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I'm still thinking the goal of lowest in-game time to 600k is best. Use the easiest, as anything harder just adds needless waiting, as I see it. Max population can be absurdly slow, as this GameFAQs topic points out a twice rolled-over population counter in one layout. I'm not sure how many thousands of years I can shave off of that attempt. YouTube of said layout.
There exists maps where there simply isn't enough land to hit population of 600k, especially Practice Map. Waiting for taxes to build up the cash necessary to build a megalopolis is by no means a fast process.
A TAS does not have a very large advantage over an unassisted run, where the main apparent advantages lie only in luck manipulation and crazy-fast zoning. It can't create money out of thin air any better than an unassisted run. It can't design a crazier city structure than is normally possible. There's not a lot where a TAS has any major advantage, though point me to one if you see one.
Again, I believe the best choice is fastest possible to 600k. Don't bother making life any tougher.
Ack! I was just about to post, then I hit "Preview" and notice another one. You've done a great job, Dammit! (...) May the script help many a player on their path to build a megalopolis.
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Dammit wrote:
I do hope some kind of TAS is being planned?
I have no plans, but I am curious. I may try something, but there's no guarantee.
DemonStrate wrote:
The weird thing I noticed about this, is that if you let the game keep playing after the disasters, it goes down to 28800, and stays there, even though there aren't any buildings with power or nearly any complete squares at all. Why are there still residents?
If the center tile is damaged, the whole building explodes. If the outer tiles are damaged, the building completely freezes and can't change until you bulldoze the rubble around it. As population depends on the level of the zone, those sims are stuck there!
However, a little removal of surrounding rubble later, and those buildings can continue to properly shrink.
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I like the idea of the freeze glitch myself:
The goal is to never use a sword.
As a TAS, we must not fail in our goals.
Ganon can't be defeated without a sword.
As there is a conflict between game physics and the goal of the "perfect" player, this results in a paradox. Therefore, the game freezes in a state of quantum indecision when two absolutes collide.
That is how I'd put it. Other than adding my voice in the support of that particular ending, I have nothing further to add.
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Dammit wrote:
I'll try. I'll edit later with the result.
Edit: OK, seems to be working. [...]
A little more crowded than I imagined, but this allows me to see precisely where the optimal spots for those R-zones begin and end. Should also help anyone else who wants to try TASing this, in case they want to muck about with some layouts before finalizing one.
I will simply say thanks. This is pretty much what I hoped for.
EDIT: Just re-posting my runs in case you don't want to go hunting them down just to have a pre-built city. (first)(second)
Hmm, it would be nice to see the precise number, but the lack of space for three digits does get in the way. Can you recolor the text? Perhaps use three different colors, one each for <100, 100~199, and 200~255. We can still cross-check with the color boxes so we can guess that "02" there is actually somewhere over 100.
Mind if I present this to the GameFAQs board? I'm sure there's someone who'd love to see land value actively exposed like this.
EDIT: I just realized... By holding down any button, time does not pass. As such, even L or R will halt the flow of time. This becomes quite a problem if I want to watch land value change the moment it happens. I can play a movie in read-only and hold L or R without interfering with it and still see the changes happen, so I suppose it's not that big of a deal.
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I made a different layout. It reaches capital before I do the money trick, and 600k population by 1902 NOV. This one is pretty close to being perfect.
I'm not sure if it's possible to manipulate the warnings into never appearing. Pollution and crime will always be present, but even though they are running rampant in the megalopolis...
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More out of curiosity's sake, could someone make a lua script that gives the exact land value of each square? I dug around for some memory addresses which I think are needed for this.
0x7E01BD,2s Screen X position (by tile, not by pixel)
0x7E01BF,2s Screen Y position
0x7F6B00,1u Begin Land Value array
A square is 2x2 tiles in size.
The first element in the Land Value array points to the upper-left corner of the whole map.
Add 0x0001 (1) for each square east, and add 0x003C (60) for each square south.
The last square in the array should be at 0x7F76B7.
