Stuttering in early digital video was how some codecs adapted to available bandwidth. Under I/O pressure, some codecs maintained framerate but dropped resolution, while others maintained resolution but dropped frames. (If you look at the frame drops in your examples, they always occur after a scene change, when most of the bandwidth was taken up by the scene change.) These are decisions made at encode time, which is why the stuttering is always at the same point -- the frames you're expecting weren't recorded.
Just got to that point in the video. But yeah the fact he's not seen it before he should consider himself lucky as I used to have several games with the same problem at one point in time. Thankfully it does not seem that common, I at one point had maybe at most like 5 games that had the problem. EDIT: Also I do believe the games that had this problem I owned used the same codec that LOR 2 uses.
+Jim Leonard Interesting... 'cause I'm thinking back to some other games I played with cinematics like MechWarrior II and Descent II and neither of those have any stuttering, although I do recall with Descent II, if your system can't handle the framerate of the high res cinematics, it would load a bit, play a bit, pause until more is loaded, play a bit more, pause, etc., thus why that game had the cinematics recorded at both low and hi res and was user selectable.
@@Pixelmusement That was another way to (not) deal with bandwidth starvation. Another game that encoded this way is Under a Killing Moon; the ending cinematics dropped frames during encoding to not exceed a 2x cdrom rate.
Ah yes. The Sega Saturn like 3D accelerator using quadratic surfaces instead of triangles. It's 2D performance was pretty bad and there were not a lot of compatible games. LGR made a video: ruclips.net/video/jChtlWNIAL4/видео.html
As a kid I don't think I ever actually won a single game of this, but I still played a ton of it. There's a certain charm to the voice acting in this game, and I always wished I could play a single-player RPG with the graphics of the battle sections. I liked the castle designs and wanted to explore them as just a single character, but of course that'll get you annihilated in an actual game. See if you can find the goofy easter egg song in the game files! (Or be a stick in the mud and just look it up on RUclips, I guess...) It always stuck with me.
Oh I've seen stuttering encoded in videos before. When I started playing the GOG version of Under a Killing Moon many years ago I spend the first hour or two trying to troubleshoot DOSBox performance problems. It turned out Access Software had stuttering in their developer logo video that plays in the beginning (verified by opening the video in VLC). But when the first thing I saw was already stuttering I immediately thought that the DOSBox GOG shipped with it must have some terrible config problems.
What a way to start off the new year with game that I own. I got it back in 2000 from a Big lots for 7 dollars. One of the strange things about this game is that the windows/dos version can run in windows 7 without any kind of changes. All you need is the disk in the cd rom drive and the Sierra On-Line utility's program as the game runs from the cd and it somehow works fine. It's a fun but very basic strategy game, but it's great for those who are new to strategy games or those who are jumping from console to pc.
+14Fitzzpatrick It's not actually all that strange. Modern Windows can run any 32-bit Windows application, the trick is just how well the video support works, or if any special tricks have been done to enhance performance. One thing's for sure, this game does not use 3D accelerated graphics and does not require extreme performance to do its thing, which means all rendering is done by software and there's likely very few tricks involved, thus why its compatibility with modern Windows is still as high as it is. :B
It's a genuinely interesting approach they've taken to streamline it. Never really been into Impressions' style of strategy, so no surprised I didn't catch it.
@@Pixelmusement You display that screen for several minutes; you could display the tech stats on one card, then the availability details on a second card. Or, you could render/produce your show in 4k, which would mitigate the font issues somewhat if shown on 4k displays.
Loved the new intro. ^^ I liked this game a lot when I was a kid, but never managed to beat it. The game gets horribly hard as it goes on, and my childish mind couldn't handle it after a while.
Happy New Year. ADG is back! This game was a pretty good intro to strategy games before AOE series came out, IMO. You should also look at the game Castles and Castles II, it too is about castle building. One thing, if you don't mind. I don't know if someone has already said this, but can you put the game's cover art (and maybe your channel logo) on the thumbnail please? My sub box is filled with many gameplay type videos and I almost skipped this video.
