Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 1 and 2 request

JediTry

2008-03-24 12:47:01 am

Semi-retired FPS expert

This was faster than expected. We might get to see this one after all!

Psonar

2008-03-24 06:23:45 am

Long live SF64!

You thought that was fast... look at my sig!

Another triumph for Star Trek for ya!

...and I don't want to hear a thing about FPS vs. Space Shooters...

JediTry

2008-03-24 07:16:35 am

Semi-retired FPS expert

It's interesting how many verifyers there are - apparently - for this game, considering the input both you and I received over the past 5 years (from when I started to when you finished).

Yeah, Star Trek > Star Wars, but Star Wars Community > Star Trek Community...

Psonar

2008-03-26 07:02:45 am

Long live SF64!

I've finalized all the files now and the last torrent has been sent to nate... what I didn't mention here is that I had to re-encode MQ and LQ for segments 3-9, which is 28 videos. Something went wrong with those previously, but it's all good now.

At this point I'm guessing it's about a month out before we'll see it on SDA, but it's out of my hands now I think!

JediTry

2008-04-20 12:07:43 pm

Semi-retired FPS expert

And you're on. Nice comments, great run. Anybody in for a EF2 run?

Psonar

2008-04-21 07:16:11 am

Long live SF64!

Woohoo! It's up! Thanks JediTry... it's really been a blast working on this with you, and I'm so glad that it's finally on SDA to stay. I was expecting a Star Trek pun in the news post, but oh well - I guess not everyone's a trekky. Wink

Anyone else get a chance to check out the run yet? I welcome any and all comments or criticism! Cheesy

mcbroiler

2008-04-21 06:23:34 pm

Run, you pigeons. It's Robert Frost!

I really enjoyed the game, so I am slowly but surely downloading the segments... more than anything, though, watching them just makes me want to play it again!

Reaver

2008-04-21 09:09:46 pm

Good run. I noticed in your comments you mentioned the game kept crashing on the first level. This happened to me a lot when I reinstalled the game recently. I think its something to do with the patch although I could be wrong.

Bad bits: I thought were the battle with the Hirogen boss was a bit sloppy, but you mentioned this in your comments. The only other thing I could see was the amount of damage you recieved throughout the game. You did seem to iniflict massive amounts of damage on yourself with the bigger weapons. Not that it matters too much because there are plenty of health terminals around anyway. Also was it not faster to use the secondary fire on the grenade launcher to kill the last boss?

Good points: Good to see you found a few shortcuts in there. The game is rather linear so finding any is difficult. I liked segment 6. You found a route that loads the tuvok scene after a minute rather than running around waiting for the 5 minutes it can take. The same thing goes for other segments involving the Voyager crew. I was very impressed with the dreadnought level. I say very impressed because you actually got away with shooting a teammate not once, but twice without everyone opening fire on you and having to restart. Its painful having to play this game and wait for your teammates who either move incredibly slowly, or just seem to freeze in odd spots and refuse to budge. Also they're incredibly rude, shouting "Get out of my way!" when you get too close to them. Don't people in the 24th century have manners? You have great patience to wait for them. Good use of the grenade launcher in the cargo bay when repelling the harvesters invasion of Voyager. Also it was good to see the tetryon disruptor being used to plough through enemies throughout the game once you obtained it. Its a huge timesaver. Overall a good run and its good to see this game up here finally.

Do you have any plans for EF2? Its a lot longer than this one and I think its more of a challenge in difficulty than Elite Force.

Good run. I noticed in your comments you mentioned the game kept crashing on the first level. This happened to me a lot when I reinstalled the game recently. I think its something to do with the patch although I could be wrong.

Bad bits: I thought were the battle with the Hirogen boss was a bit sloppy, but you mentioned this in your comments. The only other thing I could see was the amount of damage you recieved throughout the game. You did seem to iniflict massive amounts of damage on yourself with the bigger weapons. Not that it matters too much because there are plenty of health terminals around anyway. Also was it not faster to use the secondary fire on the grenade launcher to kill the last boss?

