Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
The time also comes from not researching an extreme amount before playing a game. If you spend time you would otherwise be researching on playing, you'd play a lot more games and generally know a lot more about games.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I'm running Vista64. I got Hard Hat 3 to run in Hourglass on my system with these non-default options enabled: "Allow Fullscreen", Message Sync Mode "Unchecked", "Allow loading any custom/installed DLLs", "Allow loading uxtheme.dll". The last one might not be necessary, but the other 3 are definitely necessary for me.
The message sync mode being unchecked may make input movies not sync, but Nitsuja might be able to do something about that now that it runs at least. I'm pretty sure the necessity of leaving message sync unchecked is because of the loading bar.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Ooh! The StickMan one is a full run. :o There's one part that seems suboptimal (though admittedly I'm no expert on the game), but the rest is totally awesome. Wouldn't this mark the first full "submittable" run made with Hourglass?
Hmm. I was only able to get Hourglass to run StickMan (and subsequently play the movie) after enabling "Allow loading any custom/installed DLLs". That info should be in the movie file. If safety/security is your goal, just use a warning like "Warning: This input file specifies 'Allow loading any custom/installed DLLs'. Play at your own risk."
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Yes. This is what debugging is for. I know some people with extensive reversing experience who would be able to figure out how it worked, given a replay in which it occurred. I may not be among those people, but I know it's possible.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I think since we're not the Elasto Mania community, we can safely ignore the "rules" imposed upon unassisted speed runners. The point of TASvideos is to beat the game as fast as possible, abusing glitches where possible. Skipping apples sounds like an awesome trick I'd love to see in the TAS! The same should be said about the powerful ejection glitch. Both of these glitches would be awesome to see abused to perfection.
I don't know the standard rules about game versions to use. Someone else should chime in here.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
nitsuja wrote:
Lex wrote:
Also, there's an issue with the "Stop Running" button not closing the process completely. With Geoffrey The Fly, at least, every time I ran it, I ended up with another instance of "Geoffrey The Fly.exe" running even after pressing the "Stop Running" button. The "stopped" processes seemed to be frozen.
I guess you're using Windows 7? I'm not able to test that OS at the moment and it probably wouldn't be hard to fix this if I could, but it seems like they disabled the ability to force-stop other processes in that OS (i.e. TerminateProcess doesn't work even if the application calling it has permission to use it on the target application). "Stop Running" should work anyway under normal circumstances because it actually asks the game process to kill itself first, but if you hit Stop before the first frame or after the last frame the game renders then it won't get that request either. Note that if you close the Hourglass program, that's guaranteed to always cleanup any game processes it started (even if you force-terminate Hourglass it won't leave anything extra running).
I'm using Windows Vista 64. Yes, I cleaned up the processes by reopening Hourglass a few times, but doing that resets the Hourglass configuration which is an inconvenience. The settings should really be stored per-game in the .wtf files, shouldn't they? As it is now, "Disable DirectSound Creation" resets every time the program is restarted.
Also, I know I'm able to kill processes in this OS. Process Explorer can do it.
Also, even if I click "Stop Running" in the middle of the game while it's rendering frames, it freezes the process and doesn't unload it.
For the record, Nitsuja, you are an amazing pioneer respected and loved by all. Keep exploring please! :D
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Wow, what a ridiculous game. I didn't know Moses' mother had to run like a maniac past pikemen, huge spiders, and seagulls with Moses on her head.
At least this game isn't ridiculously slow. Think of how terrible it would be at Castlevania awkward-looking-stomp-walk speed or MSX-style less-than-10-fps speed.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I experienced the same bug in Elasto Mania as abyrvalg (welcome!), actually.
nitsuja wrote:
What other options did you set besides the framerate (such as sound or multithreading options)?
Lex wrote:
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.) and the "Disable DirectSound Creation" setting is enabled.
That was the only non-default setting I ended up using.
Also, there's an issue with the "Stop Running" button not closing the process completely. With Geoffrey The Fly, at least, every time I ran it, I ended up with another instance of "Geoffrey The Fly.exe" running even after pressing the "Stop Running" button. The "stopped" processes seemed to be frozen.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
nitsuja wrote:
Lex wrote:
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.)
Note that it's best to round up if it's not exactly a whole number. 50 would be reasonable here. I've seen a few games with weird framerates like 37.6 or 47.3 but as far as I can tell that is the correct speed for those games to be running at.
I tried 50 fps, and it desyncs. I actually tried 50 before trying 47. Playback synchronizes when recorded and played back at 47 fps, but doesn't with 50 fps.
ALAKTORN, the desync may be due to the same as the above. Try fiddling with the fps setting before recording. If you find the right setting, post it.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Geoffrey The Fly (Nifflas MMF game) works and syncs if set to 47 fps (Yes, 47. That's the fps the game reported when it was initially set to 60 and 50.) and the "Disable DirectSound Creation" setting is enabled. I know this may not matter much since Geoffrey The Fly is an insanely short game and is an autoscroller, but this syncing does give hope for other Nifflas and/or Multimedia Fusion games.
Elasto Mania syncs for me with a 60 fps setting, full screen allowed, and hardware acceleration disabled. Elasto Mania TASing is now reality!!! :D
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I loved this game as a kid, I definitely want a TAS of this game published, and I LOVE that you danced to the music in the first (club helicopter) flying level. This TAS put a big smile on my face. I'm voting yes for those reasons.
One has to admit this game has great music and style.
Edit: Also, this is a game I could console-verify or cart-lend for console verification.
Edit: Also, this game is a far better game than Super Mario Bros. For example, how did you simply not take the hit on that scorpion boss? So cool.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
That's really interesting because when I was a kid, I played that game so much that I had a consistent route through that level which always felt very rhythmic and I'd always go the same way through the first pipe. :)
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
If you want noise reduction, there are plenty of solutions for that, like mass-loaded vinyl and highway-style sound barriers. Assuming the proper countermeasures are taken, noise is not a good argument against progressive technology.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
How do wind turbines "mutilate the landscape"? Don't they just make the landscape look super cool? I don't understand you here. To me, a wind farm looks awe-inspiring.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I also noticed the hill-running at 0:36 in the encode. Is there some penalty for jumping up that hill instead of being slowed by it? I stopped the video after the first level to see what your response on that is.
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I uploaded it to YouTube on 2011-04-26 and once it was done uploading and processing, the resulting page told me the video was too long. It was below 15 minutes. I'm just stating a fact.
It's your fault because you must be running stuff in the background. DailyMotion uses Flash just like all those other web video players. If it's lagging, your machine is having a hard time rendering Flash.
