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Someone did total control in a non-timing-sensitive way (i.e. possible without TASing: it looks like they used an emulator but not frame advance): http://forums.glitchcity.info/index.php/topic,6638.0.html
The method's a lot slower than the one used in the current TAS, but interesting in its own way.
I love seeing tricks that I thought were TAS-only done on console, by the way.
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I've now watched this run. I love the amount of precision in this TAS. So many jumps were made that clearly weren't intended to be possible, and often appeared to stretch the boundaries of possibility even for a TAS.
My favourite moment was probably "Crossing the Gap". I expected absurdity (given the level's reputation; it's heavily studied due to being one of the levels playable in individual levels mode), and started out a little disappointed because it appeared to be using quite a banal route through the level. Then something utterly absurd happened, and I laughed out loud :)
We even get to see one of the stars, although not collected. I'd be interested in seeing (probably not as a submission, just as a demonstration for your fans) TASed routes for the five most interesting stars. (The one that requires the other stars to be collected beforehand obviously wouldn't be significantly different from the current route; then one of them takes far too long to collect, and another one is an issue of knowing where it is, rather than there being any particular interest in the way it's collected.)
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@Patashu: Against some enemies, there's the issue of running out of PP. In general, Pikachu's stats and typing are so bad that it's likely to need a bunch of grinding for experience in order to be able to finish the larger/more difficult battles solo. (Especially against rock/ground types.)
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Re the ending: if you 100% the game up to that point (not viable for a speedrun because it requires waiting for several hours at one point), it makes two levers green, meaning you don't have to detour to pull them. That's the intended way to get the 100% ending.
You can do the same thing using corner boosts, which is very difficult to do in realtime, but possible (a lot of rewinding is normally required to try them over and over again, although the best players can do it with moderate consistency). Of course, a TAS doesn't have much issue with this.
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For what it's worth, people doing save corruption runs of GBA Pokémon games on console (using a GameCube) cut the power to it, because it detects the reset button and doesn't reset for a couple of seconds until after it's pressed, making it basically impossible to time correctly.
In my opinion, save corruption via disconnecting during a save should be considered a separate category, but not disallowed outright. Runs can be interesting both ways.
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Oh, if the seeding happens on a timer every time the battle is started, I'm suddenly very relieved; that seems to be completely unexploitable at VGC (where you'd surely be noticed if you were using a metronome to time when the battle started in order to aim it approximately, and you wouldn't be able to retry). So the problem would only be for wi-fi play.
(And because of your understandable desire to prevent the information as to how that person was cheating getting out, I'll mention the curious behaviour of Hypnosis when battling between DP original and Platinum, and leave it at that. Their method was a lot less clever than yours, though. And I'm curious as to what would happen if the cheater's opponent tried to upload the battle video. My guess is desync, at the least.)
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JSmith wrote:
In case you ever need to do it again, Xorns can manipulate luck to some extent without using time by kicking at empty space.
Neat idea. Reordering actions seemed to work well enough, but if we have to slip through walls in the future, that might come in useful too. (Also, what we were doing the first time we were xorning was AI manipulation, which is mostly based on your movements, not the RNG.)
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hegyak wrote:
It's been silent. How goes the breaking of things?
dwangoAC and I have mostly been busy, but there's been a bit of progress (unfortunately, mostly negative results).
The good news is that we found another spare action on Water (getting the bubble to move from beneath us at turn boundary, which we need to spend anyway, in order to save an action moving out from it manually); it takes a bit of manipulation but it's not unreasonable. This gives us at least four or five viable ways to do Astral, via giving us a bit of headroom before the frame rule there. (We still don't know which is fastest, but because of the frame rule, it doesn't matter.)
The bad news is that we've been trying to work out how to do the egg setup, and it turns out that there's no way to adjust the timer of an egg once it's been set. (We were testing iceboxes; by NetHack logic they should slow the timer, or at least kill the egg almost immediately like they would in real life, but instead they act identically to chests, i.e. not really useful at all.) So this means that we have to manipulate all the timers to be correct, the instant they're created. At the moment the only real idea we have for this is "stand next to a wall and create the timers one at a time, manipulating in between." There are a couple of ways to create the timers. The fastest in gametime is to create them at the same time that we set the egg species, but that requires manipulating two unlikely events with no chance to manipulate in between, so is probably not viable. Alternatively, we could create the egg, then reset the timer on a later turn (we might have to kill the timer in between to stop it hatching, but that isn't difficult); that takes twice as long but is easier to manipulate.
If anyone does know a way to manipulate egg timers (other than via rerolling them with undead turning, which we already know about), please let us know in the thread.
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I'm a competitive Pokémon player myself, and for this and other reasons, I'd get very suspicious if someone insisted on hosting all their wi-fi battles with me. It shouldn't matter for official tournaments, because those are played from the title screen (thus being harder to manipulate), and the DS isn't powered off from one game to the next. (I can still see it being theoretically possible to cheat under those circumstances; e.g. you could power it off and on again without the event staff watching; but the event staff would have a reasonable opportunity to catch someone cheating like that, the same way that they'd have a reasonable opportunity to catch someone switching their cart.)
I guess I'd rather the knowledge be public simply because someone else might have already determined the information, and been cheating with it, without such a strong sense of honour.
(BTW, if this works on Poké Balls too, the information would be very useful in preparing for tournaments; we could RNG the catches as well as the Pokémon's stats.)
