AdamW

the win95 .exe has fairly poor compatibility, way worse than prboom. the original .exes are of course best but they just don't work very well under modern Windows. (ironically, they work very well under Dosemu on Linux, once you get it set up right...)

Nice idea Fred, but I don't think it'd really work. The Doom guy isn't an entity like a mouse cursor, over which you have *entire* control. He's subject to Doom's approximation of physical laws like inertia, friction and gravity, so you can't really just 'draw' out a course and have him follow it. ling: yeah, I agree, something like that shouldn't be too outlandishly hard to achieve.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned it yet, but one of the DHT's that was never claimed was - IIRC - for a bot that would produce a 100/100 run of a level without human intervention. My take on this - bot programming for dm has always shown that the 'nodes-and-human-tweaking' approach tends to be best (the best bots are given very detailed node routes and some extra level-specific hints; most of them will play on J. Random Level but noticeably worse than they play on levels for which they have been optimised), and this can only hold more true for speedrunning. It would also probably take some detailed programming for the bot to be aware of tricks like wall-running (programming a bot that could work out the MAP24 trick, for instance). I'm not sure bots are the best answer to super-optimised speedrunning; you'd have to optimise the code so much for each particular map that it would probably wind up being more efficient to build the demo. (For those not aware, built demos are made by hand-editing the demo file (or, rather, its lmpc-converted version), and are currently the best known way to make ultra-optimised demos, like E1M1x008).

it probably has a lot to do with those 'errors'; they're probably not truly errors, but exploits to make the original game do things it really shouldn't. Most ports 'fix' a lot of stuff in the original .exe, which is usually good, but certainly has the potential to screw things up in complex situations.

can't say I really know the feeling, no - every time I start playing Doom again I get addicted to it. last time was with Vile Flesh. sigh. I try and keep off it now though, I just don't have the time...hehe.

well, doug's always easy to impress. :). I wonder whatever happened to Rudy, anyway? When was the last time anyone heard from him?

ragnew? Richard Agnew? now *that's* another old-timer, if I'm not mistaken...hey man. :)

I'm not on XP, I run Linux. Doom2.exe works perfectly. :) The Zap! guys (Sedlo and fx, mainly) used to post all their demos on their clan homepage, didn't they? What happened to those? I made quite a lot of doom2.exe demos last year or the year before with slagboom, all of which we posted somewhere (I think dang or compet-n misc or something), which you're welcome to if anyone has copies. I lost mine in a hard disk related incident. There's also the bunch of ones I got from Pat Hook a couple of years back, old-skool stuff, which several people have copies of. I'm sure there are others lying around as well - ask Anders Johnsen if you can, he was making a big archive. I'm sure with all of those it's a worthwhile collection. And you don't need doom2.exe to WATCH them, you can use prboom or eternity, which work just fine on just about any operating system you're likely to run.

Why not real Doom demos?

tnt nm09 is rather in the same vein as pa02. :) They're both possible, but insanely hard. I've got quite close to pa02 (I had the blue key on my best attempt). I think Drew got close to tn09, but don't remember the details.

hey, at last something we agree on! But I still maintain referring to *anyone* who plays Doom as professional is misleading and wrong. If no-one who played games was a professional in the usual pastime-playing-related definition of the word, maybe it would be OK. But there ARE professional gamers, and therefore referring to people who *don't* make money playing games as 'professional' is just misleading. It's as misleading as it would be to call an amateur golfer 'professional' because he's very good at golf.

myk: erm, if it's the main definition, why was it definition #4? What happened to 1 through 3? "Amateur sportsmen of the highest caliber are definitely professionals, else they could never obtain superb skill... which is well above the standard for a "professional" sportsman." No. No they're not. They're amateurs. Amateur and professional in sporting terms are opposites. You can't be both. Professional is what you become when you stop being an amateur. I can't even believe we're having this debate, you're just so clearly utterly wrong. If you originally wanted to say that people who play Doom very well practice a lot and are amazingly good at it, yes! Yes they are and yes they do! But they're not bloody professional. The other definition you're bringing in now is 'professional' as applied to a range of 'conventional' jobs - lawyers, doctors, accountants etc. That's completely irrelevant to Doom as well.

yeah, cos everyone loves Kasparov. :) anyway, quit trying to bend the definition of professional. Sure, you can use it in that sense as an ADJECTIVE when you're describing a REPAIR JOB. We're talking in the sense of a NOUN ("I am a professional") here and we're talking about performers in a sport / game. In that category the distinction between amateur and professional has *always* been about payment and always *will* be about payment.

btw, I'd been playing a couple of years before I found that out, so I'm now so used to it that my little finger still holds down the ctrl key permanently when I'm playing, even though I've had that autorun trick permanently in my config since 1996...:)

