Notes / Addenda: 11:15 The internal timer starts when you start the program's executable. Doing a soft reset does NOT restart the timer. Saving the game will preserve the timer. So, let's say a runner wanted to start their run at 1 minute. They could, technically, save their game at 50 seconds, and then only have to wait for 10 seconds for all of their attempts going forward. But, as far as I can tell, no one has wanted to do this, and they just wait out the full time. 16:28 AdmiralJay told me that, after he learned of the strat, he was unable to replicate it himself. Perhaps there's more to it than we originally thought.
What about opening the program, and using TAS timing, from first input. So you wait long enough to get an early skip, and then you use the second time the timer gets to rollover to skip MORE audio?
@@ICountFrom0 i dont think theres any 2 unskippable dialogues that are 18 minutes and 12 seconds apart. with the wr being 25 minutes 47 seconds long, and a tas definitely being shorter, you'd need to use it in the first 6 minutes for it to happen twice during a run. and if you spend more time waiting for it to hit the 18 12 mark than the dialogue would have taken to actually listen to, then you've lost time. and with the biggest cutscene being 17:48 into the run, theres no room to squeeze another before or after, so you'd have to be using 2 other cutscenes that add up to be longer
@@ICountFrom0 If the unskippable dialogs lined up that way, yes, you could. (Keep in mind, MOST of the dialog in the game is skippable. It's just these few parts that aren't.) For example, if there were long unskippable dialogs at 3 minutes and then at 21 minutes, then sure, you could do that. But there's nothing like that, unfortunately.
Amazing. It's always incredible when the reason behind a skip is discovered and it becomes possibly consistent. I can't wait until the day we find out what Urquan was talking about before he disappeared. If Sluicebox had time, I think he'd be able to find out maybe, but idk.
Me: "I can finally go to bed knowing what made those cutscenes skip." Brain: "What about these ominous skips hinted by UrQuan before he vanished?" Me: *Stares at the ceiling the whole night* Great video as always, OneShortEye! My inability to watch your KQ7, Laura Bow, and Sanitarium videos out of fear of spoilers is beginning to weight heavily upon my shoulders. I need to fix this ASAP.
A gltch that probably wouldn't get noticed in normal play because players would not have consistent timing, but playing the game much slower may give more opportunities to have it happen in a playthrough.
I actually love the RNG Elements of Sierra Games, they can be frustrating (especially to Speedrunners) but they offer a nice bit of surprise and replay value for the player. Also the idea that you have to time your game clock perfectly so you can skip dialog is hilarious, you already have to juggle the clock in a regular speedrun and now you have to do it even better just to squeeze a few seconds out of the late game.
I don't mind RNG in Sierra games, but I still don't understand why they had to make the RNG rules so convoluted in this game in particular. Maybe it was growing pains? By the time they got to King's Quest 7, they "gave up" and it's all 50 / 50 dice rolls.
@@OneShortEye A lot of games have it so the RNG isn't always just 50/50s and the other early Sierra games had similar variant RNGs. But for KQ5, it's just so weird in a lot of spots that I can only assume it was partially due to being their first game using the new engine and maybe part of it might be how Roberta Williams can sometimes be weird when it comes to game design.
As someone with no coding experience but who grew up with these games, it's great to see what was going on 'under the hood.' Thanks for the great explanation!
16:30 That's one of the biggest flaws on discord: The discoverability of "old content" is almost null (and even new content can be buried quickly). But anyway! Amazing video @Oneshorteye!
For sure. Even being gone for a day can mean missing big things if a Discord is really active. Digging into history and doing what I do can be challenging. For instance, the Speedy Adventures discord (bless 'em) has one channel for everything LucasArts. So if I want to find info on say, just Monkey Island 2, I also have to dig around MI1, MI3, DoTT, etc.
Yours are definitely my favorite gaming documentary videos on the platform. I only grew up exposed to Sierra games through cultural osmosis (and mostly jokes in Homestar Runner), and your ability to capture my attention and get me to understand what's going on under the hood in these games is super impressive. I also love that you don't take yourself too seriously and throw some genuinely fun bits into your videos. Keep up the great work, OSE!
@@OneShortEye Yeah, very similar for me. While i've played some kings quest it's only been recently and I'm not great at them. Your content has continually impressed me. Every video is superb. And you are great at taking me through a very complicated and technical narrative while keeping it exciting. I don't even have any other interest in speed running. I would say I was even slightly prejudice towards speed running before watching your videos. Anyway, I just want to second that you have extremely good instincts for how to tell a story and I always look forward to your videos. I wonder if you have any other topics, maybe even outside of gaming, that you might want to talk about. I understand this is your passion, so this might be what you really want to talk about. But yeah, you are just so good at breaking things down I would be interested in anything you wanted to make a video on.
