The Next Iteration of DSDA

[GoneAway]

Zeromaster and 4shockblast are in charge of uploading new demos and wads, respectively, but they do this when they have time and not necessarily as soon as Andy posts. Since we've also been working on fixing errors and omissions, there's a lot of work being done behind the scenes. For the most up to date and accurate data, Andy's site is still the source of truth.

[DoomedDude]

Ah, I see

[GoneAway]

Two bits of news here:

 

A) We've fixed the errors and omissions we know of with two exceptions: (1) some demos are missing comments, and we are fixing those, and (2) we need to check through the fixes Andy made in his thread that weren't duplicated to the new archive. If you see a problem besides these 2, please let us know.

 

B) We are currently still working on tools to improve the day-to-day upload process, so you can expect some delay right now in processing new demos. We are tracking the backlog, so there isn't any worry of things being lost, but we ask your patience in the meantime.

[Bob9001]

So I take it that this is now the update thread similar to andy's?

 

 

[ZeroMaster010]

19 hours ago, Bob9001 said:

So I take it that this is now the update thread similar to andy's?

 

 

Yes, I'm the captain now! .. at least for a little while.

 

43 demos uploaded yesterday, some misc demos are missing until the wads are uploaded. There's no specific day for uploads or anything like that for now.

[HeadshotTAS]

Glad to see this train is still going so soon after Andy's retirement. Keep up the good work!

@ZeroMaster010 I noticed that my new BTSX E1 demos are marked under a different name to my other demos ("Headshottas" instead of "Headshot".) If you could please merge those demos to Headshot and list my demos under that name from now on I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

https://dsdarchive.com/players/headshottas
https://dsdarchive.com/players/headshot

[GoneAway]

It's on the todo list, thanks!

[didierbertrand2]

demos i've posted november 17 were not upload to the new dsda

[Dimon12321]

41 minutes ago, didierbertrand2 said:

demos i've posted november 17 were not upload to the new dsda

 

For now, please upload your demos in multiple archives. Create an additional post in Miscellaneous demos with 6 attached files where each one represents a single demo.

 

Edited November 23, 2019 by Dimon12321

[ZeroMaster010]

On 11/21/2019 at 8:16 PM, ZeroMaster010 said:

some misc demos are missing until the wads are uploaded.

 

[GarrettChan]

@kraflabA quick question. It's fine to use the template text file I used earlier for Andy? Thanks.

[GoneAway]

Yes, you can continue doing what you have been doing.

[baja blast rd.]

I hereby propose the new DSDA 3 template. 

 

Pwad (if not Noye.wad): 
Map: 01    
Category [a. Pacifist / b. Stroller / c. NM-Speed / d. Other]:
Exe:      
Cheating method:
Time:      0:__.97

  
Bobname: 

 

Edited November 24, 2019 by rdwpa

[almostmatt1]

This was mentioned on Discord:

 

"fast-motion is a niche tool and can be used in human runs to skip very large waiting sections. (imagine a 30-second elevator at the start of a run, just waiting.) this is, or should be, TAS because boring sections are part of the challenge."

 

I agree with this, and admit that I've done this on a demo I have recorded and submitted as non-TAS (my Eviternity NoMo D2all in 56:47) which, other than speeding up through waiting sections, is otherwise genuine. I recorded and submitted this without giving any thought to qualifying it as TAS as I thought of speeding up as nothing more than a quality-of-life thing at the time - there's a 2 and a half minute wait on one level, for example. I mention this just to make the point that I did not at the time have the intention to deliberately cheat and pass it off as otherwise. 

 

It's an interesting topic though as IMO it's obviously significantly less egregious than slowmo, -recordfromto or xdre editing, which is what I think of when I think of tasing, which I doubt I'm alone in thinking. But, at the end of the day something isn't "more or less" of a tas, it just is or isn't one. 

 

Kraf or Zero, if you agree that this qualifies it as TAS, if it's okay I would prefer it to be simply be removed from the archive rather than marked as TAS. I have an actual XDRE tas that's 20 minutes faster that I would rather stand on its own on the archive.

[GoneAway]

There are other runs on there that used speedup in the past because this had never really been discussed and fleshed out as a tas vs nontas issue. Since it's relatively new as a written rule, I'm not inclined to label your run differently, since you didn't realize it was a problem. But other people are welcome to voice their opinions as well.

[Dimon12321]

I think it's reasonable to raise a question: How fast-forwarding improves the overall result?

