Star Wars X-Wing Alliance speedrun

[Thinkshooter]

Update:

The humble result of this forum discussion is the following Death Star II. Tunnel Speedrun video:

HD version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFzm0u5Oa9U

Standard version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVEiXBIUf4c&fmt=18

If you like this tunnel run, check out my Knights of the Old Republic run and my Hidden and Dangerous 2 run.

~

Original post:

Hello all. I'd like to discuss a new project with you, and I'm gonna need your help. I've been waiting for a while for someone to produce an X-Wing Alliance speedrun video. Or any speedrun in the X-Wing series. Well, I haven't found traces of such a thing, and I've sorta gotten into the speedrunning business recently, so I've run preliminary tests on XWA myself. Here are the results.

First, I want to gauge interest in this. X-Wing Alliance is an oldish game. Now that doesn't bother me at all, but I need to know whether the X-Wing series fan base is still big enough to 1) produce verifiers, and 2) display sufficient level of interest in the video. 1) is a live issue: I've recently submitted my Hidden and Dangerous 2 run which still doesn't have enough verifiers. I'm not gonna invest a lot of time in a game as long and complicated as XWA if I don't know for *sure* this time that there will be enough volunteers to verify it so it can be published. 2) is just as important: I won't work on this if barely anyone watches the end result.

For the above reasons, I ask that you make your voice heard on this forum, or contact me by other means, if you're interested in 1) or 2). I won't progress further than what you can find here if enough people are not really interested in this game any more. If interest is low -- no hard feelings, I'll just invest my time elsewhere. You'll see below however that I'm nost just rambling and this plan is not just a fanboyism or wishful thinking. I already made the initial detailed feasibility study.


Game choice

Why XWA? I really like the other sims in the series, especially X-Wing (the collector's edition for the updated gfx), also XvT and BoP. Well, the problem with X-Wing, even the collector's edition, is that it has a bit outdated gfx, and would probably not fit into the ~7-hour SDA suggested max timeframe. XvT and BoP have similar graphics, but are sometimes really annoying. Also, without a proper story line, they were a lot shallower. XWA has it all: the best gfx engine in the series, great story line, and, as you can see below, it *might just* fit in the SDA time limit.


Game length

I've played through XWA many times. The last couple of times with a speedrunner's attitude, keeping missions to the minimum length. My biggest question was whether it would be too long to publish on SDA. The longest game published here is around 8 hours, but that's probably an exception. It's hard to imagine that peeps would download e.g. a 10+-hour flight sim video. According to my semi-aggressive initial test, the 50 missions should clock in at just under 7 hours. (The game has 53 missions, but you can skip up to 3 rebel missions. Missing out on skippable content in a speedrun is evident.)

Thus, an XWA speedrun would be twice as long as my two other runs combined. And, the segments are a lot longer as well. These are important reasons why I won't progress further without feedback that this project has sufficient interest.


Entertainment value

When I first had the thought of speedrunning XWA, I thought it was a crazy idea for a couple of reasons. One, length -- see above. I didn't think that a game which keeps you busy for weeks can be gotten down to reasonable length. Two, I seemed to recall that many of the missions were fixed length. E.g. enemy entering at 2 minutes into the mission. Nothing you can do to speed it up. After the test, I found that although there *are* such fixed time intervals in most missions, there are loads more opportunities to speed up the game, and it's even possible to use this "downtime" to do something that will speed up whatever comes later. On many occasions, downtime can be avoided by knowing the mission well.

The third concern I had was that today's gamers are impatient. Not everybody has the patience to play or watch a game that doesn't provide instant fun, or if it makes them wait. Well, there's no way around it: this video would not be for impatient people When you need to get to a hyperbuoy that is 10 clicks away, you must wait that one minute to get there even at top speed. There's no going around this. I do have some ideas to make a few long and relatively uneventful journeys interesting though, as much as the game engine allows.


XWA upgrade project

This would probably come up at an early stage. Will I use the upgraded ship models in the video? Well, on the one hand, I'd love to. I really like those fancy models and they do improve the experience. But the XWAU project makes some *non-cosmetic* changes to some ships in XWA. It may not change *a lot*, but it does. To my understanding, that excludes an SDA speedrun. Please correct me if you have reason to think I'm wrong.

