Why is there no glitchless category?

[termrork]

Most games do, why not doom? (i.e. I would count glides as glitches)

[Looper]

That's the problem. What are glitches exactly?

[GoneAway]

I mean, if you want to do something you can. If there's lots of interest then it would become a standard category naturally. If not then it isn't needed.

 

You can see on dsda there are demos marked "intended route", which is more or less what you're talking about.

 

"Glitchless" is pretty much impossible in doom though. If you touch an enemy or a wall or are even near certain walls you're running into glitches. Also I don't consider gliding a glitch. It's a pretty natural element of the game engine that makes complete sense to me.

 

Another point is we would need a whole bunch of glitchless categories, because it's just a modifier of the existing ones, which is a bit too much when probably a small number of demos are affected.

 

Anyway, anyone can just say "intended route" in their submission and Andy will mark it as such.

[Linguica]

Doom is the original speedrunning game. To ask why Doom doesn't adopt speedrunning categories from newer communities is missing the point - Doom speedrunning came first and any "categories" in Doom speedrunning were invented out of nothing, specifically for the pasttime of Doom speedrunning. If Doom speedrunners want to have a "glitchless" category it ought to be in direct response to something in Doom speedrunning they want to address, not to seem more like some other speedrunning community.

 

You might as well ask why Doom speedrunning isn't always on skill 1, since that would be faster and easier, and most other games are speedrun on the easiest skill level if there is a choice. Why doesn't Doom do that? Because you want to show you are good at Doom, that's why!

[Grazza]

Some excellent replies already. I'd see this as more of a "per map" thing than a general category. If (e.g.) a glide makes a particular map trivial, then record a "without the glide" demo for that map if you wish. If this results in a highly entertaining, skill-laden demo, then it will be viewed on its merits.

 

But I don't think you'll ever get broad consensus on what is a glitch and what isn't. Straferunning and wallrunning can definitely be viewed as glitches. As kraflab hints, every time you bump into a monster there are glitchy momentum issues likely to come into play. Is a 32-unit glide a glitch? A 32-unit wide object fitting through a 32-unit gap isn't an obvious glitch - the fact that it doesn't fit through easily seems more like a glitch. Even if you could assemble a list of glitches and non-glitches that a fair number of people agreed upon, competitive play in that category would tend to get a little "hypocritical". "Hey, a monster opened a door for me. Not my fault!" "What, I just happened to graze against a monster. Can't blame me if I got an accidental speed boost." "I just shot the monster in front of me, and the one behind it died for some reason - beats me why!"

[Killer5]

I have no idea why there isnt a glitchless category.

 

I would guess term just means complete a map using natural route. Being as restrictive as possible in what you are doing with regards to exploits. I guess you can define the set of exploits/glitches as 'anything which was not originally forseen by id software at the time of release' and then just make sure you disregard that set of stuff in planning your run.

 

You are better off just deciding on your own rules for the run and then making a demo saying 'I created a demo putting these restrictions on myself' and calling it a day imo. Then if someone else thinks it is cool it could gain traction?

[Looper]

24 minutes ago, Grazza said:

Straferunning and wallrunning can definitely be viewed as glitches.

 

Straferunning a glitch? Hmm, so how are you supposed to play the game without even accidently pressing strafe left/right the same time as move forward/backward?

I mean sure, maybe they didn't realize you can move faster with the straferun but this sure is a glitch I would keep in a glitchless run.

 

On the other hand, if straferunning is allowed and you can skip keyed doors (doom2 map03 for example), is that a glitch or a clever shortcut by the mapp... level designer?

[Da Werecat]

I can only see this happening with a dedicated source port where as many "glitches" as possible are fixed. That includes straferunning. So the mechanical alterations would be pretty serious. An interesting experiment, but perhaps too niche, and can you imagine the amount of bikeshedding it would have to endure to survive?

[Grazza]

9 minutes ago, Looper said:

Straferunning a glitch? Hmm, so how are you supposed to play the game without even accidently pressing strafe left/right the same time as move forward/backward?

Well, I was choosing the most absurd example of something that was surely an oversight by the programmer (id didn't retain this quirk in the Quake engine) but that is such a fundamental part of speedrunning that it would be harmful to exclude. And indeed it impacts jumps, linedef skips and grabs, including some so standard that we don't even regard them as tricks.

 

Your final paragraph makes an important point. Does the mapper's intent come into play?

[Da Werecat]

I think they only finally got rid of it (for good) in Quake 3. Before that, there was a server-side speed cap for the players that cut off excessive speed when running diagonally, but didn't affect walking.

