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Very nice run (maybe I should refer to it as just "movie" since this isn't really a speedrun). I agree that this game is better suited for superplaying than speedrunning. You did some really crazy and funny stuff in this video, so I'm tossing in another yes.
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I've played Half-life, Half-life 2, Quake 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Blood (a looong time ago)... probably some more that I can't remember right now.
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kbxcomic: Your avatar is waaaay too big. It should be at most 80x80 pixels, yours is 575x324, so please shrink it. :)
EDIT: Oh, it got solved while I was writing this. No matter, then. :)
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You and I think alike when we're bored, because I've TAS:ed this some too. :) And after just watching 10 seconds I noticed a quite big possible improvement. It's possible to keep moving while still transforming to an animal. Not only does this allow you to keep moving to the right, it also allows you to be higher up in the air when transforming.
I'll dig out some old .fcm showing this trick... ah, here: Click me!
I don't know how much time this adds up to, but I'm guessing at least 10 seconds or so.
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Great run, buddy. :) Nice use of tricks/glitches, you really showed what this game has to offer. Yes vote. Oh, and I had no idea you worked with this alongside Darkwing Duck too, it must have taken a lot of time to work on both runs back then.
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Yeah, I'd say around 2-5 seconds too. Avoiding taking damage was a stylistic choise that Frenom used too, and I personally think it makes the run more impressive and fun to watch. But, if others think that taking damage should be prefered, I might implement it.
Oh, and I am cancelling this submission due to known improvements that mmbossman found. I will make an improved version, which will be around 10 seconds faster, or more. I don't know when it will be done though, but hopefully before 2008. ;) It depends on how much luck I have with editing the moviefile.
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DJ FozzBozz wrote:
Not canceled, but my free time is pretty much inexistent... Right now I can't access my run, since I'm at my girlfriend's house... By the way, I found a way to save even more frames in the WIP I posted.
Allright, nice. :) I agree that girlfriends are more important than TASes, so take your time with this run. I'm looking forward to it. :)
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*bump* Has there been any more progress made on this? We haven't heard anything for over a month now... I hope you haven't cancelled this, since the WIP looked really promising.
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One day, our well known super hero "save state man" was low on funds. He sat down and thought about how he could get his hands on some cash.
"Robbing a bank? Nah, I'm a super hero after all. Winning the lottery? Meh, too boring. I know! I'll sign up for "Deal or no deal"! That way I'll get both money, and get a chance to show off my super powers to others!"
Said and done, save state man appeared in an episode of Deal or no deal, though it was never aired. The TV-show was afraid that others would accuse that the the game host accepted bribes or something, since having that much luck is impossible... without save states.
However, I managed to get an inside video, in form of a .vbm-file, of that episode. You need the "Deal or no deal" ROM for GBA to play it, and VBA 19. It shows save state man getting 1 million dollars in less than 9 minutes, rejecting the cases from 0.01 dollars to 750 000 dollars in ascending order.
Go watch it!
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How is the .avi-encoding going? I don't mean to nag about it, and I know that the encoders have a lot of things to take care of, it's just that I don't think it's a very good idea to leave the wrong .avi-file up for too long. Once again, sorry for nagging. :P
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Bisqwit wrote:
But oh no, in front of you, there are two persons who are directly in line with your "optimal" path, and they're walking slower than you are. So what do you do? Do you pass them by the left side, or by the right side? Furthermore, when is the optimal moment to pass them? Maybe you'll speed up your pace a bit and slow down it after passing, so you maintain the same average energy consumption.
I think the best way to deal with that scenario is to yell to them to get out of the way. They'll probably think you're either crazy or in a big hurry. Either way, they'll probably move out of the way, making the way clear for you. :) And if they don't move, you might want to try yelling at them at different times to manipulate luck. Sooner or later they'll have to move. ;)
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Bisqwit wrote:
Blublu wrote:
You know you TAS too much when you're driving in real life and come up to a red light, and the thought occurs that you should see if you can drive right across without being hit by another car. If you crashed, you'd just reload and find the correct frame.