A side note: the loading of the new XWAU models make the first 1-2 seconds of each mission sluggish. Whenever a new model appears, it jerks the screen. This doesn't look good on a widely published video either. Let me know if you know of a fix.

In some cases, SDA allows cosmetic skin changes though. If someone solved the video jerk problem, and made sure that the skins don't change game behaviour in any way, I'm all ears. I'll attempt to get this thfough the site crew if that's the case.


Game mode

Normal difficulty. (Hard mode is considered, but only if it won't make the video significantly longer. To be tested.) All cheats are off, of course.

Several missions have the opportunity to call in reinforcements (Shift+S). Whenever that shortens the missions, I call them in. I do like the challenge without extra help, but this is a speedrun and time represents the most important extra challenge -- if a few extra fighters help meet that challenge faster, imho that must be done in this case.


Progress

It's possible to use a completed pilot file and rerun all missions from the historic missions chamber. The choice of ships, weapons and beams is much greater that way. You can make the ship faster by installing the beam weapon and never using it. Should a speedrun begin with a rookie pilot, just as during normal game progress, or can I use a completed pilot file? (I'm asking because in Star Wars Episode I Racer, the speedrunner races on all courses in the best vehicle that he got himself in a previous run.)

If this method *IS* allowed on SDA, I need to know now as there are significant speedups resulting from the full ship customization in the historic missions room.


Technical problems to solve

Ok, where do I begin. Running this Windows 95 game on a modern computer is a challenge of its own. Thankfully, I've managed to overcome all but the fanciest obstacles. If you can help with the outstanding issues, that'll make the end result better quality, and more pleasing to watch.

First of all, running this game on a modern computer isn't easy. If you've got one of the newer nVidia or ATI cards (which covers like 95% of video cards out there), the default setup won't let you play the game as intended. After reading various forums, it seems that Radeon HDxxxx cards won't play it at all. If you've got an nVidia 8xxx or newer (I have a 8400 based card), then you have the choice of using older drivers, in which case, the targeting box won't show up. Or, you can use new drivers, but then as soon as a backdrop image comes into view, all else disappears.

On my system, the combination of Vista32 and driver version 178.26 seems to have solved the above problems.

The next problem is recording. Once you start recording your gameplay with Fraps, it slows down to 5-6 fps which is unplayable and unwatchable. I've still made it work with a tool called D3DWindower (just google it). This tool runs full-screen DirectX apps in a window. If XWA is run in such a window, then recording won't make such a huge impact. I haven't found any other game recorders that would handle this game better. Recording analog TV output is not an option I believe.

D3DWindower has a side effect though. If you set it up so the flight engine works, it breaks all animations *outside* the flight engine. If the animations work, the flight engine doesn't. Now it's possible to record the animations separately and append the videos together, but *technically* this increases the number of segments from 50 to 100 or 150. Will they count these between-mission sections as separate segments then?

The next problem is resolution and anti-aliasing. The Concourse is 640x480, while the flight engine can be customized to run at higher resolutions. Recording and appending multi-part & varying resolution video files into a single video is cumbersome, and would make the end result vary in quality. (I.e. concourse in low res, flight in high res.) Therefore, the best option seems to be to use the 640x480 resolution all along. This makes the recorded video files more manageable in size, BUT limits the the resulting top video quality at HQ. No extreme quality, no insane quality. I tend to think that's an acceptable sacrifice in the case of a 7-hour video though. Let me know what you think.

Which brings up another problem. 640x480 is very blocky. However if I turn on anti-aliasing to fix that, all objects disappear when the flight engine kicks in. This is true in full screen and D3DWindower alike. Tested with other driver versions. Under Windows XP, anti-aliasing works but you have the missing targeting box problem... I even used a utility called nHancer to force various custom AA modes but no combination has solved this.

Anyway, cookies for anyone who can make anti-aliasing work on newer nVidia cards, without breaking anything else.

The problem might be that XWA runs at a 16-bit colour depth, while new nVidia cards need 32-bit depth to use AA correctly. If I force 32-bit depth, the game won't start and complains with a "Directdraw Init Failed at 2" message. If you know how to force 32-bit depth without inducing this message, let me know.

Mission clock. The mission clock is fast, compared to the actual video length. I *really* hope that's not because the game is slower on newer computers. If someone could test the game on an old system and let me know if the mission clock is in sync with a stopwatch, I'd appreciate it.

