Andy Johnsen

Smooth as silk. Grinding for a 54-53 seems pure madness. I have no doubt you can get it if you decide to put in the hours given the relative low attempt count to get this. Below the 1 minute mark used to be a magic goal here, imagined but not achieved, and now we have Kinetics and Loopers knocking them well below. Very clever route improvements here, and an excellent run on top. Amazing timestamp. I did not imagine the 49 to fall this quickly, comes to show there's always a faster way with maxkills. Part of what makes them so interesting :)

The correct answer has been given in the thread, this is indeed a JDoom screenshot I took, which was slightly edited in some software of the day. :) The shadow cast by the bars in the back is part of the maps architecture / detailing.

Very cool! I did not expect this to be a solution back in 2001 :)

Four fantastic AV01 runs in a row. This is awesome. Spectacular followups mhrz and Kinetic! The Tyson run was quite unexpected too, good to see the berserk getting some use, it's pretty much useless for maxkill :)

I *might* have it archived on an old drive, indeed. Give me some time to unearth this stuff and I'll have a look for it!

So stating that a tool assisted demo is tool assisted is not warranted? I think there's an interesting discussion surrounding its historical acceptance and how it's viewed today, and another interesting debate on where to draw a line as far as what kind of assists one want to see in comparative record runs. The users who have been utilizing the 180 turn have done so in good faith, and there's enough material in this thread to show why they perhaps should feel ok about that too. Malicious intent has nothing to do with recent cases of the automated turn key. You lost me at "people like you" or else I'd take the time to respond, because there's an interesting discussion to be had as to where one should draw a line and why. I think I'll rather have that conversation with someone less prone to attempt insults. Have a nice day :}

The history of this thing is obviously more complicated than I first assumed, given Widlake greenlit it in his early CN incarnation, I have no problem agreeing to that. Putting words like "filty tool-assisted plague" in my mouth to drive a point home is not a good tactic, and uncalled for. Who are you trying to score points for with this? It's a bad look. I've simply stated the genralized viewpoint I claim was held on it back in the day and maintained a respectful understanding for why it might be viewed different today. The idea that it was "always accepted" is what sparked this topic in the first place, this is a claim that does not measure up to the general attitude towards its use, before it resurfaced in recent times. I stand by the claim that using a tool to assist with automated turns in a run means it's tool-assisted. The question is more if you think such a tool assist should be allowed, I personally do not - but my opinion on that is not more than just another opinion. I can put into historical context how it was generally viewed back in the day, there's nothing missguided about that. How you chose to weigh that claim / tidbit is up to you. The red line was certainly drawn at some point by the admins and player base, but it was not explicitely noted the way it probably should have been, instead of a clear stance, it was simply phased out. It's quite likely the DM camp contributed to this viewpoint more actively than the speedrunning scene, at one point. These were intertwined communites in the late half of the 90ies, and impacted each other both with player bases and shared knowledge / ideas.

Yeah, I really should get some of my archive out there in case of a drive failure, I have hundreds of logs from #Nightmare from 1998 until 2005 or so, lots of outdated, amusing discussions going on in those I bet. I also saved a ton of the old long gone Doom sites that were still online around the 2k mark, that's another portion I really should do something with at some point - not to mention untold quantities of long lost recordings (mostly deathmatch related stuff, but probably some notable sp runs as well). That's another topic for another day, tho :}

I suspect I won't convince anyone and I'm not sure it's super important to sway those in the need of hard proof since the point has been made and agreed upon; Compet-N was its own thing, DSDA is its own thing. How the latter decide to move forward on this should be up to the developers and the majority of active runners. I can just attest to how it used to be viewed, and you won't find proof of the top players from the given period leaning on a tool that was generally shunned. I'll try to do a deep dive into old logs to see if I can find anything specific, but that aside you'll just have to decide to look at the stats and listen to some of the most active players from the 90ies era if you have interest in that time period, or ignore it on lack of factual proof and lean on Widlakes original draft. I don't blame anyone for disregarding it as old confused musings. :} I can just attest to the way it was viewed at the time I was very active, the time period between aproixmently 1997-2004. If the tool had been utilized by a select few during that time the rule set would have been worded differently now, I'm convinced of that - the general opinion of it probably negated the need to put it on paper, since it was such an obvious external meddlign with the player movement. Some have already run the stats and displayed a picture of when it was accepted; really early on and then again popularized by a few modern runners. From the feedback in this thread it's quite obvious several active players have the same fundamental distaste for automated turns that we used to hold, and I'm not surprised by this. Most runners probably don't want to remove skill based precise turns in favor of automated turns. We'll see if this claim holds up better than the lack of factual conversations from back in the day. :} Historical context aside, the road forward is the current generations to decide. My opinion is quite obvious, and I think there's good arguments from a purist point of view still.

