Melon
Member
Posts: 295
Registered: 02-10 |
The title says it all really, if I were to start up a site to maintain records for a small number of popular Doom pwads, would you be interested? If you think I should not care what you think and go ahead and do it anyway, let me propose a different question: are there any particular features you would want from it?
Let me explain what I have in mind by preempting a few questions:
Is this a C-N replacement or something else?
Something else. I am calling this a "C-N-like" because it would follow a similar format while being something else entirely. The aim is to have a place where people can compete under a specific and consistent rule-set/basis for a world record. The only submissions accepted would be ones that beat the current best submission, rather than something like P-DANG where anybody can submit a demo and they earn points based on how good it is. There would likely be a "number of world records held" leaderboard but that would be it as far as "points" are concerned. I think it's better to put the focus on individual records.
What wads were you thinking of including?
By "modern" wads I actually mean wads that aren't already covered by C-N (there's no point in re-inventing the wheel for those wads). In practice I would likely aim for a mixture of old and new wads e.g. Scythe, Speed of Doom, PRCP, etc. but I imagine it would be down to community consensus. Instead of competing under a large range of wads, I'd prefer to keep it constrained to a small number of wads at a time, introducing new wads at a rate of 2 or so per year to give people time to focus on a particular wad.
What demo categories are you thinking of including?
I want to try and avoid including too many categories if possible because it might stretch the competition too thin, and we all only have so much time to play so there's no point in including a billion categories. I am planning to include UV-Speed, UV-Max, -fast, Nightmare, Pacifist and Tyson (all of these for per level, per episode and full wad movies) as I think these have enough interesting differences between them to be worthwhile. Would there be enough support for -respawn and NM-100%Secrets as well? I don't know about co-op categories, I don't think there are enough people willing or capable to do them to be worthwhile. I'm happy to include anything with enough support.
What would the rules be? What source port will be used?
The current modern standard for speedrunning is PrBoom+/GLBoom+ so that makes the most sense to use. Just like everybody tends to do here anyway when recording demos, each wad would be recorded under a specific complevel depending on what the wad was designed for. The SR-50 options would be banned, as would mouselook (looking up and down), but I'm not bothered about other conveniences the port allows such as monster kill counts, alternate HUD, transparent automap and gamma correction raising the lighting level in GLBoom+. I would allow these mainly because it's too hard to prove if they were used or not, and also because having monster kill counts available removes a bit of frustration from failed attempts due to wandering monsters.
How would you prevent cheating?
This is where it gets tricky. I believe that the best way to prevent cheating is to try and promote a friendly and close-knit atmosphere as much as possible. My current thought was to have the submission process be attaching your demo to a post in a dedicated thread in this forum if that's OK. This is for two reasons, one is because you're all registered here anyway, but also because such an openly public and community-oriented submission method would hopefully help quash some thoughts about cheating. Aside from that, I'm planning to watch all of the demos looking for suspicious behaviour, but I may need some help for "second opinions" if necessary. I'm aware that I'm not the most experienced person when it comes to this, so maybe this is a sticking point? There will always be the danger of people submitting subtly tool-assisted demos regardless of what methods were put in place and going to sophisticated lengths might just provide more incentive to try and get around the rules, so an honour system might just end up being the best anyway.
Would you accept old demos recorded before the site began?
Yes, provided that they happened to be recorded under the same rule-set as those being used for the site. You would also need to resubmit them yourself, I will under no circumstances go through DSDA and pick up old demos myself, if you were worried about that. I imagine many old demos would likely be obsoleted by a new record pretty soon anyway. On a similar note, "records" in this case will only be compared to other demos specifically submitted to the site, so even if there is a faster demo on DSDA, your submission only needs to beat the previous best submission for my site.
Are you aware that this is going to be a hell of a lot of work?
I am aware that this will be a lot of work, and as always happens my highest estimate will probably fall short. What I should probably do is get all of the backend preparation up and running and then see how I feel about it after that (and finish that map for the progressive fiction community wad first).
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11-12-11 16:27 
