Probably the coolest speedrun I've ever seen.

Wanna see a run without any deaths.

This was not only ridiculously impressive, but extremely entertaining. Brought back tons of nostalgia and the commentary wasn't dull at all. I would love to see you guys tackle Mysteries of the Sith next!

they could beat level one if they manage to bounce katarns corpse off the cliff walls.

The biggest difference would be level 8; Cabbage linked to a video of how it would look like. Level 4 would be nearly the same. You just have to go up the short elevator, hit the switch to open the doors, jump off the ledge, then out. It's only actually a few seconds saved. In fact I think I may still have it up on Youtube, since Cabbage found out about the death-based endings after I finished recording level 13:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfZqNwKcbDo

Cabbage and Random you guys are awesome.

That's a good point, any plans for MotS?

I'm happy to help out with a MotS run in the same capacity that I did on this one - i.e. assisting with trick-finding and planning and maybe running a level or two, but with someone else doing the majority of the work.

I asked Engy about MotS after we finished DF2, and he wasn't up for it - I think one big project was enough for him for now, especially since his main reason for starting on this was just to improve his old 2004 run.

There was a guy called roy_hess working on a MotS run over on SDA who gave up because not enough people seemed to be interested in the run. The thread is here: http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/jedi_knight_mysteries_of_the_sith__round_2_w.i.p._new_videos_see_1st_post2.html

If you wanted to, you could always try getting in touch with him to encourage him to carry on with that run, or to start again (I briefly started looking for tricks and found a nice timesaver on level 2 which is mentioned at the end of the thread I linked to; I'm sure there's plenty more to be found). Alternatively, if someone from this place has the time to take on a MotS run, I'll be happy to help them out with it, too.



Leaping straight across from cliff to cliff and skipping most of the level was actually one of the things I looked into back when I was playing around in MotS. A corpse boost almost certainly wouldn't be possible because you don't have a straight path (or anything near to one) from the starting cliff to the exit, and your corpse doesn't actually bounce off walls - it slides if it hits them at an angle, but if it hits them straight on it just comes to a stop. The alternative is to force jump off a stack of sequencers, reach the other cliff and survive, then run to the exit. At the time I attempted this and concluded it wasn't possible. I've gotten better at explosive jumping since then so if someone starts a run I'll give it another look, but I'm not too hopeful.

Edit: By the way, I'm pleased to see that people enjoyed the audio commentary. I was worried I was stumbling about and 'um'ing and 'er'ing a bit much.

Nah, the audio commentary is what really made the run interesting. The tricks were cool, yes, but having someone actually explain what was going on with each trick made it that much more enjoyable and easy to understand.

Agreed.

Without the commentary I probably skip ahead a few times in the video and end up closing it after 2 minutes. Not to say the video was boring, there would just be no way in hell I'd understand what was going on it all happened so quick. And I probably wouldn't have even noticed that you were strategically getting secrets in some levels and not in others.

With the commentary I was enthralled and gladly watched both videos in their entirety.

Yeah, +1 on the commentary. Made the video more enjoyable, I probably would have got bored and not finish watching it.

I seriously hunger for more of this, haha.

Yeah, I think all of Massassi (20 guys?) would bow down if you did MotS, but at the same time I feel wrong asking anyone to sink that much time into something so useless simply for my entertainment.

(Only on internet can a thread about a video be visited by its creators. I got some fuzzies out of that. I chatted with LittleKuribo in #DesertBus last week and swooned.)

I don't have a video capture program, but I would be glad to give a hand with MotS! I could always download fraps or what ever you used.

Please PM me and let me know what is needed/involved in taking on this project.

Thinking about it, I bet there is a way to land that jump on the last level of MotS to get to that little platform and skip the whole level!

That was cracking. Give yourselves a biscuit.

It's like Kyle himself is playing the game.

+1 for speedruns of awesome. I routinely visit SDA and TASVideos, though admittedly I visit the former less than I did in the past.

I wish there was a better way to watch the runs than downloading a couple hundred MB of video or 20 separate 4 MB videos

SDA is on a backlog of submitted runs, but it has been verified and I've finished the videos for it. You can grab whatever quality you want off of my hosting for the time being:

http://engy.us/videos/JK/JediKnight_LQ.mp4 (42 MB)
http://engy.us/videos/JK/JediKnight_MQ.mp4 (128 MB)
http://engy.us/videos/JK/JediKnight_HQ.mp4 (427 MB)

All of them have the commentary on track 2. The commentary is actually a little bit better synced to the run in these.

Most of the newer videos on SDA have the option to watch them in Flash, and I'm sure you can probably find them on Youtube as well (you can often with TASVideos at least). Still, if you want to download it for yourself, it is annoying to have many of the videos broken up like that.

Would you like me to mirror these on Massassi so your host doesn't get hammered on bandwidth?

I remember suiciding with massive amounts of charges and then having friends hunt for my corpse... good times lol

I think I'll be okay on bandwidth. Thanks for the offer though. If my host gets mad at me I may take you up on that.

All anyone who wants to have a go at running Mysteries of the Sith will need is FRAPS (I'll leave it as a matter of individual conscience whether to buy it or torrent it - the latter should be fairly easy), MotS, a load of free hard drive space to record to, and a means of compressing their recordings so they can upload them (raw FRAPS recordings are massive - my raw DF2 recordings were about 1GB per minute). For compression I recommend the fairly idiot-friendly Anri-Chan: http://speeddemosarchive.com/kb/Anri-chan

I'm also not sure whether FRAPS can record if you're running with Hardware Acceleration disabled, so if you are then you may need to get find a way to make the game work with hardware acceleration on. I remember having to mess about with the ddraw.dll fix for DF2 and getting fairly confused before suddenly everything started magically working fine.



