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Grazza

Compet-N: incoming and discussion, part 1 [please post in part 2 instead]

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xit-vono said:

I suppose plutonia needs some -respawns as well.

I hear you. Here is the first -respawn entry for MAP14 (Genesis). This is my first Plutonia demo in about 8-9 years. =)

Edit: just after I posted that first exit, I saw how this map should be played (i.e. stx-Vile's UV Max run), which resulted in the second entry. If you haven't seen the first one, you didn't miss much; go straight to the second. ;)

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I finally managed to do my long attempted TNT ep.1 max run.
http://competn.doom2.net/incoming/compet-n/5445ev01.zip

Really happy I did it, it was on my to-do list for too long now. Check the .txt for more info about it if you like reading this sort of stuff. :)
This year has been great for TNT stuff so far, let's keep it up. :D
I'll start working on another max movie, but dunno yet if it will be ep.2, ep.1 -fast or some different wad.
Anyway, I hope you'll like this demo. :)

And Never_Again, where's the ep.3 max? :P

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DeDo said:

I finally managed to do my long attempted TNT ep.1 max run.
http://competn.doom2.net/incoming/compet-n/5445ev01.zip


My congratulations. I'm going to watch the demo asap.

DeDo said:

I'll start working on another max movie, but dunno yet if it will be ep.2, ep.1 -fast or some different wad.


It's would be great to see these episodes on -fast but I'm guess they are too hard to beat in max stile. Especially the second one. Fast and complete teleportation of the -fast monsters is the real problem on some levels.

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DeDo said:

I finally managed to do my long attempted TNT ep.1 max run.
http://competn.doom2.net/incoming/compet-n/5445ev01.zip

Cool! I'll watch it soon.

In the meanwhile, two days after I posted my UV -respawn for Community Chest 3 MAP27 in the Community Chest thread, another level that has gone a long time without a UV -respawn entry now has one, this time on the PWAD side. Coinciding with my newest DM2GM2 demos in the misc. demos thread, there is now a 2:42 UV -respawn demo for Memento Mori MAP11: Halls of Insanity. Enjoy my first "true" Compet-N run ever!

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Nice one Herring. I wanted to max that that map once but couldn't figure out how to approach the not pssible to get 100% thing so I left it alone in the end.

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Cool to see people filling some respawn holes. Btw, pn13 is not misnamed because it's the nightmare speed record as well as the nightmare secrets record (The only secret on the map is a soulsphere which is very useful for surviving the rest of the map)

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DeDo said:

I finally managed to do my long attempted TNT ep.1 max run.
http://competn.doom2.net/incoming/compet-n/5445ev01.zip

Congratulations on the completion of this project, DeDo! Nice to see the time brought down below one hour.

A very solid-looking run, and your movements are very smooth (is that because of low mouse sensitivity?), so your demo is more pleasant to watch than mine (watching my own demos is usually a hurtful process ;). I noticed that you don't use strafe-50 at all, though. You should try setting it up; it's fairly easy to learn. There plenty of long stretches on TNT levels where you basically have to run in a straight line, and strafe-50 can really save some time there. Not to mention a few shortcuts.

Here are some observations that you may find useful for your next run, be it -fast or plain UV Max.

MAP01: Tysoning here can be a hit-and-miss affair (unless your name starts with an X :); I found that switching to the shotgun as soon as possible is more efficient. Some time can be saved by backing onto the Blue Key while facing and unloading buckshot into the Chainees (I think stx-Vile was first to do it). In the exit room the most efficient weapon is the chaingun: you get as close to the Imps as you can and keep spraying the Chaingunners - the Imps provide a cover, and get into the crossfire between you and the Chaingunners. The shotgun's reloading time slows you down too much here.

