Author Topic: A Million Reasons  (Read 8776 times)

The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #20 on: September 12, 2012, 12:50:49 PM »

This is only 30k

I'm guessing similar head-torch-and-afk-message screenies would be about the same size.

You look quite fetching in that shot. (lol) Simple as it is, I think I am more proud of that dumb little macro than anything else I've written in my 7 plus years in CoH.

eabrace

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #21 on: September 12, 2012, 12:56:43 PM »
You guys have so much on Titan Network, you can't seriously expect all of us to have looked at all of it. <wink> We'd never have time to play if we did.
I know exactly what you mean.  :)

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The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #22 on: September 12, 2012, 01:08:24 PM »
"Kobold still hates you. "

I had several, my favorite was a paladin hunter of the dead. I am a D&D player & gamesmaster going WAY back, I'm neglecting my online D&D game in favor of the Save COH campaign as we speak, in fact. I loved DDO, but finally just couldn't take some of the development choices any more and haven't played in a while. But I digress, and I had an idea that was actually relevant in another thread.

We shouldn't just be saving screenshots. We should encourage everyone to do a demorecord of their characters, extract the record, and post THOSE to a library somewhere. That would immortalize everyone's characters in a form that would be very useful to the community of demorecord artists.

I am going to have to scrounge around and refresh my memory of all this. I distinctly remember that it was possible to extract the information in a demorecord which defines your character. That was the key discovery that allowed me to do a wallpaper for my gaming desktop at the time which showed all my characters posed together for a group shot. Have to scrounge around and find all the demorecords and work files I used to put that together, though I bet someone can save me the work of refreshing my memory.

An archive of demorecords is not as visually appealing to the casual viewer on a website as screenshots. But it would be vastly more useful to the community in many ways. I wonder if you could set up some sort of modelling site that allowed you to upload demorecord copies of a character and then rotate the model so people could admire our characters from all angles? Way beyond my skills, but... wait. I see this coming. I better go explore Titan Network and make sure they are not way ahead of me before I say more.

Kobolt

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #23 on: September 12, 2012, 01:22:03 PM »
Hey guys there is a DA site that is unofficially the CoH of DA and they have a folder for screenshots...
http://cityofheroes.deviantart.com/

eabrace

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #24 on: September 12, 2012, 01:26:00 PM »
We shouldn't just be saving screenshots. We should encourage everyone to do a demorecord of their characters, extract the record, and post THOSE to a library somewhere. That would immortalize everyone's characters in a form that would be very useful to the community of demorecord artists.
Demorecords are good.  Costume files (saved at the tailor) are also good.  Sentinel+ saving everything about your character in XML - including all of your costume slots at once - is a good way to go, too.
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The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #25 on: September 12, 2012, 01:31:47 PM »
Demorecords are good.  Costume files (saved at the tailor) are also good.  Sentinel+ saving everything about your character in XML - including all of your costume slots at once - is a good way to go, too.

I *think* I have a costume file of every costume I've made for every character. Need to get busy and verify that. I already went through and did a Sentinel+ save of all my characters. Next pass I need to do a demorecord of all of them. Probably a separate save for each costume, I guess.

Maybe some day we'll have a utility to convert the Sentinel+ save to a demorecord entry, that would be nice. But in the meantime I think I'll make up a demorecord with all costumes of all my characters... that would be handy to have around anyway.

Codewalker

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #26 on: September 12, 2012, 01:41:56 PM »
Maybe some day we'll have a utility to convert the Sentinel+ save to a demorecord entry, that would be nice. But in the meantime I think I'll make up a demorecord with all costumes of all my characters... that would be handy to have around anyway.

That's actually pretty easy to do by hand if you want to. All you have to do is open up an existing demorecord file, find the COSTUME entry for the entity you wan to change, and copy the lines out of the Sentinel+ XML file. They're written in the same format and should be in the same order so you can just copy/paste them.

Costume files are slightly more involved, but all the information is there, it just needs to be reformatted. I'm sure there's some scripting pros lurking around here who could probably whip something up to do it automatically...

zybron

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #27 on: September 12, 2012, 01:52:36 PM »
I'm coming in a bit late on this discussion, it seems, but what about Pinterest? It's designed to host images and is one of the fastest growing social network sites. Seems like an ideal place to gather and post images. I'm not certain if we would want a single SaveCoH account to post all the images or if it would be better for everyone to post screenshots from their own accounts, though.

The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #28 on: September 12, 2012, 03:24:33 PM »
That's actually pretty easy to do by hand if you want to. All you have to do is open up an existing demorecord file, find the COSTUME entry for the entity you wan to change, and copy the lines out of the Sentinel+ XML file. They're written in the same format and should be in the same order so you can just copy/paste them.

Costume files are slightly more involved, but all the information is there, it just needs to be reformatted. I'm sure there's some scripting pros lurking around here who could probably whip something up to do it automatically...