Good points: Good to see you found a few shortcuts in there. The game is rather linear so finding any is difficult. I liked segment 6. You found a route that loads the tuvok scene after a minute rather than running around waiting for the 5 minutes it can take. The same thing goes for other segments involving the Voyager crew. I was very impressed with the dreadnought level. I say very impressed because you actually got away with shooting a teammate not once, but twice without everyone opening fire on you and having to restart. Its painful having to play this game and wait for your teammates who either move incredibly slowly, or just seem to freeze in odd spots and refuse to budge. Also they're incredibly rude, shouting "Get out of my way!" when you get too close to them. Don't people in the 24th century have manners? You have great patience to wait for them. Good use of the grenade launcher in the cargo bay when repelling the harvesters invasion of Voyager. Also it was good to see the tetryon disruptor being used to plough through enemies throughout the game once you obtained it. Its a huge timesaver. Overall a good run and its good to see this game up here finally.

Do you have any plans for EF2?  Its a lot longer than this one and I think its more of a challenge in difficulty than Elite Force.

Psonar

Edit history:

Psonar: 2008-04-23 06:43:07 am

2008-04-23 06:40:58 am

Long live SF64!

Quote:

I really enjoyed the game, so I am slowly but surely downloading the segments... more than anything, though, watching them just makes me want to play it again!

Hey, thanks for watching, and I'm glad I could inspire you to play it again! Do you have access to the game?

[hr]

First, Reaver, thank you very much more the detailed comments! I'm glad you enjoyed the run!

Quote:

Good run. I noticed in your comments you mentioned the game kept crashing on the first level. This happened to me a lot when I reinstalled the game recently. I think its something to do with the patch although I could be wrong.

How many patches were there? Did the patch also include the Jeri Ryan voice clips? I'm thinking my run was unpatched... that or I patched it between segments maybe when I began playing Holomatch online.

Quote:

Bad bits: I thought were the battle with the Hirogen boss was a bit sloppy, but you mentioned this in your comments.

Yeah, the sloppiness was there, but the time was still my best despite it, so I stuck with it. At that point I thought my run would be done over the summer alone, so I felt deadline pressure and accepted the segment despite the blemishes. There's certainly some room for improvement - especially on sloppiness.

Quote:

The only other thing I could see was the amount of damage you recieved throughout the game. You did seem to iniflict massive amounts of damage on yourself with the bigger weapons. Not that it matters too much because there are plenty of health terminals around anyway.

From my perspective, if I didn't die, that meant I could've cut it closer and possibly saved time. While sometimes it was simple sloppiness, it was usually a willing trade-off between the powerful weapon and my limited health. Trust me - I cringed every time I launched a grenade or photon burst at close range and lost many attempts because of it. A more skilled FPSer might could have gotten the job done with a different weapon or tactic.

[quote]Also was it not faster to use the secondary fire on the grenade launcher to kill the last boss? [/url]I never exhaustively timed the different weapons, but after several attempts with different weapons, I realized that the Tetryon Disruptor secondary fire is both powerful, accurate, and rapidfire. Without testing it's damage yield compared to the Tetryon and also comparing rates of fire, I can't say for sure, but I was very much happy with my choice because it was easier and risk free, and my hunch is that it's the fastest way to deal damage available.

Quote:

Good points: Good to see you found a few shortcuts in there. The game is rather linear so finding any is difficult.

I looked hard for a few more in likely places, but couldn't manage anything. Someone more experienced with glitching the Quake 3 Arena engine might know better. It's a shame everything is so linear, and levels are entirely isolated from each other. If you could walk through every door in the game it would actually accomplish remarkably little except for saving the time it takes to open the door. In many games, such freedom would completely destroy linearity, but EF was a tough nut to crack.

Quote:

I liked segment 6. You found a route that loads the tuvok scene after a minute rather than running around waiting for the 5 minutes it can take. The same thing goes for other segments involving the Voyager crew.

Yeah I was very patient and nearly exhaustive with the Voyager segments. They were so simple and isolated that I strove for perfection on them even though it was a simple task of optimizing the route between dialog activations. Segment 6 had a variable length from what I could tell... it really seemed like a roll of dice... either that or it was literally every other attempt or some strange pattern... I'd have to check further back in the thread.

