In-game Timer

JaggerG

2013-05-28 06:23:08 pm

Shifty Leader

That M2k2 guy

oh man look at me go I am on a ROLL in terms of not finishing things I start...

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-05-28 10:18:08 pm

2013-05-28 10:17:53 pm

Other than going back through Theater mode to grab all of the in-game cutscene times, which I haven't done yet, is there anything else you can think of that I could do to help? I still feel I should take another look since the cutscenes are going to be more or less consistent across a run no matter what the player does other than the second or two it takes to skip them, making it easy to simply cut out the ones we know count towards the timer once we have our final in-game time.

But unless I'm missing something a lot of these other things you're looking at have a chance of being highly inconsistent as a direct result of what the player does or doesn't do along the way, right? The fact that we're having problems determining where time is being cut out would seem to suggest that, at least to me anyway.

JaggerG

2013-05-28 10:28:40 pm

Shifty Leader

That M2k2 guy

I guess you could time the last third of the archive or something, that probably has a ton of cutscenes added. I'm surprised there are none in Sector 3, but I'm probably gonna find more in Sector 2.

Prime Hunter

2013-05-28 10:36:13 pm

Yeah most of the major cutscenes happen at the beginning or towards the end once you've dealt with the Ridley plot, which is after the 2nd visit to Sector 3. There's a bit when you save Anthony and of course the Ridley scene itself but otherwise it's mostly running back and forth across Sector 2 and 3 for a while due to Adam having no idea what Samus should be focusing on for a good 1/3 of the game. "Hunt the creature! No... check for survivors! No... forget the girl, that creature's becoming too dangerous!"

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-05-28 10:37:24 pm

2013-05-28 10:37:13 pm

Um... you were talking about going through that 7 hour long video on Twitch right? I don't see it up there anymore, just the one from the other day. (May 25)

JaggerG

2013-05-29 08:03:43 pm

Shifty Leader

That M2k2 guy

Oh poop. Looks like they fixed the bug that keeps it available permanently, too. Okay, be back in 5 hours.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-05-30 12:24:42 am

2013-05-29 10:37:45 pm

So it wasn't something on my end, then? Ouch. Well, in that case I'll go back through Theater mode and try collecting all of the cutscenes so we have something to compare it to.

Edit: Still plugging away at Theater mode for the moment. Back up through Ridley and I've found an extra 30:05 of in-game cutscenes that I hadn't counted the first time around. That puts the total well above an hour and a half even at this point if you add all of the FMV time I found originally, which is far beyond the 1:13 difference I had between my GT and RT in that latest run. So either a bunch of these cutscenes aren't counting like we suspected, or we're losing A LOT of time due to navigation rooms, lag, authorization, etc.

I don't expect to find too many more from here on out though since a lot of what's left is already covered by the FMV cutscenes.

Prime Hunter

2013-05-30 01:22:38 am

And... done! New cutscene time comes in at 01:45:32. Meaning that compared to my other time of 01:08:47 including the credits, there's another 37 minutes of in-game cutscenes that I hadn't accounted for.

Based on my most recent run where I had a 01:13 deficit between my real time and game time, that means I'm about 32 minutes over budget. We can't be losing THAT much from things like lag and the maps, can we? I have the times broken down into sections by when you visit each sector, so once we have a full run again we can start picking out where the time differences are coming from.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-05-30 01:53:40 am

2013-05-30 01:49:01 am

Actually I'll just put it here now so we can have it when it's time to examine the run closer. I think the math is accurate.

Code:

   ______________________

    Intro          08:28     00:08:28
    Main Sector    12:12     00:20:40
    Sector 1.1     11:06     00:31:46 
    Sector 3.1     01:20     00:33:06
    Sector 2.1     05:33     00:38:39
    Sector 3.2     09:41     00:48:20 
    Sector 1.2     11:58     01:00:18
    Sector 2.2     00:00     01:00:18 
    Sector 0       11:02     01:11:20
    Sector 1.3     16:58     01:28:18
    End/Credits    14:34     01:42:52
    Post Game      02:40     01:45:32
                     
    TOTAL                    01:45:32

JaggerG

2013-05-30 02:07:14 am

Shifty Leader

That M2k2 guy

The staring-at-furby-shell cutscene doesn't actually count the first 5 or so seconds, if I guessed right. There's a cut as she's looking at it. It makes the most sense from timing multiple runs through that segment. It's probably bizarre crap like that that's making up a lot of the difference.

Prime Hunter

2013-05-30 02:11:11 am

Yeah, that's why I listed the times for each sector to see where the biggest discrepancies lie. I tried to ignore the moments I could remember happening in a run even if you skip everything possible, such as Samus yelling out to Anthony when she saves him from the seeker bug in the second Sector 3 visit. Even then there has to be a few of these that don't count if there's that much of a time difference.

JaggerG

2013-05-30 02:12:41 am

Shifty Leader

That M2k2 guy

Doesn't Hard mode or something tell you Press (-) to skip? Curious if it says that for every cutscene. If not maybe that could provide a clue.

Prime Hunter

2013-05-30 02:13:18 am

Interesting theory. I think it does, but I haven't played Hard mode since the game came out so I couldn't tell you.

