Lets racing time

Ok, so we may have to delay the X4 race a little bit, unless we can find a 4th who can race the game on Sunday (around 2PM EST). If not, then we'll have to move the race to Tuesday. If Sunday doesn't work, does Tuesday for everyone?

I might could be your fourth on Sunday if you still need someone. I'll try a test recording tomorrow just in case. Been a while since my last romp with X4.

I should be available at that time on Sunday, but I haven't even set up a PS1 emulator on my 3 year old computer yet(not to mention I haven't done PS1 recording ever), and never played X4 in my life, so I think anyone else would be a better bet.

PS1 emulation/recording is more of a pain than you might think. Anyone wanting to participate who hasn't done it before should definitely get that sorted out and tested well in advance. I found that I needed to switch to screen region capture software since ePSXe would lag horribly with Fraps running.

I'll play around with it tonight and see what I figure out. If I remember right, even setting up the emulator is a pain in the butt.

Likewise, I found out that I could only do it through a streaming service and then uploading it to YouTube. Hypercam screws up the emulator something fierce. And those of you who are interested, I need to know soon if you are able to record it before we decide who our fourth will be.

Last time I recorded SNES, I used Open Broadcaster, combined with the zsnes emulator, which turned out to give me no problems at all, once set up right. Had no disappearing footage, no desync issues or anything else I've experienced with Hypercam or other recording software. It also records Minecraft pretty nicely for me, and probably other PC games as well(not really tried it out that much yet)
Any experiences using that program to record PS1 emulators?

Speaking of which, which one is the best PS1 emulator today. Still ePSXe?

ePSXe is the only emulator that I've found that can run MMX4 at all.

I agree. You thought Whispy Woods and Lololo were mean on Extra Game? You should see what Kracko becomes. He is no longer the nice friendly Kracko you thought you knew.

I kind of prefer races where the racers swear in frustration a lot over the ones where they competently speed through.

I just recorded about 2 hours worth without trouble (30 minutes of idling on the intro movie and the rest me struggling through most of the bosses, definitely need to practice). Emulator hiccups a little from time to time, but very playable. Happy to throw my hat in the ring if you'll have me.

Ok, so looks like at 2PM EST on Sunday, Nov 3rd, the following people will be racing Mega Man X4:

Me
Brickroad
Ossobucco (AKA Jasu Bakuhatsu)
and jpfriction

I am going to need your Skype info (Except for Brickroad)

It also looks like enough people would be interested in a second heat of the game, for those of you who aren't able to join us on Sunday.

The X4 race video is almost finished. I'm looking over the current draft for errors, and if it checks out then it'll be ready for processing. If someone can PM me the keys to the Racing Time account before then, I'll be able to start uploading as soon as it's finished.

Excellent, thanks again for volunteering for the processing. Hopefully it wasn't too much of a hassle.

It was a pretty big hassle, but I think it turned out quite well. Putting together future races will probably take a lot less time now that I've learned how to do everything.

The X4 race is now finished and ready to upload; I just need to get the Let's Racing Time password from somebody.

Sending a PM.

Apparently the account gave Jasu some extra hoops to logging in, which luckily I was able to help with.

If anyone has the same issue and needs the account's recovery email address, contact me.

I haven't had any problems logging in

I think the hoops are for any time there's a login attempt from a radically different place. When I logged into the account the first time it I remember having to answer an extra question or two. After that though it was gravy.

Has anyone tried to see if it would be better to record all of the audio in one Audacity track and then record the video with no audio and use some sort of visual que for syncing? I think the most distracting thing we've run into so far is when the audio gets out of sync and people start talking over each other or when one person loses footage and we have a missing person in the conversation.

I would think it would be better (not necessarily easier) to have a "master" audio track and then work with the video rather than having disparate audio and video from each racer. Plus, then you could have everyone record the call so you would almost be guaranteed at least one good recording with everyone's voice, regardless of what happens to the video.

It's something I'd be willing to test on some short races/test videos. I don't know dick about the editing process, so this may be too complicated and you can ignore me.

Something that actually occurred to me was that if someone doesn't mind playing with the game audio muted, they can stream the game and capture everyone's voices so you don't have to worry about dropped audio. Of course, this will only work in videos under 2 hours, unless you don't mind uploading the footage in parts.

