It's something that has to be done when you start the run or it will desync because of the system clock.
I did WaDF at 60fps and the game seems to be at 57.1 native; my playback was indeed ~5% faster than the game runs outside of hourglass. That's about 30 seconds off for every 10 minutes. (Thankfully I wasn't making a submission-quality run, just a test video, which I was able to slow down to compensate.) Being 10fps off seems like it would be much more noticeable while you were making it, so maybe this game doesn't work the same.
You could try what I did: pull up two instances of the game next to each other, one in your 60fps configuration in hourglass, and one outside of hourglass, and see how they relatively run. If they're operating at the same speed then at least you don't have a problem with the game playing back too fast.
I suspect the failure at the end has more to do with the fact that the code you need to enter is 7190 instead of 7910.
wow, I'm amazingly dumb.
Fixed that and finished it (post updated), thank you.
I also found a glaring mistake that is too far back to fix (hexing = desyncs): I could have kept the glass ball straight to the end of Shadowlands. It's possible to get through the air current using a bounce offset against the ceiling.
It didn't occur to me to make a more traditional encode instead of some fancy smancy one that you need very recent codecs to play. I just updated my post with a link to a normal MKV that should play just fine for most people. :)
Also, thanks for merging the topics.
So I completed a test run of this game.
MKV: http://www.mediafire.com/?y8cbigzrlbabotz
Time is 9:56.57 so I got sub-10min. I have no doubt it could be further optimized by some seconds. This is my first attempt at TASing and the only real tools used were rerecording and frame advance. I made a 2 second strategy error in Shadowlands; I spliced the fix into the video.
On my system, sound effects don't play in this game, just the bgm. Also, the framerate of this game is 57.1fps; the run was made set to 60. A better choice would have been 57. The run did indeed play ~5% faster than it should, so I have carefully adjusted this video accordingly to make the playback and run time accurate. In the past I prescribed a few Hourglass settings changes, but I think the only one necessary is Allow loading any custom/installed DLLs.
I hope this shows the potential of the game to be TASed and lays out the route for someone with more ability than me. I think hourglass will need to support fractional framerates before this game can be TASed to site standards; as far as I know it doesn't yet. And the whole sound effects not working thing sucks, although I'm not ruling that out as being a problem with my setup.
I would like to inquire of someone better than me at Japanese if any further work was done on this game. I couldn't find better than this on youtube, but did manage to find this thread. This was one of my favorite games growing up and I'm debating tackling it if no complete run exists.
OK ill cancel the any% and make it a no rba/ww/dot skip. does that sound better?
I would float the ideas with, among others, our seasoned OoT TASers and the many other resident zelda experts like Tompa. IRC channel, etc. If submission here is one of your goals, better to have conferred and decided what you'll do with confidence before beginning work.
Apologies if you already have done this. The main concern is category hell. We have an OoT all temples and all trials run with no RBA which still skips the DoT (and does dungeons in a convoluted order, including the deku tree as an adult). I am concerned that the strategy of most of the dungeons wouldn't change considering how much they have been broken. I imagine you're familiar with the run I mentioned so you know what I mean... the process of almost every dungeon is "collect the dungeon's item if it is necessary to the quest, then glitch through a wall and into the boss area loading zone, and damn 95% of the small keys and conventional doors". It's been a while since I played MQ but I'm concerned you'd still be skipping 90% of what makes MQ different regardless of restrictions.
Re: GamerNetworkOnline. I looked for a thread on this and couldn't find one.
It is my understanding that on youtube, two identical videos cannot be monetized. Youtube has a proprietary algorithm for determining how similar two videos are (or at least as far as their audio content goes). I have dealt in the past with a particular audio track sold at a website that offers inexpensive hip-hop backing tracks. Someone had monetized, somewhere on youtube, a track they made using said backing track. As a result the guy who wanted to use the track found he could not monetize his own rap over the same track. Monetization on youtube gets approved or disapproved almost instantly for some users, and this was one such user. By uploading various test videos and attempting to monetize them he was able to see almost immediately if it "worked" or not. Even modifications such as slowing or speeding up the track or changing its pitch didn't fix the problem.
