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One more thing that came to my mind would to have LUA scripts hi-light buildings that are low on energy.
That way one won't have to care to click around on the buildings to check wether they are damaged or not.
Would also be cool to find the RAM-addresses of the buildings so that we can monitor the health at all times.
Another task for LUA or RAM-watch would be to see all the things in construction, units and buildings. This is in perticular very good when one have more than one vehicle factory, hi-tech lab for building ornithopters, and what ever.
Would also be great to see a countdown to when a superweapon is ready.
Money alarm could come in handy. Something to check when the silos are full. This should not happen since the production of units may never stop in a TAS I think. :)
That was some more ideas. I'll post right away when it hits me.
Edit:
Perhaps code a LUA OSD that tells when a unit has finished it's task?
That way moving units and designate them new tasks will be more efficent.
Edit 2:
Continued to test levels and playing.
Finished level 2 now. I know it could have been done faster if I manually would have called the harvesters back earlier. Not much on the entertainment either. I went for 2700 credits instead of destroying the enemy. Harvesting the spice should be faster.
In game clock tells me the time of 6 minutes for this level, which is still a good result.
In earlier tests I managed to get 7-9 minutes.
Also did a rough test on how many refineries would be optimal. Conclusion is that three refineries is the best for this level when it comes to finish as soon as possible.
I will have to do some testing when it comes to cashflow on later levels. I think that 3 harvesters per refinery is a good estimation. Perhaps 2 refineries and 5-6 harvesters should bring cash fast enough?
Anyways. The link for the updated GMV is:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1628664877/Dune%20-%20The%20Battle%20for%20Arrakis%20%28U%29%20%5B%21%5D-Level3.gmv
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Does someone know the mechanics of the starport?
After all the prices changes in it. Does any one know whats affecting it? Would be sweet to have the RAM-addresses of each price in it so one better can keep track of it.
Also it would be great to have the mechanics of the death hand missile. It can be hard to aim it so that it hits the right place. Would be cool to have a LUA aim script or something, if possible. :)
Another thing that would be nice, again if LUA would be an option, is to draw red dashes that pin points the destination of enemy units.
Aqfaq wrote:
If I recall correctly, just disabling one of the graphics layers should do the trick.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Made a new try with Gens10a.
Seems to be working just fine.
Made a little test using mostly frame advance to play around. It is of course not perfect in any way.
Level 1 with Atredies in 3 min. I HATE that the harvester can't have ONE more unit of spice in it. That would have been enough for the level to complete a lot faster. :(
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/894843225/Dune%20-%20The%20Battle%20for%20Arrakis%20%28U%29%20%5B%21%5D.gmv
Perhaps this doesn't rise much climaxes. But a real level with serious fights would.
I dare someone to make Level 9 without taking a hit.
Could be possible with some serious frame advance, planning and RAM-watching.
Another goal could be to finish Level 9 without building anything extra (radar could be allowed). Only use the starting units.
Anyways. If someone finds any more RAM-adresses, it would be great to have them posted. One thing that could come in handy is to switch off fog of war somehow, without affecting the GMV as a cheat would.
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I will have to wait to watch this. I have some problem with running Mupen. It crashes on me every time.
If someone have an encode of this movie I'd appreciate it.
Cheers.
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I also encounter a crash problem when I load a rom.
szAppName : mupen64-rerecording.exe szAppVer : 0.0.0.0
szModName : hungapp szModVer : 0.0.0.0 offset : 00000000
Tried different compabilities such as Win2K.
Right now I'm running this program with Windows XP Pro including SP3.
The hardware is:
Nvidia Geforce Go 7600.
Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 1.83Ghz
1GB DDR2 Ram
Funny enough THPS 3 works without crashing the emulator. However the graphics are totaly bung.
One thing I noticed is that Mupen takes well over 150Mb of Ram when it crashes. Not sure how normal this.
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Nice to see the revival of this.
Personally I think that Life force looks a bit cleaner around the score board and weapon table, but as you state, the Salamander version has a really interesting title screen.
I suppose you will have to surprise me in the outcome of this run.
Hope you make it quick. I'd love to see the final submission.
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Great run. Thanks a lot Cpadolf. :)
gstick wrote:
BTW, I found this weird trick some days ago.
I had thought of uses of it since then. And I came up with this idea while I was watching this run. I succeeded in improving more 22 frames than this run. However, there's a few lack of optimization, maybe.
Ha ha! Very weird thing you found there. Very cool though. :)
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Well.. To me it is very much harder to collect all the balloons if I play in real time. Knowing that it is harder it also adds entertainment value to me when I collect them all.
About repetitiveness I think it's the other way around. Missing some of the parts in the game is not adding up to the 100% run, thus I miss my goal, and hence it decreases entertainment value from the stated goal.
And as stated, this run is not for fastest speed, because it has other goals that comes first. If it was a run for speed then skipping parts of levels would be a great idea.
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adelikat wrote:
Highness wrote:
Every time you press the trigger on the zapper the screen goes black. If there is anything on the screen that is possible to shoot at, those things are shown as white rectangles. Would it be possible somehow to make a patch that doesn't show the black images with white rectangles in them?
I hate to get epilepsy from playing those games. :)
Why would we want to remove this? This is correct emulation of the game.
I know it is the correct way. But I don't like the correct way always. In this case the correct way is annoying and does not increase the entertainment at all if you ask me.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Request:
Patch to remove the black frames with hit boxes in zapper games.
Every time you press the trigger on the zapper the screen goes black. If there is anything on the screen that is possible to shoot at, those things are shown as white rectangles. Would it be possible somehow to make a patch that doesn't show the black images with white rectangles in them?
I hate to get epilepsy from playing those games. :)
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Forgot to state that I used fceux-2.0.2.win32 to make the run.
Ran it under wine since I lacked the interest to install and compile libs etc for the native linux support. :)
