Posts for Randil

Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Very entertaining, and a nice improvement. Yes vote.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Allright, I get it now. Thanks for explaining.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Good job! Yes vote from me. I'd like to get some details on this 1 frame improvement, I don't understand exactly how it was saved.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Welcome! Starting out with an NES game is a good idea. There are many simple NES games, and Amagon is a good choice to start with. There are a few games listed under question 2 in the Anticipated Questions page, so maybe that page can help out. If your intention is only to learn how to use the emulator and the TAS tools, any simple game that you are familiar with, perhaps Super Mario Bros, is a good choice. If you want to make a TAS that you intend to submit, take a look at the movies from 2005, maybe you can find something there.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Truncated: You're nerdy in an awesome way. Those things looked quite difficult to make.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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I'm a little late, but Merry christmas! I think this has been yet another nice year here in the TASing community.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Maybe you know this, but I think the desynch bug can be cured by opening up the .fm2 in a text editor and replacing all "|1|" with "|0|". Still, it is quite inconvenient if it occurs frequently.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Nice job! Yes vote from me.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Truncated wrote:
>Stars don't do anything except give you some points. Are you sure? You seem to get an extra life just as you get 50 stars. What is the wobbling in some places about? It it a faster way to accelerate or something else? It first happens 23 seconds in. What are the keys that appear sometimes, and the room that you end up in if you touch them? Some explanation on that would be nice.
You're right, 50 stars give one extra life, my mistake. I'll edit the author's comments. The wobbling serves no speed purpose, it's just an antic that was thrown in. (at least I think so, Aglar recorded this level, perhaps he can correct me on this. I don't think it affects RNG). Keys sometime appear after you break a specific block. When you pick up this key, you will be teleported to a bonus room. Once you've taken the key in this room, you will be teleported back to the level, sometimes at the same place you took the first key, and sometimes a bit further on in the level.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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mklip2001 wrote:
Could you put in some more explanation, such as why you fire the flame sword from so far away [...]?
I can answer this: The flame sword is a powerful but time limited weapon. When there is a flame wave on screen, the timer for this weapon stops. The reason for constantly firing this weapon is to keep it longer.
adelikat wrote:
Most of those are probably situations where it was equally fast. Generally I would test with auto-fire and savestate, then attempt to improve. If I merely matched it probably went with the original state. Often the amount of damage didn't need to be optimized like when the HP is 22. The max you can do is 7 so either way you are doing 4 hits and none of them need to do a lot of damage. I hope that made sense.
Yes, that made sense, and this is what I thought too, I just wanted to make sure. Thanks for explaining.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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That was totally mathematical. Spoiler: I still laugh at the end when it says you've caught and seen 152 pokemons. Yes vote from me!
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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I'm glad you decided to finish this. Now I got that burden off my shoulders! :) I think the run held a consistent high technical quality (even my part!), so I'm throwing in a yes vote. I have a question though: When using the flail on bosses, sometimes you seem to be very accurate about when you press B (such as the boss around frame 15000), but other times it looks as if you used autofire (such as around frame 16400). Why is this? EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to ask: Did you get any help from Nitrogenesis' WIP? If so, maybe he should be mentioned in the comments.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Sure, that would be great! It seems Aglar has been working on this too, so I guess the next version will definitely be a team effort.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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I've been looking for more improvements, and I have managed to find quite a few. I'm working on improving the published run, and so far, I have squeezed out 71 frames from the first world (though finishing the last level with one less HP). There are many small time savers here and there, so I won't list them. Here's the WIP. Level details, if anyone is interested: Intro screen: 1f saved 1-1: 19f saved (20 total) 1-2: 28f saved (48 total) 1-3: 23f saved (71 total).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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I got around to watching your WIP. Good stuff, it looked tightly optimized, was fast paced and overall entertaining. I just wanted to chip in and say keep up the good job!
