Posts for Randil

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Posted: 12/4/2010 2:51 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
If you are using FCEUX to record a NES movie, you can open and edit the movie files in notepad. This way you can splice movies together by cutting and pasting sections of input from one movie file to the other.
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Posted: 12/4/2010 7:52 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Flygon wrote:
Self explanatory... sort of.
I find it mostly cryptic - perhaps I'm just not updated on current events here. Are you leaving the site? In that case, why? EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out.
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Posted: 12/4/2010 7:40 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Nice! Goonies 2 was one of the first games I TASed, so it brings back memories. I'm guessing you've seen the run on SDA? The 17:33 run contains several improvements over the published TAS, so you should carefully watch that run. I hope you get the hang of using frame advance and all other emulator tools. I really, really, insist that you use frame advance instead of recording at a slow speed. I'll even go so far as to say don't even bother learning TASing at slower speeds, because you won't be using it. With frame advance you have total control of every action taken. It was thanks to frame advance that I could finish the first person sections that fast - I could take my time, carefully testing moving on each frame to find the fastest frame to move. You should also make sure you are using the frame counter and input display. This way you can easily compare your frame counts to the published run as well as DJ FozzBozz's run. I have some RAM addresses that should be useful, here. If you're unfamiliar with RAM watching, there's an article about it here. Watching RAM addresses when TASing is very useful, so it's something you want to learn after mastering the other tools. I would be very interested in seeing your progress. You can upload your movie file here. There are plenty of other articles about TASing here, perhaps they can be an interesting read. Yeah, this was a lot of info to take in, but really, feel free to send me a PM with any questions you might have.
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Posted: 11/29/2010 6:30 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Nice solution, I completely understood it, though I doubt I would have found it by myself. Maybe my geometry skills are getting rusty :) It has indeed been quite some time since I faced these kind of geometry problems in a math course.
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Posted: 11/27/2010 11:43 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I agree with Sonikkustar's very detailed review. My favourite new parts were: *When you turned the background in Iceman's stage green. *Bombman's stage literally made me laugh out loud. Nice find! Same goes for Wily 1 and 2 of course. *Not having a health bar starting from Gutsman's stage. Who needs it, anyway? Here's my yes vote, and to sum things up: You guys are awesome.
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Posted: 11/26/2010 4:43 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Is it possible to find the angle a without assuming any lengths or coordinates and without using any trigonometric functions? I think I need a push in the right direction, I've spent 2-3 hours trying to solve this, without any luck. It's a fun problem, so I'd like to be able to solve it! The 4 angles I have not found are BDE, ADE, a and AED.
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Posted: 11/25/2010 8:44 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I placed the triangle in a normal XY plane, with C at (0,0). I set point B to (1,0) (I can set it to any value >0, it has no effect on the angle a). Then I calculated the coordinates for points D and E by interpreting the edges in the triangle as straight lines (y=kx+m) and calculating where they intersect. Now I had the coordinates for all nodes in the triangle CED so it was trivial to find the angle a. And now I came with a different answer (I made a mistake before): a = 26.9175 degrees. Is this right? Maybe my method won't work. With B at x position 1, my coordinates for D are (0.1289, 0.7310) and for E they are (0.7660, 1.3268). It should be noted that I tried finding a the "normal way" by just adding up angles in each triangle and such. In the end I ended up with 4 unknown angles, including a, and I had 4 equations for them. The matrix for this system of equations was singular, which was weird. I probably made a mistake along the way, thought I carefully redid it and ended up with the same singular matrix.
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Posted: 11/25/2010 5:03 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Is the answer a=16.9175 degrees? (If it is, I can explain how I did it, if I'm wrong, I won't bother)
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Posted: 11/17/2010 6:19 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Haha, nice job! Obvious yes vote from me.
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Posted: 11/13/2010 11:35 AM
(Edited: 5/2/2022 7:33 PM)
