Demo UI

Written on October 26th, 2023 by Matthew Earl

Demo UI

JoeQuake features a media player-style interface for navigating demos. Simply move the mouse when a demo is playing to activate the UI.

The interface has the following elements, from bottom-to-top, left-to-right:

  • Pause/play: Click to pause and resume demo playback.
  • Seek bar: Click to seek through time on the current map. Using the mouse wheel in this area jumps back and forward in one second increments. There is a small marker above the seek bar indicating the time when the player finishes the map.
  • Time: Elapsed time and total time (including intermission) for the current map.
  • Speed: Increase and decrease demo playback speed by clicking the arrow controls or by using the mouse wheel in this area.
  • Freefly mode (FF): Toggles between freefly camera and first-person camera mode.
  • Map selector: Shows the current map. On a multi-map (marathon) demo clicking the arrow controls or using the mouse wheel in this area will skip from map to map. Click between the arrows to toggle the map menu.
  • Map menu: Shows all maps in the current demo. Click on a map to skip straight to it. Clicking outside of the demo UI will close the map menu.

Tips and tricks:

  • Clicking outside of the demo UI (when the map menu is closed) will pause or resume demo playback.
  • Leave the mouse still and the UI will disappear after a short wait. The timeout can be changed with cl_demouitimeout and the hiding animation sped up with cl_demouihidespeed.
  • Bind keys to the commands demoskip and demoseek to enable keyboard shortcut navigation. For example, bind demoskip +1 to skip to the next map, or demoseek -5 to seek backwards 5 seconds.
  • Navigate to the end of a marathon demo, pause, and load a ghost to get instant split times between the two demos.
  • Disable the UI with the cl_demoui cvar. demoseek and demoskip commands will still work when the UI is disabled.
  • When in freefly mode, hold the right mouse button to control the camera’s view angle.

Skipping between maps of marathon demos is only currently supported for single file marathons. Demos which consist of multiple individual demo files are not yet supported by the UI.