Joined: 11/17/2005
Posts: 278
Location: Massachusetts, USA
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
It's just that this game is really frustrating. The Final Fantasy Tactics map sucks, the useless Belmont descendants in the town suck, 99.9999% of her weapons are useless AND consume MP, you have abilities that use hearts but you can get them only in very few places or using stupidly expensive and riculously difficult to drop items.
The good things are only Shanoa's animation and some bosses...
The map is very different from Super Mario 3 (SMW, FFT, sure) because you don't walk on it. Just point and click and you're there. In a TAS you'll see a brief fade effect before I double tap with frame precision. You want to see a sucky FFT map? The currently published NSMB run. 'nuff said.
I agree that the villagers are a bunch of idiots who reward your grinding with underpowered items. I think they should be skipped in a TAS. Technically, the villagers could give you items earlier than you should have them. But since you usually have to replay a stage 3 times to get the right green chests to make them happy it's pointless.
This game has unlimited MP. It refills crazy fast. And they put heart fountains in the game to refill your hearts. There's one in the village. Since MP is of no concern, the hearts are what enable the powerful moves. If you're grinding candlesticks for anything or using heart refreshes, you're doing it wrong. You should use your hearts on the boss and get a free refill when the stage is over.
This game does have useless weapons (knives, Torpor, Cubus, and arguably the bow) but the hammer, sword, scythe, and rapier are all balanced in terms of dps, reach, and enemy weakness. When I played this game my glyph sleeves were hammers/sword+nitesco/lightning. That way I could kill every monster I encountered.
And if you're still frustrated, you can always do the villager's quests while powerlevelling. But I don't think a TAS will need to grind anything. Not even ability points. I think a TAS is going to grab a sleeve full of weapons, fly through the stages, and use the backdash-cancel trick to spam the bosses to death.
I stand corrected - there is exactly one discovered OoE glitch: klmz found a way to get a Nomion to force Shanoa into a wall. Which is a good start. But those monsters only appear at the start of the game and in Dracula's Castle. So I haven't found any use for the trick yet.
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paul_t wrote:
The link in the first post has been updated with a new version.
Changelog:
Previous and next savestate slot hotkeys
Stylus display during recording with X and Y coordinates
Software rasterizer GPU is now the default, some games may look better with OpenGL so try both
Ram search and ram watch update when a state is loaded
Oh awesome! I was about to complain about that last one. Actually, when I did it on Wednesday, it crashed consistently. I do memory searches while loading save states all the time.
I think there might be a frame or two of input lag after loading a save state. Or the rendering might be 1 frame behind after loading a save state, which would cause me to think that. This is something that was only somewhat recently fixed in snes9x.
I also noticed that although I can set hotkeys for tab, print screen, and pause/break, they won't work when I try to use them. Turbo seems to never work no matter what key I map it to. (Although I am getting less than 60 fps sometimes. Obviously I can't turbo when I'm already going as fast as I can.)
Updating the RAM tools when I load a save state is really the only thing that's important. And it looks like you took care of it. Thank you for working on such an awesome emulator. I'm glad to have it.
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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Long story short, the only way it will be entertaining is through cheats.
Wait what? Eligor dies really quick with or without Redire. It's just that the Redire trick is extremely awesome. But then with tool-assistance we might find something even cooler.
Is this the first Castlevania game in a decade where you can't leave the map or abuse some exploit to get lots of free stuff? DoS and PoR both have memory corrupting exploits related to closing the lid while you're out-of-bounds and stuff. This game has been out for 7 or 8 months now. No exploits yet? Really? I tried looking for stuff on my own in March but I didn't find anything. However, I wasn't expecting to be able to TAS this game so quickly. :)
So I need access to all the maps and items before I can start looking for exploits. So I start the game up and start playing. At 45 fps. Ugh. I get partway through the Monastery but it's painful to play like that. So I open the memory search tool...
(All memory addresses have an 0x02 assumed in front. The number of bytes is in parenthesis.)
100310 = GOLD (4)
1002B8 = MP (2)
1002BA = Max MP (2)
100D64 = 'total displayed INT'
100D50 = 'effective base INT'
100D38 = STR stat
100D3A = CON stat
100D3C = INT stat
100D3E = MND stat
100D40 = LCK stat
100D36 = your natural DEF stat (this is added to your DEF stat)
100D34 = your natural ATK stat (this shouldn't exist either. it is unused)
Your stats are recalculated when you level up. So you'll need to pause and unpause with these cheats on to get your godly stats back.
