You Were Never Here!
Quake 3 Beginners Guide
Demo System
Demos are in-game recordings that can be played back via the game engine, great for nostalgia, studying tactics, watching past matches, sharing with other players, etc.
Recording Demos Online
Connect to the server and open the console
1. Enter /g_synchronousclients 1
2. Enter /record [demo name] (where [demo name] = the name for your demo)
3. Enter /g_synchronousclients 0 (leaving at 1 causes choppiness and lag as the game tries to wait for all clients to be up to date.
4. To stop demo recording enter /stoprecord or exit Quake III.
Playing Back Demos
Select a demo from the demos menu, or use /demo [demo name] in the console.
Demo playback fails if:
The map was not found
A required mod was not found
The Network Protocol version of Quake that saved the demo was different from your current version
The timedemo benchmark
A timedemo is a benchmark to test the speed of your current computer system. In the timedemo process, Quake III plays back a demo recording at the highest speed possible (rendering as many frames per second as possible). At the end of the benchmark, Quake III will show the results in the console. The number to note is the average amount of frames per second (fps) rendered, as this is a pretty solid number for comparison purposes provided that the same demo is ran with identical graphics settings on both machines.
Run a timedemo by entering the following commands in the console:
1. /timedemo 1
2. demo [demo name]
(replace [demo name] with the name of a demo file or select a demo through the demo menu). After running the demo the results will appear in the console. Sometimes you must use the PGUP key to scroll a bit up because the results do not always show up on the last line of the console. Don't forget to set /timedemo 0 after running the demo.