Demo Recording

Overview

A demo in City of Heroes is an in-game recording made via the /demorecord Slash Command. The demo feature allows you to make recordings of your gameplay and use the game engine to play back those recordings. The recordings created this way are not actual video documents, but simply text files with a record of all the commands, models, effects, and animations that tell the game engine how to render the recorded demos. Because the demo files are just text files, demo recordings can be edited with any text editor, or with player-made tools specifically designed to manipulate demo files. This gives you the ability to modify demo recordings (or even create them from scratch) to make custom "movies" for playback via the game engine, allowing situations and events which may not exist during actual play. The demo playback can then be captured with a video capture tool to further edit and customize your film, and to share it with others.

How To Record A Demo

To begin a demo recording, type the following on the chat command line:

/demorecord "demo name"

Where "demo name" is the name of the file you wish to save the demo name as. Do not use quotation marks in the actual name. The demo name should be all one word and should not contain any punctuation (hyphens and underscores are acceptable). For example:

/demorecord coolinvasiondemo1

To stop the demo recording, type the following on the chat command line:

/demostop

Please note that the demo will also automatically cease recording if you zone, such as when exiting a mission. If you have recorded a very large demo (either lengthy or one featuring a lot of in-game activity), the game may pause very briefly when issuing the /demostop command. It may therefore be advisable to wait until after the big boss fight to stop your demo recording.

The recorded demo will be saved to your City of Heroes directory in the "client_demos" folder. The demo recording file will have a suffix of "cohdemo". In the example used above, the "coolinvasiondemo1" file would be found as follows:

\city of heroes\client_demos\coolinvasiondemo1.cohdemo

Playing Back A Demo

Recorded demos can be played back multiple ways. Two of the more common methods are either to create a shortcut to the cityofheroes.exe application and modify it to launch a demo or to use a player-made application specifically to play back demos.

Playback Via A Windows Shortcut

To play back a specific recorded demo via a Windows shortcut, use the following steps:

• Locate your City of Heroes directory and make a shortcut to cityofheroes.exe on your desktop (or wherever you prefer).
• Right click on the shortcut and select Properties.
• Within the Target box you will see the command line: "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" (the directory path may be different if you did not install City of Heroes in the default directory).
• At the end of this line, add a space, followed by -demoplay yourdemoname (where yourdemoname is the name you gave the demo).
• For example: '"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe -demoplay coolinvasiondemo1"
• Exit Properties.
• Double-click the shortcut you just created. This should launch the game client into demo playback mode and play the demo you specified.

Note that when playing back a demo via this method, the demo you specify in the shortcut properties must be in your client_demos folder.

For greater flexibility, you may use a demo launcher application (see the next section) or if you plan to play back many different demos, you may omit the demo name from the shortcut target, and then just drag and drop the demo you wish to play onto the shortcut.

Playback Via A Demo Launcher

An alternative to playing back a demo via a shortcut to the game client is to use an application specifically designed to play back a demo (the application still does this via the game client but handles all of the operations required for demo playback automatically). Many people find this less cumbersome than launching via a modified shortcut or other method. Another advantage of using a demo launcher is that is may also perform automatic functions to "fix" certain aspects of demo playback if there are known playback issues resulting from playing the demo directly.

Probably the most popular demo launcher is Zloth's CoH Demo Launcher program.