THIS IS A TOOL-ASSISTED SPEEDRUN. IWAD: Doom 2 Maps: D2All, 1-30 (no secret levels) Skill: Ultra-Violence Category: UV-Speed Exe: XDRE 2.20, XDRE 2.22a (custom build) Time: 9:42 Date: 05/02/2021 - 19/04/2022 (dd/mm/yyyy) Authors: almostmatt1 YouTube: https://youtu.be/MzuJCMV4sK8 This is an entirely built tool-assisted speedrun, each input for each frame was manually entered in XDRE. Most of this TAS was built by myself, with Zero-Master performing the void glide at the end of map 08. Many thanks to him for his help! My oldest Doom memory is being a very young kid and being scared enough of the first enemy in E1M1 that I couldn't leave the first room. My next earliest Doom memory was finding RamboBones 14:02 TAS over a decade ago, and it absolutely blowing my mind. I had no idea what a TAS was, but even after learning that it wasn't really a person playing I still thought that it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. I'd have never guessed then, still not really yet having any interest in playing the game, that I'd end up making this! The 30nm TAS in 12:44 by Zero-Master is faster by 1:18, but RamboBones' 14:02 30uv was the fastest completed D2All UV-Speed TAS for 16 years. Because of the significance of Doom 2 D2Alls the pressure to 'do the demo justice' (and who knows if I ended up doing that) stopped me starting this for quite a while, but I wish I had sooner, and I wish I had taken less breaks. The time between starting and finishing was 14 months and even though I spent a lot of that time not working on it, often to work on other TASes, all up I still easily spent hundreds of hours making this. Some of the tricks were quite hard and time consuming, but I tried squeezing out every little thing I could - there are hundreds of wallruns, .000000 tricks, thingruns and little bits and pieces of optimisation, and that stuff takes a very long time. At times I got a bit obsessed with this run. Very often in my spare time, for what felt like the thousandth time I would watch the demos by RamboBones, Zero-Master or some uploaded WIP by myself just in case there was something I missed, or to find out of there was one of the hundreds of turns I could transpose differently to look better. I'd catch myself thinking of random bits of level geometry and different movement options to navigate them. I often built sections of levels, or whole or even multiple levels, to compare slight changes to save a few frames. A few times I remember waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning, thinking about something related to the run, and getting up to check the demo out in XDRE because I couldn't stop thinking about it. And now that it's done, I'll probably still keep wondering how much better it could have been done! But I feel mostly released from this at last. There were a few demos that were very helpful to study and compare my times to as I went, namely the 12:44 Nightmare demo by Zero-Master, the map 1-22 NoMo in 8:04 by Looper, the Ep1 (maps 1-10) in 2:46 by 38_ViTa_38, and the map 1-20 in 8:13 by Xepop. Even aside from competing against it here, Vitas demo was one of my biggest inspirations and motivations to get better as I got into TASing and was pretty intimidating to go up against. My 1-10 time is 19 seconds faster and while that's entirely due to new tricks I'm pretty happy to have not lost any seconds against him anywhere. I'd heard the idea of sub-10 minutes being thrown around a little, but to me it wasn't an obviously realistic goal. Looking at Zero-Masters TAS, even though with a bit of faster movement and a couple of new tricks some significant time save was certainly possible, saving 2:45 seemed to be quite the tall order. 12 maps in I was over a minute ahead and knowing there were some big tricks later, I started to hope. After about map 23, I put some numbers together and knew that I had it. I can't quite explain the feeling of seeing the ending screen time for the first time. New skips and tricks will eventually be found for this game, I have no doubt. If anyone wants to make a new TAS including new strats but doesn't want to go through the hassle of building a whole D2All, anyone is welcome to use as much of this demo as they like. I just ask that you credit my work and that you notify me if you can - who knows, maybe another 16 years will pass before someone makes another one of these and I'll have moved on to other things. :-) This is too many comparisons but I was curious about a lot of demos and perhaps you are too. I'm here comparing: - The previous best UV-Speed TAS, 14:02 by RamboBones. - The much more recent 12:44 NM-Speed TAS by Zero-Master. Different difficulty setting, but still historically significant