A Sudden Shift
I started this blog as a bit of an introduction to Doom and speed running Doom. Recently, I've been (not) posting reviews/playthroughs of a custom WAD. This time I'm going back to my roots a bit. Today I'm gonna talk about speed running again.
I haven't had a ton of free time lately, so it's been hard to find the time to write about Valiant. I have a few more posts lined up, but I still have to write and upload all the photos. It's a bit of a timesink, but I do plan to get back to it... Eventually... In the meantime I've been trying to speed run more. It's a little easier for me to work it into my schedule.
Which is why I have this demo to show you! It's a UV-Max run for the second map of the second episode of Needs More Detail, a PWAD for Ultimate Doom by a Doomer named Fiend. I found out about Needs More Detail via a different PWAD, Doom the Way id Did. For this PWAD, the authors wanted to recreate the same mapping elements and styles that the original developers of Doom used.
Needs More Detail is similar in this regard. The maps are generally reminiscent of their Doom counterparts. After a brief casual playthrough, I checked NMD on the Doomed Speed Demos Archives. This inspired me to try to record some demos for it. I started off doing No Monster demos, since there weren't any previous records. But I wanted a WAD to sharpen my UV-Max claws on, as well. This is the result of my labors:
A new record for E2M2. The previous record was by a Doomer named skepticist. Skepticist is familiar to me, as he had recorded demos for Perdition's Gate, some of which I have beaten. Skepticist currently has most of the UV-Max records for NMD. But now he has one less.
His previous time was 4:10, making my demo a mere 7 seconds faster. Honestly I would like to get the time somewhere under 4 minutes, but this map isn't very fun... Shotgunning barons and cacodemons is only fun for... Actually, it's not much fun at all.
Usually a good way to improve a previous demo's time is to find a new route or a new trick. UV-Max times can pretty much always be improved even by just better movement or better luck. My demo has a bit of both, but no real significant route changes or new tricks. Just some good, old fashioned, better play.
The biggest problem I faced in this demo was the yellow key room full of lost souls, two cacos, and a baron. Skepticist went ahead and killed all the lost souls, letting the baron and the cacos infight more readily. I tried leaving the lost souls alive, because killing them takes a good 5-10 seconds. But I was never able to get the baron and the cacodemons to damage each other sufficiently using this route. So, I returned to skepticist's tried and true "Kill All Lost Souls" route.
A fun thing I was able to do with this demo was make use of Doomer Krankdud's batch file for demo recording. It's a simple little script, but it saves the demos with a unique name, instead of replacing the previously recorded demo. What this means, is I had a folder full of aborted demo attempts at the end. So I could see exactly how many times I failed, how many times I succeeded, and how many times my source port (what I use to play Doom) crashed. So, here are some statistics:
- Attempts: 80
- Exits: 7
- %Exits: 8.25%
- Crashes: 2
- %Crashes: 2.5%
Pretty interesting stuff, at least to me. I always like analytic type things. Something that I would like to try in the future is to find a way to scrape the times of all the aborted demos to see at what time I usually died or exited the game. Maybe that's a little sideproject for me...
All right, that's going to be it for now. I hope you enjoyed this little look behind the scenes of Doom speed running. I'll be back with more of the same, or more of something different at some undisclosed point in the future...
