AdamW

well, the only significant comparison you can make to darkening 2 is that it's a lot harder. the first ten levels are supposedly a lot easier than the rest and they're about as hard as darken e2. just played through map11 for the first time, what a fantastic level - the design on this pack is really top-notch. can't wait to see some rocking maxdemos here, hehe :)

Well, played up to map05 last night, i'm having a blast so far :). Nice cleanly designed fun levels, good to see a back-to-basics megawad :). I had some neat times for map01 in beta, for some reason they desync now even though the map doesn't appear to have changed - agh! Recorded a quickie pacifist in 0:31 (my old time 0:30) though...where should I send it, anyone know?

You realise what this means, of course? Our FRICKING DEMOS probably won't work any more. Curse you, Fred! CURSE YOU and your CURSED REJECT TABLES! =) And Enjay, yeah, you certainly will see a big FPS improvement, that's what a reject table is *for*. It allows Doom to stop worrying about monsters that are out of view, basically, and in a map as big as Vrack 2 this is a significant factor, because in the first version your computer was computing every single awake monster all the time, which puts a bit of strain on the poor thing.

ZDoom's rockets definitely do less damage at least up to v1.22 - I haven't played the 1.23 betas much. I played Vrack2 a lot in Zdoom 1.22, and believe me, you use a lot of rockets there. Magikal: the speed you're running towards the enemy, the angle you're facing, whether you're hopping up and down on one leg, whether it's a Tuesday in June with a full moon showing...none of these make a rat's arse difference to damage calculations. =). Doometallica: Lost Episodes and Maximum Levels aren't official releases, just illegal (since I think neither pack asked for permission from the authors) re-releases of wads which were probably ripped off cdrom.com. you missed the id anthology, which I think had at least one of the Dooms in it. Raziel: i don't think the changed rocket damage has anything to do with rocket jumping. it'd be perfectly possible to rocket jump in the original doom2.exe if you could look up and down and jump, that's the only change needed. It's just a bug, plain and simple, and I have no idea how it's stuck around so long. as for ports, I hardly use anything but prboom any more - 3D-accelerated Doom just looks horribly wrong, and prboom is wonderfully stable and has an extremely well-implemented and effective compatibility mode system.

Demo recording in Duke is extremely buggy, which is the main reason no-one ever really made any. That and the level design really doesn't much lend itself to speedrunning. Deathmatch demos work OK, but I dunno where you could download any. As for old games with an active following - well, there's Nethack, which is rather older than Doom...the Civilisation / Civ2 community probably counts, since Civ2 isn't much of a change from Civ at all...the original Championship Manager came out around 1992 and that's still a huge game in the UK, though it's been heavily updated since then so I guess it can't really count...can't think of any others off the top of my head.

good to see activision at least recognise the true ranking of id's games. =)

pure old-fashioned arrogance. and the fact that i know where you live, and the bloke with the baseball bat is on his way. ;)

Hellbent: "I resubmitted under another email address." From the small print: "One entry per person" tough luck, old chap. * Adam knocks another one off the list of competitors...=)

since the page randomises the position of the screenshots each time you access it, saying things like 'left of the cyberdemon' doesn't help us know what picture you're talking about. and i can tell you there's no duplicate levels in the contest, so whichever other screenshot you're thinking of, it's not E2M8.

Kinda. Method at the start is to get the cacos fighting the imps then stand behind the cacos, you're safe from pretty much everything there, and it's a bonus if the chaingunners do see you and launch an attack, cos you can get the cacos fighting them too. Only problem is when a caco kills its imp and turns back to you, you have to be careful dodging it until another imp hits it. I have actually got to the imps' key, once, and that's the hardest part of the run, so it's possible. (After that the really annoying part is the baron/key bit, which you have very little control over.) You don't need all the imps dead, theoretically you don't need *any* of them dead, but realistically you need four or five down to have a chance at the key. As for PA02, ooooh. It's definitely possible, but incredibly, incredibly hard. There's not really any slow way to do it, just too many shotgunners and not enough health, so it's basically a P1M3-style level, run as fast as possible and rely on luck. You basically need an absolutely huge dollop of luck at the start: you need to get the first key and get back to the key bars with at least 75/200, which is technically possible but almost never happens..then you need a lot of luck and a lot of precision at the end. It's way, way harder than any other pacifist i've done, but it *is* possible, and if I had a couple of months and nothing else to do i'd probably make it. Heh.

read the entry page carefully, it tells you what to do for international entries.

i already did that, it should be in compet-n misc dir. took me about 45 minutes, it's not all that hard. i wimped out on the barons, did them the impossible-to-die way with pistol. and for the people who seem confused, map07 tyson has already been done, it's a hell of a long demo though. btw, nice work on t2m8 and t4m1 xit-vono, i never got past about 2/3rds on t2m8...:\. i'm not too sure about your archvile method for map30, though, they just don't do that much radius damage...and they can't see you to attack you once you've gone through the hole, so you'd be limited to just the attacks which were launched before you got through. nice idea though. remind me to do pa26 soon. bleh.

ling, can you post the results of everyone who says it's easy at the end? =) i'd like to know what the screenshots were taken in, too, the perspectives seem wack...can't replicate some of the views right in doom.exe or zdoom...

Maybe you should make it clear that the primary download site is ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/ - reading between the lines of the announcement email I think they want the main load on that server, not 3dgamers.

Um...yes, actually, I am. I've never been able to track down a legal copy of Ultimate Doom or Final Doom in this country (couldn't get final doom at full price, never seen it on budget or indeed at all since then), though i've always wanted to buy them legitimately. So i'll be buying this box set as soon as I see it. Is there something wrong with wanting to pay id for their efforts? (Though how much of the profits from this go to id I wouldn't like to guess. Probably none. Oh well.)

you really think they're that rare? i just ran a couple of searches, came up with a copy of the book with CD for $8. i don't get paid till friday...so if no-one else finds it before then i'll buy it and upload the levels. they don't look as if they're official in any way to me though - just some schmuck's add-ons.

yeah, correct. i've sent a rather long mail explaining this to andy, hopefully he'll put it up on his site soon :)

dude, it'll never be as good as boothill. :)

Doh, of course it did. How could I forget a URL like that? :)

Directory structure, basically. When COMPET-N started off, it was pretty much just a directory of cdrom.com (well, it could've been one of the older sites to start with...don't remember if we'd starting using cdrom.com by the time COMPET-N started off), with Steven Widlake looking after it. Since cdrom.com kept standard 8.3 filenames, the name had to fit into 8 characters, hence COMPET-N. And it's uppercase I guess because standard DOS reports everything as uppercase (though since cdrom.com runs *nix, it would've been lower-case at the server end...)

is that a word?

The DM isn't exactly going to be serious given that we'll be using fecking joypads here, heh. Given that, I think reacquainting people with Doom1-style DM could be interesting, since it makes for a rather different style of play when the default weapon of most DMers - the SSG - is removed.

Nintendo have a track record of removing blood from id conversions - check Wolf3D on the SNES, for instance. Anyone remember if N64 Doom had blood?

Absolutely right. If you can persuade one to scratch another (requires good timing) you can get them to fight, and it can also be done another way, which basically involves getting them to blow up barrels, there's a quite famous demo of this in e1m8.

Jon - now you mention it, that rings bells with me, too. Have to look it up. Excalibur_Z - Quest was the codename for the project id were kicking around before they decided to do the new Doom game instead. The 3DActionPlanet article is pretty much pure speculation. All we actually know is that id are going to be talking about "NEW GAMES" at Quakecon. Anything beyond that isn't official :).