Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Ooh, good question. The fights should last similar amounts of time, so that's not really a factor. I suppose it comes down to earlier possiblity of glitch use vs. wasting less time to get the soul.
I dunno. Isn't the first useful place to use the glitch in the Gardens anyway? If so, it'd probably be better to wait until the garden.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
I'd forgotten how completely different this game is from the NES version...
It's not really all that impressive, but it's clearly well-optimized. Clean work. Thumbs up. Yes vote.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Lol. Awesome. This is one of those games that can almost get a movie from concept alone. Yes, he flings his limbs at enemies. Yes, he gets this limbs back. Yes, he can run without legs. No, you can't take him home with you.
Yes vote, and if the River City Ransom run deserves a star, I'd say this one does, too.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Well, I don't have the ROM so I can't really do much testing for all that junk, but according to my cartridge, the Bracelet is always the first drop after you collect the blue shield. (Moon Shield, if you happen to actually know its proper name.) After that the chests follow this pattern: wizard, weapon, bear-trap, bracelet. Repeat. I'm not entirely sure what taking a hit (and thus losing your shield/armor) does to that pattern, but I never had the bracelet drop when I wasn't wearing the gold armor. *shrug* Then again I only played for about 30 minutes.
The bracelet, however, is one of the worst weapons. The lance (standard weapon; the game calls it a sword), dagger, crossbow, and arguably the scythe (since you can fire it downwards) are all better weapons than the bracelet for most enemies. And that's not even considering the fact that the bracelet won't let you use magic. (Of course, magic may not actually be useful for a TAS; I haven't done any research there.)
I distinctly recall that you don't actually need the bracelet to kill the final boss, but iirc you do need it to gain entrance to the boss. (Which means you have to fight him using the bracelet anyway, barring some really handy glitch that would let you switch weapons without actually picking one up.)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Another discovery that's going to set me back.
New data: the layout of a given floor does not affect the contents of the chests therein.
(Exception: chests containing spells have fixed contents. I'm not sure why, but I'm pretty confident about this.)
Furthermore, there seems to be a literally infinite amount of possible drops for a given dungeon floor. (As opposed to simply inumerably indefinite, as was pre-supposed.)
The good: This means I can force any drop on any floor if I have enough patience. Furthermore, this also probably means that I'll never have to use a floor with a very out-of-the-way stair. (I.e: one I can't reach without killing a monster.)
The bad: This means I have to scrap all my work up to this point again. It also means I'm going to have to do a lot more work than I had previously believed in order to get a near-optimized run of the cave.
The ugly: I'm almost certainly going to end up just standing in front of most of the stairs for a few seconds before entering. Lovely, eh?
I still plan on giving you guys an update next Monday, but at this point that's only looking like it's going to be the first 3 floors, rather than the first 6.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Which version of the ROM are you using? It's possible that v1.0 and v1.1 differ in this.
I dunno. I guess I'll dig up the ole' cartridge tonight and see if I'm remembering this correctly or not. But I distinctly remember watching that big face flash after hadoukening Sigma.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
asteron wrote:
Can't you hadoken sigma's final form when the "hand" rises up?
I know that's possible, because I've done it on the console. I don't think the Hadouken actually does a one-hit-kill on that boss, though, so it might be the case that it's faster not to wait for the hand. (Because it's a bitch to position such that it brings you there without ramming you into the face. At least, it's hard to do so on a console. It's probably not too hard to manipulate.)
Then again, I haven't watched this whole thing yet, so I have no clue whether that input was useful at all or not.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
*rubs eyes*
Yeah, I'm not dead yet.
Ok, it's good-news/bad-news time. The bad news is that my real life has been incredibly hectic ever since I moved. I had a hell of a time getting registered for classes, (I'll spare you the details there) and in fact I was only able to register for one class before registration "officially" ended. As such I've been playing catch-up for the past month or so, and I think I've finally managed to do so. Unfortunately midterms are coming up, so I'm not going to have much opportunity to do much of anything for another couple of weeks.
The good news is that I have done a lot of work on this run. I have once again started working on the cave from scratch, but I think this time I'm attacking the problem correctly. It turns out that the number of possible floors varies from floor to floor. There are 7 possible B1's, but there are 11 possible B2's from B1-A, and then 13 possible B2's from B1-D. The function that generates floors (and I'm pretty sure it is pseudo-randomly generated, rather than selected from a pre-generated set; I've found several dozen distinct B2's so far.) is highly confusing, but I'm doing my best to work through this.