1002C0 = glyph equipped to 'Y'
1002C2 = glyph equipped to 'X'
1002C4 = glyph equipped to 'R'
1002D6 = what is displayed as being equipped to 'R'
Your weapons can be anything from 1 (starting weapon) to 49 or 50 (Dominus). Hacking them to 51-54 lets you use your transformation skills as Shanoa. "Weapon 51" is actually kind of awesome. For the R button the good values are 1 (Magnes), 2 (Paries), 3 (Voliticus), 4 (Black Panther), 23 (Dominus), and 24 (Agartha).
100458 = Lizard Tail (starting item)
100459 = Ordinary Rock
10045A = Serpent Scale
10045B = Glyph Union (starting item)
10045C = Glyph Sleeve
10045D = Book of Spirits
Set the relic's bytes to 255 to own the item and set it to ON.
10045E-100548 = inventory
Each byte is one item. The right nibble is the quantity. The left nibble, if odd, marks the item as found in the guide. For some reason the game likes to use '9' for this. So at the start of the game 10045E will have a value of 0x91. That means 1x Potion, and mark it as found in the guide. I recommend you open the memory viewer, put your cursor on 10045E, and then hold down the 9-key for a few seconds. (100485-100489 = colored drops.)
1003EA-100437 = glyphs
Same as inventory items. Just write 0x99 over each byte. *shrug*
1003CC-1003D0 = map availability
Write FF onto each byte. Interestingly, the maps are in a very different order than the order you play them in.
Tomorrow I'll start having fun with these. :) The behavior of the game with 800+ luck is pretty funny.
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Satoryu wrote:
you're not going to get Redire in a TAS.
Oh yeah. Even if you wanted to you couldn't have it for that boss anyway. Come to think of it, you don't get Nitesco until closer to the end. So I think was wrong about the lightsaber dominating all the bosses.
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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
I can already tell how the boss fights after the huge crab will be: Attack a bunch of times, wait 1 minute for the MP to regenate, repeat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChyQvqIVi6o
The TAS won't be so overlevelled though. Maybe three or four swings of the giant lightsaber. Dracula might take 6 or 8.
I was never able to get the Redire (magnetic boomerang) trick to work when I played it.
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Memory corruption bugs are my favorite! :) What a dorky thing to say. I'm not an expert on SNES hardware but I do know about the specific examples you presented.
Omega wrote:
Does anyone remember the Sketch bug in Final Fantasy 6? It's conceivable that the results of that bug are accurate, as there are videos of it being done on a real console that confirm the effect's validity (or so I heard, I haven't actually searched for these myself).
This glitch is definitely emulated correctly. I even used a guide to doing it on a console while I made my glitched run. The reason this exploit works the same in an emulator is because it predictably writes over (mostly temporary) variables with a payload coming from the ROM itself. You can't manipulate the payload and the same addresses are poked with the same values each time. And none of the affected memory addresses contain code, pointers to code, or any type of script. And interestingly it's the complexity of FF6 that causes the glitch to be predictable. Because so many temporary variables are created for each battle, the ultimate result is always either a hard crash or an arbitrary inventory modification.
Exceptions:
- The only other thing besides your inventory that you can break, is the camera. I've tried really hard to exploit breaking the camera, but it was no use.
- If you cause a hard crash then the result of the hard crash might not be accurately emulated. Read the next section. And by the way, for snes9x 1.43, I think I've had the Sketch glitch overwrite memory that belongs to the emulator itself; which leads to lol roflcopter wtf headdesk and hours of wasted effort. (You load a new save state, and the game is still dead somehow, or stops emulating or syncing correctly.)
Omega wrote:
However, there is another, related bug which involves attacking while an item is equipped as weapon. In Snes9x, the results of this bug are arbitrary in the sense that if you save a state right before the bug occurs and then load it after the bug occurred, the results may be different. I've even had the emulator crash. Granted, this was all quite some time ago, so it may have been fixed since then, but it points to either the emulator being inaccurate or the save states being incomplete.
