The Plutonia Experiment in under 9 minutes [TAS]

[RockyGaming4725]

After almost 500 hours of work over almost two years @almostmatt1 and I are thrilled to finally share this TAS. We worked on this collaboratively, sharing the demo file back and forth and making gradual progress until this was done. We often had to return to earlier points in the demo, scrapping old work to implement new discoveries or improvements - a very time-consuming process, but one that was worth it in the end. Plenty more comments in the text file. We hope you enjoy!

This is a fully built tool-assisted demo; all inputs for each frame was entered manually in XDRE.

 

Special thanks to:

@ZeroMaster010, for his helpful ideas on maps 23 and 26.

@ClumsyDoomer and @abyrvalg, for their older Plutonia TASes which paved the way and have been great sources of inspiration.

@dsda-dev, for the DSDA-Doom source port and its brute forcing features which were invaluable throughout the building process. 

@vita, whose unfinished D2All demo set a standard that forced us to push ourselves as hard as we could.

30plx854.zip

 

YouTube:

Edit: Here I've linked an unlisted playlist to some old twitch streams of me working on the demo I did a while ago. There's not much, and they are pretty old, but in case you want to catch a glimpse of what some of the development was like, check it out! 
I've also put the text file on pastebin.

Edited June 1 by RockyGaming4725
Added streams playlist, and pastebin link.

[slowfade]

I'm four or five days late but just saw it! Fantastic stuff. The amount of tricks and optimization is incredible. I need to watch it again with full attention while reading the individual map notes. Speaking of which; I definitely think you should upload the text file and link it to the youtube video. The average viewer is lazy to download and extract things, and sometimes it's not even possible (not to mention that I feel a large number of people no longer understand what a zip file is). Having the notes immediately accessible to any potential reader would do the TAS more justice, in my opinion.

 

By the way, if you ever have the time or the interest to make some kind of article (or a video essay!) about the computational aspects of this, it'd be so interesting! I mean the brute-force searching aspects explained in great, documentary detail.

 

Anyway, congratulations for getting it done!

Edited May 13 by slowfade

[RockyGaming4725]

On 5/13/2024 at 3:03 AM, slowfade said:

I'm four or five days late but just saw it! Fantastic stuff. The amount of tricks and optimization is incredible. I need to watch it again with full attention while reading the individual map notes. Speaking of which; I definitely think you should upload the text file and link it to the youtube video. The average viewer is lazy to download and extract things, and sometimes it's not even possible (not to mention that I feel a large number of people no longer understand what a zip file is). Having the notes immediately accessible to any potential reader would do the TAS more justice, in my opinion.

 

By the way, if you ever have the time or the interest to make some kind of article (or a video essay!) about the computational aspects of this, it'd be so interesting! I mean the brute-force searching aspects explained in great, documentary detail.

 

Anyway, congratulations for getting it done!

Thank you very much!! Good idea I suppose, maybe something like a pastebin link could make all the comments a little bit more accessible.
 

The idea of a write up/video essay on the TAS has been in my mind but I’ve decided that for the foreseeable future I’m not going to do anything about it. A bit hard to find motivation to sink that much time into something again, also just the pure amount of stuff to cover is a bit daunting. Perhaps focusing on one aspect, like utilization of brute force could make it more limited in scope, but again, it’s just not something I’m willing to dedicate lots of time and energy into. Of course, I’m only speaking on my own behalf, not sure what Matt has in mind but right now it doesn’t look like a write up or video essay is going to happen. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind.

It also poses the question of how much effort I’d be willing to put in a video essay - if I made one, I would want it to be edited and scripted for sure - I think if I was willing to go the extra mile to make a video I’d want it to be a highly polished project to serve the other project well.

 

I guess it is worth mentioning that we do both want to eventually submit this TAS to tasvideos, which would probably come with an extra write up / mini documentation on tricks and such, something very similar (if not exactly) to Matt’s trick write up on his Doom 2 TAS submission.

 

[Bank]

@RockyGaming4725@almostmatt1 really incredible work. I'm not a speedrunner or TASer but I love mesmerizing gameplay and the sheer number of tricks packed in this demo is insane. Looking forward to seeing how this affects human runs of Plutonia.

[Uncle 80]

hahaha, beautiful work :D "Speed" really lived up to its name in this run.

[almostmatt1]

This was almost two years in the making which means almost two years of chatting with Rocky, sharing notes, ideas, progress, etc. I'd just like to publicly state how good it was to work with him and that I don't think I could have gotten to the end of this project working with anyone else. He has been consistently very hard working, level-headed in the often huge set-backs we encountered, never had any ego attached to work of his that needed to be scrapped or improved upon, and was always totally understanding whenever I needed to take a step away for a while due to burnout or whatever else. When I would send over progress of mine, the majority of the time he would go to the effort of scrutinizing it and finding valuable improvements to my work instead of taking the easy route of just accepting whatever I threw his way and moving on. He's been unfailingly kind, mature and extremely easy to work with for years of collaboration. Mix that with how freakishly good at TASing he is, and there is no-one I could have had a better time working on a demo like this with. It's awesome that one of the best Doom TASers to ever do it also happens to be one of the most solid people I've ever met online and I'm grateful he's around.