disable "Runtime > Performance > Store Video Memory in Savestates"
disable hardware acceleration in your system display options troubleshooting settings, or maybe try changing other options that are specific to your type of video card
try using older or newer versions of your video driver or a different video card, if possible
If any/all of those don't help, then revert the change(s) and I guess you'll have to wait for a fix. If one of those does work, keep in mind that some of them aren't saved settings, so you might have to re-apply it every time you start Hourglass.
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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.
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LegacyCrono wrote:
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.)
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Are you continuing it from a savestate that you made before fixing the movie? Usually after editing a movie file, you have to playback the whole movie and re-save over your savestates before using them to continue recording. (Because a copy of the movie file is stored inside each savestate.)
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mapler90210 wrote:
Please don't rely on the TAS you are judging to decide whether you like the hack itself. You would never do that with an official title and it's bad policy to do it for a hack.
I agree. Actually, some people do this with official titles as well, and it bothers me too. A great TAS often makes the game look awesome, but if someone makes a boring TAS of a game, that doesn't automatically mean the game is the problem. Even if it makes the game look bad, that could be entirely the fault of the goals of the TAS and/or the level of precision it was played at (and that has been the case in the past).
Many TASes don't even provide enough information to get a valid "first impression" of the game (e.g. imagine you'd never played or heard of Chrono Trigger until you saw this), so it seems silly to watch one and then proclaim that the game is poorly made or easy or whatever. I have almost no idea what's in Mario 74 because I haven't played it and this TAS skips essentially all of it. What's leftover doesn't seem interesting enough to publish here, especially not after comparing against existing TASes of Mario 64, and that's all that really needed to be said in this case.
EDIT: Of course the hack itself should still be under scrutiny, and the run should show significant differences from the original, but some people seem to be combining the two things and judging the hack itself based on the differences they see in a particular TAS. And for a run like this that doesn't have significant enough differences from an existing run, I don't see the need to additionally judge the hack itself at all when the TAS has already failed to differentiate itself and that's reason on its own to reject it (and I don't mean to blame the authors of this TAS for that... the only way to know how it would turn out looking was probably to go ahead and do it).
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Toothache wrote:
I hardly see the point in this other than filling space. Like I said, a TAS is not the best environment to be following a game's story, there are better avenues for vicariously 'playing' a game.
It's not only about following the story, it's also about following the TAS itself. If the text is readable, that increases the chances figuring out what's going on in the TAS (which weapons or spells are being equipped, which options are being selected, etc.), which can increase its entertainment value. And as for the story, some games force you to read quite a bit of story text regardless of whether your goal is to follow the story, so if you can't actually read the text then those parts of the game become even more boring than usual.
That being said, I can see the appeal of sticking with only official versions of the game for the sake of purity or something like that (plus Japanese text usually goes by faster).
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Seppel wrote:
This happened on my WinXP Dell Mini9 notebook as well, so it's not vista exclusive.
Can I see your hourglasslog.txt of this? (I'm mainly looking to know which game you were running and which audio codec the game loaded to play mp3 files so that I can reproduce those conditions on my computer.)
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Derakon wrote:
Gotta say, that big "GAME OVER" over most of the screens is really killing the entertainment for me. :|
I guess it would be possible to make it go away much earlier by sacrificing a few frames to do an extra save/load when passing by a save box. But it already doesn't bother me, since less than 15% of the run has it onscreen, and it usually doesn't cover up anything important during the time it's there. I did find the less-glitched run more entertaining, though, partly because of getting to see things like the Tetris room or Bowser/Wart/Wily that would otherwise get skipped.
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Try r64. I don't know if Demul in particular works yet, but there was a bug with commandline arguments in r63. (It was passing the commandline arguments directly, but many Windows programs that parse arguments assume that the path to the current executable has been inserted as the first argument.)
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By the way, the latest version supports commandline options now, so I tested this out on an emulator I had handy that I knew supported starting a game via commandline: Gens (svn296). It lagged occasionally, but I was able to record a movie and use savestates and frame advance, even though from Gens' point of view I didn't use any movie or savestate features. The movie played without desync issues and AVI recording also worked. I don't know how many other emulators this will work in already, but there might be a few.
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Can someone explain how the glitched run instantly skips the tetris room and the room after it?
I thought I saw the nicovideo description of the glitched run saying something like "this breaks the usual TAS rules by using some debug features" but I'm not sure what it's referring to or if that's just a result of poor machine translation.
Toothache wrote:
Nope, I've tried that, Tristal, didn't make any difference.
Maybe that means you didn't really run Hourglass with admin privileges, since it wouldn't make sense for Windows to return ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED to an already-elevated process. Note that the thing that failed wasn't even the DLL injection or anything unusual, it was simply a standard "run the game exe" call. Have you also tried checking the box to run as admin in the compatibility properties of hourglass.exe? What about XP compatibility mode? Does it help to move Hourglass and IWBTG out of your downloads folder and onto your desktop?