The last problem is fonts. The in-game fonts that ship with XWA display incorrectly on nVidia cards. There are 4 further font fixes available on LucasFiles. One of them works, but it's really ugly, at least at 640x480 resolution. There's a way to fix the original fonts *properly* with the XWA Dat Customizer utility. To be done.


A gameplay problem

Then there's something I don't understand about the game engine. I'm sure you remember the freighter ships (Corellian transports YT-1300 and 2000, called Sabra and Otana respectively, and the Millennium Falcon). The auto turret, activated by the F key, sometimes fires at targets non-stop, and sometimes just sluggishly. I haven't figured out what made that difference. Needless to say, this takes its toll on how fast you can finish a mission.

I've even fired up the Alliance Mission Editor called AlliEd, but I haven't found any mission settings that would slow down the automatic turret.

If you know the reason, please help me out. I'd like to make the speedrun video as good as possible.



Finally, I wanted to let you know that this video (if it ever comes out) won't be perfect. I'm not the best hotshot out there -- my strengths lie elsewhere. For example, I'm quite good at eliminating unnecessary elements while planning a mission.

See what I'm doing? I'm lowering your expectation so if the video *is* born and published, you don't discard it because I miss a few shots, for example. There, I'm glad we made that clear


Anyway, I'm waiting for your input. Please share your wisdom. If you do, and the game ever gets published, I'll give credit where credit is due.

Thinkshooter

[Thinkshooter]

I realize that my post above is quite long. To sum it up, here are my questions and requests:
- let me know if you can verify an XWA speedrun
- if you'd be interested in watching the run, please drop a note
- can you help make Anti-Aliasing work on an nVidia 8400 based card, without breaking anything else?
- would you download a roughly 7-hour video in extreme or insane quality? (We're probably talking 8 GB in IQ / XQ.) Or, would HQ be sufficient, at around half the size?
- can you suggest a better way to record the game?
- do you know, or can you find out, if the mission timer is always out of sync, or does the game actually run slower than intended on new systems?
- do you know of a way to avoid the initial jerkiness when displaying XWA-Upgrade models?
- can you tell me what makes the turret to fire in such a sluggish manner in some missions? E.g. in Prologue - Mission 6 - Rebel Rendezvous, or Battle 7 - Mission 3 - Phase 3.

These questions need official SDA answers:
- would the usage of the XWA upgrade project disqualify this run from SDA?
- is it OK to use a completed pilot file and speedrun this game from the historic missions room? Star Wars Episode I Racer seems to have been run that way.
- I may need to record those 5-second inter-mission sections separately. That's for technical reasons (game won't record properly...), not because I'm too lame to do a 5-second *AND* a 15-minute segment together. Will these count as separate segments or not?

Thanks, your input is appreciated!

[Defender]

Wow, X-Wing... I played the original (and the Imperial Pursuit and B-Wing expansions) as well as TIE Fighter (though not its expansion), but never got the collection or XWA. Therefore, I'd love to watch a run of the games, but I wouldn't consider myself suited to verify. I mean heck, look at my avatar

I'm sure High Quality would be fine.

I've never had good luck with Camtasia, but it's another option (I've had better luck with it recording applications running in windowed mode, so it might work for you).

I can't give you any official answers, but I would say that if the "XWA upgrade project" is more than just a cosmetic change, then it would invalidate the run. I would say that a completed pilot file would be allowed, but fall into a different category (like New Game+), since you have access to weapons you didn't the first time through. I would finally say that technical segments probably would not count as additional segments (though the penalty is only 0.5 seconds per segment... and in an 8 hour run, it won't hurt much anyway). There's also the option of creating an Individual Levels table (especially if you can replay levels easily in the simulator).

Good luck, and I hope there's interest in this series.

[HOC]

Interested in seeing and may be able to help verify. I don't think there's going to be much appeal, however. And I suspect it'll be very dull for the most part due to all the parts of the game just flying in circles waiting for a scripted event to occur at specific times.

Must ask, how's your accuracy (As a pilot. Nevermind turret)?

Do your game issues still occur without the XWA upgrade mod?

Turret - From my experiences with the game, there are just times when the freighter turrets will be either sluggish, or simply refuse to fire at all. I have never been able to find an answer as to why since the game's release.

[Thinkshooter]

I'm sure High Quality would be fine.