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Thank you Mister Epic, you just gave me nightmare material for a week. This made me laugh a little, and it was very short, so I'll vote yes on this.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Looks optimized. I liked the stylistic choises. Some minor things I noticed: *3-3: You can enter the door 2 frames faster, as shown here. *4-1: You forgot to speed boost from the platform around frame 13000. This would save a few frames. These are very minor details (that might be edited in, I don't know), and won't stop me from voting yes on this.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Awesome! I have a much longer WIP here that doesn't use warps (I didn't know how to pull them off). I did it a long time ago and have no big intention of finishing it. Hopefully you can continue to shave off more frames from it. Keep it up! EDIT: I dug up all the RAM addresses I have:
00DD X|pix
00DE X|big
xdd |
1c5e Boss|HP
46A Boss|inv.|time
| |
00DB Y|pix
E2 Y|speed
5A9 Speed|change
e6 Collision|detect
| |
| |
E4 Stop|on|1
E2 Stop|ok|on|1
E3 Glide|on|1
| |
5AB Glide|on|192
10E 100|coins
10F 10|coins
110 1|coins
5BC Weapon
568 Bubble1|Y|pix
| shoot|on|SC=6
| |
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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I have a nice lua script here that I made. It is very basic, it tells you your X position and if you lose any X pixels for some reason. The "Lost X" value assumes you move at top speed, 2 pixels per frame, the whole time, and if you for any frame don't, this value will increase. You can set "Lost X" value to 0 at the start of the level by changing the values of startframe and startx in the script. If your x pos, the value displayed by the lua script, is X on frame F, set startframe=F and startx=X. And 0x02F is 256*(x pixels) and 0x030 is your X pixel position, but I guess you knew that. Good luck with this.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Nice to see that we're spreading the word! And I thought I recognized the writer's name - Dale North has made a few remixes on OC Remix.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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DarkKobold wrote:
2nd, both movies take the invincibility power up in the first level instead of taking damage. Given the length of animation, the damage may be faster.
This power up is tricky to avoid. You can't jump over it (it's too high up), and you can't jump under it (your lowest jump will still make you touch it). You can't jump on the A block above it either. The only way to avoid it (as far as I know) is to run down into the pit to it's right, and then jump up from it. When avoiding damage, this wastes more time than the animation from the drink. On the other hand, when I tried this, I avoided touching the spikes in the pit, so it might be a bit faster to avoid the drink if you take damage from the spikes.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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Personally, I suggest you post your new run in the forum before submitting. This way people can give feedback (I'll make sure to help out as much as I can) on it and help you make the run as fast and entertaining as possible before submitting. I hope I'm not coming off too harsh here, since it's not my intention - you obviously know how to use the TAS tools, and I hope and think you can get the next version of this TAS published.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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This game is quite short, and I think it makes an okay TAS. There were a few sections that looked improvable, so I decided to try them out myself. Here is the movie file. I TASed the first two levels (my test run is probably further improvable), and here are the results: *The intro screens can be finished 16 frames faster. Level 1-1 was done 13 frames faster. Comments: *You don't have to kill the first boar on level 1 - it's faster to jump on him. *For the ledge that Truncated asked about, it is indeed faster to slow down a little right before the jump in order to avoid bumping into the wall. *The invincibility potion here is actually very hard to avoid picking up, so it's faster to pick up it than to avoid it. Level 1-2 was done 89 frames faster. Comments: *It's faster to break the second A block rather than slowing down by bumping into it. *You can get a nice speed boost from the first moving platform here, since it is moving to the right. *By jumping off the second platform as soon as possible, you can avoid getting slowed down by it, since it is moving to the left. *You don't have to jump on the third platform at all. With these things in mind, the other levels look improvable too. And like Truncated mentioned, you should definitely test if killing more enemies can remove some of the worst lag, even if it costs a few frames to kill enemies. I hope you make an improved run, but with the known improvements in mind, I vote no on this run.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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It's been some time since I TASed this now, but I seem to remember that an enemy's drop is affected by on what frame he spawns, and on what frame he is killed. I'm not sure if your movements can affect randomness in this game. Sometimes you need more than 200 tries before getting the desired drop, so it can be hard to tell the difference between an impossible drop and an unlikely drop. I have to admit that I am very rarely on MSN (read: almost never). However, I am on TASVideos' IRC-channel quite often (#tasvideos at irc.freenode.net), so you could try and get a hold of me there if you want a real time discussion.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
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There's some information on it here.. It is quite intuitive: the first few lines will contain information on the movie files, such as emulator version and ROM checksum. The first line that looks something like |0|...U...A|........|| is the first frame of input. In this case, it means that up+A was pressed on the first frame. The row after this is the second frame in the movie, and so on. I hope that helped!