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Hmmm, but why doesn't running the ROM I named (USA) run the same as the (E) one if I turn off PAL emulation? Instead it runs much closer to the original PAL version.
Actually there seem to be 4 speeds to run the game at depending on how I set the emulator.
(E) - with PAL emulation
(E) - without PAL
(USA) - without PAL
(USA) -with PAL
The first and third are pretty close, but the other 2 are way different, weird.
The game seems to be doing something on its own to compensate.
I guess the question is if the game is truly intended to run in either region (even if its not an exact match) meaning some specific code somewhere is written specifically to compensate for the region.
Well not like I know where in the ROM that code would be.
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Oh also there was some discussion of this in the previous submission thread.
here
If you rename the rom with a (USA) tag and then run it, it does indeed run in NTSC mode with the same speed as the original (EUROPE) rom runs in PAL.
It sems like the emulator ignores movie and other settings, maybe an emulator glitch.
I don't know the technical details of what the emulator is doing here though, but this may be how they got the same timings.
Might be something worth checking out in Bizhawk too?
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Encode is public now sorry I missed that.
@fsvgm777: Interesting, I remember seeing a quote from Bisqwit saying he saw no visual difference between the two:
Bisqwit wrote:
I tested the ROM with "-pal 1" option of fceu, and I couldn't see a difference between its timing and the timing of the previous AVI. I think the ROM automatically adjusts and thus works properly even if played in NTSC.
Yet the difference seems obvious enough in your GIFs, I wonder what went wrong here.
Or perhaps he meant that the game runs properly with either setting, and over time this got mistranslated to runs at the same speed?
We need a judge!
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In fact even that message in the original publication is a bit misleading.
The game was only released in Europe, hence there is no equivalent rom with a (USA) for example, there is only one ROM. It's not that Luke picked the wrong version, it's the only one.
However it is true that the game can recognize the region setting, (I did put this in my submission comments) so NTSC is proper.
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Its not a complete redo. 'Running speed' in ball mode doesn't take effect in the air. So it doesn't change everything. The biggest impact is on long straightaways.
I'm back to the start of level 3 and 600 frames ahead of the rough draft run.
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New discovery (for me at least)
It seems even morph ball mode has 'running' speed.
You can activate it by unmorphing and remorphing while holding down B.
It is subject to the same 6 frame rule as running. you have to hold down B for at least 6 frames before remorphing again.
This will save significant time. Let's go fast!
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What is specific about it is the proximity of the item box to the boss room.
In most other areas, there is something of a dead zone between then last object and the boss room. Presumably this is done on purpose to clear out all objects before the boss spawns. In this case however the item can fly just far enough to still be spawned when the boss is supposed to appear.
Done with a rough draft of act 4 and almost 1500 frames ahead. Sub 8 minutes may be possible.
EDIT: powered through the rest of the game, the 5-2 boss skip was pretty easy. The final boss is significantly faster.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25041199123772823
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25023081448658793
Act 3 done. I saved more time on 3-2 then I expected to which was nice.
The Boss skip was not so easy to get working, the result is better then I expected but not terribly fast. The good news is that its not as complicated as originally thought, might even be practical real time but some pretty good luck would be required.
About 1000 frames ahead at this point.
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After you fall a certain distance you lose horizontal momentum. So that ledge is needed to be able to fall to the left fast enough to catch the platform below you.
I am almost on Act 3 boss, not quite sure how to set up the skip yet but hope to have it done soon.
EDIT: ok, got the boss skip working. Here is the set up.
You need to get an item to spawn in the first slot and fly out of the item block to the farthest right possible. To do this, first you need to kill one of the lasers which ordinarily spawns there. It also helps to kill the second higher laser so a laser shot doesn't take this spot, then its just a matter of getting an item to spawn where you want it. So it doesn't require 5 slots to be filled as in the explanation video, only one, but that script sure did come in handy!
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/24992745444023405
Made it through act 2.
