27/03/2003 @23:11:01 ^00:22:17
I had better post something, else what would be the point of having a site at all..? Heh.
Recently I have pursued a policy of going to every single social event I can get myself invited to. This even included going to the union. Yeah, I went to Baby B. There were a few records I liked, even! I was so surprised! So anyway I haven't been arsed to update this thing, or go on IRC, very much. Oh well.
One thing on IRC I did do, was go to the 2002 Golden Cyber Awards. I went to the previous one last year, so I was looking forward to this. The 34s speedrun of Doom II map 24 won a lot of categories, as did the 6-second rocket jump speedrun of Doom II map 7. I guess this wasn't too surprising...
Speaking of Doom I should mention a recent update from Matt, about my playing it round his house... He deliberately doesn't say what happened but I must be honest. Basically I played like absolute shite:( I could make excuses about being unused to his computer, his keyboard (which wouldn't register when I was pressing two keys at once properly) and his mouse (apparently the best part of a decade old, with dirt to match, heh) but you know, I have to hold my hands up and go "yeah I was crap"
For example I was trying to speedrun E1M4 and because of the one-key-only thing I couldn't strafe50 jump to the exit, and it took me like a dozen attempts to strafe40 jump to the ledge to get the yellow key and do it that way. I was profoundly embarrassed, so the day after I tried to do it here, and managed perfectly well, getting a 40 second exit with relative ease. So I tried to record a demo of it. But...I just couldn't finish it. Damn Sod's Law. It's worth saying that the current world record is 12 seconds (click on "UV speed" under "Ultimate Doom records") don't go thinking I'm world-class or whatever...
For some reason I am inspired to explain some terminology!
- Jumping You can't actually jump in Doom, unless you're playing a source port like ZDoom, Legacy, Eternity or whatever. You certainly can't in PRBoom and what it really means is running at a gap if you're going fast enough you'll clear it. So really "jump" means "run really fast over gaps"
- Straferunning (and strafejumping) There is a well-known bug in Doom related to running speed. There is a maximum speed at which you can run forwards and backwards, and a maximum speed at which you can run left or right. But the engine simply adds horizontal and vertical motion together, so by running forwards and "strafing" (sidestepping) left at the same time, you run diagonally with a noticeable speed increase.
- Strafe40, Strafe50 Slight complications ensue because there are in fact two ways to strafe. You can press a key that means "strafe (sidestep) to the left", but you can also press the key for "turn left" and the key for "strafe", which make the game interpret "turn left/right" commands as "strafe left/right". Strafe40 is where you go forwards and strafe left at the same time; strafe50 is where you go forwards and do both types of strafing at once, making you run at an even greater angle from straight ahead and with a slightly higher speed increase.
- Wallrunning For completeness I will mention wallrunning, which is technically a different game bug. When you run into a wall, your movement is changed to "slide" along the wall. The function that implements this contains some optimisations for purely horizontal and vertical walls; but problems with it allow the player to gain alarmingly high speed increases by running along a perfectly north-south or east-west wall.
Last week I was doing random searches on Google Groups and I found DIY's new location. I was quite distraught when I discovered its page had disappeared a couple of months ago, so finding that it had merely moved, and there was a new release after all this time, was fantastic. This is in spite of the fact that in order to install it I have to port all my crappy modifications to it, more work, oh well... It's all good baby:)
I wonder if anyone read all of that. This wasn't meant to be about Doom, it was meant to be about, of all things, my dad's car...
