50,000+ Times Going Knee Deep in the Dead Just To Get Out 1 Sec. Faster

April 8, 2019 8:47 PM

Karl Jobst gives analysis and commentary on Doom speeedruner 4shockblast's 23 Feb 2019 world record "8 Second"* run of Doom's first map, "E1M1: Hangar", which broke the previous Ultra-Violence Speed Category two-decade-old record of "9 Seconds"* set by Thomas "Panter" Pilger on 28 September 1998.

* Disclaimer: Doom's speedrunning community uses the in-game end of map completion time for single map speedruns, which rounds down to the next whole second. Panter's 1998 run was actually 9.91 seconds, and shock's run is 8.97.

posted by radwolf76 (31 comments total)

Even if it's a stupid fucking game this is a colossal achievement requiring so much hard work and skill. IDDQD.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:49 PM on April 8, 2019 [6 favorites]

I speedran Proust's In Search of Lost Time in five seconds in 1998 by glancing at the first page of the first book and then the last page of the seventh. An exhilarating read, I fully recommend it to anybody who really wants to commit to something.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:01 PM on April 8, 2019 [13 favorites]

Recommend watching the 8 second video as it is only 8 seconds.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:15 PM on April 8, 2019 [14 favorites]

I speedran Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Er, well, Swann, Swann, there's this house, there's this house, and er, it's in the morning, it's in the morning - no, it's the evening, in the evening and er, there's a garden and er, this bloke comes in - bloke comes in - what's his name - what's his name, er just said it - big bloke - Swann, Swann
posted by Chrysostom at 9:26 PM on April 8, 2019 [6 favorites]

I've gotten obsessed with watching speedruns recently so this is Welcome Content
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 10:02 PM on April 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm afraid even to contemplate the obsessiveness required lest I get caught up in it.
posted by praemunire at 11:49 PM on April 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

The players who did this obviously developed impressive elite skills, but it sounds like in the end what finally broke the record was monsters randomly stepping out of the way and randomly shooting the player at just the right angle to give them a damage boost in the right direction.

So they worked hard to develop this perfect path, technique, and timing, but then just had to repeat it over and over until the luck of monster RNG pushed them over the edge to 8 seconds. That seems kinda unsatisfying?

Also, the video says the Doom replay files are simply a recording of player inputs. If that's true, then how is it that the random stuff will happen the same way when you watch the replay?

The answer is that Doom's method of faking randomness (all computer randomness is faked somehow unless the computer is hooked up to a Geiger counter or some other hardware that can sample real-world randomness) is done by using the player's inputs as a seed to generate pseudorandom numbers, so recording the inputs allows the game to reproduce the pseudorandomness as well.
posted by straight at 1:51 AM on April 9, 2019 [4 favorites]

It's a lot more basic than that: DOOM/m_random.c
posted by kersplunk at 2:36 AM on April 9, 2019 [16 favorites]

I'm afraid even to contemplate the obsessiveness required lest I get caught up in it.

This video and this level of obsession makes me think of Devil Daggers, which ironically is a game entirely focused on the antithesis, which is lasting as long as possible.
posted by Fizz at 3:14 AM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

I guess this is as good a place as any to ask...

What's the appeal of speedrunning?

I mean, on the one hand, I get it – because it's there. I do enjoy when people stretch game systems to see how the game behaves under extreme or unusual conditions, or find unintended ways to play a game, and so on.

But I don't get the min/maxing spirit of speedruns (or perfect runs, and tool-assisted stuff, and so on).

Maybe it's because I optimize digital systems all day long in my day job (web development), and I don't really want my entertainment to be about optimizing digital systems? I dunno.

Not knocking the post; it's just something I've always wondered about, so I figured I'd ask. To each their own, of course.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:35 AM on April 9, 2019

What's the appeal of speedrunning?

You ever thumb thru the Guiness Book of Records? We're a weird group of monkeys.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:41 AM on April 9, 2019 [11 favorites]

[ over-caffeinated brass section ] ... the human drama of athletic competition.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:03 AM on April 9, 2019

...and the agony of defeat.
posted by notyou at 5:28 AM on April 9, 2019

What's the appeal of speedrunning?

