JKist3

Just stumbled upon this thread. It's pretty cool!  If you ever focus on duel you should make sure you are training the bot on game settings consistent with one of the competitive standards in doom duel.  Differences in match settings that may seem minor to an outsider can change the cost/benefit ratio of many in game decisions. Making sure you can input the correct match settings into VizDoom will be important. Testing a duel bot vs humans on a competitive standard will also be the best measurement of bot performance as this is where the highest human playing level has been reached and these are the settings where the habits of the humans playing against the bots have been developed and are most applicable.

I have a byoc ticket, but it's still up in the air if I'll actually make it. This would be my first byoc so not sure what people usually do for planning.  Are people here trying to select seats together?

Doomkid said:

Maybe the ping in Doom just seems worse due to the split-second nature of the game. Games with a slightly slower/more strategic approach would probably still be playable with a ping of 300 or below. I'm just guessing though, the only games I have much experience playing online are Doom, Street Fighter and Smash Bros which all get affected in a very similar way by high ping.

This is the right answer. The degree of disadvantage caused by latency depends on the game. Lag causes less of a disadvantage in MMOs compared to FPS games.

Lejionator said:

Thanks for definitive clarification about the "swingshots", Jkist3. Now really understand this intriguing thing I have read at Devastation's Guide. :D

I now really understand how RAW was the doom2.exe, lol. But now I just have one more single doubt. It is about the initial spawns the map01 and green/indigo players, in multiplayer.
I have realized, after seeing so many old demos that players with certain colors always born at the same spawn point. Green always spawns on the ledge of 3 weapons(BFG, SSG and RL) and indigo always spawns in front of Chaingun. Interestingly, in Doom2.exe, the spawns are random during the game, but did not know they were always pre-determined early matches(initial spawns). But my question is: what determines a player to come be green(player 1) or indigo(player 2)? It's about who enters the first in the server? lol, it's funny!

In doom2.exe you can specify by command before the game starts who gets assigned which color. As you may or may not know a specific color will have an advantage over the other in doom2.exe due to spawns and lag. On lan indigo is lagged, while over the internet green is lagged a lot more than indigo. Also, in entryway map01, green gets the much better starting spawn and as a result starts off in control or with a frag run or both. As you can see in old demos between 2 high level players, green will usually win on lan. Originally people played to a 100 frag limit because this was as high as the in game frag counter could go. As games got more competitive a new standard was made: instead of 1 game to 100 they played 2 games to 50 with each player switching colors to make it an actual fair contest. This is the reason the current competitive standard is a 50 fraglimit. After modern source ports came out and eliminated the color advantage the 2nd game to 50 was no longer needed for a fair fight and was dropped.

Lejionator said:

Regarding the issue of the compatibility of the demos in modern ports, I think I found a bug in Odamex since it was created to be as vanilla as possible. Or maybe not, I think maybe this is not the intention of having Odamex sync with LMP demos. Who knows?

I agree this is most likely a bug you found with odamex.

Lejionator said:

I just think the biggest nonsense about customers about Doom is the incompatibility between them!They should be universair as are the customers of any quake, meaning they are compatible among themselves. For example: a player using Odamex could go into zandronum or zdaemon servers. This incompatibility only divides communities. :(

This would be nice. The issue is that unlike quake, doom wasn’t released with a client/server model, so these multiplayer projects have to code their own. They wont all be coded the same way, so the resulting ports will be incompatible. For everything to be compatible the ports would all have had to fork from a single multiplayer port, not implement their own client/server approach.

^^ Yup that's me.

A couple things regarding this proposed multiplayer section:

1) I'm interested in multiplayer stuff but miss many of the multiplayer threads because I'm not that active on the doomworld forums. This is because it's a pain to sift the multiplayer stuff out of the sea of non multiplayer doomworld threads. I and hopefully others would be more active in these threads if they were grouped together in an easily findable section.

2)

Linguica said:

There was a Multiplayer forum before and it was a ghost town. We've talked of reviving it, but we're concerned it would just be a ghost town again.

I don't know when you last tried a multiplayer section but the multiplayer scene has changed a lot over the past few years. ZDaemon used to have a near monopoly on doom multiplayer and their forums were the place to go for multiplayer discussion. As a result, I'm not surprised that a doomworld section at that time would have generated few threads. Times have changed though. The ZDaemon forums have dried up and there really isnt a place to go to for doom multiplayer stuff. The best I can think of are the WDL forums, but those are pretty specialized and don't really fill the full niche. Furthermore, the ZDaemon forum decline was due to administrators running their playerbase outta town, not from lack of player forum interest! Granted the scene has withered away over a few years of this situation, but it seems possible some of this interest could come back with a doomworld forum section.

