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My feelings on The Demon Rush
Game Page: Doesn't exist yet

Nathaniel Stalberg's run

Verifier Responses

Quote:
Okay. Done. I didn't time it, but I think the start/stop times are pretty easy to see.

Comments:

No cheating or dishonest play.

The quality of audio/visual is excellent. No problems there.

Quality of play is also very good. Runner clearly knows what they are doing, and very little time could be saved. Excellent use of available upgrades. Occasionally the space friction in the game causes play to slow to a crawl, but this is unavoidable and the only time this really costs more than a second is segment 3. Actually, segment 3 is the only one I can really nit-pick, and given its length and difficulty I think that the minor mistakes are certainly acceptable.

The existence of segment 5 makes me frown, since it is a non-necessary 'mission' in such a short game, but the runner is correct that it reduces the total time and allows him to beat the final segments without power leveling. I don't like it, but I don't think there's a better way either.

Verdict: accept. This run won't ever be beaten.


Quote:
Okay, Starcom.

First segment is probably the only one I have an issue with. The runner misses some 6 shots which, even taking into account how hard it is to hit anything in this game, is a bit ugly. He also doesn't spin around before entering the Starbase, which puts him in a worse starting position at the beginning on segment 2, and there's a trick I found after the runner had made his run where by leaving the 'Ship Controls' tutorial popup onscreen, you can prevent the larger 'Turbo Thrusters' popup from appearing so you still have space to keep shooting uninterrupted without having to close a popup first.

All in all there's several seconds to be shaved on segment 1, which is only some 40 seconds long in total, and the missed shots probably give a fairly bad first impression of the run. This is a pity, because the rest of the run is really, really good.

Segment 2: Simple segment, done optimally as far as I can see.

Segment 3: He misses a couple of shots on the missile frigate with the launcher, but this is a hard segment and he does a pretty good job of handling the much more important execution factor in this fight which is to circle around the frigate in such a way as to manipulate it into moving up the screen instead of down so that you're moving towards the Missile Launcher when the Frigate dies and you don't have to turn 180 degrees after picking it up.

There are some visible maneuvering mistakes costing seconds, the ugliest being some 6-7 seconds lost when he misses the missile pickup in Delta Draconis, but honestly it's just because this is a game where tight and accurate control is difficult and this is a tricky, nearly 3 minute long segment where lots of things can potentially go wrong and you have to pick up two drops from enemies whose movements are difficult to predict.

Segment 4: Warp warp warp. Accurately done, but I noticed that whenever the runner slightly missed a black hole with a warp, he wouldn't start holding down the warp key again until after he'd gone through it for some reason, which cost a couple of seconds.

Segment 5: Nice trick using the mines to destroy the Sentinel. Also, a good bit of research on the runner's part to discover how awesome the yield maximiser is and that it can be gotten from that Sentinel. A neat segment.

Segment 6: Decently accurate movement and shooting in this fight segment, a well-planned order to tackle the enemies and well-planned use of missiles. Good stuff.

Segment 7: Warp, warp, warp, blow something up, warp, warp, fly home. Don't see room for improvement here.

Segment 8: Holy crap this fight was sweet. All the carefully planned item, money and missile management through the rest of the run culminates into this: the runner has enough damage upgrades to destroy each segment of the boss with a single missile, and has access, when he combines the missiles he's stored up with the ones available in this sector, to exactly enough missiles to win the fight. Well executed warps, good shooting with the missile launcher and the main cannon... this is an epic and impressive end to a good run and the fact that it was possible at all owes to the runner's careful resource management through the run and his careful research of the game's item drops while planning to discover that he could get the yield maximiser from the southwestern Sentinel in segment 5 and how much it speeds up this fight. Good show.

Conclusion: Mixed execution with a couple of ugly moments is not enough to mar the overall solidness and excellent planning of this run. Also, having attempted it myself, I can testify to the fact that tightening up the execution in segment 3 and even in segment 1 is a lot harder than it looks. Another good indie run that deserves to be on the site - my verdict is to accept.


Decision: Accept

Reason: Yet another Flash game accepted into our library.

Yes, I'm aware Rope hasn't been posted yet, but I haven't forgotten the game.
Thread title:  
Edit history:
ExplodingCabbage: 2010-09-17 07:58:02 am
ExplodingCabbage: 2010-09-17 07:57:04 am
The mp4 videos for this run posted on SDA have some sound desyncs (at least for me, watching either on the SDA Flash Player or with VLC) that the original .movs that were sent to the verifiers and which NMS posted on Filefront didn't have. Fixable? For now, the .movs are still available at http://v.speeddemosarchive.com/starcom/ if anyone wants to watch without the desyncs.

On an unrelated note, while I'm bumping the thread, I urge anyone who decides to watch this run to stick through with it to the end and not to abort after the somewhat underwhelming (in my opinion) first segment. It gets more impressive and cooler the further into the run you go.
Edit history:
nate: 2010-09-21 11:23:32 am
so, does anyone have any ideas for fixing this that don't involve fraps or camtasia?

edit: or is it only constant desync?
Quote from nate:
edit: or is it only constant desync?


Probably. It's worse the further into a vid you go, anyway, and worse the longer the segment is. Can't say for sure, though.
Just happened to be looking at this run again and was sad to see that the desync was never fixed, especially given that the issue wasn't present in the original videos the runner submitted. It's not that noticable in most segments but in the final segment you hear stuff happen far enough in advance to process what you've heard, look at the screen, consciously think 'wait, that hasn't happened yet', and then see it happen - and that level of desync is really distracting.

Any hope of this getting fixed at some point, nate?
wow, long time ago.

i could probably do better today if i had the originals.

do they still exist?
As luck would have it, I still have the vids the runner submitted saved on my PC. Being the only .mov files on my computer let them go unnoticed and unscathed during my great speedrun video deletion spree a few months back wherein I deleted nearly all the other speedrun videos I've ever downloaded to free up drive space.

Here are some Dropbox links to the .movs the runner submitted:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%201.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%202.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%203.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%204.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%205.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%206.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%207.mov
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/Starcom%20seg%208.mov
That's great, since I actually lost mine in a hard disk failure. If you reencode, could you append them this time? The run's not all that long and I don't think anyone would want just specific segments.
new version is up.

took me quite a while to figure it out. for some reason i didn't consider the possibility of vfr.

for reference, the solution was version 20110528 of qtsource and:
Code:
qtinput("Starcom seg 1.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 2.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 3.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 4.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 5.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 6.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 7.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
\++\
qtinput("Starcom seg 8.mov", audio=2, vfrFPS=30)
Yeah, Snapz Pro X uses vfr and drops frames rather than add duplicates. That's much nicer now, thanks. Does that mean it needs to be retimed, though?
i know the .mov files were in v which means it may have been timed using them.