As far as I know, it's just reading up those memory addresses, some calculations involving screen positions, then drawing boxes and showing a number in each one. But I don't know the second thing about lua.
The reason why land value might be important to know is because the R-zones need at least a certain value in order to grow and maintain their size. The C-zones need quite a bit to reach a high potential, but can maintain their size even with no land value. They both need a lot to hit TOP. I-zones don't care about it at all.
While making a layout, it would be useful to know when the land value starts to drop off, so we can know much quicker where I-zones will be preferred. Besides, I'm sure any serious SimCity player would appreciate an on-screen Land Value-O-Meter.
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dave_dfwm wrote:
Wonderful job with the 600,000 population!
Technically, all I'm doing is using a layout proposed by someone else. That someone else (Gothic_Sara) should take the credit.
dave_dfwm wrote:
Don't parks reduce the pollution in the city?
They do not appear to. The only thing they seem to do is raise the land value, which is still a good thing for C-zones and R-zones.
In fact, one way to reduce the pollution complaint is to actually build more industrial zones in the areas with no pollution.
For some reason, the game uses the average of all tiles with pollution when figuring out if there's a pollution problem. The completely unpolluted areas are never added to this average. One can have a single airport in the corner of a map, no industrial, no seaport, no coal power, and in fact have all residents miles away from the airport, yet the pollution message still shows up as though it's a big problem.
In the tiles where there are pollution, there's a high density of it. Zero density tiles aren't counted towards this average, so all the squeeky clean places that didn't have the airport in the example don't count.
So taking care of the pollution warning messages would involve destroying a number of industrial zones to turn most of that red pollution into green and building a few I-zones with the residential zones. Needless to say, this strategy isn't the brightest one out there when it comes to quick, high population.
As for crime, police departments galore. But since the central residential block is already doing well enough without any, and the fact industrial zones tolerate just about everything, this would only serve to reduce the max potential population, as police departments themselves don't contribute to the number of sims.
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Building a small yet functioning city in 6 seconds. I'm just fooling around, seeing what it looks like when we TAS-build a city.
The shortest in-game time is definitely less than 4 years. Going for shortest input may extend this time when we prematurely stop short of filling the rest of the map. Additionally, the shortest movie length needs the extra input to click through the crime and pollution troubles messages that will almost certainly show up.
While I am interested in trying to build a megalopolis in record time, I seriously don't want to be the one person to try. I have enough other stuff to be doing already. Mainly, I'm just prodding around with tests, like the unassisted run with 0 rerecords and showing proof of concept. I've proven the layout works. I've shown the pace we should build the city at. At this point, that's all I care about doing, though it may change later.
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The layout is nothing real exciting. I didn't record the run.
EDIT:Now I recorded something. I recommend use of the turbo key. Lots of use.
Edit2: I deviated from the layout in the snapshot in that southeast corner, where all those industrial zones are separated from everywhere else. I wanted to show that the industrial zones work just fine with one rail, and a layout to take advantage of that.
The GameFAQs message board has an awful lot of information. It's where we got the layout, and all we needed to do was ask. Why, the person even provided a snapshot of this layout.
With the initial 20,000$, I built the biggest city I could with it, following part of the layout while running out of money to begin the money trick. Taxes at 0% to succeed at the trick and to maximize zone demand. Then I just followed the layout in the picture after I got all the money I need, making sure to build a stadium, an airport, and a seaport.
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Bootman wrote:
I seem to recall that after Live Force is cleared it restarts at a higher difficulty. [...]
It does. Things are faster, and things that don't normally shoot start taking pot-shots at you. Beat the game again, and things get even faster. I am not aware of any in-game code that starts at a higher difficulty, so the only way I can instantly get there is by altering the game or using a save-state, neither of which are accepted at TASVideos to my knowledge. I am not aware of exceptions.
Bootman wrote:
[...] I seem to recall the the big yellow claws/hooks/thorns in the middle of level one are killable. [...]
I don't remember ever destroying them. In my run, I actually do fire a shot at one of them while my ships are "impaled" on them in an attempt to make a sound effect. Using memory watch, the HP did not go down.
