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Stage 1 is done.
Link to videoAttention: calling for movie verifiers!
This TAS was made in Bizhawk 2.8 with Dolphin-5.0-16426 core implemented. However, I don't have Windows 10 to check if it really syncs alright.
Please check if this movie fully syncs on your end and comment here, if everything went well.User movie #638201772197234242
Settings used in Bizhawk. From non-default ones, it has no memory card in Slot A, MMU enabled, Widescreen Hack on and Aspect Ration is "Forced 16:9".
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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8 years ago, I made an attempt to beat this game. Dolphin TASing wasn't that stable, I didn't know much about the game despite playing it hard in my childhood, my PC wasn't strong enough and I wasn't experienced in TASing. I beat Stage 1 Area 1 and dropped it.
Now, the problems are fixed, emulators are more stable and I'm ready to do a serious attempt to complete the whole game.
Enemies
Show-up animation for an enemy is calculated from the frame when the radar shows the number of enemy(-ies) spawned, to the first frame it can take damage.
Vanish animation - from the frame an enemy takes the killing hit, to the frame when its dot is removed from the radar (or 1 frame after the radar number changes).
Mousers (white weak). HP = 12 (??)
Mousers (green). HP = 24
Mousers (white strong). HP = 60
Mousers have a specific damaging mechanics. When they get hit by an attack which knocks down, they spin backwards like snooker balls. The velocity of a spinning mouser goes down.
When a spinning one touches another mouser, it slides back a little and enters its stun animation. At this moment, mouser loses 4 hp (low speed) or 8 hp (high speed). Then, a spinning mouser hits that mouser again and again. If its HP reaches 0, it goes into the spinning state as well. That's why hitting 2-3 mousers results in the whole crowd getting destroyed.
It's possible to destroy a white weak mouser with an air juggle attack too, but the condition is not clear. Sometimes they die, sometimes they don't.
When a spinning mouser gets inside the area of another mouser which is about to spawn in, the victim takes 16 damage per a frame. That's why on Stage 6 some mousers die as soon as they pop up.
Green mousers for some reason take human damage from shurikens (8 from a regular shuriken, 18 from an electric shuriken).
Purple Dragons (white and green). HP = 18. Show-up animation = 66 frames
Purple Dragons (orange). HP = 24. Show-up animation = 81 frames
As soon as they show up,
- green ones usually start surrounding you.
- white and orange ones just approach you
Foot Ninjas. HP = 30.
Show-up animation: 12-17 frames. I guess, the "ceiling" height matters. You can do a double jump and hit one, but it immediately teleport to the ground and falls down from the ground height.
Bo ninja vanish animation = 71 frames.
Katana ninja vanish animation = 61 frames.
Katana ninjas run towards you, if you are away from them. Bo ninjas stand still and throw shurikens, but it's possible to make them approach you, if you deal damage.
If the player performs attacks (no matter successful or not) or a dash, and if a ninja is not knocked down, it falls back by doing a back-flip. That's why it's sometimes difficult to kill them fast.
Nanobots (blue). HP = 30
Nanobots (big yellow). HP = 48
A nanobot (robot) can be knocked down, but it doesn't take 2 hits from neither of strong attacks (idle and running). The only way to hit it while it falls down and get up is air juggling.
Unlike Foots, "A, dash, B" doesn't usually work against blue Nanobot groups because they attack faster then Don does a strong attack. Sometimes, "A-A-A" works a little faster, but it doesn't speed up the spawn of the next group of enemies.
Foot Tech Ninjas. HP = 60.
Show-up animation = 70 frames (1st frame when it becomes invisible). However, a falling enemy can knock them down as soon as their hitboxes touch each other.
Vanish animation = 65 frames
If you are, let's say, 4-10 meters away from one of them, it slowly approaches you, and when the distance is 4 meters, he waits a little and jumps at you.