I only clicked the video because the snapshot of the game screen looked interesting, if it was a generic box art I would not click it at all, so there's that...
+Hemang Chauhan Not every game has cover art and frequently the cover art is a very poor indicator as to what the game is like, thus why I don't do that, but having the channel logo on the thumbnail isn't a bad idea... just gotta think of a good way of doing it which won't overpower the gameplay image... hmm...
i think i will try this game, looks great, nice +tidy graphics + its from my fav. pc era, usually i play rts rather than strategy , but you say its not overblown with options so i have a feeling you could get into it if you come from the "simpler" rts world
Kris, there are non-interlaced versions of the cinematics available in boxed copies of the game. For some strange reason I'll never understand, GOG.com chose to package the interlaced versions even though they surely had access to the non-interlaced ones.
The plot to this game is similar to _Castles: Siege and Conquest._ RUclipsr *Effing Controller* isn't very good at it, either, but he does play an excellent game of _Myth: The Fallen Lords._
Random but I sometimes misread this game's title as "Lord of the Rings." Maybe you should contact me if you ever do a Tolkien-based game, since you know how particular I am about that man and his work? (I need to finish the Interplay LOTR games...)
Oh man, these graphics are so lazy and spartan, not even a palette swap to animate water. I looked up the developer and most of their creations seem to be tabletop games with "but on a computer" twist with very basic graphic design. Funnily enough Caesar II (1995) has better graphics and water animation despite being released one year earlier. I only played one of IG games, Detroit, and loved it at the time, so at least they did know how to deliver interesting strategy layer. I want to thank you for ADG series, I enjoy the format, and appreciate the work you put into covering things like video/audio hardware support and cycle count for every game.
Impressions did one thing good, and that was the strategy. The actual underlying simulations ranged from excellent to maddening. My introduction to them was C3. Which is great when you can wrangle the walkers, and insane otherwise.
oh wow, I love this game! Played it soo much till 2001 or so, then got it to play again some 4 years ago, still holds up. and i am not a big fan of strategy games.
Always kinda surprises me that you're bad at strategy games - after all, you are an expert at Minesweeper and seem to be good at logical thinking overall, so you should be decent at strategy games too :D
+JarlFrank True, but there's one other catch: My short term memory is ABYSMALLY BAD, as in, I can forget things a mere second after being exposed to them, so because of that I can't see more than one or two steps ahead of me in terms of strategizing because if I try to I start forgetting those steps. To put this in perspective: I can't solve Rubik's Cubes because that requires being able to see multiple steps ahead, so... I just can't do it. :(
Hi = Kris. Played a lot of this game once or twice, but never finished it. Recommended, though. HUGE WARNING: Lords of the Realm 1+2 are great. Lords of the Realm 3 is bad. Only play the third game if you are really a hardcore fan. I didn't get into it and found it very boring, stopped after maybe half an hour. By the way, the battle reminds me of the graphics of Knights & Merchants. Coincidence or did they re-use assets?
@@Pixelmusement Ah, thanks. I got Starflight 1+2 or whatever it is called on GOG because of your video (that 1986 (?) space exploration game). Still need to find the "Muße" (as we Germans say) to play it.
I'm curious to know why you're "bad", or at least consider yourself such, at strategy games. It's a continuing theme on your channel. In my experience success in those types of games is primarily a question of logic, setting things up so you have an advantage and a better chance of winning. You clearly have a logical mind as you write code etc, so why the suckage when it comes to strategy games? Genuinely interested to know, not being contentious or anything.
+PlayStationPaul Heh, I just answered this exact question with a different commenter! But I'll say it again so you don't have to go searching the comments: My short term memory is ABYSMALLY BAD, as in, I can forget things a mere second after being exposed to them, so because of that I can't see more than one or two steps ahead of me in terms of strategizing because if I try to I start forgetting those steps. To put this in perspective: I can't solve Rubik's Cubes because that requires being able to see multiple steps ahead, so... I just can't do it. :(
@@PixelmusementOk that makes sense, I don't have a great short term memory and probably couldn't solve a Rubik's Cube but I do well at strategy games once I start learning the mechanics. Although it probably works in different way for me, I'm the sort of person that will decimate my foes on the battlefield but could be misclicking icons left, right and centre whilst doing it, especially if there's been minor changes in the interface between games.