You ever thumb thru the Guiness Book of Records? We're a weird group of monkeys.

I don't have this itch the way some people do, but I do completely understand it. There are only a handful of games where I've truly felt this rush of energy, this desire, this need.

Speedrunners are chasing this kind of thrill, where you just need to be inside of the game at all times, to push yourself to be better, because the voice in your head is always telling you that you could be doing more because there's always something else that you could be doing or improving upon.

I fully recognize that this may not always be a healthy obsession, but it's one that many people are addicted to. The game just clicks in your head. There's this desire to always push the line, to go past it. I'm struggling to describe this feeling. Something like that though.
posted by Fizz at 5:46 AM on April 9, 2019

I love speedrunning, including the fact that the odds of someone showing up in any thread about it in near-disbelief that anyone finds it appealing at all approach 100%.
posted by Earthtopus at 6:06 AM on April 9, 2019 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I dig the variety. I mean sure there's speedruns where it's 100% unrecognizable as the game anyone else plays which I find technically interesting but boring as sin as an outsider, but speedruns where someone just uses the game world perfectly, every hit counts, every buff matters, and they finish the game in the same sort of timeframe it took me to get out of the training area? That's fun.

hbomberguy has a 45-ish minute video that explains it pretty well, and kind of explained the appeal of the world breaking style of speedrunning, too.
posted by Kyol at 6:14 AM on April 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I was going to suggest that video by hbomberguy -- I think it's a good look into why people like this stuff. But, realize that it's also going to be a bit personal for each individual.

For me, I tend towards speedruns for games I know really well. Without that context, it's hard to really appreciate what's so impressive about a given run. I also am fine with glitches to a point, but it can cross a threshold where it stops being an interesting speedrun and becomes at best an interesting trick. For example, someone figured out how to inject arbitrary code into Super Mario World by abusing controller input and used it to jump right to the victory screen, and that's funny (and even weirder when used to code new games like Flappy Bird inside SMW) but it's not a satisfying speedrun.

I also am not a huge fan of runs where it's basically, "execute this perfectly thousands of times and just hope to get the right RNG" -- which is admittedly what this FPP is. I'm not saying it's bad or shouldn't be done, I just don't personally find it super exciting. Whoever has the record at any given moment is really whoever was willing to dump the most time into rolling dice, which I find unsatisfying. Weirdly, if they figured out how to manipulate the RNG (which has happened for some games!) it would become more interesting to me (because that manipulation itself would be a skill differentiator).

At the end of the day, though, I think it's mostly just neat to see people who are really good at a thing you are less good at, and appreciate the skill that went into them pulling off something effortlessly that you couldn't have done with 100 tries.
posted by tocts at 7:14 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

hbomberguy has a 45-ish minute video

cenzor has a 3:02 minute video
posted by otherchaz at 7:31 AM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

What's the appeal of speedrunning?

People need hobbies. Some people have kids, some people do this.
posted by MillMan at 7:43 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

I also am not a huge fan of runs where it's basically, "execute this perfectly thousands of times and just hope to get the right RNG" -- which is admittedly what this FPP is.

As I linked to upthread, Doom doesn't really have a RNG in the understood sense - it just has a hardcoded list of the numbers 0-255 shuffled around, and when it needs a 'random' number it just fetches the next one off the list. So you can argue that outside the player's actions the game is completely deterministic.

A more recent game will probably use a standard PRNG like the Mersenne Twister. I have no idea how they'd seed it.
posted by kersplunk at 7:51 AM on April 9, 2019

wait, why are they backing away from the doors each time, wouldn't it be faster to keep pressing against them so you get through faster?
posted by mittens at 7:59 AM on April 9, 2019

They explain that in the longer video, it's better to be in motion.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:04 AM on April 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

I Am Not A Doom Speedrunner, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that making contact with walls/objects kills the momentum built up by bunny-hopping diagonally. (In a lot of older game engines you can move faster via diagonal inputs than you can by moving straight forward or back. Some modern engines also preserve this but only while you're airborne, so the tech is often known as "airstrafing".)
posted by tobascodagama at 8:07 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

So he's shooting his gun at nothing in particular to change up the RNG or something? I watched the Karl Jobst video, and he doesn't get super deep into the random element, and I think relying so heavily on a random element is something speed runners usually don't like.
posted by RobotHero at 8:17 AM on April 9, 2019

Speaking of airstrafing, it's a key movement tech in Titanfall 2, which has a tutorial level (called "The Gauntlet") that was actually built with the express purpose of being a speedrun challenge for players.

