The DWIronman League dies to: Epic

[SleepyVelvet]

DEAD: Map02

Category 1

noisy_EPIC.zip

 

Was staring at my map for fifteen seconds, and then a cluster of revenant rockets exploded me.  I'll never know where that yellow key go.

[Austinado]

Cat1

Dead on Map02

GZDoom

Kills 153/216

 

STARTS AT 1:52:06

 

 

[ReaperAA]

After not playing Doom for nearly a month, I decided to jump right into ironman at near midnight...

 

epicdemo.zip (Category 1 and died on the beginning of Map 3)

 

… and I screwed up. Although it is not such a bad thing I suppose, since I am not a fan of maze like maps (though I am judging the wad only from map 2). I share Roofi's sentiment that Eternal's mapping style in general has not aged as well.

[Crusader No Regret]

Prepared attempt here.  Bit it at the very end of map 5 in a most silly way.  Really should have picked up a bit of health before rushing over for a berserk pack.

 

  Was able to cheese the blue key trap in map 3.  Still spent 5 minutes getting revenants dead though infights as a precaution.  Found the computer map secret for the first time in this attempt which leads to several minutes of standing around looking at the automap.  Sadly, didn't find any new secrets that I hadn't located before with it.

prep_epic_cnr.zip

[Pegleg]

Here is my Category 3 entry.

 

Yes, this was prepared. And by prepared, I mean, I'd played the first half of the map before, so I knew what was coming there. With the end of the month fast approaching, I decided to give it a shot.

 

Dead on Map 01
Kills: 49/52
Time: 9:03

 

dwi_pegleg_epic_cat3.zip

 

The second half of the level confirmed my thoughts about the first map from my first post. Good ambushes, good encounters, the secrets weren't obvious (at least to me, but then I'm horrible at finding secrets). The ammo is definitely scarce; I think I ran out just in time to find more ammo sitting there. Some people don't like that, but I have come to appreciate the balancing that goes into that.

 

I thought I had a decent shot at finishing the first map (small goals, same as ever) until I came to the last room. I don't like revenants. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Oh well. Good set. Good choice. Let's see what next month brings.

 

For reference, here is my Category 1 submission.

[dt_]

Went off the rails on map04, though I hung on for a bit before dying, like any movie bad guy worth his salt (cat 1)

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9nw0j26rzs60sh4/dtepic.lmp?dl=1

 

Enjoyable, didn't even know there was an epic 1, I'd only previously played epic 2

[Arbys550]

Category 2, survived in 1:11:31. I played this around 3 or 4 years ago. I remembered what some of the levels looked like but none of the monster placement, save for the last fight. Overall, I think Epic 2 is better, and I think most would agree. I hated map04.

 

arbysironepic.zip

 

 

[FrancisT218]

@Arbys550 Yeah map04 is very tough to stay on the train...perhaps frustrating (good job you made it though!) I suspect Eternal borrowed extremely from E1M4 of Phobos: Anomaly Reborn here (another wad that is probably outdated but the visuals and atmosphere in that one were incredible for their time).

[Vince Vega]

It's quite Epic that I'm missing Epic and this month's DWIronman installment — for the first time since I registered here and uploaded my first entry in Jan'18. Shame on me, but I'm in a long travel seven times a hundred miles away from home and don't have an access to any PC.

I'll try to get back to my usual schedule in September. See thee soon.

[RjY]

category 2, survived in 2:14:48 (sorry the host I usually use seems not to be accepting uploads right now...)

MAP01         52/52  0    6/6    2/2   8:26+02     8:26
MAP02       216/216  0  76/78    4/4  30:11+18    38:37
MAP03       206/206  0  33/34  10/11  50:28+02  1:29:05
MAP04         78/78  0  12/12    2/2   6:49+15  1:35:54
MAP05       337/337  0  46/51    4/4  38:54+30  2:14:48

Although I haven't played it for some years I know this wad pretty well. It's a useful one to keep around if you have tinkering with source ports as a hobby, because it pushes at a bunch of limits. entryway used to use it as a benchmark for rendering speed for example.

map01: obviously things were going too well so instead of just running for the exit I had to faff around and let the two revenants hit me from 100/195 to 23/118. Waste of several minutes scrounging for missed stimpaks.

map02: this went fairly well, although slowly with lots of meandering around. I don't think it's possible to avoid getting punched when you get the red key. The partial invisibility is useful for once, with all the far-off chaingunners on towers. Of course, I kept on "saving it for later" and in the end didn't use it.

map03: I've been really enjoying grand adventure maps recently. I had to spend an age and a half finding all the secrets. Missed the last one frustratingly. I thought it must have been an archvile jump, but afterwards I checked in an editor, it's not. Also the blue bridge, I ended up doing a glide past the switch to find out you shoot to raise it, and if that wasn't irritating enough, the berserk it leads to isn't even a real secret!

map04: I was determined not to fall off the train which is why I spent so long waiting for cacodemons to float into range, you don't want them turning up at the worst moment.

map05: Here it is, the most renderer-breakingly wide-open map of its day. I kept returning to the BFG secret because I forgot when it became available, and had real trouble with an archvile up there, but with so many spheres (and 4 previous maps of inventory) my health was never in danger of running out. If I hadn't been recording I would have probably spent another 10 minutes trying to remember how to get that soulsphere off the pillar, but I'd got all the secrets (and was conscious that I was running out of month) so off I went.

