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My feelings on The Demon Rush
Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/GrandTheftAuto3.html

Andre 'l2ebel' Bodmer's PC run

Verifier Responses

Quote:
Grand Theft Auto 3 ReRun (PC)
Verification decision - Accept ( 05/05/2009 )

Quality

Video - good
Audio - good
Gameplay - fantastic

The gamesplay in the entire run proves just how much the runner wants to not only do well, but to perform perfectly. The subtitle commentary was a nice touch, and made the run all that more enjoyable to watch and verify.

Segment Specifics

Segment 1 Overall:

Very well executed, the only hiccup being pulled from the van by the triad, but in the end it didn't matter since Sayonara Salvatore requires you to wait anyway.

Segments line up lovely.

Segment 2 Overall:

Good segment, no mistakes that cost much time.

Segments line up perfectly.

Segment 3 Overall:

For what the runner explains to be a random segment for the spawn locations and routes of target vehicles, this run is incredibly done, with fantastic luck and with no obvious mistakes

Segments line up beautifully

Segment 4 Overall:

A great final segment, the strategy the runner used for shooting the Dodo and collecting the packages on the dam was amazingly presented, and the run as a whole is really well done.


Quote:
Quality (Capture)
Pristine.

Quality (Gameplay)
General
1. Bumping off the doors by skimming side surfaces removes the full “Get in and out of car” animation. He does this on every car he gets that he uses for multiple missions where it’s acceptable.
2. All the parts where he crashes into cars and has to correct himself are gone.

Segment 1
This guy is finding stuff that I never even would have thought to try. The first big one is it turns out that getting out of the car when picking up Misty makes her run to you instead of walking slowly.
Makes a risky jump off a hill with a car he can’t damage. This wasn’t used in the last run, and saves roughly 10 seconds.
Rides the rails above the city in the cop car for a nice shortcut and some weapons at the end of it.
In Van Heist, instead of bumping into the armored van with a truck, he parks his police car in front of it and it runs into him until it stops. This is faster, and avoids vehicle locating and switching. This also means the mission goes 26 seconds faster than the old run.
Taking Out The Laundry goes over a whole minute faster thanks to a new strategy involving buying the Uzi during the mission and doing drive-bys with it on the trucks. This means avoiding going out of the way to get the grenades, which you need to exit the car to use. Also, the runner doesn’t have to get out of his car, steal the truck, park it in front of the others, and blow them up. Finally, he doesn’t have to waste time driving the last behemoth to Toni’s place.
After he completes Blow Fish, a guy prevents him from getting in the truck he’s going to use to get away, costing him about 10 seconds.
The rest is fast and fine.

Segment 2
Misses getting hit by a crazy driver by a few hairs during Payday For Ray.
Other than that, this is one of those boring segments, but the runner doesn’t do anything noteworthy in terms of mistakes, except for having to hop over the car when he parks to close to a wall. The area surrounding it doesn’t let you do it any other way though.

Segment 3
The way he handles Evidence Dash prevents a very long drive back to Donald Love’s place.
Something that I never thought of was the way the camera works around your car. The runner focuses it in front of him looking behind him, so the game renders no cars in front of him as he drives. Quite a cool abuse.
During Liberator, the runner takes out the enemies and rescues the old man way faster than the old run did, thanks to using a gun to kill all the bad guys instead of the truck, and getting the hostage to spawn in a closer place. 

Segment 4
He triggers a replay during a mission where he has some downtime to get the car he wants, which is the fastest one in the game. By loading a replay with the car in it, it apparently makes the game more likely to spawn that car for him.
Uses the camera trick again during the 5-star wanted level chase to get rid of the stuff in front of him.
In Grand Theft Aero, instead of shooting all the Cartel in the hangar, he just runs them over in one pass.
Screws up jumping on the truck and over the fence at the end of the mission.
The Dodo is slower than the car when it comes to going back to Donald Love from the under-construction building, but he needs it for later.
Bait gets completed 37 seconds faster. A new trick is used where the Dodo is the vehicle of choice and the cars that follow the runner to the ambush will still see him and follow him no matter what.
During S.A.M. he uses a new strategy which involves shooting down the plane at the spawn point, and collecting the packages that fall onto the dam. It’s such a beautifully executed strategy that it brought me to tears of joy.
During the last mission, he shoots down the helicopter faster than the old run did.

