Lets racing time

Yeah, that would do it. Lagarith is a lossless codec, which means it isn't compressed at all. Xvid will do you a solid.

I just realized that the video I sent you of last night's run is at 3x resolution and will need to be resized. Do you want me to do that and send you the fixed version?

This worked out swimmingly and I'll recommend it to anyone looking to cut down on file size.

I can resize it on my end, but the torrent you set up stalled out after about 15%. Let me know when you're seeding again and I'll finish grabbing it.

Oops, I figured it had stopped because you were done downloading. I'm seeding it again now.

Mega Man 2 race!

And does do I have plans for the whole evening.

I'm going to watch it tomorrow morning! ^_^

Torgo, it amuses me to no end that you made the video description 'Dispensuro no Toothpesto'

Who was it that had the mic problems? Did they get fixed? I couldn't watch it with that for very long.

Also, I'd really like to see Brick kick everyone's asses at Mega Man 3. I watched his LP, and honestly, I think I agree with him that it's better than 2.

I'd be down for a Mega Man 3 race. ^_^

Watching Umby desperately trying in vain to cheat his way past the Crash Bomb boss in Wily 4: A++, would watch again.

It was Umby, and actually his mic works fine, he just forgot to set his recording to record voice.

Also, I remember seeing a Goon race of a Mega Man game where they had little icons of the bosses that each player had left to defeat below his screen, not unlike you guys did with Disney NES compilation. When they defeated the boss, the icon was greyed out. It was REALLY useful, given the nonlinear style of Mega Man.

Yeah, I had trouble watching it with the gaps in the conversation. I do need to at least skip to Umby and the wall boss now, though

Alas, a feature I didn't have time to figure out/implement. I'm going out of town for two weeks tomorrow, so between that, my own slow start, and my complete inexcperience there was a lot of stuff I wanted to do that I just left on the cutting room floor. It was either that or look at as long as another three weeks to finishing it.

(My original idea for the loss of Umby's audio was to "sub" him with the Pyro from TF2. Unfortunately, this would have been massively time-consuming and required at least two more passes on the video. By the time the idea came to mind it was too late.)

Overall yeah, it's pretty rough, but all things considered I'm quite pleased with it. It was a ton of fun to race and, in a way, even more fun to put together. The good news is that a lot of the groundwork is laid and now that I've done it for myself I know a lot more about what I'm doing and how to do it. Future stuff should be a lot quicker to produce, and be a lot nicer.

But speaking of which, what did you do for the finish markers in the Disney race, Brick? That's on the top of my list for any future MM runs.

Without Umby it's basically "Red doesn't know how to shut up and rambles randomly."

...so a lot like my Castlevania videos.

If we had six people in a race, how would the layout have to change?

This is amazing.

I hacked it together in a complicated and probably not-very-efficient manner, of course!

The counters sit in a 4x4 grid; four players, four games. And I knew where it was going to sit in the video. So what I did was mark down the frame number of each completion and made a new grid with the new completion "lit up". I believe it took 13 images. Then it was relatively simple to string the .pngs together into a video clip using Avisynth, and then adding that clip as an overlay.

A Mega Man video would be a little more complicated, since you'd need a separate clip for each player, but the principle would be the same.

Is there any other way?

Yeah, that's basically the kind of solution I had in mind. Inelegant perhaps, but in the relatively short amount of time I've spent with avisynth, I've learned that crazy, inelegant solutions are kind of par for the course.

Strictly, six players on an NES game you wouldn't have to change it at all. The video is running 854x480, which is space enough to put six "screens" at their original resolution in a 3x2 grid with some room to spare. The rub is that you won't have much space for anything else. In fact, you'd probably have to rotate the timer on it's side and put finish times on each player's screen rather than off to the side. Some of the SA video's do this. It works, it's just a little cramped.

The alternative is to increase the resolution, which may or may not be ideal, depending. Ultimately a six-man Mega Man race would probably benefit from a little more vertical space to give each player stage clear markers. The downside is that in doing so you veer into oddball resolutions that YouTube doesn't like so much (YouTube displays 16:9 only). YouTube doesn't crop footage, but it will add black bars to the edges to make a video "fit". Again, you'll see this kind of thing in a lot of SA videos and it's perfectly fine, but if you're the type to want your videos to "fit" perfectly, your options are kinda limited.

Very sorry about the technical issues, but I'm glad I could entertain everyone with my failure. I swear, though, I will beat you all at Super Mario Brothers 3, and there's nothing you can do about it.

When do you want to race it?

Would I win SMB3? Probably not.

Would I enjoy it all the same? Hell yes.

Hah, I would definitely not beat Brickroad, but I will definitely try. I'd want a "full clear", every level grindfest, and it'd have to be when I'm not completely busy, like the summer. But it shall be on like Donkey Kong.

I think someone mentioned the idea of no warping, but you can chose levels to bypass. This has the potential to backfire if you die on an airship!

The Goons managed to knock out SMB3 without warps in a few hours, if I recall. Granted, a few of them dropped out and one of them was so drunk he couldn't make it past like World 2, but there it is. And let's be honest, it'd have to be no warp whistles. Warp whistles would defeat the whole gol durn point.

I think I'm going to pack my headset and see if I can get the recording software going on the family's rig. Ya know, just in case.

Ok Internets or no Internets I'm down for a SMB3 race (if it starts early enough in the evening). If I'm dropped again I'll just babble for an hour or two and upload my own version like I did with SMB.

(I say all this because word is up here the FibreOP upgrade is actually complete, but I haven't really tested it in the past night or two to confirm that myself, but I'm hopeful)

This weekend is pretty shot for me but I definitely want in a SMB3 race. Will I win? Nope. Will it be hilarious? Sure.

I feel relatively good about my SMB3 skillz. I didn't do a complete run of the game, but I was playing it off and on while travelling yesterday and aside from a few farts here and there it went pretty well.

One of the keys is making smart use of P-wings and Jugem's Cloud to get past sticking points or long levels. Basically, any cuts you can take short of a Warp Whistle, take it.

Are folks pro- or anti-card game? I think the time spent is worth the buffer all the extra items give you. There's nothing worse than getting bogged down in that one level with nothing to spare except a Music Box and a Starman.

I'm fairly decent at SMB3, it has been quite a while since I've played it. ^_^ However I'm down for a race as per usual. If you need an extra.