[Dwaze]

I once thought "Glideless" could be interesting i.e. no skip/squeeze/void glide while still allowing everything else.

[termrork]

apart from doom being the grandfather of speedruning it imo would not harm to look at other games how and why they have a glitchless category: i.e. mario world, the glitch speedrun is done in a few seconds where you manipulate the game such that you get the credit screens. there is a category in which you are allowed to use the star world which needs about 10 minutes and a category without star world which takes over an hour.

 

I guess everybody would agree that we need a glichless category if it would be possible to do the same in doom, I.e. doing doom2 in a few seconds manipulating it, because otherwise there is no joy in watching D2All speedruns anymore. I hope that is something we all agree on.

 

in the mario world case it is very easy why and how they put up the 3 different categories, why: the time difference is simply too high and one skips too much of the actual game. how: one category without manipulating the game mechanics, one without and one with star world

 

therefore, for the doom case imo we should ask ourself do the current skips harm the experience of the game that much such we want a glitchless category or not. Imo the only way is that the community agrees on a certain ruleset (i.e. with polls), because one big point of speedrunning is that all speedrunners do know the rules and there is no ambiguity, how else should you be able to compete? if everybody as suggested several time in this thread can do his own rules it will be extremely chaotic. because of this I do not like the "intended way" category if everybody can come up with their own ruleset. also simply recording a demo with my own ruleset and see if other people try to beat it will result in the same. one can see that with the d2all I've recorded in a potential new category over 100% that there was no discussion whether this should be included as a new category or not.

 

 

[4shockblast]

We can't even agree on what the current ruleset should be, let alone a completely new category. Also, I think polls wouldn't be a good idea to develop a new ruleset anyway.. Just looking at this thread, a bunch of people don't think glitchless is a good idea in the first place due to the all concerns with defining the category at all brought up previously, all concerns I hold as well. As such, you probably won't even get a lot of these people voting on the poll at all; after all, if someone doesn't think glitchless is a good idea, why should they care what the ruleset will be? Just run whatever you want to; if people think it's interesting or cool, they'll try to do it, and if not, they won't.

 

WRT the over 100% category, I personally don't have much interest in running the IWADs that way (running IWADs is tiresome enough as it is), and I don't really feel like applying it to the PWADs either. It seems like too arbitrary a ruleset for me, and also it's quite annoying because it has the same issues that respawn has which is that you end up relying on getting lucky with enough monsters dying to get good times (except in cases of maps with one secret or item where it's entirely trivial). It's also unclear how it operates on maps with zero secrets or items or monsters.

 

However, if you look at the Sunder map 5 tables for example, you'll take note that a couple of people recorded runs on the no-glide route because it's much more interesting than the glide route, so the intended route approach works in case the run itself is interesting enough for people to record on. Even with su05, it's not "glitchless" because no one wants to over-extend the run by having to press every switch in sequence, which goes to show that people will really run whatever they want to regardless of whatever ruleset someone wants to come up with. :P

[Looper]

2 hours ago, 4shockblast said:

It's also unclear how it operates on maps with zero secrets or items or monsters.

 

I dont think that's unclear. It's just PrBoom+ messing the tally screen up. Secrets should be 0% when you have 0/0 secrets reached (as in vanilla), not 100%. Just like termrork showed in his demo. Same with items and monsters. What to do in a map with no monsters, no items, no secrets? Well, just go to the exit, since you can't do anything else.

[4shockblast]

1 hour ago, Looper said:

 

I dont think that's unclear. It's just PrBoom+ messing the tally screen up. Secrets should be 0% when you have 0/0 secrets reached (as in vanilla), not 100%. Just like termrork showed in his demo. Same with items and monsters. What to do in a map with no monsters, no items, no secrets? Well, just go to the exit, since you can't do anything else.

Sure, but so many people are used to pr+ tally screen showing 100% for 0 monsters/secrets, it's practically a second standard now. For instance, how would you treat maps that are pr+ only or designed for pr+? Surely, it wouldn't make sense to think about what vanilla or Boom do in those cases, but that introduces additional complexity to the category. Verification alone becomes more annoying just because the "real" percentages aren't shown in the primary source port people use for demo playback and running, and a lot of people will end up being confused by this distinction. Anyway, this is more of an aside to this discussion, the primary reason I'm not thinking of doing that category seriously is that I don't really find it fun. :D

[Looper]

I guess you are right, 4shockblast.

