tony_mke

Try E3M8 again with a pistol start. It makes it much more climactic. Something to keep in mind: Pistol starting Doom 1/2/Final Doom is a lot more challenging and fun, especially knowing it's ultimately the intended (or at least, tested for) experience.

What I find so disappointing about this topic isn't the attempt at enforcing consitency or a level playing field in speedrunning - that seems rational to me. It's the unspoken bit that comes with it that makes me chuckle: that playing something other than the "real" doom is somehow impure - not-as-intended, and conferring advantages. The constraints that drive people to source ports - the fixed resolution, the #define'd limits, the vertical mouse movement, and the lack of autorun - were never design constraints. They were technical constraints resulting from a deadline. Constraints people overcame in other ways before source ports. Even when DOS was the only option, things like the joyb_speed trick for autorun and the novert TSR for disabling vertical mouse movement were commonly used. If you were to ask an id dev at the time if demos recorded using these things were "pure", their response would have undoubtedly been "who cares?" I happen to play in DOS Doom as much as possibler because I appreciate the period-accurate nostalgia romp. But me doing that doesn't mean sparkling boom isn't just as fun. If the demo plays in DOS Doom - the difference between which pile of compiler output spat it out is a pedantic one. </rant>

Howdy friends. Been playing Doom since I was a wee lad ('96-ish). Even became a software engineer simply from being so curious about how it worked. You'd think that after playing for 28 years, I'd be pretty good at the game. You'd think... I stumbled onto decino on YouTube as a senpai to study when learning to casually UVmax plutonia; he frequently references the happenings here. Then I found this excellent WAD Progression for Skill Improvement thread and have been following its advice by repeatedly dying like an idiot engaging in a high-feedback skill improvement process since.

Source ports are not Doom. Demos recorded in source ports should be invalid. If you're not playing on original EXEs compiled in the Doomagne region of France, you're playing sparkling Boom.

I've never actually participated on this site, but I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who did this. This is a gamechanger for playing my favorite version of the game. Firm handshakes all around.