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Question to Judges:
Suppose there is a game where it has a lottery system. It's very unlikely in a normal gameplay session to win the 1st prize. Extremely unlikely, and especially rare to get.
If you do win 1st prize, you will earn the prize, but it has no effect on the story plot progression, no NPC dialogue changes, and anything else. It may be an insignificant game event, but due to its rarity, it may have some significance in entertainment value.
When doing a "maximum event%" TAS, is it acceptable to try to win 1st prize as part of the run?
LogansGamingRoom wrote:
how do you completely erase a cancelled tas from this website?
I think you don't. It's so that, in the case where someone wanted to continue with your cancelled TAS, they would have something to work upon.
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My personal wishlist for console verification:
I would like to see GBA TAS runs be console verified on the same game, River City Ransom EX.
https://tasvideos.org/7569S (This is already approved for Playground)
https://tasvideos.org/7579S (This is already approved for Playground)
https://tasvideos.org/7900S (This is still pending judgement, as of writing.)
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
On the RTA leaderboard there are "no cheats" categories. What are those cheats, and how are they unlocked in game?
They are referring to "Password Cheats" and "Character Profile Customizations".
Password Cheats can be entered in the game, by going to the in-game menu, Status, and then change your character's name. You can unlock many special techniques only NPCs can use, and special end-game items called "Scroll Items".
With the power of "Scroll Items", and the in-game's menu feature to allow players to merge multiple character profiles (called Character Profile Customizations), you can create powerful characters. By merging multiple profiles together and using the Scroll Items, you can effectively create a brand new character with a custom appearance, super technique attacks, and ultra high attack stats. So when you start a brand new game, you can choose to load your customized profiles, and then speedrun as quickly as possible to the end.
In my TAS run, I didn't use any password cheats nor have access to the end-game Scroll Items. Scroll Items can only be unlocked in New Game+ mode (NG+).
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I will do my best to explain how the game works:
EZGames69 wrote:
So I wasn't sure why jumping was only done near the end of some stages as you seem to get a good speed boost, but when I looked at the inputs I found that the jump speed builds up overtime the longer you run for, so it seems to only be worth doing at the height of that speed. Especially since you pause for a second when landing. Also I assume you can't jump in the shop areas so that explains why it wasn't done there.
When you are in midair, you can control your characters to where they will land by holding down the D-pad in the direction you wished to go. In other words, you are able to accelerate when in midair. In certain stages, I would jump near the end, so that I can accelerate and move faster than if I were to run normally and enter the next area. In the game, you can either walk, run, or jump into the transitional entrances to reach the next area. If you were to jump and accelerate into the entrances, you get an overall faster time entering the next area than if you were to run to the next area.
EZGames69 wrote:
Also the jump speed I mentioned above? That doesn't matter anymore after awhile because MY MAN IS ZOOMIN. I guess somehow buying a bunch of swords made this guy run extremely fast, and also teleporting? Honestly I wasn't paying attention to all the shopping so I must have missed the part where my man learned instant transmission.
The "teleporting" skill is learnt when you use the Skaterz item. All the sword items are used to boost the attack stats, and nothing more. The running speed is set to the max when you use the Rocketeers item.
EZGames69 wrote:
Now since RNG seems to be a big part of this game, and minor improvement to some areas may not be worth it if it means different enemy behavior (which was mentioned by the author in the submission text). But even so, I can't see anything that looks sloppy or at least improvable. One of the boss fights though had a 74 frame wait time before moving to the next room, which I assume was RNG manipulation, as when I removed that the following enemies didn't sync with the inputs.
Correct, RNG manipulation happens whenever your character interacts with the NPC, and the NPC is about to do a new action (walk, block, attack, turn around, flee, etc.). When it happens, the RNG determinant updates, and will drastically affect the next RNG that will occur a few frames later.
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Forgot to trim empty frames near the tail end of the exported BK2.
User movie #638073630631867133
Could someone replace the current BK2 file with this one? Thanks in advance.
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calcwatch2 wrote:
YoshiRulz wrote:
Is there a reason you're not just doing everything in C#?
I'd love to do everything in C#. I thought Lua scripts were the only official way to write tools that ran while the game was running. Is there a C# way to do this?
And then would this be a DLL plugin of some kind? I'd prefer something that's simple for others to set up. It's easy enough to tell people "Download this Lua script and run it from the console."