You know you think in TAS tense too much when you want to optimize all your movements, i.e. walk the straightest route, comparing whether stairs or lift will be faster, considering the time waited for the lift, time spent opening the stairwell doors, … changing facing pre-emptively when turning, experimenting with moving in counterintuitive ways (such as the Michael Jackson door opening style), reaching your hand to daily items abnormally fast because normal movement just is quite sloppy, optimizing with which limb to open or close the fridge door when you are handling other items at the same time, etc.
Yeah, I do all that.
This is scary, but I do all that stuff too, actually. I mean, who doesn't want to minimize the time it takes to get to school/work or go shopping?
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If you need any RAM addresses, I have a few that might help you:
;================================
; >> Ninja Gaiden Shadow
;================================
[NINJA GAIDEN]
C020,1u,Screen X position
C50D,1u,X position
----
C008,1u,Input on 1
C09B,1u,HP
C093,1u,Fire wheels
----
C411,1u,Boss HP
"Input on 1" means that the game only accepts input when this is 1.
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The .avi-file for this submission was encoded with the wrong movie-file! The .avi-file was encoded with the old .fcm-file, before Bisqwit replaced it with a 95 frames faster one. (you'll see this on floor 28 - in the current .fcm-file, I don't get money drop on this floor, but in the .avi-file I do.) So I guess this will have to be encoded to .avi again... :P
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asteron wrote:
Its funny how much the bot failed taking good pictures :)
I guess this run is mostly screen scrolling?
Yeah, about 75% of this run is waiting for the screen to scroll. :P And it is here that the most "movement" is going on too, that's why most screenshost are from screen scrolling.
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The first 3 levels are done now, 193 frames faster than the current run. Microstorage seems to be down at the moment, so I'll upload the WIP when it's back up.
EDIT: The first 4 levels are done now, so I've done 1 out of 8 areas now! :) Here's the WIP.
EDIT2: I'll just continue updating this post with new WIPs until someone stops me. ;) 5 levels done now, 368 frames faster. Here's the new WIP.
EDIT3: Area 2 done, so I've done 8 levels now. Currently 540 frames, 9.00 seconds, faster. WIP.
EDIT4: 11 levels done now, 840 frames (13.667 sec) ahead of published run. WIP.
EDIT5: I don't know if anyone follows this thread, but I'm putting this TAS on hold for now, due to other projects.
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I've done some in depth analysis of how your character's speed works in this game, because I intend to improve the current run! :) Here are my results:
I've done a graph that explains how the game calculates your speed when on the skateboard:
Perhaps a little confusing, but let me explain: When on ground, every time you advance 1 frame while holding down B+right, the game checks your current speed. If it is less than 80, your speed will increase by 3. So your top speed is 82, you will get this speed by holding down B+right when standing on ground with speed 79.
Getting speed 79 isn't trivial, you have to make a jump to get it - when in air, you accelerate/slow down by 1 per frame, so by slowing down to speed 79 right before I hit ground, I'm able to accelerate to speed 82 immediately once I hit the ground.
There is no such trick when walking, your top walking speed is 75, which I keep until I get the skateboard.
I have made a WIP of the first level. I gained 55 frames on the level (by moving slightly faster), but lost 4 frames after the level due to having more life left. Here is the WIP.
And I read something about warps in this game in this post, but I don't know any and no FAQ on GameFAQs tells anything about it either (or perhaps I just missed it). So does anyone here know anything of "warps" in this game?
Oh, and with school and all, I don't know when this will be finished, so be patient. :)
EDIT: Allright, so I found the "warp" on level 1, the one where you stand between two totems and a cloud takes you up to a bonus level, which dumps you down to section 4 of the level after you're done with the bonus room. Taking the bonus room is about 3 seconds slower than skipping it.