The memory locations I was looking at were 0x0506 and earlier for the enemy HP. Not that it matters for this particular case, since it's so fun watching my ships play with the hit-detection and act like they're stabbed. I am not aiming for a 100% kills run, either.
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So, in-game cheats are generally not allowed for a TAS... We can still hit 600k without the debug mode, anyway.
I saw the simple layout that hits the high population. It was made to be simple. It doesn't take advantage of the fact that industrial zones only needs a single rail to work. Along with commercial zones, police departments, and fire departments, but that's less important when there aren't as many of those around in the layout. But it is still a simple layout, the simplest possible that still meets the goal of 600k+ sims.
As a test, I built the layout myself. Here's the history:
1900 JAN:New mayor elected
1900 FEB:Became town
1900 JUN:Became city
1901 FEB:Became capital
1901 MAR:Became metropolis
1901 AUG:A plane crashed! (Happened right by the Your House...)
1902 MAY:Became megalopolis
1903 JUL:Population came to 600,000
That was an unassisted run by emulation, but we can already freeze time anyway. Money glitch was used, of course!
Your transportation can be broken up in lengths of 1 to 3 tiles, and still cover all transit-related demands. Residential zones are the only ones that need to go someplace (any building that isn't R-zone or nuclear power plant), requiring at least 2 tiles, but everything else is perfectly fine with a single tile of rail leading nowhere.
Crime can run rampant in the city, as it only affects land value upon hitting a certain value.
Sims can complain like crazy how you're doing a bad job, yet they come flooding your place anyway.
Screw sensible planning!
Then again, a lot of it will be waiting and doing nothing. Setting up the whole thing might actually be more entertaining than the actual passing of time for them to grow. I say the priority should be to make the most senseless-looking arrangement and still get a 600k+ megalopolis freaking fast.
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Yo! I'm back to working on this run!
It looks like my EVO run is put on hold now. And I'm swinging back to this run. Well, at least I'm still trying something.
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Dromiceius wrote:
Anyway, I hope you manage to finish this; I don't think anyone's actually attempted a 2-player shmup before, despite the obvious awesomeness of such a thing.
NES Life Force/Salamander would like a word with you:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1699
My latest post over there: (I just got back into making a little progress, unmentioned over there)
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=187088#187088
I say, go for it! I will make an effort to view your progress whenever you update us. I'm not familiar with this game, but who knows what I might spot.
... Okay, I have nothing useful to say, other than to point out that, yes, there exists an attempt by someone at some point for some other game.
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Not that I meant to forget everything happening here, but zero progress has been made since last I post. The classes I'm taking eat up a fair amount of time, and my interest in things tend to wander.
Just letting you know my status. If I continue, I'll let you know that as well.
EDIT: Thought I should add a little more to this post. I thought a little more about the RNG. Apparently, the game picks up a new random number before using it, in between times where the emulator re-cheats it back to the numbers I specify. The cheat-set values ended up changing before the game uses them for the flashy meat, which threw off my original observation.
I've reset my luck program to no longer ignore the lower bit. And talking about this seems to help me want to get back into things.
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FatRatKnight wrote:
Heh, this prompted me to make a (highly edited) snapshot. All you have to do was go into the impossible-to-select Hands & Feet menu to get Chainsaw Legs!
Note what I said. In there. A highly edited snapshot. Obviously, the menu is impossible to select, so I couldn't have had entered it.
In short, I made a snapshot of a normal menu, then edited that to show random junk. Come on, the chances of Chainsaw Legs showing up right after it's mentioned are real low.
Would make for a good April Fool's joke! I clearly fooled you, though I intended to say that it's not a real snapshot that can be found in-game.
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You've obviously able to post here talking about your problem. Since you're having troubles just linking it, I'll try to come up with an even more inconvenient solution, but one that hopefully does something.
I take it you're trying to use Microstorage now. It provides a number in the URL when you upload a file. Copy that number here, and I'll play around with a few things. From the impression I get of what the site says, I can put in any filename I want after the /info/#######/ part. Keep the same extension it says, probably .smv of course.
