Yup, I'm gonna have to cut it out of the TAS unfortunately. There's no way I see us figuring out a way to bypass the lower amounts of damage... Anything involving more casts of HB require massive frame loss elsewhere that far outweighs this trick and anything during the fight that actually works results in a cutscene getting triggered anyways, which completely negates the entire fight.
An example of that last part is that I did manage to kill him with some fancy footwork/AI manipulation, but at the end, you lose control and the dog launches back to the cutscene trigger area, enables the trigger, and basically makes all that work for nothing since v1.7's method was faster at that point. You can't swap characters either (I tried all 77 frames worth of opportunity to do so) because the boy either immediately dies or the game has a flag enabled that prevents you from doing so on that particular frame.
Very disappointed that I can't get this properly into the TAS, it's a cool trick and has a lot of very mechanical aspects to it in how the game works... I may go back to an older TAS version and utilize the 12 HB it uses to show it off sometime.
:( :(
edit:
Finally got past Thraxx this morning after roughly 1 full week of working on it. The fight looks awkward though, i'm not happy about this, but it's required for the proper manipulations. I guess I'll have to get used to it.
Grumly posted in the SDA thread about a value he fixed at 64 to achieve 133% damage on every cast of Hard Ball, this led to me figuring out the range of said value. Ironically, the range almost always ended up being equivalent to Nitrodon's level 0 formula with Hard Ball (11 to 20). So naturally, I began messing with this.
Getting higher values achieves higher damage on just about everything EXCEPT Thraxx. Thraxx seems to be inverted and takes much higher damage from lower values. The v1.7 achieves a 500+ with 11, so does v1.8. This possibly could lead us one step closer to actually understanding the way the heart damage works, but sadly I haven't been able to discover the formula(s?) for how it does so. It's not really needed anymore for me personally, so it's less of a factor in my progression, but if anyone would like to try their hand at it there's tons of info in the SDA thread. The address is 7e358e. Nitrodon's formula for the alchemy spell damage can be found either on my excel doc under Panda.Notes or buried in the depths of the SDA thread as well.
An interesting effect happens when you skip the cutscene and proceed to get the auto-level up from Thraxx but not from the maggots when killing the boss at lower levels. I have 4,XXX,XXX,XXX needed exp to level up now, yet killing a single thing will progress the level and give me what I need. Unfortunately, this ALSO means that because I didn't kill the maggots automatically from Thraxx, I'm not sitting at a nice 60+ hp for Magmar. I think this will be fine in the long run, I just may have to spend a bit more time and possibly a few frames to avoid some of Magmar's nonsense he can throw out. It shouldn't matter if I can do this.
Total savings from cutscene skip: 756
Adjustment losses incoming: Kill 3 mosquitoes, probably 1-4 frames (select, attack, select, resume sprint)
I will be editing this post from now on with updates unless something major is accomplished/discovered/changed.
edit2:
Getting closer to end of Act 1, working on the Magmar fight off stream right now. Probably won't finish the fight until tonight or tomorrow morning though since I'm manipulating every single aspect of it instead of just magmar's pattern. May as well shoot for absolute perfection instead of as close as possible right? :)
Anyways, on the way, I found this:
http://www.twitch.tv/theangrypanda1/c/3553566
Now, unfortunately, there's invisible walls/pipes blocking my path to OoB into Magmar's door initially, BUT, this still saved me 93 frames in total, which more than makes up for anything lost during the new Thraxx fight revamp and it's consequential minor losses elsewhere. Overall, I'm looking at being around 800-900 frames ahead of my previous v1.7 movie once Act 1 is done.
Super motivated at the moment because Thraxx cutscene skip became possible. I pretty much attribute this to Grumly's address he posted, which removed an aspect of the fight I was blind to. Still no actual formula for Thraxx heart damage though.
The mosquitoes I chose to kill were:
1 - Quicksand Cliffs - costs 4 frames (select, attack, select, sprint begin)
2 - Quicksand Cliffs - costs 3 frames (select, attack, select)
3 - Volcano Sewers - costs 1 frame (dog attack, abusing sewer static speed)
Hopefully I'll be posting the Act 1 video in the near future for you guys.
edit3:
Did some testing and discovered that I can get 90 Call Beads in lower pyramids. This completely changes the core route from leveling Sting to simply spamming base power Storm + Flare against Aquagoth and Verm. Possibly even utilizing Heat Wave in select areas to force lag and lock sprites on the screen, thus despawning others. I'm not even sure how many frames this could potentially save, but here's my rough layout:
Normal Route = 7 8x for level 3 Sting + 1 8x for Aquagoth + 1 8x for Verminator
Theory Route = 2 or 3 8x for Aquagoth + 3 or 4 for Verminator
Even if I end up needing to use an extra cast somewhere, it's still much quicker. There's also the benefit of me not needing to manipulate water drops in the desert OR pick up stuff by the river/eastern beach, which costs me tons of frames previously.
