City of Heroes Demo Launcher

This program is used to launch demos in City of Heroes. (See this Paragon Wiki article for details on what demos are and how to make them.) While recording demos is really pretty easy, playing them back is a pain. You have to pass in command line parameters to get a demo to play. Few people even know what those are and even fewer want to mess with them. So I made this little program.

Installation

Download the CoH Demo Launcher. Open the zip and put the program somewhere. You can put it anywhere you like, really. (Vista users see the note below. This program does save a configuration file in its directory so, if you run the program from the admininstrator account but the program is actually sitting on another user's desktop, then you'll probably run into trouble.)

If you get a weird error right off the bat, it probably means you don't have the .Net Framework installed. Go get it at Microsoft's site. Vista users should already have this.

Help for this program is still in the works but I tried to make the options as verbose as I could. As you might expect, this program is provided AS IS. Anyone is welcome to use it for any purpose, profitable or not.

VISTA USERS: Yes this program works with Vista. (In fact, I wrote it in Vista!) However, if you normally have to enter your Admin password to run City of Heroes, then you also want to run this program in Admin mode. Instead of double-clicking on the program to run it, right click on the program and select "Run as Administrator." If you don't, you may get some very different graphics settings than what you see in the game. Also, if your rights are not set up correctly in the game directory, you may not be able to dump screenshots.

Demo Launcher 2 is a complete re-write of my old Demo Launcher, which was written way back in CoH beta testing days. I've added quite a few new advanced options as well as a few new options to clean up broken demos.

If you're looking for some demos to get you started, head on out to w00t Stuidios, select the File Depot, then check the Demorecords area. Download what interests you, unzip them, and put them in a folder called client_demos in your game directory. Then run the Launcher, select a demo, and watch it go!

For those really into demos, you might want to check out my Demo Edit program!