especially as there are so many routing changes compared to the 14:02. - The human record as of writing this, 17:29 by Looper. TASes and human speedruns are very different things, this is just for a fun comparison! - The 10:04 turbo tas by 4shockblast. His TAS takes advantage of the maximum movement values allowed by the game engine (up to 127, from the normal 50) allowing for faster movement and some different tricks. - The unfinished map 1-20 TAS in 8:13 by Xepop. He supposedly got up to map 29, but this was the furthest publicly available demo I could find. - The 2:46 Episode 1 TAS by 38_ViTa_38. The format here is 'individual map time, total time (individual map improvement, total improvement)'. Note that only 4shockblast & RamboBones went through map 31 & only RamboBones went through map 32. Even though this TAS is at the time of writing this the only fully completed demo to show some of these tricks done, there does often exist several individual level TAS demos showing them off, mostly made by Zero-Master. Despite at times quite significant time saved compared to the other demos listed here, my map times are sometimes equal to (or only modestly improve) many other good IL TASes. But it's already too dense here, so I'll leave them out. ### Map This TAS 14:02 UV-Speed - RamboBones 12:44 NM-Speed - Zero-Master 17:29 UV-Speed - Looper 10:04 Turbo - 4shockblast Map 1-20 UV-Speed - Xepop Map 1-10 UV-Speed - 38_ViTa_38 ### 1 00:04, 00:04 00:05, 00:05 (00:01, 00:01) 00:04, 00:04 (00:00, 00:00) 00:05, 00:05 (00:01, 00:01) 00:03, 00:03 (+00:01, +00:01) 00:04, 00:04 (00:00, 00:00) 00:04, 00:04 (00:00, 00:00) 2 00:12, 00:16 00:24, 00:29 (00:12, 00:13) 00:17, 00:21 (00:05, 00:05) 00:29, 00:34 (00:17, 00:18) 00:11, 00:14 (+00:01, +00:02) 00:13, 00:17 (00:01, 00:01) 00:12, 00:16 (00:00, 00:00) 3 00:15, 00:31 00:17, 00:46 (00:02, 00:15) 00:17, 00:38 (00:02, 00:07) 00:30, 01:04 (00:15, 00:33) 00:13, 00:27 (+00:02, +00:04) 00:15, 00:32 (00:00, 00:01) 00:15, 00:31 (00:00, 00:00) 4 00:16, 00:47 00:18, 01:04 (00:02, 00:17) 00:21, 00:59 (00:05, 00:12) 00:25, 01:29 (00:09, 00:42) 00:13, 00:40 (+00:03, +00:07) 00:17, 00:49 (00:01, 00:02) 00:16, 00:47 (00:00, 00:00) 5 00:18, 01:05 00:19, 01:23 (00:01, 00:18) 00:20, 01:19 (00:02, 00:14) 00:27, 01:56 (00:09, 00:51) 00:16, 00:56 (+00:02, +00:09) 00:18, 01:07 (00:00, 00:02) 00:18, 01:05 (00:00, 00:00) 6 00:35, 01:40 00:43, 02:06 (00:08, 00:26) 00:46, 02:05 (00:11, 00:25) 00:52, 02:48 (00:17, 01:08) 00:35, 01:31 (00:00, +00:09) 00:41, 01:48 (00:06, 00:08) 00:35, 01:40 (00:00, 00:00) 7 00:02, 01:42 00:05, 02:11 (00:03, 00:29) 00:02, 02:07 (00:00, 00:25) 00:12, 03:00 (00:10, 01:18) 00:03, 01:34 (00:01, +00:08) 00:04, 01:52 (00:02, 00:10) 00:04, 01:44 (00:02, 00:02) 8 00:08, 01:50 00:17, 02:28 (00:09, 00:38) 00:14, 02:21 (00:06, 00:31)* 00:24, 03:24 (00:16, 01:34) 00:09, 01:43 (00:01, +00:07) 00:12, 02:04 (00:04, 00:14) 00:12, 01:56 (00:04, 00:06) 9 00:30, 02:20 00:32, 03:00 (00:02, 00:40) 00:34, 02:55 (00:04, 00:35) 00:53, 04:17 (00:23, 01:57) 00:27, 02:10 (+00:03, +00:10) 00:31, 02:35 (00:01, 00:15) 00:30, 02:26 (00:00, 00:06) 10 00:07, 02:27 00:22, 03:22 (00:15, 00:55) 00:24, 03:19 (00:17, 00:52) 00:31, 04:48 (00:24, 02:21) 00:15, 02:25 (00:08, +00:02) 00:21, 02:56 (00:14, 00:29) 00:20, 02:46 (00:13, 00:19) 11 00:23, 02:50 00:25, 03:47 (00:02, 00:57) 00:29, 03:48 (00:06, 00:58) 00:32, 05:20 (00:09, 02:30) 00:22, 02:47 (+00:01, +00:03) 00:24, 03:20 (00:01, 00:30) 12 00:31, 03:21 00:35, 04:22 (00:04, 01:01) 00:36, 04:24 (00:05, 01:03) 00:47, 06:07 (00:16, 02:46) 00:25, 03:12 (+00:06, +00:09) 00:32, 03:52 (00:01, 00:31) 13 00:47, 04:08 00:52, 05:14 (00:05, 01:06) 00:56, 05:20 (00:09, 01:12) 01:01, 07:08 (00:14, 03:00) 00:41, 03:53 (+00:06, +00:15) 00:48, 04:40 (00:01, 00:32) 14 00:06, 04:14 00:07, 05:21 (00:01, 01:07) 00:08, 05:28 (00:02, 01:14) 00:19, 07:27 (00:13, 03:13) 00:04, 03:57 (+00:02, +00:17) 00:06, 04:46 (00:00, 00:32) 15 00:35, 04:49 00:25, 05:46 (+00:10, 00:57) 00:42, 06:10 (00:07, 01:21) 00:53, 08:20 (00:18, 03:31) 00:18, 04:15 (+00:17, +00:34) 00:48, 05:34 (00:13, 00:45) 31 Skipped, 04:49 00:30, 06:16 (00:30, 01:27) 00:22, 04:37 (00:22, +00:12) 32 Skipped, 04:49 00:11, 06:27 (00:11, 01:38) 16 00:09, 04:58 00:10, 06:37 (00:01, 01:39) 00:10, 06:20 (00:01, 01:22) 00:13, 08:33 (00:04, 03:35) 00:07, 04:44 (+00:02, +00:14) 00:09, 05:43 (00:00, 00:45) 17 00:41, 05:39 01:19, 07:56 (00:38, 02:17) 00:47, 07:07 (00:06, 01:28) 01:05, 09:38 (00:24, 03:59) 01:01, 05:45 (00:20, 00:06) 01:13, 06:56 (00:32, 01:17) 18 00:06, 05:45 00:20, 08:16 (00:14, 02:31) 00:20, 07:27 (00:14, 01:42) 00:24, 10:02 (00:18, 04:17) 00:14, 05:59 (00:08, 00:14) 00:19, 07:15 (00:13, 01:30) 19 00:25, 06:10 00:30, 08:46 (00:05, 02:36) 00:29, 