Prime Hunter

2013-06-07 03:03:46 pm

I've got some free time right now so I think I'm going to start going through your cutscene run and find out the RT vs GT of each segment. As I said before it would at least help us narrow down where the most time gets shaved off and how much of that is strictly from the cutscenes themselves and how much is through gameplay quirks.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-07 05:03:28 pm

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-07 05:02:58 pm

2013-06-07 04:40:49 pm

Haha, wow. If my math is correct there's a little less than six and a half minutes of gameplay in the first 30 minutes of your stream. (Up through the "Any Objections, Lady?" cutscene)

tomatobob

2013-06-07 04:45:48 pm

One shall stand, one shall ball.

Hahaha even I expected that number to be higher. I know part of that is because of Jagger going fast but good lord Other M that is MGS territory right there.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-07 05:07:54 pm

2013-06-07 05:03:47 pm

Ran into the first major difference between GT and RT in this segment too. A 04:44 addition to GT over the course of 10:13 RT, 08:46 of which is cutscene. I see what you meant now about the purple slug boss causing inconsistencies, since everything leading up to this point has been an almost 100% match between GT and RT. (3 second difference)

Longest cutscene in this segment before and after the boss is 06:53 on my timer with 03:10 being FMV, leaving 03:43 left over. (Guess it was good that I got just the FMVs the first time around if they end up making a difference!) Even if you cut out the FMV part that leaves 5 minutes of cutscenes, which still doesn't add up smoothly. So it's likely something else that doesn't count.

Edit: Whoops, math was off a little on the GT total for that segment, which puts that 06:53 cutscene closer to the difference between the GT and RT numbers.

Prime Hunter

2013-06-07 05:05:55 pm

Quote from tomatobob:

Hahaha even I expected that number to be higher. I know part of that is because of Jagger going fast but good lord Other M that is MGS territory right there.

There's a few minutes for menus but yeah, it's a pretty high ratio of cutscene to gameplay leading up through the first boss.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-08 04:39:27 am

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-07 07:12:44 pm

2013-06-07 07:12:34 pm

Decided to stop for now at the 1st save in Sector 3. Want to know something scary, Tomatobob? 40.74% of the game has been cutscene!

Code:

- Stream Time:    01:36:02

- Real Time:      01:20:50
- Game Time:      01:12:34

- CUTSCENES:      00:32:56
- GAMEPLAY:       00:47:54

Taking all of this into account, there's still a difference of 08:16 between GT and RT even when cutscenes are included.

Prime Hunter

2013-06-08 02:22:56 am

Doing some more timing and came across the first death of the run when you go to save Anthony in Sector 3. The fact that the continue places you in the middle of a segment completely throws off the timer.

There's only a 3:11 GT difference between the saves surrounding the death, but the two halves of gameplay add up to 02:06 (up to when Samus screams out upon death) and an additional 05:20 once you continue afterward. I know some of that time likely gets cut out because of the continue, but that's still quite a few minutes beyond the GT. The only way I can see the game making up for this is if part/all of the cutscene involving Ian doesn't count against the timer as it's 04:26 all together with only 02:34 of that as FMV.

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2013-06-08 04:39:43 am

2013-06-08 04:39:21 am

Okay... that took longer than I expected. Finally finished going through your cutscene run on Twitch.

Code:

- Stream Time:    05:18:48

- Real Time:      04:04:08
- Game Time:      04:08:16

- CUTSCENES:      01:45:27
- GAMEPLAY:       02:19:21

So in the end, there's only a 4 minute difference between RT and GT when cutscenes are added? I admit, there's probably some errors due to the 4 deaths but I tried to cut out the extra time for each of those based on where the game popped you back up when you continued.

There were a lot of segments that were off by only a few seconds, a lot that were off by about 20-30 seconds, and then a few where things really skewed like that one I mentioned in my previous post surrounding the Ian cutscene. I've got it all written down though so we can go over individual segments at a later time. Looks like there were 42 segments in all and each of those took anywhere from 45 to 75 seconds off of the Stream's timer due to going back to the menu and reloading the game, which is where most of that difference comes from.

Now I can stop spamming this thread for a bit.

Okay... that took longer than I expected. Finally finished going through your cutscene run on Twitch.

[code]- Stream Time:    05:18:48

- Real Time:      04:04:08
- Game Time:      04:08:16

- CUTSCENES:      01:45:27
- GAMEPLAY:       02:19:21[/code]
So in the end, there's only a 4 minute difference between RT and GT when cutscenes are added? I admit, there's probably some errors due to the 4 deaths but I tried to cut out the extra time for each of those based on where the game popped you back up when you continued.

There were a lot of segments that were off by only a few seconds, a lot that were off by about 20-30 seconds, and then a few where things really skewed like that one I mentioned in my previous post surrounding the Ian cutscene. I've got it all written down though so we can go over individual segments at a later time. Looks like there were 42 segments in all and each of those took anywhere from 45 to 75 seconds off of the Stream's timer due to going back to the menu and reloading the game, which is where most of that difference comes from.

Now I can stop spamming this thread for a bit.