I sent an email to Id Software asking about the demo files and why they arent directly cvar editable and will they ever change to be like Q3’s… well here’s the reply and it isn’t looking good.
The demos in Quake1/2/3 were network demos. Basically it would record
the network stream and then play it back. As far as the game was
concerned, a network demo was a real game (just with super intelligent
bots I suppose). In Doom 3, the demos are render demos. This change
was required mostly because the single player game doesn’t run through
the network interface anymore. Instead we record all data going to the
render engine and play it back. The game isn’t actually running at that
point, which means you unfortunately can’t modify cvars or your view at all.The good news is, you don’t actually have to use the demo functionality
built in to the game. It’s possible to write a mod that records all the
appropriate information (which is essentially what Machinimation is).
The problem of course is you couldn’t run it with any mod.
Now i’m guessing exactly the same problem will be with RTCW2, the demo files will be huge and they will be render demos, basicly eliminating recamming, sweet smooth slow motion capping, clearing the HUD, switching to 3rd person view. A sad day indeed, the Q3 engine had theeee best demo file system ever made, i’m a bit miffed we’re gonna be limited to these render demos. Im guessing there wont be near as much movies made with games that use the D3 than what we have and still see with Q3 engine games :disgust:
