DSC: and 1.31

[Money]

Will it be supported (in a light or non-light version)
??

[Unregistered]

pleeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase! :)

[Leonidas]

yes yes yes

give RAL a few days

[sergio]

C'mon RAL
I'm dieing here
:)
and what about net code that was troubling you (demo propreties)

[RAL]

DSC light 1.25 with q3 1.31 support will be released tomorrow (sunday).
It will support 4 demo formats
dm3, dm_48, dm_66, dm_67

cu,
RAL

[Money]

We love you RAL. Thnx for the good job you keep doing for us demo freaks

[sergio]

Thanx RAL!!
you are really something :)

DSC is the best demoplayer ever.

[Unregistered]

Its true that DemoShowCreator is the ultimate demo tool.. thats why im a bit dissapointed that the full version hasnt seen the light of day yet :|

[RAL]

Without some support from id it will not be possible. I cannot try to hack every new protocol version. The q3 1.31 release has still the invisible players bug, so it's likely that a new PR (sure with a new network protocol version) will come soon.

If you guys would like to have the full version, you should ask id to support me a bit in network protocol questions.

[Money]

I thought 1.30 was the latest, but because of the built-in wallhack they made another pr to terminate the wallhack.

Anyway, and I think I speak for the majority of all the dcs users, we support you 110 % in finetuning and perfecting the one and only demo-player everybody should use.

Where can we mail ID in support for you ??


With kind regards, and full admiration for the job u do :)

Money

[RAL]

Look at the QuakeFinger section at www.planetquake.com. There you find a couple of email addresses from the id Software people.

[Unregistered]

I see your problem RAL, and perhaps it is difficult to get the code.. im just wondering if ID dont wish to support you then how the hell do all the other demo players get their hands on the code unless they are hacking the thinggy.

btw MO is rigth though .. if that what it takes then lets all mailbomb ID ffs =)

Im not in any way complaining about your lack for deadline or lack of progress, i just think its a damn shame if the full product of demoshowcreator is not released since it truly is the most awsome demo player i've have yet seen.

[Unregistered]

Ok RAL, i've just mailed John at ID os lets see when and if i get a response, ill let you know if something happends

[RAL]

Originally posted by Unregistered
I see your problem RAL, and perhaps it is difficult to get the code.. im just wondering if ID dont wish to support you then how the hell do all the other demo players get their hands on the code unless they are hacking the thinggy.
[..]


I'm not aware of any other actual q3 demoplayer which tries to analyse the demos. It's not necessary to extract informations about the demos to be able to create a demoplayer. Look at geekplay for example. This is a rather simple but effective tool. Or look at seismovision, which is more complex. But both cannot look into the demos to extract informations like pov, winner, mod, scores and so on, so there is no need to use knowledge about the network protocols (The demo structure is very similar to the network code).

But these infos are necessary to create a really good tool. One side of beeing able to parse the demos is:
You know the mod of the demo. That's a big advantage for a q3 demo player, since q3 itself is not able to start the respective mod before playing a mod demo. When you are in vanilla q3 and try to play a rocket arena demo, shit happens, because Q3 is not willing to switch to the installed RA3 mod before loading the demo. It would be no big deal to include this funtionality into Q3, but it isn't included in Q3. Some time ago I asked id to include the code to do this, but I got no answer.

The other bright side is: You have many informations about the demo without the need to watch it before. You can add database functionality to the demo tool to let the user e.g. search for all demos, where the difference between the winner score and the loser score is one point or so.

I would love to add some database functionality to the full version of dsc. Ok, my time is a bit limited, but I could do it, if I would have the knowledge from id about the protocols 66 and 67.

The only small chance to get the support from id are the dsc users.
I mailed id Software people more than one time and I never got a positive answer. Only if there is enough interest in such a tool id will perhaps support it. That are the hard facts.

[sergio]

ok I'll ask ID for some kind of suport.

[SomebodyElse]

@Ralph:
erm.. how did you find out how to parse the dm3 and dm_48 demofiles?

bye

[RAL]

That's not a lame question.
The very most of the knowledge came from Martin Otten (-> HLTV), who published the complete dm3 specs with his Argus tool. Also he helped me a lot in answering questions about his code.

The demo specs for dm3 are available at
http://www.slipgate.de

Some parts of the needed specs for dm_48's I find out myself, others I got from different sources (Strider, the developer of the demo converter tool q3dc and Golk, a project which is dead now).

Also I had to figure out some mod specific code, for both the dm3 and dm_48 demos. That was a kind of fuzzy and partly unfinished work.

