Doom Eternal and Dizi Research

The traditional witching hour has struck once again, and I feel compelled to fill in the void with a little bit of verbiage.

The Monday passed, I took a day of leave. Doesn't matter what the original plan was, but it evolved into a type of R&R for myself so that I don't get completely burnt out. What happened in the end was that I took the opportunity to run a few errands. Some of the errands included sending my bicycle off for servicing (the seat post was sliding a little too often for my taste), and purchasing replacement cup cushions for my over-the-ear headphones.

Those on their own aren't worthy of any major exposition. I just want to share that B-spokes offers damn good service. Very responsive, and very good workmanship. Maybe this is relevant to some of the readers of my blog.

I've also finished reading the Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) book by Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig. A good refresher in many ways, though the contents may be a bit dated at this point. But anything at this stage is better than just sitting there and vegetating away my training as I do work that is nearly orthogonal to what I have been trained in for about 40% of my life.

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In other less depressing news, I found out an interesting dizi fingering combination for the elusive low instrument B-C trill. In more traditional terms, when we are using 筒音作5̣, the 3-4 trill is notoriously non-existent. Most ways of treating it are to just play it as 3-4♯ instead, that is, by raising the left index finger and putting it down (assuming orthodox stance). Much of the dizi repertoire assumes this type of trill, based on the principle that trills are to be counted by alternation along the instrument hole design, as opposed to that of the scale used as in ye olde western music concept.

If we were to play 3-4 trill (or instrument B-C trill) normally, it would involve some complex acrobatics for the left hand, alternating between 6 and 54 (using the usual dizi hole numbering strategy). It's horrific.

The inspiration came when I was looking at the 4-5 trill (instrument C-D trill). It involved an alternation of 5421 and 54321, i.e. merely moving the right index finger. I messed with 542 and 5432, and heard a sound whose pitch was a tad sharper than instrument B. So I lowered it a smidgen by half-covering 1, and voila---I got a working instrument B-C trill just like that. This has the advantage of not having to flatten the instrument C pitch through lipping 5432. Works best for extended trills---if it is of a short enough duration, I suppose that alternating between 542 and 5432 is somewhat workable.

Naturally, I've reworked the tremolo fingering chart to reflect this finding.

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Work-wise, let's just say that things are getting more depressing in a different way. I'm not going to talk much more about it right now---there will be the right time and right place to say more; the time is not now.

I've gotten back to playing Doom Eternal on Eileen-II, in a bid to actually complete the game. I've started to get used to the so-called ``alpha rotation'' mechanism---it involves firing and then immediately switching among the three big single-shot conventional weapons of the Super Shotgun (SSG), the Ballista, and the Rocket Launcher using the mouse wheel.

The original ``alpha rotation'' was a technique for maximised DPS from Doom 2016, and it was done with the Gauss Cannon instead of the Ballista, and often combined with the glitch for ``instant Siege mode''. I first heard/saw it during the speedruns for the original Doom 2016. The key idea here is to use fast weapon switching [via the mousewheel] to interrupt the reloading animation for each of these weapons.

I cannot do the complete rotation now---I'm often just doing SSG↔Ballista. Sometimes I manage to do the SSG→Ballista→SSG→Rocket Launcher→SSG rotation. The main reason why I don't often bring the Rocket Launcher into rotation is that it is still my first play through, and I don't know where the enemy spawns are, and so having a weapon whose AOE can damage myself badly when fired point-blank really isn't that good of an idea.

But the ``alpha rotation'' definitely made the late-game for Doom Eternal that much more manageable. Previously, I would probably just run around with the SSG and maybe throwing in some Chaingun fun to help thin out the horde.

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Anyway, I think that's about it for this entry. I need to take a shower, and then go turn in for the night.

Till the next update then.

Edit: Made a mistake. The weapon that I used in my interpretation of the ``alpha rotation'' is ``Ballista''---the ``Arbalest'' is the mod that is used for charging to fire a single over-powered shot, sort of like siege mode for the Gauss cannon.