If you are far away from one of them, they run towards you. When the distance became ~6 meters, it switches to the tactic above. In some cases, it continues running towards you.
Foot Bee. HP = 60
Show-up animation = 91 frames
Vanish animation = 151 frames
Cars. HP = 200
You can count "Bash!" words to see how much damage you have dealt. Explosion has a short range. It doesn't have much purpose.
UPD: all other info has been moved to the submission text.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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I'd like to tell you about my failures in TASing this game. After all, negative experience is also experience.
Settings:
- Speed Units = km/h - for better comparison with speedruns
- Transmission = Manual.
Automatic one switches gears too early. As a result, you car drives slower.
- Stability control (SC) = Off.
When SC is On, your car is more sticky to the ground which affect both your throttling (speed gaining) and steering a little. As a result, your car moves slower by 1-2%.
When SC is Off, the steering a little more slippery, especially when you drive over sidewalks/pavements.
I feel like all it does is tweak the gravity for your car.
Known speedrun tricks:
Double steering (DS) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0bKpCz7GOk
Double tapping (DT) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMGFfoUwtaQ
Both techniques are used to make the car enter the drifting without major speed looses, which results in covering the turning sections much faster.
Why I dropped it so quick?
I have been meshing input for 3 hours to perform a trick to cover the first turn of the Tutorial Race (the very 1st race in the game) faster and didn't get any luck. I am shocked how easily speedruns utilize these tricks!! I even downloaded one of the speedrun videos, copy-pasted its input frame-by-frame and still failed to perform DT. No luck with DS too.
I have major doubts that even if you manage to perform any of them, it won't be easy to adapt it to your case to complete your section faster.
I can assume stable 60 FPS of PC version helps doing that or maybe some plugins I'm not aware of. GC runs at 25-50 FPS depending on the render state, but I'm sure it still should be possible.
Global TAS problems
- If for most games RTA timings can be relatively easily beaten by slow-motion runs, let alone frame-by-frame building, NFS: Underground is one of the hardest ones to do so. It's gonna be cumbersome to achieve "Beats all known RTA records" goal.
- The game is very long and tedious. Any person, except for some special hyper-patient individual, will go nuts spending years to compose an acceptable 4 hours of input to beat the game.
- Even if TAS bots become capable of Dolphin input bruteforcing, they will have to an extremely big amount of work, despite the fact that input variations can be narrowed down very much.
P.S: yeah, no input file this time. I made first 10 secs of the 1st race, but it shows nothing useful, since I didn't manage to perform a trick at least somehow.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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So apparently different versions of Pac-Man: Tengen and Namco are considered different games.
Considering the identical gameplay as well as most of the assets, I would say, it's similar to beating a hack which doesn't bring much new stuff to the "original".
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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CasualPokePlayer wrote:
LoadLibrary failure either means the dolphin dll in the dll folder is just missing (bad download?), or a dependency for that dll is missing. Dolphin requires the 2022 visual c++ redist package, which you can get here https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
Note too that Dolphin dropped support for Windows 7-8.1 officially some time ago so the core might just not work for those OSes.
Thank you for the response! I installed VC_redist and it didn't help. Looks like they've made some changes to the core which ruins its workability on Windows 7 beyond Dolphin's GUI.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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Mizumaririn wrote:
However I am not sure if you are aware of a glitch being present. I watched the WR on SRC (the platform is PC). By swapping a jewel into a blank tile while the jewels above drop to refill, one dropping jewel gets deleted, allowing for much more versatility (and the number of possibilities). Is said glitch also possible on the DS version?
I also want to question, is destroying star gems and hypercubes slow? it seems that normal matching can destroy gems faster than these 2 special gems.
I was aware of this glitch. I tried it for a couple of times, but got no luck.
