Header not parsing correctly

[econoraptor]

I'm encountering a bug in this GOTV demo http://www.hltv.org/match/2300904-dollarhouse-rize-nordic-masters-season-2-finals

Header.PlaybackFrames, Header.PlaybackTime, Header.PlaybackTicks, Header.SignonLength are all 0. I tried the dust2 and mirage matches and both had this bug. I also tried another matchup from the same tournament, but didn't encounter the problem, so I don't know how widespread it is.

[econoraptor]

Found some other matches from the same tournament with the same problem, so it's not just an isolated incident.

[Calak]

But you can play demos in cs go ?
And in the demoui in the game, which information get you for the number of ticks , frames, and duration ?

[econoraptor]

Yes, i can play the demo in csgo and everything looks normal on demoui. Ticks and time duration is displayed properly.

[Calak]

And for this demo in particular how much time and ticks?

[econoraptor]

For the Dust2 demo:
Ticks - 507904
Time - 1:06...

I did notice something else though that might be helpful. Right after selecting the demo there's a splash screen. Other demos seem to display the total ticks and time immediately, but this demo doesn't display them properly until the demo is fully loaded.

[moritzuehling]

Has anybody made any progress with this problem? I've seen it now myself "in the wild", and it's pretty annoying.

[Calak]

I did not had time to search about it but if they return 0 for ticks, duration, etc these demos seems to be corrupted.
Maybe make a binary analyses the files to verify the 0 values.

In this case:
On old version of the game engine, corrupted demos can't be read. Maybe recent engine extrapolates these values directly from demo's datas (last in-game tick, etc) and so, complete the demo header.
If I'm right, you have to implement the same process to handle these demos (if these files are really corrupted, maybe I'm wrong)

[moritzuehling]

https://github.com/SteamRE/SteamKit/blob/master/Resources/Protobufs/csgo/netmessages.proto#L245

It's open for grabs now, whoever wants to parse the Server-Message is open to do so :)

[econoraptor]

The bitstream is still a bit magic to me, but I was under the impression these types of messages don't get parsed?

[main--]

@econoraptor We do parse netmessages for several important purposes. We used to use protobuf-net for them, but this turned out to be quite slow - so as of #26 some additional boilerplate code is unfortunately required. I'd recommend using e.g. NETTick (proto - impl) as a template since the general concept is very simple and repetitive.

As you can see, bitstream interaction is limited to just ReadProtobufString() and ReadProtobufVarInt() which are straightforward and do exactly what it says on the tin (and ChunkFinished but if you just copy the basic structure, you don't even need to think about it - unless you want to, of course).

[main--]

@econoraptor That being said, there's obviously the alternative of just using the old SLOW_PROTOBUF mode which is still available (for debug purposes mostly) just like #65 does. You wouldn't have to implement a FastNetmessage then, but do consider that most DemoInfo users would not benefit from this then as our NuGet releases don't enable SLOW_PROTOBUF for performance reasons.

Whatever you choose, we would be happy about any contribution!

[econoraptor]

Ok, I'll take a look and see if I can figure out how to implement it.