improved hell revealed 11 max kills speed

[gggmork]

I think so anyway. As far as I know this was the fastest:

MAP11 04.04.2001. Radek Pecka 15:23

I got 14:31 (ultraviolence) and recorded a *zdoom* demo (so maybe only playable in zdoom), downloadable here:

((see attached file in my later post instead))

Only problem is everything was 100% but the kills were 99%, so don't know if all I missed was a lost soul (I think lost souls don't count?). I don't use a mouse or 'super strafe' by the way.

also if it matters I use zdoom 2.1.7

[Opulent]

I enjoyed that. been awhile since I've seen that map.
I think your two small route improvements smoothed your time... and maximizing the bfg helped too.

[myk]

The BFG does more damage overall in ZDoom because of some code changes (including that it lacks the blockmap glitch, and I think some other modification), so getting that time in v1.9 should demand more work.

Lost souls don't count, so you must have missed some other monster(s), unless ZDoom has a tally bug.

[TheDarkArchon]

ZDoom counts lost souls.

[gggmork]

The bfg must operate on some bizarre quantum mechanical mechanism because its damage seems to depend on where the observer is. I *******ely think anyone at compet-n could get a much better time; they probably mostly passed on this level, considering it to puny to bother and went straight to 32, playing only with their feet by now for extra challenge. My only chance, especially as a keyboarder, was to be efficient with the ammo/bfg (The 15:23 guy had like 6 spare bfg blasts still left at the end). Also running past the cyberdemon and letting that first archvile down from the top platform helped.

Are there any 'legendary' demos to recommend, like the most wickedly impossible tyson or something that even the doom gods marvel at?

[emailking]

gggmork said:
The bfg must operate on some bizarre quantum mechanical mechanism because its damage seems to depend on where the observer is.

The blasts are shot out from your body in a cone centered on the direction in which you were facing when you shot the gun. This isn't quantum mechanical because it's completely deterministic (aside from the exact direction of the blasts and damage levels too I think). Also the gun and target states have never been coupled. So it's not something like opening a box on one side of the galaxy tells you what in a box at the other end. I see where you're getting it from, but the BFG is pure fantasy.

[gggmork]

I won't pretend that it was a good comparison or that I know what I'm talking about. Frankly I suspect quantum mechanics is largely memetically replicated nonsense. I just meant, as far as I can tell, blasting a cyberdemon in the face while standing right next to him nearly kills him, whereas blasting him in the face while standing a great distance away does much less damage (I think anyway).

[emailking]

gggmork said:
Frankly I suspect quantum mechanics is largely memetically replicated nonsense.

Quantum mechanics is not make believe nonsense. It is reality. It's the reason you can see through glass. It's the reason the chips in your computer work. It's the reason you don't fall through the floor. Heck it's the reason the atoms in your body don't collapse inwards.

I have a masters in physics and know what I'm talking about. Quantum Mechanics may seem strange to you, but the reality is that the world is very strange indeed at small sizes. The weirdness gets averaged away in some sense at larger sizes. (This is called the correspondence principle and can be proven.) Hence the order that you are used to in your everyday life.

There isn't any consensus on why the world is this way at small sizes, but no serious scientist doubts this. And everything can be mathematically described so it does fall under science.

I didn't mean to go off on you. But I feel the need to set the record straight when it comes to physics.

gggmork said:
I just meant, as far as I can tell, blasting a cyberdemon in the face while standing right next to him nearly kills him, whereas blasting him in the face while standing a great distance away does much less damage (I think anyway).

This is because when the cyber is right in front of you, most if not all of the shots will hit the cyberdemon because he's blocking most of your field of view. 2 such mega blasts are all that's needed to kill it in this case. If you hit the cyberdemon from far away, it may be that none of the shots hit it, and it only takes a direct hit from the plasma ball. This takes more like 5-6 blasts to kill it.

[gggmork]

Hundreds of attempts and a case of carpal tunnel syndrome later, I shed almost a minute off the time (used 'attach file' feature since sendspace links expire).

It is a Zdoom ultraviolence max kills hr11 demo, 13:39, using keyboard only (again missing 1 stupid lost soul I think). Who cares when there are people who can complete doom2 in nightmare in a half an hour.. but whatever.