I'm glad the mystery skip's case was identified! I wonder what other SCI games this kind of skip work with. And if there are some where speedruns go long enough that the skip could come up more than once...
Ah, I probably should put this in the pinned comment. Sierra fixed that bug shortly after release and it doesn't happen in any other game that I'm aware of.
It's so strange seeing Paw in this context. Sure I knew he LPed some stuff and had a kings quest retrospective, but I also knew him from TGWTG and reviewing music movies back in the day. lol
The things people come up with that supposedly trigger a skip that actually isn't influenced by player input are an interesting case study in confirmation bias. I was scratching my nose with my left middle finger at the exact time the dialogue skipped, this *must* be what caused it!
@@GigaBoost Not entirely wrong. Every frame, the raw state of the buttons is added to the random number generator's seed. With the right timing you *can* in fact make or break a catch. This is also why tool-assisted Pokémon runners "dance" in the grass and battle menus.
I love watching your videos so much it's unreal. Not a speedrunner but I used to watch Paw's videos back when I was too young to probably be watching them and been low-key obsessed with these games ever since even though I hate actually playing them lmao. These videos always make me feel so cozy and nostalgic though. Always looking forward to new ones.
I love how you say that they "earned" the run instead of that they "had" it. It really emphasizes the hard work and effort put into these games to play them this fast.
I love these videos! As someone who grew up on all the Sierra games, every time I get a notification you've put one out I'm clicking on it. I can't help but think the comment about Pawdugan's strategy only being on Discord and both runners not seeing it is the perfect example of why Discord, and by extension other closed/invite only forums are such a problem. How much of both what you and SummoningSalt have done would even be possible were it not for open forums like SDA? Its like IRC all over again, Discord too will eventually stop being supported, and lots of internet history will be lost.
Thanks for the kind words! Keeping track of everything is a problem. And even now, it's difficult having to sift through all the Discord comments to find what you're looking for. What we gain in convenience we lose in discoverability.
Oh dang, Paw Dugan! I remember watching his playthroughs of this series on the old Nostalgia Critic website lol. It was my introduction to this series, and also why I recognized the game when I saw one of your videos in my recommendations and decided to watch it (and, of course, subscribe immediately). I had no idea Paw speedran, but it's nice to see his name again, making it kind of full circle for me :)
@@OneShortEye Yeah Paw is such a legend - he pioneered adventure game Let's Playing! and his let's play of KGV was funny as hell. I remember his music series called "Full Circle" so I see your Easter Egg there! :D
As an outsider looking in, getting wrapped up not only in the record itself, but also the pure HISTORY of how it came to be, is absolutely fascinating. If people like this were able to put their collective thinking together, we'd have solutions for some of the most obtuse issues facing the world right now. It makes me wonder if people holding on to proprietary secrets, should instead share their findings to the community to encourage solution-driven advancement instead?
That's such an amazing glitch find. Makes sense if you know a bit about programming and yet it's also not in the slightest bit obvious no wonder players were clutching at straws to guess what was happening.
I saw this video in my feed and went "I BET MDB watched and commented on this!" Glad to see I was right. Thanks to you and this game, I will always remember "Life-giving water! Nectar of the gods!"
Every time I see a OSE vid drop in my sub feed, I can't wait to learn about this epic stuff that's going on in the community. On the one hand, it's absolutely incredible that people will dive into the code and figure this stuff out. On the other hand, I'm a little sad because the RNG randomness & mystery provides a lot of tension and drama during these runs. Regardless of how ya feel about it - and for me it changes day to day, practically - it's _always_ fascinating to hear the stories about how these are discovered, dealt with and figured out. What a great vid and update on the KQV speedrun scene!
The explanations in this video are so clear, and the script is perfect. For example, after having explained the dialog skip, I was wondering how it could be used in the speedrun. And that was exactly when you asked "How to use it in a run?" at 10:40. Fantastic job.
Sick video (as per usual) dude!! Whenever I watch your videos, I always find it hilarious when you remind me that games used to let you end up in a _purposefully_ unwinnable state. That was a feature! In the modern gaming era, it's almost the *exact opposite.* In most games, the devs and QAs have put in a significant amount of effort to make absolutely sure that the player CAN'T get themselves into a scenario where the game can no longer be beaten! Kinda crazy how much design philosophy has changed (in some ways good, in some ways bad lol)
Oh yeah, it's such a weird game design choice in hindsight. What I remember reading was something along the lines of, if players finished the games too quickly, they felt they weren't getting their money's worth. So adding dead ends was a way of extending play time. Looking at it now, I don't mind DEATHS, but I think unwinnable scenarios that aren't even communicated as such is objectively bad game design.