I had a chance to try Hourglass on a machine with Windows 7 x64, and it had no such issues with starting games (no elevation was required). I wonder why the same version of Windows would decide that launching a game requires admin privileges on some computers but not on others?... Is there anything unusual about your system that you can think of? And does it fail in the same way if you try to run a different game such as Cave Story, or is it specific to IWBTG?
EDIT: I think Toothache was having problems due to having avast! installed, which loads itself into every program and conflicts with the function hooking Hourglass needs to do. I rewrote some of the hooking code to work even if avast! is installed, so this should be fixed in r65 and higher.
antd wrote:
i chose to capture audio and video but it seems not to have captured audio (r57)
You didn't set multithreading to "disabled" or turn off "use software mixing", did you?
If that isn't it... what OS are you on? There are some known sound issues with Vista and Windows 7 due to some games choosing to use a completely different sound engine if they detect that they're on those OSes, but I wasn't aware that this was one of those games. I guess not everybody is having this problem due to all the videos with sound out there (and I'm sure it works for me).
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Pointless Boy wrote:
None of the Multimedia Fusion / Multimedia Fusion 2 games I've tested seem to work in Hourglass. (They just crash.) They do run in kkapture, however.
I think I had opposite results on my system (works in Hourglass, crashes in kkapture), and several other people have said MMF games work for them in Hourglass. What OS are you on and which games are you trying? If I can't reproduce the problem I might ask for your log file of the crash.
Pointless Boy wrote:
I'm aware of that code, and I even have a link to that same page on the project home page of Hourglass. There are a few things I've been planning to borrow from kkapture (but haven't yet), but there's not as much overlap as you'd think.
Pointless Boy wrote:
I don't know if it's directly analogous, but I'd imagine the goals and methods of kkapture and Hourglass are very similar, since they both wrap programs and trick them into running at arbitrary frame rates.
They're very similar, but also different at a pretty fundamental level. Some of the biggest differences are:
kkapture doesn't care about determinism. To make things deterministic in Hourglass requires reimplementing very many things that kkapture doesn't need to worry about, and this is pretty much the biggest source of incompatibility.
kkapture tricks the program into running at a fixed framerate. Hourglass doesn't quite do this. It enforces a maximum framerate but allows the game to choose its framerate and then detects it. So it's easy to end up with unnaturally-fast AVIs when using kkapture, but not Hourglass.
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Toothache wrote:
I got 'Injection failed...' when I tried to play back the same movie. Any idea what this means? Using Win 7 x64.
That's a really early error to get, maybe you have some overprotective security software installed? Please show me the hourglasslog.txt that's in your Hourglass directory after it fails.
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Patashu wrote:
I did this and I get
DESYNC DETECTED: on frame 2, your timer = 6141 but movie's timer = 6037.
Windows XP SP3, EeePC laptop. Am I forgetting something?
Hmm, I don't know. It works for me on XP SP3 and it works for Lex on Windows 7 so I guess it's not an OS thing.
Could you try it again with Hourglass r57 (and without carrying over your .cfg file to the new version or changing any options from their defaults)? When you play the movie in that version, a dialog will appear telling you that the movie was recorded in an older version and asking a question. Try answering both Yes and No on separate playbacks and see if either works. Also check to see whether setting "Runtime > App Locale > Force Japanese Locale" has any effect.
And, could you try:
Restart Hourglass
Make the Hourglass log more verbose by choosing "Runtime > Debug Logging > Print Categores > all" (this option isn't saved in the config so you'll have to set it after starting up Hourglass).
Get a log of the first 2 or 3 frames by checking the Paused checkbox, playing the movie, and hitting frame advance (backslash or spacebar) until the frame number says 3.
Close Hourglass, and then show the hourglasslog.txt in its directory to me (or post a link to it in these forums if you want).
Then I can compare that log with the output from my system and see what moment the desync happened.
Oh, almost forgot: since this game launches a second executable, please try all of the above both with and without "Runtime > Wait until sub-process creation" being checked.
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Oh, so, this might be two problems:
FMOD might use WASAPI on Vista and Windows 7, which isn't supported. I see this change in kkapture's changelog: "force fmodex to use dsound on vista/windows 7 (i won't write a windows audio session implementation if i don't have to)". So maybe all I have to do is copy that change from kkapture.
Some of these games end up using DirectShow to play their MP3s. DirectShow uses whatever installed codecs it finds handy, and probably some codecs do unsupported things. On my system, where it works, it uses ffdshow to play the MP3 (I can see an ffdshow icon appear in the taskbar whenever a Game Maker game is playing MP3 music).
So I think I have some good leads now, and maybe the above will suggest some workarounds that could be used (for example, if FMOD checks the OS version to decide whether to use WASAPI, then setting Hourglass and the game to run in Windows XP compatibility mode with admin privileges might help... and/or installing 32-bit ffdshow might help) until the above issues are really fixed.
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Have you tried it in the newest version (r57) as well as older versions? Also, I thought you had a similar problem with Syobon Action, which you found a workaround for (the DLL options), but I guess doing the same thing doesn't work for these other games? (I've had reports of Game Maker games working on Windows XP and Windows 7, and the only Vista-specific bug I know about in Hourglass is related to those DLL options.) What about Hero Core, does that game not work for you either?
