Game:

Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)

Duration: 0:22

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11

This is a short clip from first the clientside /demo functionality, followed by the same clip from Theater mode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg-R3-WTP4A (1/4 speed)

Take special note of:
- Camera movement when swinging around - theater noticably more jagged especially with shotgun fire at start.
- How the pistol animates. In Theater clip, the first 4 shots don't even have a visible model recoil
- The consistency and timing of the shots, especially the last few bullets. In Theater clip, the shots bunch together vs consistent last 6 shots on demo playback

Theater mode has a really awkward snapshots-per-second rate and results in hilariously bad representation of the finer details of what actually happened. Aside from how badly pistols animate in Theater mode, there are many other issues that crop up - the biggest among them being how drags can appear to completely miss targets - shots often appear to go off while the crosshair is still traveling towards targets, rather than on them. (edit: Here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnJ_VfxiC7c )

I understand that it's probably technically necessary in both storage and bandwidth to cut corners with Theater mode. I understand that for console gaming where the controls make people turn like tanks the representation may have 'enough' precision that it's acceptable. However this poses a serious problem when we are trying to make high quality movies, especially from top players using a keyboard and mouse, especially when we use slowdowns which accentuate the problems with Theater's inaccurate representation.

This has never been an issue with past CoD games (except MW2, let's not even talk about MW2 and its hilarious lack of anything PC FPS related) with the old clientside demo and playback functionality which is miles more accurate, even if it is limited to a single viewpoint.

On the other hand, with Black Ops clientside demo functionality was raped by Treyarch in the process of coding Theater mode. Avidemo got obfuscated and requires a retarded workaround to use. Timescale and UI customization functions are unusable.

It is quite sad, because Black Ops has a lot of complaints about hitreg, mainly when people go back to Theater mode and it looks completely off. The hitreg, while not perfect, is at the very most only as 'bad' as CoD4 stock.

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There are two solutions I can think of. I'll distill them into what I'll label as a pipe dream, and a more practical approach.

==THE PIPE DREAM==
Integrating clientside demos with Theater Mode - best solution, probably toughest from a development standpoint:
- Checkbox in Option menu to 'record clientside demos'
- When ticked, every game has a demo automatically recorded, named according to the ID that democlient tags that map with
- When you load something from Theater mode, Black Ops checks the demos folder for the existence of a corresponding clientside demo. If it doesn't exist, nothing happens - Theater functions as normal. If it DOES, however, Theater will then overlay the first person information whenever that player's view is being used.

In essence, basically what this means is that whenever appropriate, the more accurate clientside demo data will be used during playback, and for everything else (other viewpoints, freecam, dolly, etc) it falls back on the file from Theater mode servers.

For Treyarch servers, no extra baggage occurs, all the extra processing is done clientside during theater mode playback. Players can go manage their own files and delete them to free up HD space or whatever.

Of course there are technical hurdles - how to handle the difference in the timing of events between the two versions? What happens when the clientside demo only covers a section of the full game? (if you drop in/out mid-match for example)

Also not to mention the fact that on consoles managing clientside demo files in this fashion is probably a bitch. Sucks to be you guys ololo.

==THE PRACTICAL APPROACH==
Take all functionality of Theater mode, i.e. timescaling, UI toggling, rewinding and apply it to the /demo functionality and keep them completely seperate of each other. You can still freelook, but players/entities out of portal visibility from your position will disappear (No stranger to this from using LCEffects)

Or even simpler, just give us back all our game variables and devmap/sv_cheats so we can tweak demo playback to our liking and do what we've been doing for the past 5 or so CoD games.

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p.s.
@Treyarch:
1) Give us better timescale controls plz. 0.1 is fine for consoles, but more precision on a platform designed for taking advantage of variables (i.e. PC) would be nice. This is completely overlooking the fact that atm we're pigeonholed to 0.2

2) Why does each ejected shell on the gunmodel split into 2? Fix that :(

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