First attempt demos [never played the map before]

[Linguica]

FDAs of D2TWID on skill 3. I gave each level the old college try, restarting only if I felt like I hadn't gotten far enough for it to be a good effort.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1905074/d2twid-fda-linguica.zip

[Never_Again]

Nice to see FDAs on other skill levels than UV, not everyone has to act like a .doom.god. Great notes too, lol.

Some notes of my own:
- despite what the TXT states the first nine of these are -complevel -1, not 2. I see some oddball stuff like "monster_avoid_hazards" enabled there ...
- demo footer missing. make everyone's life easier and turn it on, please
(Options -> General -> 3rd page -> Demos -> Use Extended Format = YES)
- the established practice is to continue when you die, not record a new demo

Thanks for sharing, Ling.

edit: Oh, and have a look at this new thread: Boom / MBF demo header format. It sounds right up your alley. ;)

[Linguica]

According to the OP, my method is acceptable:

The normal practice with first demo attempts (or FDAs for short) is to restart the map after a death, and keep playing the map from scratch until you exit (or give up).

I'm just a quitter.

How can you tell some are -complevel 1? I am pretty sure I recorded them all with -complevel 2. Maybe at the beginning I forgot to set a complevel at all, but that ought to be, like, -complevel 17, not 1.

Also if "use extended format" makes for demos that are fully backward compatible, and are also superior for those who care about demos, why is it off by default?

[Never_Again]

How can I tell? See #21 on this list. :P
As soon as I saw the ouch face pop up twice in quick succession on MAP03, I knew it was not a vanilla run. Up comes up the hex editor and sure enough ... Of course, you can also check Prboom-plus' stdout.txt:

ST_Init: Init status bar.
G_DoPlayDemo: playing demo with Current PrBoom compatibility

That's -complevel 17 alright. It's what you get if you specify no complevel on CMD line and have default_compatibility_level = -1 in the config (note the minus sign). That's why it's also known as "-complevel -1".

Why the extended demo format is not on by default? That's a good one. entryway should know the answer to that. There's simply no good reason for it. I don't consider LMPC and a couple of other ancient demo utils choking on demos having data past the quit byte (0x80) a good reason. Fortunately, your FDAs can still be played with a single click with a little elbow grease, just add this line to the pattern list in the config (the actual pattern# doesn't matter):

demo_pattern1961          "D2 The Way id Did /((30id.*\d\d\d\d)|(d2twid.*))\.lmp/doom2.wad|d2twid.wad"

edit: won't work for all maps - use the patterns from my next post instead

Oh, and the MAP04 FDA desyncs almost at the start. What's your D2TWID.WAD's date stamp and CRC-32? Should be 2013-12-27 and 5b76aaf, respectively.

[Linguica]

My d2twid was created November 16 2013?? I downloaded it in August 2014, how would I have downloaded an old version?

[Never_Again]

from d2twid.txt:
===========================================================================
Archive Maintainer      : Reuploaded because of zip issues
Uploader Email          : xaser.88@gmail.com (send confirmation here)
Primary purpose         : Single play
===========================================================================
Title                   : Doom 2 the Way id Did
Filename                : D2TWID.WAD
Release date            : 11/7/13 (finalized 12/22/13)

I imagine ZIP issues were not the only ones. Luckily, the project's home page still has the original version, and your MAP04 FDA plays back to the end with it. Perhaps you grabbed your copy from the original thread in WADs & Mods.

edit: So I guess instead of the pattern given in my previous post you should use these two instead:

demo_pattern1961          "D2 The Way id Did /(30id.*\d\d\d\d)\.lmp/doom2.wad|d2twid.wad"
demo_pattern1962          "D2 The Way id Did (original release) /(d2twid-fda.*)\.lmp/doom2.wad|d2twid_old.wad"

Just rename the original version to "d2twid_old.wad" so it won't conflict with the final version, then you can watch demos for both.

[Aqfaq]

I clicked random wads from the archive.

Lucky winners:

1. PEARLJAM.WAD: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom/d-f/dmperl.zip

FDA. Skill 4. Just to show my skills for those who may be interested. I soon noticed that the monsters were generally not tough, so I just tried to be as fast as possible. The level had some intricate puzzles that took me way too long to solve. I used IDDT, because the first room was so confusing, sorry about that. Time is 14:23. This was fun to play once, but probably not that fun to watch.

2. Another one, Forgotten Phobos Station: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/p-r/pstation.zip

Same thing as above. Never seen the map before. This went nicely. I had no idea the level was so short. 2:13.

two-fda-runs-by-aqfaq.zip

[Never_Again]

Aqfaq said:

I clicked random wads from the archive.