Thanks for the tip. I'll have to try that and see how it turns out. Would be a lot easier than making 42 demorecords, then extracting all the characters and combining them into one file. I saw Leandro's post about the "crowd scene" perl scripts he wrote and saved it. I'm thinking of pulling together enough info to do a "crowd" of my own characters. Hmmn. Should be possible to do a script in Openoffice or something to process the Sentinel+ output into a COSTUME entry. Been meaning to figure out their scripting anyway. No more than I have to do might be faster to just do it by hand, we'll see.

Mantic

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #29 on: September 12, 2012, 03:32:43 PM »
Hey guys there is a DA site that is unofficially the CoH of DA and they have a folder for screenshots...
http://cityofheroes.deviantart.com/

I'm aware of that, but they're more general purpose that what I was after. I can draw anything, it says nothing about the game. Images that actually show the characters/costumes in the game show exactly what is being snuffed out (never to be seen again so far as we know), as well as a feature that makes the game uniquely attractive.

Besides, the existing City of Heroes group on dA has established moderators who may not be prepared to be swamped by a million screenshot submissions.


--

A note about demorecords: they are as limited as they are powerful. Demorecoding artists can put together any combination of animation and character definition, regardless of what powers your characters have. But if you don't record those powers/animations somewhere, there won't be a reference for them. So if you are using demorecord to store your characters, you may want to cycle through their powers while recording as well.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2012, 03:45:54 PM by Mantic »

Victoria Victrix

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #30 on: September 12, 2012, 08:21:18 PM »
You know, you guys make my head explode.  I can barely take a screenshot, I would love to have demorecords to play back, but I don't know how to make them or play them.   :gonk: :'(
I will go down with this ship.  I won't put my hands up in surrender.  There will be no white flag above my door.  I'm in love, and always will be.  Dido

The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #31 on: September 12, 2012, 08:37:04 PM »
You know, you guys make my head explode.  I can barely take a screenshot, I would love to have demorecords to play back, but I don't know how to make them or play them.   :gonk: :'(

Easier than you think. Happens I know a great website to give you the basics of making a demorecord:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demorecord_(Slash_Command)

more details

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_Recording

So the short form is, type

/demorecord <name you want the file to have>

That starts the "camera". It will record everything around your hero. Well, actually, everything in the zone at the time, but who's counting? When you've done whatever it is you want to record for posterity, you can type

/demostop

Voila! There is now a file in the directory where your City Of Heroes is installed that has the name <whatever you used above>.cohdemo

Now, any time you want to play them back, you need nothing but the game client. You will need to do a little editing to make a shortcut that is set up to play demo files rather than connect to the game server. That process is fairly simple, but long enough that I'm going to refer you to that second wiki page rather than retyping it here.  A lot of people bypass that step by downloading something like  Zloth's CoH Demo Launcher program:

http://home.roadrunner.com/~dasloth/CoH/Demos/DemoLaunch.htm

You can do a LOT more than just record your character's glory using the demorecord system, as people like Samuraiko and Leandro and many others show us regularly. Kinda an amazing feature of CoH, really. Hope this helps, trying to give you pointers to the info without overwhelming with technobabble, but I'm enough of a geek that it's hard not to babble technically even when I think I am speaking ze english.

Victoria Victrix

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #32 on: September 12, 2012, 08:45:17 PM »
Hunter, I love you and will have your Kheldsquid Lovechildren.

Boy if I follow through on that, my squids are going to be budding a LOT....

THANK YOU!  I have that copied to a document on my computer for later use (so I can find it again).
I will go down with this ship.  I won't put my hands up in surrender.  There will be no white flag above my door.  I'm in love, and always will be.  Dido

The-Hunter-JLJ

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Re: A Million Reasons
« Reply #33 on: September 12, 2012, 08:54:33 PM »
Hunter, I love you and will have your Kheldsquid Lovechildren.

Boy if I follow through on that, my squids are going to be budding a LOT....

THANK YOU!  I have that copied to a document on my computer for later use (so I can find it again).

(twinkle) Kinky. No worries, great lady, after all the pleasures you have granted me over the years, glad to help out. As Obi Wan observed oh so long ago in a galaxy far, far away, you've taken your first step into a larger world. It is quite amazing what you can do with demorecords.

I sat down to learn a little about it a few years ago, and by the end of the afternoon I was able to produce a "movie" with all 12 of my characters on Protector standing heroically on the bridge outside the Founder's Falls train station. Let me see... drat, only version of it I still have is an early "goof", the final version is on a machine I have out on loan. But it probably is good enough to illustrate anyway:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=315879001844360&set=a.315878985177695.65776.100002667875920&type=3&theater

The mistake I made was simple - the second row is standing out over the water. Time to search the backups and see if I can turn up the good version.