Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I'm working on a Rayman GBC run. I can't show off a WIP yet, but here's a screenshot:
This game was a Rayman 1 remix with remixed Rayman 2 music. It's kinda boring to play, but it makes for a very interesting movie.
It's a really hard game to run. You can lose a frame just by jumping and landing on the wrong kind of ground. But as tedious as it is, it's making an extremely awesome movie so far. There are lots of places to do cool stunts and there are lots of shortcuts to take that the creators never intended.
I'll upload a WIP when I finish Airy Tunes.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
After doing a tool-assisted run, do you ever find yourself doing really stupid things while playing the game normally, such as forgetting you're not using slow motion and attempting stunts that aren't possible without it? Worse, do you ever find yourself under some sort of pressure to play as if you were performing a tool-assisted run, even when you're just playing for fun?
This used to happen to me a long time ago when I was trying to speed run Metroid Prime. I remember how it went- I would just keep re-loading the game over and over every time I made the slightest step in the wrong direction. The best time I got was 1:31, and it could have been better if I could have ever figured out the stupid dash through Thardus' room.
Sometimes I would just want to play the game casually for enjoyment, but I found I could not. I had forgotten the normal route of the game and found myself having to resort to sequence breaking. I found myself trying to take shortcuts through rooms for no reason. I also found myself getting angry whenever I would screw up a jump or something, even though I was not under any pressure to play the game fast or flawlessly.
Now, I think it's happening to me with Boulder Dash. I am no longer able to play the game at normal speed because I keep trying to follow the speed run route and getting trapped or killed.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Hey cool! Didn't expect to see you posting here :)
Michael Fried wrote:
Edit 2: What are some of the obvious mistakes you're talking about?
I'm mainly referring to all the waiting you did for enemies to move, or walking through those minibosses and getting damaged. But I'm pretty sure that luck manipulation and invincibility may be able to improve these (I'll have to see when I get there though, I'm just going by theory right now... shooting the wall enough times to get a fairy might take too long)
Also, I notice that you do a lot of shooting for fun (like opening windows or shooting those things on the wall in the fun house), but a lot of times it causes a lot of needless lag. (The most obvious places this happens are in the first Key room in the fun house underneath the Cat miniboss, and in the Witch's room, and in the first room of the Castle)
I didn't figure out until near the end of the pirate ship that pressing up or down makes Minnie walk towards Mickey, so if you do that to keep them close together all the time, they'll be closer together when you jump onto a ladder so they'll both get to the top of ladders faster.
I didn't know that, so thanks for the tip. It appears that if you hold up or down while walking, you can make the two stick together instead of having to jump through the room. I think that will help a lot.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I'm going to try to beat the Mickey Mousecapade movie.
I think I can beat it on a few points:
- It has obvious mistakes.
- It doesn't manipulate luck to change the monster appear points, making the player wait for monsters to move
- It doesn't use invincibility fairies at all, which can help out in lots of places (falling lights, cheap boss kills, etc.)
http://www.samus.co.uk/cad/Mickey/1mickey.fcm
I'll keep my WIP there. So far, I only completed the first room, as I'm trying to learn the game's basic physics. This movie uses a reset on frame 1 to change the snakes' position, and it completes the room in 288 frames (measured from the frame the room appears to the frame it fades as you're exiting)
I'm extremely busy right now so this movie won't be getting completed fast at all, not that it matters anyway.
Edit: Thanks to that trick, I completed the first room 4 frames faster.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
For example, would it be against the rules to, at the very start of a movie, hit the reset button multiple times in order to change the appear positions of the first enemies?
I ask this because I've heard of reset-related controversies in the past and I just wanted to make sure this was okay.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Mlandry wrote:
on the last level with the green background and the totem heads or whatever those are, you are pushing the heads one by one to make jewels, but the last one you take a faraway head instead of the one right next to the jewel maker thingy
The rocks have to fall into the magic wall (at least 1 square). Otherwise, you're just pushing them on top of the wall.
Mlandry wrote:
Also in the level where you stand for like 2 minutes doing nothing, there is a jewel left when you create them, is there no way to create them faster so none are left?
Although the level requires 80 diamonds, I breed 81 amebas because of a glitch in the game which very often deletes one of the diamonds when they appear. It didn't happen in the recording I accepted, though.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
My fingers hurt.
This movie plays the game 3173 frames faster than in the other movie. Most of the levels are as fast as they can possibly go, except for the amebas (which might be improved if the source code was interpreted) or if there were some new crazy strategies for certain levels that I didn't think of.