 

In my opinion, there are plenty fun categories, or would be. I don't find categories fun if there's no competition, meaning no interest by other players.

 

Doom's problem is that there are way too many categories and maps, so most of the time there's no competition, hence I basically sticky to the most popular ones to find some. I think any new category, even though it could be fun and well-defined, is just pretty much 0 interest because there's no competition. Even if some competition existed, there would be another new category and 1000 new maps to shift the interest.

 

True UV-max, glitchless, +100% tally, nomo100s, tornado, stroller, uv-respawn, uv-fast and all the episode/movie variants.... nope from me.

 

For example: Map01 uv-max, pacifist, uv-speed, nm, nm100s, nomo, ep1 and movie runs of the categories combined with co-op already makes it 54 different ways to play just map01. Now add these additional categories and you have over 100 ways to play one level. Don't forget you have the TAS variations to double it. It's too much for me, but sure, play whatever you find fun.

Edited January 3, 2019 by Looper

[termrork]

um yeah this thread was not supposed to be about over 100%, but thank you for your opinions! to the problem of 0/0 secrets I chose this to count as 0% since this creates less ambiguity that in this potential new category maps which do not have a secret or items the best route would be the usual uv speed route. what always buged me is for example if the fastest possible route in UV can be done in pacifist with the same effort then these 2 categories are simply the same (i.e. map27). in the case of prboom you can always push tab to see on the automap if you have a 0/0 of anything.

 

ontopic: @Looper surprisingly I had completely the opposite in mind. namely that the usual categories are out of consideration to speedrun for a lot of people. only a handful of people can compete on the highly optimized runs in iwads. I.e. I like to run doom2 a lot, but of course do not have nowhere near the skill needed to compete with you, ZM or elim etc. also high techs like glides are a big barrier for speewalker like me since they are difficult to learn and to pull off (not to mention port differences). so what should someone interested in speedrunning do? of course one could try to do some niche category you mentioned, but apart from glitchless they are either very old with optimized times or are no fun (at least for me). of course I can only talk about myself, but going for random pwads is sadly not an option for everyone as you pointed out, if you want competition you have to confine people on some wads. iwads are of course of special status, but as I wanted to point out too difficult for the most people. a glitchless mode might have been a good way for newcomers or people without godly skill to run some iwads with some competition. but it seems only a small minority would welcome something like this... so it seems I will return to map and run my own maps :). see you in AVJ!

[dew]

Read just the first few posts, then I felt like it got bogged down with bikeshedding. It's already been postulated pretty much:

• Doom is the OG speedrunning game. Our predecessors made the rules, we extrapolate and innovate from them.
• There is no "glitchless", because YOU didn't bother recording it, soldier! Goddamn, son, the archive gets UV ballerinas and NM pacifists! Now gimme 20 "glitchless"!
• And as far as definition goes - it's indeed impossible to truly get "glitchless" in Doom, because we casually break the intended physics by merely pressing two keys at once. Instead, the "intended" route of the particular map should be considered, and such demos do indeed exist. Don't take that sr40 jump over a gap, don't sr40 run over a platform that's meant to descend and trap you. Don't glide, don't RJ or AVJ unless "told" to. Etc, etc. You cannot define unified rules for this, and perhaps divining the mapper's intent can sometimes get murky, but you cannot expect someone else to prescribe the rules exhaustingly. It is not possible.

 

14 hours ago, Dwaze said:

I once thought "Glideless" could be interesting i.e. no skip/squeeze/void glide while still allowing everything else.

Oh dear, perish the thought. There is no technical connection between squeeze and void glides, so banning them under the disgusting "glide" umbrella makes no sense except linguistic.

[termrork]

@dew ok since this came up very often and I did not comment on it. what I meant with the community has to decide on a ruleset on what might be called glitchless

I did not mean that you are not allowed to do anything anymore because SR40 might not have been intended. I meant not to maximize glitchlessness, but

to maximize fun. of course for everybody this is different. that is why I would the majority decide. I.e. I do not believe that the majority thinks the most fun way

