?

[ent]

@@Sephiroth

[Sephiroth]

Hi! Sorry this took so long. I just did that command and at first, I did while the demo was played and there wasn't a change. So I exited jaMME and restarted it. Then I played the demo with that command still set to 0 and now I get a connection interrupted with an error that I'll put in a picture below. By the way, I'm using jaMME 1.9 right now.

 

[ensiform]

Means the buffer size is too small for some sort of string.  Could be a filename or anything.  ent can look more at his code probably to give a more precise location.

[Sephiroth]

I'm glad to see you're watching this topic too ensiform. Thank you.

[ensiform]

I typically just watch the new content link for posts lol.

[ent]

Send me your demo, please.

And tell what moment the bug occurs at.

[Sephiroth]

The video is kind of private because I recorded a whole clan meeting so, I'm going to send it to your privately. I wouldn't want them upset that I'm sending out stuff like that.  

Honestly, i noticed that it happens right when I do /amhello. Maybe that has something to do with it but, I'll send it to you to make sure.