Star Gems and Hypercubes, as you can see on the video, show the animation of clearing the lines or specific gems and it's enough time-consuming to go with regular combos and Flame Gems, which occupy 3 columns to make gems above it jump and fall down. It's time-consuming as well, but you can swap gems in other places in the meantime.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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Bejeweled 3 is not a really good game choice for TASing. For 2 reasons:
1) Entertainment. As we can see in this submission from 2012, it gets boring quickly. Yeah, this is one of the games which are entertaining when you play it, and not so entertaining when you watch a TAS.
2) Optimization. When you make a combo, a set of jewels, which falls from the top, is selected at random, depending on the time moment at which the combo was done. That means, each quest should be heavily bruteforced high and low in order to achieve your goals in the fastest time.
I'd say, optimization is the main restriction here.
Bejeweled 3 has not a big variety of goals. It has it's own set of achievements, but I don't think any of them, besides Levelord, worth its submission, as they are aimed at an extremely long play.
So, I would emphasize 2 reasonable goals: Levelord (short) and Quest Mode (long), which we'll focus on below.
Special Gems glossaryFlame Gem - collect 4 gems in a line. Blows 8 cells around it. All gems above the explosion jump up, but it's still the fastest interruption among special gems.
Star Gem - collect 5 gems forming an 90-degree angle: these are 4 variations of "L" and the "+" variation. Clears the whole row and the whole column which are traversed by the gem.
Hypercube - collect 5 gems in a line. Clears all gems of the kind a hypercube was swapped with.
Note: combining 2 hypercubes clears all the gems on the field.
Supernova - collect 6 gems in a line. Can be made only the game drops multiple gems from the top after you've made a combo. Provides the multiplied effect of a Flame Gem and a Start Gem, i.e. clears 3 rows and the 3 columns which are traversed by the gem.
Quest Mode
Quest mode consists of 40 stages, introducing 11 game modes.
Alchemy
Vertical combos cover columns. Horizontal ones cover rows. 8 matches on each line in 1 direction is enough to cover the whole field.
Things get a little complicated when you need to cover the field twice, but I think the strategy is still regular combos. Special gems are not that game changers here.
Avalanche
This mode is slow-pacing. Not much can be done here. Combos should be done during a fall of a gem line, to make them fall at the full speed. Making combos in other moments will pause the timer which drops a new line of gems.
It's possible to swap a gem with an empty space if there is no question mark above it.
Blowing a Star Gem at the end will save some time comparing to making 3-4 combos after the last needed line of gems.
Balance
It's about manipulating the frequency of red and blue gems. Don't let more than 3 columns be unsortable because, the more combos you do, the more gems fall down and red/blue ones are seen more often. Special gems are not that required.
Butterflies
Every time you make 1-2 combos, a random gem at the bottom turns into a butterfly and each combo makes it jump one space above, until it reaches the top.
It's about the frequency of combos to spawn more butterflies. It's not that hard to make combinations with them.
Gold Rush
The main problem is making combos at the bottom to break the ground cells. Blowing a Supernova, especially, near the bottom, is the fastest strategy. Well, a Star Gem along the line with gold cells is good too, but who knows if this will be faster than a Supernova.
Ice Storm
It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Poker
Obviously, to get a Flush hand, you gotta rely on manipulations of the random. Say there are 3 available combos of the same color. You do these combos and make the game drop gems of the same color to do 2 more combos, resulting in having a Flush (5 of a kind).
Unfortunately, each your gem swap result gets recorded on one of 5 cards, so there are not much possibilities to prepare the field for the next set of cards without ruining your card combination. I don't think it's possible to collect constant Flushes (5 of a kind), but the rotation of Flushes and quads (4 of a kind) is definitely possible.
Also, combining a special gem gives you +50 points to the result.
Sandstorm / Buried Treasure
You gotta clear specific areas to pull the items out. The strategy is the same as in Ice Storm. It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Stratamax
Since we have a limited number of moves, it's about manipulating cascade combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Time Bomb
You gotta make combos with specific gems with timers. 3-4 combos trigger a new bomb to drop down from the top. Not much to say. Flame Gems may come in handy.
