demofixup

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles many developers face throughout their workflows relates to accounting for changes that may end up breaking certain features employed by a small part of the user base. This scenario can be observed in some video games’ speedrunning sessions as well, where an NPC’s badly optimized scripted behavior is used as an exploit to bypass a portion of a chapter before being patched in a future update.

Other times, files such as demo recordings can become incompatible with newer builds of a title, which is where programs the likes of demofixup come into play.

Many players seek to improve their skills through not only frequent practice, but also in-depth analysis of their gameplay style to find out how to increase the efficiency and timing of their actions. While simply recording the game’s window may suffice for most players, the dynamic nature of more complex environments featuring a wide variety of timed obstacles and interactive elements can lead to a number of unexpected results in certain levels, which is why Valve implemented the demo recording at the Source engine level to register snapshots of the game’s state.

With it, users can review gameplay footage rendered in real-time as it unfolded, allowing them to check their movement and series of actions from a third-person point of view. Like many other pieces of software, video games are subjected to similar updates designed to fix bugs or bring new gameplay mechanics designed to augment the overall experience. In the case of Portal 2, a particular entity class by the name of “point_survey” got removed through an update, rendering demos recorded using a prior version unplayable.

The app at hand can be executed with the help of the terminal of your choice by specifying the name of the demo or the directory in which it resides to essentially remove the record of the aforementioned entity from its data-tables section and prevent the newly updated Portal 2 client from displaying an error regarding the now-unidentified type of entity class when trying to replay older demo recordings.

If you happen to have a variety of recordings made prior to Portal 2’s build 8873 release and you wish to avoid jumping through hoops to obtain an older version of the game in order to review them, demofixup may be the right tool for the job, given its fast-paced and straightforward method of fixing the files in question.