You can get out the door before it closes after using force-pull, but there's a smidgen less time to do so. I did trying shooting/pulling that first ST while falling down, but more often than not I'd end up clipping the tunnel. Persuasion sucks up all your force if you have it on, I think it leaves enough for speed or 1 jump but not both.

I think the drop/low jump is slightly faster, but it is a bit prone to 'sinking' into the ground (something to do with surface flags not kicking in) as happened in Cabbage's run. The rail-boost was random and only happened on some runs, basically if the first ST hits you and doesn't knock you out of the pipe, just keep running. Most of the other little things you're doing different are slightly better I think, eg half-jump out of pipe looks quicker and getting onto the pipe at the end longitudinally is probably about the same speed but easier achieved.

Something I found early on is you can avoid damage when landing on top of the elevator tower if you land on the exact edge between the elevator and the tower (don't seem to have any clips of this, sorry).

Video or it didn't happen.

Yeah... I did get a bit of that sinking issue too. I'll have to figure out what triggers it; in the other area you just have to make sure to hit the sloped section of the pipe to avoid it. About damage on the elevator tower; I don't care how much damage I take getting there as long as I don't die. There's 4 health pickups down there, which is enough to get you back up to 100 before your shields get worn down. Anyway you can hit the edge between the elevator and the tower and not take any more damage, but more commonly I hit that edge and take a lot of damage and die. So I usually avoid it.

Awesome. I look forward to seeing a sub-1:00 run like you were previously hoping for.



Wow, this is surprising. You say 'teleporting'; is it actually a teleportation or just a sudden speed boost? Weird that this happens when the elevator is lowering but not when it's rising (I think) and that you need to not be holding any movement directions for it to work. I'll have to play around with it I guess.



Same advice I was gonna give. Also, if you get hit in the front, be aware that you can spin around in midair immediately after jumping in order to get the explosion to boost you in the right direction and look extra stylish.




I never once experienced this when hitting the nearer edge. Are you trying to hit the far edge?

Yeah I would definitely describe it as a teleport. The amount of space skipped is too large to be from a speed boost and if the speed had actually changed to be that fast I should have taken impact damage. I'm guessing the game has collision resolution code to keep you out of floors, walls and ceilings and in this case some quirk in the code had to move you a fair amount to get to an open spot.

Jump to elevator: Nah I was dying when hitting the near edge. Though I re-watched your run and noticed your jump comes in a lot lower than mine, which may be the difference. I'll have to see if I can replicate that.

As for the sticky rail boosts I think it will always push you in the direction you're already going. Explosive push effects seem to be on a slight delay from detonation, which I think is why rail shots fired straight at a wall during a jump will still boost you mostly up.

Interesting. Clearly this is something for us to test out further whenever a level offers us an opportunity to.



Yeah I noticed that your jump there was unnecessarily high but figured that was just because you'd messed up the jump on that attempt. If you do a low jump there you can land anywhere and take no or almost no damage - no need to use GHORG's glitch. I only used it (or tried to) when I'd occasionally do a full-height jump by accident, and face serious damage (or death, if I'd taken damage on the initial fall) if I landed normally.



I've definitely had the explosion of rail charges from the first guy bring me to a near halt in midair, or boost me straight upwards (with fatal results upon landing). I suspect your hypothesis that boosts from explosions occur slightly after detonation is correct, though - just that isn't quite enough to get the push to come from behind you if the charge hits you right in the middle of the chest.

Got my 0:59!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6CNFnZYDnQ
http://engy.us/misc/_JKAUTO_s1l4_astdestruct.jks

congrats! good run

Doesn't the rail charge impact slow you down when it hits you?

Sometimes, especially when travelling at high speed, but not always and only rarely when moving slowly. Same as with all other projectiles. Probably depends upon whether the impact code or projectile hit code picks up on the collision first. I'm not sure why this matters?

Good run


Actually, I'm curious how your mouse/keyboard are setup RandomEngy? I struggled to get accurate control over movement at F4. I started with a WMO 1.1 on a gaming mousepad, tried two other mice, then went back to another WMO 1.1 . After this I started overclocking the usb polling rate from 125hz to 1000hz and lowering sensitivity. The last things I was playing around with was getting 120hz working on the monitor so I'd have 120fps, and oddly enough increasing the res back to 1280 seemed to make things a bit more controllable.