@@OneShortEye Roberta Williams was also heavily inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, which had its own share of moments like this. I remember watching a video where they dug up and interview where Roberta talked about spending months or years trying to figure out the game and finish it. This seems to be one of the reasons for a lot of the weird design decisions in especially earlier Sierra titles, that Roberta wanted that experience recreated for others.
The dialogue skip explanation is very interesting. I remember you CAN skip the dialogue in this game, but only after it's been playing for a while and you get to skip the last bit of it. This might explain why.
Hmm, interesting. To be clear, most of the dialog in the game is skippable. There are just these few parts that aren't. As for the dialog that IS skippable, I've never had a problem with dismissing it instantly.
I love finding out the answers behind old mysteries like these. They always sound so intuitive in hindsight (of course there'd be potential for plenty of integer overflows in older game), but so impenetrable at the start. An extra little puzzle in this puzzle game.
16:14 Wait, the fact the information was lost in the unsearchable black hole that is discord is absolutely to the fault of people that left it there. People really need to stop using discord for anything that has any chance of being vaguely important to anyone. Discord is not a forum, if you write it there its automatically lost unless you put it somewhere else or someone else cares about it enough to take it out of discord
Having grown up on all these Sierra and LucasArts titles, I get excited every time you put out a video! Great start to the new year. Keep up the great content.
Always a treat to see a new OneShortEye video! I've never enjoyed playing adventure games myself, but I love your videos about them. Keep up the great work!
This was the video of yours that the algorithm threw at me first which I enjoyed so much that I went back and watched all of your speed run doc content over the weekend and I'm glad I did so. I'm eagerly awaiting whatever topic your next video covers!
Very well put together content dude. Top notch voice over, building a narrative, editing, visual effects, etc. Keep on that grind, and I bet this channel will explode.
I run a community for an old game Enclave, and we recently did a similar discovery which was also based on frame data like this, but more tied to how velocity works in the game. This is a new thing to explore. Thanks for finding it!
I remembered you talking about this in your first video about KQV. Cool to see the mystery has been solved! I'm glad you did a follow up to explain the findings. =)
The timer issue makes sense. I see this kind of thing all the time when programming around a timer. Due to the timer overflow, the duration in this case is thought over 18 minutes before it started and thus passes the check immediately. Timers I see usually have much higher overflows, days, even years, to the point where overflow bugs are near impossible to run into let alone debug if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
LOVE the way you react to things the runners say mid-run. Really stands out from the speedrun doc meta. And the graphics are stellar. Immediate subscribe, I'm stoked to see where you go with these vids, mate.
The Quick King's Quest Chronicles Continue (say that 3 times)! I love how the ideal path is to bag Manannan in his brothers room, and then Mordack just goes to sleep without noticing - nothing more soothing then a cat in a bag LOL! So pleasant to listen to King's Chill along with this, something surreal about combing blade runner with King's Quest though, sort of diametrically opposite - it fits speed running in general perfectly though. Hope to see more Quest for Glory stories, or Gabriel Knight, or LeChuck's Revenge, the latter must be juicy optimization and awful RNG at the end (you've very weighted on the Sierra side over Lucasarts, which suits me actually, but the other side is worth an occasional visit). Cheers!
So much has been happening with QFG recently, I'm definitely planning on doing a video on 2EGA and 4. But I'm waiting for activity to simmer down a little bit. And I'm actually in the middle of a Monkey Island 2 video. Excited for that one. The challenge is that there's SO much history it's difficult to pare it down.
Your videos are amazing!!!! Incredibly well put together, detailed and just super interesting for any of us who played and loved these games as kids. Makes me want to quit my job and become a full-time Sierra game speed runner.
Thanks for the kind words! I can't promise you'll be able to quit your job, but the King's Quest speedrunning discord is here: discord.com/invite/kAPTPTR
I have watched a number of Karl jobsts videos on goldeneye speedrunning and one thing that you can see happen when a new strat is found/made replicable is that there isn't popularity in actually devising those new stats and instead optimising what is there. so that last bit about the skip reminded me of that
Speedrunning old adventure games is such a niche thing for me but it turns out to be just as janky and complex as other more popular genres. Seeing how passionate people are about speedrunning is amazing and rubs off on the viewer as well.
Never got into the King's Quest games myself (do like the style and love stuff like Monkey Island though), but regardless I was captivated by this beginning to end. Great video.
I remember my mom getting soft locked wasting the pie before the yeti, what was worse was controlling the character via keyboard, me mom, and bro spent the whole evening trying to find out what the brooch was called in the second game and took forever guessing random articles of jewelry.
Kings Quest V was so epic back in the day. You could make incorrect decisions that later stopped you from progressing. Almost like a modern puzzle in expert difficulty, but that is the only setting lol!