It's the Bizhawk API, "ApiHawk". It's a way to write external tools (and is how you would create DLL plugins).
https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk-ExternalTools/wiki
It's pretty easy for other users as well. Just tell them to drop the DLL inside the Bizhawk/ExternalTools folder, and start up the Emuhawk.
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willbobsled wrote:
I guess I'll chime in.
I've been keeping my eye on RCR EX TAS progress for some months and while I really wanted to see the game represented on the site, I wasn't too thrilled with the choice of category, since Any% seemed like a far more natural debut. I don't recall the exact theoretical TAS route but Lottery->Excalibur (lots of 'em) + Skaterz->Pump Sneaks was assumed to be fastest.
The disadvantages of buying Pump Sneaks is that you need to buy multiples of them to max out your agility, which helps to increase your running speed up to a certain point below the max value, while a single purchase of Rocketeers would give you max agility value at the get go.
The RNG gods tried their best at thwarting my efforts, and they did succeed. :*(
This is the current best attempt at making Excaliburs + Rocketeers + Skaterz, PRIOR to the reputation and additional optimization strategies found after this submission was created.
Link to video
However, it is slower by around 20 seconds due to how the RNG calculates the *next* lottery ticket winnings to get a second 3rd prize winning, to be able to purchase the in-game shop items, and other things. My current progress involves trying to make the RNG (via the determinant) hit the exact number before it loops back to 0x270. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
willbobsled wrote:
One major routing issue was that there was no fast way to deathwarp back to Waterfront Mall other than jumping in the pit before the warehouse after some immense backtracking but if you find a way to do all the shopping and then void out or die in Mojo's room, something similar would likely be optimal. Amusingly this route would look very similar to the current RCR NES TAS. I'd really strongly recommend reaching out to the RTA community on discord for advice for routing on future submissions.
Will do. Do you know where I should reach out to the RTA community, as I'm only familiar with Speedrun.com?
willbobsled wrote:
Finally, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere but the RNG is handled by a simple index and array of size 128 or 256, I forget which. The index cycles through the array taking the value of both the element retrieved and the one after it to do RNG magic until the end of the array where the RNG array is rerandomised and index is reset to 0. An interesting note is that the array always seems to be initialised with the same RNG values at power on, which hinted at an RTA-viable route to using Lotto Tix. Also we were looking for the Gang Distribution table in the ROM (chance of each gang appearing in each room) but were unable to find it - please let me know if you discover anything. Good luck!
If you are able to figure out where the RNG is handled using the simple index you've mentioned, please post in the discussion thread here:
https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/2028
It's best to try and consolidate all of our findings to that one place, so it's easier to keep track of it. Also, if you have more information about the Gang Type RNG, I wish to know that as well, so we can see what we can do with it to get more ENTREES often.
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I haven't dabbled too deeply in this. In your code, it seems you are adding new picture boxes to the same form, and thus you are stacking the forms together. What if you add new picture boxes to different forms?
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Looks like there's a consensus:
Routing strategy comparison (greater = better): Rocketeers + Skaterz > Rocketeers > Skaterz > Agility stat boosts > None
I'll have to return from travel in October, to begin experimenting with the TAS a bit more.
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From Samsara's post, a "far superior strategy" was mentioned. Does that mean, judging only by solo special techniques alone, does that mean "using Rocketeers" is a better strategy than "using Skaterz"? Or, it means something else entirely?
feos wrote:
There's nothing to change because we don't ban this.
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feos wrote:
Samsara wrote:
4. RCREX lets you freely change several options that affect both gameplay and physics. Making full use of these would speed up the run significantly. I don't exactly know how we would handle this from a rules perspective right now: I'd personally allow it, but I'd need to run it by others for a consensus before making it official.
If those options are there to be freely and openly edited, that looks like an intended feature. Is there any official assessment of how "normal" those options are considered by the devs?
I'm basing this off of how the game allows the players to access this setting.
The game has 2 types of menus, the Pre-game Settings, and the In-game Settings.
Pre-game settings are settings the player can configure before the main story begins. Some of the settings seen here are disabled when you're in-game, meaning you would require starting a brand new game session if you feel like you wanted to change the settings again.
