Final Doom: The Plutonia Experiment UV-Speed in 19:58

plutonia in 19:58, demo recorded with crispy doom v4.0

Youtube:

Wall of text here and in the .txt, might have something to do with this being my most hard worked demo...

It's been about 3 years now since I posted my first demo, 30pl2523, which took about 7 weeks to do. At the start I had only played through doom1\doom2 twice and final doom once, now I've done 59 d2all runs (18 of which are on nightmare), so needless to say I've improved a bit since. I also wrote back then that I would probably try to get under 25 minutes, but that "it's going to be difficult"... Though 30pl2523 was surprisingly good for my skill at the time, "Overall the worst maps were by far map 4 and map 29", map 04 was bad luck with the barons blocking my way on the way to the exit. 2 years later I also verified that I got extremely unlucky on map 29 by having an imp block me from doing a jump between 2 platforms, while there was an 8 unit wide edge the imp couldn't walk on. It would most likely have taken me months at the time to get under 25 minutes assuming I didn't improve or change the route significantly.

I always intended to improve it since it's my favorite wad and a fun\challenging run, but I was hoping someone else would try to improve the time so I would have more motivation. For some reason I've improved TNT twice instead, and then a nightmare run, when I could have played a fun wad instead (well, the fun disappeared after crushing defeats and enormous amounts of bad luck when attempting this).

I believe it was after getting 30nm in under 23 minutes (2016-08-01) that I moved onto this, where I had gone over the UV route twice after finishing the plutonia nightmare run. If I recall correctly during the previous times I went over the route I figured under 23 minutes would be doable, and under 22 minutes would require a perfect run. So when I started working on this I eventually saw that under 21 minutes was possible after trying to finish every level as quickly as possible with as aggresive as possible route. I then thought "well, I just need another minute..." and so many.. many.. hours were spent on working on small time saves and consistent strategies. Once I figured under 20 minutes was within range of being possible I developed an obsession with having to finish it no matter how much work it would take.. the combination of my favourite wad and breaking the 20 minute barrier, when doom 2 in under 20 minutes was already really difficult, was something I just had to do.

So this is a demo I've been working on for a relativly long time now, I'd say it's significantly better (as in it would be more difficult to improve) than my best 30uv time. Hard to compare it to the plutonia nightmare run since I got so extremely lucky there, which unfortunately was not the case this time as this did take forever.

Short description of some of the notable levels (more info in the .txt):
Map 01-04 are very reset heavy, which has really tested my motivation. Barons blocking the way to the blue key door on map 04 is as annoying today as it was 3 years ago, simply nothing that can be done about it.

Map 12-14 are the absolute worst. At the start of map 13 my heart rate goes really high and I can't even tell if it's because I survived the bullshit map 12, or if it's because I'm about to do the damn north glide. Several times I've gotten stuck behind the blue key door on map 13, wasting otherwise decent attempts.

Map 16 and 18 are cruel as well, the vile jump on 16 seems to have gotten more difficult as I kept getting blocked going for the jump, which I can't recall happening often before. Mostly it's the time loss to bad vile rng that hurts.

Then of course we have map 22-25, I've died way too many times on map 22 to ridiculous things that never happened when I practiced. Map 24 has 2 luck based parts, if something infights the arch-vile just before the jump then I am fucked, if the cyberdemon times his rockets perfectly or the mancubus blocks me before the exit then I'm also fucked.

On top of all this I managed to fuck up map 30 once, losing 6-7 seconds and ending up with 20:03. My first exit was 20:07, everytime I fall too far behind I just end the run, 30pl2007 had a really unlucky moment which cost me 20 seconds.

And it didn't end there, no, I had to get absolutely screwed over just 1 more time... Once again I reach map 30, and this time I fired 8 BFG plasma balls on the cyberdemon and I did over 2500 damage with the tracers (includes the arachnotrons)... never a single god damn time did that fail to kill the cyberdemon, but this time I rolled 2100 (!!!!!) damage... if you throw an 8-sided dice 8 times the chance of getting 21 or less is about 1.1% (sure you have to consider doom rng table, but assuming it's similar to the direct rocket damage rng it's hardly different). He was left with 48 health... from 4000 to 48, and this cost me the run.

I feel I've had an unusual amount of bad luck, as if doom somehow wanted to get back on me for getting away with the lucky nightmare run. I almost want to try nightmare again just to find out how lucky I really was, but for now I'll "relax" with some attempts at nm100s for the episodes runs instead...

I've also posted an episode 1 run (failed d2all attempt) in 6:25. While it's probably not of much interest as the d2all, it is hard to describe just how insane of a time that is. It's over 20 seconds ahead of where I want to be for sub 20 30pl, and it was 8 seconds faster than my previous best e1 time, I don't think I'll ever be happier with a demo than that. The biggest mistake I made was missing activating a switch, and there was no bad luck at all.

Also I've discovered a few new tricks for plutonia, none that were useful for me. One has been done by JCD and Ch0wW, you could arch-vile jump to reach the switch which opens up the door to the exit on caged (map 04) in coop. On tombstone (map 23) it's possible to grab the red key with an AVJ through the window after yellow key door, might be useful with TAS, but I doubt it.

Then we have the death domain (map 20), definitely saves timein a TAS. There's a teleporter by the blue key door which would skip about half the map if you could go through it. It has a height of 25 units, so it's 1 unit too high. Fortunately there is an 8 unit high step at the blue key door, and the distance between those ledges is 4x32 units, and since you fall 0,2,3,4 units in 4 tics you have 4 tics to do at least a 96 unit jump (doomguy is 32x32 units, so 3x32 instead of 4x32). At first I thought you needed to gain momentum against a monster and combine it with a RJ, but a RJ alone is actually enough!

30pl1958.zip