TF2 How to Record & View TF2 Demos (Windows)

Status
Not open for further replies.

sowon

Valorant
★ Donor ★
Honorary Member ★
Sep 12, 2019
609
318
158
united kingdom
What a lot of players, new ones especially, don't know or are unaware of how to do, is record and view demos inside Team Fortress 2. A demo is a recorded in-game snippet of footage that can be saved to your computer and sent elsewhere so others may view that demo.
Knowing how to record demos is a crucial element to learn, particularly if you require evidence of a cheater, need to review a round of jailbreak that you have played, or if you just want to record yourself pub-stomping.

Start & Stop Recording:

To begin recording a demo, you must enter this into the console - which can be accesed by enabling the developer console in advanced options:
record [demo]
Where [demo] is the name of your recording. e.g eggplant, hacker, aimbot, freekill, pogchamp, etc.

Conversely, to end a recording after you've began a recording, you must enter this into the console:

Finding Your Demo:

To find your recording on your PC, simply go into the following directory using either of these two methods:
  • This PC -> Drive with Steam on it (In this case, my C: Drive) -> Program Files (x86) -> Steam -> Steamapps -> Common -> Team Fortress 2 -> tf
  • Steam Library -> Right Click TF2 -> Properties -> Local Files tab -> Browse Local Files -> tf
You will see your demo's name with .dem suffixed, this is your demo that you have just recorded.

1

Viewing Your Demo:

To view your demo on your PC, go back into the developer console and input the following:
playdemo [demo]
Where [demo] is the name of your recording. e.g eggplant, hacker, aimbot, freekill, pogchamp, etc.

Once your are inside your demo, you'll be headed straight into the demo from the perspective that you recorded it.

Pressing Shift + F2 allows you to bring up this window which allows you to control the demo playback:

2

The playback controls themselves are pretty self-explanatory, but I will explain a few:
  • Load - As implied, loads a selected demo
  • Stop - Stops the current demo playback
  • Resume/Pause - Plays & pauses the demo
  • Goto - Brings the demo to a selected 'tick'
    • A tick is a Source engine nuance which is similar to milliseconds
      • In my demo above, going to Tick 4000 would bring me near the end of the demo
  • Time slider - Adjusts the playback speed
    • Adjusting to 50% makes the speed of the demo 2x slower, 200% makes it 2x faster etc.
Automatically Recording Demos:

If you wish for your game to automatically record every second of your games and/or you'd rather skip manually recording, you may enable 'Auto-Record All Matches' inside the Demo Support tab inside Team Fortress 2's Advanced Options.
Otherwise, leave this on Manual to record demos on your own.

3

Hopefully this guide can assist you and others on how to record demos efficiently so you are able to capture demos for whatever reason you may have. Any questions, leave them below, and of course, share this guide around to those you think may benefit from learning how to record and view demos.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.