Timing
Fun times ahead.

Importance
Though he loses some time because he adds an extra segment in, it’s still a highly optimized and impressive run. The subtitle commentary is pretty helpful, because even I didn’t understand some of the stuff he was doing, nor the factors involved. It really could have used better spelling though. Definitely an accept here.


Quote:
The pace of this run is very fast and I'm just amazed at how efficient he is at pulling off some of the missions. Overall really well done.

Video and audio are very good quality. There is no syncing problems that I saw, it all makes sense and in order.

Definite Accept for me!


Quote:
Video Quality: Not perfect, but very acceptable
Audio Quality: Good

I watched through the run twice, once without commentary and once with commentary.
The loaded replay in segment 4 took me by surprise at first, but watching it through the second time it made sense.
Several grammar/spelling mistakes throughout the commentary, but it's easily readable the whole way through.

Decision: Accept
Very good run overall, heavily optimized over the last run. Good job again l2ebel Smiley


Decision: Accept

Reason: It's an improvement, also, the Dodo.
Thread title:  
Not like this decision could ever have gone any other way.

By the way, why is the console run still on the site given that even the obsoleted PC run rapes it until it bleeds?
My feelings on The Demon Rush
I've been wondering about that same thing myself, ExplodingCabbage, but no one brought the topic up. I assume the two versions aren't THAT different.
Complete. Global. Saturation.
Quote from mikwuyma:
I've been wondering about that same thing myself, ExplodingCabbage, but no one brought the topic up. I assume the two versions aren't THAT different.


They aren't. The only difference is the lengthy loading times present. I think it should be taken it down. I know it's supposed to be the person who did the run that requests this, but still, it's another one of those Jak and Daxter cases where the slow run is from 2005 and it has long since been greatly improved upon.
The biggest difference are the controls. Manual aiming isn't possible on ps2 / xbox which makes some missions more difficult (for example "Farewell Chunky Lee Chong"). But I think the run should be taken down because the time difference is extreme.
Expert Donkey Fister
cool, thanks for verifying Smiley

part of the reason why the subs are so wacky is because i started to break each sentence down to use the shortest words possible so that i could fit everything on a double-liner.

i wasnt entirely sure about the replay trick in seg4, since the replay content isnt from the run but from casual play.
i guess its ok though because its a feature of the game to always have any replay saved(?)
Yeah the replay is iffy, I'd have preferred to see a run without it, but if I was a verifier I wouldn't've rejected for it.
My feelings on The Demon Rush
I just watched your run l2ebel, and I have to say I was really impressed. Your driving was tight, and your knowledge of the game is obviously quite vast. In addition, the S.A.M. strategy was Shocked

You shouldn't feel ashamed about doing a subtitle commentary. I thought it worked better than an audio commentary because you didn't have a whole lot to say at points, and having to listen to someone struggle to come up with something to say is painful, IMO. On top of that, all of your subtitles were either informative or funny.

I can understand taking breaks for months. When I was doing Contra 3, I'd some times play for an hour...a month.

Also, I liked the comment on GTA4, and I agree with you 100% about games. Smiley
Yeah, this run has impressed me more than any I've ever seen. And I don't make statements like that lightly.

