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AdamW said:

it's probably faster to quit and start over on the fast run than it is to spend a few minutes mashing a door

This is a very good point. I give up. Doom won this round.

Edit: Interestingly, an imp can wake up in the blue key area by seeing you through a wall when you are at the red key area. The question is: If the imp can wake up like that, can the imp also attempt to shoot at you from that room? Can it maybe hit a barrel?

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It is difficult for sure, but we have known that is possible for a long time. Considering how many mind blowing demos have been done recently, I would say it is worth trying.

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Here is a pretty good attempt.

I created the bat file for recording at 17:00 and got this demo at 17:38. Now, I don't know if I should get excited or if I was extremely lucky (well, I sure was).

Should I play this while streaming on Twitch? Otherwise a lot of people probably won't believe me if I ever do it.

Btw can anyone explain why sometimes these two zombiemen behind the first door don't wake up? Do you just have to run in really fast so they don't notice you? Is it controllable enough?

pa02sick.zip

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Hurt Me Plenty (3rd skill)
Pacifist in 1:18 [with one "unintentional" telefrag]

Has anyone done this before? Of course it's not The Real Thing, but it's still kinda interesting I think. The main difference from UV is that the blue key room is not so terribly overcrowded, so you can actually kinda control what's happening. Also the exit room is a lot more safer, but I think even on UV there is an "almost reliable" strategy for it (open the door, move to the left for just a moment, and then it is usually possible to quickly reach the switch from the right side without any shotgunners blocking you). Oh, and before you jump down to the blue key area there are 2 shotgunners less on the way. The rest is very very close to the UV experience. (in the red key fort there is only one shotgunner less on HMP)

pa02hmp.zip

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Memfis said:

Here is a pretty good attempt.

I created the bat file for recording at 17:00 and got this demo at 17:38. Now, I don't know if I should get excited or if I was extremely lucky (well, I sure was).

Should I play this while streaming on Twitch? Otherwise a lot of people probably won't believe me if I ever do it.

Btw can anyone explain why sometimes these two zombiemen behind the first door don't wake up? Do you just have to run in really fast so they don't notice you? Is it controllable enough?


Cool demo! As far as I can tell, monsters seeing you around corners seems like it might be timing-based? May also be luck-based, though, I honestly couldn't tell all the times I had to use a strategy like that. Yeah, from a bit of testing I did, it seems luck-based to get that far, but not impossible, and honestly after getting through the full thing with saves, it seemed much more doable than before. Yes, there's a ton of luck involved, but there's been so many luck-intensive demos/improvements posted in the past, that I really don't think pa02 is completely out of the question; it just would take much more work than the average IL.

I think after doing it with saves and seeing this attempt, I plan on setting aside a few attempts per day or maybe some longer amount of time per week or month and just testing my luck - I mean, eventually, it has to happen, right? :D Also, if others start doing the same, between a group of runners it's a lot more likely that someone manages to get to the end. Streaming or saving all/most attempts is definitely a good idea, though.

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pa02 Community Project: A Thousand Monkeys On A Thousand Keyboards

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It is interesting to note that if somebody would have done one run a day since this thread's creation, they would have had over 1,800 runs logged.

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Memfis said:

Btw can anyone explain why sometimes these two zombiemen behind the first door don't wake up? Do you just have to run in really fast so they don't notice you?


EDIT: according to discussion in #speed 8 tics might be wrong. I got the value from Doomwiki, didn't directly check the source code. If monsters wake up may also be dependent on the frame of their idle animation and possibly also RNG which would make it a lot less reliable.

Monsters in Doom have a reaction time of 8 tics (approx. 0.2286 seconds). If it's all dependent on reaction time that means if they don't see you for at least 8 consecutive tics they don't wake up.

Memfis said:

Is it controllable enough?


Possibly. In your demo as you are pressing against the door you actually managed to do a door boost and you preserve some momentum and therefore go through the door faster. On the way back there's no door in your way so you can go out of their line of sight very fast as well. They only wake up when you enter the door again without doing a door boost. So yeah, it's basically all about going fast but you might still need some luck.

dew said:

pa02 Community Project: A Thousand Monkeys On A Thousand Keyboards


Hah, exactly what I thought when I first heard the idea in Discord.

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Yeah, I think the primary factor here is the amount of insane people attempting the run. :D But I believe that there is quite a lot of strategy as well. For instance, my start with standing in a corner is nice because it always makes these two zombies infight, and they pretty much never attempt to enter the building and block me on my way back.

Moreover, this position is very good: you can hide behind a weak zombieman for a while and wait for the shotgunners to start fighting (both these nearby and also the ones in the blue armor hideout). So I can recommend using it. But I also think that it's important to experiment with various approaches and not get stuck too much on the same tactic, otherwise you'll kinda stop learning new things after a while.

Then there is a neat healing trick you can attempt if you get a bad start (the first shotgunner attacks you or the zombies hit you too much). When you enter the darker part of the sewers, you can try to pick up a medikit on the right "through" a shotgunner. The success rate is actually surprisingly high, and also imo it just feels cool as heck to "steal" that medikit from the stupid zombie. :) I'm attaching a demo where you can see it happening at ~10 seconds (here it took a bit more time than usual). Btw, from my experience, for some reason it helps to start turning around when you try to grab it.