[Unregistered]

Ok RAL i know your demo player has alot of cool features.. why do you think everybody in here wants it so badly.. we wouldnt even be here if the tool sucked =) and THATS a fact.

Anyway regarding the structure and the parsing etc. now im no coder or such so i just thought that you needed the code for everything in the player.. guess i was wrong, so vasicly what you are saying is that all the other demoplayers does is to parse the commandline from the proggy? (ex. demo 1.dm3 etc) or didnt i understand you correctly?

Regarding ID being supportive i think it sucks they are not more willing to help those who try to keep their product alive with all kinds of cool shit. :|

[RAL]

Let me try to explain it again in more detail.

What do people basically want from a demoplayer? Ok, at least a good demoplayer should play all demos from everywhere. That's not possible without knowing the mod type of a demo. Why is this so? Let's assume you have a Urban Terror demo Myutdemo.dm_67 on your desktop at which you double click. The demo player had set some Windows registry entries at it's installation. That's why a double click on the demo file executes the demoplayer program. The player gets the ut demo file's location and name as a command line paramter. It's very similar as you would have started the player yourself with a command line parameter like this:

DSC.EXE "c:\documents and settings\username\desktop\Myutdemo.dm_67".

What does the player now? Well, first it copies the Myutdemo.dm_67 file into q3a_root\baseq3\demos. Now the player must execute quake3.exe with a command line parameter to play the demo:

quake3.exe +demo Myutdemo.dm_67.

Now Q3 loads and ... shit happens. Myutdemo.dm_67 is a MOD demo and so Q3 fails to play this demo. The player should have executed q3 at this way:

quake3.exe +set fs_game q3ut2 +demo Myutdemo.dm_67

Now q3 firstly loads the MOD located in q3a_root\q3ut2 and secondly it starts the demo.

Now it's hopefully a bit more understandable why a player should look into demo file to find out from what MOD the double clicked demo is. DSC does this for dm3 and dm_48 demos, but not for dm_66 and dm_67 demos. There are three workarounds in dsc to help the users to come around this limitation:

a) On default it plays dm_66/67 demos as cpma demos. That means DSC executes q3 like this:

quake3.exe +set fs_game cpma +demo SomeDemo.dm_67

This assures that the very most downloadable demos can be played with a double click from everywhere. This is because cpma can play baseq3, ra3, osp and cpma demos.

b) If a demo SomeDemo.dm_67 is doubleclicked from it's 'natural' location (q3a_dir\SomeMod\demos) DSC assumes the demo to be a SomeMod demo and starts q3 at this way:


quake3.exe +set fs_game SomeMod +demo SomeDemo.dm_67


c) There is a "play as.." entry in the context menu of demo files. When you choose this command you have the control yourself what mod should be started before playing the demo.

------------

The above was about a player only tool. Why did I stopped the development of the full version? The full version of DSC is far more than a player only tool.

http://www.3dcenter.de/dsc/dsc1_big.gif

In the middle area of DSC's main window you see the list of demos in a detailed view with columns. You may choose what columns you want to have. Some examples are columns for final score, winner, pov, mod, gametype. For dm_66/67 demos I don't can get this informations because the lack of knowledge about the network protocols 66 and 67. So it would be pretty useless to support dm_66/67 in the full version of DSC. This was only one example. If you would look into the source code of DSC full, you would recognize that the program really needs the parsed informations about the demos in several situations.

[Unregistered]

Can the OpenDemo project somehow be the solution to this? http://machinima.com/opendemo/

[RAL]

Nope, but for sure Uwe Girlich knows all the needed details of the q3a demo formats. In the early days of dsc he gave me some tips about the dm3 format, but nothing in detail.

[Unregistered]

I think i understod that RAL ... one thing i'd like to clearify though is this :
"Now it's hopefully a bit more understandable why a player should look into demo file to find out from what MOD the double clicked demo is. DSC does this for dm3 and dm_48 demos, but not for dm_66 and dm_67 demos. There are three workarounds in dsc to help the users to come around this limitation:

a) On default it plays dm_66/67 demos as cpma demos. That means DSC executes q3 like this:"

Is this the reason why under mod selection in the demo player that when selecting OSP as default mod to play all demos that no matter what it allways loads up CPMA mod to play the thing unless i select "play as.." ???

I dont know if its a bug or what i just find it interresting that is the options is there to select whatever mod you want to be played as default that is doesnt work properly... is it some sort of security by you becourse CPMA supports all mods?

[Unregistered]

As to the above i think i got my answer in the DSC update thread..