3) What's the actual cost and effort involved in setting this up? Why not try it for a few months? If it's a ghost town, then remove the section. I don't really see the downsides here...

Lejionator said:

First, thanks to everyone who helped me better understand this fun game! Mainly to JKist3, I'm a fan of your gameplay. Nice work there at QuakeCon 2013, man! The Grand finals was awesome!!

Thanks! Glad you enjoy doom multiplayer.

Lejionator said:

Just an addendum regarding "swingshots", I've read it a topic regarding zandronum forum and a guy said so: I think the dude didn't realise that there's actually a three or four tic delay between hitting +attack and actually firing, and though that that "somehow calculate[d] into your [shot's angle]". I believe this to be due to a time delay between the actions press the button to shoot and actually shoot. And as modern ports have unlagged netcode, maybe this is fixed? Just a guess, after all.

There is indeed a delay between +attack and pellets coming out of the gun. In modern ports with unlagged, opponent positions at the time of pellets getting shot are used for damage calculation, not positions at the time of +attack. So there is still a meaningful delay between these two things. Previously, before the ports had unlagged, you had the additional delay of internet latency to worry about which made aiming on them much harder. Due to the way the p2p netcode/lancode worked in the original doom2.exe, you saw the opponent where they actually were and would need to aim hitscan weapons the same way as on the current unlagged netcode ports. Keep in mind though, swingshots were being discussed back in the doom2.exe days before any of these client/server ports existed, whether they had unlagged netcode or not, so later client/server netcode behavior would not have been the cause of the mythical “swingshot”.

Lejionator said:

A question: at the time of doom2.exe, there was no way to access the in-game scores during a deathmatch game?

No, there was no in game scoreboard. You had to count your opponent's frags in your head. Good luck playing in a FFA match like that! You can see what I mean when I say the original game while a classic was pretty raw and unrefined.

Lejionator said:

I do not know which port JKist3 used, but at the time I assist this demo using Odamex(cuz Odamex RULEZ!). And the demo always make that bug exactly at frag 16 of Ocelot(green color).
I tried to see OCANM1K.LMP again in Odamex and the same thing happens. So I take scifista42 tip and downloaded PrBoom+ with "-complevel 2" parameter and used it to watch the same demo. And finally everything went well, the game ran perfectly! I did not know that these things happen and I remember that GhostlyDeath had mentioned about synchronized and desynchronized ports, and do not understand what that means.

I used doom95 to play the demo. As I mentioned before there was a point where the game was paused. This is after frag 15 from what I remember, so it is indeed most likely the cause of your problem. Regarding GhostlyDeath's comments: some ports try to maintain vanilla compatibility (you can watch lmp demos on them from doom2.exe) while others don't focus time and energy on maintaining this. Because odamex tries to maintain vanilla compatibility, not handling this demo correctly this would be a bug in their program.

Lejionator said:

1- At the time, in 1995, 96, 97, which was the port they used? Doom95? When they started using ZDoom?

In 1995,96,97 doom2.exe, the original game program from id software, was used. The competitive scene gradually shifted away from exe and onto online ports in the early 2000‘s. The source port scenes quickly grew far larger than the doom2.exe scene because of the convenience advantages they brought (the original game from id software while a classic, was raw and buggy compared to what you are used to nowadays for an fps game). Additionally, under internet latency, client server architecture offers better multiplayer abilities than the p2p doom came with, though it’s debatable at what point in time the doom c/s source ports surpassed the original in terms of play quality over the internet. Still, while the source port scenes attracted most all the players, a few of the top competitive players stuck to playing private games of doom2.exe for a while longer before migrating themselves. It’s safe to say that by at least 2004 the competitive scene had moved to ZDaemon. It then stayed on ZDaemon until late 2011 or so, after which it migrated to Odamex in a much smaller capacity.

Lejionator said:

2- What was the easiest method to record demos at the time? They used shortcuts on the desktop? Batch files? Had they created binds to already record with a given name or typed manually?

Starting a doom2.exe game isn’t like what you are used to today where you just double click on a server to start. You had to make sure everyone was ready and manually type in a lot of parameters from the command line, so typing out out one more for a demo wasn’t too bad and was how most players did it afaik. Additionally, actually recording a demo in doom2.exe created a lag which hurt player performance so there was always a decision about whether to record a match or not.

Lejionator said:

3- And nowadays, what has changed to record demos? There is easy binds to it with names, dates and times already included in the file name?

Nowadays with the modern source ports demo recording is a lot easier. You can have your port auto record any game you join or simply make a start and stop recording key bind.

