DOOM CAPTCHA
doom-captcha.vercel.app
doom-captcha.vercel.app
1. press the back arrow to move back
2. press spacebar every second
and that's it, 30 or so seconds later the captcha is solved :-)
By default it was the arrow keys for movement and <> for turning with CTRL as fire. But you could re-map the keys and after a few years quite a lot of people did.
Also use something like IDCLEV15 and you can go to other stages.
What does this mean? I was able to "solve the captcha" using IDDQD.
i would probably choose to use doom captcha even if it takes 5 times longer. it is proven that at least people will interact with this if they wouldnt with traditional ones
jk robots can do this now
Anyone can think of something humans do and just playing DOOM in a browser falls well short of anything new.
All the hard stuff is missing. It's half an idea.
Nah, it's all the idea but half (or less) the implementation.
Still counts as a PoC by many definitions. I've been handed less complete proofs to continue ("we fleshed this out in Excel in the client meeting, said we could have it done for real by Tuesday, can we?").
The concept here is the UX of what it would be like if it were properly hooked up.
Just like what you would do with any captcha proposal. You’d want to mock up the UX to evaluate whether it something people can do.
Though here’s it’s just for fun.
…hang on, this is starting to feel like Elliptic Curve cryptography: it’s trivial to prove a demo file is a “solution” to a random-seeded Doom map, but nontrivial to work-backwards to generate a demo-recording.
The heart of Bitcoin is just "Find me a number between 0xf80000 and 0xff0000 whose SHA-1 hash starts with eight zeroes..."
Plus, left and right arrows rotate the characters since it's keyboard only, but in modern FPS you are used to having them laterally move you and you rotate with the mouse, so your reflexes are off.
But very platform dependant, so maybe OP is on a browser or OS that doesn't let you do that.
I know it works on Chrome for me, but not on FF.
The pistol is crazy accurate in these games so you can pick enemies of from afar with a few shots each, and in this case they are firing shotguns which are very ineffective at long range (the game stimulates them as having unrealistically wide pellet spread, so even if a far-off enemy gets a pin-point shot you will only take minimal damage).
I remember playing over the collage NetWare LAN and winning people who had better but less accurate weapons (usually the shotgun, or the double in later versions, as we found that the most cathartic) simply by keeping my distance. Works until someone gets close from behind, at which point if you respawn somewhere convenient you can find the bugger PDQ, and pick him off with the pistol for revenge. Even works against the rocket launcher, just make sure you don't get hit directly (d'oh) or hang around where it is easy for splash damage from misses to ruin your plans.
It is a valid method for many DOOM-style games (as they were called in my day) and their offspring. Works well in HL2 where you can spam the trigger button as fast as you like and the basic pistol will fire at that rate without a limit (other weapons have a minimum shot latency).
Then you're incentivized to find a defensible spot and keep mashing the "chirp" button so you get a steady stream of enemies.
You could remove the chirp button -- but then you're left sprinting out juust far enough that the enemy detects you, then run back somewhere defensible. Not very satisfying.
Or you can make it so enemies stream towards the player continuously, regardless of how close they are, without any trigger -- which is sort of equivalent to having the chirp button get mashed automatically. Again, find somewhere defensible and mash the attack key.
None of these approaches feel very satisfying. There must be some clever approach to this issue which doesn't run into any of these problems. A simple set of rules which leads to a large variety of combat challenges instead of a degenerate winning strategy.
The situation here is one of level design and player load-out – this Doom level is not intended to be encountered with only a pistol, so the only way to make progress is a way most wouldn't find fun. Though this sort of situation can be interesting if it occurs naturally though, such as a player not managing their ammo correctly for what is coming up, because here it is part of the challenge or getting yourself out of a pickle of your own mix. It can also be good if it is plot relevant. And running at the combine pistol equipped was often fun. It isn't always a situation that needs to be “solved”.
If this implementation supported the now-standard WASD (which was absolutely used by some high-level Doom players back in the day) AND if it allowed me to fire using the left mouse button (again, like the original game), then it would have been relatively easy to prove that I'm a human. :)
or alt?
https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Configuration_file#Keyboard
[1]: For a childish reason - being considered not a "true" way of playing. Although maybe that had some rational roots too, because back in the day mices weren't particularly good - bulky with heavy balls and imprecise with lint-hungry rollers and simple low-resolution sensors.
In Doom and Wolfentein 3D, it was more of a weird mouse look and move thing that wasn't very usable.
Nah... No mouselook really makes this much harder. Took me over 10 attempts to pass, and I'm Diamond at Overwatch.
E1M5, E1M7 are also good levels to skip to on Ultra Violence and start blasting, Using respawn on Ultra Violence also makes it interesting for E1M5 and E1M7.
2. It feels like "-fast" has been used.
3. The task is much, much more difficult because you can't strafe.
Very cute though :-)
But I always redefined A and D as strafe-left and strafe-right.
I literally did not know the keyboard shortcut to strafe, because I have probably literally never used it.
You can strafe with the old-school chording of Alt.
The sound was fucked up for me, high pitched, no idea why (fits the ridiculousness of this experience though, so NBD).