I ended up recreating the track for him. Eventually I got it to a point where the track was so similar to the original that my own version of it triggered their algorithms for duplicates and failed to monetize. We worked it down to a point where we found that adding/removing a single instrument (a strings section playing a chord) made the difference between the track being recognized as unique. The process was not unlike the process I've seen related to the eur-orion constellation and determining the minimum amount of pixels that must be blacked out on an image of a scanned piece of currency for photoshop to not "see" it as a scanned image of money and refuse to allow editing. What we did was with audio but it was a similar trial and error process while dealing with an unknown algorithm.
The crappy part is that the guy I was working with abandoned the project, partially because of how important being able to monetize is to him above other things, and I never got any sort of compensation or satisfaction of seeing the track reach the light of day. But this experience leads me to believe that if you upload and monetize a TAS you made, then nobody else will be able to monetize that same TAS. If their algorithms are honed enough, this is a potentially excellent solution to preventing people from doing what that particular youtube account started doing.
On the flip side of the coin of youtube monetization, I am unable to monetize a song that is entirely my own work, on my own channel... because I did not upload it to youtube for over a year after making it, and in that time several other people uploaded it themselves, and one of them along the way must have monetized it. For close to 12 months now the status of my video's monetization has been "pending", and my understanding is that it stays that way forever and nobody ever reviews the case. Nevermind that I proved to them more than reasonably that the work is my own. I have been able to monetize other videos without incident.
The only problem I see with this solution is users being unwilling to monetize their own TAS videos because they are concerned they do not have the right to, since they do not own the rights to the game. I don't have a good solution to this other than to point out that youtube has allowed and continues to allow many people to monetize things they did not own or have permission to, that clearly can be proven to be other people's work. Since you made the input that is playing the game you're arguably far more in the right to monetize a video of the playback than the many youtube users who are blatantly making money from others' work. When it asks you to type an explanation in the box when you are monetizing a song, it is sufficient to write "I wrote and performed the music in this video", so some variation of that should be fine for a TAS.
On the other hand, the fact that we were able to get GamerNetworkOnline removed has implications that it is in fact not OK to monetize any sort of video game footage. So either youtube is taking this stance, or they are just incidentally removing particular videos or channels when they receive a lot of complaints. The former is how it should work, but the latter is my theory of how it actually works... I've seen overwhelming evidence that most of the processes are never touched by an actual human and are completely automated to have as little man-time involved on individual issues as possible. If they take the former stance then it should be quite easy for us to shut down anyone else who attempts to monetize TASes they didn't make. If the latter is true then only big and repeated complaints from the public lead to anything, and monetizing your own TAS uploads on a personal basis is probably the best shut-out solution. Those who monetize other videos on their channel will be rightfully hesitant to attempt this, because if youtube ever has a problem with it because of video game rights and a channel has several monetized TASes on it, they're looking at a chance of losing monetization privileges or having their account closed.
I'd like to see some attempts made to test my monetization theory as it applies to TASes because the audio and video portions of a TAS are different in several significant ways from a filmed video, a static image, or the audio of a song. It'd at least be another tool in the arsenal if we can confirm that one guy monetizing a TAS prevents others from monetizing the same TAS without substantially modifying the video or changing the audio to something else entirely. (Insubstantial parts of the video should not affect the algorithm, i.e. the encoder's animation/screenshot/logo at the start and the overlay of the movie name and rerecord count in the first few seconds)
edit:
rog wrote:
it is in fact not OK to monetize any sort of video game footage. So either youtube is taking this stance
Yeah, that's the crux of it. Everything is automated and virtually nothing is enforced until a threshold of people complain, and even then it's uncertain. If the monetization uniqueness algorithms work as well on videos of TASes as they seem to do on songs and some videos, I'm saying it might be a risk worth taking as protection, if the risk is indeed as small as it seems, for an author to upload and monetize his own TASes to ensure others cannot. It's also an open question whether or not this uniqueness algorithm would prevent monetization of, say, a 1 second improvement TAS, if the previous version still exists on YT as a monetized video. I'm trying to think of a way to undermine would-be assholes without undermining the good guys too.
I recently played through this game for the first time, and I still don't know much about it at all, but I see potential for an amazing TAS. That said, I tested compatability with hourglass, and it works much better than I expected, although not completely. There isn't a thread for this game yet so I thought I would kick it off.