That's how I pick WADs to FDA, too. I also take an extra step and check DSDA to see if the WAD is there already. If not, the FDA should be all the more interesting to see.

Aqfaq said:

The level had some intricate puzzles that took me way too long to solve. <...> This was fun to play once, but probably not that fun to watch.

A demo will always be fun to watch for someone, somewhere - that's my firm belief. That goes double for a run featuring puzzles solved without saves or consulting an editor.
Thanks for sharing!

[Aqfaq]

Adapt or Die: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/a-c/aod.zip

FDA, Time: 6:45

I am so used to playing only the top wads (from Cacowards) that it is quite fun to play strange random wads with surprising designs.

aod-fda-645.zip

[Aqfaq]

Paranoia: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom/p-r/paranoia.zip

FDA time: 7:35

I played quite badly. Ammo management caused some headache.

paranoia-fda-735.zip

[Fredrik]

Memfis said:

But in case someone is interested... Just for laughs I uploaded an archive with 3531 FDAs by me.

I enjoyed your epic struggle on COECITS... only to be thwarted by the spider mastermind at the very end.

[Ancalagon]

Memfis said:

3531 FDAs by me.

Wonder how long all those are in total

[Never_Again]

You'd have to submit them to DSDA for Andy to run through his script to find out. ;)

But here's a better one. Can you imagine anyone (a human, I mean) posting 3000+ pr0n videos of him/herself? Mwaahahaah, I'd rather think not!

Which proves what? That DOOM is berra than секс!
:D

[Memfis]

Fredrik said:

I enjoyed your epic struggle on COECITS... only to be thwarted by the spider mastermind at the very end.

Oh man, that one was so funny. Literally died to the last enemy after like 25 minutes of playing. But I killed him too!

For counting the time my first thought was to just look at the total filesize and divide by some number I don't remember (just compare any demo's filesize to its length and you can figure it out), but then I remembered that there is a relatively small number of -longtics demos so that would be a little incorrect. I'm not sure if I marked all -longtics demos in the filename.

[Never_Again]

Well, it's roughly 490 hours, or 20 days and a half.

[Walter confetti]

please delete this post

[Walter confetti]

FDAs of Silhouettes of Phobos: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom/s-u/sophobos.zip

E1M1 in 7:05
E1M2 IN 9:01
E4M1 in 19:36

I've deleted by mistake (more than else i didn't knew that are also valid FDAs where you don't reach the exit), this time i used the complevel setting yay!

Anyway, beautiful maps for a 1995 mapset!

fda_walt_sophos.zip

[Andrea Rovenski]

My first shot at FDAs. I made a FDA demo pack for Oblivion (Located here) in prboom+ cl9.
I did E1M2 - E1M9 (already played M1 before getting the idea to do the pack)

Download here

[MD922]

FDA of Abyssal Speedmapping Session 16 Map 01

abysped01fda.zip

[MD922]

Cleim 2 Map 12 FDA

cl12fda.zip

[Walter confetti]

FDA of Explorer: Ruins of Baevon in 11:23, using zandronum 2.0 even if the author this map claims that it's limit-removing, when is just zdoom and derivative ports intended...

[Walter confetti]

^ FDA of the wad above

fda-walt-xplurin.zip

[Walter confetti]

FDAs pack of the following wads, recorded with prboom 2.5.0 on HMP skill:

WAYBAC, complevel 2
idbest, complevel 3
cbctc e1m1 trough e1m8, pistol start, complevel 3

fda-walt-demos-040415.zip

[Hitherto]

BETALABS

e1m1 - e1m9 separated, total ~1,6 hr, died once

Crap! My zip excess the maximum size by ~20 kb. So I packed this by 7z with changed ext.

blb-hth.zip

[dew]

FDA for Romero's e1m8b in 29m 13s.

Commentary in the textfile, this was a fun map. Grandpa John can still kick ass.

e1m8b_fda.zip

[Veinen]

^ What he said.

Final time 14:18 + one 15s failed attempt.

e1m8b_fda_veinen.zip

[4shockblast]

Guess I'll join the crowd, FDA, 2 deaths, 15:33 final time. Really unfortunate second death, I had no bullets and there were too many monsters surrounding me. D: Still, I didn't think this map was that hard overall.

e1m8b_fda_shock.zip

[baja blast rd.]

CChest map07 in 11:09.

This map is kind of hilarious.

cchest07_rdwpa_fda.zip

[Walter confetti]

Marine's Folly, recorded with prbomm 2.5.0.3, 3 deaths, no exit

fda-walt-marfoly.zip

[Walter confetti]

SCARVERS.WAD fdas, complevel 3, 3 deaths, record on prboom 2.5.0.3

fda-walt-scarves.zip