[Jesse]

"Hey there. Apologies for the late response. I'll admit it, I read this email and completely forgot about responding. *sigh*

Aaaaanyway....to be honest the issue was a month ago so the details are a bit fuzzy in my head, but I believe the first issue was I didn't have the map uploaded to the server (I think it was a workshop map). After I got that resolved I realized there was an SSL certificate issue with YouTube that was occurring that was preventing the uploading of the video. I was able to resolve it in the end, so that's always good.

I do have a confession though: you're one of the very few people who have *ever* used igmdb to render a CSS demo. A while back I put a fair amount of effort into getting CS, CSS, and CSGO support into the renderer, but I wasn't able to get enough traction in those respective communities to get people to use the service much. And yeah, as you might have also noticed, the config of the game needs a bit of work (in addition to the POV changes you mentioned). Things like having a crosshair, etc should be in there, but I kinda ran out of steam when it came to adding the needed polish. Also, I'm not a huge CS player so I don't really know the best config settings like I do in QuakeLive and TF2.

Rright now if a SourceTV demo is uploaded then the POV is set to automatically change every so often as you noted. This was done primarily because that's what I did in TF2 - in TF2 if you don't click the mouse during playback then you'll always be looking at the same position through the entire SourceTV playback, which is typically at the ground or into the sky. I guess it is different in CSS? I can disable the POV autorotation if you think it would be better. You sound like you've played much more than I have so I'll take any recommendations. Remember though, the entire demo recording is done without any interaction so any changes to POVs, etc must all be scripted and run automatically.

I actually wrote a proof-of-concept a while back which allowed you to enter in someone's name and they would be followed during the playback (literally just how you explained it) however it is extremely error-prone. A single spelling mistake would cause the wrong person to be followed or no one to be followed at all. The end result was a demo you didn't want to watch and was very unsatisfying. I also thought of giving the demo submitter the chance to pick a player number, but most people don't know the clientIds within the demo, so that presents another issue. The last thing I was working on was actually trying to preparse the demo and extract all the player names and clientIds, and then presenting those names and having the user pick one. Parsing the demo proved to be a bit more complex than I had planned on so I didn't make much progress there, however that is probably the most promising way moving forward...

To answer your question about the really old demo: I investigated it and the engine was reporting this:
ERROR: demo network protocol 7 outdated, engine version is 24
Failed to read demo header.
Are you able to play this demo on your own computer? I could investigate it if I knew it worked somewhere else.

Crypto donations...funny that you mention that. I've recently started doing some collecting of Monero and RaiBlocks. So yeah, I guess I do take crypto-donations. What coin did you want to donate with?

I appreciate getting emails like this. It's always good to know the work I've done (and still doing) is appreciated by players. We recently surpassed 20,000 demos rendered. Dang."