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I like this run a lot more than I ought to. It gives us an idea of what a Mario 64 TAS would look like if backwards long jumping had never been programmed or discovered.
Could a Mario 64 runner please explain why Mario's speed appears to go up incrementally (and not continuously) with the HSWK?
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Mitjitsu wrote:
During the final battle in SM64 when Mario throws Bowser he says "So long X Bowser". Sadly, there is no clear consensus on what X actually is. The 10 most popular theories in no particular order are...
1. So long a Bowser
2. So long ah Bowser
3. So long eh Bowser
4. So long gay Bowser
5. So long da Bowser
6. So long de Bowser
7. So long dah Bowser
8. So long deh Bowser
9. So long day Bowser
10. So long king Bowser
If I was to personally guess I would go with number 8
According to internet lore (so take it with a grain of salt), the line was originally, "So long-a, Bowser!" in the stereotypical Italian accent that we all know and love from Mario. Because the game (and production team) was Japanese, there was some miscommunication between the writer, director, and voice of Mario, Charles Martinet. Perhaps the dash was removed, the "a" was accidentally capitalized, or Martinet just didn't know what they were looking for, and read it not as a schwa, but as the letter "A". In short, it was supposed to be, "So long-a, Bowser!" and is instead, "So long A, Bowser!"
I don't know if it's true, but I like the plausibility of it.
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I think one of the most useful tools any TASer can learn is Lua scripting. It's not especially difficult and it's extremely rewarding. I say run whatever game you feel like-- Earthworm Jim included-- and use it not to create a published run, but instead to just get a feel for the basics of Lua.
I may help you out more another day, but I need sleep now. Good luck!
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Not to be discouraging, but the published run beats the first level over a minute faster than yours, even including loading screens and a startup splash screen that wastes 19 seconds.
You can view the run here:
Link to video
Like I said, I don't want to discourage you and I know you said your run isn't perfect, but I'd primarily like to know what goals you're aiming for here. Let's just say you aren't yet on track for a published Earthworm Jim run (your biggest obstacle being the published run on a superior system).
So what would you like to get out of this site?
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Stevmay09 wrote:
I've only been on these forums for a small time, but how long have you been working on this? How long will it take to finish? (estimate)
Rest assured, nothing you've said has been rude by a long shot (we're happy to have you here!), but "How long will it take to finish?" is one of those unspoken faux pas among TASers. For example, FatRatKnight and I have been "working" on a Final Fantasy Legend TAS for two years, but thanks to other commitments and laziness, it's been stuck at 90% completion for the better part of a year. It's not so much that the question itself is rude, but that it defies any good answer. No one wants to say, "It should be done within a month," and then force a deadline upon himself, or perhaps even discover a massive time-saving technique that requires them to restart the entire TAS, to the disappointment of the anticipators.
With all that said, I'm sure CoolKirby will be happy to answer your question. How long will it take to finish?
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Stevmay09 wrote:
so how do i make a script? do i use notepad or something? or is it within the emulator itself?
I recommend Notepad, though there are some freeware Lua editors. The only annoying thing about Notepad is that you must manually change the extension. Your first script should look something like this (I'm typing this from memory, so it may not run):
Language: lua
while true do
valueofinterest=memory.readbyte(0x00) --Replace "0x00" with a RAM address that you're interested in. It will be in hexadecimal, so it should still begin with "0x".
gui.text(10,10,valueofinterest,0xFFFFFFFF,0x000000FF)
emu.frameadvance()
end
The loop says to execute all the codes in its interior as long as the script is running. The first line within the loop reads the byte you're interested in and stores it to valueofinterest. The second line says to display the results onscreen at x-coordinate 10, y-coordinate 10. The last two arguments of gui.text just make the text white with a black background. The third (or last, depending on how you want to look at it) says to advance one frame. If you don't include that line, your emulator will cease to run and the script will crash.
Your second script (same function, slightly more advanced) should look something like this:
Language: lua
while true do
valuesofinterest={0x00, --Replace all of these with RAM addresses of interest. You can also shorten the list.
0x01,
0x02,
0x03,
0x04,
0x05,
0x06,
0x07,
0x08,
0x09,
0x0A,
0x0B,
0x0C,
0x0D,
0x0E,
0x0F}
for i=1,#valuesofinterest do
gui.text(10,10+9*i,valuesofinterest[i],0xFFFFFFFF,0x000000FF)
end
emu.frameadvance()
end
This script just displays several results (up to 15) onscreen. The only thing you should know is that the # sign takes the length of an array. Therefore,
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Stevmay09 wrote:
Could there be a script that tells me what frame i would have to land to get a critical or dodge? I've spent hours trying to find that perfect frame. It would really help out. Is that possible?