*casually sidesteps quantum mechanics discussion to avoid humiliating myself*

**USES ZDOOM 2.1.7** if that matters (didn't put in a text file)

zdphr11save1339.zip

[Searcher]

I'd side step that discussion as well. Please make sure your text file on your demo shows the version of zdoom you used. Should be fun to watch.

[gggmork]

This time I tried hr13.
I shed 21 measily seconds (my time: 12:53) off compet-n's record (record was 13:14) of hell revealed 13 (last look at eden), doing an ultraviolence max kills (attached demo uses zdoom version 2.1.7).

I know I can do about a minute faster with enough tries. Also this demo has one short death tacked on the front because its a pain to constantly press 'esc, up, enter, y, move the mouse to start, run, ok' every 20 seconds to start a new demo. Not a particularly good run, but the one that happened to make it all the way through.

This is the basic route:

From player start, it's quicker to go up the left stairs immediately out the door, but for me anyway, there is only a 10% chance of making it out the top door with sufficient life this way. So I always go right and wait a bit to rush past the hell knights easier with more life.
Once out the door, I've tried various things. Attempting to kill the arch vile right away is a pain so not worth pursuing. Also tried waking chaingunners then hanging out in the blue armor area and opening/closing the door repeatedly to cause infighting. But it seems fastest to just run right out the door because all those cacodemons and chaingunners basically die for free as you play the rest of the level anyway.
Get double barrel, then once out the bottom door I go left and wake up chain gun spider, then go to the east door of the place with the key/barons/and an arch vile. I start from the left area of this door (to persuade the arch vile to move left) immediately grab the key and attempt to go out the right door immediately, hopefully leaving that arch-asshat in there for now.
Then I go to the 1st key door and just kill and finish everything in there (my first inclination was to only wake up all the monsters in this room, and right away similarly wake up everyone in the door opposite the center cyberdemon as well, hoping they'd all just die in the center chaotic mess quicker. But that doesn't work well because you have to keep reopening the doors to let them all out as monsters can't open them). When exiting this 1st key room I use the quickly open/close door technique to cause infighting and try to kill about 2 mancubuses before heading out.
Then I just nab the soulsphere in the teleporting mess, grab the center key (since cyber is generally distracted with infighting) and head for the death cage key door. (This place can be done quicker if you just nab the key and cause infighting as soon as possible, possibly using the arachnotrons as shields a bit, but that's death 90% of the time for me so don't bother) So instead I only activate the door-close linedef and immediately hold down the fire button on the double barrel shotgun and count blasts. 20 blasts is the time it takes before you have to grab the key as then the door will soon open. Then you just infight kill everyone here, but might be quicker to open/close door from the outside while you do other stuff.
Next, I go left out the door to kill the reverents (if alive still) near the currently inaccessable plasma gun. Then kill the center pain elementals. Then go to the original container of hellknights and that archvile and let them out to cause infighting with the cyberdemon. While that's happening, kill that arch vile if still alive, grab the rocket launcher/rockets, and head to the teleporting mess to rocketize them (taking advantage of spash damage on an area of concentrated enemies).
Probably make sure all but cyber are dead, then open the final key door and run to the opposite side of the cyber hoping reverents will hit him and cause infighting (and hoping the arch vile won't blast you). If the stupid arch vile doesn't come out, alternate from the shelter of the teleport mess area, and currently inaccessable plasma gun area, constantly reopening the door, hoping to nail the arch with rockets while he's staying still while firing.
Yada ya, get the plasma, go in the warp to the 1st area and immediately kill the arch with the plasma, run up the steps and try to run out that top door to the bottom (where the original 2 barrel shotgun was) as soon as possible. But note that wall hugging the windows while running can make the cyber infight more (and hopefully kill those reverents in cages). Just use single barrel on the elevated caged hell knights at the bottom as rockets are a waste with no splash damage and double barrel doesn't concentrate well. Hopefully you have some rockets to eventually use on the arch vile at the top; if not plama works pretty good but he can be a prick if he hangs out on the lower right stairs.
My first idea was to simply never use the end warp back to the beginning and instead just head back up through the door. But that door on the top permanently closes until reopened from the side where the player originally starts. Plus its probably better to cause cyber demon infighting in the player-start-area while you kill everyone in the double-barrel-shotgun-area anyway.
Then just kill the cyber and all remaining and, like, win and stuff. Well I mean to the extent that wasting your life playing video games can be called winning.

z13save1253forzdoomv217.zip

[xit-vono]

That sounds interesting. Can you do it with doom2.exe?