You gotta love how KQ5 is full of soft locks where you render the game unwinnable by messing up some seemingly minor thing... until the endgame, when you HAVE to get caught by the Blue Xenomorph to progress.
When David runs KQ5 at marathons, he does a bit where he repeatedly says, "Now we pick up the [x]. It's the most important item in the game, can't win without it." For like, every single item.
@@OneShortEyeSierra loved that shit but I think the single worst example is Valdo & Marie (obscure quasi-educational UbiSoft adventure game) where carrying a certain item into the last area guarantees the worst ending. You have to just not pick that item up - multiple hours of gameplay earlier.
Awesome video to see! I recommend looking at Quest for Glory V speeruns, as davidtki has a very cool and huge skip in that game, which had been discovered years ago as a bug, but took a long time to be noticed by speedrunners and used for speedruns.
Yay new video! Has it been discovered how the coded random number generator works for this game? I've heard that there's sometimes a trick to it since computers technically can't randomly generate a number
The RNG seed is based on your computer's time when the program starts. No one's really tried to see if they can set up a process to get a consistent seed, but it looks impractical. Add to that, the game calls the random function all over the place, like how long a cow waits before moving outside of town, for instance. So you'd have to play perfectly to make it worth it in the end game.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Notes / Addenda:
11:15 The internal timer starts when you start the program's executable. Doing a soft reset does NOT restart the timer. Saving the game will preserve the timer. So, let's say a runner wanted to start their run at 1 minute. They could, technically, save their game at 50 seconds, and then only have to wait for 10 seconds for all of their attempts going forward. But, as far as I can tell, no one has wanted to do this, and they just wait out the full time.
16:28 AdmiralJay told me that, after he learned of the strat, he was unable to replicate it himself. Perhaps there's more to it than we originally thought.
"The internal timer starts when you start the program's executable." If you are running with ScummVM is this when you open the game?
@@PensiveGoatRuns If you're running it with ScummVM, it's when you click on "Start" from the main menu.
What about opening the program, and using TAS timing, from first input. So you wait long enough to get an early skip, and then you use the second time the timer gets to rollover to skip MORE audio?
@@ICountFrom0 i dont think theres any 2 unskippable dialogues that are 18 minutes and 12 seconds apart. with the wr being 25 minutes 47 seconds long, and a tas definitely being shorter, you'd need to use it in the first 6 minutes for it to happen twice during a run. and if you spend more time waiting for it to hit the 18 12 mark than the dialogue would have taken to actually listen to, then you've lost time. and with the biggest cutscene being 17:48 into the run, theres no room to squeeze another before or after, so you'd have to be using 2 other cutscenes that add up to be longer
@@ICountFrom0 If the unskippable dialogs lined up that way, yes, you could. (Keep in mind, MOST of the dialog in the game is skippable. It's just these few parts that aren't.) For example, if there were long unskippable dialogs at 3 minutes and then at 21 minutes, then sure, you could do that. But there's nothing like that, unfortunately.
Great editing on this one. You kept it under 18:12 minutes so you didn't have to worry about any audio issues.
lmao
What's so special about 18:13
@@thewhitefalcon8539 watch the video...
Yeah, if he got to 18:12, he might have to deal with cannon shots.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 wow.. Do people still click on a video they intend to watch and comment first!?
I love the detail where he says "shut up" and then you immediately shut up.
Gotta listen to the man.
If only the game responded to "Shut up!" like OneShortEye does, so much time could be saved.
lol
Heck of a video Shorty. It’s an honor to be included in your fantastic work and a pleasure to work with you.
Thank you for helping with it! I love talking about our littler corner of the world.
Nice job admiraljay! awesome run, nice record.
14:29 What a fantastic gag! As someone who watches a lot of speedrun history videos, I've never seen this kind of role reversal.
Amazing. It's always incredible when the reason behind a skip is discovered and it becomes possibly consistent.
I can't wait until the day we find out what Urquan was talking about before he disappeared. If Sluicebox had time, I think he'd be able to find out maybe, but idk.
Me: "I can finally go to bed knowing what made those cutscenes skip."
Brain: "What about these ominous skips hinted by UrQuan before he vanished?"
Me: *Stares at the ceiling the whole night*
Great video as always, OneShortEye! My inability to watch your KQ7, Laura Bow, and Sanitarium videos out of fear of spoilers is beginning to weight heavily upon my shoulders. I need to fix this ASAP.
I like how "old man tells life story" is shorter than Graham's scream
A gltch that probably wouldn't get noticed in normal play because players would not have consistent timing, but playing the game much slower may give more opportunities to have it happen in a playthrough.
I actually love the RNG Elements of Sierra Games, they can be frustrating (especially to Speedrunners) but they offer a nice bit of surprise and replay value for the player.
