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There are two problems when playing a demo:
- you cannot pause
- you cannot rewind

Setting cl_freezedemo to 1 is only freezing the image on the screen, the demo continues to play, so when you unfreeze it (by setting to 0) you can see the timer increased accordingly. I don't understand what's the point of having this "cl_freezedemo" setting, if this is the intended functionality. How exactly is it useful?

The minimum setting for the timescale seems to be 0.1. Would it be possible to freeze the demo when setting the timescale to 0?
I think this would be more difficult, but still: How hard would it be to allow setting the timescale to a negative value for rewinding a playing demo?

Thanks!

I think you can't consider demos like videos.

I haven't used cl_freezedemo so I don't know how it could be used. Could be that was an attempt to make something useful, but is not :D

As for the rewind, I imagine playing a demo is reproducing the events contained in your demo file, and letting the engine doing its work. That means : the engine can shoot a rocket right in front of you, but it can't make it go back.
What you're asking for is more a "post production" job, I mean, you should use some video editing tools to make pauses and rewind and such ;)

Edit: and oh, maybe i'm all wrong :P (and you still are right demo playback could be improved, for some kind of rewind maybe without producing video while rewinding for expl)

Thanks, but you did not answer any of my questions, as far as I can tell. :-P

He gave a long answer to this: How hard would it be to allow setting the timescale to a negative value for rewinding a playing demo?

The short answer: Very hard

Then the idea mentioned by Cacatoes of creating a video which you can then rewind seems to be the only option.

Any idea about pausing a demo? Some more info: I noticed when you set a very low value for timescale, you get "connection interrupted" printed on the screen, sometimes flickering, so I guess "timescale 0" would have the same effect as "cl_freezedemo 1" currently has.

Thanks.