+0xBADCOFFEE The trick to skipping them though is that if you don't critically overpower the opposing army, the calculated battles are not going to go in your favour, so if you want to win with equal or lesser armies you pretty much have to fight the battles. :P
Stuttering in early digital video was how some codecs adapted to available bandwidth. Under I/O pressure, some codecs maintained framerate but dropped resolution, while others maintained resolution but dropped frames. (If you look at the frame drops in your examples, they always occur after a scene change, when most of the bandwidth was taken up by the scene change.) These are decisions made at encode time, which is why the stuttering is always at the same point -- the frames you're expecting weren't recorded.
Just got to that point in the video. But yeah the fact he's not seen it before he should consider himself lucky as I used to have several games with the same problem at one point in time. Thankfully it does not seem that common, I at one point had maybe at most like 5 games that had the problem.
EDIT: Also I do believe the games that had this problem I owned used the same codec that LOR 2 uses.
+Jim
Leonard Interesting... 'cause I'm thinking back to some other games I played with cinematics like MechWarrior II and Descent II and neither of those have any stuttering, although I do recall with Descent II, if your system can't handle the framerate of the high res cinematics, it would load a bit, play a bit, pause until more is loaded, play a bit more, pause, etc., thus why that game had the cinematics recorded at both low and hi res and was user selectable.
@@Pixelmusement That was another way to (not) deal with bandwidth starvation. Another game that encoded this way is Under a Killing Moon; the ending cinematics dropped frames during encoding to not exceed a 2x cdrom rate.
A lot of searching brought me here, thank you for posting this.
3:06 "NV Digital Audio" is referring to the audio hardware found on the Nvidia NV1, which was only found on Diamond Edge 3D video card.
+Tempora158 Good to know! Thanks! :)
Ah yes. The Sega Saturn like 3D accelerator using quadratic surfaces instead of triangles. It's 2D performance was pretty bad and there were not a lot of compatible games.
LGR made a video: ruclips.net/video/jChtlWNIAL4/видео.html
New intro for the new year!
I like the change to the intro. I remember having this game as a youngster but not being very good at it.
As a kid I don't think I ever actually won a single game of this, but I still played a ton of it. There's a certain charm to the voice acting in this game, and I always wished I could play a single-player RPG with the graphics of the battle sections. I liked the castle designs and wanted to explore them as just a single character, but of course that'll get you annihilated in an actual game.
See if you can find the goofy easter egg song in the game files! (Or be a stick in the mud and just look it up on RUclips, I guess...) It always stuck with me.
This was by FAR the favorite game of my late father.
So needless to say that this vid really took me back. Thank you. :)
Thanks for suffering through another strategy game! This is one of my favorites. Excited for all the vids this season!
Yes, the show that constantly sends me running to eBay has returned!
I love your intros. Just the way I remember how my games both sound and look.
More complexity doesn't necessarily mean a better game, sometimes streamlining is best. Glad you're back with ADG reviews - here's to a good 2019!
Oh I've seen stuttering encoded in videos before. When I started playing the GOG version of Under a Killing Moon many years ago I spend the first hour or two trying to troubleshoot DOSBox performance problems. It turned out Access Software had stuttering in their developer logo video that plays in the beginning (verified by opening the video in VLC). But when the first thing I saw was already stuttering I immediately thought that the DOSBox GOG shipped with it must have some terrible config problems.
Excellent pick for a game to start with!
I remember a lot of PC games around this time as a kid, but I don't remember this series at all from than until I watched your videos.
Love your ADG series!
What a way to start off the new year with game that I own. I got it back in 2000 from a Big lots for 7 dollars.