Might be. I haven't played past the first few levels of MotS for over a decade, but if someone starts a run I'll certainly start looking into stuff.

I just checked again and I'm fairly sure that explosive boosting from cliff to cliff isn't possible; it's just too far, and even when I cheated in unlimited explosives and turned on invincibility I wasn't able to make the jump because the skybox ceiling is quite low so you need to travel in quite a low arc.

I did discover this trick, though, which makes the matter moot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJpjZjsAkI

Hopefully this will motivate someone to start a run.

Oh my god yes. Did you have to hold right to stay on the tie? I imagine as it changes frames the player would drop.

Alright, the answer to this is slightly complicated, and much of what is below is somewhat speculative because I don't know any technical stuff about the engine; this is just the best explanation I can come up with.

Back when we were planning the DF2 run, Engy used the term 'grounded' to mean the state, as he figured was recognised by the game engine, of being stood on a surface. Landing on any flat or near-flat surface usually results in being instantly grounded, but not always (for instance, landing on a corner of such a surface deflects you away and gives you a speed boost away from the corner). Whilst grounded, the game's physics behave slightly differently to whilst in the air; for example, if you turn your view whilst grounded, your velocity immediately changes direction as well, meaning you can whip round tight corners and keep your speed; whilst in the air, this doesn't happen (unless you have the fly cheat on).

Once you become grounded on a moving platform, the game starts handling your velocity relative to that platform, and if you don't press any movement keys you'll remain stationary relative to it. The wing of the Tie Bomber is no exception; once you're grounded on it, you can take your hands off the controls and be carried along.

The hard bit is becoming grounded. I think the game will only let you become grounded on the Tie Bomber if your velocity is roughly equal to that of the Tie Bomber. Otherwise, when you land on it you either become grounded and immediately ungrounded, or the game treats it as an impact or something, I'm not really sure. However, whenever this happens, your speed gets increased significantly in the direction the Tie is travelling, and you get pushed a tiny bit away to the left.

Notice in the video that I'm facing slightly to the right of the path the Tie is on. This compensates for the bumping to the left that happens during each impact. I can't face any further to the right or I'll end up overcompensating and travelling up the wing, and then I'll bump into some other part of the Tie which for some reason ****s everything up and makes me fall off.

You can probably also understand from the above explanation why I have to get onto the Tie from the front whilst running away from it. I need to have the whole length of the wing for Kyle to get impact on so that he builds up enough speed to get grounded on the wing. You can see that I almost fall off the back of the wing here, despite having 'w' held down at all times. If you aren't travelling in the same direction as the Tie when you land on it, you don't have a chance of staying on.

It took me over an hour of experimentation to figure out the method you see in the video, and even then, I have a less than 1 in 5 success rate with it even starting from the quicksave I made immediately before the start of the video. It will be a right ***** to try and get this working in an actual run of the level, but it should be humanly possible - Engy certainly managed to pull off plenty of levels in the DF2 run featuring tricks I had much worse success rates with than 1 in 5.

Wow, that was amazing. The corpse chucking and insane jumps (like level four, jumping past that whole rising water puzzle) were astonishing.

This makes me want to replay JK or MotS. I think I'll play through MotS again... I think I only ever played it once or twice ever.

What a post. There's something really special and intriguing about dissecting every quirk of the engine to exploit. It's almost as if you want the gameplay itself to have as much subtlety and variation, but the intentional mechanics are never that deep.

Videos are blocked at work, so I NEED to watch this when I get home

I will start running through mots as soon as my room is put back togeather, I got all new furniture/desk and TV so everything is a mess right now, but I should be all set saturday so I am going to start running through the levels and saving each level as a saved game since there is no level select!

should be fun

If someone else is carrying the run I may put in a few attempts on some levels as time allows.

well I want to try with MotS

Awesome find on that TIE Bomber!

In the level coding for Jedi Knight/MotS levels, you have to flag a surface as being "ground" if you want the player to stick to it. Otherwise, it treats the surface as essentially frictionless. The editor that we use, JED, usually does this automatically, so most level authors never need to worry about it.

3d objects, like the TIE Bomber, work a bit differently, I think.

If we're gonna start a MotS run, it's probably worth me pointing out the obvious fact that the Kyle levels and the Mara levels are totally independent of each other, so it's like doing two seperate campaigns. We should probably get the Kyle levels out of the way first before we even start thinking about the Mara levels.

It'd be really cool to get a whole bunch of you guys working on this thing. I look forward to doing this run if you're up for it.

Sorry, I suck too much to help.

Yeah Cabbage/RandomEngy, I don't know if you guys bothered using the JED/ZED level editor to check out the game's layout, or if you did all that by trial and error. But I would imagine looking at the layout for the MOTS campaign could really assist in finding ways to break the game (finding holes in level boundaries/invisible walls, enemy spawn patterns, script timings, etc).

Yeah, this inspired me to play through JK again. I got the JKE pack and have been having a lot of fun. I'd forgotten all sorts of things about the game, though, like Jerec's hilarious acting or Jason Court being a hotty. And I also just remembered that if you use explosives around the rail missiles in MotS, they shoot off. That's so awesome.

-Ahem. Other than that... I think an MotS run would be pretty spectacular, but have no idea how the system might work. So, good luck.

Just opinion here, but I was on the wall about corpse flinging, this I would consider seriously cheating.

According to what? If you were fighting through the game without worrying about the speed run, were up against the door and someone railed you and killed you but you still got to the end of the level, it'd be legitimate-The game programmers designed it that way. So KNOWING those tricks makes them illegitimate? You could suss out patterns and holes in a level through rigorous trial and error, so knowing those tricks via opening the file is instead cheating? The goal is to complete the game in the shortest time possible, not to suffer as much as possible.