Quote:

I was very impressed with the dreadnought level. I say very impressed because you actually got away with shooting a teammate not once, but twice without everyone opening fire on you and having to restart. Its painful having to play this game and wait for your teammates who either move incredibly slowly, or just seem to freeze in odd spots and refuse to budge. Also they're incredibly rude, shouting "Get out of my way!" when you get too close to them. Don't people in the 24th century have manners? You have great patience to wait for them.

Yes, enough really can't be said about the annoyances of the teammates. I actually found ways to leave them behind on most of the later levels by skipping lifts or letting doors or lifts close behind me, shutting them off. I didn't specifically notice that I shot them twice. I know the game gives a little leeway during a firefight, because I've accidentally blasted teammates with a grenade or something when trying to blow a Borg off their back or something and not been declared mutinous. I always tried my hardest to keep Mitch alive on the Dreadnought level, and I can't remember if I did or not. It's sheer dumb luck if he stays alive because of all my tetryon disruptor use in areas with those big plasma tubes that can be blown.

Quote:

Good use of the grenade launcher in the cargo bay when repelling the harvesters invasion of Voyager. Also it was good to see the tetryon disruptor being used to plough through enemies throughout the game once you obtained it. Its a huge timesaver.

Being such a linear run, weapon usage was a huge factor in getting through the enemies as fast as possible. I especially enjoyed using grenade launcher secondary fire to deal collateral damage on Borg, by shooting a Borg in a crowd... his shields protect him, but the the blast hits everyone else. Also, pre-emptive mine setting was fun. Oh, and I simply adored using ricocheted tetryon gun shots to take out enemies behind me at the very end of the Borg ship (blindly killing the final wave of Species 8472 to open the door just as I got to it) and the Dreadnought (killing the walking robots who are following me so that they don't give Chang and Mitch any trouble).

Quote:

Overall a good run and its good to see this game up here finally.

Me too... sheesh its been a long road - I can only imagine how Jeditry feels, having been around for this run for 2 or 3 years now. I'll again thank Jeditry for his un-submitted run, which I used as a basis for whether or not my segments were any good. Thanks Jeditry - it's been fun!

Quote:

Do you have any plans for EF2? Its a lot longer than this one and I think its more of a challenge in difficulty than Elite Force.

The length and the added challenge are both reasons why I'm not likely to be the EF2 runner. There will be one eventually, I have no doubt, but having played through the game, I'm not sure I'd want to do the speedrun. I think my somewhat sheltered FPS skills were passable on EF1, but I feel like EF2 needs to be run by a pro. If I did it, it would take me ages on each segment, and I don't have the time.

We definitely need someone though. Anybody looking for an FPS to run? The trekkies won't try and convert you - we promise!

[quote]I really enjoyed the game, so I am slowly but surely downloading the segments... more than anything, though, watching them just makes me want to play it again![/quote]
Hey, thanks for watching, and I'm glad I could inspire you to play it again! Do you have access to the game?

[hr]

First, Reaver, thank you very much more the detailed comments!  I'm glad you enjoyed the run!

[quote]Good run. I noticed in your comments you mentioned the game kept crashing on the first level. This happened to me a lot when I reinstalled the game recently. I think its something to do with the patch although I could be wrong. [/quote]
How many patches were there? Did the patch also include the Jeri Ryan voice clips? I'm thinking my run was unpatched... that or I patched it between segments maybe when I began playing Holomatch online.

[quote]Bad bits: I thought were the battle with the Hirogen boss was a bit sloppy, but you mentioned this in your comments.[/quote]
Yeah, the sloppiness was there, but the time was still my best despite it, so I stuck with it. At that point I thought my run would be done over the summer alone, so I felt deadline pressure and accepted the segment despite the blemishes.  There's certainly some room for improvement - especially on sloppiness.