If I'm successful in my attempt, I will try to link to it here. If met with further success, then I will ask you to quote my post and nothing else, and see if that triggers any problems.
Then again, I'm not even sure if what I'm thinking will even come close to working, or even make any sense.
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lurker wrote:
I get a desync every time I try playing these files. What rom/snes9x version should I be using?
Emulator used: Snes9x v1.43+ v13 for Windows
ROM: E.V.O. Search for Eden (U)
This movie also uses Up+Down and Left+Right occasionally. Make sure it's allowed. If you still have troubles, I'll look deeper into my setups of the emulator.
klmz wrote:
I guess it is possible to get Warted or Feathered body in the final battle in Chapter 3 with extreme luck manipulation, as you did in the dino run.
The extreme luck involved creating two flashing meats simultaneously. I have to study how the luck works in further details before I can even replicate something like that. I just happened to be lucky when my manipulator program spat out numbers that strongly suggested such a possibility at the time, and I took it.
Then there's the further problem that eating meat takes time. Under the best of circumstances, where the meat is actually directly in the way, it will still have to save 1 or 2 hits per meat. Then again, I'll only need 2 extra flashing meats, but setting things up for optimal eating speed...
Between the Mammoth brothers and the Bird King, I am assured enough for a Warted Body by the time I hit the yetis. So all savings depends on whether saving 3 hits on Bird King and 1 hit each from the 3 Mammoth Brothers, plus a hit for each remaining Tyrasaurus, is worth manipulating up the meals.
negjay wrote:
Here's a question though - how much time would it cost going mammal?
First off, one would follow my dino route, grab the Green Crystal that I neglected, and save the evolved dino form. Upon becoming a mammal, one might want to Green Crystal into dino form right away to maintain speed. Compared to the dino route, it's a little slower already.
Then comes the fact that even the fastest horse can only maintain an Agility of 14. On the other hand, it won't slip on ice, gets stronger hits (20 or 25 kicks. Except they're pathetically slow), and you get to see a few neat things.
Overall, lots of time would be spent, and if I were aiming for time, would not show enough new things to warrant a second run, especially considering the first three chapters. A play-around run, however, can and probably should become mammal, as well as show nearly every feature of the game. Reset-recording would be needed to fully maximize the play-around.
negjay wrote:
The way you handled Fort Bird-Man was simply awesome, and I think I missed how you evolved the bird's feet into chainsaws.
Heh, this prompted me to make a (highly edited) snapshot (EDIT: link removed). All you have to do was go into the impossible-to-select Hands & Feet menu to get Chainsaw Legs!
EDIT: Keep in mind I intended to make the link temporary, so now I've removed it. Generally, I don't want to tax someone's site with traffic, so that's the whole reason I intended to keep it temporary.
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You absolutely can't start a new topic at all, even with a new title?
I just copy whatever link Microstorage gives when I upload the file. Generally, my links look a bit like this
This points to my E.V.O. TAS
I disabled BBCode in this post so the actual tags show up. If yours look exactly like this, I can't really guess as to what's going on.
Last resort is to disable HTML and BBCode in your posts. If you still can't start a new thread, maybe even convert this topic into a new Tin Star thread, possibly editing the first post to reflect this change. Even if things become inconvenient, at least you've got a way to show us what you've been doing. I don't see how the site can fail when you insist on plain text after disabling HTML and BBCode.
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Been putting less time into this, as I've now got some classes to go to. I've still finished chapter 5 in one of the runs, though.
Go birdie! Less than 42 minutes of input!
- Real men don't use elevators to go up!
- Cro-Maine was quite a surprise. I figuratively buried all the other bosses, but not this one! He had to make it literal!
- Not easy trying to be entertaining during the Bolbox battle. Since each enemy has an extra long hit-stun, I could have wandered around a little while beating the stuffing out of them, but I didn't.
I plan to finish off the dino run to figure out which one's faster, then pull off a complete restart from scratch trying to improve on every stage starting with the first.
eternaljwh wrote:
With or without jetpack? ;)
But we already have a RocketKnight! ... Should I say yes anyway for the coolness factor of owning a jetpack?