[yadda yadda old and some bad info, edited]
When i let the video load all the way first the 60hz play works flawlessly. If the video loads slower than 2x playback speed it sort of craps out when it nears the end of the loaded part. Using Chrome on win7 and modest hardware, and I must say that looked awesome.
Oasiz I dont think an external hack is needed. Just some analysis:
The audio doesn't sound incredibly different to me, just has some beating and slight but fast and consistently spaced chops to it. It also sounds exactly the same to me on multiple playbacks (I did not confirm this by recording and analyzing it up close though). It is relevant for anyone who can play the videso at 2x speed to report if this is also the case for them, or if each experience is widely different sounding.
I'm not sure how to describe it but listen at normal speed to the slowed-down video. one particular example is the SMW keyhole entrance, how its a long smooth tone. If you open that in an audio program and timestretch it to normal speed it will be translated nicely. But the player is not doing a timestretch.
It may be that the "correct" sound of the video can be created by taking the original audio at normal speed, splitting it every 1/59.97th second (one video-frame-length) and inserting a frame-length of silence after every split (or a duplicate of the split part), then overlaying this onto the half-speed 30fps video. In other words, taking ABCDEFG and turning it into A_B_C_D_E_F_G or AABBCCDDEEFFGG.
I don't know enough about emulators or audio formats to know the specifics of how the tones in these half-speed videos were generated, but I suspect that's not exactly how the half-speed audio was made. Stretching out a sample or simply extending it smoothly results in something that sounds good played normally, but I mention all this because the sound, replayed at 2x, sounds to me like samples are being regularly dropped with some pattern... and the choppiness comes from newly-juxtaposed sample points not matching up. If you'll imagine a sine wave playing that has a period of X samples, removing 1/60th of a second or 1/30th of a second of samples from the sound to turn into double-speed might leave you with a splice at which the sine wave isn't at the same amplitude where the splice meets, and you get that clicking or beating sound. You're familiar with how this happens if you ever threw a sample into a slicer and chopped it into small parts and noticed clicks at the start and end of each slice.
My apologies if this is bad information or not what's happening :( I am excited about your idea and felt the need to share this observation. I am hopeful that it is just a matter of figuring out exactly how the audio signal is being modified when you run the player at 2x speed; if this is done by a predictable and regular dropping of samples; if it happens the same in all browsers.
Where being bad is good, and greed is good!
Seems the greedier you are in this game the more it rewards you, even now. Beautiful discovery, and thank you for fixing the parts I thought were meh.
Noticed the same thing. I think it's harmless. I clicked on it, realized it was a referral type site. It does have the icon, and it does take you to casino games, per sé.
I support free sites doing anything reasonable to stay online.
The only negative side effect is that I then tried browsing for a TAS of a casino type console game and can't find one.
It takes a minute I think and it involves exiting and entering the water multiple times + you need to kill a goomba in the cave and activate a blue coin switch etc. so it might be useful, but it's unlikely.
Would it make any sense to possibly go straight to the blue coins using the method in the video and then getting the other coins after + going after a different star?
Sorry, I am pretty much a n00b about this (oddly).
The level only has 104 coins so one way or another you have to visit every coin site anyway, so there's no reason to waste time entering the cave first or backtracking to set up a BLJ to gain a second or two of speed once in the cave. You'd also lose the momentum activating the blue coin switch and there is a ring of coins on the ground to collect as well.
I'm also very familiar with this game and I fast-forwarded the minigames and the tiles at the end of each level. I'm quite glad the silver coin spawn criteria were determined so that this could go forward, as 100% in a Wario Game is an unusual and novel TAS type (have you seen the work on 1?)
It sucks that you discovered such good tricks so late in the run, especially the route choices and cutscene skipping, but the innovation is still here. A hell of a lot of shortcuts came up in the end. I have to say I particularly enjoyed the work in the rooms with the two types of powerups you don't want... the Odd Wario ball and Freeze rooms are difficult to pull off in real time, let alone with these ridiculous TAS platforming routes. All in all the level routes all seem optimal.
Yes vote.
Just so people know, me and Baxter went ahead with (2). The two restrictions we decided to follow are:
-No warping of any kind (be it left+right warping or warping to 1-1.)
-No 1/1ing.
We believe the inclusion of these two restrictions will ultimately produce a more entertaining run overall.
The run is now actively being worked on and we'll release a WIP once 1-4 is complete.
