trigger_camera question...

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<TD style="FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: gold">? posted by LAzerMANiac (http://www.snarkpit.com/forums.php?forum=2&topic=798&r=16)</TD></TR>
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It's a trigger_camera mini-movie contest! go here for details!

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How do I record anything at all???

Kind of pointless for a whole new thread, but oh well. To record things in Half-Life, load a map then go into console () and type "record x", x therefore being the name you want for the movie. Once done, go into console again () and type "stop". Now, once all of this is done, its now in x.dem in your mod folder (particulary valve/). This will not play in anything BUT Half-Life (disregarding any .demo players). So, you need a program like VirtualDub or something and convert that .dem to a .avi.

Ah, finally done :biggrin:

Correction: Vd does not support direct conversion of dem -> Avi files.

You have to create a series of BMPS, and virtualdub can merge them together to an AVI. (no sound). Virtualdub has nothing to do with HL demo files, it just merges the images. This can also be done with VideoMach (but I prefer Virtualdub, which is freeware.-> www.virtualdub.org). Make sure you check out the 3rd-party filters and add-ons for it. Avisynth and Virtualdubmod are worth downloading. (Slow-Motion ? Reverse ? Anyone ? :biggrin: )

How to make HL create a series of BMP's from your demo, this is a guide from my fellow Belgian TFC friend grayfox: http://www.planetfortress.com/hlmp/hlmp2-beta/article.asp?ID=366

In the sense of the question and the contest, though, you don't actually "record" anything.

trigger_camera entities work in real time within the level. There are a number of tutorials that can guide you through this process, but the basic premise is that a camera entity can move and track objects along set paths much like a real camera would in shooting a movie (i.e. a camera on a dolly or something). Once the camera is triggered, the player perspective is moved to the camera and it follows all motions accordingly until it automatically re-sets the view after a certain amount of time or is triggered off again.

The sequence in Half-Life where Gordon is dragged to the trash compactor is one such use of the trigger_camera. Also, security cameras as seen in a couple CS maps or in Blue Shift are created by the same means.

Although cameras, while cool, can be a very big pain to work with.

Refer to This tutorial to help you out a bit.

Vash said:
This will not play in anything BUT Half-Life (disregarding any .demo players).

How exactly do I play these .dem files in Half-life?

EDIT: playdemo x and stopdemo... I found it out by myself... (thx Mikk@)

OK, I've made a .avi movie now using Virtualdub. The BMPS I used were 1024*768, 20 fps... the bizzare thing is that the avi file is 236 mb and only 5 sec or so... is something wrong or are the movies supposed to be so big?

Now you can encode it to DivX or another compression format with Virtualdub

(you might had to consider switching to a lower resolution to play the demo ... the BMP's would have been smaller.)

BMP files are completely uncompressed. That means that at high resolutions you will build huge AVI files if you don't add some compression. The best compression I know is DivX (fast or slow, there's not much difference).