Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

2016-11-28 12:32:19 am

Any% in 37:23

Played on the GOG.com version of the game, ran on DOSBox, CPU speed:max, 100% cycles, Frameskip 0

Overall this is a decent run. The route is optimal, as far as I can tell, I had a few misclicks throughout, amounting to maybe 20 or 30 seconds of lost time. I'm happy with it, though. The time could be faster with better and more accurate clicking, but I don't want to run it over and over again (more than I have, that is) to shave more time off.

I am posting this here in case anyone is interested in this game. I haven't found any other speedruns of this classic game anywhere online, so now there's one!

Thread title:

LotBlind

2016-11-28 01:16:43 pm

Thanks for posting it! Are you planning to submit as well? Based on the first couple minutes it's good enough, the pre-placement is there. Sounds like your mic bled through into the audio though? That's an issue... :/

I see you mentioned earlier that you're not interested in submitting. It seems like wasting your effort them: surely you're really two steps away from having created a complete speedrunning package with nothing detracting from it. a) Get rid of the mic noise b) crop the video. Still, as you say, it's better it's here than not being here. I don't have the time to watch any runs (any) that aren't in SDA verification sadly.

The game was solid!

CleverDan

2016-11-28 09:43:35 pm

Thanks, LotBlind, I figured you'd check it out Tongue

I've actually had a few ideas for places I can tweak the route and maybe squeeze some more time, so it looks like I'm not done with this yet. I think I have a faster solution for the final puzzle (the first-person wolf segment), as well as some minor things throughout the run. I'll be testing them out and working on an improvement over the next few days.

Regarding this run, my mic shouldn't be picked up at all, because it's not even plugged in Cheesy

I think you're hearing the awful audio quality of the game itself. Believe it or not, it took some tinkering just to get it to sound *this* good. I will consider submitting this run once I am satisfied with it. I've never cropped a movie file before, but I can't imagine it being too difficult to do.

LotBlind

2016-11-29 04:04:25 am

Just ask tech support on these forums for info on the extra noise: it's there! Compare with this for instance. Make sure it's dealt with before resuming attempts. They can also give you suggestions on how to handle the cropping, though it's also possible to get direct help with encodes if that fails, so long as the raws are accessible.

This seems like a game where it's pretty difficult to know what exactly is required of you to make the story progress... or am I wrong? Lot of the time you're just examining everything. I hope you've done tons of tests to see what's really necessary to do. You seem to have it really well memorized so I hope you won't have to change it round a ton.

CleverDan

2016-11-30 10:25:28 pm

Apparently OBS was set up to record audio from my mic, even though my mic wasn't plugged in, which is why that extra noise was in the recording. I've fixed that now. Thanks for the heads up, I probably wouldn't have ever noticed.

As for the routing, I've found ~3 to 3 1/2 minutes of improvement in the route, mostly in chapter 4. Chapter 4 is notorious for needing to walk through museums, examining every exhibit, listening to tour tapes, brushing up on history, etc. However, you actually need to do very little of this to progress the story. I've narrowed it down to exactly which exhibits trigger the story to advance, saving a lot of time out of my old, "optimal" route. Also, my revised solution for the final puzzle saved roughly 10 seconds, so that's something too.

I'm going to be pushing for a sub-34 minute time before I'm happy with the time. I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to spend on it for the next week or two, but I'll be trying to squeeze in runs.