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I actually kinda liked watching this, but I'm not sure if it should be published. I think you did everything you could to make it as entertaining as possible, but it got a bit repetitive after a while. I'll refrain from voting. Still, impressive work!
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Posted: 11/12/2010 5:24 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
It's been some time since anyone posted here. I had another TAS dream this night. I dreamt that I was TASing Mega Man 2 (Wood Man's stage) for some reason, and things were going pretty well. In the room before the boss, I managed to zip into the floor by holding down select. I got really excited, and posted about it in the forum, thinking that maybe I'll even join up on the next MM2 TAS! After that, I looked back on my first submission, in this dream it was a Solstice TAS. The submission comments were awesome, they simply said "This input file should work with every ROM version of this game, and if it doesn't, then F*** YOU! I would also like to show this picture while I'm at it:" and then I posted a picture of Donkey Kong running on a rolling barrell down the street. The first comment on that submission was Tompa, simply saying "Lua'ed.".
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Posted: 11/9/2010 6:13 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
The choice of using the E ROM was intentional, because it will make this run directly comparable to the published run, and the gameplay is identical between the E and the U version. I have tried hex-edit the run to synch on the U version. The text times differ (the U version sometimes has slightly more text, so text that's 1 page long can be 2 pages long on the U version), making synching a bit difficult. My best attempt made the run synch for about 2000 frames before the first desynch. If you think this run should be made on the U version, I will have to redo some sections due to changes in the 2-frame rule, but some sections could probably be edited in. A run on the U version would be a bit longer due to more in-game text, and a 1f longer intro screen, but the gameplay itself would be identical.
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Posted: 11/4/2010 7:25 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Thank you for all your solutions. The polygons don't have to be convex, so non-convex polygons might show up. Your solution for convex polygons looks simple and show run very fast when implemented in a computer program.
Nitrodon wrote:
Consider the triangles A1-A2-A3, A1-A3-A4, A1-A4-A5, and so forth. (If the polygon is convex, this forms a triangulation of the polygon.) A point is inside the polygon if and only if it is inside an odd number of these triangles. I'm not quite sure what to do if it's on the boundary of one or more triangles.
Interesting! I am curious to know how you came up with this.
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Posted: 11/4/2010 6:36 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I have two questions that are of some importance to my job, but they may prove an interesting challenge for you! (I don't know the anwer to them). I have looked for solutions to these two problems myself, but without any luck. A 2-dimensional polygon with n vertices can be represented as an n*2 matrix (let's call it A), where each row in the matrix represents a vertix. Let us assume that the polygon is not self-intersecting. The elements in the left column are the X positions of the vertices, and the elements in the right column are the Y positions. You can draw the polygon by drawing lines from the vertix on row i to the one on row i+1, for i=1,...n-1. In the last step, connect the last and first vertices. a)For any point (x,y) and a polygon represented in the way described above by the matrix A, provide an algorithm that checks if (x,y) is inside the polygon or not. b)Assume you have two polygons represented by the matrices A and B. The intersection of A and B is a polygon C (at least I think so... please provide a counter example if I'm wrong). Provide an algorithm that gives the elements of C in terms of the elements of A and B. If A and B don't intersect, C should be the empty matrix.
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Posted: 11/1/2010 7:43 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
The reason why you're carrying a Snifit when entering the bird head is because RAM address $0052 is 2. Poking this address to 0 before entering the mouth will make you appear in the room without a Snifit. Now you just have to find out why this value was set to 2, and what the RAM address stands for. :)
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Posted: 10/30/2010 6:32 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I watched this just now. The run looked good, and it was definitely short enough to keep my attention the whole way. Here's another yes vote!
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Posted: 10/30/2010 9:40 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I have noticed a bug with the joypad.set() lua function: the input recorded by this function is not actually recorded into the movie file. Consider the following script, which presses down for 50 frames from when the script starts running: 
Language: lua
k=0

