Ryback

Hey there Andy, Ry is Back (well around for a little while anyway)

Another old timer weighing in, although I wasn't nearly as active on IRC and so Andy probably has a better sense of the community consensus. It's just a rarely considered edge case in the rules. Then, as now, there were very few keyboard-only speedrunners, during the time I was active I think there were just 4-5 others total. So there were never many active players who might have seen the need to use a 180 spinner utility. I never considered using one in one of my demos, although I wasn't aware of an actual ban in place and given the earlier recorded demos would probably have made the assumption that it would be fine. Were there players who might have used a spinning utility but didn't because they knew the demo would be rejected? I'd be pretty surprised actually. The discussion is pretty much of historical interest only though, I don't know that we should take any lessons on what the current rules should be from this. DSDA gets to set what the rules are now, Compet-N had its time but it's dead, Jim.

If you mean the note at the bottom of that page, it's referring to this site: Tool-Assisted Speedruns This went public in June 1999, and most of the demos published until the end of July 1999 were recorded either early 1999 or late 1998. Other notable pre-2000 Doom TASes include Doom 2 Done Quick and Doom done Quick (at the same link), which were published May and June 1998, although they weren't thought of as TAS at the time.

Nice route improvements @Bob9001 Don't know that I'll have a demo reply for you, but we'll see

This one takes me back - TNT Map13 UV-Fast in 5:19 ef13-519.zip

The command for the included video would be: doom -warp 1 8 -skill 4 -record try "-warp 1 8" starts the player on Episode 1, Map 8, and "-skill 4" sets the skill level to Ultra-Violence (standard skill level used in speedruns). Also if you started the game with the above prompt you'd start the map with the pistol, rather than the shotgun, but I don't suppose that too many people are going to mind that.

No particular reason, no, Doom had exactly the same process as well.

Sort of. The game didn't have any options for you to record a demo from within the game, these were all passed as parameters when you ran the game for the first time. Say you wanted to do a speedrun of level 15 of Doom 2. You'd invoke the game from the DOS command line with the following command: doom2 -warp 15 -skill 4 -record try This would launch the game, skip the main menu, and immediately start the player in level 15, on skill level Ultra-Violence (-skill 4). As soon as the screen wipes and the level appears the player can begin to play and all their keyboard and mouse inputs will be written to the file try.lmp. Suppose it's an unsuccessful attempt and the player dies 30 seconds in. At this point they'll hit 'Q', which quits the game and writes try.lmp to disk. To play back this file, the player can use this command: doom2 -playdemo try Specifying the level and skill is not required as this information is retained in the demo file header. If on the other hand it was a successful speedrun, then the player may want to publish it. So they'll rename the file to something that tells other speedrunners what sort of run it was (and fits in the 8 character limit of DOS filenames), eg lv15-124.lmp. This filename tells players it's a speedrun of level 15 of Doom 2 and the time is 1:24. A list of the Compet-N naming conventions can be found here. They'll also create a text file with the name lv15-124.txt which would usually be generated from a standard template, and add to it some info about the run, what was special about it, their thoughts etc. These two files will be zipped together, and lv15-124.zip would be uploaded to an FTP site like the Compet-N incoming site. A site admin would review the run and if all was fine, include it in the latest update. Although the /incoming site was public to other runners, so they could see what the latest times were even before they had been verified, and download to view on their computers. So now if anyone else wants to view the lv15-124 speedrun, they download the .zip file to their computer, copy it into their Doom 2 directory, and unzip it. Then the command to playback is now doom2 -playdemo lv15-124 Playing demo files back is a lot easier with source ports, as the .lmp filename extension can be associated with a source port like prboom-plus. So usually just doubleclicking on a demo file is enough to launch prboom-plus and run Doom with all the correct settings for playback.

