Oh wait ... what is THAT? OMG! It's an Earthbound TAS redo! WOW!
The first part is up on my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M29bJnBoT5g .. It goes from the start (duh!) to leaving Pokey's house. I'll try to make it to Giant Step within 10 minutes, so the 2nd part should end after Titanic Ant.
Right before Starman Junior, this new run was 205 frames faster than the old run (and that's even before fighting a single fight!).
Since I'm TASing both Earthbound and Uniracers at the moment, don't expect regular updates for any of the 2 games. I tend to work on one game until I get tired of it, and then work on the other game. Still, progress will be made constantly; I just don't know for what game that progress is going to be.
Enjoy!
See, I never tried to get all this information. Why? Because it's not necessary to know that to TAS the game. Trial and error, and these memory addresses I gave you are more than enough to get a perfect jump every time. I never bothered getting this data, because I don't need it.
If you want it though, nothing's stopping you from getting it yourself. I'm certainly not going to do all your work when that particular work is useless to me.
Sorry to say this, but all that is information is already known. Also, there is no strict amount of frames to press certain buttons, mainly because these numbers vary according to the angle the bike is at.
Also, boost table including headbounce: http://www.obellemare.com/speedruns/Uniracers%20%28U%29%20%5B%21%5D/Uniracers.html
As for the order in which to do stunts, the boost table speaks for itself. It is better to do a flip first, and then it is better to fit in one of each stunt before making a stunt you've already made. For example, F2R is slower than FRZ. It's all mathematics, really.
The only thing that has been kept somewhat secret (I think) is this list of useful memory addresses to watch while TASing:
7E04B7,2s,Speed
7E11CD,2u,Booster Meter
7E0411,2u,X Pos
7E0415,2u,Y Pos
7E1509,1u,Screen X Pos
7E11FD,1u,# of Flips
7E11F9,1u,# of Rolls
7E0F61,1u,# of Twists
7E042B,1u,# of Z-Flips
7E042F,1u,# of Tabletops
Also, the trick you thought of to define whether a section is faster than before, I used that technique to improve Zoom Zoo.
Please don't view this post as an offensive message or anything. It is meant to be purely informative, and not offensive in any way. I'm completely neutral in this message.
Alright. Here's the WIP .smv: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1674584940/Uniracers%20%28U%29%20%5B%21%5D.smv
You're free to take a crack at it and see if you find any improvements, but please keep in mind that short term improvements don't always mean long term improvements. For example, an improvement on a half loop might not always mean an improvement on the lap time. So if you do find improvements, please take the time to check if the lap time will improve because of it or not.
Also, apology accepted, I apologize too, no harsh feelings, all is good, everyone is happy. :)
Let me know if you find anything.
I wish you good luck on that.
About the attitude, I think your attitude is worse than mine here. I'm kinda tired of hearing you say that you're better than me and you can improve my work and you're so good and I'm not, and blah blah blah. I never liked your attitude from the start of this thread, and I don't think I ever will. There, I said it.
Despite all that, I'm still trying to be as civilized as possible. I asked you to give me your e-mail address so that I could send you my WIP .smv, which you can then try to improve on. What's wrong with that? I don't see no "bad attitude" in that. But since you brought on the topic, I decided to "let the world know" how much I don't like you. Still, if you want the WIP, PM me your address and I'll send it over.
I'm not the kind of person that tends to be openly rude to someone, unless that someone was rude to me in the first place. So there, I know how you feel, and you know how I feel. How about we just keep that to ourselves and still try to stay civilized?
The reason I asked you to PM me (instead of me posting the WIP here) is because I tend to prefer not giving away this WIP publicly. Why? Don't know. I guess this TAS has a certain sentimental value to me, and I'd hate for someone to take over my work or something. Call me paranoid if you want, but that WIP smv is going to be given away only by personal request via PM.
Anyway you've got 23.97 now, how much does the the faster the computer player help?
