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Catastrophe wrote:
scrimpeh wrote:
Nice improvement. Yes vote, natch.
Edit: One thing I'd like to know in general is what happens in the screen wrap-around glitch. Why does it work and how is it done?
If anyone could tell me, that'd be much appreciated.
Due to some odd grid-snapping code Link can only turn on every 4th pixel. For example, if you're at x=125, facing right, and you hold up, then Link will walk east to x=128 before turning north, and then start walking north.
Movement on the same axis is unaffected. If Link is at x=125, facing right, and you press left, then Link will walk left immediately. There's no need to snap Link to the grid in this case so the game doesn't.
Tapping one frame in a perpendicular direction will cause Link to do an instant 180 turn without moving. This is a bug in the grid-based code. (Who checked for 1-frame inputs in the 80s?)
The check for screen transitions assumes that if Link was facing left then the player must be holding left. (Bad!)
1) Stand at x=5, facing left.
2) Tap up or down for exactly 1 frame.
3) Link is now at x=5, facing right. The grid-based code normally prevents this!
4) Walk left. Since Link is facing right, the map transition check for the right side of the screen is checked, oops.
5) Link's x-coordinate underflows and he appears on the right side of the screen.
6) And now that your x=255, and you're facing left, the left screen transition is checked, and that fails too.
The y-coordinate is the same except that you need to adjust for y=0 being up in the status area. While walking around in the status area the map data is usually a copy of the top 3 rows of map data, shifted left a half tile. Except for when it isn't. :x
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Alright, thanks for the great response, everyone. I did not expect it at all.
jlun2 wrote:
This was nice. You mentioned the tree had weird glitches. Can you please show them in a separate video?
Can do!
Link to video
You can climb up the tree without triggering the screen transition by doing so at the very edge. Your y position just wraps around, so you'll be effectively where you started. For some reason, the game keeps track of both your x and y positions in 2 bytes, so even though only the low byte is relevant most of the time, the high byte not being zero here prevents your character from getting shown on the screen.
A common theme in this game is attacking messing up screen transitions in some capacity. Here, you can abuse it for a couple of different things.
Similar glitches also exist elsewhere, so here is some additional stuff I didn't get to show:
Link to video
Here you can see Airwalking by letting a gravestone carry you into the wall. It's pretty neat, but not very useful anywhere - Plus, if you jump, you can't get back down again, which makes it possible to get stuck in several parts.
In the video, I also show how attacking before triggering a screen transition can permanently bork the exits.
Link to video
Sprite glitches are really common. This is just one of them that I couldn't show.
Link to video
Some more airwalking, along with why I couldn't do it against Frankenstein himself.
I hope y'all found some of that somewhat interesting. Cheers.
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As a rule of thumb, your second run will always be miles better than your first. As tempting as it may be to submit your newly finished TASes to the site, you may want to wait for a v2 which benefits from all the experience you've made with the game and skills you've gained as a TASer.
Plus, doing a testrun beforehand allows you to nail down the route and strategies of your game so you don't run into brickwalls when doing the "real" run.
If you finish a run, you can always post it on the forum first to collect feedback. If the feedback is good enough, you can still submit it anyway.
Good luck with your endeavours.
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Nice improvement. Yes vote, natch.
Edit: One thing I'd like to know in general is what happens in the screen wrap-around glitch. Why does it work and how is it done?
If anyone could tell me, that'd be much appreciated.
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Hi. If you're unsure about a submission in the future, you may want to upload it on userfiles, and post it on the forum.
You'll get much better feedback that way.
As it stands, B presses or not, this is unfortunately not a good category choice. It's not very interesting and pretty trivial to TAS.
Best of luck in the future.
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If you mean movies like this one, you need to set FCEUX to enable background input, launch 2 instances of it, load the games, and TAS away. You need to be very wary of desyncs, however.
There was a tutorial on this somewhere, let me see if I can dig that up...
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Kurabupengin wrote:
The old ones are too big, with that I mean the actual pixel size.
