Andrew L: No, because you don't get access to Destruction until the final level.

BTW I just skipped ahead and took a look at the final level. I tested with the freebird (fly) cheat and if you can land on the platform in the middle of the central chamber straight away at the start, you will proceed normally to the ending sequence and be able to win the game (although for some reason Kyle doesn't show up in the final room). The only thing stopping you just dropping down there immediately is that you get a fade-to-black before you land. Unfortunately, this is kind of a hard obstacle to overcome.

I have two ideas. The first is to use sequencers set off by destruction to slow your descent (the disabled sequencers on levels 12-14 will hover in midair if dropped from height, so positioning them should be possible). The second is to lure a flying enemy into the central chamber, Force Push it down into your path, then land on its head and from there bounce off onto the platform. I've tried both and not yet succeeded, but I'm still hopeful that both methods should at least be possible.

Can someone test them out and see if they can get either method to work (or better yet, record it)?

I did somehow manage to land of it and skip a part of the level last time I played, but it was an accident and I'm not sure how :downs:

K I just figured out a way to do the skip on the last level. Video soon.

Nice, can't wait to see it!

Here you go:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=06QTGHUL

Done in four segments for the sake of my sanity, but there's no reason a sufficiently determined runner shouldn't be able to do it in one go.

Cabbage: I highly, highly recommend using Dropbox next time. It's free, and doesn't have any of the ridiculous ads/wait time. Plus it does a ridiculous number of other awesome things (mainly syncing) in addition to public hotlinking of files.

Here's a link without all the megaupload nonsense for everyone:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41063/Level14Skip_HQ.mp4

bloody hell

Thanks for the reupload, Cool Matty.

I think this means we're almost ready to begin running the game.

that is insane!

nice catch on the wall I never noticed that lip there before

K, plans for the final two levels:

Level 13: Just do the same as RoyHess's run here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TONL3Oksf6s

The only improvement I can see, besides execution stuff and not delaying activating speed at the start, is to hop across the rafters at 1:29 instead of dropping to the floor.

For added style points, charge Kyle after activating the level end trigger and knock him into the pit.

Level 14: Use the skip I posted, then hop off the platform at the earliest moment when you will hit the teleport trigger before triggering the fade-to-black. Keep holding a direction to run off the platform and teleport to the final area. Swap to fists. Win.

All we need to do is go back to level 2 and check for ways to avoid the fade-to-black there, and we can start running. Who's in?



I don't think there actually is a lip in the way that you're thinking. I think it's just two vertical solids joined seamlessly together, but the game's mantling code is happy to 'ground' you on the lower one despite the fact that its entire top surface is blocked. Someone can probably confirm this in ZED.



This would be awesome. If anyone wants to put up such a bounty (to Child's Play, or any other charity, or to a charity of the runners' choice) it'll certainly help motivate me.

Since speedrunning is all about hyperoptimisation, though, perhaps rather than a fixed bounty for beating a set time, it'd be more appropriate to have a scaling bounty proportionate to the amount of time we save? RoyHess's run was just over 31 minutes, so how about a bounty of x cents for every second less than 30 minutes our final time is? The better the run, the more you pay!

Actually, that "lip" is an amusing screwup by the original developers. There's a small strip of surface (piece of wall, basically) that isn't flagged as impassible. I imagine, since it's marked as passable, that you're actually walking inside it slightly, and since the surface below is impassable, you're standing on the edge of that one. Without the impassible flag, a surface is not solid (used for fake walls and the like).

You can see that strip of surface if you look at the wall. Its texture is not aligned properly to the rest of the wall, meaning there's an obvious seam. (You'll need to crank your brightness up ingame to see it)

or use force seeing

Excellent work. You have been absolutely tearing through this investigation. Though I'm probably not going to get too much time to do anything on this in the next week.

K I checked out the differences between Easy and Hard. I'm fairly sure none of the elevators along our route travel faster on Hard. The only advantage of Hard mode I could find was that the turret that blows up the barrels on level 2 to lower the force field shoots faster. However, this is more than outbalanced by the Rancor taking an extra saber secondary and Dark Mara taking 5 extra saber secondaries. Of course, we'll also take more damage on Hard from the extra enemies.