And this is an unpredictable bug. The difference here is that random garbage that is not an animation script is being interpreted as if it were an animation script. This causes graphics corruption as the rendering code runs crazy. The bad script may also cause arbitrary code to run, which may cause illegal instructions, which can lead to emulator inaccuracies. SNES9x handles all of the documented features of the SNES perfectly*. But when it comes to the undocumented features and illegal instructions, who knows? A real console may not even crash or behave weird. So the emulator just does its own thing there.
I think the policy of this site is to reject glitches that are emulator-only. Super Metroid has the Murder Beam glitch which isn't used here because it executes a bad animation script which behaves differently on a console than it does in snes9x. Kirby Superstar has some nonsense way to summon the final boss, but that's banned too because it also relies on the emulator's handling of certain bad code.
Basically, the line is drawn at modifying data versus running bad code. If your game executes what would be considered a seg fault or an illegal instruction in Microsoft Windows, then your TAS is invalid. Unless you can prove that a console has exactly the same undefined output. As if, because if you get that far, then you've almost certainly also crashed the program.
I mentioned the reset button thing in inichi's Chrono Trigger thread. If he had precise control over how much of the save file was written before it was interrupted then he could surely do a lot more with it.
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This is a guess of course. But I think it's the discussion you wanted.
Super Mario Kart (SNES) battle mode 1v1 would never end. You can always dodge a green shell or an invincible player. And all four tracks provide easy ways to dodge red shells. And that's without items. With items, you can take feathers, and the game will never end. There's also that track where you can enter the walled in areas with a feather. You don't need to be tool-assisted to play an infinite game there.
SMK 64 battle mode 1v1 would also never end. You can hop over both red and green shells. And invincible players can always still be dodged. Although without feathers, if someone was looking at your controller and knew what buttons you were pressing, then they would hit you with a star.
SMK 64 3v1 would probably end, although you might need two people to literally hold the victim down. The match is A+B+C vs D. Player D is on a perfect star route, always staying invincible between two or three item boxes. Players A and B take one or two hits each to bump D off the item box right as the invincibility duration ends. Player C then hits D during his briefly vulnerable moment. Repeat. But the second time, the final damage to D comes from the bomb carts of players A and B.
There are easier solutions that are not automatic wins. For example, it's the start of a game. Player D drives in the shortest path to the closest item box. The other 3 players all converge on player D. If player D finds any item other than a star from that first box, he's screwed. If I remember correctly, items can be stolen during the BLINK BLINK BLINK phase when the roulette stops. That'll also end someone's invincibility streak, although you still might need 3 carts to ensure that a hit lands.
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FODA wrote:
I strongly vote for some musician to do something impressive with daigasso band brothers.
KORG DS-10!
The Castlevanias are my first choices. But my other first choice is ROCKET SLIME. Yes, I had to yell it. Great game, fast movement, you don't have to stray far for 100% completion (by the game's definition of 100%), the bosses will die fast when TASed, and I think it will be under an hour.
Also, TASed tank battles! Luck manipulated ammo, perfect knowledge of what your opponent will fire and where, inhumanly fast cannon loading, and potentially crazy sabotage.
And that's assuming I just play the game and don't try to find glitches or anything exciting. Which I will. :)
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OH MY GOD IT'S FINALLY HERE!
The DS is my favorite console since the SNES. They both have the same controller and a ton of really good 2D games. Sign me up!
Serious question here. So unlike everyone else I know, I actually bought DS cartridges. Is there any way for me to easily dump them so I can get started? Obviously I could find roms if I wanted to. But I'm afraid that the roms floating around the Internet have the anti-piracy measures hacked out of them. And I don't want to TAS modded games.
<- so excited! :D
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girfanatic501 wrote:
Interesting glictch in Navi Mode found by DeGamer of GameFAQs: "I found this glitch by accidentally pausing the game at the right time. While playing in Navi Mode (I have never had this happen on Original Mode) if you reach an area where the screen needs to scroll and the action momentarily stops, pressing the "Start" button to bring up the weapons menu can cause the background to scroll when it's not supposed to. For example, let's say you are in the beginning of Clash Man's stage and you climb the ladder to proceed to the second screen. Now once you are there, you jump on the gap that will make you fall back to the lower screen. As you as falling but BEFORE the screen scrolls you bring up the weapons menu. What will happen if timed correctly is that the weapon menu will appear in the foreground, meanwhile in the background Rockman continues to fall and causes the background screen to scroll downward even though the background should be paused. Now here's the major part of this glitch. When you close the weapon menu and return to the game, the background you now see will have the "functions" of the previous background you were in. What does this mean? It means all sorts of crazy stuff can happen depending where you do this such as you walking in mid-air, climbing the background, or just dying for no apparent reason." This glitch does not help you (I think) but I thought it was worth mentioning.
