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I remember this being discussed at some point but can't find it. Anyway, I'd like to make a script for my upcoming Crystalis run that fast-forwards some of the grinding. It should be possible to for a script to set the speed to turbo at frame x and then back to normal at frame y. Problem is that emu.speedmode("normal") doesn't seem to do anything. You can switch to turbo mode but not back. How hard would it be to fix this? It could be useful for watching scripts like this and other cases.
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Here's how the big dragon fight works:
He moves back and forth, making a random roll every 32 frames. That roll determines if he does an action or not. The type of action is determined by the almighty $0008 counter. Now if you don't take a hit the action will never be lasers. But if you get hit a flag gets set that lets him do lasers. In that case, he does lasers if the counter is 0-7F and bouncies otherwise. So getting the right behavior requires manipulating the counter and random seed. Also, this means that there is a two-second window for lasers followed by two seconds that are no good.
I really wanted to reach another breakpoint on the counter but ended up quite a bit short. So I used that extra counter time to wring out lag from pyramid dungeons. The result is pretty good. Now I just have the big dragon fight and the tower left. I think the toughest part is going to be figuring out how to get DYNA to use its lasers. It really must be done because it makes a difference of about 1.5 seconds of lag.
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It's coming along nicely. I have the overall plan done for the rest of it and am working on tweaking some lag out of Mt Hydra right now. I also want to make a nice viewing lua script before I submit so I might not finish before the end of the year. This is the last really annoying section though, because the floating eye enemies are the last ones I need to deal with that have completely random behavior.
I found a few improvements over my test run near the end. There is going to be even less grinding and about 12 seconds saved. So the final version will be about 40:50, a little more than two minutes faster than the test run.
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Sorry, didn't realize that you can't concentrate the experience by killing people off. The stone idea sounds really cool.
About having dead characters I am making some assumptions. First, that enemy actions are completely random. Second, you can't change your luck once a round of battle begins (unlike Dragon Warrior, for instance). With 3-4 people attacking or doing something your manipulation needs to take all of them into account plus the boss. But if it is one on one then you only need to get a good hit from them and something weak from the boss. Or maybe only one char attacks and another heals or something. You might have more rounds in the battle but if each round is fast then it could be faster overall.
Anyway, I might be mistaken in my assumptions or missing something else. I don't know much about how the RNG works in this game.
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All right, this was the first version that I found watchable with no fast forwarding. It's good but if you want to do better I would encourage you to do more analysis of how the RNG works. Also consider the crazy possibility of leaving some people dead. Reason being that each round of battle could be better with one good hit from you and a useless move from the enemy. You could also reach a higher level with fewer cores. But this depends on how the enemy behaves, so you need to look into that. Great job, I look forward to seeing something published.
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Derakon wrote:
...with subweapons unavailable the bossfights become more interesting
Actually, most of the boss fights use the hidden quick-draw sword technique instead of the actual jump-and-slash subweapon. You'd have to get rid of that too to draw out the boss fights.
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I had this game and like just about everyone else I couldn't beat the mexican boss. Until reading your submission text I didn't even know that regeneration was the issue. Abusing hit detection makes this interesting.
I know that in the first two levels at least there seem to be five possible locations for orbs before the boss and the orbs will be placed randomly in four of them. Did you investigate that? It's been a while and forget the details though.
Also, it might be all right to stop input before entering your name. There's no ending or credits afterwards. It's funny that Marble Madness was made by the same company and has a similar arcade-style high scoring system but you enter the name at the start instead of the end.
I'll still vote yes because this looks like a pretty solid run.
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This looked pretty good to me and the game is of course awesome. I'm not sure how a 2-player run would compare. There would be more enemies, so it would be longer and more repetitive. The second player would be useless a lot of the time. You could have them fight each other but that would get old.
I bet this can be improved but as it is it looks well enough done and certainly stylish enough for a yes.
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Cutting battles is a good thing to look at. I did some similar optimizations in Final Fantasy 1 where it is even more critical because some fights can't be run from.
There I used FFHackster to get maps of where all the no-encounter spaces were. I was actually able to make a hacked rom where no-encounter spaces were marked. So I recommend doing something similar to find all the possible places that may be useful. In some cases it was worth it to go quite a bit out of the way to avoid encounters.
