Dealing with Demos (Part One)

I’ve decided to dedicate some posts to the processing of Demo files for Machinima, there is a bit of info out there regarding this topic, but its all a bit patchy, I figure it would be good to have all the information consolidated and referenced (read linked) in the one place.

For anyone who is starting out with demo recording, editing and exporting in the Source engine, I recommend you first read the Valve Wiki on demo recording tools. Its a good starting point for learning some of the lingo and concepts.

Though the demo system may seem daunting at first, my experiences are that once you get hands on and dive in, it all becomes fairly straight forward very quickly. Though there may be some seemingly random occurrences in replaying demos, they are negligible and most problems you will notice, turn out to be not so random, but rather, consistent. Most problems, have workarounds and will become just another part of the work flow (at least they have for me).

From personal experience, the demo files are restricted to recording players and live objects (further referred to as entities) within line of sight of the client (you) recording the demo. Though it seems a bit hazy to the exact method the process uses to define what is recorded and what is not, perhaps there is some proximity variable or it may just be the inherent buggy-ness of the demo recording/editing process. It has become clear to me that this restriction of what is recorded is not so much to reduce demo file sizes, but to hinder or stop wall-hacking.

So on these conditions I base my starting tips to recording demos (with Machinima in mind). Using the console (activated in game from Options>Keyboard>Advanced, be sure to check the “Enable Developer Console” giving access to the console where the “record [filename]” command is made. As stated in an earlier post, I recommend you use naming conventions to help you manage your demo’s later in the editing process. The more organisation/management done during shooting the more productive you will be in post which is when you will already have enough on your plate besides file management and sifting through a bunch of demo files not knowing which take was the decent one.

Once recording, your demo will record from your point of view, including your hud and playermodel (these can be hidden later) along with and in game chat/audio received (note this does not include your own voice transmissions). Be sure to keep close to the action that you want to record, but DO NOT be involved in said action, you are to be a passive recorder of the events you desire. I find that if you have still shots, its best to frame them in the demos and then roll camera, but if you know you are going to need to change the camera angles in demo smoother, then you can either frame a nice shot, or just stand idly by and do a total repositioning of the camera at a later stage. From here, you should have enough information to go shoot some demos, and I recommend you do just that. The next post will follow up on what to do next.

Part two coming soon.

T

Tags used on this post:
X .dem X demo drive function X demo files X demo recording tools X demo smoother X how to record a demo X machinima X source engine X VAC X valve demo problem X wall-hacking X wall-hacks X wallhacking X wallhac

Second shoot

It’s been a long day, and I’m surprised I can still stand to look at an illuminated screen. The good thing however, about long days, is if they’re productive, then you’re sure to have gotten a lot done. As it turned out, posting for help on the Dead Workers forums really paid off. I ended up with a host of able, motivated and constructive actors at my command resulting in shooting most of the first 8 scenes of the short. Half of the entire piece. This is far beyond what I had planned to achieve today.

First up, special thanks to SigmaSin, DogmeatStew and Radec who helped out for 4 hours. Not to forget Choke, Clydefrog, Regory and Zimo. To all of you, thanks, especially for your thoughts/ideas, as I’m sure you noticed, I’m still finding my feet in the directors chair, so your advice and criticisms are essential.

So with these demos shot, im now turning my hand to some serious work on demo smoother. After an hour playing with it tonight leading to frustrations over missing functions, seemingly in my version. My problem is that in the demo smoother window, I’m missing the “lock camera” function, I’m not sure if I need it, but on top of this, the ability to add key frames is broken, in that when I hit the button, it will jump back on the camera track and create a key frame there, instead of the position I desire. However, I stumbled across the following poster who had the same problems as I, I just jumped back on my windows machine to test out his work around and it appears to be sound. As its too late to continue on it, ill leave it for tomorrow.

I’m keeping it brief as I’m exhausted. But as a parting note, I’ll leave you with the 4 most important things I’ve learnt today.