Also the idea that you have to time your game clock perfectly so you can skip dialog is hilarious, you already have to juggle the clock in a regular speedrun and now you have to do it even better just to squeeze a few seconds out of the late game.
I don't mind RNG in Sierra games, but I still don't understand why they had to make the RNG rules so convoluted in this game in particular. Maybe it was growing pains? By the time they got to King's Quest 7, they "gave up" and it's all 50 / 50 dice rolls.
@@OneShortEye A lot of games have it so the RNG isn't always just 50/50s and the other early Sierra games had similar variant RNGs.
But for KQ5, it's just so weird in a lot of spots that I can only assume it was partially due to being their first game using the new engine and maybe part of it might be how Roberta Williams can sometimes be weird when it comes to game design.
@@OneShortEye maybe because KQ5 was using a new engine
As someone with no coding experience but who grew up with these games, it's great to see what was going on 'under the hood.' Thanks for the great explanation!
+1
16:30 That's one of the biggest flaws on discord: The discoverability of "old content" is almost null (and even new content can be buried quickly). But anyway! Amazing video @Oneshorteye!
For sure. Even being gone for a day can mean missing big things if a Discord is really active. Digging into history and doing what I do can be challenging. For instance, the Speedy Adventures discord (bless 'em) has one channel for everything LucasArts. So if I want to find info on say, just Monkey Island 2, I also have to dig around MI1, MI3, DoTT, etc.
if only there was some sort of way to publish text content online in such a way that it could get indexed by a sort of search service
Yours are definitely my favorite gaming documentary videos on the platform. I only grew up exposed to Sierra games through cultural osmosis (and mostly jokes in Homestar Runner), and your ability to capture my attention and get me to understand what's going on under the hood in these games is super impressive. I also love that you don't take yourself too seriously and throw some genuinely fun bits into your videos. Keep up the great work, OSE!
Those are extremely kind words. Thank you.
@@OneShortEye Yeah, very similar for me. While i've played some kings quest it's only been recently and I'm not great at them. Your content has continually impressed me. Every video is superb. And you are great at taking me through a very complicated and technical narrative while keeping it exciting. I don't even have any other interest in speed running. I would say I was even slightly prejudice towards speed running before watching your videos. Anyway, I just want to second that you have extremely good instincts for how to tell a story and I always look forward to your videos. I wonder if you have any other topics, maybe even outside of gaming, that you might want to talk about. I understand this is your passion, so this might be what you really want to talk about. But yeah, you are just so good at breaking things down I would be interested in anything you wanted to make a video on.
I'm glad the mystery skip's case was identified!
I wonder what other SCI games this kind of skip work with. And if there are some where speedruns go long enough that the skip could come up more than once...
Ah, I probably should put this in the pinned comment. Sierra fixed that bug shortly after release and it doesn't happen in any other game that I'm aware of.
You make me root so hard for people I don't know playing games I've never played myself
It's so strange seeing Paw in this context. Sure I knew he LPed some stuff and had a kings quest retrospective, but I also knew him from TGWTG and reviewing music movies back in the day. lol
The things people come up with that supposedly trigger a skip that actually isn't influenced by player input are an interesting case study in confirmation bias.
I was scratching my nose with my left middle finger at the exact time the dialogue skipped, this *must* be what caused it!
Holding the B button or alternating A and B makes Pokéballs more likely to catch Pokémon.
@@GigaBoost Not entirely wrong. Every frame, the raw state of the buttons is added to the random number generator's seed. With the right timing you *can* in fact make or break a catch. This is also why tool-assisted Pokémon runners "dance" in the grass and battle menus.
@@Kawa-oneechan you can't positively affect rng in any consistent matter outside of TA though
I love watching your videos so much it's unreal. Not a speedrunner but I used to watch Paw's videos back when I was too young to probably be watching them and been low-key obsessed with these games ever since even though I hate actually playing them lmao. These videos always make me feel so cozy and nostalgic though. Always looking forward to new ones.
That's incredibly kind of you!
I love how you say that they "earned" the run instead of that they "had" it. It really emphasizes the hard work and effort put into these games to play them this fast.
I love these videos! As someone who grew up on all the Sierra games, every time I get a notification you've put one out I'm clicking on it.
I can't help but think the comment about Pawdugan's strategy only being on Discord and both runners not seeing it is the perfect example of why Discord, and by extension other closed/invite only forums are such a problem. How much of both what you and SummoningSalt have done would even be possible were it not for open forums like SDA? Its like IRC all over again, Discord too will eventually stop being supported, and lots of internet history will be lost.
Thanks for the kind words! Keeping track of everything is a problem. And even now, it's difficult having to sift through all the Discord comments to find what you're looking for. What we gain in convenience we lose in discoverability.