Wall Blast
Flame Gems are not so useful here because they may not cover much of the wall blocks. Supernova is the fastest strategy because it covers much space.
I actually managed to make 2 hypercubes and join them to cover the whole field, but I think it's a slow strategy.
Jewels Random
The game drops new jewels at random for each of 8 columns which have less than 8 jewels after combining some of those. It also keeps track of total quantities of each color on the board, as well as the amount of possible combos, but it's not too restricted.
In rare cases, but easy enough to face it in a regular play, the game drops multiple jewels of the same color, making it easier for you to get powerful jewels.
In even more rare cases, you can get 5 (hypercube) or 6 (supernova) similar jewels in a row just dropped down for you. This is the main point of manipulation for the fastest strategy to complete some of the non-trivial goals.
In all modes, except Classic, the game doesn't let the player run out of combinations by always providing a set of jewels which make at least one combo possible. For a TAS, if you get into this situation, that definitely means you gotta replay a stage or rewind continuous playthrough to get a better random.
Here is my TAS which beats the Quest Mode. It's rather a low-effort run, cuz' I didn't bother beating each stage in the fastest time. A human may spend dozens of hours on each stage to get objectively fastest time, I think it's a work for a bot to mesh buttons.
Link to video
Here is the input file. I don't know why you'd need it, but anyway.
User movie #638173207203289282
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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CasualPokePlayer wrote:
Can you please post the resulting last_stdout and last_stderr files?
Where to find them?
When I launch a game, I get the following error.
It doesn't matter if the firmware is present on not, but I can assume only the autodetected firmware will work.
I found dsp_coef.bin for "DSP COEF" and dsp_rom.bin (?) for "DSP IROM" in Dolphin's Sys folder within "My Documents" directory. Internet seems to share the same IPL.bin file for Gamecube, no matter where I look for it.
Anyway, all of these 3 files are not detected by Bizhawk and, if I import them, they are shown as question marks.
Using 5.0-16793 final release.
Windows 7 SP1 x64.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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I've been following your WIPs. Even though some skips are not performed due to token collection, it looks even more entertaining than your regular TAS.
Yes vote
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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The deja-vu feeling would stick with me to the end of the video, if I didn't put a thumb up to it some years ago xD
Just like in Street Fighter 2, the author tries to show all the game's tricks. I think, quitting the match as soon as a glitch is done, is a nice touch.
The entertainment level higher than in Street Fighter 2, but it could be even higher, if you could initiate playaround matches in-between CPU fights (like in Mortal Kombat) to switch the story characters.
Nevertheless, yes vote!
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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Hello, eladog. Welcome to TASVideos!
As pointed by other people, your TAS can be done faster. Besides, "warps" by HappyLee shows better movement optimization. Even World 1-1 can be done faster.
The goal choice is also not well-selected. You're using warps, but not the ones which lead to the fastest game competition. In speedrunning, people either use fastest warps to complete the game, or not use warps at all (a.k.a. "warpless"). It's good to see a TAS which uses a non-ordinary route, but it's not acceptable this way.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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I guess, someone has already reported this, but new "New Submissions" list doesn't look good.
The game name, the branch and the author(-s) light up only when you point at it which is a downgrade to convenience. I double-checked my Dark Reader browser plugin, it was off for tasvideos.
Mobile version, on the other hand, doesn't have this defect. Black text on a bright-grey background with a dark-green timing looks decent. No objections here.
The current list of publications begs for an improvement: add a JS script that shows a thumbnail in a bigger resolution in the panel to the right where it used to be, but it was showing only the latest picture.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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Here's a temp encode:
(deleted)
I'm not a fan of RPG speedruns and this one is relatively long, I didn't really enjoy it. Meh vote.
Your movie finishes at the very end, when the year of publishing shows up. Please, upload here an abridged version of your .bk2 file that ends at your last input in order to trigger the credits roll. It should become about 157600 frames in total. Maybe less.