I like the idea of scaling them down, I felt they were too big before.
I was wondering if, in general, they may be look better with the black areas removed, i.e. like this:
With Mega Man X1, X2 and X3, it's really just a matter of turning the black area transparent. With Mega Man 3, 4, 5 and 6, one'd crop out the 8 black columns on the left of each screenshot and put them back together again.
There's one caveat in that the black bars are part of the actual NES output, and therefore technically shouldn't be cropped out. However, I think they look really distracting here.
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Hello Alex76FR
It depends on the system framerate, which is usually around 60. So a frame is 1000/60, or ~16.667 milliseconds long.
On NES, the exact framerate is around 60.0988 fps, so it's probably closer to 16.639 milliseconds per frame.
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Excitement!
I was hoping a NSMB run would come along sometime. Gonna watch now, editing my post with comments later.
Edit:
That was really good. I liked the Death Abuse in 8-F2. Does the current wapred publication do that?
Yes vote.
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Finally got around to watching the encode (Thanks, FractalFusion!)
Of all the alternate goal runs for Rockman we've seen before, this one is by far the most entertaining. The execution is on point and very smooth, with no obvious mistakes. It's also quite refreshing to see the game how it "should" be played, rather than what TASers made of it. My only question is whether it is possible to not have enemies drop items in the boss corridor so you don't have to jump over them.
It's a shame the PSX version cuts the sound quality so bad (at least I presume that's the game and not the encode), but the weapon switch makes up for it. I also really appreciate that the PSX version eliminated the copious amounts of lag that plagued the first Mega Man.
So, all in all, I really did like the run. If we want to publish an "alternate goals" run for Rockman, it should be this one. A RCW run has also been published before (by the same author, no less), so this shouldn't be a problem either.
I'm voting yes.
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Aqfaq wrote:
ALAKTORN wrote:
Aqfaq wrote:
EgxHB wrote:
I put three months of on-off work into the original run, and another month on the second iteration. It's a waste of the author's sweat and toil.
It sound like you don't enjoy TASing. You should probably stop and find a hobby that you actually enjoy.
It sounds like you don’t have a brain. You should probably stop posting.
You correct. I have no brain. you man like you say that always to a woman like me. I should sweat and toil to make run and complain and be proud of me. then have brain only.
This thread's going places, I can see it now.
Anyhow, EgxHB, while this is a shitty thing to do from the uploader, we're not your lawyers. I second (third?) what Derakon said, since this is the likeliest and easiest way to get results.
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So this is what the cartesian product of Burst Chaser and Air Sliding looks like.
Anyhow, the TAS exhibits a pretty large mastery over the game, making it through the stages at such a breakneck speed. Thanks to the spot-on execution, it makes for a very smooth and exciting watch.
On the other hand, as this is a hack, it was explicitely made to enable fast movement without really changing much else about the core game engine. One has to consider if Rockman 4: MI, which features similarily fast movement using the Hell Wheel weapon isn't a better representative of this category.
As far as entertainment goes, I'm voting yes.
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As great as a hack may be to play, if it doesn't bring any new gameplay or significantly different level design to the table, there's no reason to publish a TAS of it on the site.
I can't see anything majorly different from the vanilla game in the TAS, unfortunately.
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If ya couldn't have done 99, you shoulda at least gone for some funny number like 42 or 69. But 78, what significance does 78 bear? It's not even a prime number!
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While I know nothing about the game or the run's technical merits or the aspects it improves on in regards to previous submissions, I can rest assured the movie file ends on the very exact frame the last input is delivered.
If that's not an instant yes vote right there, I don't know what is.
The old ones are too big, with that I mean the actual pixel size.
With Mega Man X1, X2 and X3, it's really just a matter of turning the black area transparent. With Mega Man 3, 4, 5 and 6, one'd crop out the 8 black columns on the left of each screenshot and put them back together again.
There's one caveat in that the black bars are part of the actual NES output, and therefore technically shouldn't be cropped out. However, I think they look really distracting here.