02:56 (00:04, 01:46) 00:40, 10:42 (00:15, 04:32) 00:18, 06:17 (+00:07, 00:07) 00:28, 07:43 (00:03, 01:33) 20 00:29, 06:39 00:32, 09:18 (00:03, 02:39) 00:32, 08:28 (00:03, 01:49) 00:35, 11:17 (00:06, 04:38) 00:25, 06:42 (+00:04, 00:03) 00:30, 08:13 (00:01, 01:34) 21 00:03, 06:42 00:13, 09:31 (00:10, 02:49) 00:04, 08:32 (00:01, 01:50) 00:11, 11:28 (00:08, 04:46) 00:07, 06:49 (00:04, 00:07) 22 00:11, 06:53 00:12, 09:43 (00:01, 02:50) 00:14, 08:46 (00:03, 01:53) 00:23, 11:51 (00:12, 04:58) 00:09, 06:58 (+00:02, 00:05) 23 00:17, 07:10 00:30, 10:13 (00:13, 03:03) 00:23, 09:09 (00:06, 01:59) 00:41, 12:32 (00:24, 05:22) 00:20, 07:18 (00:03, 00:08) 24 00:23, 07:33 00:25, 10:38 (00:02, 03:05) 00:30, 09:39 (00:07, 02:06) 00:36, 13:08 (00:13, 05:35) 00:16, 07:34 (+00:07, 00:01) 25 00:34, 08:07 00:37, 11:15 (00:03, 03:08) 00:40, 10:19 (00:06, 02:12) 00:41, 13:49 (00:07, 05:42) 00:29, 08:03 (+00:05, +00:04) 26 00:25, 08:33 00:28, 11:43 (00:03, 03:11) 00:36, 10:55 (00:11, 02:23) 00:37, 14:26 (00:12, 05:54) 00:17, 08:20 (+00:08, +00:12) 27 00:11, 08:45 00:11, 11:54 (00:00, 03:11) 00:14, 11:09 (00:03, 02:26) 00:22, 14:48 (00:11, 06:05) 00:08, 08:28 (+00:03, +00:15) 28 00:06, 08:51 00:31, 12:25 (00:25, 03:36) 00:12, 11:21 (00:06, 02:32) 00:41, 15:29 (00:35, 06:40) 00:21, 08:49 (00:15, 00:00) 29 00:32, 09:21 01:08, 13:33 (00:36, 04:12) 01:04, 12:25 (00:32, 03:04) 01:30, 16:59 (00:58, 07:38) 00:51, 09:40 (00:19, 00:19) 30 00:21, 09:42 00:29, 14:02 (00:08, 04:20) 00:19, 12:44 (+00:02, 03:02) 00:30, 17:29 (00:09, 07:47) 00:24, 10:04 (00:03, 00:22) *Since creating his 12:44 TAS, Zero-Master has produced an updated version with a 10 second map 08 (and no alterations to other maps), utilizing the new void glide there and successuly avoiding a desync, ultimately bringing his D2All time to 12:40. He posted this demo in Discord but not to YouTube or Doomworld. I made the decision to make the comparison to his 12:44 because that demo has been seen far more due to his significant YouTube presence. For map 08 though, comparing my time to his updated 12:40 TAS: 00:10, 02:17 (00:02, 00:29) Individual map comments: Map 01: At first after the door boost I did an ugly little run around the imp and got a 4.63. I backed up to lure the imp away a little and had a better path through (plus a brief imp thingrun) and got a 4.54. I've since made a 4.51 TAS, but there's no way to implement that without a desync. Map 02: The first area took a bit more work than I expected to kill the shotgunner in two shots (1/9 chance) and have the zombieman stay out of my way. The instant glide certainly looks impressive, but really it's fairly technically straightforward. The blue key area really, REALLY sucked to make. I made it through fairly quickly the first time but had only 30%ish health - wether or not I could have made the map03 RJ or not it was pretty ugly and I decided to go back and do better. Bad monster movement then screwed me over for about 4 days before I was able to get any exit of any kind. 8 frames slower than Vitas map02, but still a 12 and an exit with 100% health. Map03: Most of the time spent on this map was trying different shots on different frames in different directions at different things to get good enough luck to get unstuck from the teleporter faster. I ended up getting a good result and getting tele unstuck on the frame after teleporting. After a frustrating map 02, it was actually relaxing to do all the otherwise fairly monotonous rng testing. Map04: Luckily this didn't end up being the hitscan-shredding headache I was worried it might have been. I don't think there's much that's particularly noteworthy. I'll briefly mention that something weird happened here. This map has one less tic of intermission screen than what I aim for, which I didn't notice until building map 10 or so. This was a just small note but when I corrected it, a desync occurred - but not until almost a map and a half later when a Revenant tried attacking me on map 06. Despite all player movement, monster behaviour and rng being the same until this point, because the total tic number went from an even number to an odd one the Revenant rocket changed from being tracing to non-tracing, changing rng, causing a desync. Quite a strange quirk of the game! Thanks to Daerik for determining the cause of the problem. Honk. Map05: I likely shot more than was necessary at the start here, but it worked in the end. Having the imp kill the shotgunner I ran against was timed nicely. I was almost looking forward to it being a bit of work to dodge projectiles on the raising bride at the end, but it ended up being pretty breezy. I finish one tic later than I could, because... Map06: ... because the revenant sees me and