If I got it right, the cutscene after the credits doesn't require any input from the player.
Also, you were using Bizhawk 2.9 which hasn't been released to public yet. For the future, please consider replaying your TASes on official release versions of your emulator. But this time it's fine. It plays back on Bizhawk 2.8.
https://tasvideos.org/MovieRules:
Use an official release of an approved emulator. Development/interim builds are allowed if the resulting input file syncs on an official release, though use them with caution as sync is not guaranteed.
UPD: temp encode has done its job. I've deleted it
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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LaddyPlays wrote:
Dimon12321 wrote:
There is also a custom tag for input files (called "userfile"), which is a better alternative to a URL. You can quote my post to see how it looks internally.
Taking note of it, thank you! Later I will upload a WIP of my TAS once I feel like enough progress is done. (Is it just me, or both of these userfile links are broken? I can't view them...)
Oh, looks like the author didn't feel like keeping that WIP for a while.
Here's one of mine. It won't disappear xD
User movie #63404054620389365
Here's a hyperlink.
LaddyPlays wrote:
So far I am in the middle of Level 5, which is just an auto-scrolling one. The bad thing is that I actually had finished it once, but because I forgot about saving the branch, I lost all progress I made on it and must redo all of it.
Now that I think of how long I took to get this far, maybe I should actually spend more time into it. I will try to clear 1 to 2 levels, then gather resources about tricks and glitches everyday. I will also play it regularly by myself to remember most of its details. A long time ago, as I was unable to figure out how to pass a level and relentlessly pushed into a wall, I accidentally clipped through it to finish the level. I don't remember how it was done.
There is no actual guide how to find glitches. Not much people like messing around trying various tactics to see if they can clip through a wall, glide through a platform or some other possible glitch scenario. Most glitches are discovered by accident.
When it comes to route planning, some people make first-try walkthroughs (also known as "TAS Test") to gather all the knowledge. For example, first 3 levels are played like normal, then on level 4 a new movement glitch was discovered, then on level 7 another one discovered or maybe some time saver is used. So, instead of replaying all the game again using discovered glitches, better routes and more skilled game mechanic usages, you can build the 1st version of your TAS to see, what improvements you can apply to your 2nd version, and if it's optimized, then it's time to submit your TAS on tasvideos.
Of course, it's not mandatory. There are a lot of 1st-version TASes published here, because it can take quite a lot of time to beat the game again using some new discovery.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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I have a question that kinda addresses that recent situation with SMB world selection.
Generic version:
Does a TAS violate the rules, if you complete half the game using a special glitch, then return back to Main Menu and continue a new game from the same level that you have just reached?
As a result, all the levels are completed, despite the fact that you technically selected "the world" in the Main Menu.
Specific version:
GBA version of Doom has a unique player state glitch that drastically changes the gameplay. Episodes 1 and 2 can be completed using it. When Episode 3 Map 1 starts, you cannot continue the speedrun due to the player state limitations which cannot be now circumvented. So, you have to go back to Main Menu and start Episode 3 Map 1 with your normal state, up until the end.
Thank you for your time!
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
It doesn't matter if the firmware is present on not, but I can assume only the autodetected firmware will work.
I found dsp_coef.bin for "DSP COEF" and dsp_rom.bin (?) for "DSP IROM" in Dolphin's Sys folder within "My Documents" directory. Internet seems to share the same IPL.bin file for Gamecube, no matter where I look for it.
Anyway, all of these 3 files are not detected by Bizhawk and, if I import them, they are shown as question marks.
Using 5.0-16793 final release.
Windows 7 SP1 x64.
Mobile version, on the other hand, doesn't have this defect. Black text on a bright-grey background with a dark-green timing looks decent. No objections here.
The current list of publications begs for an improvement: add a JS script that shows a thumbnail in a bigger resolution in the panel to the right where it used to be, but it was showing only the latest picture.