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Guys, while the criticism is legitimate, keep in mind this service was not created by the TF2 community or snow. He just discovered and shared it. So typing that stuff here doesn’t even reach IGMDB.

Hi guys. I was alerted to this topic via email so I figured I’d give a quick reply (and fyi, this was posted originally to http://www.esreality.com/post/2433113/quake-3-quake-live-demo-renderer/ and later on to http://teamfortress.tv/thread/15876/?page=1 when TF2 support was finalized)…

I’m the main guy behind the rendering tool so it is great to see it getting used by people who care about the demos and movies. I’ve received a ton of help from mdv, who did a majority of the per-game hud and graphics customizations.

The demo-to-render functionality wasn’t ever really meant to be realtime, which is why a lot of the graphic qualities are turned up pretty high. It also helps to make the game look pretty damn nice, especially to those people who may not be professional players and might just be randomly browsing youtube for a nice looking video. I love TF2 as much as the next guy but I also love to see nice graphics.

To quickly answer some of the questions:
-Steam api wasn’t really considered as a login method – mainly because I didn’t have time to code it up. Some day…

-The different explosion effects were added to increase the sexiness of the render, but having said that if enough people don’t like it I can remove it. The renderer is/was made for the community, so in the end you guys have the final vote.

-The hud being used currently is StatusSpec (https://github.com/fwdcp/StatusSpec), although I’m open to using others as the default one for the renderings.

-Now that about 4000 demos have been rendered in a single year, the demo rendering page is mid-way through a rather large transition which will expose some neat new features. In the coming weeks/months (depending on how much time I have) I’m going to be adding in custom graphics options and custom hud options which you can pick from at the time you submit the render request into the queue. Depending on engine support some games will support blurring as well. In TF2’s case, you’ll be able to pick custom hitsounds, and depending on how much feedback I get, I’d love to have other options as well that you can choose from.

-I’m not quite sure how to make the damage numbers bigger. Help!

-While IGMDb and the demo renderer (which originally were just tech experiments for myself) were aimed at supporting the Quake 3/Quake Live communities, I’ve played TF2 for a long time so it was always a priority of mine to get TF2 supported. Thankfully the Quake 3 and Source engine are practically brothers and getting Source integrated wasn’t a huge endeavor.

Anyway, thanks again to all of you for using the demo renderer. Any feedback is appreciated. Feel free to add me via steam or contact me (http://www.igmdb.org/?page=about).

It’s a shame HUDs break on every update, otherwise it would be nice and easy to have a HUD for rendering which would also include damage numbers.

The custom explosion particles do look very nice but they can get in the way of seeing what’s going on (probably mostly youtube’s fault).

If I were to suggest one improvement to how the render looks, it would be to use the old scattergun animations: http://tf2.gamebanana.com/skins/135992

just because valve broke this a while ago to make all the scatterguns use the horrible looking new set of animations

Quick update:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWfIlXITWI

hrbls and I worked on removing the hq explosions and skybox and added in the Hudas Iscariote hud. Thoughts or comments?

Not in the above render, but the scattergun animations you guys requestied are in there as well.

For some reason the rendering machine’s TF2 stops playing the demo about 11 second before the actual finish. The same thing occurs on my machine, however not on hrbls machine. Anyone run into an issue like that?

Yeah, the aim is to allow those options to be defined by the submitter, rather than set the same for everyone. All in due time…

Edit:
Here’s the above video with the scattergun animation fixes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12KnmPIC2s0

this is so good, what hitsound is that btw?:)

Quoted from Phnx

[…]
can you make it so we choose huds and hitsounds from a variety of options?

Lawena offers this feature, so it’s definitely possible, if maybe only from a selection of pre-defined HUDs. HUDas Iscariote is definitely better than the previous HUD though.