Probably the best way to do that would be to show a disassembled demo file. Utilities have existed since the mid 90s to take a demo file and convert it to a readable text format, such as LMPC. This is the LMPC output of Thomas Pilger's 5 second nightmare run on LV01 of Doom 2: # DOOM LMP file: nm01-005.lmp # Number of players: 1 # Total play time: 15.25s # Number of game tics: 534 HeaderStart Game: DOOM Version: 1.9 Skill: 5 Episode: 1 Map: 1 HeaderEnd DataStart GF50 SL40 TR28 # 1 (0.02s) GF50 SL40 # 2 (0.05s) GF50 SL40 # 3 (0.08s) GF50 SL40 # 4 (0.11s) GF50 SL40 # 5 (0.14s) GF50 SL40 # 6 (0.17s) GF50 SL40 # 7 (0.20s) GF50 SL40 # 8 (0.22s) GF50 SL40 TR1 # 9 (0.25s) GF50 SL40 # 10 (0.28s) Each line of the file corresponds to a single frame within the game, and records player input. Three bytes of which are used for movement, and a fourth for special actions (eg shooting, activating a door). With 35 frames a second, this means the demo format takes only 8400 bytes to store a minute of speedrunning action. This made it easy to share these files with others on slow dial-up connections. Recording a file like the above would be done from the DOS command line, with Doom's built in record feature: doom2 -warp 01 -skill 5 -record nm01-005 And played back the same way. doom2 -playdemo nm01-005 The downside of LMP demo files is they're not strictly video files, and there's no ability to seek through the file, rewind, replay etc. So by convention people would record a separate file for each attempt, and only publish the successful attempts. This is contrast to more modern platforms like Twitch which will host a multi-hour session and if there's a record breaking run it's likely at the end of the session. As Linguica says above, there were no speedrunning forums at the time. People would sometimes post their demos to Usenet (alt.games.doom or rec.computer.games.doom.misc), but these were frowned upon by others who had no interest in watching demos and didn't want to download large binary blobs. So FTP sites became the main place where people shared their demos. You would upload your speedrun to the FTP site using an FTP client, and download other runs you might be interested in the same way. The two biggest FTP sites for demo sharing were the DHT and Compet-N. DHT (Doom Honorific Titles) allowed players to send in demos for specific categories (Maxkill, pacifist, Tyson etc) but with no competition element. Compet-N was designed from the start as a "Competition" site, and only accepted demos if they were new records. It also maintained a leaderboard, a list of current fastest times, and current active players. New demos and updates would generally be announced by the site owners themselves. Eg here are some posts from Simon Widlake, original Compet-N administrator, to the rec.games.computer.doom.misc group giving the latest updates, times and leaderboard status: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.misc/c/PSWNKf8jVAY/m/04XL2jwwtqAJ (1995-04-05) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.misc/c/bUJIPevOn04/m/YG7dcvzOOjwJ (1995-04-27) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.misc/c/YgzcSjS8jYc/m/9AXjg8q75HUJ (1995-11-01) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.misc/c/erSn1vPyyIg/m/sd6wAXY4xEsJ (1995-12-06) https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.misc/c/D_W5hP3a_mA/m/4gF-EZ0kNqQJ (1996-03-20) This didn't give the speedrunners many platforms to talk about their own work, but the above two sites both encouraged players to include a text file with a description of their demo, and here players could talk about what was challenging about their run, what went well, etc. This tradition stuck, even in the moddern day when people can just post a demo description in a forum like this, or talk about it in their twitch channel. That's why if you download a demo file even today, it's almost certainly a zip containing two files - the actual demo .lmp, and a .txt file with information about the run.

The link dew posted above to the Compet-N website has all the old archived news items, but the green design dates to 2001 or so. The very earliest Compet-N page was much plainer, and only hosted the current best times on each map and an overall leaderboard. There was an interim design around 1999-2000 with a main page for news items, but I wasn't able to find it within the archive.org copies.

Great work John, this one's been on a few people's wishlists for a long time!

As the hypocritical pacifist guy, I'll just chime in now and say I broadly agree with the proposed changes. Removing player intention from the pacifist criteria makes for a cleaner, more straightforward category. A run is not pacifist if you damage a monster by shooting, or if you shoot barrels that explode and damage a monster. That's it. Intention is a messy thing to judge anyway, as there's two kinds - the intention of the player and the intention of the Doomguy. The Doomguy doesn't have the level knowledge we have. He doesn't know that a particular teleporter on Perfect Hatred will make him telefrag a Cyberdemon - why charge him with that monster's death? I don't expect this will change pacifist running much except a few less edge case demos will be discarded. It's unlikely telefrag deaths will become a new pacifist tactic for clearing a path as it's tricky and takes too much time. Inevitably running tends toward faster, simpler routes.