The main things I was trying to get rid of are; there seems to be some kind of unintended motion blur applied to textures when you're moving ( Jon'C ? ). The engine doesn't appear to be able to render moving textures as well as QuakeLive (which I've spent a lot of time on over the past 1.5 years). There also seems to be some form of inaccuracy to the actual mouse movement, not slop, but something else. I half think that maybe 1280 res allows your eyes to re-focus on distinct details in the map/textures a little quicker after the motion blur has finished, but that's guessing. Maybe turn the res up briefly when you're next running around and let me know what you think?

The other thing I was going to try was using a HL-CS reg script I found ages ago which removes Windows mouse acceleration, I don't know if this would make a difference to the mouse movement, but I'll give it a go.

I'm not sure what you mean. If you can get a good screenshot or video clip of what you're talking about, I can tell you exactly what's causing it.

Mouse accuracy should be resolution independent because JK used DirectInput. DI directly maps hardware axes, circumventing cursor acceleration and the resolution issues that affect most other games. That doesn't mean the mouse accuracy is good, though; JK has a number of small issues with numerical stability, and I've always suspected that these issues were ultimately caused by some horrible problem with the player look vector.

I've uploaded a 10meg xvid here. I wasn't sure how much youtube would alter the detail.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20972489/JKM%202011-11-10%2021-28-00-29.avi

If you watch the black/white lines on the wall, they'll go fuzzy when you start moving, even at low speed and close up. This is a bit of an extreme example, as the contrast difference makes it pretty noticeable, but it happens to all textures. Possibly this is something introduced by my video card drivers (catalyst) I don't know...

I did notice that Fraps kills the framerate, which probably doesn't help either! 120fps goes to 30, 75fps to 60 and 60fps to 30. Might have to google this.

I use a Razer Deathadder and a SteelSeries QCK mousepad. The mouse runs at 1800 DPI so I have to put the sensitivity in JK as low as possible for both axes. Though IMO the best thing about the mouse/pad combination is the low friction, not the silly DPI numbers.

Really the only issue I have is the fact that it runs at 30fps (well everything except for first person gun models) when hardware accelerated. I got used to it after a while, though. I don't notice any texture blur in game or in that video.

By the way, if someone had some magic dust to get the game to run at 60fps I'd love you forever.

In that video, the black and white lines do not change at all. If you step through the video frame by frame you can easily see there's no blur at all (which would make sense since JK wouldn't ever implement such a costly screen-wide effect back then). You're either experiencing response time blur from your LCD, or your video card drivers, but I honestly bet its the first.

Yeah, it's a problem with your monitor. The only reason you notice it is because JK has high-contrast and low-resolution assets.

Playing around in level 4 a bit. It seems like water skimming is gone! Sad. I was only able to stop myself from dropping into the water rather than bouncing off of it. However it looks like we'll get to show off tri-chording in the swimming sections: Jump and duck act as Swim Up and Swim Down: a third axis to increase total velocity.

Healing seems like it would be of most use here given the falls and low enemy density. I made a new autosave with that instead; let me know if you want it.

:O I never noticed this. That's pretty weird and surprising.



Yeah - in the big circular room you make a curving jump from one side to the other without dropping into the water.



I'm not sure there are many (any?) parts of the underwater section in which we need to travel both vertically and horizontally simultaneously, but yeah, the velocity from swimming up/down seems to stack with the velocity from moving forwards/backwards/left/right. In fact this is also true when facing upwards/downwards; you travel down much faster by facing downwards and holding Forwards and Crouch than you do if you just hold one or the other.

Probably worth checking whether 'Swim Down' and 'Crouch' stack with each other.



Yeah I suspected that Healing would be useful here, basically just for the end section. Uploading the save would be helpful.

http://engy.us/misc/_JKAUTO_s1l4_astdestruct.jks.healing

And yeah, there aren't many times where we have travel both vertically and horizontally but we can, say, look a bit down and hold "swim up" to go faster horizontally. (edit) Scratch that... swim down/swim up don't add to horizontal velocity no matter where you're looking.

Yeah, you're right, watching it in slow motion there is no blur. Damn monitor. I'll play around with FRAPS to see if there's anything that can be done about the framerate drop.