This would be solved if there was a bot in the server that posted every message somewhere easy to see
This is actually teh single most important mystery ever solved in human history!
Oh dang, Paw Dugan! I remember watching his playthroughs of this series on the old Nostalgia Critic website lol. It was my introduction to this series, and also why I recognized the game when I saw one of your videos in my recommendations and decided to watch it (and, of course, subscribe immediately). I had no idea Paw speedran, but it's nice to see his name again, making it kind of full circle for me :)
Paw's great! As far as I know KQV was the only game he speedran, and even then, for only a brief amount of time (relatively speaking).
@@OneShortEye Yeah Paw is such a legend - he pioneered adventure game Let's Playing! and his let's play of KGV was funny as hell. I remember his music series called "Full Circle" so I see your Easter Egg there! :D
i love his stuff! He's what got me into let's plays. I miss his content :(
His LP is why I have Cedric's line about the pOOOIIsonous snake stuck in my head forever. That and "Life-giving water...nectar of the gods!"
As an outsider looking in, getting wrapped up not only in the record itself, but also the pure HISTORY of how it came to be, is absolutely fascinating. If people like this were able to put their collective thinking together, we'd have solutions for some of the most obtuse issues facing the world right now. It makes me wonder if people holding on to proprietary secrets, should instead share their findings to the community to encourage solution-driven advancement instead?
Great way to start a new year with my favorite speedrun documenteter
You're too kind. :)
In the past 3 days I've watched all of your videos , thank you for the great content!
Great video. Thanks for making it.
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for your generosity.
Thanks!
Thanks for the support!
14:30 OMG you had me chuckle real hard and re-watch that joke a few times there! Perfect execution! 🤣🤣
That's such an amazing glitch find. Makes sense if you know a bit about programming and yet it's also not in the slightest bit obvious no wonder players were clutching at straws to guess what was happening.
I remember Paw Dugan's REALLY old streams of Conquest of the Longbow! Real funny guy
Longbow is a great game, one of Sierra's best.
I saw this video in my feed and went "I BET MDB watched and commented on this!" Glad to see I was right. Thanks to you and this game, I will always remember
"Life-giving water! Nectar of the gods!"
@@Trooth "Look out! It's a pOOOISSSonous snake!"
Every time I see a OSE vid drop in my sub feed, I can't wait to learn about this epic stuff that's going on in the community.
On the one hand, it's absolutely incredible that people will dive into the code and figure this stuff out. On the other hand, I'm a little sad because the RNG randomness & mystery provides a lot of tension and drama during these runs. Regardless of how ya feel about it - and for me it changes day to day, practically - it's _always_ fascinating to hear the stories about how these are discovered, dealt with and figured out. What a great vid and update on the KQV speedrun scene!
The explanations in this video are so clear, and the script is perfect. For example, after having explained the dialog skip, I was wondering how it could be used in the speedrun. And that was exactly when you asked "How to use it in a run?" at 10:40. Fantastic job.
Sick video (as per usual) dude!!
Whenever I watch your videos, I always find it hilarious when you remind me that games used to let you end up in a _purposefully_ unwinnable state. That was a feature!
In the modern gaming era, it's almost the *exact opposite.* In most games, the devs and QAs have put in a significant amount of effort to make absolutely sure that the player CAN'T get themselves into a scenario where the game can no longer be beaten!
Kinda crazy how much design philosophy has changed (in some ways good, in some ways bad lol)
Oh yeah, it's such a weird game design choice in hindsight. What I remember reading was something along the lines of, if players finished the games too quickly, they felt they weren't getting their money's worth. So adding dead ends was a way of extending play time. Looking at it now, I don't mind DEATHS, but I think unwinnable scenarios that aren't even communicated as such is objectively bad game design.
@@OneShortEye Roberta Williams was also heavily inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, which had its own share of moments like this. I remember watching a video where they dug up and interview where Roberta talked about spending months or years trying to figure out the game and finish it. This seems to be one of the reasons for a lot of the weird design decisions in especially earlier Sierra titles, that Roberta wanted that experience recreated for others.
The shock and disgust when this happened to me in KQ1 as my first pre 90s game...... I'll never be the same
The dialogue skip explanation is very interesting. I remember you CAN skip the dialogue in this game, but only after it's been playing for a while and you get to skip the last bit of it.
This might explain why.
Hmm, interesting. To be clear, most of the dialog in the game is skippable. There are just these few parts that aren't. As for the dialog that IS skippable, I've never had a problem with dismissing it instantly.
These videos are some of the best content on RUclips. I get so excited everytime I see a new upload. Keep up the good work
Those are extremely kind words. Thank you!