But yeah, if someone manages to top the GBU ladder with this (preferably singles, because doubles is used for all official tournaments), it'd be a clear sign to TPCi that something is broken. They wouldn't be able to fix it before probably the sequels to X/Y, though.
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Warp wrote:
MrGrunz wrote:
Let's say a game runs with 60 input frames per second and 30 visual frames per second. That means you have 2 frames of input for each visual frame. Wouldn't it be possible on a real console to hold right on frame 1 and left on frame 2 with light speed reflexes to make the game register this as pressing left-right at the same time?
That would happen only if the console polls the controller 60 times per second and buffers the pressed buttons until the application wants to read their state. It doesn't sound like anything that any console or game would do (although that's only a guess from my part.)
Console games basically never do that. Some PC games do, though, because PCs work like that by default and some games never bother to change it. (On the other hand, there's rarely a problem in pressing left+right on a physical PC keyboard; they tend to be completely separate keys.)
FWIW, with the SMW submission, I'd like it to mention an official controller that's capable of the input possible. I'm happy if it's not the normal joypad, so long as it's something that Nintendo released that's capable of providing that input.
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I think in-game time is a valid goal for this game, and would be different from realtime. The two differences would be: no damage (unless it saves 3 seconds realtime, which is possible if it lets you sequence break but unlikely), and adding an extra strategy (waiting in the start area in order to get a good angle for completing the stage, which is very important for in-game time runs of the game done by humans). So there's room for a separate category here, if well done.
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I'd like both encodes to exist. I imagine most people will watch the hacked encode, but sometimes with Sonic runs I've preferred to look at the unhacked one with the player offscreen every now and then.
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mkdasher: Here's the list of which Pokémon are in which slot: http://eggmove.com/encounterfirered.htm
(Adapt the URL in the obvious way for other Pokémon games.)
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ShinyDoofy wrote:
NitroGenesis wrote:
psst ShinyDoofy you arent supposed to be here.
I am not? :(
/Amaraticando: My main focus is on the part of reading the controller's buttons multiple times per frame. That just blew my mind. Well, somebody's trollin'...
There's usually no particular reason why a game can't read the controller buttons multiple times in a frame; they just typically read the buttons once per frame so that their game logic and rendering logic stay in sync. For instance, in the NetHack TAS I'm working on, during luck manipulation we press buttons 12 and a half times per frame on average, because that's the maximum speed the game can read, in order to manipulate luck as fast as possible.
EDIT: A great example of this is Super Mario 64. It only reads the controller when it actually cares about the input, and not when it's lagging, so it ends up reading less than once per frame. The N64 console verifications of Super Mario 64 rely on this to sync properly; although Mupen isn't very accurate, they know how much lag Mupen thinks is in the game, and can measure the lag the game is actually experiencing because you can actually electronically detect that the controller is being read, and so they can adjust for lag on the fly. Many other N64 games, like Ocarina of Time, can't currently be console-verified because they read the controller every frame, and so there's no way to adjust for lag.
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I guess this is a real category (using passwords to unlock alternative game modes in order to speedrun those modes is OK), if a different category from the any%.
I also guess this is not an interesting category :)
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I guess the definition of optimization for a run like this would be that you'd want to do things that would be as efficient as possible given a different goal. (For instance, in the NetHack run dwangoAC and I are making, we're up against a huge framerule, but we try to maintain entertainment by accomplishing each individual task as fast as possible even though we could dawdle and still make the frame rule.)
EDIT: And a concrete definition: an "infinite loop" TAS could be measured for optimality by how many frames it runs for before it loops for the first time, smaller is better. ("Continues making progress through the game" is harder to define, though.) Still, this seems like a genuinely interesting category due to the planning involved and the knowledge about the game required; you have to have a sufficiently good handle of the game that you know your input will keep working forever.
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garik16 wrote:
ais523 wrote:
The RNG for Legaia's already been found, but I can't remember offhand where it is. (I remember it was a pain to find, though.)
Huh, ExileUT told me the only useful thing he learned was random encounters. Any idea who else might know, ais?
You sure also the same RNG is used for everything? All I see in the thread is the stuff for random battles.
We aren't sure the same RNG is used for everything; it's just the encounter RNG that was found. Ilari cracked the pattern, but sadly can't remember what address it was at, and neither can I. It's possible there's another RNG used for other things, although that's reasonably unlikely unless the developers of the game were trying to stop randomness exploits, and most game developers don't bother.
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Is it faster to jump on/over slopes than it is to walk along them? Or is it the same? (I seem to remember this having been a huge debate at one point.)
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Masterjun wrote:
right after you see thispokemon, the game saves, and if you reset you see this.
I hope this makes the ending valid :)
Hmm, what interests me is the other details of that save file. (Pokédex 152 is impossible in normal play, but a common side effect of the glitch used; badges 5 is interesting, and one less than is normally possible without memory corruption; but I suspect what people are interested in is whether Unknown Dungeon is unlocked, which may be nontrivial to work out.)
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The "gotta catch 'em all" run of Pokémon we have actually does catch Missingno., but not the other glitch Pokémon (there are many more than just the well-known Missingno. and 'M). So it might not be the best example. It might be faster to catch it, though, and even if it isn't, it's possibly worthwhile for entertainment reasons.
