Nine Inch Heels

step 1: create sector step 2: assign F_SKY 1 to the ceiling of the sector you just created step 3: lower the ceiling of the sector down to the floor, so the sector has an effective height of zero step 4: there isn't a step 4... word of advice: If you don't understand what we're saying, read linguica's vanilla mapping tutorial, so you learn the terms we use in mapping...

If you want an entry on the DSDArchive, you will need to provide a demo-file that contains examinable data. If not, but you met all the criteria for what a UVmax would be regardless, and you then told a mapper "hey, I UVmaxed your map the other day - here's what I think about it..." they would at least know (and/or expect) that you've seen the map in its entirety (all secrets included) - that's what's the most important part about it in the first place. I don't think anybody would care if you called it UVmax or "casual max" in that context, and I certainly wouldn't be wagging my finger in either case. It's primarily down to what the term "max" entails, and making sure that there aren't however many different interpretations of it circulating around in a community where it's not only a term used in speedrunning to outline what a runner has accomplished, but where a significant number of people will straight up expect that you've actually seen 100% of something instead of skipping over bits and pieces. Put yourself in a mapper's shoes, and imagine I told you that I maxed your map. Then I start talking about something that rubbed me wrong, let's say for argument's sake a hurtfloor section for which I couldn't find a rad-suit (even though there are several tucked away in a secret that you, as the mapper, think I should have found since I told you that I maxed your map), and suddenly there's a problem just because one of us didn't have their definitions right.

If you're not going for 100% secrets, then you're by default not UVmaxing. It's not some term you get to just appropriate to what you do casually, because that term has rules, a long standing tradition, and the resulting kinds of expectations behind it. So don't call something a UVmax when it isn't one, especially not if you give feedback on anybody's maps, upload YT videos of your play-throughs, or whatever the hell you may or may not doing on social media... And no, this has nothing to do with gatekeeping, just bringing that up because I know a few folks who like to scream and shout about every time they see the faintest hint of an opportunity... Those categories we use in speedrunning are an established "currency" of sorts, and watering that down by way of employing category descriptors wrongfully is plain and simple negative value for pretty much everybody involved... As for the rules, I can only speculate, so I'll just say that memorizing secrets and routing maps with them in mind - even if the argument has been made that it makes things "easier" (which is an irrelevant argument when it's about speed at the bottom line, that also ignores that movement skills are involved, which don't come so easy) - is an expression of skill. Now you may ask "why not 100% items also?" and the answer to that question is, by and large, unnecessary tedium...

I always thought it was the other way around, but I stand corrected...

If someone were to ask me what my pick for demo of the year was, I'd tell them that it's too early to tell... But this right here is a very strong contender...

Except it's not a case of bad mapping, it's a user error since they didn't use the correct port.. Pointing that out has nothing to do with pride, and this spiel of "doesn't run in my favourite source port 0/5" needs to die a miserable death since yesteryear...

It's important because, in the general sense, source ports, and port behaviour isn't subject to "norms"... The ports do stuff corresponding to their design goals, where DSDA-Doom is meant to be the port that provides accurate behaviour whenever you set the correct compatibility level, while GZDoom does stuff only kinda, sorta, maybe, -ish roughly right, because the port caters more towards modders, and game-devs as an independent platform rather than trying to deliver a behaviour that is "historically accurate"... GZDoom does not care about delivering the exact same experience people had back in the early 90s - but with higher screen resolution. It might get most of the way there, but it's falling short the moment mappers employ methods that depend on very specific "quirks" GZDoom is unable to "emulate"... GZDoom may tell you that it has a "strict vanilla" compatibility setting, but it is, in fact, not vanilla. It may tell you it has a "strict boom" setting, but it is, in fact, not "boom" - and the GZDoom devs will never be upfront about this simple matter of fact, because that would be "bad PR"... Set DSDA-Doom to complevel 2, and you get actual vanilla, minus QOL stuff like screen resolution, and stuff like a better HUD... And that is why, whenever this topic comes up, and someone says they need help, but doesn't specify their port of choice, you see recommendations to use DSDA-Doom for everything that isn't meant to be played with GZDoom specifically. It is the successor of PrBoom+, which has been the go-to previously in most cases when it came to slaughtermaps, and that status quo is never going to change, because different ports are there for different purposes...

