A working demo function

I want a working demo function. From what I've heard, the demos in the unreal engine are buggy. Maybe after Uber updates the engine, we'll have working demos? I hate how incredibad the quality with real-time recording is compared what I can do with a demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6dDlqD8r-s

Watch in 1080p to get the full effect.

this would also allow us with not-so-epic computers to record gameplay and render maybe over night, expanding the community even more!
screen recorders are never as good as demo renders and i've seen ppl render TF2 footage at 1080p with 240 fps, it was absolutely amazing and i would love to do that for MNC

Off-topic: setting FOV to max does help you see more but i don't like how the hand models look too stretched so i set mine to a lil higher than default only, not max

I agree with everything Ray said . Also, here's another test video. I think this one looks really nice in 1080p. It looks less natural but the colors are very vibrant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRrnhr56W-Y

How does Demo videos work?

it's like how clients and servers exchange data. it makes a copy of those information into a format that the game can replay exactly everything that happened during a session. therefore it's not as demanding in resources compared to screen recorders (capture every single pixel on the screen) and will not have quality loss if given the time to do high quality renders since it renders all the models instead of pixels on screen)

hopefully that makes sense

Is that the reason that it looks so much nicer than when I actually play TF2?

You'd be even more sad face if you saw what the footage looks like before YouTube re-encodes it. If I ever do a TF2 frag movie, I'll definitely upload a 60 FPS version for download.

But is it just the demo that looks that nice?

technically the renders should have as good quality as in-game (very close)
the reason the videos don't look as nice on Youtube is probably, as Sunny Dove said, Youtube's encoding issues, which i'm not familiar with at all

given enough rendering time a demo should look better than any computer could possibly play the game at

thats what I was hoping...

I play the game maxed out at 1920x1080 at 60 FPS. The demo only looks better / smoother than in-game in the sense that I can create a video from it at any FPS I want (some people even use 480 or 1000 FPS and scale it down later after they do their slow motion work).

And if you're talking about how vibrant the colors are, that's my color correction applied during editing. This is close to what my game actually looks like while playing it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6dDlqD8r-s

maxed out in the in game settings or maxed out via launch options/ini files it can make a big difference

you can get some awesome effects from explosions recorded at 1000fps and played back at 60

I've changed a couple things in .ini's to make the explosions better and maybe one other tweak? Anyway, the game looks great even being as old as it is if you crank up the settings.

Hmm, I could use this for CS:S as well.

and Sunny's match analysis vid made me think that with the demo function, we could actually make extremely in-depth match analysises (<-- if that's a word). being able to replay a certain situation from different perspectives

To get that demos have to be recorded by the server itself

Demo recording was nice in UT2004 as instead of recording video, it recorded actions
Every jump, movement and shot was recorded basically making a script to be replayed later
Was handy for video recording as you could crank up your detail settings for prettier graphics and would allow you to see from not only the players' 1st person view, but also go third and look around the player
Wasn't perfect tho

This is exactly what you can do with Source game demos. If MNC's demo system worked, we could do this as well. You don't need the server to record the demo. You just need your system to write a .dem file during the match (whether that be through console commands or some built-in UI).

I should add that server level demos in 2k4 allowed you to view from anyone's perspective, yours, teammates', enemies, etc

perfect