MAP02: dealing with the Demons before the jump is a solid approach and is very safe, but I prefer not to release them too early to leave (most of) them for later for the SSG (which you do with the first three Specters). Even if they botch your jump to the stairs, you can restart the run - you have wasted two and a half minutes at most.
The trip to the Medikit in the start area is a waste of time, it's only useful on NM! - you have two Soulspheres and two other Medikits ahead, after all.
Missing the jump to the Blue Armor secret still happens to me occasionally. It spoils things enough for me to restart the run (still only four minutes wasted). Generally, you should have no trouble strafing back to the exit.
Last, you can strafe-50 from the second Supercharge back on the ledge pretty easily after a little practice. Even the regular strafe-40 will do, but that's not reliable. Time saved not having to run back to the Yellow Key door makes learning strafe-50 a good idea.
All this considered, your time is surprisingly good; but I think 4:00-4:10 is well within you reach. :)

MAP03: the time is great, not much to improve here. I'd use more rox on the Mancubuses, and I prefer to deal with the inhabitants of the two mini-bunkers in the open area from the entrance to that area, at a distance, rather than running around later (but that may be a matter of taste). Here the demo desynced for me, and I noticed that it was recorded with TNT.WAD as a pWAD. Really, you should record with the Final DOOM exec.

MAP04: it's annoying how you never manage to get that Chaingunner behind the Rocket Launcher with the first blast, isn't it? ;P The Specters or the Imps always seem to get in the way, like they're his bodyguards or something, heheh.
I was very surprised at your choice of route, I don't think I'd seen it before. So much running around, just not to have to deal with the Lost Soul pack? Or did you want to get rid of the Archie first thing? I think a more traditional, linear approach would be faster; plus the dumb Skeleton triggered those computer panels for you and released the Skulls anyway. :D
Still, the time is good, weird route or not. More rox could be spent on the Mancubuses, but being an inveterate ammo hoarder myself, I can understand wanting to save the rockets for later. They come in handy in the cell block on MAP07.

MAP05: I prefer to use the shotgun from the start up to the Blue Key room. The monstars are spread pretty thin early on, so reloading times don't matter; and the shotgun is good on Imps at close range.
In the Blue Key room some time is wasted on grabbing Medikits, which I think is the retribution for taking the Supercharge too early on the previous level (weird route, that ;). For the first time, I saw the signs of uncertainty in the Supercharge chamber. Yeah, the infight between the Barons and Revenants didn't work out too well. I prefer to immediately run from the Supercharge and quickly blast the Skeletons with a couple of rox; then, depending on the mood, either retreat into the twisting corridor, or manuever between the marble pillars and the Barons.
An the end, you can spare four-five rox on the Barons. That will speed up thing a bit without hurting your ammo balance too much. I usually get around 4:50 on this map, so your disappointment with 5:43 here is understandable.

MAP06: one of the best looking TNT levels, with the absolutely fantastic, mind-blowing music. This track begs for a 10min-long trance cover!
I see you took an aggressive approach at the start, no doubt wishing to make up for the previous map. There is little risk in it, as the map is probably the easiest in the first episode: there are no tricks, ambushes or really tight spots. You don't need to drop down from the walkway after grabbing the Yellow Key, though. I usually approach the YK with the rocket launcher ready, and quickly blast the Chaingunner then the first two Cacodemons.
Strafe-50 seriously speeds up this level, BTW. Also of note is the balcony leading to the Blue Key - you can wallrun there. Doesn't really save time, but never fails to cheer me up for some reason. =)
Lastly, if you blast the Archie quickly enough, you can jump onto the exit lift before it goes up, saving a few seconds. Still, the time is good!

MAP07: I agree with your definition of "the ultimate champion of 99% kills in the first episode", this map certainly can be frustrating in this respect. Just the other day I had 99% kills here for the first time in months. Still, I believe the amount of backtracking you did is a bit excessive.
After teleporting out into the open, I run around the building killing everything, then teleport back, usually telefragging anything that may have sneaked in. When done quickly and efficiently, it only needs to be done once. Then you must slow down when teleporting back to the start area; dropping down from the teleport pad wastes time.
You can even dispense with the running back and teleporting altogether, though the doubts will keep gnawing at the back of your mind until the tally screen then, of course. =)

Overall, I think this level can be improved by at least 30-40 seconds easily enough. The best part was telefragging the Mancubus - that never happened to me!