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Letting you know roughly what my progress is so far:
Bird - At Bolbox battle. Yay, the final battle!
Dino - King Rogon battle. Less than a minute lead by this point now.
Sub-40 minutes might be possible, but not in these test runs. A fresh new run will slowly be worked on after I get these two finished out and available for viewing. Though, if someone really wants to see them now, when the runs don't quite reach the ending yet, I'll post them out anyway.
DrJones wrote:
I post here to cheer FatRatKing, I'll see this run for sure.
Somehow, this very name was referred to not too long ago from someplace else. My response is the same: I am FatRatKnight. As much as I'd like to rule over all fat rats, I'd rather be the rat in shining armor.
negjay, from like a while ago wrote:
I could see 55 minutes for a final time but I don't see going below 50, unless there's a big change in the Prime Frog fight. I'm not one to accurately estimate this kind of thing though.
Your estimation is a bit off, as the bird run is roughly 38 and a half minutes in and currently fighting Bolbox. Then again, there is that big change in the Prime Frog fight... Ah, no wonder! It's all because of that single battle! Nothing to do with rest of the run!
Heh, just joking a bit.
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Chapter 4, birdChapter 4, dino
Some random notes:
Apparently, I found a way to negate the "can't jump down through platforms" deal. If I bite while in mid-jump, it mysteriously disables the ability to fly until I land. That could have been useful to know while I was still in Chapter 3...
I could have skipped the "become mammal?" dialogue in the bird route, but no... I had to test this after I was well on my way through the chapter. It was properly skipped in the dino route.
Honestly, I was hoping that the trick used against the Mammoth Brothers in the dino run was impossible. But I try it, and it turns out the "contact-damage" hit-box is small enough for me to squeeze in.
I particularly like the outer "Fort Bird-man" room, bird route. After the one jump I make, I bounce all the way into the door. 11 bounces were made. Fun.
You may note I start tackling air repeatedly in the bird-route all of a sudden. That's about when I discovered that's it's slightly faster than dashing normally. I have not compared it to jumping speed yet, however...
The dino run actually needs to take damage in order to save time. I haven't found a need to take damage as the bird, yet.
For some strange reason, Sir Yeti has "contact-damage", but Mother Yeti doesn't. It is abused in the dino route when it allowed me to go into the tackle-loop as seen with the Mammoth Brothers. Interestingly, the few frames in which I can act before I get clapped to death is just long enough to continue the tackle-loop. Not abused in the bird route.
I looked through the rest of the game, and saw how much HP each boss has, thanks to memory watch. I have determined it's most likely faster to take a little time to evolve the body for extra strength. The Warted Body has the same +2 to strength as the Feather Body, so I might pick that up once I restart the run and actually evolve it sometime before I fight the yetis.
I've been charging ahead first as the bird, then follow it with the dino. As a result, the dino route is somewhat more optimized. Meaning once I do go back through, there will be lots more time to shave off in my bird route than the dino route.
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I seemed to have messed up on a few things concerning my last post. Edits in that post will be made.
You know what? Getting the bird is quite a detour. Since I'm not sure just how much time I can save in chapters 4 and 5 to make up for becoming a bird, I thought I'd go both ways and see what happens...
Chapter 3, birdChapter 3, dino (Fairly insane luck happened here)
The split between movies should be around frame 61238. I suggest a save-state at 61234 so you can avoid fast-forwarding through the other movie file.
Another disadvantage with the bird I didn't anticipate: It can't jump down through platforms. Sure, it can fly down through 'em, but there's no chance that I can bounce on anything with a lofty platform over its head. The dinosaur would have no problem going right through it. Seeing as the B button both begins flight and lets you fall through platforms...
Two minutes of difference between the two runs, though. My question is, can that much time really be saved being a bird? Honestly, I'm rooting for the bird because, look! Wings! And, um... It can fly! And, er... Well... Um... Go birdie! Yay! Yea, just a personal choice, but if it turns out to be slower overall, I will take the dino path and lock away the other run.
