10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th 2003

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Opulent
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10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th 2003

Post by Opulent »

Hi everyone.
I have been tasked to make a "DOOM Demo Timeline" for the last 10 years for Doomworld's 10-year celebration. (remember their 5years of DOOM celebration?)
Okay.  What I am asking is what were relevant points in the DOOM demo history?
Some things are not worth mentioning, but depending upon the detail of the article, some are.
Any clarification on anything, especially non-Compet-N, would be very helpful.

Very rough outline off the top of my head:  (don't be offended if I forget something!  But speak up now if I have so I represent everyone correctly) :)
1) DOOM internal demos / idsoftware-Romero demo passion during coding / Wolfenstein demo support
2) 1.2 -> 1.9 releases / ftp.cdrom.com
3) Ifrag / H2H / Dwango / Kali / Quakecon-type events
3a) Xenos to Xoleras; a deathmatch recap.  (yikes)
4) DHT exams -- all incarnations
5) Compet-N! :-*
5a) including some of the bigger milestones - 30uv / e4nm / Anthe / 22nm / 30nm / Lindgren / t2m8 / Panter / 30uvmax / Henning / Hegyi / Anders / Vile / +?
5b) inclusion of new categories to the Compet-N; then pwads
5c) How advent of new tricks allowed for new demos?
6) Pdang - Arno and Ralf
7) other misc websites -- Panter / Yonatan / Gazelle / AROlivera / Team Insanity / Mr Doom / King God Space / Ricrob / RJSham / Bahdko / Siebers / Presage / Ledmeister / Yeti-BDL / Mineral / Girlich / Doomster / Mirra / Sjoblom / Wad MAster's Competition / Yasuko / Ugwad
How do some of these figure in? yikes...
Others to mention?  Romero doing Legacy demos through Episode1 with comments.
What about the Coop-N, and all the Norwegian/Croatian/Netherlands/etc.. deathmatch tourneys?  ugh.
8.) Quake - SDA/QDQ  -- this isn't too important to DOOM outside of TAS, but it's influence and similar people and direction is worth noting. (shame the people don't overlap more actually, but that shows the difference between the engines and gameplay)
9) TAS (including QDQ projects)
10) DSDA
11) Source code released / source ports -- influence, new capabilities
12) Demo recap of the last 10 years including the best demos ever (whew, this already has my head spinning)
13) (which should be earlier, if included at all) DOOM demo flexibility -- TAS, command-line options, F12, source port capabilities(16 players, chasecam, flycam, recam, etc..) , +?

Most people have been too busy playing to bother recording or put up a website, so short of Bahdko's vigilance, virtually all dm demos through all 10 years are barely listed or even recorded.  Who knows what happened at DMCon95?  Do you even know what happened last night? :P

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Feel free to email me as well: Opulent@cox.net  Thanks!
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Never_Again »

What a prodigal undertaking! You might need more than a calendar two weeks Ops; more like id's two weeks heheh.
Good luck, however long it may take!

>Who knows what happened at DMCon95?
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

For deathmatch demos, you NEED to get in touch with Anders, who last I heard was collecting a huge archive. I was too, till I managed to wipe my Doom directory sometime when I was switching hard drives. ARGH. We'd both gained access to several important sets of demos from the 1995-1998 period, including the ones Patrick Hook used to host on rockisland.net (fun trivia - sCary, the guy who ended up running the Shuga Shack, started out with a page that was hosted in phook's rockisland space, http://www.rockisland.net/~phook/scary . No it's not there any more). Anders also managed to track down a lot of others from various places that I didn't have. You should be able to find a lot of that period's deathmatch history by reading the newsgroup archives at Google Groups, especially the whole Merlock / Xoleras thing. You might want to try and track some of the people involved down and talk to them personally, as I'm sure a lot went on in places I didn't then go - IRC, Dwango, private email etc. Good luck!
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

It would be cool to amass a real history, but I basically have this weekend and that's it.
I couldn't even be sure I'd get email replies in less than a week.  =/
thanks for the input, that is useful... I was trying to avoid bothering people who are retired(fx, Sedlic, Arno, Ralf, Anders, Henning, etc...).
Man, I forgot all about Rock island... that seems like ages ago.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by admin »

I have the Phook archive, probably Anders and BahdKo too. It was uploaded to dang/misc a while back by a very generous someone (sorry, I don't recall who it was).
My deathmatch archive is about 200 megs, I think that's not bad, probably dwarfed by Anders' archive though.
As for deathmatch history BahdKo should be able to provide with lotsa info and trivia.
What you mention would be a massive undertaking, I'm not sure if Doomworld's readers are interested in every single detail. Given the timeframe till Doomsday, I think a top-down approach is best (starting from most important down).
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

Thanks, Adam.
I hope to spice it up with demos to keep their mind off the words (hopefully).
for anyone IN the DOOM demoscene, this won't be worth reading.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Ryback »

That looks like an enormously comprehensive list, you should end up covering everything.

Some suggestions:
* Don't forget the LMP Hall of Fame, which deserves mention as the first LMP collection.
* DHT's role in the development of unusual playing styles (nm, tyson, pacifist)
* Slowmotion. Uwe, Steffen, the demos disqualified, how they were done.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

I was seriously considering NOT mentioning cheating at all.  Uwe, Steffan, and others deserve to be mentioned for the real work that they did, not the worst things.
We'll see how it pans out.... I'm still struggling with.. uh, everything. :)
thanks for the input, Chris, Adam, and Adam.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

besides, we *don't* know exactly how Uwe and Steffen did it, do we?
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Andy_Olivera »

Well, since the source code wasn't released back then that leaves only two ways Uwe & Steffen could've done it. The first is by using a TSR that modifies the timer during play(like a Strafe50 driver). I don't know how to do this. The second method is easier. There are two 4-byte integers in the EXE that control the game's internal clock. You can change them with any hex editor.