1. Hard work can be really enjoyable.

2. Hitting a Scout in mid double jump is hard.

3. bind <key> explode         //no. really

4. The Skybox was made for fun. Awesome, awesome, fun.

Thanks guys. T

Exporting workflow

After the two hour shoot I had a brief look over the material I had shot, I started keeping a tally in excel of the takes, noting the scene the take was for, the filename, size/length, quality and whether it had been exported. I’ve decided to expand this to keep while recording (not neccessarily in full detail, but just to keep track), I see this addition to the workflow will be beneficial further down the production line.

Demo naming conventions, as I had figured, are important. My first method was simply naming the demos take001 and incrementally up the number with each consecutive take. Im now moving to sc001take001 (using my scene breakdown to denote which scene is which) which makes reviewing and exporting your demos much easier. Im also looking into binds to automatically activate and increment the demo recording at the hit of a single key to start and stop.

For the tech details on exporting demos, the following wiki covers enough of the bases:

http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Help:Recording_demos

When exporting, trimming your demos down as tight as possible is a wise decision as the .tga files that are exported take up a lot of space very quickly (about a gig per minute at highest quality). I found VirtualDub (suggested and detailed in the above wiki) to be fine for the task of converting the .tga images to .avi video, and making use of queuing up jobs is great to process later when you have grabbed all of the source images.

After throwing some of the .avi’s into Final Cut Pro I played around and things are looking great, the frames are smooth enough that it still looks good when slowed way way down (I think I went as low as 30%), im now delving into demo smoothing, just to get an idea if there is anything I can change in shooting the footage that might aid in later processing, but so far all it seems that is important is to be close enough to see the action (dont be so close that you interrupt the actors) and you can create entirely new camera paths before exporting. Demo Smoothing will be essential to this production, I can just tell.

Bye for now T.

autoexec.cfg

bind = “sv_noclipspeed 5″

bind – “sv_noclipspeed .5″

bind F1 “sv_cheats 1;
god;
noclip;
r_drawviewmodel 0;
cl_drawhud 0;
sv_alltalk 1;
mp_disable_respawn_times 0;
mp_autoteambalance 0;
ent_fire item_healthkit_full kill;
ent_fire item_healthkit_medium kill;
ent_fire item_healthkit_small kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_full kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_medium kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_small kill”

bind F2 demoui2

bind F3 stop

bind F4 record take0

bind F5 jpeg

bind F6 “noclip”

//bind F7

//bind F8

bind F9 “fov_desired 75″

bind F10 “fov_desired 80″

bind F11 “fov_desired 85″

bind F12 “fov_desired 90″

First nights shooting

So I’ve found some time to blog on the first nights shooting. After concerns that I wouldn’t get onto the server I had originally planned to, I put out feelers for what other options that were out there. I assumed it would come to nothing just like the three other times I tried, but lo and behold [WP] cHoke told me to check out GameArena, saying he heard you could buy server time there. This however wasn’t true, you cannot buy server time, BECAUSE IT IS FREE. I made a booking selecting various options (detailed further) and received a return email as follows (specific details removed):

This email is to confirm the GameCreate booking made at
07:48pm, Saturday 12th April. This is an automatically generated email; no reply is required.

Listed below are the full details of the requested booking:

Booking description: xxxx
Booked Date and Time: Saturday, 12 April 2008 @ 09:00pm AEDT
Duration: 3 hours
Game: Team Fortress 2
Server address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxxx
Max players: 10

The following server settings were selected:

RCON password: xxxx
Join Password: xxxx
Time Limit: 2 hours
Capture limit: No limit
Custom Maps: ON
Max Rounds: Unlimited
Frag limit: Unlimited
Start Map: tc_hydro
Map Cycle: cp_badlands

Auto Team Balance: OFF
Critical Hits: Enable Criticals
Respawn Timer: Disable Respawn Timers
Stalemates: Disable Stalemates
Stalemate at Timelimit: OFF
Party Mode: OFF
All Talk: ON

If you have any problems, please visit GameArena Support at http://www.gamearena.com.au/help/contact/ . Choose ‘GameCreate’ from the drop down list and be sure to quote your booking ID.