At the end of the Gauntlet, your time appears (under "J. Cooper", the player character) in a list of times for in-universe characters, many of whom appear as NPCs during the campaign... plus G. Sager, a reference to a Titanfall YouTuber who achieved the fastest Gauntlet run during the pre-release tech test. Gamesager's time during the Tech Test was a speedy 25.5s, which he cut down to ~20 as soon as the full game was released.

Recently, a speedrunner known as Cash Mayo set a new record on the Gauntlet: 12s flat. Respawn immortalised him in their new game, Apex Legends, by releasing a new speed demon character called Octane whose backstory involves a Gauntlet run where he blows off his own legs while using the "fragboost" (literally what it sounds like, you detonate a frag grenade at your feet) technique to match Cash Mayo's 12s time, as seen on this piece of concept art. Octane's character intro video also includes a link to Cash Mayo's run. :)
posted by tobascodagama at 8:21 AM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Backing from doors: acceleration is not instantaneous, and momentum is killed by walls, so they back up so that they can go through at full speed.

Strafing/diagonal walking: game tracks top speed separately for forward and sideways, so running diagonally is faster than the game's intended max speed.
posted by explosion at 8:38 AM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

So he's shooting his gun at nothing in particular to change up the RNG or something?

Shooting at nothing is done to "wake up" the enemies, which can be useful even in casual play. In Doom, enemies begin in an idle state where they just stand still doing nothing. They only start to move around and shuffle towards the player if the player is visible in a 180-degree cone in front of them, or if they "hear" the player perform an attack within earshot. (The precise definition of earshot is complicated and has to do with how the map is built, but that's the gist.) The sooner the monsters wake up, the better the chance that they'll have moved out of the optimal path. Firing a weapon does manipulate the RNG, since damage values are randomized, but this run doesn't seem to do any deliberate RNG manipulation. RNG manipulation is considered TAS-only in Doom speedrunning because there are so many things that can advance the RNG. (TAS: tool-assisted speedrunning, or manually crafting a sequence of inputs that perform a speedrun with perfect timing impossible for fallible humans.)
posted by skymt at 8:52 AM on April 9, 2019 [4 favorites]

Ah, I thought at first it was to provoke a reaction, because that definitely is a Doom thing, but then they talked so much about their movement being random that I lost track. But you don't get the random movement until they are moving, that makes sense.
posted by RobotHero at 9:46 AM on April 9, 2019

Speedrunners are chasing this kind of thrill, where you just need to be inside of the game at all times, to push yourself to be better, because the voice in your head is always telling you that you could be doing more because there's always something else that you could be doing or improving upon.

I fully recognize that this may not always be a healthy obsession, but it's one that many people are addicted to. The game just clicks in your head.

This is not limited to video games, either.
posted by praemunire at 10:06 AM on April 9, 2019

I've been following the Mario romhacks lately, where people build and play levels that require, comment on, extend and subvert the speedrun skills with new, astoundingly difficult levels (even entire games). Check out, for instance, Grand Poo Bear playing Grand Poo World 2 or Invictus.

GPB plays the first level of Grand Poo World 2 for the 1st time

A few weeks later, he's mastered it and runs an all exits, good ending world record
posted by wotsac at 12:48 PM on April 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

> What's the appeal of speedrunning?

The appeal to me is the riddle, it's like those physical puzzles that appear to set an impossible task. The rope isn't long enough to reach, the hole is clearly too small, but if you twist all the elements to some unexpected function, suddenly the ball is free! Except it's four hundred of them entangled with each other.
posted by lucidium at 2:20 PM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]