Hey there! It took up a lot of courage to sign up for this site, but I'm glad I did. Some short formalities are I'm Jordan, you can call me Jordy, and I'm a 20 year old woman.
I say I'm newish to speedruns, because looking back I think informally ran Portal 2 for a while. It was the 360 version, and I would play every day and using all my own techniques, I managed to get my time to under 2 hours. It's not much, but for 14 year old me, I was proud.
Anyway, I watched last AGDQ and decided to try to pick up FF7 PC, because the run seemed fairly simple! I've practiced and have confidence up to the Guard Scorpion fight, but sadly I had controller issues and had to stop for a few months (I am not a PC gamer, so using the keyboard was foreign to me and was not working out no matter how hard I tried). I recently resolved my controller issues, but now I have to relearn the first 20 minutes of the game. I do have a guide I'm following, both a written and visual one, and I'm excited to learn the rest of the game.
I understand that a large portion of running games is streaming or recording as proof, but I sadly cannot do that. My laptop is sadly a hunk of garbage (I was actually genuinely surprised it could run not only FF7 but Sonic Adventure 2) with only about 4 gigs of ram on a DDR3. I've attempted to use Xsplit and OBS in the past, but they're so demanding they would frequently freeze up all my other applications or just straight up crash the laptop. My net connection is also not good, randomly dropping to less than 2mbps download and 700kbps upload. There's no reason for these drops to happen, and I'm hoping to get it fixed soon, however.
I'm afraid that any runs I do will be invalid because of my inability to record. It also prevents me from sharing my runs with other members of the community and asking for advice or new strategies. I still desperately want to get involved in the community and I'm anxious that I won't be able to.
Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated (whether it be for running FF7 or getting involved in the community) and I'm really looking forward to learning the rest of such a great RPG.
My laptop was very old, and streaming was near impossible due to the CPU being underpowered. OBS Classic and Xsplit were too much for it to handle, but I was able to make local recordings using OBS Studio (which seemed to put less pressure on the CPU). I would recommend giving it a download and seeing if you can record using that.
The only other alternative that comes to mind is a new computer unfortunately. Let me know how it goes, and welcome to Speedrun.com!
Yeah, recording uses less resources than streaming does. You can also less with the settings to lower the quality of your recording.
You want the best quality possible, but even a 240p video will work as proof.
Hypercam 2 can be good for low end devices. with control over compression quality and limiting FPS it can be really good. also before playing games put graphics down as possible, and make ur windows theme basic.
theres loads of tutorials and videos and guides on how to optimise hypercam and windows together
I second Hypercam, my PC is very very low end (1 GB RAM, windows XP) but Hypercam doesn't slow my runs unless I close a tab or something like that.
I never stream anything unless I've connected an ethernet cable. Wifi is convenient if you're just browsing web pages, but good old cables are far more reliable and generally faster.
As far as recording, there's nothing that isn't possible if you're creative enough. If you have to, just aim a video camera at the screen. No need for all this fancy software if your computer can't handle it. If speedrunning has taught me anything, it's that there are always multiple ways to approach a problem.