DM2_LMPS

[Ryback]

I've been browsing through a lot of the old Doom demos at cd.textfiles.com recently, many thanks to Grazza for all his work in compiling the list of Doom CDs.

In amongst the crap this lmp collection I ran across recently seemed interesting, and I couldn't see any discussion going on about it, so I thought I'd post a thread. The pack is called dm2_lmps. It's a collection of UV speedruns for Doom2, recorded between August and November 1995. Nothing remarkable about that, except for the fact that nearly every time in the pack either matches or beats the comparable Compet-N record of the time.

And some of the individual demos are quite remarkable. A pacifist pa24 for instance, recorded more than six months than Anthe's 'first ever' demo, and a second faster to boot. The level 3 speedrun uses the window jump nine months before Demonlord debuted it in the Compet-N (with a remarkable lack of fanfare). There are other examples and I recommend giving the whole pack a watch, it's quite entertaining.

Not that I'm saying the early Compet-N players were cribbing from other people. I reckon none of the major players knew about this pack. It wasn't ever uploaded to /idgames. The recorder is only identified as ""Typhoon" of San Diego". So he's almost certainly a deathmatcher, and this was uploaded to a BBS or Compuserve or the like.

Finally what this demopack neatly demonstrates is how much higher the skills were amongst the deathmatchers than the single players back in 1995. The movement skills are as smooth and rapid as any cheated Steffen or Uwe demo. Typhoon doesn't show much trouble executing the various jumps and tricks.

It makes me wonder - how many of the various shortcuts and tricks we think may have been invented by single-player folk really belong to the deathmatchers?

[Kristian Ronge]

An intriguing collection, which raises some interesting questions... such as: how much serious speedrunning activity of this kind was going on outside of COMPET-N? (After all, they're COMPET-N records, not world records!) And how much interaction was there between the parties?

There are notable shortcuts used here and there, and "Typhoon" clearly has knowledge of straferunning (see the start of map 12), which Uwe proudly called "diagonal run" as late as May, 1996, and some common speedrunning tricks (quick example: pistol shot at the start of map 1). He is also strangely oblivious of other tricks (e.g. the SSG grab in map 16, which Kai-Uwe claimed came from the deathmatch scene, wallrunning, or any switch tricks involving the z-axis) and uses weird routes in some maps (maps 9 and 10 immediately come to mind).

I'd hardly call the demos as smooth as Steffen's or Uwe's, BTW.

EDIT: Forgot to say ... *Nice find*! :-)

[Searcher]

Cool Find! Us nostalgia collectors will really enjoy it.

It is interesting to note that there might have a been a fairly active demo community before compet-n pulled it all together.

There are no doubt many cool demos "rotting" on hardrives somewhere, or even great demos lost in HD failures years ago.

I'll bet some of the early runners didn't even know they were all that good, because all their friends were very good as well. They might have thought they were just average for the time. And with no repository to compare to they might not have even found out until years later. By then they might have lost that edge.

[Colusio]

Where is that doom cd list, Grazza compiled?
I did a search on "Typhoon of San Diego" doom deathmatch. I couldn't check that first link got a reset ack when I try to connect. Maybe it was another lmp run from him. I did my first nm runs on map02 and 07 today and his lmp are more helpful then the only other lmp I have from Anthe (his episode nm run).

[Grazza]

Coldfusio said:

Where is that doom cd list, Grazza compiled?

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/32849-cd-textfiles-com-content-guide/

[Colusio]

Thank you and also for making it easy to watch demo's.
I can't generalize my above statement, trying map05 now. His route=certain death (for me)