Hi Xit! It was definitely not furthered by Adam during his compet-n maintenence, the proof is pretty much in the submission rate for incidents where the 180 flip occurs. This tool would have been used consistently if it was in some way accepted by the speedrunning community. The DM and SP scene overlapped quite a bit during the late 90ies early 2ks, and it was esepecially frowned upon to use any additional tools like this within the deathmatch scene. It's evident they did allow it in Widlaks early days, and Istvan pretty much just picked up where he left it. By the late ninties, this would have fully unacceptable for submissions, despite the old rule sheet.

Yeah this is most obviously not true. There's a substantial upside to using an automated 180 degree turn in certain situations both for speedruns and deathmatches. You don't have to play around with it for long to realize this, even if you're not a hardcore speedrunner. Hi Ryback! Glad to see you're still around :} I agree with this sentiment.

Hegyi retired from the scene many years ago, and have been very unwilling to engage in anything related to the game since. He don't owe us his time in any sense, so that's fine... :}

This is interesting and good historical information, excellent post. "S" aka the Judge is probably Simon Widlake, the founder of Compet-N who ran the place the initial years, not Istvan. Istvan took over the reigns from Simons original run with it, and from the Donner Lv15-041 run it is obvious Simons view on what was a cheat was very simplistic and uninformed compared to the standard set by Hegyi later on. For all practical purposes, this was not an accepted tool you could use for speedruns during Adams Compet-N days, as stated before, I can only claim this from being active through the Compet-N years from early 1997 until 2004 and intensely involved in discussions with all the most active players on a daily basis, both within the Deathmatch community and the Compet-N environment - who all converged on IRCnet #nightmare. Adam was also the first admin with a technical insight of enough value to concistenly check lmp inputs and disqualify runs that didn't meet the criteria. Although less surprised by the early days of moderation I'm very surprise to see Istvan use the utility, and this would no doubt have caused a spectacle back in the day if it had been common knowledge later on, and the runs removed from the record tables. These went unnoticed, and Istvan was not up front about using it in his runs either. His moderation came in the gap between Widlake and Hegyi though, and granted Widlakes take on what constituted "cheating" I suppose it's understandable. As for the Sedlo PA23-055.lmp the explanation for not catching what was up is quite simple, the turn happen as the game start and cloaked by this very fact - possibly written off as quick start trickery at the time. It is very interesting that this is the only demo where he used the tool to preform a move that would have sparked a debacle it it had been detected. You don't see him using it in any obvious spots in any run, and for a good reason. Sedlo never utilized the 180 turn in any recorded deathmatch that I've seen either - and you can count those in the hundreds - which should be telling of the real feeling he had about using it. There would be exceptional good use for it in his fav. DM map (Doom2 Map01). So the one time he used it, he felt the need to hide the use of it. In all practical sense, Compet-N submissions were handled very strict when it came to checking for anything beyond what was doable in the game without any modifications when Hegyi took over, and this is the most impactful and most important period of moderation for what set the standards. The lack of demos using it should be telling enough. One interesting exception from the purist stance was the use / acceptance of novert (we didn't have the option of turning it on/off ingame - that's another interesting discussion to have, and one I feel way less strongly about than automated turns, since you still have to perform your own movement). What the above post prove to me though, is that we were wrong in the 90ies assuming "spinning utilities" ment hardware; it is obvious this was what came to be accepted real early on as the explanation for the old Widlake rule set when the early days leniency eventually phased out. The gap following the early days until the modern days for the tools utilization should tell this story regardless of what I claim here though :}

How I view things is not automatically a statement saying how you should view things, its okay if you think the run is legitimate enough despite the use of the 180 key. It's still a tool assist, but you might feel indifferent about that, you might think it's of minor impact, you might think it should be allowed and embraced; fair enough. The original question that was floating around was "did they allow this back in the day" - and the answer to that is still no, despite a rule set that seems to indicate so and understandably causes confusion. As for disabling a tool assist turn from being activated on recording, from a/(my) purist point of view yes, I think it would be a good idea to do so, but there's stuff to consider when it comes to this as well. Maybe there should be a comp level allowing for it specifically. It should be needless to say - these are opinions and good counter arguments are interesting.

I hear you, and I understand why the claim can be made in retrospect that this was allowed back in the day too, unfortunately you just have to rely on counter claims from players who were active at the time, which might not be enough to convince you, which is fair enough. Most likely we won't find a specific case where there's an open discussion about a submitted demo using the 180 key turn. I might be able to find something if I go through tons of old logs, but I wouldn't bet on it. As a sidenote, there was no great divide from the most active players when it came to sr50 use to improve on old runs, I know the topic was discussed but there was absolutely no grand controversy around it, except when automated sr50 appeared. There were no tacit gentlemans agreement in place for the automated 180 degree key flips, either, to my knowledge. At least I never heard about it :} The difference between utilizing sr50 as far as the game allowed compared to adding a tool in order to do automated flips is quite distinct.