The faster time was the result of the improvement of ALL the levels but one (19-2, which was already as fast as possible). I achieved my sub-20 minute time I was aiming for, but I went on to trigger the credits this time which took about 10 seconds more.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
If you decide to use the select glitch, I know for a fact that there is a secret world near the very beginning of the game which takes you straight to the Queen, so you'd probably get a very small time.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I've ompleted up to 22-3 (although 22-3 could possibly be improved, I'm not done with it yet) and I've hit the 10 minute mark. I'm aiming for a sub 20-minute movie. If I can somehow complete the next 7 levels inside 10 minutes, I've got one.
Also, it seems that I'm finding improvements to all the levels. Every level with the exception of 19-2 has been improved so far.
21-1: Fought off some weird object overflow problems, caught stuff on my head to collect diamonds faster, used a faster strategy for the middle section. Huge improvement over the last run.
22-2: I believe this level cannot be improved any further. I never had to stop to wait for a bug this time. Huge improvement.
22-3: I somehow gained 1 step here. I think it was because I cleared out 1 less space beneath the huge avolanche.
22-4: I let out both bugs at once, and it went much faster.
23-1: I let the bugs out on the left this time instead of the right, because it's closer to the exit. Small improvement.
23-2: Collected the diamonds in a better order for a small improvement.
23-3: Found a new strategy for dropping the rocks, and collected the diamonds in a better order.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Unbeatable game: Microsoft Russian Square, on hardest difficulty. The only thing good about that game is the music. I played it on easiest difficulty a lot, and it was fun. I only beat medium difficulty once by pure luck, and tried to beat it again another day but only wound up spending about an hour stuck on the last 5x5 square and being unable to line up a row before the timer went out. Hardest difficulty is just freaking impossible, with about 6 blockers on the board at one time.
Dragon Warrior 3 for the Game Boy Color I would call unbeatable, not because of difficulty, but because of sheer length. That game takes YEARS to play. I played for about a year and a half before I got fed up with finding the monster medals. And that's AFTER I abused the seeds that certain enemies dropped to get all my party's stats to 255.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
The amebas on 20-3 got O W N 3 D ! Check it out!
It took me 4 days to do it, but I did a LOT of luck manipulation and managed to get the level down to below 30 seconds. It all started with the novel idea of- why wait on the amebas, when I could have the amebas wait on me? So I took the strategy of just letting them expand wherever they wanted THEN covering them with rocks when there were 14 of them. It worked like a charm, and 20-3 is now 1000+ frames faster than in the previous run. There's still a possibility that this level can be even faster, and I'll dig for it!
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
I started over today. I wanted to see if I could beat my time.
Well, I'm up to 19-3 again, and so far the movie is 123 frames ahead of the submitted one!
In game, I measure improvement by "steps". A step is 8 frames. It takes 8 frames to perform just about any action- step from one square to another, collect a diamond one square away from you, push a bug, etc...
19-1: Gained 1 step on this level. Apparently, pushing the rock onto the bug and waiting for the rock below to fall in order to collect the diamond is faster than dropping the rock on the bug and running over to collect the diamond. This is the fastest this level can be completed. Further improvement is impossible.
19-2: No improvement. I performed this level identcally to the previous level- further improvement is impossible.
19-3: I ganed a freaking 12 steps on this level!! That's 96 frames! I did this by rethinking my strategy. Collecting the 2 diamonds on top at the beginning is faster than waiting for later to run all the way over there and pick them up. Also, getting to the bottom left diamond by running under everything is faster than entering from the top, waiting for all the rocks to topple to let you through. Further improvement may still be possible.
So 13 steps, combined with faster menus and password entry, imrpoved this video by 123 frames so far.
http://www.samus.co.uk/cad/boulder_dash/bd_q4_2.fcmhttp://www.samus.co.uk/cad/boulder_dash/run_progress.txt
I'll update those files as I complete this run.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Tombad wrote:
Only small complaint I have, is that you stand still when waiting for the amebas to "fill up". Couldn't you have done something during that time?
Unfortunately no. For one thing, the character acts as the final rock that traps the amebas in, it has to be there for them to convert. Moving the character would have probably allowed for the amebas to escape (plus, in the case of 20-3, I didn't really have much to do anyway the last two diamonds were along my path to the exit)
Also, in the case of 24-3, it probably would have affected the random number generator for the worse. The "dance" done there was by far the best out of many random motion patters in an effort to speed up the amebas. (Yeah, I could just stand in one place and press buttons, but isn't pretending the movie is desynching more fun? :P)
I actually had a series of attempts on 24-3 where I went down and sqashed bugs for fun while waiting for the amebas. But that whole concept seemed to slow them down by about 40 seconds. Go figure.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Eh, I just tried using the warping to last level trick, but I have bad news. My final completion time was about 6:30, but sadly, when I pulled the purple stalagtite out of the final level, instead of giving me the "you win" screen, it played the "world blows up" cutscene AGAIN and sent me back to the title screen. So I guess that doesn't work.
