Game:

Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994)

Duration: 10:52

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2

Information in the text files submitted alongside demos may contain errors, missing information, links that are now dead, or contact info that is no longer valid. In particular many .txt files refer to doomedsda.us, a demo archive that no longer exists. Generally everything is left as-is with the goal to accurately represent the material as it appears in the archive, however in the case of this upload the full text file is too large for the video description and has been edited during the upload process to fit. Links to the PWAD & Demo on dsdarchive.com are found at the bottom of the description.

This demo has a dedicated Doomworld thread: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/128702-doom-2-in-under-10-minutes-tas/

This demo appears on tasvideos.org: https://tasvideos.org/7458S

Demo created (YYYY/MM/DD): 2022-04-18
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** .Txt File**
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THIS IS A TOOL-ASSISTED SPEEDRUN.
IWAD: Doom 2
Maps: D2All
Category: UV-Speed
Exe: XDRE 2.22a
Time: 9:42
Authors: almostmatt1

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.

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. :-)
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** Viddump & Upload Details **
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IWAD: Doom 2
Source Port: DSDA-Doom 0.26.2
Smooth Demo Playback: On
Smooth Demo Playback Factor: 2
Change Palette On Pain: Off
Use Extended HUD: Yes
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** Links **
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Demo File Link: https://dsdarchive.com/files/demos/doom2/61716/30uvx942.zip

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