chases me at the start of the map if I finish map 05 as soon as I can hit the exit switch, but if I wait an extra tic at the end of map 05, it doesn't notice me. It took me a little while to work out what was going on. It also took a bit more time than I'd like to work out the weird elevator trick at the start (not sure who discovered it, but thanks!). Basically: regularly you approach the elevator from the east and cross a linedef that lowers the elevator. You can skip this linedef, perform a glide between the bars north of the elevator, and then trigger the elevator from this side, which makes the elevator move faster (8 units/tic instead of 4 descending and ascending). Triggering the regular eastern linedef would take the elevator 381 tics (a bit under 11 seconds) from beginning to descend to reaching the top; performing the trick takes the elevator 243 (a bit under 7 seconds), saving roughly 4 seconds. I also thought it was necessary to rocket back to the eastern platform, since that was what happened in both Loopers and Vitas demo. Turns out you can just run (glide) through the south bars, which saves a bit of time. It doesn't mean the elevator moves any faster of course, but it does mean you can trigger the elevator a little earlier, saving time. Map 07: This was an exciting point in building for me, because up until this point I was matching the times of Vita, but because this trick wasn't known when he built his demo I had the opportunity to actually make an improvement, seemingly impossible until this point. That meant that after building this map, this TAS became the fastest-paced Doom 2 TAS I know of. Perhaps a somewhat arbitrary accomplishment, but I was thrilled about it. Since 2 seconds is clearly the limit, I did what I could within that time and grabbed the backpack, the Plasma Rifle (really, it's more beneficial for the additional 40 cells for the BFG later on, but I didn't end up needing it) and an additional rocket. I considered bumping into the rocket launcher for an extra couple of rockets but it seemed pretty unlikely to still be under 3 seconds so I didn't try it. Map 08: This map was the single most frustrating part of building the whole demo. Zero-Master mentioned in Discord that a glide here was possible and I spent a few months on-and-off trying to make it work, being quite unwilling to move on and give up the several seconds of time save. Eventually I set up 6 simultaneous brute force instances (each checking a slightly different set of inputs - brute force is a single-threaded process and so the closest you can get to multi-threading is to just do it more times at once) and left them to work for 15 consecutive uninterrupted days, after which it found... nothing. I cancelled the brute forces, decided to lie to myself and pretend it must just have been impossible after all, and moved on, managing to get 11 seconds with the normal route. I separately did a co-op tas to achieve a void glide in the same area but otherwise moved on. I got up to the map 10 trick, got frustrated at that, got frustrated because I knew I'd made a mistake moving past map 8 without the void glide, and left the demo alone for a couple of months. Out of the blue, a few months later Zero-Master posted a demo with the trick succeeding. He was kind enough to also do the trick with my demo, taking him all of about 10 minutes. With the inclusion of this trick I managed 8.97, saving a further three seconds over the 11 I had without the trick. It meant needing to rebuild the next couple of maps, but three seconds in a demo like this is enormous. Massive thanks to Zero-Master for his contribution here! Map 09: There's a slightly different way to do the first bit where you need to avoid/thingrun against the pillars and shoot a rocket, but it requires a more aggresive rocket boost and I was mindful of saving health for the map 11 rocket boost. I figured if I lost too much time I could always just give myself another rocket boost later in the map to save some time anyway. The hell knight by the blue switch was pretty annoying, I still didn't manipulate him particularly well here, but I tried this section quite a few times and this is the best I managed. Lost some time to Vitas demo in one spot, gained some time back in another, and the map ended up being 2 frames slower. Map 10: I tested wallrunning along the north and south wall at the beginning, the south wall is here about 8 frames or so faster since you can do a .000000 trick and accumulate south momentum during the wallrun itself. Everything up to the void glide is quite straightforward, but I spent a fair bit of time working on tuning up the turns near the start, because optimising smoothly turning is