[quote]The only other thing I could see was the amount of damage you recieved throughout the game. You did seem to iniflict massive amounts of damage on yourself with the bigger weapons. Not that it matters too much because there are plenty of health terminals around anyway.[/quote]
From my perspective, if I didn't die, that meant I could've cut it closer and possibly saved time.  While sometimes it was simple sloppiness, it was usually a willing trade-off between the powerful weapon and my limited health.  Trust me - I cringed every time I launched a grenade or photon burst at close range and lost many attempts because of it.  A more skilled FPSer might could have gotten the job done with a different weapon or tactic.

[quote]Also was it not faster to use the secondary fire on the grenade launcher to kill the last boss? [/url]I never exhaustively timed the different weapons, but after several attempts with different weapons, I realized that the Tetryon Disruptor secondary fire is both powerful, accurate, and rapidfire.  Without testing it's damage yield compared to the Tetryon and also comparing rates of fire, I can't say for sure, but I was very much happy with my choice because it was easier and risk free, and my hunch is that it's the fastest way to deal damage available.

[quote]Good points: Good to see you found a few shortcuts in there. The game is rather linear so finding any is difficult.[/quote]
I looked hard for a few more in likely places, but couldn't manage anything. Someone more experienced with glitching the Quake 3 Arena engine might know better.  It's a shame everything is so linear, and levels are entirely isolated from each other.  If you could walk through every door in the game it would actually accomplish remarkably little except for saving the time it takes to open the door.  In many games, such freedom would completely destroy linearity, but EF was a tough nut to crack.

[quote]I liked segment 6. You found a route that loads the tuvok scene after a minute rather than running around waiting for the 5 minutes it can take. The same thing goes for other segments involving the Voyager crew.[/quote]
Yeah I was very patient and nearly exhaustive with the Voyager segments.  They were so simple and isolated that I strove for perfection on them even though it was a simple task of optimizing the route between dialog activations.  Segment 6 had a variable length from what I could tell... it really seemed like a roll of dice... either that or it was literally every other attempt or some strange pattern... I'd have to check further back in the thread.

[quote]I was very impressed with the dreadnought level. I say very impressed because you actually got away with shooting a teammate not once, but twice without everyone opening fire on you and having to restart. Its painful having to play this game and wait for your teammates who either move incredibly slowly, or just seem to freeze in odd spots and refuse to budge. Also they're incredibly rude, shouting "Get out of my way!" when you get too close to them. Don't people in the 24th century have manners? You have great patience to wait for them.[/quote]
Yes, enough really can't be said about the annoyances of the teammates.  I actually found ways to leave them behind on most of the later levels by skipping lifts or letting doors or lifts close behind me, shutting them off.  I didn't specifically notice that I shot them twice.  I know the game gives a little leeway during a firefight, because I've accidentally blasted teammates with a grenade or something when trying to blow a Borg off their back or something and not been declared mutinous.  I always tried my hardest to keep Mitch alive on the Dreadnought level, and I can't remember if I did or not.  It's sheer dumb luck if he stays alive because of all my tetryon disruptor use in areas with those big plasma tubes that can be blown.

[quote]Good use of the grenade launcher in the cargo bay when repelling the harvesters invasion of Voyager. Also it was good to see the tetryon disruptor being used to plough through enemies throughout the game once you obtained it. Its a huge timesaver.[/quote]
Being such a linear run, weapon usage was a huge factor in getting through the enemies as fast as possible.  I especially enjoyed using grenade launcher secondary fire to deal collateral damage on Borg, by shooting a Borg in a crowd... his shields protect him, but the the blast hits everyone else.  Also, pre-emptive mine setting was fun.  Oh, and I simply adored using ricocheted tetryon gun shots to take out enemies behind me at the very end of the Borg ship (blindly killing the final wave of Species 8472 to open the door just as I got to it) and the Dreadnought (killing the walking robots who are following me so that they don't give Chang and Mitch any trouble).

[quote]Overall a good run and its good to see this game up here finally.[/quote]
Me too... sheesh its been a long road - I can only imagine how Jeditry feels, having been around for this run for 2 or 3 years now.  I'll again thank Jeditry for his un-submitted run, which I used as a basis for whether or not my segments were any good.  Thanks Jeditry - it's been fun!

