What's the most time you've spent on a demo without any result/improvement?

I've been speedrunning one little map here, got an ugly exit. Now, after 2 hours of playing, I finally managed to repeat that time... I think the most for me was like 7 hours in E1M2 UV-Speed of 2002ADO. I was so mentally destroyed after that. But that's probably nothing compared to what some of you guys have experienced.

In late 2011, when working on A3D4-355 (my 99th released demo), I got 4:00.06 after just one day of recording sessions, but breaking that barrier took me almost a month of retrying the run and reworking the route. Demo is not as fast/clean as I would do in 2014-2016, but still one of my personal unforgettable victories.

I'll bite. Out of the recent stuff, plutonia map 12 tyson took me over a month on and off. It was a mental torture for me and the only way I can explain keeping on playing that crap for such enormously long time (for my standards) can be explained only by severe case of Stockholm syndrome.

For comparision - plutonia map 29 was 2 days effort, map 28 was about 3-4 days effort, map 32 took me just a single day, av map 20 about 3-4 days altogether, but with long pauses between attempts, playing for maybe one hour every other day throughout over a month (I can't afford to waste entire days recording anymore).

Stephen Hawking says we should not send radio signals to space, because the space monsters might detect us. I'd say let's just stream j4rio's tyson runs to space on all frequencies continuously. Because...



"I hope the alien civilizations remain silent, lest they be Doomed." -Fermi

I had a Scythe2 map17 max route that abused the speed trick... and it just broke me. Couldn't get an exit at all for days before I gave up.

Lots of experiences of this type, probably some deleted from my memory to avoid long-term anguish! Worst is when you prove unable to beat a terrible but flukey early exit, despite lots of little route/technique improvements.

One that comes to mind is Icarus map22 Stroller on the "new" route. I called it a few hundred attempts; it was quite a few hundred, though of course with a short demo that doesn't amount to massive numbers of hours. I'd really like to see someone achieve this and put the task to bed.

I recall trying HR map26 Stroller (detecting a pattern here...?) quite a lot. It seems like it should be trivial (and maybe it is), but I never managed it. At the time I was trying it, momentum-preserving tactics were less well known, which is my excuse...

Two that would have fit nicely in this category, if I hadn't finally cracked them, were Henry map04 Pacifist and Build NM Pacifist. The former was an annoying case of "managed it when not recording, but then couldn't do it within the first few thousand recording attempts". Kids: always record and always check you're using the best route before putting serious time into a run. The latter was mostly scientific curiosity. I thought it might be feasible to make it some kind of record-breaking longest run, whereby some long repeating loop occurred whereby a lost soul ending up hitting Romero every few hours. But it was not to be. :(

I think that if you want to avoid this type of frustration, a healthy dose of realism is important. How realistic is it to beat a time or achieve a task? And will it really be such an awesome demo if you eventually succeed? You don't want to end up with a ugly demo and feeling disgusted with it and yourself, especially if no one else likes the end product. I avoided that sort of situation by not going back and improving my 1:26 on Rigel1, despite it being one of my earliest demos. That time is probably optimal. :p

Well I think I started trying rn14 around 2008/2009, but did not succeed until april 2015 after about two months of serious trying. I had also worked on it on and off for quite a lot of time. Other demos that are very hard worked I know are for example Sedlo's lv24-036.

Plutonia 13p took me 10 hours.

My first and only serious attempt at beating a sound record was my av04-416 UV max. I played ~3 hours a night for like 4-5 days but I enjoyed playing the map so much it was actually fun.

On the other hand I spent 3-4 days learning to optimize episode 2 of Epic 2 and ended up giving it 2-3 attempts before getting bored and giving up because it was a 2 hour run. I Regret spending so much time in prep for the run and not going through with it. Although I thought veinen was attempting it but it seems he gave up too.

When pulling off a challenging run, spending long time to get a single exit is fairly normal for me. For example, in early 2016 I tried to speed through Eternal MAP12 Nightmare with 100% secrets for 8 days (10-14 hours per day), which resulted in 6:53. That first exit satisfied me despite a few overcautious parts.

What's odd is when improving a messy but relatively lucky first survival takes a lot of grind. Bringing my UDoom E4M8 UV-Fast close to 2:00 was no problem, but getting under 2 took me some months (on and off). 1:59 is a bit slow for my current taste, but still not bad.

@PjSpartacus: good job with runs like AV04-416. As for lengthy planning/studying, I personally don't find it that tiresome. I'd better spend 5 months learning some deadly and tempting challenge with savegames and gradually working out a cool strategy which will allow me to reach a good time within maybe just 5-20 hours of optimizing my reflexes in actual demo attempts, rather than waste tons of months trying to blindly survive a nearly unfamiliar run (which was common for me 10 years ago). For instance, recording ET22S315 took me just one ultra-lazy session after about 10 weeks of nice routing. A hell of a lot of constant fails is not nearly as pleasant for me as a heaven of a lot of productive research work ;-)

It took 1 week for me to get to the holyhell map03 exit. It was very painful when I kept getting killed and then start all over again and again....I thought to give up but after a week I got to the exit.

My Chillax map 30 and 39 demos were also my hard experiences. Especially chillax map30 tortured me mentally very much when I kept failing to kill the Brain Boss from a long distance as I'm not good in making tas. That part was very much frustrating!

Now the same hard time is going on for my holyhell map01 demo, still no improvement but won't give up.

Recently Sunder Map05 Reality/UV Max took me a week of grinding a few hours per day.

Earlier this year Sunder Map13 UV Max took me a couple weeks. The PEs potentially not spawning in at the 3 switch encounter was incredibly infuriating.

Heh, this thread has shifted towards "my most laborous demo achievement". Folks, you were supposed to name you biggest failures to achieve a goal! :P

It was only a few hours, maybe 2-3, not sure, so obviously not that much... however, I was attempting to improve my time on TNT map 17 on nightmare difficulty which is just f'ing stupid. There's really no skill involved at all, it's just 100% luck and it's also just a terribly pointless and boring IL to watch. I grab the invisibility next to the start and try to do a guideless glide while there are hitscanners and imps around. There's a chaingunner almost right next to me, it should be possible to ignore him and still make the glide, but the chance is ridiculously low and getting a quick glide itself is very difficult.

The current nightmare time 15 seconds, UV-pacifist is 8 seconds, I think I was aiming for 10-11 seconds or something, but I had to stop and ask myself why I was wasting my life on something so stupid. I'm not proud of my IL's, maybe someday I'd improve those that I'm unhappy with, but there's no way I will ever touch tnt map 17 again.