the most difficult and annoying thing in Doom tasing. Yes, I sincerely mean that. It can subtly and surprisingly lose or gain you quite a few frames a lot of the time. Anyway, much more interesting is the void glide. Zero-Master found this and apparently struggled quite a bit manipulating a revenant into the right spot, while getting himself into a very, *very* specific spot, to make it work. I tried doing the same for a while and just about tore my hair out, and then realized that using a lost soul would be a lot faster, thankfully it also ended up being a lot easier. My initial goal was to save a second on ZM's 11 second IL TAS but my first exit was an 8, saving much more time than I expected, and I figured that the PE could be manipulated to fire a lost soul faster so I went back and got a 7. This is my favourite trick in the TAS. Map 11: I really wanted 23 seconds, which is what Looper got in his NoMo demo. My first attempt got a mid 24, not looking very promising. A few maps later I went back and realised that I did some stupid stuff on the elevators. I ran off of the first one a little bit late in order to cross the linedef to lower it sooner, and this came at the cost of pressing the switch to lower the second elevator later, which is the wrong way to prioritise these events. But then on the second elevator, I DIDN'T run off of it late to trigger the linedef as soon as possible, which in that instance should have been the priority. I rebuilt all that, ate a small rocket sandwich for a little extra speed, and got 23. Since I'd already done map 12 at this point, I knew how much health I could afford to lose while still not dying on the map 12 RJ at the start, which was handy. I spent quite a while brute forcing the diagonal wallrun over and over at the start, and ended up with a fortunately too productive result that gave me way too much momentum accumulation, so I had to deliberately slow down so that my angle towards the wallrun against the door was okay. Wallruns being too fast is a good problem to have. Map 12: Once again I wanted to match Loopers NoMo time of 31 instead of Xepops time of 32, and since the majority of the map is basically No Monsters it was fairly straightforward to do. I expected the Cacodemons in the last room to be quite troublesome but they didn't end up being much of a problem. I did have a problem with linedef stuff though, I think that sectors affected by this linedef type move at different times according to the RNG number, at least they were affected when I did things to adjust the RNG number before crossing it. Map 13: If you're a TAS nerd check out frame 8137, I accidentally got what is probably the cleanest .000000 trick ever at the start of the map, I was just trying to get a decent wallrun position and that just happened. I tested two minor route changes to get back to the first tele again: running out of the building after getting the blue key, and running straight to the tele in the blue key building. From my testing the latter was about .4 seconds faster. I wouldn't have thought to do this if I hadn't seen Zero-Master do it in his Nightmare TAS, since both Loopers NoMo demo and Xepops UV-Speed demo did what appears to be the slower strategy. I regret firing a rocket at the wall when approaching the yellow key room, it was an unecessary waste of a rocket. It didn't get me a 46, and I would have gotten a 47 without it. If trying to break the barrier and get a 46, Im sure there would be far more beneficial places to boost that would have had a better effect. Map 14: Pretty simple, I don't like that I got scratched twice by the imp but it's fine. Map 15: This was exciting to start because with the zero press I knew I was going to do a bit better than Zero-Master, a fair bit better than Xepop and MUCH better than RamboBones' maps 15+31+32, which I ended up saving over half a minute against! Apparently RamboBones had a "the run isn't legit unless all levels are beaten" attitude. There are some very old comments on Doomworld confirming this: (talking about a different demo of his) "I did map 32 because it's part of the game, hence I say I did all 32 levels ;)", and (talking about 30uv1437) "How can it be a full doom2 run if you skip a level?" ... "I still think it's cheating to skip a level, even an 'unecessary' secret one". Not sure what the common opinion was like on this all that time ago, but oh well, more time to save for me. :) After getting the yellow key I also tested doing the .000000 trick on the south wall while exiting the building, and that ended up being 3 frames slower. What would have been even faster than this is going to the left of the baron, since that would have put me in a better spot