to play map16 or to watch a speedrun of map16 is to do it in 11 seconds by using a glide in the end. this way you skip most of this awesome level. but if I am right and the majority thinks like this, then we are in the same situations other games were in which they invented a glitchless category. I thought like this the first time I saw a glide and I know several people I wanted to speedrun with at least casually, but they refused by saying they do not want to do glides or we would have played on a port which does not even support them. people were talking about confusion since everybody should do what they want and everything is fine. but one of my biggest problems with doom speedrunning is i.e. the difference of the ports. of course people always say on doomedsda.us there you can easily see which port was used and make your own judgment. but who knows the particular differences between the ports? even the small nuances when it comes to glides etc.? only a very small elite. imo this is not transparent and not friendly to newcomers at all. I do not know all the details although I am following the speedrun community for years now, how should someone less experienced ever get it? a category which bans these things would again make it easier and friendlier. Maybe an example how I would do it: no glides, no RJs, no AVJs but with SR40 and SR50. why with the SR40 & 50? because most of us are used to it and it is a pain to switch to normal running. furthermore, glides, RJs and AVJs to skip parts of a level are easy to ban, they are obvious to avoid. ok, I think I have said everything to the topic I can contribute.

[0xf00ba12]

1 hour ago, termrork said:

one of my biggest problems with doom speedrunning is i.e. the difference of the ports.

 

If that's such a big deal, you might never be satisfied recording demos, although I think you should just experiment and simply use whichever is the most comfortable for you. There are too many settings/options in ports nowadays that makes comparisons that much more meaningless (to me).

 

As an aside, after having recently gotten DOSBox working on my Windows 10 box, I can tell you there is a significant performance drop recording vanilla in that versus something like (G)ZDoom or Pr/GLBoom-plus. In hindsight, I'm very glad I didn't start out recording with it and I have a ton of respect for veterans that used it for CN.

[Looper]

1 hour ago, termrork said:

only a very small elite. imo this is not transparent and not friendly to newcomers at all. I do not know all the details although I am following the speedrun community for years now, how should someone less experienced ever get it? a category which bans these things would again make it easier and friendlier.

 

Isn't it fun exactly because there's a skill cap that cannot be reached by a newcomer in couple of days? If you follow the sticked threads and the doom bible of movement, I think you can learn most of the tricks and strats quite fast. Mastering them is quite a different story.

 

I don't personally see why speedrunning should be newcomer friendly. I don't mean to make it intentionally difficult. But as far as I know, speedrunning has always been quite hardcore genre, no matter which game. You need skills, knowledge etc. in order to be good.

 

9 minutes ago, 0xf00ba12 said:

As an aside, after having recently gotten DOSBox *snip* I have a ton of respect for veterans that used it for CN.

 

Veterans did not use DOSbox with vanilla, they used lag-free DOS with vanilla. Those two are different.

[Linguica]

1 hour ago, Looper said:

I don't personally see why speedrunning should be newcomer friendly.

 

I used to think the same thing, and I hate to go into a "kids today" argument, but kids today are NOT going to put up with weird arcane bullshit about a 25 year old game when they can be playing Fortnite in 60 seconds instead. Hell people on this very forum complain that they don't even want to look at a wiki, much less learn the landscape of a community over the course of weeks or months.

[Looper]

40 minutes ago, Linguica said:

when they can be playing Fortnite in 60 seconds instead.

 

You can be playing Doom in 60 seconds too, but you can never speedrun Fortnite :-D

[Grazza]

Yeah: easy to learn, hard to master. Like all the best games.

 

termrork: You seem to be hinting at some such thing as "official categories". There is no committee in the Doom community that approves or denies category applications, or designs them in some way. Each of our current categories came about by someone defining it and recording some demos or starting a contest or a demopack with some friends. If it proved fun, it caught on. If it didn't, it died out (e.g., Max doesn't need 100% items). And the Doom speedrunning community has generally been quite open to new categories. Witness Stroller demos - a frankly bizarre set of restrictions on the player, yet we now have hundreds of Stroller demos.

 

6 hours ago, termrork said:

on doomedsda.us there you can easily see which port was used and make your own judgment. but who knows the particular differences between the ports? even the small nuances when it comes to glides etc.? only a very small elite. imo this is not transparent and not friendly to newcomers at all.

I've always found it unhelpful that the information there stresses the precise version of the specific port much more than the demo format. It's basically clutter. The primary consideration ought to be the demo format (Doom2.exe, Boom, MBF, etc.), rather than the precise executable used to emulate it.

 

About 0/0 secrets displaying as 100%: this was intended by whichever programmer implemented it (sorry, I forget who it was, but some research would discover it easily enough) to help people know that they hadn't missed any secrets. Of course nowadays, we can find out in a second that a map has no secrets, so it is a less useful feature. Personally, I'd prefer it to display it as n/a, which is what I put in my txts in such cases. Or to follow Doom2.exe and show 0%.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Grazza

[Dwaze]

10 hours ago, dew said:

Oh dear, perish the thought. There is no technical connection between squeeze and void glides, so banning them under the disgusting "glide" umbrella makes no sense except linguistic.

