Lets racing time

I wasn't specifically referring to that version of the game, I just assumed it was something everyone had played in one form or another.

I agree with all of this, although I think we each made a mistake or two in our pentathlons. Your Zelda challenge was incredibly hard for someone who had never played the game before, and my Ninja Gaiden and Punch-Out!! ones were also too demanding, though maybe not individually to the same extent. The best challenges should reward skillful or intelligent play, but not act as total roadblocks to players not experienced with a given game.

Of course, actually coming up with good challenges that meet all those criteria is pretty damn hard.

I think we both did about as good a job as could be expected. It was our first try!

While I still have nightmares about Bald Bull's terrifying eyelash-adorned schlong-head I had lots of fun on the Pentathalon and would love to play one again.

For what it's worth I've got I think four out of five challenges worked out for a save-state based NES Pentathlon Three pretty much nailed down (done a bit of playtesting myself and have the save states). Five is a bit more complex and I haven't gotten around to working on it yet.

Don't know when I'll get back to finishing it up and running it, though.

I think Zelda needed info on how to get a potion for a new player (possibly start with the letter, too) and it would have been pretty good. Ninja Gaiden was fine really in my opinion.

Punch Out was a problem because every fight is a puzzle so putting the challenge at the end of a circuit means you need to know a lot about the game.

I think the Zelda challenge was fine. Did another run the day after the race, and was able to clear it on my first try even without grabbing the potion. It's not that challenging once you remember/know the quickest way(which none of us really did). You don't even have to fight that many of the enemies, just run, most of the required doors are actually open.
We were a bunch of blind chickens running around farming for rupees while we could just have experimented on the dungeon layout until figuring it out. Which is probably what someone who had never played the game before would do. Even the Magic Sword isn't that important to have.

The fact that I won after spending forever trying to find the rupee caves Brickroad hadn't already visited, was just dumb luck.

As much as I goaded some of you guys your Tetris abilities, clearly the challenge as presented (beat level 9/5) was too hard. So uh, good on Mike.

I think some "score" challenges would be good, particularly for a game like Tetris. "Get 100,000 points" for example (maybe 200,000). Those kinds of challenges I like because it's a lot easier to tell who is "ahead" at any given time.

For what it's worth, the Zelda challenge played out exactly how I expected: people mostly got to that challenge quickly, then banged their heads against it for the bulk of the race.

The most important thing is that we got some fun footage out of it, though. As unfair as it might have seemed to the players at the time, the viewers mostly thought it was a hoot, so I take that as an indication to have more Zelda-Level-6 style challenges in the future.

Ditto here. They are probably the most fun thing I've done in the playingvideogamesontheinternet world

This, except less concrete. I am *probably* able to do this, but my schedule is in a constant state of flux and I've never done streaming of any type before.

That said, I think a stream race would be lots of fun if we could figure out a good way to stream and still get the final product like we do now. Not sure if twitch video is good enough and/or in a format that could work for that.

You can't download video from twitch. What you can do is upload from twitch directly to YouTube, then download from YouTube. This only works for videos <2 hours though.

blah, that's lame.

I know that I managed to get streaming and recording to work at the same time, but it's finicky as hell, so probably not worth the trouble.

Would work for a timed race, though (like Ancient Cave).

I only mention it because streams can be a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you have an active chat room. I would watch a live stream race if I were around.

But...isn't that effectively the same thing as streaming? Or am I missing something?

it's shockingly harder!

You need to get yourself some kind of screen recording software and test the hell out of it for A/V sync issues.

Best thing to do is make some short test videos, and if those look good, then you need to do a two-hour recording and check the end for sync issues. Just start the recording, walk away, and then come back and do some sync testing near the end. If you are dropping frames then you will be off by up to a minute after a couple hours! It doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be pretty close so your commentary isn't crazy off from your actions.

I'd definitely be interested in playing through some more pentathlons, as long as the timing fits with my schedule. I'm gonna have to go through all the pain of getting my recording stuff set up again, though, because I've changed computers since the last round that I did. What a pain.