Another thing I noticed in the old run of level 4: When getting out of the circular pool to hit the two switches he force jumps out, then walks up the ramp. You can force jump directly up there from the water and the guard won't be in your way. Also in MotS the water acts a bit differently: you can't just swim straight up and jump out of the water. I found it useful to stabilize near the surface without too much vertical movement then do the jump out.

http://engy.us/videos/JK/MotS-Level4-1.47-preview.wmv

Things don't go perfectly but this is essentially the route I want to take. There's a bit of time lost to waiting for force speed to kick in before slashing the first coolant pipes. I figure ideally you simply don't recast speed when waiting for the elevator to lower so you can always start it when you start going down the pipe.

That latest one is insane. The force jumps at the end are wtf nice.

Freakin sweeeet

Anyone know how to hit the first wires reliably? I've done it from the side and from behind but often the wires don't cooperate.

1:44:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztS7ZojHFxM

I'm pretty happy with this one. I added in an underwater rail boost because we had tons of shields and rail charges. Also there was a freak sticky rail boost, which is always fun. I think this will be my final Level 4 run unless something else comes up. Also I'm going to take a break for level 5.

Oh and let me know if it turns out we need the 200 armor for the next level. We can fall back to the 1:45 run or do a new one in that case.

Latest run looks good. I tried playing around with a whole load of settings to get the fps above 30, but nothing has made a difference. There are other threads on the net with people complaining of the same problems, but no real solution mentioned. I opened a support ticket with fraps, so I'll see how it goes.

No joke, I actually just had a dream where I was watching someone play Jedi Knight at 60 FPS and I was super jealous. Though it's JK that's the problem, not FRAPS. It's always running at that low framerate, whether FRAPS is on or not.

PS: http://engy.us/videos/JK/MotS-Level4-1.44-200s-preview.wmv (we need the 200 shields for level 5)

30fps at all times doesn't sound right. Mine will do 60 or 120fps if FRAPS isn't on. Are you able to check what resolutions/refresh rates your monitor can support? (there's somewhere in windows 7 to pull up a list of all possibilities, but I forget where) It might be it doesn't like 640x480.

Monitor is not the problem. The first person gun model refreshes at 60 FPS, just not everything else. It's a software issue. It's the same with everyone else I've talked to. I actually badgered a friend running windows XP to install the game so I could confirm that it happens there too.

This is with hardware acceleration on. I did get it running at 60fps in another render mode but with messed up colors.

I remember ZeqMacaw and Xzero telling me that the 1st person gun models are rendered on a different 'layer' of sorts, which is why the transparency on GlowSaber X works in that mode but not in the 3rd person mode (and why weapons don't get eaten up by the walls or something). And which is why it sometimes eats up random polygons and the Seifer cog exists (and the weapons certainly are noticeably laggier if you have a gun like that).

They clear the z-buffer before drawing the gun on a second pass. Most games do it, or something very similar. It's not literally being drawn at a higher framerate. That is impossible.

I guess it's possible that JK is running with a 30 Hz fixed timestep without interpolation. That would explain why the world appears to render at 30 fps even though the actual framerate is higher. If this is the case it is not possible to fix, because the limitation is tied directly into JK's physics simulation.

It's not an inherent engine limitation because other render modes get 60hz updates for non-gunmodel parts of the screen when you move/look around.

Oh yes and Cabbage is working on level 5 and has a preliminary run:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4533383/level5240_HQ.mp4

I've been following the works of Engy and Cabbage (and then opened up to the awesomeness that is SDA) since I caught the JK speedrun in August. Simply amazing work, and I've enjoyed watching more of these kinds of runs ever since. So for opening that chapter in my life, I thank you both. xD

It's been very interesting following this thread as it has fairly recently begun to develop again. Cabbage's plans for the levels look quite promising, very excited to see them executed via video.

I'm guessing that, with possibly a run of better luck, it might be possible to get down to 2:37 with this latest one. I didn't even think RoyHess' runs looked too shabby, but man, you guys change the game once more at every turn.

By the way, in regard to the MotS sound quality/sample rate, seems that we weren't the only ones bothered by it:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1763286

Cabbage was talking with me today about level 5: he got a 2:30 but is going to try to get one more second out of it.

Excellent. You guys are freaking wizards.

I like how sometime years after the game is well defunct, this happens. You guys are what keeps this place alive :3

fwiw, in 1997 it wasn't possible to use MP3 for game sound because the algorithm took too much CPU power.

Ah, that makes sense. The developers would've had to pay royalties to Fraunhofer to use the decoder in the game, and then real-time decoding would've been a serious pain for computers back in that era...good call.