Aw man... I never did a TAS, so I was pretty excited to participate in this competition and do a TAS for once, but looks like I didn't made it in time. =(
I was pretty happy that I found some neat tricks, too... I got 5:25.563. Oh well.
Here's the .bk2 - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17051260/streemerz-v02.tasproj.bk2
I believe the quickest path would be getting Teleport! right on the first floor, and manipulate luck to always warp directly to the I AM ERROR room. That room has a trap door that'll get you to the next level, completely skipping the boss battle. It occasionally have items too, so it could be possible to get full Damage and Tears just on those trips to the I AM ERROR room. Teleport! can be used until Womb 1, after that you should get a Bible and an Emperor tarot card to warp directly to Mom's Heart/It Lives. I don't know if Bibles appears on I AM ERROR rooms though...
We Need to Go Deeper is also an option, but it requires 6 room completions to be recharged, and Teleport! requires only 2 room completions. Battery could be useful to make a run with We Need to Go Deeper faster, but I doubt that would be faster than using Teleport!...
I think Transcendence and X-Ray Glasses could also be great itens for speedruns. The prior can be used to quickly move over rocks and holes, and considering the layout of some rooms that would be very helpful. The latter can let you enter Secret Rooms at your will, and that makes possible some very neat detours.
By the way, Distant Admiration causes a LOT of damage if used correctly. During a TAS it should be easy to stay in position where Distant Admiration inflicts damage all the time. The same for Mr. Mega bombs (heck, bombs in general).
Unfortunatelly there's a major drawback that prevents us from TASing The Binding of Isaac right now: it's a Flash game. =( Well, as far as I know we still couldn't get them to work with Hourglass...
I dunno, beating the game with a single character wouldn't be very interesting. I'd like to see a 999 score with 4 characters on Endless Mode. That would be really sweet :D
I couldn't get it to work on Hourglass at my laptop (it's Win 7 x64 though, so who knows). I think it has something to do with the DLLs he's using...
Ugh... it's visually awful. They could at least use some colors, eh? That file system thing is really annoying too.
But the music is entertaining enough and the TAS itself was quite fun to watch, so I'm voting yes.
Technically you can use "File > Resume Recording from Now" (and "File > Watch From Beginning") to create a TAS with re-records but without ever loading any savestates. But that would get tedious really fast...
That wouldn't be tedious if you could mark a frame (with a keybind) to replay and rerecord back to at maximum speed, at which point, the execution is paused and you may continue watching (and rerecording) any further input from the previous input and take control at any time (also with a keybind). This is how Worms Armageddon TASing is done without state-saving, and it's definitely not tedious considering how fast unthrottled playback and redubbing is.
I second this. Or at least an option to automatically pause when a specific frame is reached, would be awesome.
Thanks for testing that. But, if I read that right, you haven't found any combination of codecs so far that allow the game to work with audio on your system (and you aren't disabling multithreading either)? In that case, it's possible that even though the game runs, the sync is different due to the game or engine knowing that it failed to start playing the mp3. But it also might not desync... it might be a good idea to do some inter-system movie sync tests here.
It's also a little weird that audio wouldn't work if you disable only that one audio decoder, because there are tons of other fallback audio decoders it can use for mp3. But looking at your first log file, that does make it seem like the problem DLL was "CyberLink\PowerDVD9\AudioFilter\Claud.ax". I'll see if I can test how that one behaves on my system.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn't get audio to work (even if the game just uses WAV). I am playing with multithreading disabled on r57 (it doesn't work at all on r71).
I haven't yet (because it's my day off from work) but I'll make a test later to see if it desyncs when running on my Windows XP machine at the office. If it doesn't desync, at least I'll be able to produce the movies in my computer at home and play it/encode somewhere else. :)
I've verified on my computer, it's using ffdshow x64 to play mp3. (Windows 7 x64 here).
I wonder if the problem (in your case) is simply that it's an x64 DLL. Only 32-bit modules are expected to work. (Although, I didn't think it was even possible for a 64-bit DLL to get loaded into a 32-bit process.) Maybe something like installedcodec could be used to force a different codec to be used for MP3s.
I guess that's not the issue in Seppel's case, though, since it's highly unlikely that he's running x64 on Windows XP.