Thank god. The fact is I wanted you to use 1/1 because it's the fastest way, but it looks so ick and removes so much of the entertainment that I don't mind too much either way.
You know, you don't have to save in a lot of places, unless if you're going to save warp, but only if it's faster.
Anyways, I like the idea of how you get all those rupees, but there may not be any need for that if your using the rupees for the triforce charts.
90% of the saves in the current route are because savewarping saves time. This will not be true of as many places in a TAS because of how it is timed, but in a console run every segment is timed from first character movement till you save. That's by SDA rules, anyway.
We recently found out that you can save a few seconds of SDA timing in many places at sea by savewarping right after entering a new square on the 7000x7000 grid. This will be used at least once on almost every if not every instance where sailing from A to B is necessary. Sub 6 hours is possible with SDA timing and these savewarps.
MrSparkle wrote:
Chart locations are determined when you open the chart.
No, they're determined before that, possibly upon starting a new game. The sunken treasures, including triforce pieces, stay in their respective squares, but are randomly distributed somewhere around the island, making each run unique. Even if you use copied files and experimentation to get yourself to the exact location you need to be to pull up the treasure, you will only hit the ocean floor or pull up junk until you open the chart. But, you can make two copies of a file, open a chart in one, and the treasure will be in the same location if you open the chart in the other file, even if you go do other things first, wait a few hours, etc.
So far all the glitches and exploits discovered in this game have to do with physics or quirks due to small frame windows for events that actually shouldn't be allowed to happen (i.e., yesterday, through the course of mashing A+B to get through the text of a cutscene, I drew my sword at one point). Sliding, item selection glitches, OoB and other clipping. No tricking the logic or corrupting memory just yet, although that would be wonderful. When the time comes around and we have working GCN emulators with rerecording years from now, you'll need to find something like that, or a glitch allowing constant hyperspeed, to really shave hours off this game and make it worth a TAS. Barring a huge discovery, I honestly wouldn't expect the first TAS of this game to get below 5.5 hours. When the time comes when it's possible, there are many other GCN games that should be worked on before one like this.
In this last page of the thread is a lot of the reasons I use windows XP. It's not obsolete by any standard despite its age and it runs wicked fast on any 2.4Ghz+ / 1.2Ghz dual core with at least a gig of ram.
Mind you, this is with a lot of tweaks... All updates and SP3 applied to the install disc, and custom settings to avoid a lot of configuration post-install, courtesy n-Lite, so I can have it up and running the way it should be and the way I use it personally in 30 minutes from a blank drive. Only uses like 3 GB of disk space (probably less, but im accounting for SP3). I also run 2+ghz of ram without a page file and in many respects I get performance comperable to last generation linux. I understand the pros of linux and the continued lack of compatability with the software I'm familiar with has kept me from it. I'm not happy about having pirated XP in the past but I've been legal for years.
Having said all that, we could compare dicks about operating systems all day... I think a lot about the newer Mac OS releases (2007+) is incredibly intuitive and sexy, and I understand Vista was delayed largely because of the massive developments in user-friendlyness that Mac was making during that timespan... but I think the comparisons have been sufficiently worn out on this page. I still don't understand exactly what the problem is, and for which platform it is a problem, with proceeding further in the current any% TAS. I'm seeing conflicting replies and so far all I know is that the run is being made on mupen on windows, and now a record reset is required and it doesn't exist for windows mupen yet. Is this correct? Does the record reset exist on linux's version of mupen? If so, maybe we, or one of us personally who programs, help the mupen project (semi-open source?) duplicate this feature, already written for another platform?
I like this WIP a lot. I'm trying not to watch the 120-star until it's completed, but this run looks quite promising so far. Will you be doing Mario Wings to the Sky without a cap somehow, or shall you come back to BOB after getting the wing cap?
Now that's a close one. You can get Mario Wings To The Sky without a cap and just with the cannon, but it takes multiple passes. However, with the C^ BLJ, one could get back to the island in the sky quickly, which might be faster than returning with the cap. Unfortunately this is a BLJless run, so coming back is the only option (if he decides to get that star)
I'm sorry, this came across as lol-ironic since we're talking about making it up there without the scarecrow.
Anyway, awesome work so far. I really hope a new TAS of this game comes out sometime this year.