MAP08: The toughest thing for me on this level is making it onto the first rising platform in the huge final chamber, I am a clumsy mofo and never been good with jumps and stuff. I don't think you have to worry about 100% kills here, though; despite the level's size it is pretty liner and tight. It's a good idea to postpone dealing with the baddies on the ledges until activating the second platform - it takes a while to raise it, and if you killed them already, you find yourself with nothing to do.
I usually get about 30 seconds less here.

MAP09: what a nice, relaxing massacre, eh? Have you you tried this map on NM!? :P Pure adrenaline. I agree that the first part was played too cautiously, but the time was not bad at all in the end.

MAP10: played well, I see no reason to complain here, the time is good.

Overall, a nice solid movie. I think you can get closer to the 50:00 mark next time. The long TXT file is a bonus for me, as well.

DeDo said:

And Never_Again, where's the ep.3 max? :P

It's still on the cards. I just got sidetracked a bit with Plutonia -respawns, they turned out to be immensely fun. Now that I plugged up a couple of gaps in PRxxxxxx tables, I'll resume the third episode sessions.

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Eugene said:

It's would be great to see these (i.e. TNT - N_A)episodes on -fast but I'm guess they are too hard to beat in max stile. Especially the second one. Fast and complete teleportation of the -fast monsters is the real problem on some levels.

I think once you've done them on UV Max, GM looks much more doable. I would have done the first episode (which I know best) on -fast long ago, but I want to finish the third episode max run first.

The Green Herring said:

In the meanwhile, two days after I posted my UV -respawn for Community Chest 3 MAP27 in the Community Chest thread, another level that has gone a long time without a UV -respawn entry now has one, this time on the PWAD side. Coinciding with my newest DM2GM2 demos in the misc. demos thread, there is now a 2:42 UV -respawn demo for Memento Mori MAP11: Halls of Insanity. Enjoy my first "true" Compet-N run ever!


An excellent first entry, TGH, congrats! The perfect score (100% on -respawn) is a nice touch. As for the text file, I should have known you were Aquarius when I saw your .txt for that Academy run. =) (Our birthdays are one day apart, BTW). Watching the demo after reading that TXT is almost redundant, hehe. Good job on both counts!

xit-vono said:

I got some more plutonia demos in incoming now. They should be pretty entertaining.


And of course I've watched all at least twice already. I wouldn't say "entertaining" is the right word, though; "intimidating" would more like it. :D I just did -respawn on PL14 myself, and the comparison with your NM! run is not in its favor (mildly speaking). Yours are usually the demos that make me reach automatically for the replay button, 'cause they zap by too quick for me to catch everything on the first view.
Have you tried stx-Viles YK grab here, BTW? Do you think under 30 sec would be optimal here?
Your Pacifist improvement on TNT01 was a surprise; mr. twister's 0:35 looked so close to optimal already. I think we'll have to remind that last Imp about the three strikes law, his behavior is absolutely disgraceful, lol.
I see EV27xxxx turned into a real race. The demo analysis of it and Eugene's last attempt shows that you strafed left %9 more and backed down 1% less. Amazing how you managed to get 2:00 after bumping into that Caco at the end. Otherwise could have been under 2 minutes, huh?

xit-vono said:

Btw, pn13 is not misnamed because it's the nightmare speed record as well as the nightmare secrets record (The only secret on the map is a soulsphere which is very useful for surviving the rest of the map)