NES MM1 also does this. Causing lag right the screen begins to scroll is a key strategy in the new MM2 run too.
You know what's happening, right? You're looking at one screen, but you're really playing the next screen 'over'. ('Over' in memory, not in necessarily in any cardinal direction.) So when you're walking on clouds and through walls that's just the layout of the next room. And when you die for no reason, those are the spikes and pits.
Being on the wrong screen is potentially useful. In the current runs I think it saves a lot of time during MM1's boss rematches and during Crashman's stage in MM2.
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I don't mean to turn this published run into the "Oh wow! Subtitles!" thread. But...
Oh wow! Subtitles! This is the best thing since frame advance. No seriously! More runs with these, please. I knew the feature was there but I didn't appreciate it until now. Now I want to run something just so I can subtitle it. Haha.
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NO WAI.
Can you save your replays in this game? Those videos are of replays, maybe they were built?
And if that's not the case, maybe he built a programmable controller? Perhaps it's possible to modify a Gamecube to run at 25% speed?
Naw, I don't really think so. But he's so good that he could've passed them off as tool assisted. A real TAS would probably jerk the board around so violently such as to cause the ball to bounce even on flat ground. Or something.
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1) omg 56 seconds!
2) Never in a dozen lifetimes will the hostages ever beat Bond off the boat. How did you do that? Did you damage boost the hostages off screen or something? Objective A was complete right as you approached the boat.
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I enjoyed that quite a bit! :) The Silo is a fun level to see done perfectly because of all the stuff going on in it.
I have nothing constructive to say. Just that your Silo run looked awesome.
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I like your idea of requiring forward progress. It can be a bit arbitrary at times (OHKO an enemy, or use two hits for extra JP?) but it's a good way of guaranteeing entertainment. I hate spam too.
I wouldn't be so sure that calculators are the fastest in a TAS. They're definitely the best strategy when humans play, but we spend more time on our menus and we don't have luck manipulation or savestates. We build our armies strong enough so that we don't have to replay each level 5 times or fight 15 rounds with a single enemy.
I really hate to keep referencing this game, but FF6 is a good example of how a weak TAS-controlled party can outperform a human-controlled team with superior gear and skills. (For the next few sentences travel back in time to about 2004 before we knew about Joker Doom.) To beat the game in under 7 hours a console player needs to spam X-Magic/Quick + Ultima/Flare/etc. But a TAS can win in 5 hours with some DragonBoots, Wall Ring + Debilitator, and a level 12 team. Or broken gear from the sketch glitch, whatever. My point is that even if stupid instant death glitches didn't exist, a TAS is still faster without Ultima. So I think FFT should be faster without Holy.
When I think about it, you've basically broken Teleport into Teleport2. That's huge. Teleport, WHACK SLICE CUT dead. And I did not know that about Hamedo. I think you're all set. Casting Holy 5 or 7 times takes awhile too. Think of the time you're saving on the spell animations.
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DemonStrate wrote:
snorlax wrote:
As long as the center tile of a square remains (or the main tile, which you would bulldoze and which flashes the lighning bolt), a developed zone retains its population forever.
Using that concept, a maximum population run would be very interesting to watch.
I've seen a screenshot of a game where someone did exactly that. They overflowed the population counter. I think the leftmost digit of their population was either an 'A' or 'C'.
The secret is in the airplane. You can crash the airplane at will. So the first thing you do is crash the plane into the airport. As long as the key tile of the airport survives then your airport will operate at 100%. You now have a smaller airport! It's like a free landfill. Now just spend the next 150 years doing that to every other building in your optimal city. You can shave a row or column off of any R, C, TOP, or I zone. "Stacked" zones won't develop into TOPs. TOPs can only develop in a normal 6x3 space. Then you can shave them with fire.
EDIT: Google tells me that I have a lot to learn about this game. One million without zone stacking? Unlimited gifts? Wow.