[quote]Do you have any plans for EF2?  Its a lot longer than this one and I think its more of a challenge in difficulty than Elite Force.  [/quote]
The length and the added challenge are both reasons why I'm not likely to be the EF2 runner.  There will be one eventually, I have no doubt, but having played through the game, I'm not sure I'd want to do the speedrun.  I think my somewhat sheltered FPS skills were passable on EF1, but I feel like EF2 needs to be run by a pro.  If I did it, it would take me ages on each segment, and I don't have the time.

We definitely need someone though.  Anybody looking for an FPS to run?  The trekkies won't try and convert you - we promise!

Reaver

Edit history:

Reaver: 2008-04-23 05:48:13 pm

2008-04-23 05:46:40 pm

I may give this a go. I wouldn't say I was pro but I'm an alright FPS player. I'm busy at the moment with other stuff but I'll see if I can dig up my copy of EF2 this weekend and play it through to completion. This is just to refresh my mind on what it was like and give an indication if I'm up to the challenge of tackling this game. Its not that the game is overly difficult. Its just to see if I think I can pull off a decent time playing an FPS game. I'll keep you updated on my progress, if any.

JediTry

2008-04-24 12:11:25 am

Semi-retired FPS expert

It was fun, Psonar, so it's a shame you won't be doing EF2. Actually I can't remember that game at all, but if somebody'll run it I'll see where I put my copy and try helping out with shortcuts.

mcbroiler

2008-04-24 03:12:37 am

Run, you pigeons. It's Robert Frost!

Sadly, the game is at my house right now, about 2 hours away. Hopefully I'll remember to get it the next time I go home (and hopefully it'll play on my computer still).

Do you have any plans for a next run?

Psonar

Edit history:

Psonar: 2008-04-24 05:18:00 am

2008-04-24 05:16:39 am

Long live SF64!

Quote:

Sadly, the game is at my house right now, about 2 hours away. Hopefully I'll remember to get it the next time I go home (and hopefully it'll play on my computer still).

'Tis sad indeed Cry

Quote:

Do you have any plans for a next run?

Nope, no plans yet... I was considering Ratchet and Clank, but other folks seem to have it well taken care of, so I'm trying to support them. I've had lots of ideas that I've given up on for various reasons - mostly lack of interest on my part. I know that I won't finish a project unless I'm really in love with the game. That's the reason Descent FreeSpace: The Great War and Total Annihilation have been on my mind. The problem is that I'm not sure if either of them are very suited to speedrunning - but they are games that I adore and have gone back to many times, so we'll see. Then there's always the sequels to games I've already run... Jedi Starfighter and Elite Force 2. I've already said I don't feel up to EF2, and I'm not sure how much interest there is in a Jedi Starfighter run - or how good of a speedrun it would be.

Having said all that, I try to remember that I started out by running Star Fox 64, which was laughed at as a horrible game to speedrun, and I did all I could to do it justice, and managed to surprise a lot of people. Who knows what I'll do next... I'm about to take 15 hours of classes this summer, so whatever it is will either be short and segmented or I'll begin work on it in August at the earliest.

Thanks for asking... any ideas of what I should run next?

[quote]Sadly, the game is at my house right now, about 2 hours away.  Hopefully I'll remember to get it the next time I go home (and hopefully it'll play on my computer still).[/quote]
'Tis sad indeed :'(

[quote]Do you have any plans for a next run?[/quote]
Nope, no plans yet... I was considering Ratchet and Clank, but other folks seem to have it well taken care of, so I'm trying to support them.  I've had lots of ideas that I've given up on for various reasons - mostly lack of interest on my part.  I know that I won't finish a project unless I'm really in love with the game.  That's the reason Descent FreeSpace: The Great War and Total Annihilation have been on my mind.  The problem is that I'm not sure if either of them are very suited to speedrunning - but they are games that I adore and have gone back to many times, so we'll see.  Then there's always the sequels to games I've already run... Jedi Starfighter and Elite Force 2.  I've already said I don't feel up to EF2, and I'm not sure how much interest there is in a Jedi Starfighter run - or how good of a speedrun it would be.