I didn't go through the whole game on Medium but I did check Dark Mara and she takes three extra secondary saber swings, which is enough on its own to convince me that Easy is the fastest difficulty to speedrun on.

One thing I notice about Roy Hess' run is that he seems to keep force sight on most of the time. Is there a reason for this?

most of the switches in the last few levels can only be activated with force seeing on

I wonder if there is some other way to take Dark Mara out

I am at work now so I can't check the list of force powers but the last 4 are not active untill the last level like you said.

and you cant spam lightning like you could in JK

can you still spam Grip?

DSettahr: Like Andrew L says, there are lots of switches or fake walls on the last three levels that require Seeing to be on to be activated/bypassed. I don't recall whether he uses it anywhere else in the run; if so, it's probably just to see better.

Andrew L: Grip doesn't even work on Dark Mara (or any of the Dark Jedi in JK). I've tested all the force powers and weapons capable of doing damage, and there are no doors or platforms to crush her with, so I don't see any real hope of there being an alternative method.

Alrighty, just redid level 1 and shaved off just under 2 seconds from my old run. Am now happy to move on. Kind of surprised that so much room for improvement even existed, to be honest. Will upload to YouTube now.

Okay, YouTube is taking forever to process the video so here is a Dropbox link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/MotSLevel1-18s_HQ.mp4

Okay, it's now on YouTube as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkOFruwM8BI

Are you choosing Easy only because it's faster? Hard would be a separate category anyway and sounds more impressive. I usually think it's worth it to up the difficulty if the run doesn't get too much time added on.

By the way, really impressive improvement.

Engy: I'm mainly choosing Easy because fewer enemies and more pickups hopefully means it'll be slightly easier and smoother.

BTW, I've spent several hours now doing attempts on level 2 without success. The route is to run to the ramp next to the locked door, ramp jump up to the walkway with the rail detonator trooper, kill him with saber, grab the rail detonator, run and detonator boost across the fadeout pit, get the turret to blow up the barrels to lower the force field, cross over with a low-height force jump and summon the airboat, grab the revive, do a low-height force jump across to the opposite side (beneath where you were before), run off the edge and land in the secret area, drop into the airboat and activate it as soon as it's close enough, kill the enemies, jump onto the front of the airboat, drop down onto the slope above the next secret area as soon as it's close enough, from there drop down onto the slope at the bottom of the pit, jump into the exit and win.

Most of the above route is fairly easy. Unfortunately, the rail detonator boost across the pit is really ****ing hard. I haven't found a way to get it consistently, yet.

Break it into two segments?

This is one thing I'm determined to avoid doing. One thing that I really don't like in segmented speedruns is when people arbitrarily choose when to segment whenever they feel like rather than following some kind of rule or scheme, because when they do that you immediately lose the ability to objectively judge how good the run is (because you can't determine whether failure to segment in a place where it would've been highly beneficial was a 'mistake' or just a decision made by the runner in the knowledge that it would cost time). One segment per level is a rule that works well for the Jedi Knight games so that's what I'm going to stick to.

Seeing as I'm an SDA guy, if I were going to use mid-level saves I would follow SDA's 'half second penalty' rule (where each manual save incurs a penalty of half a second to your final time). I just don't think that doing so would make for a better, more fun or more interesting run in this case. The trouble with the half second rule is that half a second really isn't very much and suddenly it makes sense to add in large numbers of segments to acheive really minor things, like luck-manipulating enemies to not get in your way, or jumping onto edges of enemies' heads to boost your speed with a corner deflection, or avoiding catching on doorframes, or any of a dozen other potential tiny timesavers. The element of skill and the impressiveness of the human performance are lost completely.

Where there are major tricks that absolutely require this level of segmentation to pull off, I'll embrace that kind of optimisation (I have a run of a level of Bioshock on my YouTube channel which is under 3 minutes long and done in 15 segments). Where there aren't, like in the Jedi Knight games, I'd much rather stick to using autosaves, and battle through the hard parts with practice and persistence.

Hmm. That was a long post and maybe my line of thinking seems slightly odd (in that I'm sort of saying 'I'm determined to keep strictly to one segment per level because the only alternative I'm willing to consider is extreme hyper-segmentation of every level, nothing in between'). Hopefully you can understand my view on this, nonetheless.

