Some of you might remember that I released a small demo of the final 30 seconds of the KIT East finals from my POV. At one point someone asked me in an IRC channel how I did this, and I jokingly replied along the lines of "because I somehow saw the future and knew I'd gib two enemies in the final second with my final rocket and <25 health to simultaneously tie and win the game, I decided to start recording a new demo with 30 seconds left to make it more exciting for viewers like you." A few people believed me, I guess, and this joke got circulated around to a few websites, changed in ways that happened to make it more believable, and ultimately became accepted as fact. Anyway, I actually used a fairly simple method to create this demo from the full demo of that game, that anyone can use on their own.

I don't know if this method is common knowledge or not, since I've never heard it discussed or mentioned anywhere. If someone has already posted about it, I apologize for the redudancy. The method is very simple, and can be summarized in a sentence: connect to a GTV server playing the demo, and record it using your client during the appropriate time period. You can run the GTV server on your own computer, or have a friend run it and connect to him. GTV (http://www.gamerstv.net) is available in testing for q3 v1.31 at http://www.gamerstv.net/files/dev/ , and you can probably figure out how to use it by exploring the site or reading the documentation or something. I don't even know how to use it, so I won't bother trying to explain.

For the demo I released, I had cK-bloodshot run a GTV server on his computer, had him play the demo from my POV, and connected to it. I twiddled my thumbs for a little more than 24 minutes, brought the console down, typed "g_synchronousclients 1;record czm_last30seconds;g_synchronousclients 0", let it roll for 30 seconds, and then typed "stoprecord" - you can see in the demo that I was a bit late in typing this, as the demo ends showing the GTV server reloading test_bigbox.

It's not a particularly elegant method, since you can't fast-forward GTV, and there's no easy way to string multiple smaller demos together using this method. Nevertheless, I'm sure you'll find that it can be applied in a number of interesting ways. Record a clip of only the most interesting part of a demo - be it a nice shot, a cool jump, a particularly funny or embarassing kill, a single quad-run, an uber rail-streak, the final five minutes of a classic match, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Cut out the long "warm-up" periods, which plague so many ref-related demos, by starting your recording when the match actually starts. Use it as an instructional tool within your clan - if in a particular scrimmage or match a player executes a certain strategical manuever perfectly, recorded that manuever and circulate a demo of it amongst your teammates. I'm sure there are many more creative applications than the ones I've already listed.

GTV is currently the most practicle tool for demo-manipulation that I'm aware of. I've read about some tool by Uwe Girlich that's supposed to allow fancy editing of demos in text format, but haven't really looked into it much. But back to GTV. Ideally, it'd be able to cross between different versions - a GTV that could connect to a 1.17/1.27 server but accept 1.31 clients could probably finally provide a solution for .dm3/.dm_48 --> dm_67 demo conversion. If GTV could be configured to automatically play multiple demos in sequence, "clip demos" could be created. And of course, being able to fast-forward or even rewind GTV demos would make the process a whole lot less painful. I don't know enough about GTV from a technical perspective to know how plausible any of these suggestions are - I'm just throwing them out because I think they're interesting.

By the way, in my user profile I've uploaded my latest config files, updated as of 1/30/02. I had uploaded a somewhat buggy version a few days ago, and more than 1000 users downloaded it...doh? If you'd like a bug-free (I hope) version, please download it again.