Refer to this guide first: https://www.speedrun.com/gunmetal/guide/qdlf3
Ask any questions about getting the game to work in this thread. I'll delete any new threads that try and duplicate troubleshooting efforts.
I'm not a technical wizard when it comes to this stuff, but I've messed around with old games long enough to possibly be helpful here. Hoping to get more people interested in helping out too, eventually.
UPDATE: I PUT THE CUSTOM .INI FILE IN RESOURCES SO YOU SHOULD STILL READ THE BELOW FOR INFO BUT I AM SAVING YOU A FEW STEPS: https://www.speedrun.com/drbrainar/resources
So for awhile, I had been working with someone to try and fix the dumb issue of the flickering texture that occurs from utilizing the QS/QL trick, but we both got busy/distracted and I feel like any day now someone might try touching this game again (lol, I know, but games of mine nobody ever touched randomly got runs late last year so I'm anxious), so in absence of a proper fix for the QS/QL flicker, I am from this day forward implementing a new, kind of annoying rule based on a weird engine exploit I discovered.
So firstly if you plan on doing Any% with this game, it is required to edit the spore.ini file and add MaxPlayers=0 to the [Engine.GameInfo] section of the .ini file, otherwise the game will actually crash after a number of saves. This has been allowed, in fact required, for runs even prior to [today].
Now the second thing you need to do for a run to be verified, is under the [Engine.Engine] section of the .ini near the top, is you change the Console line, from Console=Spore.SPConsole to Console=Engine.Console. Doing this will change the function of the game a little. For some reason, the Console engine selected for the game changes menu functionality and also the QS/QL screen defaults to that used for Unreal, without a hideous flashing background.
The one downside, and reason I didn't really want to make this a requirement until now, is that now the only way to get into the game is to go into the ingame console (~) and type "start level001". I will, for runs done for this dumb workaround, allow for time to start the moment you leave the console prompt, as it steals all inputs while open. My old run is being grandfathered into this though I plan to eventually try and PB again when I'm feeling up to it.
Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope to eventually have a mod made to remove the hideous QS/QL screen bullcrap (and when that happens I will no longer require this rule, it will instead be that you need to have the mod installed). In the meantime, this is the only way to speedrun the game without it being a seizure warning, or banning the QS/QL exploit which I know is not really an option for a Unreal 1.0 game like this. I merely wanted to get this nonsense out of the way.
PS: No, there's no discernible difference between any of the player characters beyond their voice lines and walking SFX. If the QS/QL thing could be fixed without the workaround, players who want to would actually be able to select their player. I don't know what the game's intended launch command may be to select your player, or if it was only coded into the menus which become broken from doing that second .ini edit.
With the recent entry into the Sniper speedrun scene of runner DVark09, it has been learned that with an uncapped framerate, Sniper is not only (so far from what we've seen) stable still, but combining this with crouch bound to the mouse wheel makes for an OP form of crouch flying that can even overcome falling, allowing for flying underneath maps and crouch spamming to get close enough to a room to then QS/QL faster than was doable in the past.
Crouch spamming bound to mouse wheel is still pretty OP if your framerate is capped, but the distinction here is mainly in altitude recovery, because when you fall with a capped framerate, it's been found to be basically impossible (or at least extremely hard) to recover your flying crouch even with fast spamming on the scroll wheel.
Anyways, the main takeaway here is that Sniper appears to be the first major Lithtech engine game, pre-Jupiter EX anyways, to be pretty stable with higher framerates. Even when it becomes a bit easier to quickly set up uncapped FPS for others, it seems best to keep the uncapped FPS runs that utilize crouch spamming with an uncapped FPS in mind, separate from traditional any% runs that either didn't utilize fast crouch spamming with uncapped FPS in mind, or were unaware of it... Which is basically the case with every run prior to the recent one by DVark09.
𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐏𝐒 𝐫𝐮𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝/𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠: https://www.speedrun.com/sniper_path_of_vengeance/guide/i39j2
In light of how stupid this game has became to run recently for the QS/QL tech, I'm officiating with this post the ability to go into the autoexec.cfg and rebind the QS/QL keys to whatever you wish.
I have two things I've been primarily interested in, and as of me writing this, they have not yet been implemented:
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Fixing the Messages system so that it functions better. Primarily the fact we can't delete messages and conversations, or how the page seems to refresh every time a new message is posted. In fact, I don't believe we can block having messages either.
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Support for the WebP image format, static ones at least. I had asked in the past prior to the change in ownership of the website, and I ask again hoping to get more attention on that as a longterm goal for optimizing the website as much as possible.
Thought I'd share this. Faithful-ish remake of the original game, though they made their own original dog character, not Snoopy, but they still called their remake Snoopy.
Okay, for Stroll I've retimed the two WR runs as best as I currently can without doing an audio check like I'm suggesting, and unless I'm off in any way, it currently seems that Azanguru still holds the WR over newcomer shoko by ~50ms, which is pretty insane if you ask me.