[gggmork]

xit-vono said:

That sounds interesting. Can you do it with doom2.exe?

I actually don't really know how to play the original doom2 (+hell revealed wad) for windows without using a port like zdoom... or how to record a demo on it. Wouldn't it be messed up with crackly sound or something since its on windows, or does compet-n allow prboom demos or something as long as the original doom 2 file is used with it?

[myk]

gggmork said:
does compet-n allow prboom demos or something as long as the original doom 2 file is used with it?

COMPET-N itself allows only demos with the DOS executables. If that's not possible, using Chocolate Doom, or PrBoom with the correct compatibility level, you'd at least get the same underlying engine functionality as in the original engine (v1.9 compatibility), and thus comparable demos.

There's nothing wrong with recording a demo using any engine, but to compare times with any accuracy the engines need to be working in the same way, and to submit to COMPET-N specifically, they'd need to be with the engine as compiled by id Software.

[xit-vono]

Try running doom2.exe with the -nosound parameter. It runs pretty well that way. It may worry you that you would be playing without sound, but in my experience sound isn't generally very helpful in recording demos.

[emailking]

What does it even matter? It seems pretty clear to me that compet-n is dead and never to be revived. There was even a thread a while back about how something needs to be done and a new direction taken, but still nothing happened.

[Grazza]

Well, if one is to talk about "beating the compet-n time" or even making any meaningful comparison between times, one should at least be using the same behaviour, if not the exact same engine.

[emailking]

I guess I think the vanilla only mentality needs to die. The game doesn't work properly on modern operating systems and presumably this will only get worse in time. We have ports that can emulate 1.9 and udoom 99.9% accurately if not 100% exactly, including the resolution. I agree zdoom wouldn't be a good choice, but I guess I feel like who cares if compet-n accepts vanilla only? Compet-n is dead. This is my opinion anyway.

[Grazza]

I don't think there is a vanilla-only mentality. After all, the majority of the demos around here are vanilla-compatible demos recorded with something other than the vanilla exe.

But compet-n still has an uploads area, and while that is functional, compet-n is still alive in a real sense. And of course for that one does need vanilla.

As for the game working increasingly less well in modern operating systems, I would say the opposite, given the improvements in DOSbox recently and, together with that, the continuing increase in hardware performance. It is possible to use the vanilla exe in a current OS far more successfully (i.e. playably) now than it was, say, a couple of years ago.

I do agree that for general purposes, a port that is capable of emulating vanilla behaviour is fully adequate. Of course I do; if I didn't, I would hardly have used prboom-plus for pretty much every demo I have recorded in the last four years, and put untold hours into testing it, etc. So to a large degree, I think, we are saying a similar thing in different ways.

And yes, one is welcome to record with any exe one likes, and all such demos are explictly welcome here - it is great to see a new recorder in the form of gggmork, and I hope he isn't at all put off by this discussion. The awkwardness only comes when one starts comparing times with other demos that were recorded in such different ways (i.e. wholly different in-game behaviour) as to render such comparisons fatally flawed.

[myk]

emailking said:
There was even a thread a while back about how something needs to be done and a new direction taken, but still nothing happened.

If you read that thread, the main problem is that now it's so easy to hack a demo with TAS features that it isn't really possible to have a "serious" competition site, and it's better to just stick to more informal demo sharing that should be taken in good faith, like we are doing now, for the most part. What engine can be used to record is quite secondary to that, and since it's easier to use the DOS engines now than when we had that discussion (and will only get easier as time goes by and CPU power increases), it wouldn't be problematic to just stick to them anyway, if there weren't other issues in the way.

Thus too much attention to COMPET-N nowadays would ruin it, so it's not really a problem if only DOS engine users contribute to it occasionally. In any case, no one said anyone was forced to record with the DOS engines, only that if you want to submit a demo to COMPET-N itself (where it would be a COMPET-N record), it is a requirement, as it's always been.

