AdamW

fred: I find 0:05 for MAP01 easier than 0:09 for E1M1, actually. It took me a couple hours to get my 0:09 for DANG, only half an hour or so to get 0:05. For the original poster - you should get *at least* 0:10 on E1M1 before going on to anything else, it's a good way to refine your basic running speed and your 'general speedrunning kung fu' - not losing your patience, getting into a rhythm, etc. I think Grazza's post was *excellent*. The only thing I'd want to add to it is that speedrunning is a lot about attitude. The biggest trap I've seen people fall into when trying to speedrun is playing like they're playing normally; looking around, killing unnecessary stuff, going for medkits. My attitude to speedrunning a map is this - first learn the route, now it play it over twenty times in nomo till you have it down. (once you get good you don't need to *do* this, you can kinda do it in your head). Now start running properly, and keep this in mind; the goal is to be as similar as possible to the nomo run. *Everything* which involves not running continuously at full speed on the most direct route to the exit is bad and if you can possibly avoid doing that thing, you should. If it is at all possible to avoid running to the edge of the room to pick up the ammo box or medkit, then avoid it. Never stop to fire - keep running. Don't shoot up a room full of monsters just because - run straight through. If you get whacked too badly, pick off the hitscan enemies as you run. Don't switch weapons unnecessarily, this will bog you down. Top players spend more time than you'd think considering the strategy of whether and when to switch weapons. In regular play, if you hit a chaingunner with the shotgun and he doesn't fall over, you'd probably switch to pistol to finish him off and save ammo; never, ever do this in speedrunning, just hit him with the shotgun again. It's faster. But yeah, basically, you need to have the right attitude. Think of the nomo time as 'optimal' and if you want to get faster consider the things you're doing that you wouldn't be doing in nomo. And crucially, if you try something fast three times and it doesn't work, _don't give up_. As someone above said, everyone but Sedlo plays runs over and over and over again. (Sedlo can play LV07 for half an hour, get 0:08, and not be happy with it - but then, Sedlo's not human). A lot of the time this is because we're doing something stupid that will only *work* one time out of ten - for an example, look at LV02-040, the way I run the red key area. Nine times out of ten, running it that fast - even flawlessly and making every shot properly - you will either die or be on such low health you die soon after. This doesn't mean it's not the right strategy, it just means you'll have to make lots of attempts. Get used to this, it's a fact of speedrunning life.

I'm hoping so. If there isn't an update by then I might ask him if I can have the website, I might find more time than him to do updates...

Rambo: I'd think episode 1 would be the hardest of the Doom episodes, actually. It's stuffed with hitscan enemies, there's far fewer in EP2 and EP3. EP1 is certainly the hardest pacifist ep, and I'd think that'd be the most comparable category to no damage...ep3 should be a cakewalk in comparison.

This is mentioned in the demos forum, but just to make sure everyone sees...the full UV demopack for Vile Flesh, featuring me and a bunch of other lamers (;>), has been released! See http://lmp.netfirms.com/vile/ enjoy.

quasar: yes, they contained all the original text files. My guess is they were too stingy / lazy even to bother deleting them. The point isn't that they claimed to have created this stuff - they didn't. The point is that they sold things created by other people who had expressly forbidden them to do so, and didn't compensate them in any way. Come on - people didn't pay for these disks in order to get the d!zone launcher...

I used to use my dad's old-school early '70s amp and big headphones to play Doom quite a lot. It's kinda fun. I'm buying some good headphones now (got 'em on order) so I might have to try it again.

They all got a lot of people pissed off in the day, because we made our levels for free and intended them to be distributed for free, not sold for profit by a bunch of fucking lamers (can you tell I'm bitter? :>). Several of the CDs also clearly violated the author's rights, because there's a section in the classic .wad text file template where you can restrict redistribution, and many of the compilation CDs just blindly ignored this and included .wads which specifically said they weren't to be redistributed on CDs. No-one had much luck getting them taken off, though.

Grazza: nothing in E1, they're too long and too variable...maybe E1M1 with a little practice, but nothing else. I could get all the way to the room full o' pinkies in P2M1 with the monitor off when I was playing that one, though.

cacomarine: if it's not tagged secret, you wouldn't get 100% secrets for going into it. pretty logical.

or you could just find the flip stereo option in EVERYTHING ELSE YOU USE. priorities damnit! doom is the most important thing on earth, hence *obviously* it is right and everything else has the stereo wrong. ayup.

A good source to look for this kind of idea is the old DHT archives - when you submitted a DHT entry you were allowed (in fact, obliged, though it could be *anything*) to submit a free interpretation demo, i.e., do anything you like, and people got quite creative with that. Two things I remember doing - I completed the whole of episode 1 as a single-segment tyson run, once, that's in compet-n misc somewhere. The other one was a DHT misc demo I did, playing through episode 1 using only one hand. I think I died somewhere in E1M5, my memory is hazy. It's an interesting thing to do actually, especially if you don't change your config at all; I kept having to take my hand off the mouse to open doors and hit switches...

isn't there a flip stereo option in setup.exe?

torr - yeah, it IS annoying. If I wasn't lazy as hell, and I didn't hate that maze, I would have re-recorded it. But I AM and I DO, so four failed crate climbs is what you get :). I figured the rest of the run looks good and the time isn't terrible, so it's OK. For a demopack, anyway.

goddamn you linguica, did my mutant zombie pixies of DOOM not kill you yet? i'll spank them.