I hope that I'll have something to show you guys by Oct 17. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and promise that I'll have something worth posting by then, even if it's only the first 6 floors of the cave.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Well, the movie accomplishes its goals, and the run is pretty thoroughly optimized. But I'd still rather have an any% run.
But I can't very well vote "Meh" for that, now can I?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
No, for three reasons:
1) The computer I was doing this on is being very picky about when it decides to work. I could transfer all the work to this computer (the laptop), but I choose not to because it's just more hassle tacked onto these next two reasons.
2) The sheer amount of testing required for this means I need to get uber organized about it, and on top of that, I'm going to have to find a long stretch of time where I can (and am willing to) work on this with most/all of my spare time. So far I've been testing each potential "next floor" by going through it, and then all of the floors it can lead to, and then all of the floors those can lead to. That's between 25 and 36 floors per potential floor.
But on the plus side, this means that when I find something I'm satisfied with, I have the next three floors done.
In short, I have to do the work on this section in chunks, and I haven't had any time for a chunk in several weeks because of this third reason.
3) I'm moving next week. I'm transferring colleges, and I've been spending the past two-and-a-half weeks trying to get things set up and situated and whatnot. (Not just with the college, either. Housing and employment have been pissy about this, too.) Unfortunately, the various buerocracies have been very inefficient in terms of giving me answers and/or processing various these and those. Of course, that just makes life that much more difficult for me. But hopefully all of this is going to be sorted out very soon. At the very latest my life ought to be less hectic once classes start, which will be the 22nd. At that point I'll have more time to get organized and find out what's going on with my Desktop. (I suspect the memory's going bad, but the whole thing's about due for an upgrade, or maybe just an all-out replacement. But even if the desktop does need replacing, I can always transfer the work to this computer, which has no problems.)
So, yeah. It's kind of a culmination of events conspiring against me. It'll pass and I'll be able to get some more work done. (Although it would still be really nice to be able to look at the code, if for no other reason than to see exactly what the limit on n+1 floors is.)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Each level has its own challenge... which it should tell you at the beginning of each level. (Jump on so many special platforms so many times, jump through a certain amount of a special hoop, find a particular item, etc.) Once you've done that, a Clear Ring (similar to the one in SMW2) opens, often very near the last goal you clear. You jump through that to exit.
The game's pretty long, and iirc there isn't any way to speed up your movement, so precision would be the only real advantage you have over just playing it normally. That being the case, I don't think it'd be that entertaining to watch. I could be wrong, of course, but I should think that there are still better SNES games to run. (That haven't been done, of course.)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Argh! This is frustrating. Would any coders like to take a look at this game's function to determine the next floor of the Ancient Cave? 'Cause not only am I having a rough time with this, but I'm going to have to do it all over again when I take my second pass through the game. If you could even just give me the code straight out of the ROM that would be appreciated. (It'd take me a few weeks to figure out what it does/means, but that's better than working blind and trying to figure out which is the best route out of a possible 6^20.)
If anyone's wondering if I've made any progress on this, the answer is no. In fact I had to scrap all the work I'd previously done since (for whatever reason) it wouldn't synch when I pasted it to the end of my WIP. (It can't reach the correct 1st floor, I guess because all the work I was doing was anchored on a save state off the movie, which must have done something to the RAM.) I'm currently stumbling through the staggering number of possible B4's, and the best I've been able to come up with is nabbing the Dark Mirror on B3.
Anyway, if someone could get me the function from the game's code that would be awesome. (I'll give you a special thanks in the author's notes.)
If someone can interpret that function and it turns out to be enough of a help, I'd even give them co-authorship.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Do Super Widget. It's got a lot of abusability to it with the different forms, testing and recording it won't be as much work as either of the two games you've tried your hand at so far, and it'll clock in at 15 minutes or less.
And after you've finished that game you might find that you'd like another crack at this one. =P
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
I'd say that sound like a "Meh." to me.
I started a full run of the game (one that doesn't use warps) at the same time I started this run. In fact, I started that because I realized shortly after doing the first two warps of the warped run that there wouldn't be many opportunities to show off the mouse hauling ass. Whereas the first level of the game is one long section of the mouse running at top speed.
