DescentBB

Hey guys I was wondering if you can somehow take the .dem demo files from D3 and put them to a easy .mov file to watch on movie player without having to go into descent and watch the demo. If you know of any way to do this please tell me !

Thanks for your time

I don'think that a specific tool was ever made to do this. You might, however, try running FRAPS while running a demo THEN covert to a MOV format.

Mkay Thanks!

I think there's a command line too that saves every frame. Let's see...

-makemovie Causes the demo system to save a screenshot
of every frame during playback. These saved
frames can be used with video creation software
to make a movie. NOTE: When recording a demo
for use in making a movie, you should use the
"-framecap" command-line option to specify the
framerate of your movie.

COOL!

The command line option takes a HELL of a lot of space cause each frame is saved as a TGA file of about 2 megs each.

ya I figured

and AFAIK - you can only see the first 1000 frames of the movie, then the -MAKEMOVIE command stops saving them.

I also think Wolf On Air made some kind of hack that lets you output 100,000 frames though.

Don;t forget, your movies will be either too fast, or not fast enough!

D3 needs to be -FRAMECAP 30 when you MAKE the demo - otherwise you'll have a movie which plays VERY slowly indeed. D3 might have been putting out 100 FPS when the demo was made, and at 30 FPS in a movie, each second of the movie will be 1/3rd of a second of the demo.

The other thing you could do, which would be better, is to cap at 60 FPS, and delete all even numbered TGAs which result from MAKEMOVIE. Then you'd be down to 30FPS and a nice movie.

Make sure you ENABLE motionblur in the command line too. This puts some blur behind fast moving objects, and therefore your video won't end up looking jerky - even at 30 FPS with luck!

To this day though, the best way to make a D3 movie is to output your primary monitor to S-Video and plug that into a camcorder or Video recorder. That saves all the pissing around getting the speed right.

Not to mention that Targa images are not compressed and take forever to save to disk ... I would go with the FRAPS solution ... FRAPS is without a doubt the best capture utility I have seen. Furthermore, it captures the audio also.