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Noob Irdoh wrote:
Now to hope I won't be banned for arguing with a moderator ;)
Can I express a pet peeve here? Personally I'd make it a bannable offense to make text anything smaller than size=8 around here.
That being said, I'm glad I got some dialogue going.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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What about runs that were cancelled, and for whatever reason stand little to no chance of seeing the light of day again? The Willow run deserved publication, but certain things prevented that from ever happening.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Initial tests of the new version indicates that F2 works fine; I might have continued my run but right now I have a bunch of stuff to do.
Also, I've been getting some wildly varied frame rates from this game. 45, 40, 47.6, 55. I'm not sure what do do about that.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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tjp7154 wrote:
When attacking enemies that take multiple hits, most of the time you don't want to hit them right up close, but at a certain distance -- about the length of Mia's "stroke" length. At this distance, you can hit enemies at a higher frequency. It's hard to explain, but it somehow lowers the time the enemy can't be hurt between hits.
This is how the programmers kept an enemy from being hit multiple times in a single attack, actually. If there is something hurtful to an opponent sitting somewhere within its hitbox, they will not take any more damage until all attacks leave the hitbox. However, it does mean that if you strike the edge of a moving hitbox, or attack and hit something at the apex of your jump, you can strike twice in one attack.
It also means proper use of charge spamming will require proper spacing. Otherwise, against a large object like the green crystal or Hume, you can keep a string of firebals going through them and only the first will actually do anything. But then you stand back far enough that the fireballs disappear upon hitting, and keeping in mind you can fire a shot every three frames... Yeah, it won't look pretty for most bosses.
Also, if you slip some input in before Hume begins talking at the beginning of the game, you can screw with how the cutscene behaves. It is possible to fly into and over the ceiling of Mia's hometown, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem helpful at all. I'll need to see if I can trigger it elswhere.
Right now I'm holding off on doing this run until a small issue related to the F2 button is resolved. Otherwise, I think I'm all set. Proposed route:
Defeat Gar and get out of town.
Go to and defeat frog boss; get password for mountain guard and pick up scroll 1.
Go straight to the shulin; pick up attack scroll 2 behind ice wall after talking to them.
Invade Dungagan city; Smirnol -> scroll 3 -> Hume/hammer; leave city.
Initiate hide-n-seek with Gideon. Pick up wall jump boots after finding her the second time. Finish the "game" and pick up anklet.
Go to ice cavern; get scroll 4 and talk to shulin again.
Proceed to Dungagan mining facility; pick up double jump* and go to grodol cave.
Go to grodol kingdom, destroy mass of worms, and return to shulin.
Invade tower, picking up scroll 5 and the mojak.
Return to mine. Mojak into the trial.
Go to grodol cave, and mojak into Baph's realm.
Work towards Baphomet and complete the game.
The only thing I'm undecided on is picking up any health upgrades. I don't see taking damage as being all that helpful, and before long things will be killing you in one hit anyway, so I don't see the point.
What you say?
*Kind of out of the way, yes, but it will help make navigating certain obstacles easier. The main reason, though, is for Baph 2; double jump will allow getting multiple hits in between stuns, drastically shortening the fight
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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tjp7154 wrote:
<_<
I suppose if I post at ALL on these forums, I should post here. The game is definitely a very good game. I'm the one who did that "fun run" of it. I've gotten away from the game for other console games, but I'd probably go back to it in the distant future...
Why, hey there! Fancy seeing you show up. Pleasure to meet you.
tjp7154 wrote:
The rapid fire charged shots would definitely be a mainstay in the run. I stink at the timing it takes to keep it going (dash + shoot simultaneously), but a TAS would blow away bosses.
It's actually a lot simpler to pull off. Press and hold the jump and attack buttons at the same time, then when you're charged up, let go of both. After that, as long as you don't get hit or jump, pressing both attack and jump at once will let go a charged shot. The timing can be a touch persnickety, but there's no need to dash.
tjp7154 wrote:
I don't know for sure if you can avoid Baphomet's powerful "spell" attack without the charge helm. Hopefully you can. It'll have to be tested.
I'm not concerned about Baph's Beam o' Death for this run. I'll be applying pressure to his spine constantly, which should keep him from doing much of anything, but if push comes to shove I can just luck manip him from doing it. I'm honestly concerned more about Rajoman and the old man's crystal cage than Baphomet.
tjp7154 wrote:
I'd like to know how you're going to get around the game's sound bug (If you haven't experienced it you most definitely will soon). The game will inexplicably (maybe a it could be prevented) slow down and loop sounds and you'd have to reset.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the less-than-functional music looping causing a pause at the end of the song? I think Hourglass handles that, even if the music isn't handled perfectly.
tjp7154 wrote:
If you have any questions, just ask.
In other news,
Woo -- first post!
Can do. Please impart any other wisdom you may have that I might have missed. And please enjoy your stay!
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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nitsuja wrote:
GDI games had the same issue, which is fixed, but I haven't applied that fix to DirectDraw games like this yet. As a temporary workaround, you can disable "Backbuffer Frameskip" in the "Tools > Fast-Forward Options" menu. But that option is usually an important part of what makes fast-forward so fast, so having it enabled after there's a fix for this case in the code would be better.
That provided a partial fix, as instead I was getting artifacts more similar to the other described bug. I had to disable the "Frontbuffer frameskip" as well to fix it entirely.
nitsuja wrote:
I wonder, if you disable hardware acceleration in the Graphics menu, does this still happen? And what's the earliest place I can reproduce this? (I think I know what you're talking about but I can't remember where I saw it before.)
