DoD Studio

Tooling for Day of Defeat 1.3 (GoldSrc) demo files: parsing them for match analytics, and driving the engine plus HLAE to batch-record highlight clips.

A creative fork of cgdangelo/dod-studio.

---

Component status

The two halves of this repository are at very different levels of maturity. Read this before judging the codebase by whichever part you happen to open.

Area	Status	Notes
dod/ — DoD 1.3 message parsers	Stable	Hand-written parsers for the mod's user messages. No public library covers this layer.
analysis/ — match analytics	Stable	Players, scoreboard, kills, rounds, chat, survival times. Recently validated across 624 demos; derived kill counts reconcile exactly with the game server's own frag counter for ~75% of players and within one kill for ~90%.
dem-patch/ — demo reader/writer	Stable	Vendored fork of the dem crate. See Why the fork below.
hl-demo-auditor/ — duplicate finder	Stable	Small, self-contained.
native/ — capture engine & patcher	Active development	Works, but rough edges. Under near-continuous change.
studio/ — Tauri UI	Active development	Capture Studio and Render Studio are functional but not polished. Expect UI inconsistencies and in-flight refactors.
web-analyzer/ — browser demo viewer	Active development	analysis/ compiled to wasm, deployed to GitHub Pages on every push to main.

If you are here to look at demo parsing or stats extraction, dod/ and analysis/ are the parts to read, and they are the parts you can rely on. The capture and render pipeline is a frag-movie workflow and is unrelated.

Note

The GUI was rewritten. Earlier revisions shipped an egui desktop app with a WebAssembly target. That has been removed. The current frontend is Tauri v2 + Vite under studio/, and the old dod-studio-gui binary and trunk serve workflow no longer exist.

---

Workspace layout

dod/              nom-based parsers for DoD 1.3 network messages (no I/O)
analysis/         match analytics built on top of dod/
dem-patch/        vendored + patched `dem` crate (GoldSrc demo read/write)
native/           capture engine, demo patcher, take management, FFmpeg
hl-demo-auditor/  duplicate-demo detector
benchmark/        parsing/patching performance harness
studio/   Tauri v2 + Vite frontend
web-analyzer/     analysis/ compiled to wasm, browser-based demo viewer

Quick start

Analyse a demo and print match analytics:

cargo run -p analysis --bin parse_demo -- path/to/demo.dem

Headless preview CLI (accepts a demo or a folder):

cargo run -p native --bin preview_cli -- path/to/demo-or-folder

Desktop app:

cd studio
npm install
npm run tauri dev

Tests:

cargo test --workspace

Localization keys

Tokens are stored bare — lowercase, no #. The # is a lookup-time sigil meaning "resolve this as a token", not part of the name, which is Valve's own convention: every shipped game file stores keys without it. translate_key normalizes on both insert and lookup, so a file written either way resolves.

Why the fork of dem

dem-patch/ is dem v0.2.3 with the parse path hardened. Upstream resolves delta-decoder tables with .unwrap() in seven files; when a demo does not carry the expected delta-description table, that is a panic rather than a parse error, which kills the whole process mid-batch. The fork falls back to the library's built-in initial delta table where one exists and returns a graceful parse failure otherwise. As of upstream v0.3.0 all 29 of those call sites are still present, so the patch is still required.

Licensing

This project is MIT (see LICENSE), which carries two copyright lines. Charles D'Angelo's is from cgdangelo/dod-studio, which this is a fork of — MIT requires that notice be retained, so it stays. The second covers the work done here since the fork.

One directory is not MIT: dem-patch/ is LGPL-3.0. It is a vendored fork of upstream dem and keeps upstream's terms; dem-patch/LICENSE is the authority for that directory.

Because dem-patch/ is linked into every binary this workspace builds, anyone redistributing those binaries is redistributing LGPL-3.0 code and takes on that licence's obligations for the library portion -- principally the requirement that recipients be able to relink against a modified version of it. The MIT licence at the repository root does not override that, and is not intended to suggest otherwise.

Local modifications to dem-patch/ are described under Why the fork of dem above and are themselves LGPL-3.0, being changes to an LGPL work.

Documentation

Engineering notes live in docs/ — architecture decisions, GoldSrc and DoD engine quirks, HLAE protocol constraints, and a running bug log.