Anyone thought about making IWAD demos?

[chungy]

I had the thought a couple days ago to make average-ish demos for Freedoom, just to include in the IWAD. I'm not sure what should be expect, or what maps to play. The demos in doom.wad/doom2.wad themselves seemed to be played with an average player, but not too bright in some cases (more as if they didn't know the levels before playing them...). Would this be kind of what Freedoom should include? You don't really want someone to blast through a level all the way to the end compet-n style, because then you could set the impression to the play that they might not be "good enough" for the game if they can't match the quality of the demos.

Anyhow, on the demo format itself, it should probably be recorded with Boom 2.02 compatibility (prboom -complevel 9), or better yet, Boom 2.02 itself. Since Freedoom requires a Boom-compatible port itself, I don't think that this is unreasonable.

[myk]

MikeRS said:
The demos in doom.wad/doom2.wad themselves seemed to be played with an average player, but not too bright in some cases (more as if they didn't know the levels before playing them...).

Romero recorded them, but he was mostly acting, from what I can tell, playing carelessly and as if discovering the level. His movement was competent, for one (especially compared to most players back in '94 and '95).

[leileilol]

Romero also recorded the Quake demos, and yes it's intentional he chose the casual 'show off' style for them, I mean how are you going to introduce a game to someone at a high speed with everything going off overwhelming the viewer anyway. Presentation is important in a demonstration.

[Jon]

I've just committed a fairly poor walkthrough of MAP01.

[printz]

I think the original poster should record demos in a careless way, by just cruising through.

The original DEMO1 for Ultimate Doom, that with E1M5, is awesome, as it gives the impression E1M5 is insane with enemies, under skill 4.

I hate internal demos which solve entire levels/episodes. Like what, am I really supposed to watch the demo immediately following, which would reveal all secrets and enemies?

[Jon]

I reverted DEMO1 for 0.6 (compatibility issues).

I'd like to see at least one of the DEMO lumps be a deathmatch.

also

22:14 <@fraggle> best to use vanilla demos
22:14 <@fraggle> the plan was to have 2-3 levels in freedoom as vanilla only so
we could record demos on them

[fraggle]

My original conception of the Freedoom demos was to get one speedrun demo (something impressive, like a nightmare speedrun), one deathmatch demo, and one something-else (could be another deathmatch or speedrun).

OTOH: Might be nice to have a "natural" speedrun demo, a tool-assisted speedrun demo (like entryway's 30uv1441) and a deathmatch.

I think making Vanilla demos is the best option, since there's no other demo format with any kind of cross-port support. We can also be sure that source ports which don't support Vanilla playback will at least fail gracefully.

EDIT: Just read leileilol's post:

I mean how are you going to introduce a game to someone at a high speed with everything going off overwhelming the viewer anyway. Presentation is important in a demonstration.

You have a good point here. Perhaps a sensible option might be to make DEMO1 be a "casual" demo, with DEMO2 and DEMO3 reserved for more impressive stuff. If you've watched through DEMO1, you're probably watching the demos deliberately for fun, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

[printz]

leileilol said:

I mean how are you going to introduce a game to someone at a high speed with everything going off overwhelming the viewer anyway. Presentation is important in a demonstration.

I doubt demos are useful for presentation in the first place, because most ports fail to play them. Also most of the time, the player will simply cruise up to "New game", not wait to see how the "computer" dies quickly in teaser demos. In my opinion, demos may go overwhelming, because this way they make a level look more dangerous, as well as make it harder to remember.

But I hate the winning teaser demos.

[fraggle]

printz said:

I doubt demos are useful for presentation in the first place, because most ports fail to play them.

There are several that play demos: PrBoom and PrBoom-plus and Eternity are examples.

Also most of the time, the player will simply cruise up to "New game", not wait to see how the "computer" dies quickly in teaser demos.

It's important to distinguish here: we cruise straight to "new game" because we've seen the Doom menu 1,000,000 times and can navigate it with our eyes shut. The majority of people (ie. not big Doom enthusiasts) will be slow enough that the demo will start before they can start the game.

[scorpion]

fraggle said:

It's important to distinguish here: we cruise straight to "new game" because we've seen the Doom menu 1,000,000 times and can navigate it with our eyes shut. The majority of people (ie. not big Doom enthusiasts) will be slow enough that the demo will start before they can start the game.

I'm guessing that the we, as you mention it, are for the most part people who take the time to read the .txt. I know I do, and if there's something other than 'None' or 'n/a' behind 'Demos replaced:', I wait and watch.