doom
Speedrun preview

The standard maps in Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom are designed principally for solo play, with deathmatch modifications added as an afterthought. Early Doom players therefore looked for a way to quantitatively compare their relative prowess in these single-player levels, and speedrunning allows for such direct competition.

Players record their fastest level run-throughs in real time as demos, which keep track of each movement and action taken by a player in completing one or more levels. The demo format then allows the speedrunner to send his run-through to other Doomers, who can view it on their own machines and compare it to others. A player who believes his or her demo to be one of the fastest ever recorded, at least with a particular map(s) and in a particular category, can submit it to a competitive speedrunning site (such as Compet-n) for verification and posting.

Classification of speedrun demos

The following descriptions are abridged from the Compet-n documentation. [1] [2] Compet-n is generally accepted as the most prominent speedrunning competition in the world, and its terminology and rules have become fairly standard within the Doom community.

General demo categories

Ultimate Doom only

Doom II only

Note that none of these categories explicitly requires that the player survive the entire recording. Although exits often take the form of switches, one occasionally finds a Compet-n entry in which the player is killed — but then his body crosses the appropriate linedef and ends the level, so the demo is legal.

In the Doom II "Run" categories, the elapsed time is used to break ties between recordings with the same number of completed levels.

Compet-n usually allows the same recording to be entered in multiple categories. For example, most of the UV speed records on MAP31: Pharaoh have been set using the UV pacifist style.

Killing every monster in the last room of E1M8: Phobos Anomaly is an exception to the above criteria, as it is a tremendously difficult task even with a rocket launcher, and presumed impossible otherwise.

Compet-n rules for recording demos

Compet-n's FTP database includes all previous record-holding demos, as well as legal demos which have been invalidated by subsequent rule changes.

Tool-assisted demos

Tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) permits the player to use special utilities, programs, or gameplay options which are banned from Compet-n submissions. On the DSDA, they coincide, however, they are labeled TAS. Such utilities tend to decrease the overall time required to complete a speedrun; as such, speed records set in tool-assisted demos are normally tracked separately from speedrun world records. The variety of TAS tools includes Slowmotion, and savestates. The most common TAS tool is PrBoom+.

See also the list of notable TAS runs.

Related links