Posts for CtrlAltDestroy

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Posted: 4/30/2017 12:42 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Two things about the publication: The description claims an improvement both of 25 seconds (from last time) and of 71 seconds, (which is correct). This error shows both on the site and on the YouTube upload. Secondly, I'm a bit sad that the disclaimer about "long unavoidable waits" wasn't removed, as it's now a wait of only about 20 seconds, which I don't consider to be notably long. But if it needs to stay, I'd like to request it to be clarified as "The final amoeba level has a long, unavoidable wait", singular, as there are only 3 levels with amoebas in the game and the first two have no waiting at all. Thank you!
Posted: 4/28/2017 11:38 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Knuckles "Knuckles" & Knuckles. Voting Knuckles. Very fun glitches and graphics corruptions the entire way.
Posted: 4/13/2017 11:48 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Interesting. That's different than how the NES game works. The NES ROM only has map data for 24 levels (the first quest). On harder quests, the same map will be loaded and then a script will be run to apply some minor changes, such as the addition of an extra wall or bug here and there. Thus, a complex level like the "I" cave in your screenshots will be almost completely the same between difficulty levels in the NES version. 21-1 in particular uses exactly the same map data as 3-1, 9-1, and 15-1, but the diamond quota is higher and the time limit is lower. Personally, I'm fascinated by the higher difficulty and puzzle changes in the original version, and I wouldn't be against doing a TAS of some port of it in the future.
Posted: 4/13/2017 10:33 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
Ford wrote:
The IBM version had caves for Boulder, Sand, Ice, and Ocean worlds, but not for Relic or Volcano worlds
That's correct. And even then, the NES levels only loosely resemble the original levels. The details are all very different. For instance, you can see that the placement of rocks and diamonds in your screenshot of the IBM version is very different than the NES version of the same level. One thing I noticed in playing various ports of the C64 version is that the hard caves are *much* harder than anything in the NES version! There are many more bugs and tighter time limits. I think the original version would make for a nice TAS, if only it could be emulated. The GBA port (Boulder Dash EX Classic mode) seems faithful, except that the screen is ridiculously tiny, which I feel really takes away from the entertainment value. Perhaps the closest thing we can get to a faithful TAS of the original Boulder Dash at this point would be the Wii version, which seems very faithful.
Posted: 4/11/2017 11:24 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
This thread might be related: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18578
Posted: 4/11/2017 4:49 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
henke37 wrote:
Good work, but I'm concerned about the password use. Can you explain why this isn't just skipping ahead in the game?
Good question. It's kind of like "skipping" to the 2nd quest in Zelda. All of the quests in this game are similar, but the harder quests add more enemies, obstacles, and higher diamond quotas to existing levels, so it's viewed as more of a difficulty select. If I played the entire game, it would take over an hour. In fact, the first TAS I submitted to the site did exactly this, and was rejected for being too long (and being suboptimal) whereas playing only the hardest version of all the levels was judged to be a reasonable length that adequately showcased the game. All of the published Boulder Dash movies only play the 4th quest, but back when I submitted the last version of this movie, TASVideos didn't allow you to put branch names in the title.
Posted: 4/4/2017 2:03 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
This is wonderful! I've waited a very long time to see this game done justice. When the movie got to Blue Mountains, there were a few points where I started saying "What the hell am I watching?" I always knew the rings did some weird things to your speed, but I had no idea they were this broken! Congratulations on this beautiful TAS of a beautiful game.
Posted: 3/19/2017 11:40 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Try forms.newform, and take a look at the forms category. It doesn't have a lot of features, and you can't draw on them directly, but you can create labels that can give you additional information.
Posted: 3/16/2017 2:51 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Not quite sure where to post this. I'm trying to utilize DrawNew's "false" parameter to draw on top of the previous frame's drawings. My script draws many tiles per frame, and it heavily lags unless I only update the tiles that have changed. Problem is, when emu.frameadvance hits, it creates some weirdness with the emulator's double frame buffering. The surface flips to the backbuffer and new drawings are put on what used to be the backbuffer. If you run this script, you can see the flickering behavior: 
Language: lua
client.SetClientExtraPadding(0,16,0,0);
local pos = 0;

while true do
	gui.DrawNew("native", false);
-- player.png is a 16x16 png file
	gui.drawImage("player.png", pos, 8);
	pos = pos+16;
	emu.frameadvance();
end
Is this unintended behavior, or do I have to just account for this?
Posted: 3/14/2017 10:21 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I'm wondering, is there any way to actually draw on a form made with forms.newform? I've created a script that draws a minimap of the currently loaded stage, about 800 tiles total, and it's a bit clunky trying to draw it on a side buffer.
Posted: 1/11/2017 10:47 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
Even after attempting to TAS it a few times, I had no idea this stupid old game from my childhood was so technical. Also, I just realized: Mark Van Hecke, that's the guy who did the music to A Boy and His Blob.
Posted: 10/3/2016 5:58 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
These are all really awesome examples, and I enjoy reading up about them. The Kid Icarus EXP system is one that I simply forgot to mention and should have listed in the first post. I have some open questions: Have any of Zelda's bonus mechanics made a return in Link to the Past, or any future Zelda games? I have heard that in Final Fantasy 2, your stat increases during level-ups are tied to the actions you performed (for instance, taking lots of damage will boost your EXP). Would this be considered secret, or is it spelled out somewhere explicitly in the game or the manual? In Metroid 1, wasn't there a secret mechanic which dictated whether or not the seahorses in Norfair would spit fire, or was it pure RNG? Does the Metroid series have any secret mechanics?