I've never had good luck with Camtasia, but it's another option (I've had better luck with it recording applications running in windowed mode, so it might work for you).

I can't give you any official answers, but I would say that if the "XWA upgrade project" is more than just a cosmetic change, then it would invalidate the run. I would say that a completed pilot file would be allowed, but fall into a different category (like New Game+), since you have access to weapons you didn't the first time through. I would finally say that technical segments probably would not count as additional segments (though the penalty is only 0.5 seconds per segment... and in an 8 hour run, it won't hurt much anyway). There's also the option of creating an Individual Levels table (especially if you can replay levels easily in the simulator).

I just realized there's one more reason for sticking with high quality. As resolution grows, the fonts get relatively smaller. The normal and low quality versions (which are like mandatory on SDA) will be increasingly impossible to read. So HQ it is!

Downloading Camtasia to see how it works with this game. I'll let you know how it goes.

I checked out the XWAU project FAQ and they actually mention which changes are more than cosmetic. They say here that they changed the Super Star Destroyer's length. If that is the only change indeed, that would be easy to eliminate: just don't install the SSD model!

If the project ever gets there, I'll run some tests. I'm concerned that even if they don't alter ship statistics, by changing the models, they may introduce e.g. new or different blind spots, which still alters the gameplay a bit. If that's the case, that would make comparison with someone else playing with the original models unfair.

[Thinkshooter]

Interested in seeing and may be able to help verify. I don't think there's going to be much appeal, however. And I suspect it'll be very dull for the most part due to all the parts of the game just flying in circles waiting for a scripted event to occur at specific times.

That's what I thought at first. But after recording an alpha version of the speedrun, I found there's very few of those cases. A typical example would be that you hyper into a new region and let's say it takes one minute for the enemy to arrive. I found that their arrival location is never random and you can use that one minute to get to their expected arrival and meet them. Shooting starts right away.

In some missions, you need to achieve goals to get the outgoing hyperbuoy. It's possible to learn the location of the buoy and hyper out a few seconds after that goal is accomplished. No downtime there either.

There are *very very* few cases when you literally have to wait for something to happen and there's absolutely nothing worthwile to do.

Now don't get me wrong, there are exceptions (and that's why I said it's not for impatient people), but not nearly as much as I thought. The worst examples with long downtimes are usually the longest -- these are the missions I skip.

In quite a few cases, after all goals are accomplished, you can just quit the mission without hypering back to the mothership.

For the above reasons, almost half the number of missions are around the 5-minute range.

Must ask, how's your accuracy (As a pilot. Nevermind turret)?

Do your game issues still occur without the XWA upgrade mod?

Turret - From my experiences with the game, there are just times when the freighter turrets will be either sluggish, or simply refuse to fire at all. I have never been able to find an answer as to why since the game's release.

Accuracy -- hard to tell without having seen anyone else play. If I'm in a B-Wing or a Y-Wing, even in my preliminary run, I could get down TIE fighters and interceptors with one shot in maybe 3 out of 5 cases. (That's with the laser and ion cannons linked.) But it's a speedrun and I only dogfight as much as absolutely necessary. In several missions, it's possible to achieve mission completion without much dogfighting, if any.

BTW, if you know of any XWA-related video, send me a link please!

I tried XWAU earlier, but not in my test speedrun. So any issues I had were with the original models.

[Thinkshooter]

I've tried Camtasia today but it's not better than Fraps. In fact, it doesn't even record *desktop* apps. It keeps crashing with a "Failed to resume recording: invalid configuration state" error message. I've tried with and without Desktop Manager, and "Run as administrator".

I've found a few X-Wing Alliance related videos on Youtube. They are mostly trailers and intros though; nothing so far that would demonstrate expert shooting skills. But I'll keep looking.

[HOC]

You sound confident enough to convince me it's worth checking out. And if memory serves me right, the times when you are waiting for something to occur at least have some amount of chatter to keep things from getting completely boring. And they could always be sped up by throwing power to the engines. 

I asked about accuracy because there are missions where it's simply going to be needed. At least, I would think so at the moment. Especially in the later Rebel missions, IIRC. TIE bombers usually just fly straight and asked to be blown up, just require an additional salvo or so over Fighters and Interceptors. But their torps on a defend a ship mission can be a pain in the ass. Especially at the wrong angle. And the Gunboats rarely are as easy going. Advanced you won't even need to bother with for the most part.