I always record my voice and video separately and put them together myself before I send the video file off to the person putting the race together, to make sure everything is in sync. It is extra work though.

It's worth noting that with OBS you don't actually have to stream to record. There's options in there to just record footage and save it to your hard drive.

My knee-jerk reaction is that I don't like the idea of being handed a single audio track instead of separate ones, because while that might mitigate the issue of dropped audio, any issues that are present will be that much harder to isolate and fix. But I've also never tried it, so I could totally be wrong on that! I would be game to do a little testing and see how it pans out. I can't shoulder the burden of recording the audio though. My connection is far too inconsistent for that, as I'm sure most of you have noticed at one point or another.

Well, if you use Audacity as suggested, it basically takes all of the separate audio tracks and "layers" them together. If whoever's compiling everything gets the Audacity project file (as in, the .aup file, not an exported .mp3 or .wav or whatnot), then opening the file should show the separate layers, which can be adjusted how he or she sees fit.

Alternatively, something one of you guys can do is get an extra person, who isn't racing, to basically be the race's recorder. He or she would be in the call and simply record all of the audio. Then at the end, everyone would send the soundless video files to the recorder, and they'd line it up with the audio file they have.

I thought of a different way to handle a second Disney Afternoon race.

Make it timed, and make it a 'stages cleared' counter.

Racers could play any game in any order, and the goal is to complete the most stages in the time limit. So people could play the games they want to start with and feel less stressed about having to beat THAT ONE GAME. A hard limit of 90 minutes would mean the video wouldn't get too long.

For a while I was doing that in addition to recording audio with the game footage.

Of course I forgot about it when I ran the Kerby race and lost my footage.

I don't know how many of you guys subscribe to me on da youtubes, but I put out a video not to long ago promising the long lost Super Mario World Race on Christmas Day!

Well that is today and true to my word here be da video!



HAPPY FESTIVUS / CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Great race to watch.
Lost Vikings also hits me as a possible game to do within a 60 minute limit. It's too long for four players doing a full clear, but 60 minutes can showcase a lot of the game, show some great competition and epic failings. And at least I'm sure I would beat Shadow Warrior Luke at that game

Considering doing postcommentary on my own footage from the lost Allstars race now, as I feel it was a fun race, at least from my part(considering I won the damn thing by the time the other guys barely finished SMB using savestates).
I'll cut the Lost Levels part completely, as that's just me dying over and over for five levels until the race stopped.
But I don't know... would 90 minutes commentary with broken english be appealing to listen to, even if I'm able to script more, edit down and retake whenever I mess up?

It could be good English practice?

Okay. Since the All-Stars race was lost, there has been a lot of buzz about re-doing it. Since it is still the holidays I was thinking about the 1st full week of January, like say on the 10th or so.

As for the games: SMB1, SMB2, SMB3 and SMW. Yeah I added SMW to the lineup because with warps it is a pretty fast run, and I have a version of All-Stars that includes it as well.

As for the rules: No using save states, No using Game Genie or Pro-Action Replay codes. Other than that I say anything goes, including glitches that are present in the game itself. Just no outside tampering. I was also thinking about putting a time limit on the race, say 2 hours or so. If no one has finished by that time the person who has gottten the farthest wins. With a time limit like that though, I think we have to lock the games in order, so SMB1 first, then SMB2, etc.

For special benefit, I am also going to make a little cheat sheet that shows the locations of the relevant warp zones in each game. In case you forget, but I highly recommend practice before attempting this race. Or you will end up like me. XD

So far I have myself and Shadow Warrior Luke as wanting to race. I am pretty sure Dadaph, Spoony Bard, and Red Silvers are interested too. The race has 6 slots, and I can sit it out and just host it if we have 7 peoples. However more than that and we will need to do 2 heats.

Possible Racers:

Narishm
Shadow Warrior Luke
Dadaph (not confirmed)
Spoony Bard (not confirmed)
Red Silvers (not confirmed)

depending on when you do it I'd be interested. Not sure if I can get through World quickly, so I might need to take a practice run or two at that one.