Having said all that, I try to remember that I started out by running Star Fox 64, which was laughed at as a horrible game to speedrun, and I did all I could to do it justice, and managed to surprise a lot of people.  Who knows what I'll do next... I'm about to take 15 hours of classes this summer, so whatever it is will either be short and segmented or I'll begin work on it in August at the earliest.

Thanks for asking... any ideas of what I should run next?

Reaver

Edit history:

Reaver: 2008-04-25 11:00:44 pm

2008-04-24 10:00:15 pm

I managed to dig up my EF2. Had a quick burn this evening. Managed to finish up to just after you rescue Telsia and the others from the Dallas. Took 31 minutes to get there but this was really unoptimised. I'm sure I could easily shave off 5-10 minutes if I tried.

Already this game is a pain. There are a lot of things to get stuck on. Sometimes you can get stuck on things that don't actually appear to be near you causing you to lose a second here and there. Also there are invisible walls present in areas such as open lifts which you should just be able to walk off but cant. During the battle with the borg boss I noticed after I deactivated the 3rd distribution node he seemed to freeze for an extended period of time allowing me to shoot him a lot longer than normal. Its been a while since I played this game so I was wondering if any one could tell me if this was normal or a glitch?

Hopefully I'll finish the game sometime this weekend and decide from there if I will run it or not.

EDIT: Hit a snag on mission 5 where you have to defend the Enterprise. When walking on the ship and disabling sabotage devices I can't actually walk on the ships hull. It just floats off immediately. As soon as one of the Idrill hit me with their shockwave weapons I go flying off and wont fall back down. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Because I'm not attached to the hull it wont jump either. I tried the latest patch but that didn't help.

I managed to dig up my EF2. Had a quick burn this evening. Managed to finish up to just after you rescue Telsia and the others from the Dallas. Took 31 minutes to get there but this was really unoptimised. I'm sure I could easily shave off 5-10 minutes if I tried.

Already this game is a pain. There are a lot of things to get stuck on. Sometimes you can get stuck on things that don't actually appear to be near you causing you to lose a second here and there. Also there are invisible walls present in areas such as open lifts which you should just be able to walk off but cant. During the battle with the borg boss I noticed after I deactivated the 3rd distribution node he seemed to freeze for an extended period of time allowing me to shoot him a lot longer than normal. Its been a while since I played this game so I was wondering if any one could tell me if this was normal or a glitch?

Hopefully I'll finish the game sometime this weekend and decide from there if I will run it or not.

EDIT: Hit a snag on mission 5 where you have to defend the Enterprise. When walking on the ship and disabling sabotage devices I can't actually walk on the ships hull. It just floats off immediately. As soon as one of the Idrill hit me with their shockwave weapons I go flying off and wont fall back down. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Because I'm not attached to the hull it wont jump either. I tried the latest patch but that didn't help.

Reaver

Edit history:

Reaver: 2008-04-26 12:17:53 pm

2008-04-26 12:15:40 pm

Sorry for the double post. I managed to finish the game off today. I'm still having a problem with the glitch on the Enterprise Hull. I'll have to sort this out but I'm considering doing this run. For some reason he floats back down onto the Enterprise's hull if I hit the windows key and alt+tab back into the game. Obviously I cant do this in the real run so I'll have to sort out whats causing this.

I've managed a time of 3 hours just running through so far and refreshing my mind on what the game was like. I know this doesn't exactly sound good but It wasn't optimised and I got lost several times :P. I reckon its possible to shave 30-45 minutes off easily. I think I'll give this a go. Through my refresher of the game I found a neat trick. For some enemies that fall from the sky, (usually the big ones which take all your ammo to kill) If you move fast enough you can get to a point where you can shoot the area they are passing through as they fall. This prevents them from landing and attacking you. This allowed me to skip two problem enemies who take a lot of effort and ammo to take down. Several time consuming battles can be skipped in places but others are needed to get to the next section of a level. Unfortunately the most difficult boss exomorph you have to fight both times. I haven't found any huge timesavers yet. Really just a few small shortcuts as this game is quite linear like the previous one. Most time will be picked up avoiding fights.