Damn I completely forgot it was a thing even, wow. And yet it was for like 7 years of my gaming experience
I was ready to good-naturedly complain that it didn’t work on mobile, but the onscreen controls worked just fine, and I didn’t have any trouble killing 3 guys right away.
I guess I have been playing a fair amount of classic doom lately though so
Awesome captcha though :)
Apple has proposed a solution to captcha[1] which I can't wait to be standardized and widely used.
No thank you. Do not want.
PS: I stopped reading the apple support article after reading that sentence.
On a more meta level it is tragic that we wont be able to use our computer online without being signed in to an online and be verified.
Fully agreed! Again, for most people this is the way of life. They type in Google in search bar to go to google Google and then search...
> If the site being visited get info about whom that specific user
My understanding is that you only get to know user is legit without knowing anything about them.
> An Apple server validates your device and Apple Account.
> This verification is sent to a third-party token issuance server, which has been verified by Apple. The token issuance server generates a private access token that verifies you to the app or website.
This is definitely not better for privacy and gives apple even more control. I would rather 3 extra seconds for captchas.
I seem to fail 4 out of 5 captchas at this point.
The original from a few years back:
It's been so long since I've played doom but without strafing.. it's almost impossible!
Here's a link to the chat: https://v0.dev/chat/4X85A52Dzde?b=b_tOXbbZzZPgT&f=0
I meant "a lot of us already know"
"with" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. I skimmed the log and so far as I can tell, the only thing that the AI assistant did was design the UI. It didn't implement the actual game. This might sound impressive, but aside from adding minor bits of interaction (eg. a button that shows "loading" for a few seconds), there's little difference functionality-wise from a drag-and-drop UI designer like winforms (and its predecessor, visual basic, which existed in the 90s).
Here's the repo with the rest of the source: https://github.com/rauchg/doom-captcha
They also had to modify Doom to skip the menus, add the necessary callbacks, and a few other tweaks.
On one hand, it’s a clever and fun way to show off what we can do with the web these days. The way it is presented hits just right... the demo is dead center of the page, with debug tools and more info within reach. I particularly enjoyed reading the "how it's made" page to understand how it was put together. I like how all of this extra stuff was not front and center when the page loads. Even the design language of the CAPTCHA box itself felt just right.
On the other hand, it's a satire of what we have done to the web. The bad guys (like the monsters in the game) have won. I'm a flesh and blood human, but here I am having to click on fuzzy pictures of random objects before I can do the task I actually wanted to accomplish. Behind the scenes, my human insight gets licensed and used for whatever purpose (nefarious or not). Just like the DOOM demo here, it's hard and cumbersome, but for whatever reason we all accept it as the way it has to be. We all shake our heads and say "what a shame, what a shame."
Because most if not all of us have lost all hope that eventually our governments will be either willing or able to do something about the bad actors on the 'net.
It's horrible. 99% of people will give up.
You can argue that’s bad for accessibility and you are correct but let me use this opportunity to talk about that hostile “put things into orbit” thing big I noticed Microsoft and X using. Recently I’ve installed windows 11 on a laptop and had to create an MS account for testing purposes. During the captcha phase the OS was installing drivers in the background so the resolution changed to 4k during the challenge but the UI didn’t scaled. With no way to reconfigure the display I had to strain my eyes to finish it and I suffer from miopia and astigmatism.
Mobile needs a better interface and landscape mode.
At 20 or so it would be a useful admin login challenge.
To make it less hackable it could perhaps submit which monsters were killed and/or the time between kills or some other pattern. If the set roughly matches the previous attempts it could make for quite the challenge to brute force.
The "hackers" are already complaining that the challenge is to much for them :p I think you are onto something.
Ofc all of this is going to be necessary IF it actually cannot be trivially circumvented... How does the FE prove to the backend that you actually killed the monsters?
Doom is fully deterministic so you could record the players inputs and replay them on the server to verify that the kills actually happened. Some games actually do that to make cheating their online leaderboards more difficult, because it's a lot more work to fake a record-setting replay than it is to just submit a fake score, and even if you do fake a working replay it might not stand up to human review.
2) Exclusive, won't work well for many of those who need accessibility
Suggestions:
- Make the player immortal by default. Also all weapons by default.
- Add strafing, if possible.
- Make the player go to the level exit to finish the captcha (maybe a custom short map?)
- A simpler version for mobile could be the original 3x3 captcha square with enemies attacking you. Tapping on enemy squares would kill them.
Also using cheats, kills with the rocket launcher aren't registered on the app.
If you're not logged in and are using a shared IP (CG-NAT in my case), you get all sorts of fun behaviors. It loves to fail correct responses -- sometimes multiple consecutive ones. Occasionally, it will deliberately slow down new image fade-in to a snail's pace to test reaction time. Spot those stairs too fast? You must be a bot.
Taping shows the instructions for keyboard use.
=(
Pretty difficult…
which is a free as in freedom replacement for DOOM I/II and deathmatch iWADs (totally compatible with community PWADS).
But I love it!
FF on iOS.
I cant figure out how to take the right turn without killing at least one shotgun guy.
I remember some crap from hell with hcaptcha
Module.onEnemyKilled();Module.onEnemyKilled();Module.onEnemyKilled()