I'm relying on a less accurate method of at least tracking for camera movement when you hit the exit, but I'm not sure ATM if control is lost a frame before the camera starts to get detached from the player, or a frame afterwards. It is also a method dependent on the angle in which you approach the exit, and on Azanguru's run it's actually not as easy to spot the exact frame the camera is unlocked from the player, as it is in shoko's run.
Sound is still the best reference sadly, and I promise to come back later and check that over again as that will give a better indication of just exactly what each time is down to the millisecond. Also it's not exactly useful for this particular game, but I used this utility to try and get the best indications of each time: https://mattbraddock.com/yt-frame-timer/
In light of a recent run that is a perfect tie with the last WR when you ignore milliseconds, I've realized the need to finally activate milliseconds for this leaderboard. I apologize in saying that for the time being (heh, time), I'm gonna try and figure out a way of properly retiming every run so that the exact point in which the runs start is accounted for.
I hope I specified this rule somewhere, but pretty much time starts and ends with sound cues. Selecting your snake and the grunt noise it makes starts time, and the sound of hitting the final exit for each respective category is the time end. Naturally, this is a little hard to time for normally and as a recent runner learned, the ASL is close to perfect but off by just a hair. So I suggest doing the stupid thing and checking out your run audio with something like audacity to figure out the exact points.
Sorry for the extra hassle now, but this is a game with a short run that is gonna get competitive now and then, timewise.
I was wanting to ask if SpongeBob SquarePants: 3D Obstacle Odyssey (https://www.speedrun.com/sb3doo/full_game) could be labelled as both a Modification and Fangame, and also if it can technically be considered apart of the "series" from which the base game originates, Best Friends (https://www.speedrun.com/bestfriends)? I know it's already lumped in with the Spongebob series games proper, so I'm not sure if a game can be apart of multiple series or not.
Can WebP support be added to the site? Static WebP at least.
Ah, I understand. Thanks!
Hi, requesting that this game be labelled a fangame,
Well there's been a new trick discovery by me, myself and I. Awhile back I had this weird instance happen on level 1 where the level autocompleted the moment I killed the target, and I wasn't sure why. Turns out, you simply have to fly over the voice line triggers near the start of the level to execute the autocomplete glitch.
Not sure how high up the voice line triggers are along the Y axis, so I try to just get high as I can near the start of the level and hover over to an invisible box overlooking the bridge (meant to keep the player from going OOB normally, though obviously we can get past that). Possibly there's a set height you can eyeball to fall away from the triggers while still being over the bridge.
The small timewaste to fly past the triggers is more than made up for by the immediate autocomplete of course, meaning we're no longer at the mercy of enemy positions, or the position of the target for that matter as we can go right up to him, and shoot him as soon as our weapon is active. RNG is no longer a thing in this run.
Well, aside from maybe the position of your contact under the bridge. If that guy is close to either ends of the tunnel under the bridge, you can save a little time by flying up over the bridge without cancelling out the conversation to gain the sniper rifle. I think I show this off in my current PB.
Personally I'd vouch mainly for bringing back the unscaled tiling of backgrounds (tile backgrounds option basically), as the removal of that feature has kind of hurt the theme design I had going originally on a couple leaderboards, and making a new large image replicating the effect will have space and scaling issues.
Also, MLSTRM is right, it is weird to make it mandatory to only use one viewing mode over the other to get themes. I think it would be wise to have theme viewability as separate from day/night mode.
Sorry to double post but one issue that has immediately arisen for me personally was that I had actually previously used a small tiled image to create a patterned effect appropriate to the game I made it for, but now that the theme system defaults to stretching an image out only, my illusion is completely ruined.
I can counter that by noting I had checked one of my leaderboards that had not been touched since the revision happened, before I had applied a new theme color for it, and it had loaded it's background. However, you are correct that setting a theme color seems to correct the issue in most cases.
Apart from one of my leaderboards I've tested so far, I've been having trouble reimplementing my wallpapers. They're not loading, and I've tried a few things like using a .png as opposed to when I originally used .jpg files.
EDIT: Want to note that other things haven't been loading either, like custom logos. I can't really tell why some of my themes have gone back to working "fine" while some aren't loading at all despite appearing on the edit theme page.
Also, has anyone else felt it's hard to read text with night mode. I am a night mode user and ofc it being tied into being able to sometimes see themes, if they aren't broken, means it's necessary for me to enable it regardless. But I actually had to enable my one addon, Dark Reader, on speedrun.com and it's able to better render the page for me, and I don't have to stare as long at a page to read stuff. Here's some comparison screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/TPquRe3
I'm a little sad about losing out on theme customization to the level we had it before, I had worked extra hard on the themes for my leaderboards that I feel it's a tragedy to lose out on that work and not even have backups. But, I would be happy if we could at least see our custom logos be restored because I never thought to back mine up.
