Skipping Assualt Ship and Kashyyyk Intros
6 years ago

It seems that there is a way to skip the black text intro screens. All you have to do is alt-tab out of the game window, wait a few seconds, then go back in and it brings you immediately to the next level. I've had the game crash on me while doing this, but it would still be faster to just restart the game and do it again than to wait for the whole thing.

France

it doesn't work for me, either alt+tab or alt+escape (and i'm playing in windowed mode)

Edited by the author 6 years ago

I was using full-screen mode, which may make a difference, since it seems to reload the graphics or something when I do it. When I have time, I'll do some more experiments with it.

Edited by the author 6 years ago

Yea, I tried it, and it only works in full screen mode.

France

out of curiosity, how do you explain that ?

I checked the game object for the title cards, and it seems that the script that controls the title cards has a check to see if the screen is visible, and if it's not, it just skips to the end. Convenient. So it seems that playing in full screen mode is simply faster.

France

so: it works in windowed too if I hide the window in the taskbar. But it's not like the scene is skipped, it's rather accelerated, I still need to wait 15 sec to be sure I'll get to the next level when showing the window again. But I guess it's still better than 50 sec

Australia

I'm not sure if this is a legit strat due to hardware possibly making a difference, but it works in some other places, like in frontline, and bridge, possibly others then.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
France

wow...

not everywhere everywhere though, as said in a previous thread some waiting phases are either conditioned by a timer of a chain of dialogues, and this doesn't work for the timer method

I'll add that's it's really much more convienent to use alt-tab in fullscreen mode rather than windowed mode, because the game window captures the mouse, so shortcuts like alt+tab, alt+escape, alt+space+n, alt+space+u aren't effective, and also you can only hide the window during the loading screens, once the game runs the cursor is definitively captured and hitting the 'hide' window button will do nothing but hiding the cursor instead.

Edited by the author 6 years ago

First, if I had to guess, hardware doesn't have anything to do with it. I believe the game simply has points where it skips things of the window isn't visible. I'll check out those other points you mentioned though.

Secondly, there are already skips that are dependant on hardware, or even things meant to be in the game, such as load times. Jumping over the barrier in heart of the machine is also not possible with low fps.

France

the strange thing is that it's not directly skipped, bur rather seems accelerated. For example, on the briefing of Frontline, if I alt-tab during the loading screen and wait 11 sec, the door will be open when I get the window back on display. But if I wait only 9 sec, I still have to wait for the end of the previous dialogue piece. :/...

also the game crashes if I try that on the final lines of the Final Strike

Australia

For me it's 4 to 5 seconds. (Timing the time I'm waiting on the Desktop) So it takes over double the time for your game to do...whatever it's doing.

Yea, it does seem to accelerate it. I looked into the game code but couldn't see anything obvious. I've been looking for other places this could be useful, and I'll post a list of all the places once I've checked everything

Territory - waiting for spider droid. Window has to be visible to trigger the gunship discussion. So after spider droid is dead, minimize for a few seconds, then maximize and minimize right after for a few more seconds. Can't skip any more after the "You boys are going to want to stand back" line. Saves about 10s. Jailbreak - waiting for barrier to be blown. Saves about 5s. Wrath of the Republic - end of level. Saves about 5s. Saving the ship - beginning dialogue. Saves about 7s. Rescue of Tarfful - waiting for demo spot. Saves about 2s. Bodyguards - End dialogue. Saves about 3s. Critical Strike - End dialoge. Saves about 12s. Frontline - Briefing. Saves about 22s. A Bridge Too Far - Briefing. Saves about 6s. Search and Destroy - Briefing. Saves about 5s. Search and Destroy - Briefing. Saves about 5s. Final Strike - End dialogue. Saves about 30s.

ISlide likes this
France

What are we doing with this ? I clearly don't save as much time on those, and I'm not happy with alt-tabbing the game on small sequences and count in my head when to restore it. Also my laptop is not powerful enought to capture the game with my native screen resolution, so it takes even more time for the computer to stretch and unstrech the display. But I'd embrace anything that speeds up the run, and I guess skipping the campaign intros, which are true dead times, is ok.

Also, skipping the Final Strike end dialogues ? how do you save 07 then ? (... no my true question was: "when do you end the timer, when the window is back up on display or sooner ?)

... this brings me to another quesion, why don't we merely pause the timer during the campaign intros ? (if the purpose is just to save time on the run, theis will lead to the same time save for everyone, and we could still skip it with alt-tab because we are speedrunners in a hurry)

Edited by the author 6 years ago

You are right in that it generally doesn't save much time. I've only been using it for the intros, final strike ending and front line briefing. I've also had the game crash when alt tabbing, so I don't want to do it too much.

If others want, I would be OK with pausing the timer during the intros, but that wouldn't be my preference. I would also be OK with either allowing it banning it altogether.

Australia

I think it's less problematic to just ban the trick, it gets messy otherwise. Although if ISlide wasn't using a laptop we probably wouldn't even know how this trick works, and would have used it. It's comparable to high fps, but I think that's just expected if you want to speedrun old games, not sure about this one, it's not something you'd expect.

Hm. It seems that it's not just cutscenes that go faster while the window is hidden. Your squad and enemies also move faster. But not yourself. You go the same speed.

I'm not sure what I think of it right now. It's not THAT messy, and there's only one or two places it really saves much time. I don't think that just pausing the timer for the intros makes sense, since it's not so much that I don't want the time to count as not have to wait through those cutscenes. I think I have a slight preference for keeping the status quo and allowing it, but I would be ok with banning it.

France

everything goes faster ? so, there are surely way more places to use this abuse, and that means it's even more obnoxious for me. I don't wanna alt-tab the game every 2 minutes.

I tested again, and you do in fact move significantly faster. I think I would support a ban as well, since I also don't want to alt tab every time I'm walking in a straight line. I would be in favour of only allowing it to skip the intro scenes, as they're long and I don't like waiting for them.

Too bad. It is a pretty cool trick, but I think it would be really annoying to alt tab all the time.

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