GZDoom may work, but it doesn't necessarily... And don't fall victim to the illusion that you actually see anywhere near enough in some demo made by someone else, where all you have to base your assumptions on is what the FOV of the player shows, while you cannot possibly tell what they're thinking in that moment, and what they're keeping track of in the back of their minds, or what manner of risks they have been taking in order to conduct their more or less optimized runs... Not everything you see in a demo by anyone is the most reliable strategy anyhow, and if all you do is to try and mimic what someone else does, while you're still lacking fundamental understanding in some areas, you're setting yourself up for a miserable experience... Also: GZDoom default settings are not slaughter-friendly unless any given map caters to that port.... GZDoom vs DSDA doom may have differences in terms of how behind the scenes timers work, they may have differences in terms of how collisions work, they may have differences in terms of enemy behaviour, there may be differences in terms of "bugs" GZDoom (or ZDoom way back when) "fixed"... If there were no differences whatsoever, never mind a chance of any at all, people wouldn't mention independently of one another that you would do yourself a solid if you played with the recommended source-port, instead of playing on some other port that has been designed with an entirely different mindset, and entirely different design goals...

They're not about "tactics"... Tactics is taking cover from enemy hitscans while your SSG reloads... They're about strategy on a larger scale... As far as source ports are considered: Unless specified otherwise, DSDA-Doom is the port you wanna be using, and then you want to launch the port alongside IWAD and PWAD with the recommended compatibility parameter via command line arguments. If you wanna make it easier, create a .bat file with all the necessary parameters, and just double click that to play... https://dsdarchive.com/guides/dsda_doom

And here I was thinking this is another one of those "hey guys, here are some tips I've found in the YT comment section" types of threads... I'm pleasantly surprised that this is not the case... One of the first things that you need to learn is "automation"... You need to be able to develop movement patterns that dodge most of the incoming projectiles automatically, so that you can focus on something that is more important than trying to dodge every fireball coming your way. Likewise, you need to develop a feeling for the speed of revenant rockets, and develop movement habits that make you go always just a little bit faster than those homing missiles... Next on the list is threat identification... What is killing you why, when, and how? Slaughtermaps don't follow the same "rules" as most vanilla maps in that "shoot the vile/PE first" isn't always the approach you need to be taking. You want to look at the pieces on the board, and think about what those pieces are actually doing, and then formulate a strategy not based on rigid rules a wannabe expert passes off as good advice but based on the conclusions you have been able to make based on your own observations... When that's done, you can concern yourself with which pieces you need to remove first, and which other pieces are not a priority for you at any given point in time. Moreover, you also need to identify what a fight does from a methodical perspective. Is it a spammy encounter, where you're going to have to make sure you kill as quickly as possible, or is it less about "real-estate-pressure" and maybe more about some very distinct mechanics, such as for example the revenant's close combat range, or the archvile's target amnesia..? Another skill in the book is herding... Where do you need monsters to be, so that you can accomplish your goals, and how do you need to move around, and at what pace, in order to get them there? Next up is "projectile management"... Running around a lot doesn't mean you're dodging well. When there is limited real estate to work with, you want to dodge projectiles such that you don't spread them out everywhere, instead, you'll want to dodge in measured steps to keep incoming projectiles "organized". If you then want to get past a "stream" of fireballs or whatnot, take a larger and faster step to the side, so the pattern "breaks open", allowing you to find a gap to slip through... Situational awareness is a big one, of course... What's the situation of the fight overall, where are most things, where is the most firepower coming from, and which way will be safest to move to next? You need to learn to keep track of the pieces on the board, otherwise you end up in situations you have not been able to anticipate, which results in a quick death in most cases... Infighting, and also using monsters as cover is going to be required, and you want to make sure you understand at least the basic principles. Note that "causing monsters to infight" isn't necessarily the gateway to getting good at slaughter, certainly not to the degree many people would like to think it is. Obviously it's going to be required every so often, and ideally you want to get it going if there's a good opportunity to do so, but infighting can actually be incredibly dangerous to the player, due to how it spreads the monster's projectiles out across a larger area. Dying to a stray cyberdemon rocket that was not on the player's radar is anything but unheard of. Don't listen to people telling you that you always need to think about how to get infights going as if it were the be-all-end-all... Whether or not infighting is actually required depends on how the fight is staged in the first place. Infighting does primarily 2 things of interest: It increases your firepower indirectly, and it slows monsters down. You want to spend time on creating infights first and foremost if you need one or the other advantage, or both. If your firepower is entirely sufficient, and ammo isn't at a premium, then your time might be better spent on something else instead... There's probably more I could mention, but I think this will help at least a bit... There's just one more thing: SET YOUR SOURCEPORT UP PROPERLY!!!! You don't want to run any and all slaughtermaps with GZDoom default settings. Run these maps in the targeted source port, with the recommended compatibility settings. Nothing you'll learn or do will do you any good when the way a fight should actually behave is getting broken by source port settings.