@dev - dunno if Vile ever played in a *CPL* tournament, but he certainly played high-level Q3A with stx, and he's an excellent Doom player. btw, the original poster was correct. There has never been and never will be a professional Doom player. Professionals get paid, that's the beginning and end of the definition (yeah, I know there were a few paid Doom tournaments, but not enough to actually support anyone's way of life). I'm not a professional. You're not a professional. noskill wasn't a professional, xoleras wasn't, merlock wasn't, sedlo isn't, ocelot isn't. :) There are very, very, very few pro gamers in the true sense - those whose sole source of income is gaming, and that income provides their entire cost of living.

hellbent: set joyb_speed to 31. record for map18 is 21. I can manage 23. You've got a way to go yet :)

completely off-topic, please don't misapply the idea of "catch 22". catch 22, properly understood, is really a situation in which, despite the apparent existence of alternatives, you have no choice but to do one (usually crazy) thing. the original was, if I remember the book correctly, a situation where you could not fly a mission into enemy territory if you were insane. However, claiming insanity as grounds for avoiding the mission was clearly a very sensible thing to do, and in fact demonstrated that you were completely sane, therefore...off you go into the blue. (I hope I'm not misremembering that.) anyway. It's interesting to read Dev's and 999cop's posts above, as what I actually meant my post to mean was that MAP01 is quite *anti*-SSG; I tend to favour SSG as a dm weapon and I do a lot better on judas23_ than MAP01. To do better on MAP01 (as well as changing my play style quite considerably) I have to force myself to use BFG and rocket launcher a lot more. So I wouldn't agree with 999cop's position, there. btw, I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with the posters saying *new* maps should be used. I agree that many new maps are garbage in terms of actually producing skilled deathmatch play. (I do like boo.wad, good point for mentioning it, 999cop). There are plenty of other years-old levels that were actually quite popular years ago which never seem to get played any more. What about the dweller wads, for instance? Xoleras played those a lot, but I haven't seen a high quality game played on dweller in years.

map01's weapon balance is pretty good *except* that it's fairly heavily down on shotguns. But that's not its biggest problem, sure. btw, myk, I can't resist agreeing with your Rolling Stones point - you're exactly right! They're irrelevant and hugely outdated, but misguided fanboys follow them around everywhere insisting they've "still got it"... ;)

oh, and btw, dev... "I don't play i ngeneral cause it's fun." then why the heck do you play?! if it's for the fame, fortune and beautiful women, you're in the wrong business ;)

@mogul: hmm, that list seems overly narrow to me. embarassingly, my mind's gone a total blank on level names, but some of the cpm maps have been very popular, and there's one specific original game map I'm thinking of, red-themed map, there's a quad / ya in a small outside area at one end of the map and biosuit underground / red armour in an outside courtyard at the other end, one team takes each end of the map and very little happens for a while, then the powerups spawn and there's an almighty fight while both teams try to take control of both powerups. it's obviously not a 1vs1 map, but it is/was a standard 4v4 map. i'm sure you know the one I mean.

nah, ling, there's a picture of a guy who runs a news site catering to guys who still play Doom in 2004 ;)

oh, and btw, the quake series has had rather more variety in map selection in its professional history. I've followed professional quake3 since the beginning and the various leagues and tournaments run over the years have used a fair selection of maps. It's a pretty common format to use a pool of three to seven maps, and these are generally a mix of a couple of "classics" from the original game, some well-established third-party maps, AND - often - some newer and less well-known third-party maps. Over the years I must've seen fifty to sixty quake3 maps played professionally to a very high standard. Why can't Doom branch out to this extent?

dev, are you including me in your "I'm a dm god I r0x0rz!" posts? I haven't practiced dm for quite a while and the absolute top level players still hand my ass to me on a plate (hi, ocelot), but if I was in this tourney I'd be surprised if I wound up last. And I still don't like map01 or dw5map01. I can play a decent game on either, but I'm a lot better on judas23_ (or most any other dm map, really), and I would never *choose* to play either map for entertainment. I find dm'ing on MAP01 about as much fun as pulling teeth.

what you said was "there are people with less of a life than me", with no indicators of jokiness or sarcasm. that's clearly insulting, if also self-deprecating. as bahdko says, you may not have *meant* to offend, but what you said clearly *was* offensive.

welp, i've been saying it for years and I'll say it again...MAP01 and dwango5 map01 are both terrible dm levels. map01 completely distorts the Doom skillset - playing deathmatch on MAP01 isn't like playing deathmatch on *any* other map, so I just don't understand why it's so popular, it's effectively a different game - and dwango5 is just...so...irritating, and clearly better suited to ffa than 1v1. i've never understood why both these maps are so ridiculously popular. i'm glad judas23_ is in there, that's a good map.