Well, I believe that if a demo qualifies for two categories, it should go into the one that is of higher difficulty level. NM100S is inherently more difficult than NM Speed, so pn13-116 should have been labeled as NM100S. If the quickest way through a map was one through the secret area(s), I could understand that NM100S would be unnecessary for that map. However, this is not the case with PL13.
True, all existing NM records on this map involved grabbing the Soulsphere (even though the secret didn't register in Vince's demo). However, theoretically it's possible that one day somebody will finish this map on NM in 1:15 (or quicker) while skipping the Soulsphere. What then? He would appear to beat your record, but that's just plain wrong, because his would a pure NM, and yours is NM100S. So nobody should be allowed to beat your record without getting the Soulsphere and thus 100% secrets. Which is why your demo must be in the NM100S category, where it really belongs.
There are a few other such mislabeled demos in the db, and I fully intend going through it one by one and sort this out. =)

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Eugene said:


Thank you, Eugene, the more the merrier. A nice map selection, too; I love MM02 in particular. A NM! demo is always fun to watch, so mm02n148 is a double whammy for me. =)

Eugene said:

My contribution to the recent burst up of activity.

A burst indeed, as far as IWADs go: we have 22 demos just six weeks into '08 whereas the whole of last year produced only 14. OTOH, 2007 saw 83 PWAD demos posted to the seven this year.

I have updated the Compet-N /incoming guide with the latest IWAD results and marked them with asterisks so that they are easier to find. The PWADs will probably need a full day at least set aside to sort through, sorry. :\

Edit: forgot to mention my own latest demo - Plutonia MAP16 -respawn (first ever). For three or four days I almost despaired of pulling it off, then saw the Yellow Key trick and am quite happy with the result. :D

Edit2: that's 10,000+ chars' worth of post from me today in this thread. I probably should get a job doing this. :P

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Wow, thanks for the review, it's a pleasant surprise.
A few things. Actually, my sensitivity is 39, I play in Dosbox now. A few years back when I still had win98 installed I used 12 or 15, can't remember anymore.
It's funny you say you like my movements in the demo and you don't like to watch yours because it's the same for me except the other way around.:D
The reason I didn't use Final Dooms Doom2.exe is pretty much force of habit. All my TNT/Plutonia demos are with them loaded as pwads. And partially the fact that I have everything configured for plain doom2.exe. Sensitivity, autorun, strafe50(which I never really use while recording. I only ever used it for experiments and learning how to do it). I admit I was too lazy to do the same for Final Doom.

Map04:
As for my route, I think it's similar to the route I used in my -fast demo for the map. If not then I somehow came up with it while playing it a lot in the past or I saw it in a demo. Maybe both. Don't really remember but I always play that map this way now. As for the skulls, it's not often that they get released, just had that bad luck now.
And yeah, I try to save rockets for later, that's one reason why I try to force the Baron/Revenant fight on map05 but which is not reliable for me unfortunately.

Map06:
I agree, great music here, it's really a shame that map06 is the only map it plays on. I managed to kill the Archie and catch the lift at the same time only a few times, altough he usually won't last as long as this time.

Map07:
The backtracking on map07 was a bit overkill but I really didn't want another 99% here. But I think I'm getting better at avoiding that without that much backtracking. The Mancubus telefrag was really surprising, this was the first tiem it happened to me.

Map08:
Hehe yeah, the first rising platform can be a pain. Either I fall off or I miss it entirely. I learned to live with it by now hehe.

Map10:
I'm used to times around 3:10-3:30 at the most on map10 so this one was a dissapointment really.

Thanks for liking the movie, I'll play around with your suggestions and see what I can do with it later. Right now I'm considering whether to try to do an ep.1 movie for AV or start ep.2 on TNT.
Good to hear that ep.3 is work in progress, I'm looking really forward to seing that. Good luck! :)

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Never_Again said:
Well, I believe that if a demo qualifies for two categories, it should go into the one that is of higher difficulty level. NM100S is inherently more difficult than NM Speed, so pn13-116 should have been labeled as NM100S.