One of the strange things about this game is that the windows/dos version can run in windows 7 without any kind of changes. All you need is the disk in the cd rom drive and the Sierra On-Line utility's program as the game runs from the cd and it somehow works fine.
It's a fun but very basic strategy game, but it's great for those who are new to strategy games or those who are jumping from console to pc.
+14Fitzzpatrick It's not actually all that strange. Modern Windows can run any 32-bit Windows application, the trick is just how well the video support works, or if any special tricks have been done to enhance performance. One thing's for sure, this game does not use 3D accelerated graphics and does not require extreme performance to do its thing, which means all rendering is done by software and there's likely very few tricks involved, thus why its compatibility with modern Windows is still as high as it is. :B
It's a genuinely interesting approach they've taken to streamline it. Never really been into Impressions' style of strategy, so no surprised I didn't catch it.
My first PC game ever. Used to run it on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 440 CDT :D
oh man it's been so long since i've visited the ADG site i forgot all about it. Time for some procrastination!
Finaly new episodes!!!!
One advice.... User a bigger font for the supported audio devices in the game stats, is is almost unreadable on a 42" tv.
+R I might try bringing it up just a smidge, but I have to be careful otherwise I'll run out of room very quickly!
@@Pixelmusement You display that screen for several minutes; you could display the tech stats on one card, then the availability details on a second card. Or, you could render/produce your show in 4k, which would mitigate the font issues somewhat if shown on 4k displays.
Loved the new intro. ^^
I liked this game a lot when I was a kid, but never managed to beat it. The game gets horribly hard as it goes on, and my childish mind couldn't handle it after a while.
Excellent and fair review!
Awesome! Best wishes for New Year 2019. :)
Love this game.
Happy New Year.
ADG is back!
This game was a pretty good intro to strategy games before AOE series came out, IMO.
You should also look at the game Castles and Castles II, it too is about castle building.
One thing, if you don't mind. I don't know if someone has already said this, but can you put the game's cover art (and maybe your channel logo) on the thumbnail please?
My sub box is filled with many gameplay type videos and I almost skipped this video.
I only clicked the video because the snapshot of the game screen looked interesting, if it was a generic box art I would not click it at all, so there's that...
+Hemang Chauhan Not every game has cover art and frequently the cover art is a very poor indicator as to what the game is like, thus why I don't do that, but having the channel logo on the thumbnail isn't a bad idea... just gotta think of a good way of doing it which won't overpower the gameplay image... hmm...
@@Pixelmusement OK I get your idea. Thanks for clarifying.
i think i will try this game, looks great, nice +tidy graphics + its from my fav. pc era, usually i play rts rather than strategy , but you say its not overblown with options so i have a feeling you could get into it if you come from the "simpler" rts world
And a happy new year to you!
Yes, a strategy game! There's hope for him yet :P
You are right about NV audio = Nvidia. It's support for the NV1 chip
Onnellista Uutta Vuotta! Happy New Year!
4:55 LOL. Show us the damn fight, man. xD
Love this game, I'm terrible at it too! got a boxed copy at a thrift store about ten years ago
finally the wait is over :D
Kris, there are non-interlaced versions of the cinematics available in boxed copies of the game. For some strange reason I'll never understand, GOG.com chose to package the interlaced versions even though they surely had access to the non-interlaced ones.
+Vaughn Bellwood Uhh... I'm RUNNING a boxed copy, though I only have the CD for it. :P
The plot to this game is similar to _Castles: Siege and Conquest._ RUclipsr *Effing Controller* isn't very good at it, either, but he does play an excellent game of _Myth: The Fallen Lords._
Happy new year!
Random but I sometimes misread this game's title as "Lord of the Rings."
Maybe you should contact me if you ever do a Tolkien-based game, since you know how particular I am about that man and his work? (I need to finish the Interplay LOTR games...)