when running back after getting the key. Probably only lost like 1-2 frames though. Weirdly, I'd never TASed with a BFG before doing this map so even though I know how it works it felt pretty strange, despite firing it a grand total of one time in this map. I'm happy to have grabbed the megasphere too! You need to wait around before you can run over certain linedefs in the final area and I managed to get to the linedef on the exact earliest frame possible, so I'm happy it didn't cost me time to have grabbed it. Enemies in the last area were quite a lot less painful than I expected them to be. The last door is made of three linedefs that open it, and it turns out that activating all of them makes the door open faster. Activating one section of door opens it at 2 units/frame, two sections opens it at 4 units/frame, and all three sections opens it at a much quicker 6 units/frame. I was quite happy to have discovered this, and then when I shared it, it turns out people actually good at Doom already knew about it. :) Map 16: Looper got 8 NoMo and enemies don't really get in the way in UV-Speed, but he did so by relying on a lot of rocket boosting and I didn't have the rockets to spare. 9 is fine, matches Xepops UV-Speed time. Honestly, didn't put much effort into this because I knew it wouldn't take particularly good movement or a lot of effort to get 9 and I knew that was the limit. Map 17: Zero-Masters TAS uses the switch trick here, but none of the other TASes I'm comparing to above did, so this was another gigantic time save compared to Xepops, Loopers and most importantly Rambobones' demos. I didn't want to use the BFG on the spectres at the start, Xepop managed to just run right through, but after bashing my head against this section for a couple of hours I decided to just use it. Dunno why I was against it really, it's probably the fastest method and ammo is not a problem. Pretty happy with most of this map except for the chaingunners at the end. It's quicker to get through them with a better gun like an SSG, but I wanted to exit the map with a chaingun, because starting map 18 with a chaingun means I can shoot the door a few frames faster. After I knew I could get a 41 second exit with an ssg, I decided to take the slower 41 second map 17 as these extra handful of frames on the next map might have been the ones that made the difference. Aside from being a bit slower than it could have been, the frantic turning just means it's far uglier than I'd like it to be. Map 18: Topflex got 6 seconds on this map, after looking at that demo 5 does not seem doable so 6 was the goal. It was surprisingly annoying to get the zombieman in the right place... I spent about 8 hours adjusting positions and doing various brute forces with no success, but then after brute forcing to find the result AFTER the two tics that get manipulated, brute force found it in under 2 seconds. Quite a cool trick! Saves about 13 seconds. Map 19: Starts with a switch press through the wall that Zero-Master uses in his Nightmare TAS, but I'm not sure if he's the one that discovered it (seems likely, though). Actually a fairly straightforward map, but I did have a bit of an annoying time trying to get the monsters to open the door for me on the way back through the level. I wasn't really sure what time to go for here. Xepop got 28 and Looper got 27 with No Monsters. No monsters means no monster obstruction, but also means no monsters opening the door for you later. Also, neither of these demos included the switch press at the start. I got to the first door two seconds before Xepop, and at that point figured that 25 shouldn't be too big an ask. Map 20: I ended up fully building this map twice. The first time, I got a 30.11 and because it was fairly low I wasn't happy with it and rebuilt it to save time. The problem is, for a huge part of the level there's not much you can do to actually save that time. Between when you trigger the linedef to lower the wall and when you actually run through that gap, nothing you do really accelerates the pace, because you need to wait for the wall to lower anyway. It seems obvious that a rocket boost could save the required time, but also problematically, I wanted to save as much health exiting the level as possible for health-depleting tricks in later levels, so I could only really do a rocket boost at the beginning. I think doing it where I did, at the very beginning while falling, was the most efficient way to do this. Annoying, I had to do the first third of the map a couple of times because I wanted to get as much of a boost as possible while also having health to get tele unstuck by shooting the caco and to give myself a slight boost towards the wall in the next room. Something I'm particularly happy with is the very brief diagonal wallrunning while running through the lava outside. 