The concept isn't that weird, actually... There is a "subcategory" called "reality" where, in order for a run to qualify, you need to avoid any and all damage. If you managed to pull that off, any run you recorded, be it UVspeed, or UVmax, would get the "also reality" check-mark on the archives. Aside of being somewhat difficult to achieve on maps with hitscanners, there was also the problem that some maps expose the player to hurt floors, but without providing a rad suit, in order to put them on a timer of sorts, so reality wasn't a category that could fit maps like that under its umbrella... Enter MMH, where, instead of getting disqualified the first instance you took damage, you would get a score based on a set of rules, which are not necessarily easy to explain, which would then be a viable category for maps with mandatory damage intakes, in order to allow people who liked running reality to compete over these maps by way of slotting in an additional metric, which was the "score" people would get at the end of the run. The problem is that, aside of the somewhat tricky to convey rules, these runs also need to be verified. Every MMH demo you'd need to look at start to finish, and take notes as to where the player took damage, and what their highest or lowest health total was when they did, so that you would be able to verify that the score any given runner would claim for the map is the correct one... So, once you have a category that's difficult to explain, when it also comes with the additional overhead as far as verification is considered, then you have a recipe for disaster. That's why I've been saying that straightforward rules, such as the one example I gave above lend themselves more towards a sustainable category than a whole bunch of "what-ifs" and "only-thens"... Imagine being the guy who runs a map under the assumption that it's impossible to get 100% kills while tagging less than 40% of all secrets. You practice the route, you record the run and submit it... Along comes somebody else who looked at the map in the builder, and they point out a fence glide, a linedef skip, and a void glide you could have, and should have done in order to actually tag the least amount of secrets possible. That weekend you just spent on composing a route, practising difficult fights, as well as all your demo attempts is suddenly invalidated not because your run wasn't good, but because someone else, who didn't even run the map yet, just happened to know better... Why would anybody want to run a category like that - that's the question that needs to be answered when you develop rules for anything...

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but scaling up the content, and "raising the stakes" over the course of a megaWAD by way of more and tougher monsters paired with increased firepower is a formula that has, in the grand scheme of things, stood the test of time... For some people, plasma and BFG are "Late-Game" weapons, so that's where cells are being ramped up alongside rockets more often than not. PR and BFG are also very powerful weapons to hand out in the first place. Put them into the megaWAD too early, and with enough supply, and you'll see most of your ambushes going up in smoke, because the player is "overgunned". It's not so much a matter of "luxury" the way I see it, it's a general sense of "harder content = better weapons for the player". And why not? I mean, do you want to see people slog through 5 mancubi with an SSG in, like, map 29 of a 32 map megaWAD..?