It doesn't. At least, not in Zoom Zoo. Maybe it had somethin to do with Dragster, but I highly doubt it, since I only beat Nitsuja's time by 0.01 second (and he did it against Bronzen, while I did it against Goldwyn).
I thought that him (it?) being close to my Uni would make me go a little faster, but apparently it doesn't. In Zoom Zoo, I'm too far away for it to have an effect.
I assume you'll be using the same tricks for each lap, having found the optimal stunts?
Yes. If they're not the same, they'll be very similar. However, at the end of a lap, I have a different speed than I had at the start of the first one, so the part following the start/finish line will be different. The rest will be the same though.
Bezman wrote:
I guess doing laps 2 and 3 will be easier now that you've worked out what to do?
Yes. All I need is some time and motivation to complete those other 2 laps. I have quite a few things happening in my life right now, but I'm confident I can finish Zoom Zoo in less than 2 weeks from now. Worst case scenario, a month from now.
Bezman wrote:
Why do you 'only' do a twist/flip on the subsequent 180-track points, having done a double-twist flip on the 1st? Does the greater speed give you more airtime?
I'm not sure I understand the question correctly, but I can assure you I've done rigorous testing on each part of the track, and the tricks I do give the best results in the end.
When I run it, it says it requires MS Gothic font to display text properly. It seems to work fine without it, but I'd like to get this font anyways, but google was not much help.
I googled "download MS Gothic", and this was the first result in the list: http://www.kanjistep.com/en/misc/howto.html
There's a handy download link for the MS Gothic font on that page... Cheers!
You mean, like this? Uniracers Stunts & Jump Optimizer v13 (file too big to be pasted in a code block)
This bot produces frame-perfect input to create the most elaborate stunt possible for a given jump (for the game Uniracers, obviously). You set the emulator before a jump, and run the LUA script. The bot will then intelligently attempt different stunt combos and optimize for speed, and when it's done, it replays the best stunt it could find, and if you happened to be recording, it records it for you!
DeHackEd: I think this bot is a good example of an alternate usage of lua scripting that isn't just for gui displays. You might want to take an in-depth look at this ;)
EDIT: Forgot to add, this bot is best watched holding down Frame Advance. It optimizes in 10s of seconds what takes a human hours. If you don't watch it in Frame Advance, you might miss all the action as it happens too fast.
The gamefaqs scores/times are all worse, so don't bother checking there.
Correction: the gamefaqs scores/times are all for the PAL version, which explains (a small part of) the gap. PAL timing is different than NTSC, so a "standard" 25.07 in dragster NTSC (about 1504 frames) might well be 30.08 PAL.
So yeah, the gamefaqs time are in PAL, but they might have been slower anyway, even if they had been compared in frames instead of real time.
Still, thanks for checking it out! :)
You've got an avid watcher here. I'm looking forward to the finished Zoom Zoo and even more eager to see how close to perfection players were in the stunt courses.
I've compiled a list of all the WRs I could find on the Internet for Uniracers. Here's the file: (LINK)
The scores were all taken from a yahoo group called Uniracers (original, huh?). The people there posted their personal records, and when their personal record was the fastest one posted yet, they claimed it was a WR. And since I didn't find any records anywhere else on the internet, I call them WR too, even though there is no way to verify their claims for most of them. One user has posted videos on Youtube of some of his WRs, and these are the only verified claims that I could find.
If you guys know of any other source for Uniracers WRs, confirmed or not, please let me know and I'll update the text file.
BACK ON TOPIC, to answer your question (even though it was not a question), the records for stunt courses are pretty high! I'd even say they're close to perfection. I guess we'll know about that when I get to a stunt course and murder the game! :)
By the way guys, is the video quality for the videos I upload on Youtube okay? Is it too blurry? Sound too loud, not loud enough? I could try improving the quality on the next upload. Give me your thoughts! :)
Also, small progress update: I now have about a tenth of a lap completed on Zoom Zoo. 2.5 seconds are completed, and in the previous TAS attempt, a lap was 24.15 seconds. It's not much, but it's progress.