80 units moved in 1 frame, and 249 units moved in 4 frames! This is by far the best diagonal wallrun I've ever gotten. Map 21: Pretty straightforward. Optimise a few glides, get the clip. Cool level :) Map 22: The red key jump took the longest to do. I killed the imps as quickly as I could and initially the corpse of one was an obstruction for many more frames than I'd have liked, but I ended up using this to some advantage here. Since I could use it to get me stuck, I had some time to accumulate momentum with a .000000 trick, and it allowed me to get a fairly low-damage rocket boost across the gap (I wasn't able to manage it rocketless). This meant I had much more health than I otherwise would have, and the biggest advantage of this was that I would no longer need to get the berserk or green armour while in the void in the next map, because it'd have only given me 2 more health an armour, which is negligible. Addditionally this means I get to keep my blue armour instead of having green, which means the rocket jump on map 24 is suddenly very viable without having any concerns about extra health. I did plan to do a bit of routing to see where the most efficient way of picking up extra health would be in order to do the map 24 RJ, but this ended up being unecessary because of what happened here on map 22. Had that imp not blocked me this map would have easily been a second faster, and even though the low decimal is pretty annoying, the thing with the imp here saves a lot of time later. Map 23: Man, this void glide. Zero-Master showed it off first in his Nightmare TAS by using a rocket boost. It turns out it's possible, and faster and saves health, to just shoot a barrel into a correct position and use that to get the void glide. As stated for the previous map, I did not need to get health and armour like ZM did. The real madness is getting back OUT of the void, and it took me a damn long time to work out how to do it. I picked up on how to do it by watching Zero-Master TAS demos where he managed it. Basically: get yourself in the right spot, and give yourself enough speed, and you can get a diagonal wallrun effect on a wall WITHIN the map, while you are OUTSIDE of it, and this gives you enough speed to get you back in bounds. Absolutely 0% chance I'd have ever thought of that myself. Map 24: As mentioned already, because of good health I'm able to do the rocket jump here that the 14:02 UV-Speed does but the 12:44 NM-Speed does not. This saves about 5 seconds. This map took a while. I initially had a very low 24 and honestly I nearly let it stay there, but after being really quite annoyed (and I still am) by the low map 22 decimal I rebuilt it a couple of times, finding a frame here and there. I wanted to get 23 seconds while also getting the two medikits on the first ledge section, but skipping them ended up being what pushed my time under 24. I tried the trick where a lost soul triggers the linedef near the red key to do the blue room faster, but I was unable to manage this quicker than just doing the blue room normally. It seems to be one of the few tricks that are much simpler in Nightmare. Map 25: I run on and off of a ledge at the very start, because regaining contact with the ground after falling increases speed, so doing this is faster than just running forward. I do a .000000 trick while falling down the hole, due to annoying map geometry I can't do a better momentum preservation trick to avoid the momentum cap. I had this map built up until the end jump, and then realised I did something dumb and lost 7 frames early on so I built the map again. Good thing I did, because making 34 seconds was very close, almost didn't make it! I luckily got a very fast AVJ. Map 26: A major timesave compared to Zero-Masters 12:44 is here, not because I have a new strategy or anything but because ZM went out of his way here to get the blue armour to facilitate the void tricks in map 28. I'm able to do the trick just from the health and armour gathered at the end of map 27, which is much faster but makes health problems a lot more annoying. I spent a couple of days opening this demo at the start, looking at what I needed to do with Chaingunners, and just closing xdre because it looked really frustrating, and it was. I ended up getting caught on one for 5 frames, but everything else I tried either ended up with me overall losing time by taking bad lines to get around them, or avoiding them but getting killed. And I can't kill them, because I needed a quick BFG shot for the tracers to take out the imps in the next section. In guess losing 1/7 of a second isn't the end of the world but it's the type of thing that I hate accepting on a run like this. Map 27: If I didn't need to get the armour here, 10 might have been possible, but it was the most efficient way to route health and armour for map 28. 