[xit-vono]

I had actually talked to Radix from SDA earlier about moving compet-n over there and he agreed, but it's impossible to copy cgi files directly and I didn't know how to do it so it didn't happen. I would still like to get it done sometime and if anyone knows about cgi and would be willing to contribute please let me know. As for the problem of cheating, I think it is overblown. There hasn't been any demos disqualified for TAS usage and I haven't heard of anyone suspecting players of cheating, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think that if someone does cheat in compet-n in the future, then there are still ways to detect it, even if they aren't 100% reliable, so a player shouldn't be able to continue cheating forever and get away with it.

[myk]

xit-vono said:
I had actually talked to Radix from SDA earlier about moving compet-n over there and he agreed, but it's impossible to copy cgi files directly and I didn't know how to do it so it didn't happen.

The best thing to do is to get in touch with Adam, for anything like this, both because he could provide the actual site sources, and because the archive is in his hands till he lets go of it.

[gggmork]

I find the discussion helpful and interesting so of course am not 'put off' by it. I'm glad dosbox was mentioned since I've been meaning to try that. Ok, I figured out everything with dosbox. I just type:
doom2 -file hr.wad hrmus.wad -skill 4 -warp 13 -record demoname
Only:
1) Do you have to type that entire line every single time? At least with start/run, the computer remembers the previous line you typed. But you can't seem to copy or paste text/etc in dosbox, and typing that whole line from scratch every 20 seconds would be a pain when dying frequently and continuously distract you when you're trying to concentrate on the game.
2) does altering the speed of dosbox (ctrl + f11 or f12 I think) allow slow motion cheating?

Tried prboomplus a bit and it seems it needs the cd in the drive to play which is kinda annoying, but dosbox seems to run pretty good.

[entryway]

gggmork said:

Tried prboomplus a bit and it seems it needs the cd in the drive to play which is kinda annoying

heh. it's not true.
what reasons for such suspicion?

[gggmork]

entryway said:

heh. it's not true.
what reasons for such suspicion?

I probably just don't know what I'm doing. Prboom (non plus) works fine. But with Prboom plus (the only application in there is glboom plus actually) it prompts 'there is no disc in the drive. please insert a disc into drive d' when I start glboom, even though the doom2 wad (should be v 1.9 now) is in the same folder (and it does work with the doom2 disc in the drive). All well, I like zdoom better as far as playability when not recording demos probably anyway.

[Grazza]

That sounds odd. I can only think that there is something weird in your cfg file that refers to a file with that drive letter for some reason. Or maybe you have set your %doomwaddir% to some such location (in the regular prboom, the problem might be getting masked by a bug). Grab the glboom-plus.cfg from the distribution package and use that instead of your current one, and check your environment variables.

Also, try setting launcher_enable to 0 in the cfg (use Notepad or similar to edit it manually), and see if you still get the problem. Also delete the prboom-plus.cache file, in case there is any debris in there.

But I can assure you that prboom-plus certainly does not need anything in the CD drive in order to run!

[entryway]

maybe gggmork is infected by viruses

[VinceDSS]

As many people mentionned here, the DOS EXEs are easier to use on nowadays machines than they used to be.

1 - Dosbox is powerful enough to run the vanilla WADs quite well (I havent tested more crowded levels such as HR and AV's). Though I am not sure if using an emulator is allowed at the compet-n.

2 - -nosound is an option but it can be crippling for some people...

3 - cli2nop does a decent job enabling the sound under xp/2k (didnt have a chance to try on vista yet)

4 - it isnt that hard to get an older win98 system (pentium or celeron), lots of people are giving those away.

[emailking]

VinceDSS said:

1 - Dosbox is powerful enough to run the vanilla WADs quite well (I havent tested more crowded levels such as HR and AV's). Though I am not sure if using an emulator is allowed at the compet-n.

This was what I was wondering too. Having seen what Adam H. has written in the past on these issues, I'm not sure he would accept a doom demo produced with dosbox. And it has always seemed that the recognized rules of Compet-N are whatever Adam H. says they are.

[Grazza]

Surely DOSbox is more akin to an operating system (or an emulation of an operating system), so I really can't see any objection to it. (If so, there could be equally well be an objection to running Doom2.exe under Windows XP, etc.) The program being run is Doom2.exe, and not an emulator of it.