Does it save your concentration and helps you beat a map faster? I don't think it really matters. If you know the right timing when your waiting is over, you will probably get ready to run ahead, regardless of fast-forwarding. Fast-forwarding increases players' productivity. Imagine how your time consumption will increase if you try to beat a map as fast as you can that involves 2 mins of waiting and is not as easy as Survive in Hell's Map 2!

And even if fast-forwarding was used, can you prove that it was actually used?

[GoneAway]

Let's take two players. The run is 2 minutes long. In it there is a 90 second wait. One player speeds up the wait and the other doesn't. Obviously the one speeding it up will reduce the time each attempt takes and increase the odds of getting a good run.

 

If you think that's ok consider an analagous situation: we have a run where there is some part with pure rng involved right at the start (let's assume a theoretical situation where it's not skill-influenced, like monsters moving on a conveyor belt in a closet or something). Since there's no skill involved, why not use a tool to influence the outcome (e.g., by selecting the random seed ahead of time, or starting the run after that section)? The consequence would be similar to fast forwarding: it doesn't directly influence your performance but it increases the number of real attempts in a given block of time. But in this case I think it's more obvious that this is cheating.

 

It also IS a factor that you have to sit waiting. It definitely influences your performance. How much will depend on the person, but it's undeniably a part of the run itself.

 

Anyway, this has been discussed to death already in the discord, so let's not derail this thread, but I wanted to summarize some points since it's come up.

[ZeroMaster010]

45 demos uploaded.

 

Since there's been a few new players here I figured I'd write some (new) guidelines on how to name and upload demos:

 

In short: upload .zip as forum attachment, name your files correctly and set complevel if you use prboom.

 

- Always use .zip, don't use .rar or .7z etc.
- A zip should contain only lmps/txts for one wad/level/category (if you want to include a slower lmp that's fine of course). Please no folders and no zips within the zip unless you see a reason to do so. Demopacks are a little different, folders and zips within the zip are fine, but 5 demos or whatever does not count as a demopack.
- Upload as forum attachment, don't link to discord attachment, dropbox etc. If you are uploading multiple demos you can upload multiple attachments in a single post. So if you plan to record 10 demos for a certain wad within a day, then consider uploading them in 1 post instead of 10.
- Name your lmp, txt and zip files the same if you can.
- There's never any need to upload your demo in more than 1 thread, even if you posted it in the wrong one.

 

Naming convention:
Try to follow already established naming conventions, look at what previous uploaders have named their zips if you have no idea.
In general however: short abbreviation of the wad name (full name is also fine in some cases like misc wads with short names), map number, s if secret exit, category letter + additional parameters (if there are any), time. And don't use any spaces in the filenames, use - or _ instead.

 

Category letters:
uv speed - "-"
uv max - m
nightmare speed - n
nightmare all secrets - ns
uv tyson - t
uv pacifist - p
uv respawn - r
uv fast - f
nomo - o
nomo 100s - os
stroller - str
Additional parameters:
tas - x
coop - c
solo-net - sn
turbo - tu

 

Where secret exit is only relevant for uv-speed, nm-speed, nomo and pacifist. Historically "-" for max and s for nm100s have been used, it's doesn't really matter much if you continue to use it or not.

 

Time:
There's been a mix of hhmmss and totalminutes + ss to name demos going beyond the hour mark, lets just go with the simple one which is hhmmss from now on. At least 3 digits should be included at the end, if your demo is under 10 seconds use tics instead of 00X if you know how to get them.

Misc:

Doom 2 wads, maps 1-10,11-20,21-30 or 1-30 are named e1,e2,e3 or all respectively after the wadname
For example: episode 2 of eviternity on nightmare in 1:01:01 would be evite2n10101.

 

Doom 1 wads, episodes: put eX after the wad name, where X is the episode number.
For example: episode 1 of dtwid uv-max in 2:22:22 would be dtwide1m22222.

 

If you are uploading IWAD demos then please have a look at how an older demo is named, for example e1m1-008 is just the map number, but it's clear it's doom.wad. IWADs, scythe, mm, mm2, av, hr compet-n naming conventions can be found here: https://www.doom.com.hr/public/compet-n/admin/naming.txt

 

Some examples:
Sunlust map 30 nm all secrets tas in 6 hours,6 minutes and 6 seconds: sl30nsx60606
Sunder all levels pacifist tas coop in 1 hour, 23 minutes and 45 seconds: suallpcx12345
Eviternity map 20 tyson coop in 15 minutes and 15 seconds: evit20tc1515
Doom E1M1 uv-pacifist in 9.91: p1m1-991

 

Also if you are using prboom, please don't disable extended demo format (set to yes by default), you can find it under options->general->page3->use extended format->set to yes. Also remember to set the -complevel parameter!