Posted: 9/23/2016 3:04 AM
Post subject: "Secret Numbers" in retro games
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I am fascinated by secret mechanics in retro games, especially those which are not discovered until many years later due to disassembly. I feel that these secret mechanics are one of the elements that set retro games apart from modern games, as these types of mechanics are rarely seen in modern game design. Specifically I'm talking about game mechanics that fit the following conditions:
  • Not explained by the game, or explained too cryptically to be of use.
  • Consistent, not random.
  • Used frequently.
  • Not easy to intuitively learn. (For instance, anyone will naturally notice that every 6th enemy in Zelda 2 drops a magic refill)
  • Hard to tell apart from randomness. A normal player could beat and master the game without suspecting the hidden mechanic exists.
  • If understood, would greatly help in casual and unassisted play.
Examples:
  • Appearance conditions for the 1-up blocks in Super Mario Bros. 1
  • "10th enemy has the bomb" technique in Zelda 1
  • Pokemon's EVs and IVs
  • Bubble Bobble's item counters
  • Faxanadu's item appearance conditions
  • Secret audience reactions in Punch-Out
Please tell me about other examples of these types of mechanics that you happen to know about. There are many famous games I have not played, which I am not familiar with.
Posted: 5/7/2016 1:19 AM
Post subject: Re: TAS Retrospectives
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
mz wrote:
If making a TAS of a Mickey Mouse game is the only extraordinary thing I'll make in my life, I'd kill myself right now.
Perhaps not a Mickey Mouse TAS, but some TASes make it to AGDQ and earn tens of thousands of dollars for cancer research. It's hard not to call that a significant life accomplishment.
TheYogWog wrote:
All those hours I spent replaying the same ten seconds of gameplay, here and there, over and over again could probably have been put to better use, theoretically. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it at the time, and really the worst I can say about my time spent TASing is that it was time "well wasted."
There is a such thing as being too patient. There comes a point where you have to start optimizing for real-life time too. Learn to read assembly, learn to write lua scripts, learn how to find people to collab with you. This is the age of the Total Control TAS, after all. Our "modern art" now is rewriting games in real time, piping IRC chat into a Nintendo DS, and stuff like that. We've come a long way from just derping around with savestates to pull off some stunts here and there. Basically, if your TASing technique is "I'm okay with just re-doing every jump for an hour" then you're probably wasting your time.
Posted: 4/1/2016 9:55 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
For some reason, I cracked up at "Look for stars"
Posted: 12/24/2015 7:18 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Hey, nice job. I actually was intending to do this one over sometime in the future, since real-time runs had beaten my run by several seconds due to a different route. Excellent trick with the suicide button, I never thought of that. Good luck with the improvements!
Posted: 7/4/2015 5:30 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I've seen multiple movies of this game, and there are some things I don't understand about the game. For instance, how the hell are you supposed to know where the warp zones are? Just walk into random dead-ends?
Posted: 4/2/2015 2:38 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
Is it just me, or is SMW no longer a game, but the world's worst programming IDE?
Posted: 12/19/2014 4:24 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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I love how the glitch was accompanied by a *pop*. That was hilarious.
Posted: 7/24/2014 2:37 PM
Post subject: Saving hex editor notes to the cloud
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CtrlAltDestroy
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So this week I discovered retroachievements.org, which uses TAS emulators like FCEUX as platforms to sign in to a web server and earn achievements in retro games. Their achievements development system is a bit clunky and poorly designed, but there was one thing that stood out to me: in their version of the hex editor, you can add notes to memory addresses in a game. Your notes will be automatically uploaded to the server and displayed to anyone else who opens the hex editor in the same game. My first thought was that the TAS community could greatly benefit from such a collaborative tool. Perhaps a similar feature could be integrated into BizHawk.
Posted: 5/26/2014 1:23 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Cool movie. Wish I could have gotten this game while it was available. Seeing this movie really gets me excited to see a run of the main game! I can't wait to see a TASer discover all the weird little tricks hidden in the fights.
Posted: 12/9/2013 7:09 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
Fun fact: The music in this game was done by Mark van Hecke, the same guy who did the music for A Boy and His Blob.
Posted: 11/6/2013 8:26 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player (325)
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Posts: 786
We should have a new goal choice: "Aims for highest controversy" It seems to be the goal of many of the new movies lately. I admit it's kind of entertaining to watch.
Posted: 10/28/2013 1:15 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
I've met former Cardinals ace Kent Bottenfield. Rather his son. He went to my school.
I met David Freese in a grocery store last year.
Posted: 10/24/2013 3:51 AM
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CtrlAltDestroy
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I had to watch it in two parts, but I was entertained the whole way, even though I never played this game. Also, I was able to follow the player just fine. I don't really see how this is considered too fast by some people. It really is representative of the old single-screen platformer puzzles of the 90s, complete with the evil level design, and I really enjoyed watching it get smashed to bits. Also slightly reminded me of Boulder Dash in the way the pathfinding was planned.
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