Your booking ID is xxxxxxx

Regards,
The GameArena Team

Yes. It is indeed awesome. I have no idea how I didn’t find this service earlier, and now I don’t care. Note, all bolded entries are customisable. This proved a lifesaver as when time came to use the other pre arranged server I couldn’t get on due to it being stuck on a map I didn’t have and couldn’t get hold of via the server or FPS banana. This problem is through no fault of those providing me with the previous server, they have been as helpful as can be expected given their other commitments.

After getting on the server I fiddled with the console commands to see just what I could do. As it turned out I had access to all the tools I needed (or thought I needed at that point). I had made a config.cfg to customise some controls, with binds to the keyboard for switching to what I will from henceforth call ‘camera mode’, hiding the view model, the HUD and switching on noclip. I have further expanded this config file and will post it after this as a separate submission on the blog.

So I rallied the troops, a bunch of TF2 players on my friends list who had offered to help when I pm’ed everyone on my friends list looking for virtual actors, what they lacked in experience they made up for in enthusiasm. Considering my inexperience in directing they all did rather well. However, if there is one thing I’ve learned, is that its very hard to make a bunch of people stand very still for a very long time in a FPS. Random owning, as frustrating as it was to see my set ruined by blood, bullet holes and a dead body, it was amusing and diffused some of the stress. Filming in a virtual environment is actually quite stressful, even with noclip switched on, the ability to take instant flight at breakneck speeds doesn’t change the fact that the environment, can feel truly restrictive at some points, for example when trying to frame shots and keep the virtual actors on the server (I’m sorry guys, I know how boring it can be, but there is little I can do to change that!). I surprised myself with some of the clever tricks that can be done within the game, an example being where I needed a shot of two players standing in a doorway, with the roller door opening to reveal these characters standing at attention, I wanted them to be motionless, and so I employed a third actor, in the class of a spy to open the roller door while cloaked, giving the illusion that the door opened automatically. The next problem however, was the fact that the medkits and ammopacks were visible (a problem now solved with a simple batch of commands provided in the config), and very distracting. So, next we redid the shot with the spy lower on ammo and health, picking up the packs and cloaking, then speedily running to the door, the actors doing their poses and then charging off. This all had to be timed so that both the pickups didn’t respawn, and the spy’s cloak not running out of charge. This shows you how a simple shot can turn into a complicated one when you get a little picky.

“Cows don’t look like cows on camera, that’s why we painted the horse.”
“What do you do when you need a horse?”
“Ehh, we usually just tape a bunch of cats together.”

Browsing over this post, its a mess, so I’ll leave it there. Take a look at the follow up post that will give you the run down on the config, which is essentially just a bunch of binds that are at the start up of the game.

Cheers. T

Thoughts on Machinima presentation

Just made this post of the Machinima.com and figured id post it up here as well:

Although its probably a moot point for me now (I just decided to shoot my first Machinima short in Widescreen about an hour ago) I was just wondering about presentation of Machinima in Widescreen format.

For me, Machinima always seems to be made by and often for cinema enthusiasts, my attempt (and hopefully attempts) at production has (have) been driven by my interest in Film and as a means of producing some material for a film school folio, not to mention to self teach some of these skills and see if I really do enjoy working on these projects as much as I think I do, and of course for straight up fun.
After shooting some scenes for an upcoming TF2 short I’m slowly making my way through, I started exporting in both 4:3 AND 16:9 to find not surprisingly that Widescreen was noticeably more visually enticing, dramatic etc.
I think the file size is acceptable for the improvement in visual quality, my only thoughts now are for much further down the line, at release.
As its my first piece, my main goal is exposure, I just want to hear what people think of it, so it will most likely be going to YouTube, which is 4:3 (though the thumbnails for some are now shown as Widescreen, perhaps a hint at at future feature?). http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hmmmm/is-youtube-going-widescreen-280036.php

I’m assuming there are mass audience video websites that do present in Widescreen (any links guys?) but most Machinima is viewed on standard monitors, so is there a point in doing Machinima in a ratio to suit the majority of the audience?
There is also the episodic nature of many Machinima series, that perhaps plays itself more to 4:3.

With that said, my current plans are to shoot and export in Widescreen but perhaps keep it 4:3 friendly where at all possible.

http://www.machinima.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=49471#49471

T.