Either way with an update it would end up in both directories, each ZIP and demo named correspondingly.

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DeDo said:

The reason I didn't use Final Dooms Doom2.exe is pretty much force of habit. All my TNT/Plutonia demos are with them loaded as pwads. And partially the fact that I have everything configured for plain doom2.exe. Sensitivity, autorun, strafe50(which I never really use while recording. I only ever used it for experiments and learning how to do it). I admit I was too lazy to do the same for Final Doom.

All you have to do is copy DEFAULT.CFG from your DOOM2 dir to your TNT dir and change joyb_speed from 31 to 29 and you got exactly the same setup.

DeDo said:

Right now I'm considering whether to try to do an ep.1 movie for AV or start ep.2 on TNT.

I'd rather see something that hasn't been done before, but considering my dislike of own demos (the recent TNT21 UV Max is one of the few of my runs I can watch without wincing in pain every few seconds), I wouldn't mind seeing TNT ep2 from a different perspective. =)

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Never_Again said:

Thank you, Eugene, the more the merrier. A nice map selection, too; I love MM02 in particular. A NM! demo is always fun to watch, so mm02n148 is a double whammy for me. =)


I'm like MM02 too). Really nothing to watch in my recent demos though.

I'm expecting to watch any your future Evilution's movies. Good luck with the full max demo.

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ET31 is an impressive first. Pharaoh is one of the best looking official levels, and this magistral opus of a demo does it full justice.
It's interesting to occasionally chasecam away to see how the Archie and Cyber conference proceeds. It ended sooner than I expected. =)
The critical moment, IMO, was the fistfight with the three Pain Elementals guarding the Blue Key. Xit took out the first two quickly enough, but the last created such a cloud of Skulls, I thought he was going down for sure.

myk said:

Either way with an update it would end up in both directories, each ZIP and demo named correspondingly.

Is this an established practice? Can you point me to a couple of such duplicates as examples, I don't recall any.

myk said:

with an update

Are you doing the next update? :P

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I didn't expect the response for et31 to be so good. Personally I find most of these non-berzerk runs, especially plutonia style with arch-viles and pain elementals, to be quite boring and ugly. Btw, I needed to get more involved with udoom/doom2 so I got a couple of nightmare secrets demos. Cheers!

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Never_Again said:
Is this an established practice? Can you point me to a couple of such duplicates as examples, I don't recall any.

I wonder where I got that from. Some other compilation/demo set? It's curious that while the database shares NM and NS records, it doesn't do the same with those where speed and max are equivalent (eg, E2M8).

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Generally where a demo is the record in 2 categories or more there is only one filename but it appears in the database more than once. Most common examples are nightmare/nightmare secrets and speed/pacifist. In some cases a map doesn't have a nightmare secrets entry because there are no secrets or it is impossible to complete the map (quickly) without getting all the secrets. The only example I can think of where there would be 2 filenames for the same demo is sometimes Vince would upload the same demo in 2 different zip files.

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Xit Vono posted five new DOOM II records:

Nightmare!
MAP12 1:08

Nightmare! + 100% secrets
MAP04 1:08
MAP05 1:03
MAP09 2:40
MAP12 2:08

I'm not fond of DOOM2, but NM demos are always worth the download. Besides, these are the first DOOM II NM100S entries to be posted since last update (in 2005).

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Interesting, that I also found ns12, ns04, ns05 "easily" (don't need to be a Sedlo :D) improveable, but I was a big lame to do any of them :P.

One thing: I find the movement quite ugly (compared to other Xit demos) :S What was wrong?

Btw great job! :)

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Well now that you mention it I watched some of those demos and found lots of bumping into walls and stuff. I think perhaps I found these maps more stressful than usual. Map12 in particular was quite frustrating.

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Agree, the end room is the easiest part (especially with armor), however it seems the hardest part if you are watching the demo and haven't tried yourself yet :)

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