 

Txt files need to contain the following (feel free to copy a txt template from someone else):
Playername, IWAD, PWAD, Map, Sourceport/engine (with version number!! and complevel if using prboom), Category and Time. Also kills,items,secrets if it is relevant.
Optional: Recorded date, map name/author, and of course comments or any other information you find relevant like if advanced hud is included or not.

 

Don't include this part from old DSDA in your txt if you used to do that, as there's no point to that now:
"Doomed Speed Demos Archive
http://doomedsda.us/"

 

None of this is very important or anything, it just helps make uploading a little bit easier and we hopefully avoid file names like "DOOM E1m1 ULTRAVIOLENCE speed in 11 Seconds.lmp" etc.

[didierbertrand2]

my revenge demo is for this map by tedd l kolmodin  instead of this one by thomas frusti

[GoneAway]

Fixed, thanks!

[Kotzugi]

Wow, I'm only seeing this now - not surprising since my last comment was more than two years ago. I'm very happy that a bunch of people are putting in the work in their free time to contribute to more and better Doom speedrunning. Although I'm sure that there will be small niggles for some time to come, so far I'm very happy with the effort - the updated stats feature alone is amazing. I have a few questions (I might have more later):

 

"Videos are linked to demos when possible"
==> Some of my runs don't have links to videos on the official channel, but most of them are on my channel. Can we make suggestions to add them? If so, who do we contact? Also, if we add new videos to our channels that are also on DSDA, can we suggest to add them, or is there a preference for the "DooMed Speed Demos Archive on YouTube" channel? Also if YouTube links expire eventually, are there automatic checks for that? Or do we have to report them?

 

Also last time I checked (and IIRC), Compet-N still was the official source for IWADs and overruled anything on DSDA (some Compet-N records were not on DSDA back then) - is this still the case? If so, shouldn't there be links to the site?

 

Thanks a whole bunch for the brilliant effort! :D

[GoneAway]

Compet-N is a side competition on vanilla executables. It hasn't been a relevant source for records in a long time, except for people that disqualify anything not recorded on the original exes. There's no such thing as an "official" source of course. Different places have different constraints and you can judge the demos accordingly.

 

Video links are a bit sporadic right now. There's no simple way to do bulk linking at the moment, so consider that in a wip state. At some point we'll set things up so people can put their own links in but it's not super high priority for now.

[fx02]

Nice, I see port/links to them are missing. Why some people have only nicks, some full names gdpr? Also add ć to my surname to be consistent or just remove diacritical chars. Other than that it looks nice, tho I 'd like some dark skin :).

It's a shame we can't extract milliseconds from demos with some script on upload so uploads could be automated. I tried to pull something like that on compet-n but without success.

compet-n is vanilla only and we tried to see how people would react on milliseconds with new cndoom port, so I hope you will have better luck.

[GoneAway]

Player names were carried over from the existing entries in dsda, but also with some merges (especially for players that had entries on both heretic-n and dsda). We don't have a standard for that, so people can go with whatever they want. I've fixed your name - there were some issues with the encoding when we uploaded things and we haven't fixed all of it yet.

 

Dark skin is definitely on the todo list. Uploading the ports is also on the todo list. There's just a lot on that list... The biggest time investment in the past couple months was on fixing known errors that popped up during the mirroring process. I'm hoping to get through some more stuff now that I have a couple weeks off over the holidays.

 

Milliseconds are extracted automatically. ZM pipes demos through prboom+ and extracts that info from the levelstat file with a script (as well as some other basic stuff, like kills, secrets, items).

[Kotzugi]

Thanks kraflab, I understand that you have a whole lot of things to do. I suppose the video links are a "nice to have" thing as well. I'll be following this project with interest (and find the time to do speedrunning again, but I'm super rusty).

[GoneAway]

Welcome back 😉

[GarrettChan]

I'm glad that max and speed have different names right now. I had this problem for a long time that you can't tell from the name whether it's a speed or max.

 

Where should I put Reality?

[GoneAway]

I usually just put the whole word if I'm doing a reality run, e.g., h7a1reality611

[GoneAway]

Ports are finally uploaded.

[CrazyDoomguy]

Just a question, when new demos will upload in DSDA? Last upload was 12 december and new demos will every time more and more. 

Cope with these loads?