Freighter missions shouldn't be as much of an issue. Auto-turret does a great job (When it works) and anything straight ahead could easily be removed with a quick tap of the align lasers key or whatever it was called.

Maybe my judgement here is a bit too clouded though. I never really played any X-Wing mission with speed in mind. I always went for maximum kill count to fluff the numbers in the record. 

[ColonelFatso]

I would gladly watch, but I haven't beaten (or even played) Alliance so I would be totally useless for verification purposes.

[Thinkshooter]

I would gladly watch, but I haven't beaten (or even played) Alliance so I would be totally useless for verification purposes.

Thanks anyway! I don't mind if the watchers outnumber the verifiers as long as there's plenty of both...

On another note, I've run some new tests with the completed pilot file. I've replayed half the campaigns. Using the historic battles chamber, I could achieve a roughly 4-minute speedup in each campaign. (A campaign consists of 4-9 missions.) The speedup comes from the following factors:
- you can make your craft faster: simply select a craft with higher top speed, and / or select a beam weapon and redirect its energy to the engines. The beam weapon itself is occasionally useful as well.
- you can select more powerful warheads and bring down the enemy faster.
- you can select a craft with ion cannons and disable capital ships sooner than your team mates would.

There is a drawback in this game mode though (which must still be passed by the SDA crew!) and which may reduce the appeal of a speedrun. The historic chamber is not the normal game mode. I'm concerned that people would think the speedrunner had to augment his deficiencies with gadgets like custom warheads and beam weapons, rather than relying on skill to make use of a more limited craft.

What do you think? If you could download one of two speedruns, would you be more interested in the one that is half an hour faster, but which entails a custom game mode that players don't normally play and which utilizes custom craft setup? Or would you rather watch the one with the standard game progress where skilled use of limited craft is necessary? Let me know your opinion.


I've experimented with hard mode a bit as well. In some missions, it doesn't affect mission length much. In others, there's a 1-2 minute impact. A hard mode run with a completed pilot would clock in somewhere between a regular game mode run, and the completed pilot run on normal difficulty. "Hard mode" looks good on a speedrun description, but in this case, it doesn't seem to increase entertainment value that much, and the first XWA speedrun will be a gigantic effort as it is. So at this point I tend to think it's not such a great idea. But I haven't decided yet, so if you've got a compelling reason, I'm listening.

[Defender]

Sorry to hear about Camtasia not working... If it was a DOS game, I hear that DOSbox records just fine with FRAPS, but I can't really help out for this particular game. The gurus in the Technical Support forum might be able to help.

The more I think about it, the more I would discourage using XWAU. There are a lot of very old games on the site, and this IS an old game, so I wouldn't worry about prettying it up. Besides, anyone who originally played it will remember the old school graphics.

I would rather watch the game as you played through it the first time.

I would also support Normal difficulty.

[Thinkshooter]

The more I think about it, the more I would discourage using XWAU. There are a lot of very old games on the site, and this IS an old game, so I wouldn't worry about prettying it up. Besides, anyone who originally played it will remember the old school graphics.

The reason I've been considering XWAUpgrade and want to fix Anti-Aliasing so much is that this speedrun is sooo freaking long a project. It deserves good preparation. I don't want to finish it and realize at the end that it could have been made a lot prettier relatively simply.

[Thinkshooter]

And if memory serves me right, the times when you are waiting for something to occur at least have some amount of chatter to keep things from getting completely boring.

That's true. Another interesting option is to use the in-built film recorder (which requires the official 2.02 update) and maybe show what other ships are doing while I'm just flying straight.

Now filming each mission that way requires extra effort, and may create even more segments. (The latter because you can't start recording until you're in space, so flight would be recorded separately from the concourse and the hangar / ship selection.) But it would produce extra downloadable content which can be reviewed and played with.

Come to think of it, this may bring anti-aliasing one step closer. That's because we're decoupling the recording of the final speedrun video from my hardware. Action filmed with the in-built recorder can be played back on another computer.

I wonder if it's possible to record an XWA video with the original models, and replay it with the new XWAU models. Must test this!

[Bill]

- if you'd be interested in watching the run, please drop a note

Any chance of post a test video of the first level or something similar to help people answer that?

[SuperCoolAl]

I LOVE this game! I've beaten it and would certainly verify it and try to resolve your problems. Do you have the latest update installed?