Is it possible to enhance the demo-control, so that it acts more like a demo-player?
I would like be able to play the video backwards. Or start playing the demo at e. g. minute 5:00. At least i would like to be able to jump e. g. 30 seconds or 1 minute forward.

These improvements would make it a lot easier to capture some scenes from a demo. And i would save lots of time.

So how are the chances?

You could fast-forward by typing "slowmo #". Where the # is the number.
1 is default, so anything below 1 is slow motion and anything above 1 is goes faster. Try slowmo 10 or something, then you can see the time (if you tab) go by and then type slowmo 1.

Alternatively, instead of typing these, they are standard with the config file. Use the numpad keys. Where numpad 5 is default mode, 1, 2, 3, 4 are slowmo, while 6, 7, 8, and 9 are faster. Easy access to that. If still 10 isn't enough for you I bet you could write any kind of number there.
With these things I don't think jumping 30 sec or a 1 min forward is necessary.

Yeah, i knew that. I use esteels keybinds for watching demos.
Nonetheless it would be more precise and faster to jump xxx seconds to come close to the wanted point of time and then to use "fast-forward" (slowmo xxx) for the rest.
For me it is annoying to get to a special frag in the last moments of a 15-minutes 1o1-demo with slowmo xxx and find out, that i switched to slowmo 1 a tad too late.

But slowmo xxx could really be enough, if i would be able to play backwards.

Gut_Eater wrote:But slowmo xxx could really be enough, if i would be able to play backwards.

Yeah I agree totally. I also hope for a backwards compatibility.

I additionally request the possibility for the negative slowmo to be in effect during normal play as well.

The technique of travelling back in time has not been invented yet ;P

I've asked for this before too.

One approach that shouldn't be that difficult to implement is to fast forward from the start really fast by not rendering anything, until one reaches the desired point backwards from the current position.

No backwards time travelling required...

Since the demo format is basically a dump of all communications between client and server and the network protocol is delta compressed, there is no way to jump backwards in a demo without radical changes to the demo format (i.o.w.: larger demo files). Jumping forward would be possible with the workaround kyre mentioned, but it would be kinda slow, so i don't think that it would be much of an improvement over slowmo #...

I'm not so sure it would be that slow - the main cost in demo playback is the rendering, skip that and you can get at least a thousand frames/s (watch out for clock precision though, step a fixed time slice between each frame).

It's ok if it takes a few seconds to rewind, its still a heck of a lot faster than restarting manually.

kyre wrote:I'm not so sure it would be that slow - the main cost in demo playback is the rendering, skip that and you can get at least a thousand frames/s (watch out for clock precision though, step a fixed time slice between each frame).

But unless you use timedemo, the engine will also skip frames with slowmo if the hardware isn't fast enough...

i want server side demo recording

Me too, and I think I'll write it some time. It won't work completely though, that is, it will have lower quality than a client recorded demo, but it will be good enough for ladder purposes.

I was discussing with doku a while back about a web-based nexuiz server frontend that would intergrate with the ladders, blah blah blah. Anyway I was thinking maybe I could just capture all the packets and throw them in a file, but I suppose that won't work... Anyway I'd really like server side demo recording in 2.4

also, can we get a better stat logging format? xml maybe? json?

It's working in my current code now... that is, ALMOST working

Only stupid thing is that the file names can just get the IP address in their names, not the player name.


And what is the problem with the current log output? No, certainly no XML. If there is no information missing, you should be able to convert from sv_eventlog to anything else.

kyre wrote:One approach that shouldn't be that difficult to implement is to fast forward from the start really fast by not rendering anything, until one reaches the desired point backwards from the current position.

No backwards time travelling required...

So is it doable? And will it be done?