(Admittedly, that may be because I've never owned a console so almost all of the runs I watch are of PC games, which tend to be segment-fests with no skill involved.)
we have lift off
Where is this run available to view? Also there was a gta 3 run by l2ebel a while ago, is this the same but with subtitles or is it a new run as I remember reading a thread saying it just had subtitles added?
The Dork Knight himself.
We gotta wait for nate to do his encoding magic before it'll be readily available. Too bad there's no Folding@home thing for video encoding. It would be kinda funny to see a video get all of it's versions encoded an hour after it's accepted Smiley
You can view it with subtitles here if you CBA to wait for it to appear on SDA:

http://hosted.filefront.com/l2ebel

Edit: I believe 12ebel has done two runs, but yes this one was around a few months ago before he did the subtitles and submitted.
Expert Donkey Fister
Quote from mikwuyma:
You shouldn't feel ashamed about doing a subtitle commentary. I thought it worked better than an audio commentary because you didn't have a whole lot to say at points, and having to listen to someone struggle to come up with something to say is painful, IMO. On top of that, all of your subtitles were either informative or funny.


yeah i soon realised that doing audio commentary would be hard without planning and since i finished the run a while ago im kind of not 'up to whats happening' anymore and would stumble across the whole track.
Ok, i could have made breaks and then edit it all together to 1 track but that would have been way more complicated than subtitles.

Quote from ExplodingCabbage:
Yeah, this run has impressed me more than any I've ever seen. And I don't make statements like that lightly.

(Admittedly, that may be because I've never owned a console so almost all of the runs I watch are of PC games, which tend to be segment-fests with no skill involved.)


i didnt see that coming, makes it all worthwhile though Smiley

i understand what you mean about the replay thing, at the time of my first run i even found the 'look behind to prevent cars from spawning' really lame cause predicting traffic and navigating trough it efficiently is an interesting skill because for example, looking at which traffic lights are on green and which are on red becomes difficult when youre nervous.

Quote from ridd3r.:
Where is this run available to view? Also there was a gta 3 run by l2ebel a while ago, is this the same but with subtitles or is it a new run as I remember reading a thread saying it just had subtitles added?


i posted it sometime last year in 10 .rar's so if you went trough the trouble then you have already seen it. My old run was on sda in 2006 or 07 i think, but i doubt you mean that one.

On a side note: i have also uploaded my save files, maybe it encourages someone to try and beat my time.
everybody wanna tell you the meaning of music
Unless someone tells me otherwise, we'll obsolete the console run when this one is posted. For now it can stay.

Quote from honorableJay:
We gotta wait for nate to do his encoding magic before it'll be readily available. Too bad there's no Folding@home thing for video encoding. It would be kinda funny to see a video get all of it's versions encoded an hour after it's accepted Smiley

I know you're joking but this is seriously the most ingenius thing I've heard all year. It's so obvious and right in front of our noses (Kibbo kept the folding link in the topic for months on #sda and talks about it every day, lol). Don't know how hard it would be to implement but hot damn. Encoding time is the bottleneck in our process once verification is done, but I figured there wasn't any solution past "Nate buys a bunch more computers."
The Dork Knight himself.
Well it's either setup a Folding style video encoding method, or find a way to dump all of the encoding work to your gpu(s). Either way should work nicely Smiley
Isn't Amu-chan basically the same thing you guys are talking about?
sda loyalist
Voidy got there first. Assuming people could set their PCs up to receive work packets from Amu-chan, problem solved.
everybody wanna tell you the meaning of music
Nobody else uses that though, that's just what Nate wrote a while back to split jobs between his own computers. I always assumed it's not production-ready or else we would be pushing it. It doesn't seem to be high priority either (no priority?), maybe because the need doesn't seem to be there. Rationale is that if someone cared about their run going up faster, they would encode it themselves, although maybe that's not a good way to think.
Incidentally, wouldn't it be a good idea for there to be a means for us to upload run files ourselves as well as encoding them? It would save nate some time at least.

Also this thread is now way off-topic. Wink
Waiting hurts my soul...
Quote from ExplodingCabbage:
Incidentally, wouldn't it be a good idea for there to be a means for us to upload run files ourselves as well as encoding them? It would save nate some time at least.