while k<50 do

key1={}
key1.down=1

joypad.set(1,key1)

k=k+1

vba.frameadvance()
end
Let's run the script while recording a movie. While the script is running, you can see in the input display that the buttons are indeed pressed. But when you replay the movie, on the frames where these buttons should have been pressed, there is empty input.
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Posted: 10/29/2010 7:19 AM
Post subject: Re: Rei Ayanami’s Theme
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
L-Spiro wrote:
But with critiques like the recent one(s) I am not so sure I want to post anymore.
Please don't stop posting, I download and listen to your songs. I think you're seriously talented, and I think a lot of people will agree with me on that.
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Posted: 10/29/2010 6:03 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Wow, there are so many great changes here. It's almost like this revision was made specifically for me! :) Seriously, thank you guys very, very much, I really appreciate your hard work. I'll try it out right now.
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Posted: 10/27/2010 6:53 AM
(Edited: 10/27/2010 7:04 AM)
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I redid level 1 on the GBC version today, and here are my conclusions: *The games are indeed exactly the same. All tricks, game physics, etc. are exactly the same. However, there is one big difference: *The GBC game has a forced minigame after each level, a memory type game where you flip cards and try to match them (similar to SMB 3). This minigame takes about 3-4 seconds to finish when TASed, so the finished run should be roughly 30-40 seconds longer than this submitted run because of this. Here is the movie file for the first level + the mini game after it. *The GBC version lags a lot more than the GB version. For comparison, this submitted run had about 13 frames of lag on level 1, while in the GBC version, level 1 had 55 frames of lag, and this includes me minimizing lag. My prediction is that I will lose maybe 8-10 seconds due to more lag in this game version. So to sum things up about the GBC version: Pros: *Better graphics. Cons: *More lag. *Forced minigame after each level. *The two factors above will make a GBC TAS roughly 50 seconds longer than this TAS. Thoughts?
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Posted: 10/26/2010 3:52 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
The two games seem to share RAM addresses (all addresses in my RAM watch file are correct), so all tricks and strategies should work. I tried the oscillation tricks and a few other stuff, and they all worked. It seems that it is the amount of lag that differs between the games and causes desynchs. I do agree that a TAS of the GBC version should probably obsolete the GB version, unless the GBC version has a whole lot more lag. I might take a look at TASing the GBC version, but it might be some time before you'll see it in the workbench (and I can't guarantee that I'll do it). I think this run should obsolete the published run, since that run too is of the GB version, so I don't see any harm in that. If/when someone wants to TAS this game again, the GBC version should probably be preferred.
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Posted: 10/26/2010 2:38 PM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
p4wn3r wrote:
More rigorously though, the second integral at (b) is an improper integral of the second kind, since lim x->0+ (ln (sin x)) = -infinity. Thus, you have to prove this integral converges before calculating it.
I think I can do this too: ln(x) is strictly increasing on the interval 0 to pi/2, and so is sin(x). On the intervall [0,pi/2], it holds that sin(x)<x. Since ln(x) is strictly increasing we get which shows that the integral converges.
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Posted: 10/26/2010 8:49 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
You appear to be right, there is in fact a GBC version of this game that I didn't know of. It appear to be the exact same game, but perhaps someone with more insight can give a comparison. I don't know either if it's possible to play this movie file in the GBC game (I tried it, and it didn't work), and even if it did work, I fear it won't synch (this game is not edit friendly). If the games are identical, perhaps the next TAS of this game should be done on the GBC version.
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Posted: 10/26/2010 5:55 AM
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Even I can do a)! Let's go from RHS to LHS: I think I can do the first one in b) too. *takes a deep breath* which is the right answer (I checked the integral numerically) EDIT: After some work, I managed to solve the second one too: Now let's look at 2*I:
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Posted: 10/18/2010 4:53 PM
(Edited: 1/24/2022 7:56 PM)
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Randil
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1890)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I just wanted to say that on the TAS snapshot page the download link to the TASsnapshot, i.e. this link, is broken.
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