This is already way too complicated to make the category interesting to anybody... "Exit the map with 100% kills (including arch vile resurrections) as fast as possible" is all that is required. That way, runners can choose which secrets to grab, and how many of them, and which ones to avoid - that's how people can plan their routes around secrets they deem "profitable" as long as they don't get 100% secrets, in which case it would be a UVmax anyway... The moment you place a limit on how many secrets should be "tagged" at most (as long as it's not all of them) - even if the limit is dynamic - you poison the well, because then people need to scour the map in the builder, and check if anything that spawns in a secret somewhere would otherwise spawn elsewhere under certain conditions. In addition to that, a perfectly fine run would be pushed off the board not because it wasn't the fastest, but solely because someone glitched their way around a secret... Having to crack open anything in the builder just to see if it is at least theoretically possible to use "technology" somewhere is a hurdle not everybody will want to take when they could just UVmax the damn thing instead. By the same token, if somebody finds a way to glitch their way past a secret, but they can't pull it off while somebody else might be able to, then there's a chance they're not even gonna try, because they know that their route could be beaten from out of nowhere - even by a slower (and possibly overall "worse") run... You need to consider that a new category like this needs to compete with UVmax and UVspeed - the most common categories - and the rules for either category fit into one single sentence. You might think that's an arbitrary criterium, but the history of doom speedruns (the death of the MMH-category for example) shows that simplicity makes a real difference when it comes to rules.

That already exists as a niche category that was listed in "other" thus far because it rarely sees any demos at all...

A word of advice: Any category you may or may not want to see should have rules that are as straightforward as possible. There used to be a category called something like "Min-Max-Health", where you would get a score based on your total health when you exit the map, but with the stipulation that you can only increase your score until you took the first instance of damage, from which point onwards you couldn't raise your score beyond what you had after the very moment you took damage for the first time - and if you took even more, your "score-cap" would lower accordingly.... This category went the way of the dodo, because, aside of the fact that it doesn't seem particularly attractive to most runners, the rules were too complicated, or at least they were complicated enough to deter people whose English wasn't up to the task of parsing the respective rules accurately... If you want a category that does not care about secrets, just make it about 100% kills exclusively, and let people who are interested find the maps where they think that running the category is enough of a difference to a UVmax that the distinction makes sense. The moment you get into things like "how many secrets can be avoided, and how many monsters are in those secret areas, and how should the kill-tally look at the end of the run according to the numbers in the editor?" your category is going to die the instance it starts breathing oxygen...

You kinda touched on vague boundaries between genres already, but I wanna add that, in many cases, this idea that for example a vanilla enthusiast may have, which is that "IWAD style gameplay is like the rarest crop under the sun, and everything else is slaughter" often boils down to "person not knowing what the hell they're looking at"... I mean, you've made a pretty good case overall, and you avoided putting the blame squarely on the person's shoulders as much as you could, but sometimes it really is a "people-defect" that no amount of elaboration can "fix". Someone looks at something they think looks snazzy, they grab it, they try it, they get steam-rolled (or at least they find out that this something which they wanted to like isn't for them), they feel like they're missing out, and that's on top of a less than pleasant experience. What can we do about it? If the habits of some particular individuals are of any indication, a good way to deal with the sense of having been left out is to vent one's frustration on the internet, be it the review section here, YT comments, project threads... It just happens, and it happens despite the fact that some people, depending on their preferences, may have more WADs to play than they could finish over the course of a decade (assuming somewhat healthy "gaming habits"). I'm not angry that I'm like, one of the 5 or so people who boot up a ZDaemon rocket jump map these years, if anything I should consider myself fortunate that the niche I'm in is such a small and obscure one that, usually, nobody else is chiming in with their misconceptions and assumptions about what I play, and why I play it... Alas, I should consider myself fortunate, but the reality is that no new rocket jump maps, or any new demos have been seen on these forums for years (ignoring my 19 own demos). Whoever feels like nothing they enjoy ever gets made often enough, compare that to "no maps whatsoever over the course of years". Granted, I have started working on something, but with very little in the way of support, or somebody else willing to chip in and contribute, it's gonna take a while before anything is finished, because time is at a premium for me these days... There is one thing I do get angry about, however... It's when people, who don't know what the hell they're talking about, have these wild and vague ideas about what it is I'm playing, why I do it, and what it says about me as a person (for example: "boo-fucking-hoo slaughter elitist"). Thankfully, that doesn't happen particularly often these days, and even some stalwart naysayers have come around to appreciating for example slaughter over time, so I'm mostly bemoaning a thing of the past here... /ramble