[Daerik]

I didn't read the thread and was unaware of the softlock on map2 ):

 

I used -recordfromto to resume from right before where I softlocked, and will include both the demo where I softlocked and the demo I continued off of.

daerik_ironman_epic.zip

If that's acceptable, this'll be a survival in 1:02:25 as cat 1.

If not, softlock on map2 at 18:02 with 49 monsters remaining.

 

Twitch highlight that shows the softlock happening and me resuming the demo.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/727884951

 

Obtuse progression aside, this was a fun mapset. Nothing felt overly difficult, and I loved the subtle switch textures on map 3. Reminded me of the style of secrets in Legend of Grimrock.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Daerik

[NaZa]

On 8/21/2020 at 10:22 PM, SiFi270 said:

Category 2. It was going so well until a chaingunner anticlimactically knocked me off the train.

sidwi-ep.zip

Yeah, the zip here is 360 bytes and the demo lasts for a whole second! Have you accidentally overwritten the demo?

 

So I was going to update this with the obituaries triumphantly, finished most of the stuff but then I just "menu-paused" my PC as I went out of house... only for it to have crashed without my edits being saved. Great stuff! The spreadsheet was updated but all the edit cache thing seems to have disappeared and while the edit page is open, nothing else is. Wonderful, just wonderful. Well now it's too late to not postpone the new thread so I'll do that but I really want to finish these today as well. Congratulations to @Bdubzzz for yet another convincing victory and a large shoutout for @marver0PS for a first-time survival!

[SiFi270]

Well that's upsetting. I think what happened is I made a new .bat to test the original recording, to ensure it'd play the same with just epic.wad and none of my usual cosmetic addons, which it did. But then I must have accidentally clicked the .bat I used to record without removing the "-record sidwi-ep.lmp" from it and immediately quit, not realizing the consequences until now.

[Daerik]

@SiFi270

A bat file that names the demo a unique name each time can avoid this in the future.

set tmptime=%time: =0%
set datestr=%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%%date:~10,4%-%tmptime:~0,2%%tmptime:~3,2%%tmptime:~6,2%%tmptime:~9,2%
prboom-plus.exe -iwad doom2.wad -skill 4 -complevel 2 -record demoname_%datestr%.lmp

Will name it off the current date/time to the second. You can edit the demoname portion freely.

[NaZa]

Updated this competition as well. 3 down, 2 to go.

 

The notable discrepancy between this board and my leaderboards (at least until today) is that Daerik isn't listed as having survived in 2nd place but as softlocking on MAP02. Why? It would set a bad precedent. In January, ReaperAA died due to an FPS drop and I also took the original death as a MAP21 death, saying "while having a large FPS drop is certainly very unfortunate, so are power outages and sudden crashes to desktop - and those don't get a retry."

 

This situation is arguably a bit different because:

a) it's a softlock,

b) I had forgotten to put it in essential info despite saying I would,

c) -recordfromto was used.

 

 

Why did I count it as a softlock anyway?
Mostly consistency. In November '16 (way back, I know) a discussion was raised about this subject when a number of people softlocked behind the one-time yellow door on MAP07. The points raised were:

Quote

Could succumbing to documented bugs outlined in the OP result in a DNF, while undocumented ones mean you get a second go? -Alfonzo

Quote

Having DNF spots outlined beforehand is nice, but maybe put them in a spoiler for the people who don't mind partaking in the bit of martyrdom that comes with doing this challenge during the early days and possibly throwing themselves on a DNF knife. From what I can tell, that's part of the challenge already anyway, with later entrants having a significant advantage over the early birds in all the commentary that gets accrued. -Jimmy

Quote

Nahhh, no second goes—your run is your run. [...]  it's already such an uneven playing field that I don't feel like a small area where you can get stuck is where we're going to draw the line on who gets a free restart. It definitely sucks getting stuck and being forced to end your run, but anyone will tell you that getting killed anywhere in your run also really sucks. -dobu gabu maru

Quote

Yeah I was pretty mad about how I died on this one, but you don't see me bitching to Alfonzo about the WAD choice and asking for a second go because I deemed it to be bullshit map design. I mean it would be nice :P But y'know, rules are rules, and no they don't make this any less fun. What would take the fun out of this is if people started cheating by re-recording their runs or having second goes. -Eris

 

First and foremost, the bug was indeed documented as happening, but undocumented in the OP. However, I don't think it's fair the person who found the bug themselves never got a second go, but anyone after them who runs into the showstopper got a second go (see: Insertion, July 2017; Coffee Break, February 2018; Double Impact, May 2018; Plutonia, August 2018, which wasn't a softlock, but MAP03's starting pit warrants a warning). Interestingly enough, nothing ever came out of that and undocumented bugs still never got a second go (case in point: Monster Hunter Ltd., October 2019), probably because it'd be a bit unfair. Also, Daerik indeed streamed and preserved a highlight of that happening - so it wasn't a "second go", but a continuation - yet I still don't feel it's right to accept it. Out of consistency, but also because it opens a can of worms for demo recorders who can also say they did "just that". Making it so you have to send both pre-recorded and recordfromto demo is a decent maneuver around it, but it's just as easy to do that with power outages and CTD's. Also, not reading the thread before a run is a personal choice. MAP21 of Revolution (September, 2019) had a trap where a mouth closed in on you and killed you which the first victim spoilered. Someone else also died there because they didn't read the thread. Deaths also happen because of choosing not to read the thread, and so do softlocks.

In the end, shit happens. Ironman is fierce and brutal at times. But it's all part of the challenge.

Edited November 26, 2021 by NaZa