Important detail for folks who want to join in on races: you have to record YOUR VOICE ONLY along with the video of the gameplay, and they have to stay synched for potentially several hours. You don't want to record the game audio and you don't want to record anybody's voice except for your own, 'cause that will cause annoying echoing in the final product. As for long test recordings, I recommend the intro loop to Mega Man 4, which you can let play for a few hours. Come back at the end, change the game to something else and speak while starting the new one up, then you'll know if you've desynced when you watch the playback of your recording.

Mega Man 2 is my go-to. I usually will just let it play for a couple hours and then start a game and play a random level.

You guys could stream a race, if everyone was just streaming simultaneously, and people watched it in MultiTwitch. Piecing the footage together for a cohesive video, later, is a different story. Could still be done the same way it gets done now, however.

Considering the hard time some folks have had just keeping things from getting desycned or losing their audio or what have you, adding in multi-streaming on Twitch into the mix sounds like overcomplicating things and risking screwing up the important bits even more for practically no gain.

Yeah, being able to watch it live might be fun, but how many people would actually do it to make all the hassle worthwhile?

Why would twitch enter into it at all? All that's doing is making it so your screen is streaming live. You can just mute everyone's stream, and do the audio through skype the same way they do it now. The only purpose twitch serves is that people can watch it, live.

I'm not familiar with using Twitch to stream anything or how much memory it uses, but still, you'd be surprised at how even the smallest thing could screw up the audio sync for some people. If using Multitwitch to livestream a race is something we want to attempt then everyone participating should probably try recording while streaming for an hour or two first to make sure it doesn't have any issues.

Is it possible to have Twitch just stream a portion of your screen? I dunno how everyone else does it but my videos for Let's Racing Time were all recorded with the emulator windowed.

It's less Twitch and more the program you use to stream. Much like how I use Hypercam for races, I use a program called OBS to stream. OBS has a couple of options, you can stream your entire monitor, you can stream a specific window, or you can stream a game window (I think it detects DirectX or something). When I streamed the first two Talking Time games, I had it windowed.

I can't comment on Multitwitch, I didn't know that was a thing.

multitwitch is just a site that tiles multiple twitch streams on one page. It doesn't cause any burden on the users' end.

Twitch will let you export to youtube, which can be used for compiling after the fact, but there's apparently a 2-hour cap.

It would only be worth it if we had a group of folks who would actually watch the stream, though. I'm not sure what the viable number viewers would be for us to bother trying it.

I would suggest if we DO give it a go that we do a repeat race so we aren't crushed if the whole thing falls apart, hahaha.

So would we need to run OBS as well as Hypercam/whatever we use to record at the same time? Or would we be able to pull a clean copy of what we recorded from Twitch?

If we do this, I second starting with a second heat of a previous race, it might be a good experiment.

All multitwitch is, is you entering the names of multiple streams at once, and they put them all in the same window. That way you don't need ot have a bunch of tabs to flip through.

I should point out that it doesn't have to be OBS, I know of another called Xsplit, it just so happens that OBS is completely free whereas Xsplit has certain features locked behind a pay wall.

Spoony, you wouldn't have to record your screen at all if you're streaming. Twitch stores your stream and gives you the option to send it directly to YouTube. We already share our race videos via YouTube anyway. In essence, it would be cutting out the middleman.

It wouldn't even be an issue for >2 hour races. Twitch lets you crop recordings however you want (called "highlights") and then upload those to YouTube as well. So a full race could just be sent over in 2-hour chunks.

The main issue I see with streaming races is there just isn't the audience for it. Maybe one day when LRT has 50,000 subscribers and a big enough racing community that new races are going up every week, I could see it happening. But right now TT's most popular streamers are only pulling 20-30 viewers, so we'd really only be doing it to say we did it, and I don't think that's much of a reason.

It could be a more convenient option for recording if you're having trouble with codecs and stuff.

That sounds like the most compelling arguement to use Twitch right now, yeah.

Though would it also mean people might get a partial sneak-peek if they tune in on a racer's channel while a race is going on? Is that something we want, or do we not care? I rather like the surprise of finding out who won once a race is put together, myself. Also it could spoil Pentathalons if there's a second heat planned.