Also this thread is now way off-topic. Wink

anri-chan? at least for the encoding...
Nah I know about anri-chan. I'll rephrase my question as 'wouldn't it be a good idea for there to be a means for us to upload run files ourselves, just like we can already encode them.'
already considered distributed encoding and discarded it last year.

1) the source files are too large for most people to download. this is almost always true if the source is not dvd. barring that, the output would be too large to upload (since it would have to be lossless for reintegration with the other pieces). here, "too large" means "too time-intensive to yield positive roi". my paper mario ttyd directory is 243 gig. this is a good example of a run that would stand to benefit from this proposition if not for the whole bandwidth thing.
2) related to (1), cutting lossy sources without reencoding to lossless nmf is more difficult (must start cut on keyframes, adjust audio sync, etc).
3) chunk size couldn't get too small or else the deinterlacer (in the case of d1 output) would produce inferior results. similarly, there is also the problem of runs needing audio normalization.

there were some others i've forgotten now but i think those alone make the point.

amu was just an experiment in threading and network programming; i never actually used it for anything. at the time i wrote it last year i was considering buying several cheap machines instead of one powerful machine and because i'm so dependent on windows i thought it would be nice to have a program that would run on all the machines and essentially double-click on .bat files for me. but i ended up buying one powerful machine earlier this year and now i just do everything using it. even ttyd which was pretty much worst case scenario was only 4-5 days on that machine.

the truth is that moore's law has almost completely destroyed video encoding as a time-intensive process. in fact disk i/o is now by far the bigger obstacle; i've got a nice wd velociraptor (10k rpm disk) in diamond (my new workhorse) and it's just barely sufficient to feed the four phenom ii cores d1 f1 lagarith nmf.

if you're wondering how i multithread the nmf creation, it's just sumichan from 2007 or whatever:

Code:
#!/bin/bash
#nathan jahnke <njahnke@gmail.com>

if [ $# != 2 ] ; then echo "usage: $0 hq_avs_basename number_of_cpus" ; exit 1 ; fi

for thefile in `ls -1 "${1}"*` ; do  #must not be spaces in the filepaths

mv -v "${thefile}" "${thefile}.sumibak"

i=1 ; while [ $i -le ${2} ] ; do

thefilebase=`echo -n "${thefile}" | sed 's/\.avs$//'`
cp -v "${thefile}.sumibak" "${thefilebase}_${i}.avs"

echo 'sumichan_chop=(last.framecount/'${2}')' >> "${thefilebase}_${i}.avs"

case ${i} in
${2}) echo 'trim((sumichan_chop*'`expr ${i} - 1`')+1,0)' >>  "${thefilebase}_${i}.avs"
echo 'avisource("c:\'"${thefilebase}_${i}.avi"'").ConvertToYV12()
ConvertToYV12()' >> "${thefile}";;
*) echo 'trim((sumichan_chop*'`expr ${i} - 1`')+1,sumichan_chop*'${i}')' >> "${thefilebase}_${i}.avs"
echo 'avisource("c:\'"${thefilebase}_${i}.avi"'").ConvertToYV12()++\' >> "${thefile}";;
esac

#echo 'nmf '"${thefilebase}"'_'${i} >> "${1}_${i}.sh"
echo 'CALL P:\bat\nmf.bat '"${thefilebase}"'_'${i} >> "${1}_${i}.bat"

i=$[ $i + 1 ]
done
done
exit 0


so it's not the splitting that's as big a problem as the bandwidth i think. too bad by the time the bandwidth's there video encoding won't even have a progress bar. but i guess that's cup half empty.
Expert Donkey Fister
so the run still need timing right? how many ppl time the run? 1? 2?
Complete. Global. Saturation.
Quote from l2ebel:
so the run still need timing right? how many ppl time the run? 1? 2?


The GTA games are tricky to time. Mike is the one who times PC runs, and he usually does them on the weekends, so be sure to thank him for his efforts.