Doom Speedrunning History/Showcase Special Stream/Event

Hi y'all. I am Cyberdemon531, world renowned speedrunner extraordinaire (as you all are probably well aware).

Let me cut to the chase, I want to put together a Doom speedrunning special, where we have live commentary over some demos that showcase how Doom speedrunning works, the history behind it, etc. I'd like to have some word from everyone here for ideas on what runs to show, who would like to do some commentary, and all the likes.

The basic layout (as I think would work best, feel free to recommend literally anything here, this is just an idea at the moment, nothing more) is have demos play of some key runs throughout doom history, like maybe the UV Speed movies, some ILs, other neat stuff, have some runners talk about how tricks were found, how they were implemented into the runs, setups, risk, luck, factors like that. I'd also like to talk about the various categories and have a nice focus on individual levels, as I feel that's a major part of Doom speedrunning that's mostly left out of discussion 99% of the time. If anyone has good ideas as to what ILs to show, I think it'd be neat to show, like, 3 or 4 runs of an IL back to back that showcases progression in the strategies and routes and stuff, and have some explanation as to what's going on, probably some ILs with cool tricks in them would be best to showcase here.

Also, PWADs are something I'd like to dedicate a nice chunk of time to, as with ILs, I feel like PWADs in the general sense aren't really looked at much. Whenever I see any attention outside of this subforum on a doom run, it's literally only on Zero-Master's Doom 2 UV Speed movies. I get it, everyone is familiar with Doom 2, but still, I think some great runs happen on other WADs, and I want to showcase a lot of the effort that people put into them.

If anyone has any ideas for which runs may be good, or anyone who would like to provide commentary, or any information on things such as history and such, feel free to post in this thread with anything you find that would be relevant! I'd like to make this as high quality and informative, but also as entertaining as possible.

As far as a total run-time, I think somewhere around 4 hours would be nice, give a lot of different things a lot of attention.

Also, I'm working with Stream.Me, a new website that has a lot of really nice features, particularly no delay and extremely high streaming quality, and some other nice stuff. If this were to happen, I'd want to have it on this website, and I can have the website promote it on their end and get a lot more people involved perhaps on making this a fun special and showcase of the doom community and its efforts over the past 20+ years. It would also be pretty neat if we could get some article going about it on doomworld, and make a nice production out of it. I think a lot of people on the site would probably find something like this entertaining and interesting as well.

Also, if this is something that literally no one is interested in, let me know anyway! :D
Also also, if this goes well, we can do more of these, just let me know!

I'd be game to talk about the joys of pacifist and why all other categories are bad. As far as runs, I think something like the plutonia max tas would be really cool to show, since that kind of work is quite rare, but it's quite long of course. Maybe picking some segment of it would work. Maybe one of shock's scythe episode runs would be good? I don't know if he thinks they're outdated now but at the time he grinded them pretty hard. That middle ground between d2all and IL isn't attacked super hard very often. Some evolution of tricks would be cool, but someone who knows more history would have to set that up. I mean you have runs before glides, and you have revelations like zm's techniques for north and east unguided glides, which I think most people still consider not worth trying :P

This is a really cool idea because there's just so much history to cover. One nice idea might be to showcase notable firsts, i.e. the first time a particular class of trick or demo was performed. Some that spring to mind:
- first rocket jump (d1s-sw) (Steffen Winterfeldt DHT exam from Nov 95)
- first wallgrab (e2m9-007)
- first glide (lv16-021)
- first guideless glide (pl19-021)
- first void glide (e2m6test) (e2m6-057 - the first exit)
- first switch trick (ep2-0615)
- first published tas (0515uv01) (hrdq2843)

On individual levels to showcase:
- e4m2 max might be a good one, as there's such a massive time gain once some tricks are discovered. You can show the fastest non-trick run, the first trick run, and the current record
- map24 speedrun would be another one. The first pacifist by Anthe was instrumental in getting the category looked at seriously by other runners, then the various small second by second grinding improvements showing improved straferunning, then the wallrun trick, plus ZeroMaster's innovations to systematise it and make it reliable, and even a "lost" pacifist run from nearly a year before Anthe (dm2_lmps)
- Episode 2 UV speedrun is an excellent trick showcase

Some notable demos:
- Steffen's first set of UV movies for Doom (Ep1, Ep2, Ep4). A number of tricks were debuted here and they were usually faster than the IL times.
- Panter's first Doom 2 NM movie
- ZeroMaster's movie runs (but which to choose!)
- One of j4rio's maxkill epics - av25 is a good one.