The story so far

So I just did my first night of shooting on the set of Badlands, of all the things I learnt last night (and there were many), the most prominent would be that shooting Machinima is hard. Damn hard. But of course, if it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing, well maybe that isn’t exactly right, but it certainly wouldn’t be as rewarding. As catch up to me babbling about the shoot (I’ve done a bit in production that hasnt made it to the blog yet) I’m going to post the first treatment and post more info on pre production and the shoot tomorrow.

‘A Soldiers Revenge’ (working title) – Treatment:

Another day on the battlefront, the Soldier and the Medic gear up. Fastening belts, donning gloves, loading weapons, once prepared they stand at attention, salute and charge off for battle. The two head out to the battlefield side by side, men in arms. The mood is light as the Soldier fires rockets into the distance and foes explode like balloons overfilled with red jelly and confetti. The Soldier and Medic pass encouraging glances as they push forwards on the line.
The Soldier, having expended his rockets heads back to re-gear leaving the Medic to hold the point.
Seemingly from out of nowhere a Pyro torches the Medic to death with his flamethrower, the Pryo cheers with glee as he stands victorious over the medic lying on the ground in flames.
The Soldier quickly returns after hearing the scuffle, with the culprit nowhere to be seen and overcome by grief he falls to his knees. The Soldier makes a grave for his comrade and stands over the grave to lament his lost friend. In the distance the call of the Pryo can be heard, as he spouts flames into the air and cheers.
Fire erupts in the eyes of the Soldier as his loss turns to anger, the soldier charges off towards the sounds of the enemy, trusty combat shovel firmly in his grasp. The Soldier explores the area narrowly missing the Pryo on numerous occasions, seemingly both combatants are unaware of the close proximity of one another until the Soldier spots the Pyro’s flamethrower nozzle poking around the corner. The Soldier freezes, suddenly aware of the uselessness of his shovel against a huge napalm launching contraption. Standing flat against the wall the Soldier stands in fear and silence as the Pyro cranes his neck listening in suspicion. Suddenly, the Pyro grunts, dismissing his suspicion and charges back from whence he came. The Soldier breathes a sigh of relief as he tracks the Pyro, spying him charging down into the gully below he sees his chance to strike.
Charging out onto the bridge the soldier disappears from sight as the Pryo inspects the gully, suddenly from above we see a blur of red as the Soldier dives over the bridge, shovel pointing down at the Pyro the Soldier rides it much like one would a pogo stick.
The shovel blade connects with the Pyro, the force bringing his bulky body to the ground. A glorious crunch can be heard. The soldier grins with glee as the Pyro’s head slowly rolls a foot down the embankment, no longer encumbered by his torso.

Reading through it again, there have already been a lot of changes, but the core plot is still the same.

With a lack of any real dialogue, I’ve used the soundtrack as the driving force in the film. A lot, if not all of the action takes its queues from the score, which I’ve found an aid in guiding the re-writing, shooting, editing and the general pace of the piece. If I solve my problem of where to host the mp3, ill post it on the blog tomorrow.
Until then, T.

Production Woes

So the blog has fallen a bit behind, as has my productivity due to starting a new job on Monday. I have however achieved a few things in the week since I last posted. I exported a demo, found server access and possibly some virtual actors, tightened up the soundtrack and further defined the scene breakdown. This post will be brief as I haven’t the time to go into too much depth on these processes just yet, so I’ll mainly resort to linkage and hopefully elaborate on what I’ve learnt in later posts.

Firstly, to demo exporting the valve wiki gives you the bare basics, commands and basic workflow, which I found enough to get the videos out via VirtualDub to collate the .tga image files. Though for the life of me I was unable to get the direct to .avi commands to work. I hope to expand the details on this procedure though, as most online resources are rather brief and there are a few options available to you.

