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Pandemonium fights hype ! 7 hours in. Should be done in a week or so as only Nova Dragon and Kraken are tough to TAS, rest should go like a breeze.
One or two more weeks for the commentaries.
Hopefully the new any% with no emulation errors will be in the Workbench before the end of the month.
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Invariel wrote:
I have been paying only passing attention to this thread, so please forgive me if this has been asked before, but how close to 12 hours do you suspect 100% will be? (That is, how close are you cutting it to getting Excalibur II?)
Also, I watched the published run in its entirety a few days ago, great work, and the commentary was really nice too.
I get Excalibur II at 11h59min but alot of side stuffs is also done in that time.
Final time should be 16/17 hours.
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Reached Esto Gaza in a little over 6h10min.
Despite the loading times I now believe sub 8 hours Necron is possible, though it's gonna be close.
Expect the new any% to be done with overlay before the end of the month.
Then I'll get back to 100%
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Finished Disc 2 in 4h47min30s with a sweet 0 Mistodon Iifa Tree Roots :)
Loading times keep piling up. 20 minutes behind the published run but 1 minute or so ahead in gameplay.
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1) Since no one reported it I think it's an error on my hand but still.
When I go to Virtual Pad for Octoshock, if I select somewhere in the upper left corner (0<X<128 and 0<Y<128) everything works fine but then if I move my cursor above any other part (upper right and bottom) I got an error :
"Value 192.398024937888 isn't valid for 'Value'.'Value' must be between 'Minimum' and 'Maximum'"
However if I enter a number for X and Y manually it works fine as long as I don't put the cursor above said parts.
2) When I open a movie, choose "Read+Write" and go to my last savestate, the movie records as if I was on Disc 1 no matter which Disc I'm currently in. Open and Close Disc Control fixes it. But if I forgot to do it, I record with Disc 1 in the inputs.
3) Would it be possible to make an option for lua scripts like there was on psxjin saying "lua script has gone crazy, would you like to kill it" ? I often forgot to write emu.frameadvance() in the loop (my fault I know) and I have to force-close Bizhawk and restart it instead of being able to stop the script.
Thanks !
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Spent a whole lotta time TASing today.
Managed to get the Moogle skip in Madain Sari after countless tries. This seems very precise and I'm surprised multiple runners did it in RTA, so kuddos.
One change in the Iifa Tree descent, I killed both Dagger and Vivi instead of just Vivi, so Zidane takes enough Exp to compensate for a possible 0 Mistodon tree roots.
However due to how rare a 0 Mistodon is, it may be possible that I can't do it and that would mean Dagger's suicide would be a consequent time loss, but no way I can tell right now. Just have to cross fingers...
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Any% is halfway done.
12 minutes behind because of loading times but 45ish seconds ahead in gameplay.
Decent luck in Alexandria Castle fights made me able to not use Vivi's Blizzara, but no luck having Beatrix Critical.
Didn't steal the Oak Staff from Ralvuimago (16/256 odds) like in the published run but will take it from Soulcage (192/256 odds) which will save a couple of frames in setup times.
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Finished Cleyra. Route change to visit Soldier Dan at the outside of the inn. Not taking the Yellow Scarf. Fight 2 Soldiers instead of 3 at the end at the expense of a longer "before fight". Total saved : About 9-10 seconds.
So about 30-35 seconds ahead of the published run in gameplay.
9 minutes 40 behind in total because of loading times.
Just shy of 3 hours.
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In the published run, I didn't buy a Barbut in Treno which is a huge mistake.
Barbut allows for Steiner to Critical even with the Power Belt on.
So it saves 5 seconds on Ralvurahva and will save a bunch against Zorn and Thorn, then Beatrix.
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Found another big improvement.
The rain in Burmecia at the end of Disc 1 happens to make the RNG roll like crazy.
So much that it takes only 8-10 frames to get a whole new set of Random Number.
With enough patience and testing I was able to get a table where 2 numbers doing Critical were apart by 32 addresses only which is more or less the number of addresses that pass between 2 turns of Black Waltz 3.
Then I just had to manipulate the ATB of Steiner and Marcus to be faster than BW and him doing hit instead of a spell.
That way we can skip one turn of Dagger which is time consuming and there it goes :
Link to video
5 seconds saved !
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Yes it is on PS2 with Fast Disc Speed.
If my estimation is correct I should still beat that time in the end but it's gonna be close.
Encoding as we speak...
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Finished Disc 1 of the any% on Bizhawk.
As I feared, longer loading times are piling up.
New time on Bizhawk : 2h14min
Published run : 2h07min
Segmented WR : 2h12min.
I'm still searching for a memory adress that change when the game is loading so I could make an accurate comparison but I estimate the time actually saved to be around 15 seconds.
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As you have probably noticed by the lack of update, I've put the 100% TAS on hold for now. This has to do with the fact that I recently noticed I forgot to buy one javelin back at the 2h mark and ended up on Disc 4 with only 2 instead of 3 ("the perfect amount"). So I have to hex-edit 12 hours... This is a slow process and I'm back to 8 hours before deciding to take a break.
In the meantime to keep me busy, I have restarted the any% TAS on Bizhawk and besides the fact that I am 2 minutes 20ish behind the published run after Black Waltz 1, it's only because of more accurate loading times and I estimate the time saved in gameplay to be 14-15 seconds.
Now if you have any new tricks or improvments, that would be a great time to say so :)
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Yeah I know that I mentionned it even.
What I would like to know is if there was a way to speed up loading times, even if only for casual gaming.
I'll take FF9 as an exemple as I'm familiar with it, just watching the intro, we are already 7 seconds behing the RTA times and that's only after 2 minutes. In an 8 hour movie, we're talking 20 minutes lost on loading times at least.
