- Sometimes they desync. Examples include the “Prison Sex” film on Nardo’s page and the Return to Marathon films John sent me (I can attach these if needed). I’m not 100% sure what film engine the latter are supposed to use, but they desync in all three of them. It’s possible that the “Prison Sex” desync is related to monster freeze, but “From Now We Go On” (in the same pack) also makes heavy use of monster freeze and stays in sync throughout, and the RTM films desync long before there could be any monster freeze (in fact, the first one desyncs before John even encounters a monster). And I’m not running Previous AI in Tempus, so that’s not it either.
- Sometimes it claims it can’t find the map the film was recorded on (one of the “Poor Yorick” vid tips, IIRC – I think it was “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”, though it might’ve been one of the others or even all of them; also the “Confound Delivery” film in John’s fists-only pack. John also said that the film of level #33 [FrigidMan’s version of “You Think You’re Big Time? You’re Gonna Die Big Time!”] in this pack also doesn’t play if you leave the XBLA HUD on, but disabling it allows it to play. I haven’t been using the HUD for any of the films I’ve encoded on my Dell and haven’t tested this; I have no explanation for why it would cause problems for this specific film. I’m also not sure if John meant that the film says it can’t find the map or if it just doesn’t play at all; this might be worth testing if it’s relevant).
- Sometimes they just stop almost immediately (one of the “Aye Mak Sicur” vid tips, IIRC; I think it might’ve been Frode’s).
John said all his affected films work fine under vanilla Infinity, but I haven’t gotten an emulator running yet. I don’t have any plausible hypotheses as to what causes any of these problems.
I have yet to notice any of these problems occur in any M2 film I’ve played (and I’ve encoded at least eighty to date, judging from the number of videos in my M2 playlist on YouTube), so it’s possible (though not certain) that all of these problems could be specific to A1’s M∞ film engine.
I’ve been encoding most of my films using Aleph One 1.2.1 (2015/06/20) on my Dell, which runs Windows 7 SP 1 with an AMD Radeon HD 6450 running aticfx64.dll 8.850.0.0. I’ve also been running some on my MacBook, which runs Yosemite 10.10.5 with an Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536; same Aleph One release. I’ve been using the shader to render all of them. These problems seem to persist on both of them, though I haven’t tested every film on both machines. I’m kind of a n00b when it comes to graphics hardware, so I’m not sure I’ve got all the info you need; if you require anything else, let me know.
Since I can’t work out why these specific films are having issues, I don’t expect the Spanish Inquisition a quick fix. I don’t even know how you’d debug something like that, but my C++ knowledge is rudimentary at best; I haven’t written a line of code in the language in at least a decade. (I plan to fix this soon, but it’ll be a long time before my C++ knowledge is advanced enough for me to comprehend A1’s code.) I also suspect I’m the first person to have even commented about these problems (though I haven’t checked), since I doubt most other people play nearly as many M∞ films as I do (I’m one of a small number of people who’ve ever devoted a YouTube channel to Marathon films, after all), and as a result, I don’t expect it to be a particularly high priority.