If it's frame-dependent and can be found in the RAM, yes.
I don't have a copy of the game and I'm a bit busy at the moment, so this is where my assistance ends. FractalFusion will probably be able to help you.
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Stevmay09 wrote:
What exactly can scripts do? How would they be useful? Would it be easier to make one than to play it in the emulator manually?
XkeeperhascreatedmanyimpressiveLuascripts. About 99% of it is unnecessary for your purposes, but you wanted an idea of what scripts can do. I hope this inspires you as to Lua's capabilities.
As for how they would be useful, I can hardly begin to say. The most basic thing they can do is peer into the RAM and give you an idea of what's going on in the game that it refuses to tell you. In the case of Pokemon, you could compare enemies' stats with your own, foresee whether a pokeball will work, manipulate luck to achieve more critical hits and dodges, write values to certain addresses to test things, or manipulate the game in other, untold ways. Really, the easier question to answer is, "How wouldn't scripts be useful?" Come up with an idea and I or someone else will gladly tell you whether it's feasible or not. Chances are, if you can dream it up, it's possible.
Lua scripts are played through the emulator, so your third question doesn't really make sense. You should write your own scripts for a few reasons. First, you're going to want to learn to write in Lua eventually, even if you're limited to just RAM watching scripts. Second, you'll need to customize scripts to suit your purposes and there's no better way to do so than to write your own and know exactly what's going on inside of them. Third, you want credit for this run. You can (and perhaps should) start by running FractalFusion's scripts, but if his scripts do all the work for you, then you haven't really accomplished anything. I'm going to throw out a wild guess-- FractalFusion hasn't run this game because his scripts aren't complete and he hasn't done all the necessary research. If you want to run the game, you'll be so much more proud that it's your own accomplishment and you didn't have to rely on someone else's work. It might not even be out of line for FractalFusion to request co-authorship for his contribution. You're not going to let him get away with that, are you?
In all seriousness, however, TASing is a largely collaborative process. That often means co-authoring runs but sometimes it's as simple as requesting help with scripting or route planning or other difficulties in your way. Please do write your own scripts-- simple as they may be-- but don't hesitate to ask others for help when you need it!
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Stevmay09 wrote:
Hello! I'm kind of a noob here, so i don't know all the terms for TASing, but what are scripts? I just TAS a game through the emulator. I have no idea how Hex works.
How fast of a time did the Japanese guy get? A guy on YouTube got 1:50.
Scripts are essentially programs that run in conjunction with the game. Scripting is (almost?) exclusively done in Lua. It shouldn't take you more than an hour or two-- even with very little programming experience-- to get a simple script up and running that will track some RAM values of interest to you.
If possible, I highly recommend writing your own scripts. Start with the RAM-tracking script I mentioned above, then as you find the need to do more complicated things, look to Lua's reference manual, the scripting functions particular to your emulator, and, of course, the forums.
You'll be botting the game in no time!
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Ouch! That was abrupt!
I never quite understood what was going on with this TAS. Were you playing (frame by frame) against a bot of your own design? Or was it just you goofing around?
It doesn't help that I don't understand the game, or the effects going on ("LEK blind"?).
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Tub wrote:
OmegaWatcher wrote:
by that logic, every ROM Hack or non-commercial game ever made should be unpublished.
Certainly not.
But a run on a hack or non-commercial game has to show more than "Hey, look how poorly this thing is made!".
Bingo. ROM hacks and non-commercial games are the exception, not the rule. Sometimes they make the cut, when
a) they're of especially high quality and
b) they aren't undergoing frequent revisions.
There's a perfectly good section of the site for, say, Super Mario Adventure.
As for Cave Story, it may be freeware, but it's of such high quality that it might as well be a commercial game-- that people happen to not pay money for it is irrelevant.
For those of you who want TASVideos to accept every run, regardless of game choice, I have an alternate website for you that does just that: YouTube.
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Warp wrote:
When you arrive at a port with the ship, you leave the ship at the first tile where it's possible, rather than going as deep inside the port as possible. Since the ship moves much faster then the character on land, wouldn't this save a lot of frames?
Question here with answer immediately following it.
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TheAxeMan wrote:
Bobo the King wrote:
As for solo Thief, I hope you like extensive level grinding in your TASes.
Because of luck manipulation, a solo thief wouldn't need to grind. He would just take a long time against some of the bosses. Unless you disallow BANE sword, but that would be a problem for any class.
The extensive grinding would actually be for WARP or EXIT. Since they are level 5 and 6 magic it would take quite a bit more than just the bosses to get enough xp to use them on time. And for EXIT you need to do class change. The extra xp in this run comes very easily because it isn't needed until near the end. Getting that much xp earlier would take a lot more time.
