How to Create Your Own Demos

How to Create Your Own Demos using Time Travel

Advanced users:

To create a demo using time travel just run ToonTalk with time travel on. This will create a file named time_travel.DMO in the user's folder in the ToonTalk folder in My Documents. The "dmo" file records everything you do (every mouse movement, keyboard click, etc.) Double clicking on the file will start up the demo. You will probably want to copy and rename it. time_travel.DMO can be inspected or altered by unzipping it with any unzip program.

If your demo includes pictures or sounds that you have imported into ToonTalk, they set the IncludeMediaInTimeTravelArchives option to 1 before creating your demo.

Adding subtitles to your demos. When ToonTalk starts running a time travel demo named X it looks for a file named X.ust inside the time_travel.DMO archive. ("ust" is the default extension name for American English subtitles - in general the extension is the two-letter country code followed by 't'.) You can override the default for your computer by providing an "SubtitlesSuffix" entry in the "FileExtensions" section of the ToonTalk.ini file in your Windows directory. A subtitle file is made of entries separated by a blank line. Each entry has the time in milliseconds since the beginning of the demo followed by the text of the subtitle. It is recommended that any lines of text more than 60 characters be broken. The "demos" subdirectory of your ToonTalk installation has many sample subtitle files. One way to obtain the millisecond timings is to press F9 while the demo is playing back. This will record the time in your <user name>.txt log file in the "users" subdirectory.

Adding narration to your demos. When ToonTalk starts running a time travel demo named X it looks for a file named X.spkinside the time_travel.DMO archive. ("spk" is the default extension name for American English narration files - in general the extension is the two-letter country code followed by 'n'.) You can override the default for your computer by providing an "SubtitlesSuffix" entry in the "FileExtensions" section of the ToonTalk.ini file in your Windows directory. To create a narration file you should record segments of the narration (256 is the maximum number) and name them "s01.wav", "s02.wav" and so on. These files should be placed on the main ToonTalk directory while generating the narration file.

To create the narration file (in the "Demos" subdirectory) add '-create_narration 1' or '-create_narration 2' to the command line. A value of 1 changes the meaning of F11 to mean start the next narration segment (the next s<nn>.wav file). A value of 2 means use the start times from the subtitle file. If you want to specify the times when the narration should start but don't want subtitles, then create a temporary subtitle file (where the lines of text could be anything (e.g. "X") and only the start times are important. You can use '-create_narration' together with '-o' or '-I' depending upon whether you want to create the demo and narration at the same time, or to add narration to an existing demo.

Coordinating the subtitles and narration. If you wish to create both narration and subtitles, you can create the subtitles first and use '-create_narration 2' or else you can create the narration first and then run your demo with "-print_narration_start_times 1" which will print the start times of each segment in your <user name>.log in the "Users" subdirectory. You can then use these times while creating your subtitles file.

Tips:

A demo file works for the same resolution as it was recorded. With luck you can record a high-resolution demo and copy it to the low resolution subdirectory and it will work. See the subdirectories of "Demos" in the ToonTalk installation directory for examples.
Avoid using keyboard accelerators for tools (e.g. 'e' to make Dusty erase things). These accelerators differ from language to language so if you use them your demos probably won't work in a different language version of ToonTalk.
If you are creating a demo on a fast computer and expect the demo to be run on slower machines then it is recommended that you add -y 50 (or a similar number) to the command line while recording to slow down your machine.
You can create a video or animation of a demo by creating series of screen snapshots.