Sorry for the double post. I managed to finish the game off today. I'm still having a problem with the glitch on the Enterprise Hull. I'll have to sort this out but I'm considering doing this run. For some reason he floats back down onto the Enterprise's hull if I hit the windows key and alt+tab back into the game. Obviously I cant do this in the real run so I'll have to sort out whats causing this.

I've managed a time of 3 hours just running through so far and refreshing my mind on what the game was like. I know this doesn't exactly sound good but It wasn't optimised and I got lost several times :P. I reckon its possible to shave 30-45 minutes off easily. I think I'll give this a go. Through my refresher of the game I found a neat trick. For some enemies that fall from the sky, (usually the big ones which take all your ammo to kill) If you move fast enough you can get to a point where you can shoot the area they are passing through as they fall. This prevents them from landing and attacking you. This allowed me to skip two problem enemies who take a lot of effort and ammo to take down. Several time consuming battles can be skipped in places but others are needed to get to the next section of a level. Unfortunately the most difficult boss exomorph you have to fight both times. I haven't found any huge timesavers yet. Really just a few small shortcuts as this game is quite linear like the previous one. Most time will be picked up avoiding fights.

micuu

2008-04-26 01:05:56 pm

Swim Swim Hungry

I really don't have anything useful to add to his discussion unforunately, but I'd like to voice my support for an EF2 run. If you can do one Reaver, I'll watch it for sure.

Reaver

Edit history:

Reaver: 2008-06-08 09:30:48 am

2008-04-28 05:46:59 pm

Quick update. I managed to play through a few more times and have whittled the time down to 2:20. This is playing on a difficulty setting of normal. I'm going to aim for a time better than 2:10. I could probably do better than this if I could find a few shortcuts, but non as of yet.

EDIT: This run is temporarily on hold until i can finish another run I'm working on.

Reaver

2008-06-18 01:44:35 pm

Quick update. Havent really been playing EF2 recently. It seemed to be a lot slower than I remembered so I went back and started playing the first one to get a comparison of the 2. It turns out the first one can be done a lot faster. I'll post a demo later of what exactly I mean once I've improved on my technique.

JediTry

2008-06-18 06:37:12 pm

Semi-retired FPS expert

Interesting. Looking forward to that!

Reaver

2008-06-20 03:55:54 pm

Ok, here's a demo of what I was talking about:

http://www.fileupyours.com/view/171836/voy1_test.mp4

I could've tried harder but I was quite busy this week and didn't have much time to work on it to perfection. I'm well aware that there are alot of mistakes in this and I could easily improve it. This is just really to show that it can be done faster and shows a few shortcuts on the first level. Its split into 2 segments. You'll see why when you watch the second segment. Really sorry about how boring the first part is, but I just wanted to get through it to show you the second segment, hence so many mistakes and lack of any real speed. Incase you're wondering why I briefly stop just before I drop down to get the Imod it's due to a glitch I keep encountering where I crash the game. Psonar mentioned this problem in his comments as well. Please give criticisms.

JediTry

2008-06-20 08:40:18 pm

Semi-retired FPS expert

Is that bunny-hopping? Looks awesome, didn't know you gain that much speed with it. That first level is obviously a lot faster with it. Any ideas how much you can save in later levels?

Except for what you already mentioned that video looks great.