I know my question can sound stupid but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask anyway so...
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First of all, thanks to the dev team. Bizhawk is amazing.
Now my question :
Since most of the RTA runners play PS1 games on a PS2 with Fast Disc Speed and Bizhawk emulate a PS1, loading times are way faster in the RTA comparing to a TAS which ultimately would lead to RTA being faster than TAS which can be problematic.
I know Bizhawk isn't suppose to emulate a PS2 but still this bother me.
So, would it be possible in a future to add a Fast Disc Speed setting to Octoshock or is it unrealistic/not needed ?
Thanks in advance !
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Paused wrote:
Oh that is a nice consequence to the route. Yan grinding is going to be long of course... having any kind of break in between it will be somewhat refreshing.
Nice deck. I assume you've doubled and tripled check all your arrow combinations are unique right? I'd be paranoid as hell about that upon grabbing 100 cards!
Funny to me a gil grinding trick in disc1 is still a useful strat this late in.
Haven't made up my mind yet but I might consider a Speed/Entertainment tradeoff to break the routine of the Yans griding by doing Frogs or other stuff inbetween.
Every arrow combination has actually a number refering to it.
I had an Excel sheet with every numbers so everytime I started a game I looked up the number of the card I wanted with my sheet.
Of course and it wouldn't be fun without it, my lua script has derped 2/3 times and gave me the wrong number so I had to redo a few games because of that and a little bit of hex-editing.
But now that I have my 100 cards, I've cheated an A rank on every single one and got 1700 points which means we're good to go.
Even funnier than the cotton robe trick is the fact that I lost a bit of time in my first games of Chocobo Hot and Cold to dig up Extra Rare Items (1/1024 odds, Cachusha, Extension, Barette,...) and selling them right now for a good amount gave me just enough gils to purchase everything I need (alongside with the 50K from the Yans so it was definitely necessary)
Continuing my beaches tour, I'll make a stop before the forest leading to Black Magic Village to fight a Cactuar and get the Blue Magic "1000 needles", then go to the Village and synthesize the last items for my inventory. Would miss only the Duel Claws from Deathguise then. I won't have the Tin Armor as I prefer keeping the Hammer for the extended End FMV.
EDIT: Oh and I have upgrade the cards of the Thug in Treno as you requested :)
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So...
I actually have 7 minutes to kill between reaching Vile Island where the Yans are and Lamar's Qu's Marsh being fully repopulated with no tadpoles.
I could do some other stuff and get back to the Marsh later but I want it to start regrowing as soon as possible as it takes half the time to regrow compare to the last Marsh above. (12 minutes need to pass for something to happen, compare to 25 minutes in the other.)
Back to those 7 minutes.
I used them to fight some Yans with my actual party. It allows me to steal 3 Ores each time, plus gives about 10K Gils. 5 fights later I'm right on time for the Frog catching with 15 more Ores and 50K Gils with Gecko and Quina under Virus Status.
Then back to the Invicible to switch Steiner and Freya for Amarant and Dagger, and continuing the beaches healing tour.
Little Pit stop in Lindblum for Cotton Robe trick and buying some items.
Then card game against Card Freak Gon to upgrade our weakest cards.
That is where I am right now.
For those curious here is how my deck looks like after 100 games :
Link to video
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That's why I post here, because I need your ideas.
My first thoughts are :
Zidane is mandatory if I'm not wrong.
Quina's Night to avoid counters and get multiple turns seems to be also mandatory.
I'll be rotating the 6 others.
1) Freya for Freeze and Steiner who will Heat when he can.
It's the first 2 because I needed them for Ozma after Memoria and Dagger needs more Ores to start with. Also Steiner is faster than Vivi and Eiko to kill Frozen ennemies.
2) Dagger for Odin and Vivi who will Death when he can.
3) Amarant for Death and Eiko.
Also when Zidane and Quina will reach a certain level (not calculated yet) they'll get Virused so the others level up faster and then cured when Amarant and Eiko will have caught up.
?
EDIT : Wow... That just happened :
Link to video
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Thanks guys !
I actually thought of Add Status when thinking Heat from Steiner was faster than Iai Strike OHKO. Didn't have time to test because of work and didn't even think of Freeze from Freya (facepalm)...
It's now tested and... IT'S ONE MINUTE FASTER !!!! Cuts time in half.
Link to video
Unfortunately no, Mug doesn't work, but it was a nice idea.
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Chanoyu wrote:
If your Steiner is still level 27, I'd guess the formula comes down to 0% in the end, just like using Odin.
The formula: Chance = Status Accuracy + Lvl + [Mag / 4] - Target Level.
So 30+27+mag/4-72 would be the chance to hit, andd depending on Steiner's Magic, it might be zero.
I had the idea of fighting 3 Yans twice, so Steiner gets enough HP to survive a Virus Powder attack, and gets AP with no EXP, so he'll be able to use and learn Iai Strike while the others level up.
However at that point his level is 32 and Mag is 28.
So yeah according to your formula it gives 0% which seems to be the case.
I guess I have to level him up once or twice more to have a few %
Thanks !
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Hmmm. Steiner's Iai Strike is supposed to have 30% chance of OHKO ennemies, however after about 100 tries I haven't killed a single Yan. Is there something else at play in the formula ? If somebody could take a look I'd really appreciate.
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I stand corrected.
Mustard Bomb + 2 Steals is actually way closer to Charge ! + 3 Steals than I expected.
Link to video
Also chance of inflicting Heat with Mustard Bomb is 39/256.
EDIT : Yay for 3 millions frames !