Also, thanks to the guys from the DWP, producers of the Control Point podcast, as they have agreed to loan me some server time to do some of the preliminary shooting, here’s hoping they let me use it some more in the weekends to come. I’m still baffled that I couldn’t get access to server controls on any Australian servers, but then again I see the use of a US server a benefit in the fact that servers will be empty when I’m most likely to require them. Now I have the server time, I’ve put out my feelers for some virtual actors, simply by spamming my friends list with requests for assistance, I’ve had a fair few interested parties, which is good because I anticipate actor burnout to be pretty high as the shoots will be rather boring and disorganised, at least while I’m getting started.

That will have to do for now, but I’m soon to start posting more plot/story info on the blog and probably the whole treatment as well. Looking forward to sharing it.

That’s all for now.

T

Stills, sound and demo recording

Since my last post I must say I’ve been rather productive. I’ve produced some preliminary stills for the digital storyboard (posing rag dolls in Gmod), roughed out almost the entire soundtrack (Using Sound Studio) along with playing with some of the SFX from inside TF2 and had a look at recording demo’s in game.

The stills I’ve produced are to aid in the storyboarding process I will undergo tonight. I’m visiting my friend, whose artistic talents I will be putting to good use in producing a drawn storyboard. This is being done to hash out how much of the action will take place and to get a little outside feedback on how this is all going. Though I’m sure the final product will likely differ a fair bit from this storyboard (limitations in virtual acting/camera work) but I’m hoping to expand on my ideas and even add in some new ones.

To sound tracking and SFX, two big steps forward. I’ve essentially finalised the soundtrack after scouring through my vinyl and digital tracks, and after putting them all together I’m getting a really strong feel for the story, the ups and downs etc. It has all come together really well and will greatly supplement the storyboarding process. Though the soundtrack is of quite acceptable quality and all the edits are smooth I still feel I will redo the entire soundtrack from scratch, just to tighten the audio to the video. At present the piece is at 8 minutes length, and I’d imagine it will run a little less than that, as I’m looking at cutting out a chorus or two as I’m a little concerned about a few moments losing momentum due to being stretched out due to the music. Also a big development is now having access to the entire sound effects bank for Team Fortress 2, to access this information I had to jump into the team fortress 2 content.gcf file in my C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\ directory. However, accessing a .gcf file is not so easy as accessing a folder in your OS. In order to get to the good stuff you must extract the relevant files as .gcf is a compressed format utilised by steam for game content. There are a few applications which can do this for you, most notably GCFScape, which is all fine and good provided you have the .net framework, I however did not and had trouble accessing the Microsoft downloads page in order to get it and thus opted for GCFExplorer developed by SASiO. With the team fortress 2 content.gcf opened the SFX for all the weapon, characters and various other SFX can be found in GCF:\tf\sound (playing around in the .gcf however brief brought me back to the .pak days of Quake, good times). I must say, Valve have done an amazing job, providing a plethora of amazing effects and entertaining taunts/shouts/cheers for each of the classes in TF2. I took a bunch of these to populate a section of the soundtrack with what is happening in the story just to test the work flow and how Sound Studio ran manipulating these .wav files and it worked a treat.

Lastly, to demo recording. I dived into the demo recording and viewing options in TF2 in preparation for testing the procedure to get it to actual video. Using the following commands in the console (which you must activate in the advanced options and then access using the tilde “~” key) record “<desired filename>” and “stop”, to begin recording and stop recording at will. My advice is name your files wisely from the get go, as you should with anything and everything you save. Note that you can record in any resolution/texture detail, basically any video settings and change them later on, which could be a godsend to those with lower end hardware. I however found no slowdown while recording and in fact forgot about it until 20 minutes later, also of note is that all microphone audio will be recorded except your own. Once you have recorded your content you can access your files from a little in game UI using the command “demoui” or “demoui2″ the first of which is shown below. Its a very simple way to watch/fast forward/rewind and even jump inside your demo’s and view them in no-clip mode from out of body by hitting the Drive button, if you plan to output this for movie making the following console commands may be of use (note that all commands require that “sv_cheats <0 or 1>” be set to 1) “cl_drawhud <0 or 1>” to hide or show the hud, “crosshair <0 or 1>” hide or show crosshair and “r_drawviewmodel <0 or 1>” to hide or show your gun. More demo console commands after the jump.

Thanks for reading, T.