I also went back and saved some more frames in act 1.
There weren't as many savings to be had in act 2 but I still saved frames in every level. The biggest savings was beating the second boss in one jump.
Luke's act 3 start: 11170
My act 3 start: 10653
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Cooldude0027 wrote:
I would test out the Bounce Glitch in Bizhawk if I could, but I don't have it set up and I'm not sure how to set it up.
If indeed the Bounce Glitch happens not only in Mupen but in Bizhawk as well, then could it be possible that the game thinks Mario is beneath the platform for the frame that he's in it and can't down warp him for whatever reason so it upwarps him?
Also is there any way that the coin from the Bob-omb could be changing the byte in Mario's height?
About the first part, don't know, but since this behavior is not by itself producing the glitch, something else might be at play.
Personally I'm on the fence about it actually being a byte change, but I haven't looked at the code so anything is possible. At any rate, the coin itself probably has nothing to do with it, just a programming bug associated with the collision detection routines that have to process Mario and the coin at the same time. Perhaps I'll do some tests where Mario and the coin are both going over the edge to see if anything strange happens (more strange then colliding backwards.) If this does happen to be the case though, I have hopes that it is more widely applicable.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/24935710578064211
Here is WIP 1.
The only improvement I found is in level 1.
I think I'm a few frames ahead in level 2 at the doors, but it is very hard to tell, by now I am a few hundred lag frames behind the original run so am not bothering to sync up Nitsuja's file and just watching the youtube encode.
So I will only be keeping track of real obvious time saving improvements, of which so far I only have the 1 in level 1.
My guess is that the final run will be up to 30 seconds longer then Nitsuja's
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^ thanks for the tip, I never even considered 2 players. I TASed the first level (one player) a little while back but made no progress after that, guess I need to start from scratch anyway.
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@cooldude: I think the second example in your post is just normal collision detection, it will occur as long as the game thinks Mario is below a higher ceiling even when a lower one partly intersects him. As a result Mario would end up inside the wall triangle when he jumps (since it doesn't detect him hitting the ceiling) so he gets ejected out.
In your first part it would be interesting to see what happens in Bizhawk since lag frames are emulated there. Mupen can be misleading, since you can even jump seemingly in mid-air since it doesn't show all frames.
I do think edge grabbing is an interesting idea I haven't thought of. In pannen's video where he changes Mario's height to match the glitch, I wonder if that is an edge of a wall triangle? I guess this is the first thing to answer (but I don't know how to do it.)
I'm pretty surprised the bounty is unclaimed still, surely more difficult glitches then this have been studied and reproduced, and SM64 is a pretty hotly contested game.
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Sounds good to me, although Luke's quote there isn't quite right, as it certainly will change the run in other ways besides bosses.
I did a bit of testing and it seems that a level 4 run will just be me moving back and forth in ball mode at various spots to kill enemies with more HP, something neither interesting nor fast.
So, continuing onwards!
EDIT: implemented all improvements and improved the boss fight again (currently at 144 frames , Arc's fight was 163, from when the Boss's HP appears until it hits zero.)
Act 1 currently ends at frame 5539, Luke's run was at 5853, so a bit over 5 seconds ahead.
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Plush wrote:
I don't get it lol, makes no sense to me. Why do you think that coins might affect Mario's position?
Not the coin itself exactly, but the collision detection the game does on the coin as it goes over the edge. My guess here is that that happens at the same time mario is landing / changing ceiling triangles and could create an edge case where a flag or pointer somewhere gets messed up.
It's something rare enough that it might match up to how hard this glitch is to reproduce. Or at least it seems plausible to me based on seeing the backwards collisions that I mentioned in my previous posts.
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Kurabupengin wrote:
I think it's time to remove some games from the list, right? ;)
Indeed, and with Kabuki done the list is down to 26, 10 fewer then when I first posted it!
Kabuki and pro levels were the ones I was most worried about from a technical perspective, so with those 2 done I don't think there are any left that would in principle be hard to improve (having already found an improvement in PoP2 that is.)