The other thing was to make a script that figured out where I would have battles the entire run. It might not be such a big deal for this game because you can save and load without items. But if you could do some prediction you may find some cases where taking extra steps in one area prevents encounters in other areas. Or even better, you can change your path to step over more or fewer no-encounter squares to tweak things. It takes some work but it could lead to a nice improvement.
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Hmm, I didn't know anything about MLP before but learned a lot while watching this with my wife my wife who had a large collection. She comments that the lizard came with the castle set. Also, it's not accurate to say that Rarity is prancing around the MLP land. Prancing would take some more work.
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Time for an update. I am in the fortress and reached level 14 after grinding on the spiders. I found a few nice tricks to get more experience all over. So compared to my test run I am grinding less and gaining more and more time. At this point I am now 1 minute 48 sec ahead of the test run and over 9 minutes ahead of the published run. I expect the final time to be about 41 minutes and I've got 32 minutes of that done.
One interesting thing I found is how to make the bugs fly in on the big fortress 2F area with all the water bridges. Enemies and their weapons each have their own entries in the object table. Most enemy attacks are only in the object table temporarily until they are done stabbing or the shot goes offscreen. But some enemies are always twirling around a flail. In that case, the weapon is created right after the enemy is, using up that slot. This is true even when it happens offscreen. So the problem here is that those weapons are taking up the slots where the flying insects like to spawn. By preventing some of them from spawning (by hitting select) before the insects I can get those insects flying around for more experience. Flying enemies are great for xp in big areas like this because they come to you.
I did make a discovery that could save some time but won't be in this run because it's too far back. The glitch that lets you climb the slope without falling can be done with some spells as well as the select menu. In particular, telepathy and teleport both work, even if you cancel out before actually using the spell. Not only does each of those take slightly less time than the menu but it would allow for using the sword charge glitch. Unfortunately, it would also prevent using the rabbit boots to jump because the A button would trigger the spell.
Anyway, I think this would probably be useful in both mountain areas. In Mt Sabre S we would go in with glitched fire sword and telepathy. Grinding and getting the key would be slightly slower without jumping but then we could go right up the mountain.
In Mt Sabre N we can avoid the backtrack after the boss. Go in with glitched fire sword and teleport because it's a little faster than telepathy. Climb up and then go straight to the prison area for the key. After that I'm not sure if it would be faster to go back out or take the back way that connects into the area where I grind. Anyway, after taking down the walls we can cancel the glitch by switching back to wind and grind the same as before. After beating the boss we already have the key so we don't need to go back for it. One thing though is that the backtracking gave me some experience. So there will need to be more grinding to make up for that. But I am pretty sure it is an overall gain.
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Here are a few other things we discussed.
TASManiac wrote:
For getting the gold, running from less battles later on might save some time in the Ice Cave where you go a little out of your way to get the chests with gold in them. This would also help with the experience dillemma.
An interesting idea. If we could get enough gold in one or two battles and it lets me avoid going to that 6-chest room it might be worth it. Problem is that's a lot of gold. Too much to get anywhere else.
TASManiac wrote:
As far as I can tell, the fadeout lag is just reloading the map, so it all depends on where you are and isn't random. I'm not completely sure about this but it seems to be the case.
(This was in response to my comment that fadeout lag after running from random battles is the only possible optimization I know about. But I don't know how we can affect it yet.)
So by not random you mean not depending on the random counter, right? And by where you are do you mean what area you are in or where you are within that area. I did not consider tweaking the walking route to optimize fadeout lag but that's an interesting idea.
TASManiac wrote:
No route changes come to mind right this moment. Is the order you did the fiends in really the best order? Also, might it be worth it to class change, or would that take too long?
100% sure on both of these. There are only a few ways they could be changed, anyway. Doing fire last is clearly best as Kary can be BANEd and we can fly to the volcano. We could theoretically leave the Sea Shrine after getting the SLAB. BANEing Kraken would save a ton of time over hacking at him, but it's just way too much extra travel.
Class change was discussed earlier. Unfortunately, there's just no benefit. Even if you had a mage, it would be a waste of time to get them to a level where a promoted char would get cool spells.
