[BUG] Demos are Unreliable

I have now recorded several scrim demos, to test how the demos truely hold up in retail under stress.

Results are dissapointing. Out of 6 scrim demos, at least 3 of them break early during the scrim and are worthless (haven't watched them all through yet).

One demo crashes several minutes in when something weird happens in-game when I spawn at a Rover. This is a consistent crash and I can provide the demo if the devs want it.

Two other demos display no HUDs. When the person demoing dies, the camera gets stuck to the corpse and fails to track the person on respawn. These demos are also pretty worthless.

This is unfortunate. T:V demos aren't totally broken like T2 demos on release, but they are unreliable to the point of being near meaningless. T:V demos also appear to lack demo controls (Speedup/Slowdown), further hampering their usefulness.

My machine is fast & new and even when recording demos I rarely go below 40 FPS. Others on my team with vastly different systems have reported similiar issues; demos are unreliable, as many will be broken or crash in the weird ways mentioned above. I doubt this is system specific, as it appears to be a very widespread problem.

I can provide the broken demos to devs if they want, just give me a place to send them. But, given the very high chance of demos having problems, I find it hard to believe the devs can't reproduce these problems internally.

I hope we get pause/FF features sometime soon. :(

Have you tested "Admin pause" .. at least it works in servers (FFA/Tourny) if you are logged in. :)

I know of that, but I'd much rather be able to change the speed while watching demos. That'd be far more useful.

I can echo the issues with demos. In particular, the missing huds, which seems to be somewhat random. I don't run any modifications or scripts currently, yet sometimes my own demos are missing me huds and you can see the infamous respawn problem where you continue to view your corpse and then suddenly appear where you should be 10 seconds later.

This and a lack of pause / fast-forward features make demos pretty frustrating so far, which is sad because I enjoy being able to evaluate how various scrims and matches go from the viewpoints of several teammates.

I have already reported all of these problems in at least 2 different posts on this forum and got little reply from the community and no reply from the devs. I wouldn't expect this to be fixed until someone in the community does it. I wouldn't even expect a dev response to these as bugs being logged. I don't think they really consider this to be part of the game.

btw, it's tournament mode that causes alot of these problems. My demos tend to be fine if they are pub mode demos.

I'm not buying Tourney mode being part of the demo problem.

My "standard" procedure is:

Login as admin
Kick server to FFA mode to start match
Start recording

I still have flaky demos . . . missing HUD's, extended corpse view, etc.

One thing I have noticed, sometimes if you Alt-Tab out and then immediately back in, the extended corpse view goes away. It *seems* like it could be some sort of frame buffering error and it gets reset when you Alt-Tab.

I could be totally wrong.

i'm not positive these things CAN be fixed by the community

demo recording issues are not the communities responsibility. This should be and hopefully is, firmly in IG/VUG's court.

demo recording issues are not the communities responsibility. This should be and hopefully is, firmly in IG/VUG's court.

I've seen four threads reporting [bug] recordings.

Not a single dev comment. This will probably not be handled

Supposedly the "developers" jobs are done and they've been moved to other projects. The programmers, who we have rarely heard from, are responsible for bug fixes post release. Or so goes the rumor.

I'll give them a few more weeks for a patch to be produced before I start questioning their commitment, anyhow.

Does anyone have this issue with demos?

When I playback a demo, it runs as smooth as it does when I am playing, until my character looks around. Whenever I look around in the demo I get stuttered video. But like I said, whenver I am flying in a straight line and not looking left/right it is completely smooth.

Maybe something could be tweaked to help this?

I've seen four threads reporting [bug] recordings.

Not a single dev comment. This will probably not be handled

they aren't responding to anything really. you can consider it an issue if they dont respond in 3 weeks.

i get the impression we'll see patches before thanksgiving.

also, dont forget they're already basing other games on the engine.

someone at SOME point is gonna need, demos, netcode, etc all the little annoying shazbot fixed.

It would only make sense for them to fix it now. I'm sure even VUG sees this.