Playing & Recording Demos

Being able to record demos in games such as Unreal Tournament has many
advantages - Major Tournament finals can be captured and made available
for download on the 'net, entire movies can be scripted and shot and
"Speed Runs" and "Timedemos" can be created by members of the community
to show off their skills and provide a benchmark for Unreal Tournament
performance. Support for all this has been available in Unreal
Tournament from the word 'go', and is about to be expanded further by
the ability to loop demos continuously (perfect for Trade Shows and
in-store demonstrations), this feature being included in the upcoming
Unreal Tournament 406 patch.

Unreal Tournament provides the ability to record demos both on the
client side, when playing with both humans or bots - recorded from the
point of view of the player; and on the server side, recording a demo of
every event in the game - allowing the playback to be from any position
or point of view on the map. Demos you record are stored as .dem files
in your Unreal Tournament /System/ directory, and whilst they are quite
large "raw", they can be compressed with WinZip or other compression
program into somewhat smaller files for distribution.

Recording

To begin recording a demo whilst in a match, bring down the Console with
the ~ key or press Tab for the Quick Console and type in:

demorec filename

with filename being the name of the file to which you wish the
demo to be saved. Recording will begin immediately will cease
automatically upon the end of a match or change of level, and can also
be stopped by issuing the stopdemo command.

Playback

When playing a demo back, there are several options you can choose to as
to how you want to do so. The programmer responsible for Unreal
Tournament's demo support, Jack Porter explains the options and the
syntax you need to use them as follows:

demoplay filename?option1?option2?option3

Any of these playback options can be specified:

3rdperson - Plays a [client side recorded] demo back in spectator mode.
timebased - Synchronize demo playback to time rather than frames.
noframecap - Don't limit the framerate on playback to that of the
recording. loop - Added in [UT] 406 to make the playback start again.

When "timedemo 1" is active, noframecap is automatically enabled, like
it is when playing back a Quake timedemo.  The only way to stop it
returning to the entry level is to use the loop option, which I've just
added for 406.

To play a demo back normally with none of the advanced options, simply
enter demoplay filename in the console, where filename is the name of
the demo file residing in your UT /System/ directory which you wish to
play.