That's all I can think of right now. Also, sent you a PM.

I'm going to try and cover worthwhile demos to showcase first from other players and my own that I'm most happy with. Admittedly, I've watched enough demos that it's hard to think of ones that stick out. :D
- e1m7 max by Hi Jango: highly optimized max, anyone who's ever done a maxrun depending on good shotgun/chaingun damage or good blast damage will be able to tell how frustrating getting anything this close to flawless is
- su05 max by Ancalagon: good example of the more hardcore challenge run crowd, good to mention the number of runs and amount of competition for even really hard runs like this one as well
- av20 max by SAV88: strong example of a different gameplay style (keyboard-only), there may be other demos that showcase this style well from Ryback/gggmork, this just sticks out due to its recency
- pt12 by j4rio: longer more complex Tyson, may be difficult to showcase a run this long, so maybe there are better suggestions for runs like this?
- no04 or no22 by Looper: I think nomo is a different underappreciated (at least among more casual viewer) side of Doom speedrunning, good opportunity to discuss movement
- lv24 max or speed by Looper: again good to discuss movement
- tn09 by Vile - showing that even really difficult maps can often be done on NM with proper routing
- first demos or records of void glides (e2m6/e1m8): void glides are interesting in that they are pretty much the only Doom trick that parallels some of the crazy speedruns for more modern games with ridiculous OOB/zipping/whatever nonsense, their rarity and relative uselessness highlights how stable the game engine is and how little of Doom running is about glitching out the game to an insane extent
- a demo of an idgames exploration wad or something relatively obscure would be good too to show how spread out the community is in terms of what is being run, I didn't follow that thread faithfully myself, but demos from TGH or Ryback would probably be the best optimized
- Sunder/Sunlust challenge runs (su07 or su08 pacifist, su06 -fast, su12 NM-Speed, sl18 or sl20 pacifist, sl20 -fast, etc.) are good ways to showcase that modern runners are often no longer satisfied with challenge maps on normal difficulty and make their lives even harder :)

Here's the runs of mine that I would probably consider most noteworthy:
- pg12 NM: easily the hardest NM run I've ever done
- pg10 Tyson: probably the Tyson strat I'm most proud of, as it was not easy to think of
- doom e2m1 nomo: even with 2-key strafe50, it's hard for me to think of a cleaner nomo I've done
- doom 2 map 3 nomo: possibly the hardest single trick I've ever executed
- Sunlust map 32 pacifist: shows just how much proper strategies and luck grinding can bend intended strats on a map
- p2m8: obviously a very recent run, but it shows to me how important it is sometimes to ignore cries of "impossible" or "optimal" and how important it can be to look even at IWAD runs that haven't been beaten in forever or completed or have records by noteworthy players because I find that many players/viewers overstate the strength of the IWAD records and Compet-N records leading them not to try those runs or not try them enough
- Out of my challenge runs for Sunder, I would say su05 -fast/NM-Speed, su06 pacifist, su10 pacifist stand out as the most interesting to watch and are the most interesting from a routing perspective
- Scythe D2ALL UV-Speed: I don't know if I'm fully satisfied with this (I suppose you never are with a D2ALL), but it is probably the most competitive and hard-worked PWAD full run out there

When it comes to my ep runs for Scythe, ep 1 is the strongest, eps 2 and 3 are outdated (no longer hold ep 3 anyway), but my ep 1 record is just a failed D2ALL attempt anyway as my strats between the two were virtually identical. :D

Maybe when I'm less tired I'll add more.