Dang, and I thought that was going to be an easy game to speedrun. There were some tricky parts in there too- like jumping on the first tomato boss 5 times without hitting the ground, or throwing rocks in all of the organ pipes quickly.
So if someone were to do a "proper" speed run of this game, the viewer would need to sit through all of the credits. Not fun. :(
Edit: You can watch my attempt if you want. It's 7 minutes long, because I accidently overwrote the playing of the final level on my last attempt, and I didn't feel like playing through it carefully again so I just played it normally.
http://www.samus.co.uk/cad/tomato.fcm
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin wrote:
there's also a weird quirk in the game where you have to let the credits go through all the way to get to the final level!
If I can remember correctly, you can skip that. If you run out of lives on the second to final level, the game will drop you into the final level with 0 lives after the "world blows up" movie. (even more WTF?! But that's why you could beat this game in 5 minutes :P)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
This was a very weird, short platformer I remember playing as a kid. Does anyone have any knowledge of this game? I know that a good speed run of this game would probably only be about 5 minutes long, and I'd like to see someone do one. If not, I'll go ahead and make it myself.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Dang, it looks to me like the final world is going to be just as long, difficult, and annoying as the rest of the run put together. It'll take me a while to figure out, but in the meantime you can watch the first 20 levels...
http://www.samus.co.uk/cad/bd_q4.fcm (Added 11 more levels since last posting)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Finally got around to working on this some more. I started over because I found lots more tricks to make the levels (and menu screens) faster.
http://www.samus.co.uk/cad/bd_q4.fcm
Nine levels down, 15 to go.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
6 levels down. I came to my first real roadblock.
It's the 3rd ice level with the amebas. They're so horribly random, it's not even funny. Now, I'm perfectly aware that there's really no such thing as random in games, but these amebas are ridiculous. The way I go about the level determines how fast the amebas fill up their space, but I have no clue how. The best I can do is run through the level about a hundred times in different ways and take the one where the amebas fill up the fastest. Even save states don't help much, because the diamond conversion point seems to change with every keypress I make.
So... If I want to make this level impressive, it's going to take a very long while to finish.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Well, I finished the first world. Same URL.
Level 2: This level was pretty much a "duh" experience. The only real variable here was what order I visited all the cells, which would change where the bugs would be when I came to them. The best two orders gave the same result: 54 seconds left on the clock, and 2 steps short of 55. I chose this one because it shows me doing death-defying runs past the bugs.
Level 3: I only re-did this level about 4 times, and gained a total improvement of 6 steps. The route is pretty flawless... there might be a way to gain one extra step by handling the bug differently, but I couldn't find it.
Level 4: I re-did this a total of 2 times. The first time was the best, it's the one I used. The second time, I found a faster way to destroy the first two bugs... which had the effect of hopelessly desynching the next 2 bugs from my route, so I gave up on that one after about an hour of trying different strategies with the second bug cage.
So far, so good I guess.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Since fcs movies are just keystroke sequences, would it be possible to record a movie, and instead of playing, use a different movie file as the keystroke sequence? If this were possible, you could play the levels of a game out of order, and recording all results in order into a main movie file. Is there any way of doing this with FCEU?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Active player
(325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
While making this new movie, I actually learned a lot more physics that I didn't know before. For one, I discovered the true physics of the bugs.
If, on the same "turn" you and a bug land in adjacent squares, you die. However, if you time it so that you’re between squares as the bug jumps from next to the tile you’re headed to next to the tile you came from, you’ll live. Knowing this, I was able to run right over the first bug in order to drop the diamond while the rocks came down on him.
Also, I noticed that bugs take two “turns” as they turn an inside corner, but only one as they turn an outside corner. I died so many times running into the bugs while they were taking their second turns.
Walking into a square takes one turn, and grabbing a diamond / pushing a rock horizontally takes one turn. Therefore, it's sometimes faster to grab diamonds than to take two tourns by walking into them and then back out. However, It's a waste of a turn to grab a diamond and then to walk around and pass by the space where it was- it would have been faster to just walk into the diamond.
Anyway, I think I'll keep the time I have for the first level. I'll move on now. Jeez, it's amazing what you can learn by playing at 12% speed instead of 25%.
This game was a Rayman 1 remix with remixed Rayman 2 music. It's kinda boring to play, but it makes for a very interesting movie.
It's a really hard game to run. You can lose a frame just by jumping and landing on the wrong kind of ground. But as tedious as it is, it's making an extremely awesome movie so far. There are lots of places to do cool stunts and there are lots of shortcuts to take that the creators never intended.
I'll upload a WIP when I finish Airy Tunes.