However most of the remaining ones are longer runs / 2 players / ones I find boring, so not sure how fast things will get done from here. My goal is to have it under 20 by year end!
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So I've been thinking about the glitch and wondered what exactly could effect Mario's state such that a strange case could occur. Certainly by now many people have tried to replicate this following the original movie, and since the bounty is still unclaimed there must be something else at work here.
Then I was watching one of pannenkoek's other videos about extreme coin RNG:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PXiEbvZoTs
At ~1:32 I noticed a coin clipping off of the ice structure in the background in a weird way. It reminded me of the Bob-omb's coin in this glitch.
I wonder if the coin is going off the edge just as mario is landing, and as the game processing the coin clipping around the corner, it leaves some flag set that later effects Mario as he hits the floor.
I definitely lack the technical knowledge of SM64 to test this, so this might be as far as I go, but I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this? It's the only thing I can think of with a sufficiently small enough probability that the glitch is this super rare, and hasn't been reproduced even while mimicking the movie quite closely.
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^ nice! I thought that boss needed a second look.
I suppose it might be worth while to return to the question of difficulty level before getting too deep into the run.
I tried changing difficulty level to 4 and just running through the movie file, it didn't take long for it to de-sync.
Looks like the de-sync was caused by different enemy pattern. Enemies definitely have more HP so some tricks aren't possible and will make things slower.
Any thoughts on this?
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Good thinking, you are right, I can get a bounce off of that platform and reach right side earlier saving about 15 frames.
I also realized I bumped into a wall towards the end costing me another 10 or so frames, oops.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/24862911971425429
Here is my first attempt at act 1, saved about 4 seconds. I plan on doing one act at a time.
This is definitely the type of game where having more sets of eyes look at it will lead to more improvements, so if anyone wants to work on this with me feel free.
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I decided to work on this game and Prince of Persia 2 at the same time, since Prince of Persia is way to boring alone. I noticed this game a while back and it looked fun to TAS, but I didn't get around to it.
As truncated pointed out in the submission text, you can run after leaving ball form, and this saves frames very early in the run, so I'll be starting from scratch.
There are some rules as far as I can tell. This only saves time if you have 5 frames of running in between leaving morph ball and jumping, otherwise you jump at walking speed, so it's not applicable in all circumstances, and also not applicable if you aren't on the ground to run.
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I have another question for the more knowledgeable folks.
How are properties inherited by coins? I noticed that coins from goombas (who don't run off cliffs) also don't fall off cliffs, while coins from bob-ombs (who do run off cliffs) do go off cliffs. I'm surprised I had played this game a lot as a kid and never noticed this.
Is this a property that gets passed down, so to say, to the coin? Or is the coin just replacing the enemy and this property simply doesn't get updated?
This combined with the ceiling collisions may be what's causing this behavior.
Well my thought was that since the glitch happens when mario lands, it might be related to some flag representing mario's current state being incorrectly set at some point in the jump sequence, similar to how mario shouldn't be colliding with a wall he was already clipped to the other side of. Is there a list of flags that can be set that we can run through?
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GoombaHeart wrote:
Got a video or the input file of the second bit?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2s2u6hb3cdkqsql/Super%20Mario%2064%20%28J%29%20%5B%21%5D.st6?dl=0
Here's a savestate, just jump for 2 frames then press B.
I noticed something similar happens on the top platform, and Mario gets turned around after he passes the floor.
It looks like what is happening is that the game thinks Mario both hit the inside of the wall that represents that section of vertical grating that lines the floor, AND needs to be put on the right side of that wall, but it does the moving first and the collision second.
Maybe this type of order of operations error is related to the glitch?
It looks like what is happening is that the game thinks Mario both hit the inside of the wall that represents that section of vertical grating that lines the floor, AND needs to be put on the right side of that wall, but it does the moving first and the collision second.
Maybe this type of order of operations error is related to the glitch?