Doom2 has the capacity to load MAP33 and MAP34 when they're present in a .wad, I believe. There's no MAP33 or MAP34 in doom2.wad, though. It'd be fairly easy to check if this is true (I doubt it is, but I don't remember) - load MAP30 up in a .wad editor and look for sectors tagged secret.

nah. radeg got so lucky and p3m9 is no fun. he can have it.

radeg, I hate you.

i just put a bit of a comeback in incoming...first demo i've made for six months or so, p1m3-050. six seconds improvement on Vince.

oh, right, I see. yeah, i've always seen that intermittently. never pinned down a cause and it's amazingly annoying; sometimes yoy start up, do a good quickstart, and wind up pointed in entirely the wrong direction. blah. just q and restart. it happened to me for ten years playing doom, never did work out what caused it. doesn't seem to happen using dosemu on linux so far, though, fingers crossed.

grazza: on the original .exe it's generally regarded as a feature, not a bug :). If you watch virtually any short compet-n speedrun you'll notice this 'quickstart' is used, the player will already be at an angle and straferunning when the screen clears. You can turn the mouse and press some movement keys near the end of the init sequence and they will be used. If you *don't* do quickstart, the first 0.22secs of the demo will be wasted time of the player standing still on the start point. On short, highly optimised runs, 0.22secs is a big deal.

revenants. god, damn, fucking, revenants. especially when I don't have an SSG.

useful fist / chainsaw generalisations - the berserk fist is almost identical to a rocket launcher without splash damage. The chainsaw is almost identical to a close-range chaingun. by the way, ultraviolet, xit-vono is the most prolific current doom tyson player and has done several tyson runs that have never been done by anyone else. so, y'know, excuse me if i trust his assessment of the berserk fist and chainsaw over yours :).

as has been remarked, there's really no such thing as 'the original' music. the MP3s linked earlier in this thread are the closest you can get, cos they're how Bobby Prince meant them to sound when he wrote the music; at the time, MIDI-based music in games was highly popular, and the people who wrote it used Roland equipment to a man. Most people would recall the sound of the OPL2 synth on Sound Blaster cards as 'the original' because that's what most people had, but it's not how MIDI's really supposed to work. You're supposed to have a card with actual recordings of the original instruments stored on it, and MIDI tells the card how to play back those recordings. (This is called 'wavetable'). Cheap cards like the Sound Blaster didn't have such recordings (you needed on-card memory for this, and on-card memory was *expensive*) - they had a general-purpose synth chip which they tried to make sound as much like whatever instrument the MIDI called for as possible. Modern cards generally don't have proper wavetables either...because they don't need to. Proper musician cards still do, I think, but consumer ones don't. Hardly any games use midi-type music any more, and if they want to, they can easily do MIDI emulation in software with samples stored on hard disk. On Linux systems, TiMidity does this. I still remember I bought a wavetable *add-on daughterboard* for a sound card I had at one point in order to get better sound in Doom. Upgrading from a Sound Blaster to that was a revelation :) btw, fun factoid - the 'polyphonic ringtones' on many cellphones are in fact just MIDI files, and the phones play 'em just like old-skool soundcards, using cheap synths. I can upload midi files direct to my phone - Ericsson T610 - and use them as ringtones. I've got most of the Doom songs on there...:)

argh, but I don't REMEMBER these sodding levels! sigh. time to go rewatch the demos. hold on a mo. MAP01: I worked on this for a bit to get it under one minute. Slightly frustrating map, but overall fun to run. Wish I'd had just a little more chaingun ammo at the end, though. MAP02: Also a bit frustrating, low on ammo most of the way. The room full of teleporting imps and pinkies is a pain, I hate punching imps. The end of this map is fun to play, though. Punching the cacos saves a lot of time. MAP03: The open area is a pain, and hard to do fast. The rest of this map flows quite nicely. Not the most optimised demo I made for this pack, but it looks good apart from a few silly mistakes. Having health to burn on the revenants at the end helps. MAP04: Now this one's a good map. It's tough to play but makes for a good-looking demo when it's done. They key is getting everything to teleport in and infight, then use the rocket launcher - much faster than killing everything one guy at a time. If only I hadn't forgotten about the switch near the end this demo would look nicer... MAP05: This is a great map that flows beautifully...right until the sodding maze at the end, which is just a massive pain in the rear. It's slow and dark and annoying and it's really hard to make sure you killed everything (some of the weird moves I do on the ledge around the maze are to make sure all the monsters wake up). The rest of the map, and the demo, looks nice, though. MAP06: Another fun level. I really like maps that use and re-use the space intelligently, like this one, and there's some fun hectic fights in it. MAP07: This one's just a pain. Worked hard to get it under five minutes, though this wasn't my best-looking demo. MAP08: Another great flowing map only broken up by the annoying archvile fight. The end is hard but rewarding to run fast. MAP09: Probably the most polished demo I made for this pack, and one of the most fun levels in the wad. I'm pretty proud of this one. Overall - it was a blast to get involved in some demo pack recording again, and the first time I've done 100/100 recording for a while. I really had fun playing these levels. Thanks to everyone else who worked on them for the tactics I borrowed, and thanks to everyone else involved in making another kickass megawad demo pack!

cool. so who wants to zip it up and release the thing?