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Posted: 2/28/2015 3:54 AM
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TheAxeMan
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This is frickin awesome. Amazing glitches, excellent execution and even some cute touches when there is half a second to show off. Bonus points for moe. :) I had the same thought about doing Kuwanger first but yeah, you'd have to be able to get the heart tank with no upgrades. Even then you would lose quite a bit of time in the first couple sections of Kuwanger stage.
Posted: 2/23/2015 8:58 PM
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TheAxeMan
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This is probably as fast as it gets. As far as getting down to one pass, it looks like if you could beat Chaos then all you would need is the NPC glitch. A starting party would not have any instant kill methods available. Attacking would take a long time even if you can find a way to survive.
Posted: 2/21/2015 6:53 AM
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TheAxeMan
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I would suggest Basilisk for violent historical ninja story. May not be that close to some of what was mentioned but definitely a mature audiences only affair!
Posted: 2/17/2015 4:11 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Very interesting. I can think of a few tweaks for each of those potential routes. I assume that buying houses means you would, playing almost normally from the start, beat Garland and the pirates and then sail to Elfland where the item shop has houses. So if you glitch pure potions first you can use them along the way. Definitely during the Garland fight too. Even with all the shopping I would guess this ends up faster too. Surely we have to optimize the other route too as a pacifist run. :)
Posted: 2/15/2015 4:51 PM
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TheAxeMan
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I watched the RTA, it's very clever. The level hack is a great idea for handling fights. You could get a little faster by having your guys try to run from unrunnable fights instead of fighting back. It also might be possible to shave off a random battle or two. Hmm, I'll start thinking about how to optimize the luck manipulation. It might be a little faster to do the running yourself instead of letting the enemies run. That will decide whether or not to use a thief or other character as the lead. You could manipulate some ambushes too, but not repeatedly because there would be no way to manipulate the next fight. Manipulating smaller enemy groups would also save more time if they run. It doesn't look like there would be a good spot to get your guys to die. Might be faster to have them live. You could fight Garland before the level hack, but that seems slow. Perhaps if the first fight in TOFR is runnable you could go there with the hacked char still second, let the enemies kill everyone off before running. Then you don't have to hit select to reorder. Otherwise maybe Lich could use physical attacks before running. Could you execute one of the glitches after Garland? So you would pick new game, set up the hack and then load your actual party to do memory corruption and go to Garland. After getting lute you do the stairs 70 times. Should be a small savings if it works.
Posted: 2/15/2015 7:11 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Just finished a big data dump to the Game Resources page for this game. TAS is done but I want to write up some good commentary before I submit.
Posted: 2/14/2015 4:46 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Which stats can you alter? Most of them are worthless. What you really need is an instant kill ability. Either the Bane sword or instakill spells like BANE or RUB with MP to use them. Hacked level or experience on a black mage could work, just need to reach Melmond for BANE.
Posted: 2/10/2015 9:11 AM
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TheAxeMan
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welcotar wrote:
Is it preferred to avoid save corruption?
Save corruption is quite acceptable. Especially when it lets you break things much more nicely. Usually save corruption is the any% and no save corruption becomes a separate category. So don't hold back, do whatever it takes to jump to the credits!
Posted: 2/9/2015 3:56 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Very interesting. I wonder if there is some way to hack it to turn off random encounters. Another idea I had was triggering the ending by triggering the fight vs Chaos. If you make it so that Chaos comes up in a random fight it won't go to the credits afterwards. But if you hack Garland as an npc into Coneria and talk to him then it works. Only thing is there is a flag for the first two times you talk to him. Each time is actually a separate npc entry that disappears after talking. Then again, maybe you can just trigger the 'fight Chaos for the win' event. If this is possible then I think the fastest way to win would be to use the MUTE spell. The fight would be long but possibly still the fastest way to get to the credits.