Hey, as long as it's about Uniracers, I don't care! :)
So no more talking about Unirally? :-(
You can talk about whatever you want to talk about, as long as it's not off-topic (not related to Uniracers or Unirally, because they're the same game, just in NTSC and PAL).
Halamantariel, sorry for the slightly off-topic subject.
Hey, as long as it's about Uniracers, I don't care! :)
(Plus, I have no authority whatsoever on what gets said in this thread, as this is technically a public forum, but I appreciate the concern)
!!! UPDATE !!!
This is it baby! This time it's for real! The TAS of Uniracers is officially started! Updates will always come in the form of a youtube video.
So here is the first track of the Crawler league: Dragster in 23.46 seconds. Enjoy!
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-GDcRBo3cg
To keep up to date on my progress, I suggest you subscribe to my youtube channel. I upload my videos there before making a post here, and sometimes I might decide to just edit my last post instead of creating a new one. Best way to make sure to not miss anything is to subscribe.
Important information about the TAS:
It is played on the hardest difficulty level, which is going for gold medals everywhere and completing the secret 9th league. Normally, you would have to play through and win all bronze medals and silver medals. You would then be able to compete for gold, and once all gold medals are acquired, you unlock the secret league.
To skip all this nonsense, I used a hacked SRAM (created by Nitrodon, big thanks here!). That SRAM gives every unicycle every bronze and silver medals for all 8 leagues. Both the clean and hacked SRAM are available on my website for validation purposes (so that others can validate that the hack only affects medals, and nothing else).
Is there a way to do the 60fps to 30fps weave trick using mencoder? The AVIsynth script works pretty well, but I'd prefer using a 1-step encoding method (using only mencoder, which I use to encode my movies) instead of the 2-step method (mencoder first, then AVIsynth trick).
I tried finding it in mencoder's documentation, but I'm afraid my knowledge about these kinds of things is too limited to understand anything written in there ...
Oh, so there was a topic! Sorry about that. Thanks moozooh!
Mods can now delete this topic ... it's kind of useless since the other topic is quite recent.
I've been uploading some videos on Youtube, and recently (about 10 minutes ago), I realized something. The avi's I make are 60 fps, but the videos on youtube are "downgraded" to 30 fps. That creates a unique problem in that it makes things disappear if they're on the screen for only a single frame.
The best example I have right now is this Uniracers avi I uploaded this evening. Normally, when the race starts, the word "GO" is shown on the screen, alternating the G and the O on each frame. In this particular case, Youtube's 30 fps "downgrade" made the G disappear. The game now looks weird as it's showing a big O when the race starts ...
So my question is: is there a way to pre-process my avi myself before uploading it to Youtube to make it 30 fps without dropping any frames? What I'm thinking of right now as a possibility would be blending 2 frames together to make it 30fps instead of 60. That way, nothing would be lost (I think). Does such a method exist?
I apologize in advance if this has been discussed before. I did a little research but couldn't find the answer on the forums. Please point me to any existing topic (if there's one).
Thank you, video gurus!
EDIT: A good example of what I would like the GO to look like is this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEp9T0daxlw
I notice you didn't seem to be able to make any stunts on the upwards green track. I never did that when playing, but I always felt there must be some undocumented trick to being able to jump despite going upwards. Maybe not.
It's simply impossible to do stunts on an upward slope. At least, pressing B doesn't do much (a slight hop, maybe). Unless someone proves me wrong, I'm certain it's impossible.
On a sidenote, I decided to upload the avi to youtube. I hope it will help advertise the upcoming TAS (and TASvideos, of course). Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iHDG9CcCAI
Any chance of you uploading this 1-track preview onto a .smv? I watched the 2 smvs you do have and they seemed like some sort of trial run.
If you've seen the smvs, you've seen the AVI. There's one SMV of me playing in realtime, but the other one is the real deal. It's the TAS (what I have done so far), including the 23.56 dragster time.
Anyway. To watch the AVI, I suggest downloading VLC Media Player. It plays all sorts of media content.