Seems like a pretty sensible (and I believe common) perspective for someone making a video for SDA, one that I support. You're not aiming for the same things that a TAS speedrun does.

I think it's what makes speedruns awesome. Major props to sticking to your guns about this.

Railguns that is.:D

Okay, after many more hours I've gotten the pit drop more consistent and finally managed to pull off a successful run. Time was 47.500 seconds, a 40 second improvement over RoyHess's run on YouTube. I want to try and improve it further, though, because I lost 3 seconds because of the sentry gun by the barrels stopping shooting and me having to step out and trigger it again. I'll probably just keep going until I get sub-45.

Ah, screw it, I got a good looking 46.067 and I reckon I'll stick with that, unless anyone else wants to take it on or spots any planning mistakes I've missed. There's probably still another 2 or 3 seconds to realistically be squeezed out of it, but I've spent too many hours on it already and I don't have the Engy-like levels of perfection of execution needed to pull it off.

Will upload to YouTube and Dropbox and provide links in a second.

Dropbox link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/MotSLevel2-46s_HQ.mp4
YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA-MeVY-Cj8

Okay I took a look at the level today. The fall is certainly not something I can pull off every time but with practice I think I could get it 1 in 3 maybe, with no stopping/hesitation beforehand, just running straight off. Certainly a better success rate than level 4 and that level was way longer.

Also one thing I noticed is that you wait a little bit longer than necessary to jump after the field is down. I hear the field wind down noise when you start the jump but I've had success being in mid air about to hit the field when it turns off. You can stay to the left and avoid the big explosion for the most part. I think that jump and the timing for it is something you could nail with practice.

Oh yeah and I was screwing around with the force powers. Protection is dark side now? Crazy. That could certainly be useful if we get explosive boost opportunities later in the run. I was also messing around with Projection. I wasn't successful in getting any ramp boost of of it. However it does break your fall like an enemy. The problem is you have to be grounded to cast it, so it would only be useful if you have to go up and back down to it again. I wasn't able to move it in any way (Grip/Push/explosives).

If you really can get the success rate for that trick down to 1 in 3, you should be able to destroy my time for this level with ease and make my many hours of work on it look like a total waste of time. I hope you do so.

From where I was standing, I had to back away to get enough of a run-up to make the jump, but I didn't want to move at all until the final shot had been fired by the turret in case it stopped shooting or missed its third shot, as happened to me almost all the time when I tried to start moving earlier here. That's the reason for the delay. Perhaps with practice you can start the jump earlier without screwing up the final turret shot.

I think you've misunderstood how the force powers system works in MotS. There is no light/dark distinction any more, you just get any four powers from the first column and any two powers from each of the others.

Nope, because you only get access to the last column of force powers (which has protection in) on the final level of the game, and we already have a route for that that doesn't stand to benefit from any explosive boosts.

Yeah, I'd done most of the same tests with projection. I had high hopes that I'd be able to usefully abuse it somehow but I haven't come up with anything.

Anyway, are you gonna take a stab at running level 2? I'll wait on doing level 3 until you do, because you'll almost certainly beat my time if you do.

Hmm, I only tried it a handful of times and it worked for me. Maybe I was just lucky in where I chose to back up for the jump.

As for the other stuff: makes sense. I just have not had enough time to play the game proper (well that is since years ago). I think I may give level 2 a shot this weekend. You've got the autosave?

Nah I didn't bother backing it up given how easy to create a new one it is. Just start a new game, pick up the two sequencers, press t, type 'gameover' and hit enter, and you'll be set.

Okay.

Side note: I bound ~ to talk and am using T for the rail detonator.

I like how in your latest level 1 run there are lasers shooting all around you but you never get hit.

Hey does anyone know how to make MOTS not sound crappy? It's like it's running at a really low sample rate and sounds awful compared to JK. I cranked the digital channels up to 24 but that doesn't seem to help.

JK came with two different sound qualities, chosen at installation time (RES1HI.GOB and RES1LOW.GOB.)

MotS only came with low-quality sounds.

You could fix many of the sounds by replacing them with their high-res JK equivalents, but not all of them.

Thanks for that info. I think I'll stick to standard sounds then. Having the qualities all mixed might sound a bit odd.

I meant to ask - how did you bind your keyboards?

They used a direct neural interface.