Posted: 2/1/2015 12:42 PM
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TheAxeMan
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This is very cool! Could it be possible to execute multiple hacks by resetting and starting a new party? Or by changing your party's order and doing another loop? About various skips, Ice Cave skip would have some issues. Ice Cave is the best place to get the gold you need to buy the bottle. Plus it has the flame sword that ends up being the best equippable weapon for the normal TAS. Skipping orbs would be more valuable. If we can skip them all we just need to figure out how to beat the final dungeon. Earth Orb would probably be the biggest gain to skip since you could completely ignore Earth Cave. If the question is how to beat the final dungeon if we can go straight to it, white mages might be most useful. All the bosses have magic and so if they get muted there is a chance to do nothing. To get a quick kill we would need to grind quite a bit to get level 5 magic for BANE. It might be better to just do the Sky Palace and get the sky orb. As far as game flags, some other ideas: -There is a flag for learning Lefeinish. If we set that we can go to Sky Palace without visiting Sea Shrine. Still need the waterfall but that is easy. -We could go straight from ship to airship by combining airship flag with canal and Earth Orb or canoe. If I could only skip one thing I might pick Earth orb over air orb. Earth Cave is loooong. My first thoughts for four flags would be Earth Orb, Water Orb, Lefeinish, canoe. You could head straight to Ice Cave after getting the ship, then get the airship. Need to hit the waterfall and Lefein before entering Mirage Tower. Get bane sword and light the remaining orbs. Now final dungeon will be easy. A more direct approach would be to light all the orbs. Pick a fighter and three white mages. Head to the peninsula of power and grind on zombulls. Then use mute to beat the final dungeon. Black mages could get BANE but it would be tricky to grind them up efficiently. Fighting is slow. Edit: Yeah, definitely Earth Cave if it's just one skip. Looking through my run, that would save about 12 minutes. At first glance air orb might skip more but unfortunately it skips the most important weapon.
Posted: 1/24/2015 3:58 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Congratulations on finishing this! About your known improvements, did you try editing in changes to the movie file or does it cause a desync?
Posted: 1/17/2015 2:36 AM
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TheAxeMan
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ars4326 wrote:
new methods that would add new entertainment value?
Not for this any% run. Though please let me know if there are ideas for other interesting variations.
Posted: 1/17/2015 2:31 AM
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TheAxeMan
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This looks pretty fast. Is it possible that doing the moon advances earlier could get you better luck on undead? You often need to cast it twice to finish the enemies and there is one time where you use missile to increment rng (I assume that's why you do that). Even adding another cycle could decrease overall time if I am understanding this right. 2015 should be a good year for Ultima, I am going to finish my NES Ultima 4 run soon...
Posted: 1/17/2015 1:46 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Suppose I discovered a 2-frame improvement to this run. It wouldn't be noticeable at all and it doesn't change anything significant. In fact the two frames are gained just before fighting the final boss with everything else the same. Should I submit the improvement? I can remake all the extras included in the current run to use the new trick.
Posted: 1/9/2015 6:46 PM
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TheAxeMan
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The tracker is currently showing $22,812.18 out of $30,000 for a TASbot encore. dwangoAC and team are putting together some awesome new tricks for the twitch chat that will be well worth it! We should hype this up with an announcement and any other publicity channels we can use.
Posted: 12/7/2014 4:54 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Awesome, Mission Impossible! Your run looks good up until the last stage. Your planning and overall route look fine but I am sure you could have saved time in the last mission by using your gas grenades more and maybe taking more damage. You hardly use any of them and there are a lot of red briefcases. Maybe on some other stages too. The highlight is of course using the green shield guys, very neat trick.
Posted: 11/27/2014 3:42 PM
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TheAxeMan
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There are clearly some differences from the NES version: * Less lag * Shoulder button weapon switch * No way to pause/unpause as quickly as select button on the original * The glitch that allows for picking up extra blocks doesn't work or wasn't used So it's slightly different but I don't know, it doesn't really impress me after all the runs there have been on this game. It seems to be well done though. More submission text would help a lot.
Posted: 11/25/2014 10:21 AM
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TheAxeMan
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Great run kid, that was one in a million. Glad to see this game done well. I totally agree with playing easy mode, the hardest difficulty would have been pretty painfully long on the boss fights.
Posted: 11/14/2014 4:25 AM
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TheAxeMan
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I was thinking about posting but after reviewing the thread to see everyone else's age I realized I already did. Given how long ago it was I'm not surprised I forgot.
Posted: 10/27/2014 11:36 PM
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TheAxeMan
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true wrote:
This matches exactly the FM2.
I guess I should have said that it doesn't match FCEUX. When you play a movie back on the emulator with the input display on it shows the input frame by frame regardless of controller polling. I don't question the accuracy and obviously the result is the same. It's just that the conversion from frame-based to poll-based input makes it look different.
true wrote:
Did you change it after it was submitted?
There have been no changes since I submitted but there have been since I sent you the first full fm2. I changed it so that I run from the first battle, saving a couple minutes. The encode in one of the first few posts has the right movie.