@@OneShortEye I have to correct you on this one: Those are extremely deserved words. Thank you!
King’s Quest games bring back good memories. In my game development classes, my teacher would talk about game design by showing us King’s quest games
6:34 WOAH! That guy is how I experienced all the kings quest games. What a pleasant memory, thank you.
I love finding out the answers behind old mysteries like these. They always sound so intuitive in hindsight (of course there'd be potential for plenty of integer overflows in older game), but so impenetrable at the start. An extra little puzzle in this puzzle game.
16:14 Wait, the fact the information was lost in the unsearchable black hole that is discord is absolutely to the fault of people that left it there.
People really need to stop using discord for anything that has any chance of being vaguely important to anyone.
Discord is not a forum, if you write it there its automatically lost unless you put it somewhere else or someone else cares about it enough to take it out of discord
Having grown up on all these Sierra and LucasArts titles, I get excited every time you put out a video! Great start to the new year. Keep up the great content.
Happy New Year!
Always a treat to see a new OneShortEye video! I've never enjoyed playing adventure games myself, but I love your videos about them. Keep up the great work!
This was the video of yours that the algorithm threw at me first which I enjoyed so much that I went back and watched all of your speed run doc content over the weekend and I'm glad I did so. I'm eagerly awaiting whatever topic your next video covers!
Very well put together content dude. Top notch voice over, building a narrative, editing, visual effects, etc. Keep on that grind, and I bet this channel will explode.
Thank you so much for the kind words! Glad you're enjoying. :)
I run a community for an old game Enclave, and we recently did a similar discovery which was also based on frame data like this, but more tied to how velocity works in the game. This is a new thing to explore. Thanks for finding it!
I remembered you talking about this in your first video about KQV. Cool to see the mystery has been solved! I'm glad you did a follow up to explain the findings. =)
Really enjoyable vid, Eye! Thanks for sharing this story with us 👀
Thanks, Doc!
The timer issue makes sense. I see this kind of thing all the time when programming around a timer. Due to the timer overflow, the duration in this case is thought over 18 minutes before it started and thus passes the check immediately. Timers I see usually have much higher overflows, days, even years, to the point where overflow bugs are near impossible to run into let alone debug if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
LOVE the way you react to things the runners say mid-run. Really stands out from the speedrun doc meta. And the graphics are stellar. Immediate subscribe, I'm stoked to see where you go with these vids, mate.
Not like it’s even surprising but hearing this was solved i knew it would be sluicebox lol. Amazing person.
The Quick King's Quest Chronicles Continue (say that 3 times)!
I love how the ideal path is to bag Manannan in his brothers room, and then Mordack just goes to sleep without noticing - nothing more soothing then a cat in a bag LOL!
So pleasant to listen to King's Chill along with this, something surreal about combing blade runner with King's Quest though, sort of diametrically opposite - it fits speed running in general perfectly though.
Hope to see more Quest for Glory stories, or Gabriel Knight, or LeChuck's Revenge, the latter must be juicy optimization and awful RNG at the end (you've very weighted on the Sierra side over Lucasarts, which suits me actually, but the other side is worth an occasional visit). Cheers!
So much has been happening with QFG recently, I'm definitely planning on doing a video on 2EGA and 4. But I'm waiting for activity to simmer down a little bit. And I'm actually in the middle of a Monkey Island 2 video. Excited for that one. The challenge is that there's SO much history it's difficult to pare it down.
@@OneShortEye Excellent, very exciting!
I just discovered this channel yesterday. Binged every video and now i've ran out! The mark of a great channel IMO.
I want to know what a tool assisted run would be. A truly perfect run.
Your videos are amazing dude
Gonna speed run clicking that Subscribe button.
Lmk of you find any decent skips to sub faster
now do TAS
What was your time? WR or PB?
@@Hiihtopipa It turned out I was using machine assisted tools for my run and was DQed.
Just got a sub 1.0. Idk if you can top that but I'll be waiting
I’m not someone who watches speed runs but I love and await your videos
I love these stories. Never seen this game before but any community working toward a goal that takes several years always is cool in my book
I could watch seven years of adventure game breakdowns, speedruns, and all things related!
Honored my googly eyes had a cameo! Admiral__Jay is a good friend.
Your videos are amazing!!!! Incredibly well put together, detailed and just super interesting for any of us who played and loved these games as kids. Makes me want to quit my job and become a full-time Sierra game speed runner.
Thanks for the kind words! I can't promise you'll be able to quit your job, but the King's Quest speedrunning discord is here: discord.com/invite/kAPTPTR
Thanks for your awesome content!!
Thanks for your awesome comment!
I appreciate any content covering one of my fave childhood games for the PC. I just loved this game.
