Anyone who's played with any kind of demo recorder, mainly in the Unreal Engine games like America's Army, UT series, Ravenshield, Splinter Cell, etc, know about Demos and how fun they can be. Not all of them have any instructions or even mention of demo recording but you can still access the unremoved console commands to record and play demos.

Demos allow you to record (sadly only for the host in BF2) all player's movements and actions and re-render them at any speed, angle, perspective, etc afterwards. Sound shittishly boring? Is shittishly even a word? I don't know, but it's not boring. Awfully fun, you can spend hours on this thing without even realizing it.

Create a LAN server on any map or start up a SP game.

Press your tilde(~ or `) and bring down the console.

Type in demo.recordDemo demoname where demoname is the name of the file. Name it whatever. “Demo1”, “Gulf_Demo”, or “Stewed_Rabbit”. Whatever, it's your choice. No spaces though. Spaces are used to separate arguments.

Now for the fun part. Do all those things you're too arsed to do in a real match. Blow shit up, kill yourself, bunny hop with your n00b t00b. Fly loops, try and fit through the damn Kubra holes, etc, etc.

When you're done, open the console again and type in demo.stoprecording

Note: Unlike the Unreal Engine demos, leaving a game in progress with a demo recording session will not save the demo, but instead leave the demo unplayable. Stop recording first, before leaving the match.

There are two ways to play your demo;

If you want to play them through your Community tab you have to move the demo files from ..\EA Games\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\Demos\ to ..\My Documents\Battlefield 2\Profiles\Default\demos\ and then you can play them in game.

It's a bit of a hassle to play them outside becuase you have to restart BF2 each time you play a different demo, but you needn't move any files.

First you have to make two batch files. I'd put the text here but it'll make this seem long and confusing (like it isn't already) so http://www.tweakguides.com/files/BF2DemoPlayer.zip. (Kudos for TweakGuides.com for these files)

Extract them to your raw BF2 directory and run either one.

One is loaded with instructions and you must open it in the command prompt to check them out, it's the only way to record, save video definition files, etc, stuff you can't do while normally playing it back through the community tab.

The other file is an auto-player for your basic needs. The upside of these are that you are loaded with extra options and needn't move any files (if you're one of those people who are very very afraid to move anything out of its place). However the disadvantage is that you have to start the game just to play it and when you're done the game quits. Not much of a nuisance if you're a fast loader, and it's definitely worth the extra options.

There are really only two keys you need to know for the replay mode. Q and T. They're both commo-roses like the squad/command/spotted ingame versions, but the Q button controls the speed, play and pause, while T controls views. The “T” menu can be bypassed by using the space or right-click mouse button to achieve the same effects.

So now you have your hot shot? Jumping out planes? Trick jumping to new spots? Mad jet skills? Great, no one else is going to see it till you export it!

First, you can just send the demo files out. They are small, convenient, and anyone with the game can just pop them in. However, demo files will be everything you did, they can't be rewound, and lack a lot of editing precision from option 2.

Second option: Make a movie. In order to make a movie you will need to… ::HELP:: need to finish this section No time for me :P but someone add something about using cam-def files. that solves one of your problems. :P (psst chuy shouldn't we be using the forum?)