The game reminded me of Ceasar 2
Oh man, these graphics are so lazy and spartan, not even a palette swap to animate water. I looked up the developer and most of their creations seem to be tabletop games with "but on a computer" twist with very basic graphic design. Funnily enough Caesar II (1995) has better graphics and water animation despite being released one year earlier. I only played one of IG games, Detroit, and loved it at the time, so at least they did know how to deliver interesting strategy layer.
I want to thank you for ADG series, I enjoy the format, and appreciate the work you put into covering things like video/audio hardware support and cycle count for every game.
Impressions did one thing good, and that was the strategy. The actual underlying simulations ranged from excellent to maddening. My introduction to them was C3. Which is great when you can wrangle the walkers, and insane otherwise.
I find the top-down graphics in the battles really charming, though that's probably more the nostalgia talking than anything.
Hello, there is some way not to divide the units on the war map?, that is, a unit represents a unit, not that 128 soldiers are represented by 1
Lords of the Realm II: The Squeakquel
Shiny new intro :)
My first Lan game...
Did you find the Easter egg music track?
+NavJack27 I didn't even know it was there until people started leaving comments on this video... ^_^;
oh wow, I love this game!
Played it soo much till 2001 or so, then got it to play again some 4 years ago, still holds up. and i am not a big fan of strategy games.
Always kinda surprises me that you're bad at strategy games - after all, you are an expert at Minesweeper and seem to be good at logical thinking overall, so you should be decent at strategy games too :D
+JarlFrank True, but there's one other catch: My short term memory is ABYSMALLY BAD, as in, I can forget things a mere second after being exposed to them, so because of that I can't see more than one or two steps ahead of me in terms of strategizing because if I try to I start forgetting those steps. To put this in perspective: I can't solve Rubik's Cubes because that requires being able to see multiple steps ahead, so... I just can't do it. :(
Any other game similar to this?
Hi = Kris. Played a lot of this game once or twice, but never finished it. Recommended, though.
HUGE WARNING: Lords of the Realm 1+2 are great. Lords of the Realm 3 is bad. Only play the third game if you are really a hardcore fan. I didn't get into it and found it very boring, stopped after maybe half an hour.
By the way, the battle reminds me of the graphics of Knights & Merchants. Coincidence or did they re-use assets?
+Lovuschka They're similar but not identical. :B
@@Pixelmusement Ah, thanks. I got Starflight 1+2 or whatever it is called on GOG because of your video (that 1986 (?) space exploration game). Still need to find the "Muße" (as we Germans say) to play it.
Agreed. 3 was dreadful. I’d love a remastered version of 1 or 2 but I don’t even know who owns the licenses anymore.
I'm curious to know why you're "bad", or at least consider yourself such, at strategy games. It's a continuing theme on your channel. In my experience success in those types of games is primarily a question of logic, setting things up so you have an advantage and a better chance of winning. You clearly have a logical mind as you write code etc, so why the suckage when it comes to strategy games? Genuinely interested to know, not being contentious or anything.
+PlayStationPaul Heh, I just answered this exact question with a different commenter! But I'll say it again so you don't have to go searching the comments: My short term memory is ABYSMALLY BAD, as in, I can forget things a mere second after being exposed to them, so because of that I can't see more than one or two steps ahead of me in terms of strategizing because if I try to I start forgetting those steps. To put this in perspective: I can't solve Rubik's Cubes because that requires being able to see multiple steps ahead, so... I just can't do it. :(
@@PixelmusementOk that makes sense, I don't have a great short term memory and probably couldn't solve a Rubik's Cube but I do well at strategy games once I start learning the mechanics. Although it probably works in different way for me, I'm the sort of person that will decimate my foes on the battlefield but could be misclicking icons left, right and centre whilst doing it, especially if there's been minor changes in the interface between games.
I love this game but the real time battles sucked, luckily you can skip them entirely and play it like a normal 4X game
+0xBADCOFFEE The trick to skipping them though is that if you don't critically overpower the opposing army, the calculated battles are not going to go in your favour, so if you want to win with equal or lesser armies you pretty much have to fight the battles. :P