11 is still okay, I think. I did try getting 10 while also getting the armour but I didn't manage it. Map 28: I do a rocket-boosted void glide here like Zero-Master does in his Nightmare TAS, but in a slightly different position that requires only one rocket instead of three, albeit a much more aggressive one. I do have enough health for both clips and it ended up not being as close as I thought it'd be, but this had me a bit nervous while I approached this level because I was really betting on being able to make it into the void with one rocket, and did not route my health for more than that. This trick is a huge time save and skips most of the map. I managed this by myself, but thanks yet again to Zero-Master for investigating the trick for me and sending over a few helpful demos. Map 29: This map is normally the longest in the run. Both the 14:02 UV-Speed and 12:44 NM-Speed TASes take over a minute here, but there is a trick that saves an huge amount of time. There is a massive gap that can be crossed, but it requires a decent rocket boost off of a well-placed enemy, followed by a mid-air wallrun along enemies in order to make the distance. It turns out it's very, very hard. For a while I tried using the imp to blast myself off of, but trying to keep it in a good spot while not having the enemies infight while also having them move into the right spot just wasn't happening for me, so I decided to try just using the cacos, pain elementals and lost souls. It worked WAY quicker than I thought it might.. this took me about 6 hours but I expected to be stuck here for at least a few days. Honestly despite its difficulty this is the worst part of the run, I don't even know how much faster it could be but there's no way that it's optimal, it could very likely be improved by a few seconds, but even though it was only 6 hours I'm in no hurry to put myself through this shit again :) I killed everything else first because I wanted to minimise risk of infighting with the enemies I needed to get in the right place, and I didn't want the heartbreak of being sniped by a chaingunner right after managing the jump! I've done tricks that require more precision than this (map 10 void glide comes to mind) but that in combination with manipulating enemies into the right position was just awful. However, it was the final piece of the puzzle to make sub-10 possible. I don't think it's possible without this trick, at least with the current routes and tricks known for the rest of the game. Map 30: Manipulate the Icon Of Sin to spawn a pain elemental, have it fire lost souls at you, and fire rockets towards the lost souls. The rockets must be close enough that autoaim comes into effect and so raises the rocket trajectory enough to access Romero, but far enough that you don't, obviously, actually hit the lost soul. The final thing you need to do: tear up a little when you see the IOS exploding after over a year of work. It's mandatory. Demo is invalid otherwise. That's how my demo is valid. :) Unfortunately I lose some time here compared to Zero-Masters demo. The pain elemental doesn't fire lost souls at the player in UV as fast as it does in NM. Many thanks to: - Alps for the ongoing feedback, discussion and support, and for being the one to encourage me to do this run in the first place. - Looper, 38_ViTa_38 and Xepop for their previous completed & WIP demos, which were an incredibly useful resource without which my demo would have been much worse. - Biggest thanks to Zero-Master, responsible for finding many of the tricks seen here, performing the void glide trick in map 08, being one of the more driving forces of lowering the human record alongside eLim and Looper, and getting me interested in running Doom in the first place. Sub-10 would not have been possible without his time and effort spent making the discoveries that he has. - Also Opeth, countless hours of which I had on repeat while building. Thanks, Opeth. You're pretty cool, Opeth. No part of this tas really involved me having to do any significant routing, planning or trick discovery. I tested a lot of small differences while building, but all I needed to do was follow the route that other people have been chipping away at for 25 years. I'm just the guy that slapped this demo together, but the effort to work all this stuff out has been done by countless people over a very long time. Thanks to everyone for keeping this game alive!