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moozooh wrote:
Catastrophe wrote:
It's kind of a linear shooter…
Funny, the Darius series is nearly unique in its fashion of having multiple branching routes through the game, as well as the ability to choose each next stage up to the end… yet it's being called linear just as well. :P
Yeah, I knew someone was going to say that. ;) I agonized over typing "auto-scrolling x-shooter" instead but I decided to call it linear anyway. Sue me. :)
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I hate grinding and in a TAS I don't want to see spamming, either. So the original DQ1 (sleep, attack, attack, attack, attack) and CT (Magus w/ haste, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack) runs both scored an entertainment penalty. Besides that CT also featured a 20 minute grinding session. Because of that people lamented the lack of a Joker Doom strategy to fall back on.
However, DQ1 still got an enthusiastic yes vote from me for bringing the total game under 30 minutes. From this site I expect 2 hours for an RPG, and half an hour for anything else. I won't not watch something if it's 45 minutes or 4 hours, but I'm much happier with a shorter movie.
And I don't think J-RPG battles are exciting to watch. So within my two hours I'd like to see as little of the battle menus as possible. The journey through the maps is fun to watch. The battle strategies might be interesting, but I don't want to watch them play out. There's nothing dramatic about "Oh! He passed a saving throw!" I want to see more TAS tricks like luck manipulation and using frame precision to dodge an event trigger.
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Good game choice. It's kind of a linear shooter but it's short enough and flashy enough that it'll be fun to watch. This is the game with the fish bosses, right? (I just checked, yup!)
My two favorite things to see in these types of runs are superhuman accuracy that is impractical to play with, and seeing a variety of weapons. I kind of assume you'll kill everything, but maybe not. I wouldn't not use a weapon just because it would break an accuracy streak. Just make a point of being exceptionally accurate and hide the missed shots well. For the four-way missiles maybe sit on the bottom of the screen so that we never see 2 of them. Or fire the misses and then make my eyes focus on the other side of the screen.
I agree with your decision to skip the piercing weapons. In Gradius where you have shoot some protected cores they're essential. But not here.
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NES TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1218M.html Solstice.
A good length, very showy, and very tightly optimized. Though I admit I'd still vote for MM1.
GBx TAS of the year current nominations:
C...
SNES TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1135M.html Super Demo World SNES.
120 exits. It was long and I watched it twice. Both the run and the game itself owe their existence to the fantastic SNES tools that we have.
Innovative TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1236M.html StarFox 2 SNES. The run itself wasn't innovative. But the game choice and the patches used were.
http://tasvideos.org/1208M.html Chrono Trigger SNES. Inichi did what?
http://tasvideos.org/1126M.html Super Mario Kart SNES. Oh. So you can TAS a linear racing game. Good to know.
Lucky TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1227M.html Wizardry NES. He's really lucky.
Funny TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1211M.html Mischief Makers N64. Shake shake shake. The whole game is funny.
Speedy TAS of the year current nominations:http://tasvideos.org/1229M.html Ocarina of Time N64.
Link moves wayyyy faster than he should be. This is normally a slow paced game with precise actions rather than quick ones.
http://tasvideos.org/1199M.html Dungeon Magic NES.
This game broke pretty awesomely.
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I might be the only one, but I wouldn't mind if the movie ended with Link dying at Gannon. You could also swing the Rod at him a few times as you take damage to make the point to the viewer. I know Gannon will be invisible, but whatever.
I'm also in favor of AFAP. If I want to watch someone take an hour to beat Zelda "without being cheap", I'll watch an LP. (Or I'll do it myself.) Please abuse every glitch you can find. This game isn't yet at the point of LttP where we need to ban certain glitches in order make a game out of it.
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PLEASE use the umbrellas.
I'm glad to see someone working on this! I really like this game but I think it could be done a whole lot faster.
If the items are really as manipulatable as they are in the arcade version then your playing might not be optimal. You could be walking more after each stage to get the shoes, popping more bubbles, eating less fruit (at least until you get the shoes), and blowing more bubbles. You also ignore a few water bubbles. And there was one time you made a huge pile of bubbles and then... left it there. I wanted to see you dive in. Oh well.
In level 3 you got an 'X'. How'd you do that? The enemies died 2, then 2. If you can get letter bubbles that easily then you might want to try doing it on purpose more often. Any letter bubbles you earn during a level where they can't appear are saved until you reach a level where they can appear.
EDIT: Whoever encodes this, I have an idea :P