Ryback said:

- One of j4rio's maxkill epics - av25 is a good one.

Agree on this one as well, solid demo and good to show the more hardcore side of speedrunning from a different side than su05 (more free-form slaughter vs platforming/confined encounters). Was planning on mentioning it myself. :)

You should take a look to the old LMP Hall of the Fame of 1994. It contains what may be the first levels done in Nightmare! and some good runs, considering they were done a like a month after the release of the game.

http://cd.textfiles.com/doomcompanion/

Some excellent suggestions from 4shockblast there... I knew I should have remembered Hi Jango's e1m7 max.

For Tyson demos maybe a Doom 2 map with a lot of monsters would make a good showcase. map16 has a speedy record, map08 if you want something more recent. map31 and map32 are both good fast demos. And a good example of a long tough Tyson grind would be Xit's t4m6, once called the "ultimate Tyson challenge".

Sav88's AV20 is another good one, although if you want a more speedy example of his keyboard only running his latest ns10 record would be my choice.

Another map for showing route analysis and changing tactics would be map07 speed. You've got the early maxkill runs grinding out a second here, a second there. Then Sedlo discovers the megasphere grab and rocket jump off the mancubus (lv07-006). Then Dashiva discovers it's possible to do the jump unassisted by any rocket boost (http://www.doom2.net/doom2/research/map7.html), and Vile does it pacifist but with a boost off the pillar (pa07-041). Finally Looper makes it a part of the standard movie run with a reliable setup (30uv2325)

Also it might good to showcase TAS a bit, particularly competitive TAS, and how the various tools have improved. So for instance there's a progression from something done in TasDoom (eg ddq-1941, with an ep2 time of 5:05) to TasMBF (Yonatan's ep2x0429), then prboom-plus takes over (entryway's e2uv-342), then something like Doom Replay Editor (akse's e2dq-302). A good state of the art TAS is 38_ViTa_38's XDRE-built pl11xo039, or 10d2x246.zip (even though he didn't upload to DSDA!) And if you had the time might be good to show some of the early built demos from 1996, like bt24-034.

Don't think you need to show any of my stuff - Sav's a better standard bearer for keyboarders. I think my nm movie for spit.wad isn't bad, and maybe also my nm100s movies for ep1 and ep2. But as far as 1994-era idgame exploration stuff goes, TGH's runs are usually more optimised anyway.

That's probably enough from me, don't want to overwhelm the thread with suggestions...

Ryback said:

how the various tools have improved.

41:46 with TASMBF (segmenting only, I think) -> 30:01 with prb+ tools -> 22:59 with building but w/o much effort -> 19:44 with more brute force and new tricks (it still isn't good though, you can do map 29 much faster without waking the spiderdemon up).

As a viewer point of view I say this is a great idea Cyber. A notable demo I like to point out is:

- dr2008v2 map 11 uv max in 24:10 by j4rio. Considering the difficult of that map the time is just insane

Concerning Doom2-Map07, Im quite sure the Basic Idea to skip the whole map was shown and described for the first time in lv07-009.zip (or cs07-009.zip) at 1997-10-19...  

PantherD2s ((: ...Ryback great to see you all live and well again? 

I don`t know how I ended up in here today, but long time no see ((((: I remember that similey from your  .text files

from 20years+ ago (: 

Back2topic - I`ve been thinking for a long time to create some content like this. Sooo much history in here and with this game, its impossible to cover it all.

However for the general public, not everything will make sense and have interest. Covering the different and more spesific aspects in episodes would be the way to go I think.  

This summer I plan to livestream some playthrus of doom2 (nm) \ maxkill uv and other misc challanges with my commentary.

I will obviously not attempt taking any records back (lol) ((: as I am too mediocre by todays standards at best.  

However a successful playthru of doom2 nightmare aiming around the 35-40mins mark - with some historical references \ remarks along the way could be fun and is something I would personally like to do at least :)

Seeing the Original beast back even just for a bit of commentary would be a blast! Definitely keen