As for the frame charts like the kind I made in the previous chapters, I haven't made the measurements yet. It's probably more of a test run at this point, considering the number of possible improvements around. I just hope we can get the insane dino luck again when the next run gets back to that point.
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I should recognize when progress is going too darn slow. Might help somewhat if I knew how to go about using lua scripts or some way of multi-track rerecording, but right now, at the pace I'm working, the project may as well be dead.
Still, that's not to say nothing happened during all this time. I stopped several moments before getting that last blue one, since I don't feel as though I'm up to continuing for a little while.
One thing I discovered, after blasting away most of the other durable blue stuff, is that I can fire at a rate higher than 30 Hz. If you have one on-screen bullet, and fire at the same time it hits an enemy and disappears, you can hold down B for one more frame and fire off another shot. I can effectively fire at 40 Hz this way. Although fairly moot when it comes to speed in an auto-scroller, it would have given me a little more time to dance around later.
Largely, though, I'm just announcing that the project is virtually in hibernation. May as well throw in what I've got before I forget completely.
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Hmm... Seems my attempt failed somewhere. Close, but not quite.
There appears to be three ways to get around this problem:
- Get at least 100 EVO.P and pick up Pitsaurus Jaws to jump high enough
- Don't go through Domain of Omosaurus as amphibian
- Pick up Big Horn before saving amphibian form. Faster Mother Prime Frog battle
I'm not sure if the Big Horn itself is enough, but it's the most attractive choice for me. If I don't go through the Omosaurus as an amphibian, I'll get through it as a 9 agility bird at worst.
Bird's flight alone isn't much. There might be a few spots where it can help, possibly with those mid-air tackles, but the biggest thing I'm thinking about is the fact I can get 20 agility instead of 18.
Here's a breakdown of minimum evolution I need to do as dino or birdy in order to achieve maximum speed:
Dinosaur:
- 100 _ Pitsaurus Jaws
- 1000 _ Transform to 2 legs
- 1000 _ Transform to 2 legs (Twice! Gah!)
- 1500 _ Invincible Tail
- 500 _ Segosaurus Dorsal Fin
- 500 _ Ptenodons Crest
Total: 6 transforms, 4600 EVO.P, 18 agility, 12 jump, 7 strength.
Bird:
They already begin with Pitsaurus Jaws!
- 3000 _ Longtail birds Tail (EDIT: fixed the cost)
- 500 _ Segosaurus Dorsal Fin
- 500 _ Ptenodons Crest
Total: 3 transforms, 4000 EVO.P, 20 agility, 11 jump, 9 strength.
Additionally, I can instead pick up Pronesaurus Dorsal Fin for an extra point of strength spending 500 more EVO.P in either form. The bird can get an additional 2 points of strength for the 2000 Warted Body or the 3000 feather body without losing agility.
As seen above, it's much faster to evolve up something decent as a bird.
There's more strength and speed as a bird.
I can still bounce on enemies as a bird, just don't fly when I jump.
I can tackle stuff from the air, which may be useful in a few cases.
I can fly right up those elevators in Chapter 5 instead of actually using them.
On the other hand, birds walk/run slow. A trivial problem when you think about jumping...
... But is that enough to beat out the 3-stage detour I need to take?
Once crucial point seems to be that last battle in the end of Chapter 3. Since I'm taking the bird route, I have 3 decent choices to make:
- Detour into the cloud and pick up dragon form. Ignore the 9999 Blue Crystal. Longest detour.
- Beat the stuffing out of that shell enemy in the water and manipulate up a fancy feast. No crystal transform!
- Grab the green crystal in the boss stage and become the amphibian yet again. Shortest detour.
A less decent choice is to knock down the first one with my amazing 1 strength, then evolve into hitting much harder.
It seems that I can manipulate up flashing meat from the boss enemies of Chapter 3 (cheat-set RNG test), and seeing as I only need a few thousand EVO.P, I can avoid taking the time to eat food I don't care about.
EDIT: Whoops, had the cost of Longtail birds Tail at 1500 instead of 3000. That was quite a mistake...
