The extensive 9L Natural Selection demo archive
This is the nineLegends demo information page, with information about the demos we have available for download. Our goal was to create the largest and best organized downloadable NS demo archive on the Internet and we’ve succeded. This is an ongoing effort however, one we’ll probably never be completely finished with. There’s a lot more demos out there, just waiting to be catalogued and uploaded. In order to complete our archive as much as possible, for the good of the community, we’re going to need YOUR help. If you have any competitive match demos stored, any at all, from any version of NS — the older the better — that you can’t find in our archive, please drop me a line and I’ll give you instructions on how to upload them.
With demos ranging from version 1.04 up until the current version of NS, our demo archive is a great resource for anyone wanting to watch skilled players in action or just see how NS used to be played all those years back. It’s also an excellent way for movie makers to find frags for their movies, as a lot of these demos aren’t available anywhere else and have never been used in a fragmovie before.
The file formatting
One part of our archive that I’m especially proud of, is the consistent organizing of all the demo files, which makes it very easy to find the demo you’re looking for, as well as giving easy access to information about the match and vital information about version numbers, for example. The format is quite simple, but a quick explanation could be helpful to some, so here goes:
All the demos are stored in .rar files, with maximum compression settings, which reduce the size of the demos by as much as 3/4ths, making both storage, uploading and downloading a lot easier. Each .rar file contains all the demos available for a certain match, in chronological order. A .rar of a match that went over two maps, might contain four demos, one demo for each side played. In that case the demos will be named demo1, demo2, demo3, demo4. This standard is strictly followed, as it makes it a lot easier to remember the name of the demo when you have to type it ingame to get it to play. In addition to the demo files themselves, each .rar contains a details.txt file, with detailed information about the match. Some contain a lot of information, while others contain less information. Writing these details.txt files can be very time consuming, so it’s pretty much impossible for me to add totally detailed information to each one, but I’ve tried my best to include as much as possible in as many .rars as possible — and I’m proud of the result. If you want to help out adding more detailed descriptions for even just a couple of matches, I’d be very interested in talking to you.
The naming of the .rars themselves, also follows a very strict format, to make them easy to list chronologically as well as display vital information in a neat and functional manner. The specific format is: year-month-day_team1_vs_team2_pointofview_version.rar. Therefore the ClanBase Opencup Fall 03 final between Fek’lyrs and Torment, played on the 21st of December 2003, which is a HLTV recording on version 2.0 of Natural Selection, .rar would be named like this: 03-12-21_fek_vs_torment_hltv_20.rar
Demo playback instructions
To play back a demo, you need to place it in your NS folder, open up NS and type either “viewdemo demoname” or “playdemo demoname” in the console. Viewdemo gives you more control over demo playback — such as fast forward, pause and the ability to jump from location to location in the demo timeframe — but may result in poor playback performance on slow computers. Playdemo will simply play the demo from beginning to end at normal speed. Viewdemo may not work at all on demos that were not recorded on the Steam platform.
Pay attention to which version the demo is recorded in — stated in both file names and details.txt for each demo — as demos will only play correctly in the version they were recorded in. Attempting to play a demo in the wrong version of NS may result in bugs or even failure to play the demo at all. Demos recorded in 1.04 and 2.0 are unfortunately unplayable in Steam, so you need to install Half-Life the oldschool way to watch oldschool NS. You can download old versions of NS from the nineLegends.com Files page. You might also need a few custom maps that have been widely used in competitive games.
So where can I download these demos damnit?!
You can browse through all the demos by clicking this link.
Enjoy!