Here's what's normal, by the way, in a Game Maker game like Iji:
- the loading screen should not appear
- nothing should happen for a while, up to maybe two minutes depending on your computer speed and how long the game normally takes to load, before the game window appears
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Saethori wrote:
I wanna be the watcher!
Unfortunately, the video doesn't seem to quite work for me; shows no audio or video for the entire 18 minutes, on either Nicozon or Nicovideo. WIP video loads fine on both.
I wanna see more crazy stunts! ;_;
I don't get that problem, but I've seen it before on other videos, and it usually fixes itself in a day or two (not sure what causes it).
If you have Windows on your computer (or some other computer you can use), it should be easy to watch the movie directly, and the quality will be much better than on Nicovideo or Youtube.
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Lex wrote:
I tried to dump Kurikinton's IWBTG TAS, but the first part of the dump is missing. The first file, "IWBTG.avi", starts from Mike Tyson. The second file, "IWBTG002.avi", is even further.
I'm going to guess: You're dumping it to a gigantic lossless or nearly-lossless format, so the AVI splitting code is kicking in near the 2GB limit, and some simple bug is causing the second segment to overwrite the first segment at IWBTG.avi.
EDIT: The bug is fixed in r57.
Lex wrote:
I compiled revision 55 and tried it with that, but it wouldn't even run IWBTG. IWBTG just closed before it even opened, without writing to the log file.
It writes stuff to the log file even before it tries to start running the game, so there should be at least something there if you're set up right. If you're compiling Hourglass yourself then I recommend running it from the debugger and looking at Visual Studio's Output window instead of the log file. You can enable the "Runtime > Debug Logging > Send to Debugger" option in that case to skip writing to the log file. Also try compiling r51 as a sanity check, and if that doesn't work, try compiling it in Visual Studio 2008 if you haven't already (I've only tested it in VS2003, VS2005, and VS2008 so far, and only the VS2008 projects are checked in at the moment).
By the way, use the Release configuration if you're trying to play all the way through a movie of this game from a build you compile. I just noticed that the Debug build has a desync issue in this particular game, which (for the movie that Kurikinton just posted) gets auto-detected on frame 32768 and causes a real desync the next time the game uses the RNG (which is at the Arkanoid section).
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I'll take that as a request for commit privileges. You should be able to check out a non-read-only copy of the project now, and feel free to commit whatever modifications you think are good. PM me if I got it wrong or if you have related questions.
EDIT: Command line argument support has been added in r60. Also, VS2010 support has been added in r58, and the r63 binaries (and any newer versions, if this experiment works out) have been compiled with VS2010.
No, the CRC32 check would most likely have failed. Well, data files aren't checksummed yet, but the exe is the one most likely to change, and they're all an exact match in this case. It's probably due to some OS difference I haven't properly accounted for yet. (One that either doesn't affect all games or is specific to Vista, since I've been able to play movies of other games that were recorded on Windows 7 systems.)
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Does anyone know how this game manages to work on Vista with non-Japanese locale? The game appears to check whether the locale is Japanese and immediately exits if it's not.
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Lex wrote:
It syncs for me in Hourglass r49 without doing anything funny and I'm on Vista.
You're both setting the app locale to Japanese, right, otherwise it won't run at all? (I haven't gotten around to storing that setting in the movie file yet.)
turbofa wrote:
And for the encode, the second, I actually used the in-game AVI capture (I used the Xvid MPEG-4 codec with default settings)
So you're saying Hourglass put that first frame there (the one showing part of your browser window and part of the Hourglass dialog)? If so, I'm not sure how such a thing got written to the game's backbuffer, but maybe it did somehow. As for the choppiness, either Youtube really screwed it up, or you weren't using a framerate setting that matches up well with this game (or Hourglass has more issues with this game than I realized, which could easily be the case).
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X2poet wrote:
Oh,no.
Someone started this one?
Should I give up?
I suggest not giving up. At least not for a reason like that.
turbofa wrote:
I have the same sync problem when I run hourglass normally. For not have this problem, i need to run hourglass as an administrator (i have windows vista)
Hmm, well, I'm on XP so I'm already administrator, but I have no idea what sorts of extra things Vista's admin mode actually does. I might need hourglass logs of admin and non-admin so I can compare the two. The logs should be almost identical, but maybe something's failing in one mode and not the other.
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By the way, I can't get the movie file you posted to sync, but it looks like it desyncs because one of the jumps is simply missing, and it's weird because when I look in the movie file it says you press the jump button on that frame. So I'm looking for some stupid bug in Hourglass that could be causing this. If you were thinking about actually submitting this soon, maybe it would be problematic to submit it before that's ironed out. Also, I'm not sure what framerate should be used for this game. The encode you provided looked horribly choppy half of the time to me, and I wonder why you didn't use the in-game AVI capture (it doesn't work for this game on your computer?).