I remember it was for e1m8, I thought it could be interesting to do the level run without the void glide. But maybe I overgeneralized the idea previously.

[termrork]

thank you for all your replies, I understand them, but still feel very uneasy about the current status.

I would have put user friendliness and having a fun experience over the arguments, that it is tradition, it does not have to be userfriendly and everybody can do what they want...

but I understand that there have been attempts to achieve something like this with "the intended way" but failed (I have never seen such a demo

for example). so it seems a huge majority of the doom community is not interested in this. it seems the doom community is different w.r.t. this since all

other speedrunning communities I have seen have this because of the very same reasons (ironically even doom 4).

I respect that and therefore we can close our discussion here if nobody wants to come up with new arguments.

[Looper]

I'm not even sure if the intended way is something that can be easily determined. For example, map06 the crusher. Are you intended to be able to jump to the switch from the lift before the lift even reaches the bottom or are you supposed to go down with it first?

[4shockblast]

FWIW, there have been demos done that exclude tricks for PWADs and IWADs. Some IWAD examples include Vono's n4m2 without the BFG grab and Winterfeldt jump and my n4m1 without the keygrab. I had already mentioned Sunder map 5, but additionally, the runners who helped with the /idgames exploration thread had done runs like that too. To my knowledge, at least TheGreenHerring had done runs like that for PWADs with major skips, and I'd done something like that too at least once, even to the point of using v1.2 compat to make the map work as intended. I'm sure there's many others who recorded runs like this.

 

I also agree that intent is definitely one of those things that I really prefer to avoid in any speedrun definitions. As Looper indicated, it's hard to know what is or isn't intended. Even IWAD maps had intended RJs (E3M6), and intent goes far beyond tricks: for example, using a door that is supposed to require a key but hasn't been marked correctly is hardly a glitch but is certainly unintentional I would hope. Intent is one of the biggest problems many people (including myself) have with the current pacifist definition. A good example of that is the recent p4m6 run. Specifically, there is a caco that was unintentionally manipulated into a teleporter that Zero-Master telefrags much further into the run. The telefrag, however, is avoidable by a strafejump that ZM was unaware of at the time. Is it unintentional because the caco wasn't meant to go into the teleport? Is it unintentional because the way to avoid it requires a trick? Is it intentional because it is avoidable via the trick, so effectively, the runner "intentionally" chose a path that includes the telefrag? Is it unintentional because ZM didn't know about the other route? Does it even matter given the cacodemon posed no threat either way? This ambiguity is a big reason intent results in so much confusion and uncertainty in ruling the legitimacy of a run, and having yet another main category that considers intent would only result in more of this..

 

Also, regarding the difficulty argument, n4m1 is a good example of why that doesn't really work. That is, the keygrab is precisely what made the run possible in the first place; not doing the trick is actually much, much harder (not impossible, even for a movie run IMO, but certainly much more restrictive with respect to player skill). So, if we want running to be easier for players, we should probably let that trick go as well as the e4m2 tricks, or else the runs become substantially harder. Sunder is another good example here; most of the pacifist and NM runs on it are possible via unintentional glitches and strategies. So, essentially, glitchless can be much harder than glitched. Furthermore, if glitchless runs were competitive, the top times would still be largely inaccessible to most players, and the requirement of not dying at any point of the run would still be very restrictive on players.

 

For increased accessibility, short of going all out and allowing RTAs as legitimate (something unlikely anytime soon), what we really need is more guides on tricks and how to perform them. The movement bible is a great resource in this aspect, but more practical strategies and ideas would still be useful to document in some unified resource. Unfortunately, the effort required to do this is large enough that no one has really taken it up seriously yet.

[GoneAway]

Re: speedrunning not being newcomer friendly and being too hard

 

We have a discord with lots of helpful people in there willing to discuss things with new people. Plenty of times someone comes in asking about ports and tricks and how something works etc, etc. That would be the magic element here, putting in a little effort to learn things instead of blaming a nonexistent elite for not making it easy enough to participate.

 

And, has been already said, it even is, because the Doom community is so laid back you can submit any run with any constraint. If you want to run casually, why would you even care about having an "official" category? It doesn't make any sense to me. No one on here is in charge of your own fun.

 

[Linguica]

I hate when communities move to be Discord-centric. Now not only are you completely relying on some company that owns everything you post, but it's literally a "dark web" community that can't even be hyperlinked or spidered by search engines.