Man I love your content, I'm always desperate for the next instalment! Keep up the good work my man.
Thanks for the kinds words! Believe me, I'm always desperate to get them out.
Not only was the mystery figured out, but a new minute barrier was broken because of it? Nice!
Criminally underrated channel. Its high time you blew up in subs honestly.
Those are extremely kind words, thank you!
6:22 Pawdugan :D one of my favorite old KQ5 Let's Players.
I love king's quest speedrunning history/speedrunning in general videos
What an awesome video! This got me really interested i speedrunning, thanks for uploading!
Wonderful as always Shorty
Thank you!
The French Floppy was my nickname in high school
I have watched a number of Karl jobsts videos on goldeneye speedrunning and one thing that you can see happen when a new strat is found/made replicable is that there isn't popularity in actually devising those new stats and instead optimising what is there. so that last bit about the skip reminded me of that
An update to a WR history? This is new territory and I love it.
just wanna tell you how great your videos are.
keep up your work.
Great video, what an amazing find by Sluicebox. Don't think I didn't hear that Cuzco remix either!
David going "hwhut?" at shenanigans is my newest favorite thing
I swear I wasn't pressing a thing.
Starting off the new year right with a new OneShortEye video, and as a delicious bonus it's a followup to the excellent KQ5 video!
Happy New Year!
Speedrunning old adventure games is such a niche thing for me but it turns out to be just as janky and complex as other more popular genres. Seeing how passionate people are about speedrunning is amazing and rubs off on the viewer as well.
Absolutely brilliant video. You're up there with Bismuth and SummoningSalt. Easy subscribe, time to watch your back catalogue.
After binge watching your videos over new years, i can't express how much it made me smile seeing a new video.
All the best for this year.
Same to you!
Never got into the King's Quest games myself (do like the style and love stuff like Monkey Island though), but regardless I was captivated by this beginning to end. Great video.
Well-researched. Excellent explanation of what we know so far!
Absolutely something the original programmers knew about, just too much effort to fix.
Warms my heart to see King's Quest content on RUclips
I remember my mom getting soft locked wasting the pie before the yeti, what was worse was controlling the character via keyboard, me mom, and bro spent the whole evening trying to find out what the brooch was called in the second game and took forever guessing random articles of jewelry.
Nice video!! Awesome work by the speedrunners and great editing!
As a programmer myself, great debugging! Love to see it!!
I don't even like speed running but hearing you talk about it makes it incredibly interesting
Oh boy a OneShortEye video on the second day of the year! super hyped!
Happy New Year!
I always love seeing your vids. Point n Click speedruns are much more interesting then ppl give them credit for.
Also the shut up part had me laughing
Glad you liked it! And yes, I agree, though to be fair, it's often times difficult to understand what's happening in a p&c speedrun without context.
@@OneShortEye thats why its great to have your vids. You give the needed context :)
Kings Quest V was so epic back in the day. You could make incorrect decisions that later stopped you from progressing. Almost like a modern puzzle in expert difficulty, but that is the only setting lol!
You gotta love how KQ5 is full of soft locks where you render the game unwinnable by messing up some seemingly minor thing... until the endgame, when you HAVE to get caught by the Blue Xenomorph to progress.
When David runs KQ5 at marathons, he does a bit where he repeatedly says, "Now we pick up the [x]. It's the most important item in the game, can't win without it." For like, every single item.
@@OneShortEyeSierra loved that shit but I think the single worst example is Valdo & Marie (obscure quasi-educational UbiSoft adventure game) where carrying a certain item into the last area guarantees the worst ending. You have to just not pick that item up - multiple hours of gameplay earlier.
I remember going to my friends house to play the original kings quest on his IBM. Love the series…
Great video OneShortEye. The record keeps going down. Kudos on you being in Oddheaders latest video!
Glad you liked it!
Awesome video to see! I recommend looking at Quest for Glory V speeruns, as davidtki has a very cool and huge skip in that game, which had been discovered years ago as a bug, but took a long time to be noticed by speedrunners and used for speedruns.
Excellent! A new video! I look forward to watching this.
Yay new video! Has it been discovered how the coded random number generator works for this game? I've heard that there's sometimes a trick to it since computers technically can't randomly generate a number
The RNG seed is based on your computer's time when the program starts. No one's really tried to see if they can set up a process to get a consistent seed, but it looks impractical. Add to that, the game calls the random function all over the place, like how long a cow waits before moving outside of town, for instance. So you'd have to play perfectly to make it worth it in the end game.
Great video 1SI!
Thanks!
Another great work of investigation from Sluicebox and you.
"And no, you can't dump the peas out. That would be too easy..."
too easy-peasy, one might say
Let's go!! Great runs and great vid! Love it
Glad you enjoyed it!