Lejionator said:

4- I've read last week the "DevastatioN's guide". From what I researched, the Offset Weapon and SSG's Swingshot has been fixed in modern port, huh? The position of the crosshair was aligned in modern ports and Swingshot was something the unlagged repaired and is no longer necessary to shoot off target for the shot hit the enemy while sharply move the crosshairs on it, right?

The weapon offset Devastation talks about is with regards to the default original weapon sprites. The crosshair in modern ports is perfectly placed and if you look closely you can see that the weapon sprites are not perfectly aligned with the crosshair. doom2.exe didn’t have a crosshair and some players aimed with the weapon sprite. If you try to aim with the weapon sprite, you should aim off center. As far as swingshots go, I think there’s always been a debate as to whether they exist in both doom2.exe and modern ports. Even though the code is now open source, I don’t think anyone capable enough has bothered with sifting through it to verify if indeed there is any scientific basis for the existence of a swingshot or not. For what it’s worth, I personally don’t try to execute them. While I don’t think I’m a player with overpowering aim, my aim is good enough that combined with the other skills of the game, I get good results. So, swingshots don’t seem to be a necessary part of aiming.

Lejionator said:

5- I wonder if team deathmatch was something popular in doom, and if so, I wonder if there are demos of games out there, it was played in 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4, and what were the most appropriate wads. I hear say that tdmax_b4.wad was popular in TDM (map1, 4, 10, 16 and 29), but do not know if it's true.

TDM has never been that popular in doom. CTF is much more popular as a competitive team mode.

Lejionator said:

The OCANM1K.LMP(map01), both players start play normally it to watch, but early in the demo (around the frag 10 of ocelot), they start to get mad or blind, Anders starts killing himself with rockets on the wall at BFG room and Ocelot wandering in the outside(secret garden). And they were in lan! What happened here???

I watched the demo you listed up until frag 20 and never saw any crazy behavior. Your demo must have screwed up in some place. The game was paused for a little bit. Maybe your method of playback is incompatible with the pause? Just an idea.

Btw doomworld moderators: This thread got moved to the speed run demo section even though it's not about speed runs. It would probably be better suited for a multiplayer section. If only one of those existed.... ;)

A multiplayer section has my support!

dew said:

correction: the jkist settings are not used by IDL, because IDL is fully newschool (jumping, mouselook).

Ah yeah, sorry I was thinking of the other settings when I wrote that and forgot about mouselook and jumping. Dew is correct mouselook and jumping are usually used for ctf and not 1v1.

As far as 1v1 goes, there are pretty much two ways its traditionally played: 1) oldschool style with some basic fps features and bug fixes added or 2) a complete emulation of the original game. In general north america uses 1) and europe uses 2). Odamex does support both styles fyi.

sponge said:
[the rules will have to be a balance between casual and hardcore duel[/B]

In that case let me plug the game settings we run for ZDDL! We allow features that come standard in any fps nowadays (crosshairs, ability to pickup a weapon without switching to it, forcing the respawn of an opponent after a certain time inactive in the map, actors who’s height is the height of their sprite instead of infinity, all spawn points functioning properly (a bug in the original doom causes certain spawns to be completely silent), etc.) while still keeping the original oldschool gamestyle (no jumping, no mouselook). These settings are much more welcoming for people who are new to the game and also preferred by many (not all) players who still play today. There is a lot of drama in the community about most anything, but the zddl settings get my personal vote. It’s been the competitive standard in North America for the past decade in both 1v1 (ZDDL) and ctf (IDL). The European scene is a bit different and often uses settings absent of the mentioned features or bug fixes for their tournaments and leagues. Odamex does fully support the zddl/idl game settings btw.

I think Ralphis hit the nail on the head. I help run the ZDDL which is the top 1v1 doom competition in North America

http://cdevastation.com/zddl/

You can use it as an example of how doom is competitively played nowadays. The league started a number of years ago when the competitive standard in doom was zdaemon 1.08, but don’t be fooled by the name. We plan to run our next season on Odamex. ZDaemon 1.09 has been abandoned by the competitive community for a variety of reasons, and skulltag/zandronum has never been taken seriously. Odamex on the other hand is a port by the players for the players, and fully supports top competition.

Ralphis is completely correct that this game has a very hardcore following. In addition to many of the top North American players who are considering attending, a few Europeans have mentioned they are trying to scrape together money to attend this event if it looks promising. None of these players North American or European have sponsors that cover travel and hotel costs, yet many still want to attend for an event which few are predicting to have a sufficiently large prize. This says a lot about how serious the players are in this game and the type of event you could have if run correctly.