No good idea in history would have been realized if everybody thought that somebody else already tried to no avail...

And I thought it wasn't... This isn't necessarily the case anyhow. Some maps have entire secret sections in them, in the case of maps like for example Miasma with optional (because secret) fights that are way more difficult than the bare minimum required to just exit the map - and Miasma isn't an anomaly in that regard, for that matter... You could of course argue that, in the case of a map where killing everything requires finding some - but perhaps not all - secrets the case I'm making doesn't quite apply as much as it would for example when you look at a map where the only thing hidden away is additional firepower... Despite that, knowing where all the secrets are, and how to get to them, and building a route through a map around when and where you want to grab what to achieve the fastest possible UVmax is still an expression of skill... If you wanted for there to be a category that goes for 100% kills exclusively, then I suggest you start running it yourself, and see if it catches on...

What violent beetle pointed out should work... If you want a "non-UMAPINFO method", you could just create a ".bat-file" that launches the WAD you want to play such that it can put you right into the first map you want to actually play, skipping over any other maps before that, as in: C:\directory\tree\here\DSDA-Doom\dsda-doom-0.19.7\dsda-doom.exe -iwad DOOM2.wad -file WADyougonnadoWADyougonnadowhentheycomeforyou.wad -warp 04 -skill 4 -complevel 2/9/11/21 (or whichever applies here) You put the necessary syntax into a notepad.txt file, and change the file extension to ".bat"... Double click it, and you're ready to go..

From my POV, and maybe I should have mentioned it earlier, it should be sufficient to create the subsection for WIPs or whathaveyou, and then announcing that anybody who wants their still ongoing project thread moved there should actively request that... Inactive threads aren't going to bubble up to the surface again anyhow if they've been derelict for months, if not years. It seems like a lot of unnecessary effort to move what's kind of a "digital corpse of a thread" just because it "technically" belongs somewhere else in one big push or whatnot... If you really want to be that thorough, you might as well set up the framework, move the relatively few active threads, and then do the rest piecemeal-style when you feel like you have the time and the patience to spare...

I think this is a non-concern. If release candidates were kept separate from finished projects, then a lot of those potential grievances could be resolved "passively". Updating a finished WAD, because something needed urgent fixing isn't necessarily something particularly problematic either, because the aspect that finished releases and ongoing projects don't need to compete for the same real estate any longer would still hold true. I don't remember when I've last bought a game that was supposedly finished, which never received bug fixes later down the line - why would WADs be any different, and why would somebody raise an eyebrow there..?