That didn't help. The earliest place I can replicate this is the pool of water in the forest, towards the bottom of the room. It's such a minor bug that I'm not going to worry about it, though.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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You should go play it.
Anyway, thanks to Nitsuja's efforts, I have recently taken an interest in running this. There are plenty of bugs to abuse that can make Mia fly across the screen and skip large portions of the game. Some of my research...
There's no need to grab the familiar from the merchant at all. You can skip into the trial and get the max level familiar immediately.
Mojak glitching can take you straight to the final area. Combined with getting the highest level familiar, you can skip nearly half the game.
Can't grab the scroll in the forest pond all that early. I doubt it'd be worth it, really.
Charge shots seem to attack through certain invincibility times. Combined with rapid fire charges, many bosses will go down quite quickly.
I still need to watch through that "fun run" on youtube to pick up some more tips.
Also, the game has an introduction that is automatically played the first time you load the game. To get it to play again, you can delete the file intro.dat and start the game up. It also spends some time loading up saved games. Just to be sure, I'll be taking these things into account to help sync the game up. It'll cost a few frames, but it'll make it more user friendly.
Anyone have any thoughts they want to share about it?
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Okay, one more thing to report one, and I think I'll have covered everything.
I've encountered a couple of more graphical bugs in Eternal Daughter. Fast forwarding makes everything look psychedelic, and loading states in certain areas can garble the map a bit. However, I suppose these are related to the other cross-screen loading bug I found and trust they will be dealt with.
Again, thank you for your efforts.
Edit: Okay, so I have one more thing. F2 allows you to reset the game at any time, permitting you to skip right over the opening introduction. Hourglass won't recognize that, so I think I'll have to record from a "dirty state" unless there's a workaround. I've already tried changing the game input for F2.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Oh sweet, sound! I think I'll have it disabled when recording a movie, though, since it seems to do weird things if I load states between songs; I even got the game to crash doing that.
Still has the screen issue, but in any event I think I'm poised to continue on. Just need to do some research.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Nitsuja: Thanks for the response. I now understand the issues I am having. I can also get music out of the emulator, and sound effects out of the AVI I just made.
Also, thank you for your efforts. I'm sorry I can't help out as anything more than feedback that you seem to already have. I wish I could be of more help.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Sweet sweetness! This is most excellent.
Did a brief test of Eternal Daughter. It kills Gar and gets out of the opening village in around 15 seconds. It seems stable enough for a complete run, although there are several really annoying quirks I've encountered.
First, any threading mode that permits sound will lock the game up. Most modes will lock right at startup, and the furthest I've gotten has been selecting a new game before it messes up.
Second is a really annoying graphical bug that results from loading between rooms. If I'm in room A and I load a state from room B, then the screen will be locked onto displaying the last frame from room A until I blindly change the scenery, whether it be into room A or room C.
Third, I don't get what the deal with stale savestates is, but it appears I'll have to watch my entire run again in fast forward every time I wish to pick up where I left off.
Overall though, it syncs fine if I disable threading multithreading and plays smoothly enough. I'm quite excited!
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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mklip2001 wrote:
Anyway, you asked which deaths seemed out of place. I rewatched this and made a list of the deaths which didn't seem to save time and didn't look like they were purely speed-entertainment tradeoffs. Frame counts are very approximate.
Frame 17200 - Stage 2: Billy dies on the motorbike.
33600 - Stage 3-3: Billy dies from electricity on a rope.
41000 - Stage 4-1: Pimple dies in the spaceship.
52000 - Stage 5: Pimple dies during some flying antics.
55200 - Stage 5: Pimple dies before fighting Robo-Manus.
62000 - Stage 7: Billy dies before the Dark Queen appears.
I like my heroes flawed, so I feel compelled to say I approve of these deaths. Ties back into my previous post.
Honestly, nigh untouchable heroes doing everything perfectly gets real boring after a while.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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People kvetching about 10 seconds at the end are silly. I love this run! In a weird way I was thinking about Darkwing Duck when watching, seeing how our heroes consistently demonstrated sheer incompetence by doing things like running into open electrical fields like magnets and beating each other up and otherwise constantly "arguing" about things. But at the end of the day, they were still able to pull off the job magnificently well. I can imagine the citizens of earth looking at them and thinking, "How the deuce did these morons do such a good job in face of their incompetence?"
Idiot savants indeed.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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I haven't read any of these, and I'm posting anyway!
1 for the beginning of a stage or significant segment. 2-4 For various checkpoints along the way. 7-0 get used for experimentation, usually 7, 8, and 0; 9 often gets shafted. 5 & 6 are, for whatever reason, very rarely used for anything.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Wanted! Flash game. It's one drawn out boss fight against a shadowy thing on top of a tower. For each "level" the boss switches forms and tactics. Played a couple of years ago.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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So I went to take a stab at this, but then realized that much of the game relies on randomly placed events. The placement of the ponies, and the crystals needed to free them, are determined at the start of the game. This means that the best time is less about route planning and whatnot and more about hardcore RNG control right at the beginning.
Sadly, I am not equipped with the needed skills to deal with this. Just thought I'd get the game out there though.
Edit: For reference!
Link to video
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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DarkKobold wrote:
Anyway, thoughts?
I'll just stick with my NES, where there is no chance of anyone getting my money, thanks.
Aside from unhelpful snark, I really have nothing to say about this.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