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If this run's fall into Cpadolf's or Kriole's hand, I'm sure it will be better ;)
Perhaps this is true but I think the author is being a bit modest here. It looks pretty well optimized to me.
I don't know, every room looks fast but it's overall quite long and tedious. I had trouble staying awake. Like other hacks I've seen, the map layout is neat but there aren't many enemies in your way and so it's really just an orgy of running and jumping really fast. Meh vote.
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I have no experience with this or any of the other SM hacks. But have to say that I don't think this hack is that great. The main thing I noticed was the extremely low density of normal enemies. That alone made this much less interesting than the standard game. None of the new graphics are appealing. Why would you make Samus gray? You don't need to go that far to make her suit look less feminine. It seems the main goal of this hack was to create some interesting situations for wall jumps. It does succeed in that. But still vote no. Could be a nice edition to demos or gruefood delight though.
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I finally finished watching the whole thing. It's not for everyone but it's still neat to see a 40+ hour game beaten in 8.
For a few days afterwards I had 'Eyes on Me' stuck in my head and was really moody.
Some people here may not be old enough to remember that most people didn't have cell phones or Facebook back then. That meant you had a lot more time to kill playing console games. At the same time, optical storage allowed for packing in a lot more data to a game while adding a lot of load time. So it makes sense that game length hit its peak.
The other thing I remember is that I interned at HP around the time this game came out. Their internship program is called SEED and the interns are SEEDs. So I was a real-life SeeD. :)
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I'm about halfway through but I can already tell it's very well done as expected from DK.
The plot-to-play ratio in this run makes it slow to watch. But I think in some ways it's actually more interesting than playing it normally. Especially if you enjoy JRPG stories, or at least trying to understand them.
The game designers clearly had a goal of showing really cool settings with character development being secondary. Not a bad idea when the main point of the game is to have a lot of really cool video clips and 3D demoscene pans.
When I first played this game I was having serious trouble with depression and I still thought Squall was over-the-top emo.
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All right, it looks like Shadowgate's RNG subroutine is at $CB3A. The seed is at $0036. $0035 is always that number with the two nibbles reversed. Here is that subroutine:
LDA $0036 = #$55
CLC
ADC #$01
STA $0035 = #$55
CLC
ADC $0035 = #$56
CLC
ADC $0035 = #$56
CLC
ADC $0035 = #$56
CLC
ADC $0035 = #$56
STA $0036 = #$55
LSR
LSR
LSR
LSR
STA $0035 = #$56
LDA $0036 = #$AE
ASL
ASL
ASL
ASL
ORA $0035 = #$0A
STA $0035 = #$0A
RTS
Essentially, it takes the value at $0036 and adds one. Then that result gets multiplied by 5 with anything past a byte getting thrown away.
For the case of the lightning strikes it takes just the lower two bits of that result and adds 3. So you'll always get between 3 and 6 bolts. This code runs before it grabs that value and maybe multiple times, so the value that you see in $0036 the frame before isn't necessarily the one used. But if you hack that you'll be able to change your luck.
That randomization code seems to run every few frames when you wait. So you are able to get the right number of strikes by waiting.
So my advice to getting things to happen faster is to figure out ways you can change that seed at $0036 without taking time or taking less time. For example, you may be able to add fewer wait frames in other rooms to get the luck you need then.
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The number of lightning strikes is at 01E6. Still figuring out how that gets set. There may be ways to tweak it besides timing.
Ah, that's on the stack. Makes it harder to trace the code.
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This turned out pretty well. I played this game and it's very impressive how often you don't have to go out of your way to manipulate or kill enemies. Good luck with your next run.
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Derakon wrote:
I'm also surprised that the level-3 attacks are worthwhile for generic leveling,
If you aren't really good or making a TAS then you probably save most of your magic for healing. When you don't need that there is plenty of MP left over. I really just need it for teleport. Still, I wouldn't say that I am using the level 3 attacks for generic leveling. Just a few special spots where they can save time.
You don't get all your mp back on levelup but you get the difference between the old and new max mp. I really just need to worry about making it to the free healing in the Goa fortress. Another big consideration is that I don't pick up the other two bracelets (water and thunder) and I won't be using the wind and fire swords very much at all for the rest of the game.