Needlessly hostile is telling someone who brings up lilith as an example of something that runs properly only on a very particular branch of ports that they're joking, despite the fact that it's exactly what this thread is looking for - let's get that right to begin with.... There is also no self-contradiction going on, because, "fringe source ports" included, it is going to be a very short list of WADs, but probably not a very accurate one. The better question to ask is whether or not it is a good idea to plug anything into for example GZDoom just because, or rather if "port exclusive" in the sense that only one single port can run something is a good metric to begin with. For reference, see any WAD that uses mikoveyors - They aren't port exclusive, GZDoom can "run" them, but they will malfunction if you do. Likewise, any ZDaemon rocket jump map will "run" when loaded with GZDoom, but they're only actually playable with ZDaemon due to its somewhat unique physics engine (among other things), or Zandronum when going under the assumption that someone knows how to "bend" the compatibility and physics settings over backwards to somehow make things fall into place. There's a good amount of stuff that just shouldn't be played (or can't be played properly) on any port but the one it has been designed for specifically - even if it "kinda-sorta-ish works" with some other port, no matter which one it is. And when the baseline assumption is that WADs these days are either "vanilla style" or "GZDoom/Zandro", then there's a misconception going on for sure, because vanilla WADs are probably the least represented WADs in recent past in terms of community output, recent past for a community as old as this being like 2-3 years...

Hard disagree, because that's backwards-logic... You need to have releases before there is anything in the way of discussions going on about anything that has been released. Adding to that, there are probably more than a handful of people, who just come here to grab something they can play, who aren't particularly interested in discussing "design-philosophy"... And as if that's not enough, the downloads section has been broken for I can't even remember how long it was, and now, when there's an opportunity to make community content more visible, I am horribly against letting that opportunity go to waste...

lilith.pk3 is the only WAD that exists that will only perform, look, and feel as intended in ZDoom 2.81 (afaik) and other ZDoom port variants with similar technical underbellies... It will not behave as intended in GZDoom at all.. On top of that, if anybody here's joking, it's gotta be you - or at the very least you are ignorant to the fact the vast majority of WADs that exist haven't been made for ZDoom or any derivative port, but instead run perfectly fine in ports like DSDA-Doom, if not crispy Doom or even Choco Doom... The fact that the ZDoom family of ports can run these WADs as well, which is especially true for GZDoom (which can run pretty much anything by design) doesn't mean that everything the port can run has been designed for it... It's the equivalent of saying classic Doom has been designed to be played with a GForce RTX as part of your gaming rig, because the RTX can render the graphics properly, while completely ignoring the myriad other hardware pieces that get the job done just as fine... In addition to this misconception of yours, which boils down to GZDoom can run anything, therefore anything that exists has been made for it, there are certain things GZDoom doesn't do properly necessarily, which is on top of the problem that GZDoom's default settings make certain maps borderline - if not entirely - unplayable... So next time you grab anything, you ought to be looking at what the "smallest denominator" is as far as source ports are considered, and then play the map with that source port in particular to get the intended experience instead of plugging it into GZDoom just because you can...

I'm not entirely sure what we disagree on just yet... "For its time", it was an awesome product - a pioneering one at that, with all the experimentation that was necessary and the inevitable failure here and there. So far I'm with you. Where I am stuck is this idea that a review that was created decades later - decades worth of evolution of the genre itself as a whole, as well as the modding community at large - somehow needs to go out of its way to "pretend" that it is, in fact, not a contemporary review... ...Because that's what you do when you hand out "nostalgia points", you look at something through the lens of "the days of old", and, most likely, you're not even going to do a particularly good job at that, because this fascination with a product like classic doom as people experienced it back when one could consider oneself fortunate to own a 486 with 100MHZ or more isn't something you could even hope to re-live these days. It's an experience you can have only once, it's that fleeting and nebulous. So, from where I am looking at it, it is way more "honest" and less "half-assed" to talk about how one feels about something today, in a modern day context, rather than trying to somehow conjure up the magic of days gone by, but without ever being able to convey it with words... The question "how well something aged" is just as interesting to ask and answer as "how significant and influential something has been" over the course of a couple decades. It feels wrong to me to scrutinize someone who is looking to find an answer to a question someone else thinks shouldn't be asked like that. In cases likes this, I'm a firm believer in putting your money where your mouth is. If you disagree with the approach, go ahead and do a review of doom.WAD the way you think it should be done...