It would be helpful if someone (or everyone) would provide their hourglasslog.txt of the problem. If I can't reproduce the problem myself, those log files are the next best thing, and the logs people have posted about other issues so far have already been incredibly useful for fixing bugs. (You can use pastebin or mediafire or whatever and post a link to the log file, or PM it to me if you want. Just don't paste the whole text directly into a post or PM.)
Some awesome discoveries here. I got a Game Maker game that uses MP3 to run on my computer (again, Windows 7 x64).
I've used installedcodec to do that. I tried disabling all x64 drivers (Options > x64 mode > Select all and click Disable) but that DIDN'T work.
Then I unclicked the "x64 mode" and disabled all x86 drivers. I tested the game and it worked. I started reenabling drivers until I found what was the problematic driver. Now comes the interesting part...
A lot of enabling/disabling codecs later I've found the culprit codec. Well, more or less. It seems that "CyberLink Audio Decoder (PDVD9)" when enabled with other (unknown) codecs will make the game freeze. One of those codecs is "Nero Splitter", but there are others (I just couldn't find them among the 211 codec list :P).
So yeah. To put it simply: "CyberLink Audio Decoder (PDVD9)" is nasty. It works after I disabled it using installedcodec. Sadly, it still doesn't have any audio. But hey, the game is playable now :D
Here's the hourglasslog.txt with all codecs disabled, except for "CyberLink Audio Decoder (PDVD9)" and "Nero Splitter" (the game didn't work)
http://pastebin.com/APiaKh5Y
And here's the hourglasslog.txt with all codecs enabled, except for "CyberLink Audio Decoder (PDVD9)" (the game works!)
http://pastebin.com/RzPvJ16x
And finally, here's the hourglasslog.txt with all codecs disabled, except for "CyberLink Audio Decoder (PDVD9)" (also works!)
http://pastebin.com/3eTRfeUe
Ah well. That was tiring. :P
tl;dr Problem fixed by disabling a stupid CyberLink codec.
Hey there, people! I'm new around here :P
I've found Hourglass recently and got interested on TASing. I've never tried making a TAS before, but I've got a liking for TAS videos for some time now. As I make games for PC, with the release of Hourglass, I also got interested on making TAS for my own games.
So I've tried making a TAS of a game of mine, just to get the hang of it. But turns out the game isn't really that interesting for TASing (btw sorry about the lack of audio, I made it on Windows 7 and audio wasn't working there)
Well, as you guys are much more experienced than I am, I'd appreciate some tips, specially about what would make a game interesting for TAS videos. I've read the articles on the site that advice against repetitive and fixed-length games, but that's just about the entertainment factor of the videos. What about the TASing itself? Is there anything that could make a game more fun for TASing?
Cheers!
I've been trying to open Game Maker games with Hourglass too, and now I think I've found why some games are compatible while others aren't (on Windows 7 and maybe Vista, at least).
Games like Hero Core doesn't use the Game Maker internal audio system, and instead relies on external audio systems such as FMOD to play sounds. I've tested Hero Core here (Windows 7 x64) and it's working, but without audio.
My own game "Fate of Mankind" (http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/158486-fate-of-mankind) uses the Game Maker internal audio system, but doesn't have any sounds until you get a certain power up. If you get the power up when playing with Hourglass, the game freezes. The same with Iji - it starts but freezes when the music should start playing.
IIRC Game Maker calls Windows functions to play unsupported formats (such as MP3). I'm not sure if it does the same for WAV. I dunno if this info helps nitsuja, but might be a clue... I'll try fiddling with Game Maker to see if I can find other stuff that might make a game incompatible with Houglass.
Hope this info is useful :)
Edit: Interesting. I made a quick test with Game Maker 8.1. It ran fine when using WAV and MID (but no sounds were played), but froze with a white screen when using MP3. Tests ran on Windows 7 x64, with Hourglass r57, multithreading disabled.
Hi! I've tried using Flapp (http://charcoalstyles.com/Flapp/) to convert Flash games to Windows stand-alone .exe, but I couldn't get it to work on Hourglass, probably because I'm using Windows 7 x64. Maybe someone with Windows XP installed could test that and see if it works?
Edit: Hmmm actually, it seems that Flapp only embeds the swf on the "stand alone" window, so I guess it's unlikely it'll work even on Windows XP...