Some history now. Long ago(June 1996) DeHackEd author Greg Lewis indentified these particular bytes in a Usenet post. I don't know exactly how they work(neither did Greg), but they most definitely did slow down or speed up the game. My brief experiements resulted in only drastic differences in game speed(nothing playable), but if someone were to figure out how they worked and interacted a usable slow motion game(say 50% or 33% of normal speed) would be easy.

I tried recording a demo at an ultra-slow speed(something like 10%, or even 5%), but on playback it desynced. It could be that only one of the values can be changed(a multiplier, maybe) and the other controls the actual clock rate.

I'd post the addresses of the values so people could do some experimenting, but it's not really necessary with TAS around. Besides, Adam would kill me. ;D

Were the cheated demos created before or after Greg's post?
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

Girlich was certainly smart and resouceful enough to make a cheat utility.
If I was to guess, I'd say they took the global choice and modified the DOS environment to be slower.  in DOS there aren't timing issues as there would be in a more robust OS.
of course, I'm just speculating... you know, it's been so long, we could just ask him.  :)
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Ryback »

Well, going by the lmp timestamps, Steffen's 30nm was created on   11-05-1996, and Uwe's 0911uv21 on 13-06-1996. Which would seem to rule out exe hacks for Steffen at least.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by admin »

Ryback: Uwe and Steffen specialized in reverse engineering at university. They didn't need Greg Lewis to figure out themselves.

Andy: As far as I know, they did have a slowmo TSR utility. Uwe definitely figured out how to "connect" demos in a TAS way, evident in 0602uv01, but I'm not sure how that was done with the source not released at the time.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Kristian Ronge »

Speaking of Uwe's 0602uv01.. why is that, as well as 0911uv21 and e1m1c029 - which seems to have been removed from the database? - still listed as records? It makes it harder to find the real record runs by Drew, Radek and Rimmer, not to mention more confusing.

Not only that; Uwe still has points for the runs. Were they disqualified, or what? :-/
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent_ »

Andy: As far as I know, they did have a slowmo TSR utility. Uwe definitely figured out how to "connect" demos in a TAS way, evident in 0602uv01, but I'm not sure how that was done with the source not released at the time.
I doubt they did it in increments.  both were very good players, I bet they avoided that issue by just recording it all in one session.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by admin »

Kristian: that's not the supposed behavior, it was a glitch when I moved things to doom2.net. Luckily it was an easy fix. Should be OK now.

Opulent: I find it hard to believe it takes only a good player to kill 12 arachnos with 2 rockets each, 6 of them getting no splash damage at all. You're welcome to reproduce it without TAS methods.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

yeah, op, watch 0602uv01 again carefully, see how many optimal damage effects there are - MAP07 is only the most obvious. It *must* have been connected.
Last edited by AdamW on 04.12.2003 00:59, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

sorry, yeah, I'm not that familiar with it.  I definitely see your point.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Andy_Olivera »

How is that possible? To continue a demo you have to know at what point the RNG is. In order to find that out, you'd have to know how many numbers are in the table(not hard for a reverse engineer, I suppose). The problem is that in order for the demo not to desync, you have to start at the same spot in the RNG. I suppose they could've written this into the TSR(feed the program the appropriate offset, perhaps).
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

i wouldn't put it past uwe to have reverse-engineered the .exe or something...
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Grazza »

I think the H2H contests (http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/lmps/H2HMud/) deserve a mention.

I also think Winterfeldt's 30nm6520 should definitely be mentioned. Surely one of the most important (and most often watched?) demos ever, regardless of how it was recorded.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

definitely second the H2Hmud thing - it was a big deal at the time. ISTR a lot of trouble with people getting their prizes, I don't remember how it worked out, though...
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

Thanks for the feedback, guys.  I didn't want to mention cheating in such a short article because it makes it seem like 10% of Dooming is cheating... but it definitely has its place in DOOM history.
like I said, I don't think anyone who posts here will find the article worth their time.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Opulent »

For anyone who cares, the Rock Island demos are generously hosted at Bahdko's site.
I haven't watched many of these myself yet (I did have them already, I just didn't know it), but I'd assume some are quite good.
http://www.doom2.net/doom2/lmps/rockisland/
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by AdamW »

yeah, there's a bunch of the better-known players from the period in there - Xoleras, Sslasher, Galiu, some others.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by Spooky »

Speaking of Uwe's 0602uv01.. why is that, as well as 0911uv21 and e1m1c029 - which seems to have been removed from the database? - still listed as records? It makes it harder to find the real record runs by Drew, Radek and Rimmer, not to mention more confusing.

Not only that; Uwe still has points for the runs. Were they disqualified, or what? :-/
Kristian: that's not the supposed behavior, it was a glitch when I moved things to doom2.net. Luckily it was an easy fix. Should be OK now.
It's happened again Adam.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by admin »

Fixed.
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Re: 10 Years of DOOM celebration on December 10th

Post by VinceDSS »

I think all Uwe's doom2 movies used demo connection, as Adam says, that's really obvious.
Only way to really know is to contact him :=)

Btw, i dont think Winterfled used connection for his cheated 30nm. Slo mo is enouf I think.
Last edited by VinceDSS on 15.05.2004 23:30, edited 1 time in total.
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