Posted: 10/24/2014 12:20 PM
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TheAxeMan
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What a productive discussion! I think it's great to have this on profile as long as there is an unspecified option. I don't know about putting it right next to the username on every post though. While gender is part of identity it's hopefully not that important. Lower in the sidebar or just on the profile should be enough. To be honest, I can't recall ever thinking about how my username reveals my gender until reading this thread. I imagine that it's the same for some females but realistically it probably is less of a big deal for guys. Anyway after thinking about this for a while I realized that there are pluses and minuses to being open about gender. The "why should it matter" line of thinking that suggests it shouldn't be an issue. But the fact is that it is part of most people's identity. Completely ignoring it leads to the problems like what prompted this thread. Imagining that it doesn't matter at all is also not realistic; it would lead to constantly worrying about revealing yourself through your comments. There are a lot of ways this can come up, for example voice chat in MMO games. The same issues apply to a lot of other aspects of identity where there is a similar dilemma: reveal oneself so that others can take it into consideration when interacting with you or hide oneself to protect against others taking advantage of that knowledge. In other words, it comes down to your opinion on human nature. Though there is also a situational aspect; in a competitive situation maybe you should expect that someone is going to use knowledge of your identity against you. But that should not be the case in a friendly and welcoming community like ours. That is, in a kind and respectful ideal world it should only be advantageous for everyone to be open about their identity. So that's why I think it's good to have the option to be open. People can decide whether or not based on how they view the community, their level of sensitivity and so on. I would like to point out that there is another side effect - whether you leave it unspecified or not, the choice itself reveals something about you. That's why I think it's important to make it less prominent; as it is I feel pressured to put something and I worry about how leaving it unspecified makes others perceive me. Maybe I am overanalyzing things but this is something I think about a lot. Growing up I was always told to hide my mood swings (by people who don't have them) to the point that I was attempting to deny it from myself. At a certain point it becomes futile and counter-productive and it gives you a pessimistic mindset where everyone is against you. Having a circle of allies who are in is very helpful and not being honest with friends and family is just stupid. Still, I have to admit that sometimes hiding them is for the best. I do want to work towards a world where we can all be more open though. Also, I started playing the PC version of Final Fantasy XIII after never having a console that could play it. My first thoughts were that Lightning was pretty badass, but is it really necessary for her to wear a miniskirt and sleeveless top while the guys are all wearing long pants and jackets?
Posted: 10/23/2014 3:57 PM
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TheAxeMan
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Nice! The explanation of the erasing process in the beginning is good. The controller visualization is nice. Looks like it holds the buttons through lag frames so it doesn't exactly match the fm2. Also, it looks like you are using the generated result (that we ran earlier right when I finished). I changed the submitted fm2 to run from the first fight, saving a couple minutes.
Posted: 10/14/2014 12:58 AM
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TheAxeMan
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true wrote:
or would require a bank of cold NES ready to go.
This is an interesting strategy. If I were to imagine speedrunning the console verification then it seems the fastest way would be to have a NES ready for each segment. After each segment finishes you take the cartridge out and put it in the next NES. I guess there is also prep time for the bot for each segment so you probably need multiple bots too. You could get away with two if after taking the cartridge out of one you prep it for the segment after next. I think in this run you would always have at least a few minutes. You'd still have to be pretty fast with the switches. 90 seconds / 4 switches means you need to average under 22.5 sec. Then again, if soft resets can be done automatically the fastest console verification would probably use them. So when true makes the bot that does that then I'll make that run to obsolete this one.
Posted: 10/8/2014 4:03 PM
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TheAxeMan
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spweasel wrote:
are there sacrifices made to be syncable with other SRAMs?
Yes, but probably only a few seconds at most. If the category really needs to be 'No resets' then it shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Posted: 10/1/2014 8:20 PM
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TheAxeMan
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nicos wrote:
also why not produce a verification movie that would set the sram so the current tas could run correctly on console ?
The problem is the resets and power cycles. SRAM is just as much a problem here. As true pointed out, a bot would need to do resets and power cycles very quickly or else the console replay of the any% run would be quite a bit longer than a console replay of this one. On the emulator the power cycle instantly clears all the RAM, something that is probably impossible on an actual hardware. That run has 5 hard resets and even more soft resets and is only 90 seconds faster, so you can see that the resets would have to be pretty fast.
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