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So what is the fate for this submission? From an objective point of view, this run is clearly unoptimal in several places, and can be improved by several seconds.
For starters, using 2 characters instead of 1 will make this run both shorter and (at least in my opinion) more fun to watch.
And even if a 1 player warped movie would be accepted over a 2 player movie, this particular run can be improved by several seconds by optimizing movements and using better strategies in some rooms.
All in all, I'm afraid this particular submission just doesn't meet the standards of this site...
I'm afraid I'm gonna have to vote no on this.
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Not married, but I've had a girlfriend for almost 2 years now. No plans on getting married nor having children yet, but we'll see how that fares.
Perhaps the number of poll answers should increase? I think it would be a good idea to include the option "no, but I'm together with someone", or something like that. Just an idea.
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Wouter Jansen wrote:
adelikat wrote:
A warpless movie would only save about 1 minute and warping happens to not be very interesting to watch in this game. If we can only have one movie, I vote for the warpless (this may be the first time I have every thought that ;P).
Randil wrote:
Allright, so I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warpless run would save:
Using warps (...)
haha, these make so much sense I don't know whether to laugh or cry
I think that what is confusing is a small typo from both adelikat's part and mine. It should be "a warped movie would only..." in adelkat's post, and "I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warped run would save" in my post. Once again, it is the warped run that is faster than the warpless run, by about 85 seconds. Sorry for the confusion. :)
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Warp wrote:
Randil wrote:
My first vote is on Tiny Toon, where you move 5 pixels per frame when holding down left+right.
That would be an invalid vote because:
EDIT: It should be pointed out that zipping through walls does not count as "top speed" here, since that is not a "programmed" top speed.
I consider abusing a left+right glitch to increase speed to fall into the same category as zipping, because it, too, is something which was not deliberately programmed and intended to be used.
Damn, I contradicted myself there. :S Well, either way, you can accellerate to 5 p/f without using left+right too, so it still counts. :P Not that it matters much now though, since people have found much faster characters.
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nfq wrote:
einstein said that the max speed is 300000 km/s*, but in gran turismo 3 if you tweak some settings you can reach a speed of 2147483647 mph. when you reach that speed the car starts spinning around and gets sucked into a black hole which freezes the game.
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bkDJ wrote:
How are you measuring frames, anyway? like, pushing the frame advance button, or 1/60th of a second. because if a game has been kept at 1:1 speed and converted to PAL, then it has a faster pixel/frame rating on the (E) rom....
As far as I know, all these speeds are taken from the U ROM or the J ROM, so no PAL speeds here. :) But you're right, some characters move more pixels per frame on PAL, but I think that if there exists a NTSC ROM, the speed should be taken from that version.
Perhaps a little confusing, but let me explain: When on ground, every time you advance 1 frame while holding down B+right, the game checks your current speed. If it is less than 80, your speed will increase by 3. So your top speed is 82, you will get this speed by holding down B+right when standing on ground with speed 79.
Getting speed 79 isn't trivial, you have to make a jump to get it - when in air, you accelerate/slow down by 1 per frame, so by slowing down to speed 79 right before I hit ground, I'm able to accelerate to speed 82 immediately once I hit the ground.
There is no such trick when walking, your top walking speed is 75, which I keep until I get the skateboard.
I have made a WIP of the first level. I gained 55 frames on the level (by moving slightly faster), but lost 4 frames after the level due to having more life left. Here is the WIP.
And I read something about warps in this game in this post, but I don't know any and no FAQ on GameFAQs tells anything about it either (or perhaps I just missed it). So does anyone here know anything of "warps" in this game?
Oh, and with school and all, I don't know when this will be finished, so be patient. :)
EDIT: Allright, so I found the "warp" on level 1, the one where you stand between two totems and a cloud takes you up to a bonus level, which dumps you down to section 4 of the level after you're done with the bonus room. Taking the bonus room is about 3 seconds slower than skipping it.