The downside to this is finding a way to make the 14 minutes entertaining... At this point it may be easier to find a way to skip it, lol. :(
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edit4:
Act 1 Completed!
Youttube:
http://youtu.be/zKWysBnhWyQ
.bkm:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b51z2ssapfhoa89/SOE-TAS-V1.8.bkm
edit5:
Act 2 is planned to be finished within the next week or two, depending on other, more important things going on.
Things I've done during the timer:
- Killed some enemies to increase hit rate and hp buffer in case I'm forced to take a hit later on in the movie for whatever reason.
- Manipulated 45 jewel drop from every enemy. Sometimes I'll kill 2+ at once, I only manipulate 1 or 2 items drops depending on the amount of enemies (1-3, 4, respectively) because I would rather kill them in a decent amount of time and move on to the next thing instead of wiggle around for 6 minutes to get a 4 drop from 4 enemies off the same attack. This doesn't affect anything other than my sanity and patience.
- Some movement geometry/stuff as sort of a play around thing, spiders like getting in the way a lot.
- In the Market I'm grabbing the Jade Disc to give me a higher hit rate, because why not. I also might waste some time blowing myself up on chickens or buying pots just to see if I get a Chocobo Egg. It's not relevant to the movie at all, but it'd be something to do.
- The 14 minute timer is MASSIVELY demotivating, I'm very resilient to getting burned out on things, but this timer is pushing the boundaries pretty damn hard. Got ~7 minutes of it done today though, so that's something. Hoping to finish it up tonight or in the next few days, then things will speed up some.
- I did some testing and determined that Full Blimp Skip is faster than triggering the Blimp scenes DURING the timer. Hilariously enough, it isn't faster in RTA because of other reasons (menu buffering to get the frame perfect char switch on a "blind" transition).
- Call Bead spells are replacing Alchemy in the TAS. This is a TAS-only thing, it likely will never happen in RTA unless someone gets incredibly lucky. IF it does ever happen in RTA attempts, that run (barring any horrible play) will likely be unbeatable by normal standards.
In other news, I am done with anything related to real-time aspects of this game. There's simply not enough people pushing the game hard enough for me to stick around and be useful. I'll likely transfer over to Secret of Mana, Terranigma, or some other games. That being said, I do intend on doing a 100% Secret of Evermore TAS and will likely start it up sometime in the next couple weeks to see what I can get away with in terms of routing.
As for things I'd love help with, AsFarAsIGet discovered that the mapID for certain Act 1 caves and Act 2 caves are shared (meaning they're on the same map). This means if we could somehow force an event to occur that pushes the boy/dog out of bounds and then run over to the proper exit, we could have dog at River pre-timer, which implies that we could completely skip a TON of things. This obviously means that the current TAS I'm working on will be entirely outdated and redone. PLEASE find a way to make this work, I have tried just about everything that comes to mind and have obtained zero results. IF this gets working, the RTA attempts will likely become sub-hour or close to it as well. The TAS time will likely be incredibly fast and possibly not even have to do Thraxx. If you're bored and want to break the hell out of a game, I definitely encourage giving this a shot.
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Edit6:
Finally finished off the market timer. Possibly one of the most demotivating things ever and obviously took much longer than I initially thought because of how boring and anti-fun it got. That being said, got a much quicker kill on Vigor than in the previously comparable TAS (v1.6, v1.7 never got that far). The reason I go around behind Vigor to attack is to prevent a softlock that can occur if you kill him before a certain event is loaded. This is either the music track or the flex Vigor has attached to his fight, both are "enabled" a frame or two (not sure exactly when the music is loaded) before the kill.
Going to make my way to Rimsala today, then probably Aquagoth tomorrow. I'm hoping to get Act 3 done in a couple weeks. It's pretty straight-forward.
There's really nothing that special about anything else honestly, I'm going to get 90 Call Beads in Pyramids lower level. Then just stomp my way through all the bosses because this game's horribly broken.