Friday, March 6, 2020

Another Arcade Mode (and Unfortunate Setbacks)

Ugh... some luck I'm having right now...

I finally managed to upload the next Acceleration of SUGURI 2 Arcade Mode gameplay yesterday... even though it was supposed to be done on the 29th of last month, and the latest it would be posted is on the 1st of March.

I'll leave the ranting and bitching aside for now, as let's focus on more important things... the video! After playing as Tsih, I decided to play with a character that requires a bit more skill to use...


Ah, Alte. Her backstory is rather tragic, and her arsenal of weapons is also one of my favorites.

That Shock Rod is MASSIVE.

A bit more advanced in terms of skill to play using Alte... but not that tough. She's an all-rounder, and most of her weapons have a slight homing effect... this includes the melee weapon; the 'Shock Rod'.

This thing's just amazing; medium-range charge, partial homing and to top it all off... the stun charges!

Her weapons are not that accurate, though... this is why it's essential to activate her 'Searchlight' whenever possible, as it helps make her homing ability function a tad bit better, and also activates the homing ability for some of the weapons/skills that previously didn't have them, like the 'Shock Ball'.

I'm guessing this is due to her having one functional eye... so the Searchlight acts as her second eye, perhaps?

Probably the only character in which I utilize every skill available, aside from Shield and her Accel Hyper move. Her skillset is useful for every occasion; missiles and beams for crowding areas, sentries (or 'Claymores') for area denial, support and barricades...

...her "submachinegun" (looks like a minigun/chaingun) is good at stunning opponents, and also for constant damage. The 'Shock Ball' Hyper is amazing at stunning others, and the 'Salvo Fire' is a combination of beam and missile barrage... which works much more better when there's a Searchlight.

The 'Shock Ball' to 'Shock Rod' combo is still my go-to when playing as Alte. Sometimes I'll use the submachinegun instead of the 'Shock Ball' if I lack Hyper reserves.

My playstyle when I'm using Alte is to use the 'Shock Rod' whenever possible, and sometimes stun them or create a barrage first. Seems to work quite well for me. Some of her attacks are rather slow to implement, though... particularly the missiles.

And now, the behind-the-scenes stuff... 

What happened? Why did it take a week before the next video was out? Well, let me tell you the "story" that took place on the 29th of February, the 1st or March and also the 5th - 6th of March...

Firstly... after recording the video, I noticed something strange in the video, specifically the very start... the video would either be glitched green or grey for 2 seconds, lag a bit and finally the sound was introduced in the video.

What happened is that the video got slightly corrupted after the usual recording session, and refused to run on the video editor I normally use...

Video lags, and there's no sound...

So I had to think of other means of getting this done. Thankfully, I had a backup video editing software I seldom use... even though I bought it on sale during one of Humble Bundle's deals...

Notice the weird glitch at the start?

...I think it costs $25, packaged with other video/music editing software...

Originally wanted to just cut out the corrupted parts using VEGAS Pro 15, render the file and use it in HitFilm Express 14... only problem is that VEGAS Pro's rendering speed is abysmally slow; nearly an hour's worth of waiting...

...and then I found out that it will only show the audio section of the clip in HitFilm. Seems to do fine when viewing it on my desktop, even on YouTube when I tried to test it further. Must be some strange compatibility issues among the two software, or my inability to do stuff properly...

So then I was forced to use VEGAS Pro for the edits this time. I preferred using HitFilm as it was much more smoother and the UI made things very easy and fast to do. Another downside of VEGAS is that it tends to crash... a lot.

I had about 5 instances of it happening, and plenty of slowdowns when using the preview to check my works... that was not fun.

Then, the work was done and I just had to render the project! Except that I forgot to extend the project's time limit, and had to render the dang thing AGAIN... both of this alone took 3 hours. FML

By the time I was done with the editing, crashing, slowdowns and just me fucking up at the last minute, it was already late in the night. Or morning, as it was 5AM at that time.

The video quality was horrid during the first render test, so I adjusted the parameters to a visually appealing level (at least to me). This makes the rendering time even longer, and I did check to make sure it was using the Nvidia graphics card to do the work instead of the integrated one... as it will take an hour plus if I used that one instead!

Strangely... in my time of using HitFilm Express, ESPECIALLY after the version 12 update, the program rarely crashes. Exporting of projects also didn't take a millennia to get done and the best of all is that the previews don't usually slow down, unless one uses 3D objects or FX stuff... which I don't use when it comes to these types of videos.

So I saved it and decided to upload 'em to YouTube when I wake up after bed, which was yesterday. And here we are today, with this post. Recording was done on the 29th of February, tried some adjustments on the day after... and only managed to have time to get back to the edits on the 5th of March, as I was busy with work and classes... assignments; just 2 months into 2020!

Since I was using VEGAS Pro to edit, I figured I might as well make full use of it, making the video as similar as possible to the last one. The -BONUS- section was supposed to be cut out, but I wanted to try adding something different, to see how it'll look like. Not sure if this type of stuff will make a return in future videos.

But alas, everything was finished in the end. I don't like what had happened, I preferred to have all this done by 29th February or 1st March as stated before. I'm personally hoping that the same problem doesn't happen again, as when I record a clip, I would want to use it together with a video editing software that can make my work go by faster.

...plus, I'd rather not do another recording session just because the video got corrupted or something. That's gonna take a lot of space, and a retake would lose some of the things that happened in the original video... like obtaining the 1cc star, for example. I did do a practice match beforehand, but like I mentioned in the video, I had no clue what I was doing besides spamming missiles everywhere.

And that should be the end for the rants...

I guess I'll have to do more training this time round... as I'm still pretty stiff when controlling the movements, dodges/dashes and attacks. Seems like I tend to stop my dashes, then attack. Then again, I prefer to play defensively in this game as I don't like to get my HEAT up to above 100% if I can. More HEAT = more damage taken... and if not careful, can get you killed very quickly.

It seems like these 'setbacks' are happening waaay too often... this is some grade-A luck right here that I'm having right now, with how the last video.post also running into problems...

 Alright, that's enough of that! For now I'll stick to doing Arcade Mode matches, 1cc'ing them if I can for all characters... this includes previous characters that I had 1cc'ed before the start of all this. So until then, stay tuned.

Hopefully the next one doesn't run into any mishaps... here's hoping for a smooth operation.

-Panzer Fist-

No comments:

Post a Comment

The Alien