Reaver

2008-06-21 04:55:17 am

Its strafe jumping, well at least a crappy form of it. Not exactly that great at it yet. I've looked at some of the other levels such as the etherians, scavengers and borg levels. I've found a couple more places to use this to save time on, but the majority of time saved would come just from moving through corridors of the levels much faster. I'll keep looking. Two I've found are on the scavengers level. One you can actually jump across onto a platform and climb up a ladder ending the Malon section much quicker. That way you don't have to go activate the pumps and stuff. The second one is just after the Hirogen section, more specifically the section with the moving platform to jump over to the Federation part of their base. It turns out you don't have to wait to kill everyone present. You can jump across straight to the platform and there is a small ledge present you can walk along to the other side. I'll post some demo's of these later when I get the time. Haven't really found any others yet. I'm not sure of the total amount of time I could cut off the current run yet. I only recently realised strafe jumping would work. I was messing about on quake 4 for a while, I went back to Elite Force 2 and noticed you can use it there too. Turns out this game is based on the Quake engine so thats why it works. I tested with EF1 and it seems to move a great deal faster than EF2. On EF2 they seemed to have introduced some annoying air gliding in your jumps which causes you to stay in the air much longer by the looks of it. I could be wrong but it just looks a lot slower to me. I might run through EF1 and see the total amount of time I can cut from the current run.

John

2009-03-10 09:39:39 am

I am just watching the run of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force by Psonar and am enjoying it so far. I just finished watching Segment 7 - 'Borg 2' and found something wrong in the description:

Quote:

unfortunately for Munro, Foster can't be rescued, no matter what you do, but fortunately for me, there's no penalty for ignoring Foster altogether.

This is actually not true. Of course, Foster can be rescued! You only have to be fast enough to reach the inside of his assimilation chamber.
And the game gives you a penalty for not saving him: You have fight him at the end of the borg level. Otherwise only normal Borgs will beam in, which can be killed quickly.

But what actually is faster - Taking the detour to save him or fighting him at the end - this is another matter.

Reaver

2009-03-10 01:54:03 pm

Quote from John:

I am just watching the run of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force by Psonar and am enjoying it so far. I just finished watching Segment 7 - 'Borg 2' and found something wrong in the description:

Quote:

unfortunately for Munro, Foster can't be rescued, no matter what you do, but fortunately for me, there's no penalty for ignoring Foster altogether.

This is actually not true. Of course, Foster can be rescued! You only have to be fast enough to reach the inside of his assimilation chamber.
And the game gives you a penalty for not saving him: You have fight him at the end of the borg level. Otherwise only normal Borgs will beam in, which can be killed quickly.

But what actually is faster - Taking the detour to save him or fighting him at the end - this is another matter.

Getting to Foster doesnt take too long, maybe about 10 seconds at the most. When you get to him you have to wait for some dialogue to pass and Foster to be beamed out before you can move again costing more time. You waste about 20-30 seconds in total rescuing foster whereas you can defeat him in little time. Plus you get the added bonus of taking command of the hazard squad without the lingering prospect of Foster returning to take the reigns in the future :P. I'll know for sure soon enough as I plan on doing a faster run of this game and I'll be able to tell you how much faser or slower it is.

[quote="John"]
I am just watching the run of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force by Psonar and am enjoying it so far. I just finished watching Segment 7 - 'Borg 2' and found something wrong in the description:
[quote]unfortunately for Munro, Foster can't be rescued, no matter what you do, but fortunately for me, there's no penalty for ignoring Foster altogether.[/quote]

This is actually not true. Of course, Foster can be rescued! You only have to be fast enough to reach the inside of his assimilation chamber.
And the game gives you a penalty for not saving him: You have fight him at the end of the borg level. Otherwise only normal Borgs will beam in, which can be killed quickly.

But what actually is faster - Taking the detour to save him or fighting him at the end - this is another matter.
[/quote]

Getting to Foster doesnt take too long, maybe about 10 seconds at the most. When you get to him you have to wait for some dialogue to pass and Foster to be beamed out before you can move again costing more time. You waste about 20-30 seconds in total rescuing foster whereas you can defeat him in little time. Plus you get the added bonus of taking command of the hazard squad without the lingering prospect of Foster returning to take the reigns in the future :P. I'll know for sure soon enough as I plan on doing a faster run of this game and I'll be able to tell you how much faser or slower it is.

JediTry

2009-03-10 09:34:19 pm

Semi-retired FPS expert

That Foster can't be saved was meant in an ironic way, Wink

Looking forward to the new run! That one clip you posted promised a lot. Do you have any more nice timesavers?