The problem with that is that the final movie would be some 45-55 minutes long, and I'm just not sure that it's worth the extra time just to get four or five levels of the mouse doing his turbo-dash thing.
I dunno, maybe I should go work on that run and get a few opinions on it.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Why was there an underwater bus stop, again?
*shakes head*
I'm not sure which is weirder: that you're running this game, or that I'm looking forward to your updates. =P
Are you sure the green weapon is the best one? I seem to recall that it's really only powerful if you're willing to charge it all the way up. But I might be misremembering that.
Yeah, levels 1, 2, and 4 all look good. The two boss fights in level 3 look like they're.... off. I dunno. That level in general just looks bad. But then again, it's probably just the level; water levels are usually really nasty to speedrun.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Truncated wrote:
>the universe was in an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense ball. Just sitting there. Now. Why didn't it stay that way?
See, this guy called Newton had this law which we commonly call "intertia" which says that things in motion remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force and things not in motion remain motionless unless acted upon by an outside force.
Newton's laws are just macro-scale simplifications of other laws. They do not work at an atomic level, and anyway the laws need not be the same under the extremely special conditions that a singularity provide.
Anyway, proposing a "god" or any such thing in no way solves the problem of where the universe came from - it only pushes the problem one step further, and introduces a heap of unanswerable questions.
Rest assured that science has no need for the hypothesis of a god. It has never solved anything so far and the places where you can try to pry it in are getting fewer and fewer. See for example God of the Gaps.
If you want a philosophical debate, then make your own topic for it. As I said, I didn't make that first comment with the intention of starting one, and I have no intention of following up on your argument against mine. It's always been my experience that trying to convince other people to change their beliefs is an excercise in futility. Since I think we've already both spoken our minds, we can leave it at that. K?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Blublu wrote:
Well, geology seems to disprove the existense of the Volcano God. It depends on how you define "god", really. If you say "God is outside out time and space", it is impossible to disprove his/her/its existense. Then again, it's also impossible to disprove the existense of invisible pink unicorns.
Yes, it's impossible to disprove. Yes, I realize that being impossible to disprove means absolutely nothing. But you see, Science actually predicts the existance of a deity. I shall use the Big Bang Theory as my example, here. Think about it: the universe was in an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense ball. Just sitting there. Now. Why didn't it stay that way?
See, this guy called Newton had this law which we commonly call "intertia" which says that things in motion remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force and things not in motion remain motionless unless acted upon by an outside force.
Now. Let's think about this. Universe in this tiny ball. Everything that is and ever will be. Either it just decided to ignore this law, OR something outside the universe acted on it and made it explode. Call that what you will, but it sounds like a god to me.
Hence athiests who say that science more-or-less disproves the existance of God are at least as dogmatic in their beliefs as I am, and just generally haven't given the matter a lot of thought. (Not that I'm insisting that there is a god and that athiests beliefs are entirely unfounded, mind you. Simply that the particular argument that "science nulls god," is unsound.)
In any case, I didn't really say that first bit with the intention of starting a philosophical debate, and I don't really want to get involved in one now, so if you disagree, just do so respectfully and we'll leave it at that.
schneelocke wrote:
You don't need to fill out any forms to become an editor on Wikipedia. Signing up for a user account requires no more than choosing a username and a password; but in fact, that's not even necessary. You can also edit anonymously if you wish.
Really? That would explain why there are actually entries on the individual summoned monsters from the Final Fantasy series there.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Vote no. It's not a significant enough improvement of the last one to warrant publication in the time before the improved version gets published. In fact, not only should the author cancel this submission, he probably shouldn't have submitted it in the first place.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Heh. I always love old games with the bad climbing animation that looks like your character is humping the rope.
Enh. The movie feels like a meh, but I think that's more the game's fault than nif's. I'll give him a "Yes" anyway.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
2980 on level 15. Although I feel that I should say that I actually knew how to solve it, I just hit the wrong key. But, yeah.... I kept getting stuck on level 13. 'S interesting, to say the least.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(65)
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Histories can be fabricated. Especially on such a medium as Wikipedia, where anyone who's willing to fill out 15 minutes worth of forms can become an editor and post entries like that to be misleading.
That being said, I lump that into the same category as athiests who insist that science disproves the existance of a god.