I wondered if that might be the case, but I thought the battle RNG has a period of 256 (correct me if I'm wrong). Bleh, even so, I'm sure you could manipulate misses. Okay, I hereby amend my comment to, "I hope you like extensive, time-consuming luck manipulation and no appreciable gameplay differences in your TASes."
One very minor question: Was there any gear that you used only in your Fighter run that you could have sold off in your White Mage run? I noticed you picked up a bunch of money in the Ice Cave (which really did seem like a convenient place to get it), but perhaps there were some swords and armor you could have sold instead? I'll look it up, but I suspect you knew what you were doing.
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Acheron86 wrote:
jchayato wrote:
That could make the run under 2 hours probably, but no Aeris...even if you have a memory warp glitch, you can't warp across disks to avoid the Jenova at the end of disc 1...the presence of gameshark alone makes me doubt the video...
I may be mistaken, but it seems quite unlikely Aeris is removed from the game as a party member when she dies and you fight Jenova. All that should have to be avoided is the point at which she leaves your party, which is when Sephiroth gets the black materia IIRC. Skip that scene and she shouldn't be gone, even if everyone in the party seems to think so.
Also, if this were an April Fools' joke or a fake video, why even mention a gameshark at all? If you wanted to trick people, you wouldn't let them know a cheat device was involved in the first place. (And I don't actually see where a gameshark is mentioned, anyway, but I'll assume I missed that since you apparently saw it.)
Am I missing something? Are you arguing the video is genuine, or is my reading comprehension that low?
The most damning evidence is that the video contains the tags "April's", "Fool", and "Prank". That's not my favorite piece of evidence, though. My favorite is when he says, "Let's look at what a warp-glitched Speed Run could look like. Notice the time." And what is the time? 4:01:12. (And I just noticed it has 40,112 gil to boot!)
Well played, sir. Well played.
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System Error wrote:
I was going to vote no due to general extended boredom, wondering if EXIT could've been of any use (Waterfall?) and suggest that solo Thief be cooler because Thief is useless, then
I probably shouldn't answer prematurely, but if memory serves me, EXIT is only available to White Wizards. Black Mages can use WARP, however.
As for solo Thief, I hope you like extensive level grinding in your TASes.
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OmegaWatcher wrote:
Tub wrote:
Finding a glitch or a loophole in a commercial game that went through professional QA is a feat worthy of display.
Finding a glitch or a loophole in an amateurish fan game is not surprising at all.
Ok, there's some nontrivial luck manipulation involved, but King's Bounty did it faster, and Monopoly did it better.
No
by that logic, every ROM Hack or non-commercial game ever made should be unpublished.
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p4wn3r wrote:
Given that the classically allowed region ranges from xi = -1 to xi = 1, the answer would depend on the integral of the wave-function in this interval, the problem would be just to find a convenient way to express the n-th Hermite polynomial (actually its square, but you get the idea).
However, even for the fundamental mode you have to look at the normal distribution tables to compute it, since it can't be integrated analytically, so it gets complicated to get the exact value of the probability. I think a good way to start is to use integration by parts and get the value as a function of something in the normal distribution table. It doesn't look simple though, since you must have a good bound for the n-th value in order to find the convergence rate, and Hermite polynomials are not fun to work with.
I'm a step ahead of you, but you're catching up quickly. I had the most success when I nondimensionalized everything, at which point the bounds of the integral go from -sqrt(2*n+1) to sqrt(2*n+1). I was able to express the core of the answer in terms of some integral of the nth Hermite polynomial squared, plus a number times the error function. There are some other factors in there, but as I recall, they're just constants (sqrt(pi) and 2^n*n!). After having Mathematica compute the first fifty terms, I was a little surprised to find that there isn't a straightforward approximation for P(n). I had expected something like a 1/n relation, but it seems to be dying off much more slowly than that. (I just checked, and there is a decent chance it is a 1/sqrt(n) relation, though it's hard to tell and I'd like to prove what it is.)
If it is approximated by a 1/sqrt(n) relation, I would like to derive the coefficient of that term. If not, I'd like to find a sort of Laurent series or maybe even use the method of Frobenius or use a Laplace transform-- anything that's appropriate for describing a decreasing function like this one.
The fact that it decreases so slowly is sort of appealing to me, since it implies contradictions between quantum and classical mechanics are within nearer grasp than it would first seem.
Thanks, Velitha! I'll embed it in my submission text immediately. To embed it in a forum comment use
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbiNIvhABAY[/video]
Like so:
Link to video