i'm pretty sure it would be okay to submit the run with the phone recording, although i'll probably do a quick retime on the run afterwards just in case. as for if it would be okay to submit the run without the phone recording, i'd have to see what the partially frozen livesplit window actually looks like during a run to judge more confidently.

from my experience, i have two suggestions: -record with desktop capture instead of game capture. you won't be able to have the livesplit window shown in the recording, but if you're on the BFG version (without the 640x480 resolution toggle turned on) then you'll at least be able to see the livesplit window alongside the game while you're playing it. if you do want to properly record it with a non-desktop capture setup, then you'll have to use option 2, which is -use a virtual machine. i use virtualbox personally, but there's also vmware which i havent really looked into as much. with a VM you can record the game without obs showing a black screen, and also have the livesplit window alongside it as well with a proper game capture-based recording setup. the resolution will be slightly shrunk, but there's a post in the i spy treasure hunt forum on how to fix that. hope this helps at least a bit

My thoughts on this from doing I SPY runs on a virtualbox virtual machine: The screen size being shrunk to a small box is not abnormal. However, I noticed from the screenshots you sent that the box the game is showing in is quite a bit smaller than it is for me when i'm playing. To my knowledge, the only way to make it bigger is to go into your pc's display settings and change it to a smaller display resolution (i use 1366x768, and for an example of how much larger that makes the window you can view my current all rounds WR for I SPY treasure hunt). Hope this helps.

just got around to updating the category so that now there's a distinction between runs that use the CD Rom version and runs that use the Big Fish Games version

personally i wouldnt say there's exactly enough of a distinction for it to be made into a seperate category, but it's definitely fine to do runs of either game seperately on the gamepack and submit runs of them to their respective categories. same goes for the gamepack on the wii as well

late response but, since this post i have updated the rules for this game to include proper timing rules, as well as added another category by the name of "All Riddles" to give some more variety to the game here

Good to know. If I ever get the DVD version i'm 100% going to try and beat your time.

A day ago i made my first game request, but forgot to read the site rules. Earlier today it was rejected because of the rule in relation to how requests work for games in specific series. I then went to contact the series moderator, only after realizing that you can't view past requests once they've been rejected. Because of that, the message i sent to the series moderator was a version of my request done to the best of my memory, and i'm worried that it's less likely to be accepted now because i might have forgotten key details. I don't know why there doesn't seem to be anything on this site to let me view a game request after its rejection, and if anyone knows the reason, let me know.

Upper Update: I figured out a potential solution. I changed the microsoft game capture audio quality setting from 128kbps to 96kbps and checked the "record game audio only" option. I don't know which one of these did it. The testing i've done as of now is for a 30 minute game run, and i have yet to test it on longer runs. I hope that i don't have to post an even upper update than this post being currently the uppest of updates, but anyway here's some cons & pros.

Cons: audio is a bit crummstier still can't record timer (read my previous post in this section for more info)

Pros: as of now i can actually do runs of pc games now without the fear of people rejecting them because of technical issues the test run i did ended up being a pb by like 20 seconds

after posting this i realized that in the recording, there's a 4 minute period where the audio goes into nightmare crust mode with echoing and stuff and i don't know why that is. in summary, bad pc

Update: i've looked more into OBS and realized that i was speaking too generally about it. There's actually a lot of settings to change, but i haven't been able to find a good configuration. The main problem i've run into is the recording encoder. When i have it set to the H.264 encoder, the game runs slower but the output looks how it should. When i have it set to the x264 encoder, the game runs at an excellent speed but the output has an audio delay and bad framerates. So essentially, the better the game runs the more the output suffers. If anyone else here has more experience with OBS, i'd like it if you could help me figure out what to do to get things running at a playable rate, and at a watchable rate. (quick edit: if you're curious, the games i'm trying to run are old PC games that i can only run on a virtual machine (virtualbox, to be exact). i haven't tried recording any other games because of a different technical problem that i won't post about until this one is resolved.)

In response to Quivico's question, i currently have the framerate settings set to the lowest they can be set to (30fps). I don't know how to change resolution or bitrate because microsoft game capture is extremely limited. In response to TaruDuck's question, i'm not exactly knowledgeable enough to know about PC specs, but what i can say is that the space left on my hard drive is currently 32.2GB/432GB. OBS didn't run well for me even when i first got this computer, so i don't think that information is that helpful.

I agree, although there's no point in doing a speedrun of a made-up game because that would be impossible to replicate for other runners to play.

Sorry for not specifying, but the reason why i don't use OBS is because it has an even worse audio de-sync for me, and effects the game's speed to a small degree. I've also tried XSplit, which is fine except for the fact that it outputs extremely crusty framerates (which i would consider worse than audio de-sync).

Does this mean that if a category for an I SPY book is made, it could be made as a sub-category for its game counterpart? I never thought about it that way.

Isn't there like, a speedrun category on this website for sharpening pencils IRL? I'd think speedrunning a hidden object book would be more reasonable than that.

Currently for recording method i'm using Microsoft Game Capture, the built-in recording function on windows 10. It's the only software i have that produces somewhat acceptable results (and doesn't make the game run at any lower speed). The one problem with it is that, the longer the recording, the more the audio becomes increasingly more de-synced. At around the 30 minute mark is when it becomes intolerably noticeable, and around the 1 hour mark the audio is de-synced by almost 10 seconds. I have two questions about this, and you can answer either one. Question one: how acceptable is it to upload a run with the audio de-sync in it? And question two, which i would like the answer to even more: is there a method i can use to fix this through editing/post-processing?

I think that logically, the proper move to do here is for me hold off further discussion on this thread, and if i feel like this discussion should go any further i'll put together some form of proof-of-concept video. About the "what counts as finding an object" question, i think i'll figure out something eventually, but if it ends up being too specific of a solution then i might have to call this entire discussion off at the proof-of-concept stage. Also, i don't own a single book in the series, i've always borrowed them from the library (which i probably won't go to anytime soon). Don't expect updates on this in the near future (i don't know why you'd care, i don't really care that much either).

In summary, i consider this post to be in my top 3 list of the worst forum posts i've ever made.

Can't you memorize locations for the PC I Spy games too? I'm sure some runners have banked on memorization for their runs.

Now that i think about it, i probably should've read the game request rules. I've deleted the initial post, but for some reason the thread is still here so that's why i'm replying. (I shouldn't have done that and i feel like a complete idiot for even posting this in the first place.) For those who didn't get to read the original post, it was referring to scholastic's I Spy book series. Now that i've stated that, if you still care you can read my pointless ramblings on how i'd go about creating an unofficial category for this.

I Spy is one of the only book series i can think of that could have some sort of speedrun category arranged (even if not on this site) due to the nature of it being a hidden object book series, and not requiring any reading. It's really not much different from the games, except for two aspects that i think could be a problem, the first of which being difficult objects. The series has a history of including many specific difficult objects. There'd have to be some sort of confirmed location for each object to combat this problem. Secondly, multi-objects. Sometimes the books ask for more than one of the same object, and it can be kind of hard to keep track of how many you've found. My idea for this is a bit of a stretch, but maybe placing some sort of small object to keep track could help.

That answer pretty much sums it up well. The main reason i was asking was just in case there was some site-wide rule i didn't know about. Also, i think it's worth mentioning that the games i've done runs of so far don't even have a category yet.