And if you can more or less reliably do that door boost at the start and avoid waking up the zombies, you should always go for it of course.

I'm sure there are more useful things to discover. Which is, again, a good reason to try random new stuff sometimes instead of playing like some sort of a machine.

pa02heal.zip

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Memfis said:

Yeah, I think the primary factor here is the amount of insane people attempting the run. :D But I believe that there is quite a lot of strategy as well. For instance, my start with standing in a corner is nice because it always makes these two zombies infight, and they pretty much never attempt to enter the building and block me on my way back.


The infight at the start is a nice idea. There's an alternative quicker way to get through the door without getting blocked by pausing a little bit in the right spot before going through, but that has the disadvantage of not getting the infight.

Memfis said:

Moreover, this position is very good: you can hide behind a weak zombieman for a while and wait for the shotgunners to start fighting (both these nearby and also the ones in the blue armor hideout). So I can recommend using it. But I also think that it's important to experiment with various approaches and not get stuck too much on the same tactic, otherwise you'll kinda stop learning new things after a while.


Yeah, unfortunately, I didn't find that to be as consistent as I would like when I tried it with saves awhile ago, but it's still pretty helpful.

Memfis said:

Then there is a neat healing trick you can attempt if you get a bad start (the first shotgunner attacks you or the zombies hit you too much). When you enter the darker part of the sewers, you can try to pick up a medikit on the right "through" a shotgunner. The success rate is actually surprisingly high, and also imo it just feels cool as heck to "steal" that medikit from the stupid zombie. :) I'm attaching a demo where you can see it happening at ~10 seconds (here it took a bit more time than usual). Btw, from my experience, for some reason it helps to start turning around when you try to grab it.


I would probably better leave that medikit until after the blue armor to maximize health going into the tunnels (so I would intentionally try to run past that shotgun guy alcove so he gets alerted).

Still, the worst part is the tunnels. I wish there was more to it that I could find other than hoping the monsters are diligent in destroying the barrels quickly instead of the player, but I really couldn't get much out of it. :\ But even so, the luck required is not so ridiculously extreme for a non-TAS run to never happen, and maybe there are more ideas to explore there.

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Keyboard_Doomer said:

Monsters in Doom have a reaction time of 8 tics (approx. 0.2286 seconds). If it's all dependent on reaction time that means if they don't see you for at least 8 consecutive tics they don't wake up.


iirc, reaction time is only the delay between when a monster wakes up and can attack the player.

I think seeing the player would be an interval of 10 tics, because every monster (except mancubus with 15) calls the "look" function every 10 tics in it's idle state, ad infinitum. So, you have that much of a window, assuming you get lucky and enter the FOV of the monster on the immediate tic after it calls "look" to get out of it's FOV without waking up, and for the mancubus you would have 5 extra tics.

It's still only 10-15 tics, can't be determined when it happens in a real game, BUT might be useful to know for TAS.

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Why not try to estimate the chance of success? Let's say that you can do it with two checkpoints A and B. Measure your success rates getting from start to A, A to B, and B to exit. Multiply the probabilities. If it looks doable in 10^4 tries, persistence should be enough. If it's going to take 10^7 tries, better find some more monkeys or keep working on strats.

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In order to do something like that properly, you would need to create a number of such demos and paths in order to have a good sample size, and the time it would take to do that could be spent just doing attempts. Also, as I play a run more and more, generally, I get more used to the movement, which changes up what RNG I get normally (could be for better or worse), and I figure out minor strategies here and there to make it more consistent. Plus, it depends on how well I am playing anyway, and different people will have different movement and different strats/routes leading to different series of events for each person due to different RNG and monster behavior. All of this makes calculating the real probability of something like this practically too difficult and time-consuming, and I don't know how close a simple estimate would even be. :D

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Well, it wouldn't necessarily be a waste of time.

First, I think finishing each segment just a few times should give a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate. Assume that you pick three segments that are roughly equally hard, and you play until you've finished each one 10 times. If finishing a segment takes N tries on average, you've played each segment 10N times, for 30N attempts in total. The estimated number of attempts to beat the whole level will be N^3. Most likely 30N will be small compared to N^3.

Second, you might want to practice segments of the run separately anyway, to improve your preparation for the whole run. Doing so systematically might actually be the most efficient use of time.

It's true that the segments wouldn't be quite independent though. If nothing else, your hands will probably be shaking from adrenaline if you ever reach the end of the tunnel (literally) in a real run :)

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Well, here is an edit of Map02 where you start before the blue key area and you have 100%/200%. Can someone actually finish it? I haven't managed to do it yet but I only gave it a few tries.

There is only a small difference from the real experience. When you approach the blue key area, all monsters should be always asleep apart from one or two imps that sometimes can wake up because they somehow notice you when you're in the blue armor hideout. So their placement can be randomized sometimes. In this test map they are asleep. I'm not sure if it makes things easier or harder (probably harder because they are always very close to you when you jump down?).

I think Fredrik is right that people should practice separate segments. At the very least you should be confident about your approach to the exit room. Dying there would be so heartbreaking! But from my tests it doesn't seem so scary.

02bk.zip

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Yeah, practicing segments is worthwhile in general, but I rarely make assumptions about how long something will take based on segmented practice because every time when I get to real attempts, I know that with different RNG and eventually better practice, things end up playing quite differently.

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