In-game settings are settings the player can freely toggle and tweak to their preferences. It can be accessed at any time in the game in the Start menu, but it can only be accessed after the game session has begun, meaning you cannot access these settings from the Pre-game settings menu. The gravity and stats multipliers are accessed through the in-game settings, which means, at any point in the game, it is up to the player to choose whether to stick with the defaults, change the gravity from normal to either very low or very high, or change the stats multipliers from +0 to +2 or -2. This means, the developers of the game do intend the players to choose how strong they want their characters to be, either as the main titular characters, or created through the Custom Character Scroll.
(Custom Character Scroll is a NG+ item that allows the player to customize their character, allowing the player to use NPC's special techniques, NPC's stats, or custom appearances.)
I personally would say, it's pretty "normal" for those options to be used in the game at any point in time by the developers.
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Samsara wrote:
One, I don't find the category itself to be particularly publishable. To me, it doesn't do enough to warrant a separate branch, i.e if any% to 100% is a spectrum, then this sits far too deep into the any% side and just feels like unnecessary work for effectively the same result. It makes even less sense when the final bosses are actually defeated extremely quickly with that edge of screen bug, so all of the extra effort to spawn the other three bosses leads to the payoff of spending a few more seconds throwing them. Even with the edge bug strategy, I think this final fight would be far more interesting at the end of a more "full completion" style run, perhaps something like "all bosses" since a good number are skipped here.
Samsara wrote:
Overall, I think the best course of action here is to just make a new strictly any% run from the ground up, with active collaboration instead of whatever led to this situation.
Does this mean we should change it up, so that instead of using the "wall edge collision bug/glitch" to quickly off the bosses, we should aim for a "glitchless alternate final boss%"? Or, instead of fighting the 4 final bosses, we should only fight the 1 final boss, meaning it would be purely a "glitchless any%"?
By using the "wall edge collision bug/glitch" where the enemy falls through the floor, the feedback I've gotten is "the final boss fights are too quick to be considered to be entertaining." Does this actually have an impact on how TASes are judged if the runs are aiming for non-standard goals/Moons, such as the cases here where the 2 runs have the same goals?
Samsara wrote:
There definitely needs to be a better way of handling situations like these. I might have to go back to the drawing board for our rules and standards and figure out something that makes sense.
I'm glad we finally helped and contributed to the site.
Samsara wrote:
In terms of potential improvements off of what's already here, I have a few ideas:
1. Clearly the best possible improvement would be a 2nd prize lotto win, though that seems unlikely unless the RNG is analyzed further.
2. The ultimate strategy here appears to be a combination of what the two runs do, as the Rocketeers and Skaterz are both able to work together, giving both the incredible speed and the teleportation effect.
3. Acro Circus may be worth looking into as both an attack and a movement option, though I'll admit I just love that ability and want to see it used. Ideally, it would be obtained at the same time as Grand Slam.
4. RCREX lets you freely change several options that affect both gameplay and physics. Making full use of these would speed up the run significantly. I don't exactly know how we would handle this from a rules perspective right now: I'd personally allow it, but I'd need to run it by others for a consensus before making it official.
If this happens, feel free to work off of my userfile, though please at least try to improve it instead of using it unmodified.
For the special techniques, I will try to look into what other possible special techniques that could work in a TAS run. Note, that there is a reputation penalty system in place where if you use the same special technique 3 times in a row, you lose 2 reputation points. I believed this is a check to make sure the player isn't spamming the most powerful special technique in the game all the time and still proceeding with the story with high reputation.
Please let us (me and Chamale) know on the consensus of whether we are allowed to modify in-game parameters, like gravity and the stats multipliers. For the time being, I'll keep it by their default values.
In the meantime, I got to travel for work, and won't return until October. 😢
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Some external feedback has been obtained from another place. I was told that it is up to the judges to decide whether to seek out feedback from outside of TASVideo forums.
Thus far, this is the only feedback I received when they viewed the comparison video posted above.
crienne wrote:
Chamale's was way better IMO. I didn't like the teleports tom_mai used and for whatever reason I found the variety of weapons in Chamale's run to be more enjoyable than tom_mai just using the chain.
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Just noticed the branch edit.
That is actually a better name. I like it, as it is more descriptive of the run's main goal. I would also liked to know what others think about this.
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Chamale wrote:
I don't agree with tom_mai78101 describing it as a "secret events" run, because there are a lot of secret events and this run doesn't do most of them. I think the alternate final boss fight against 4 enemies is worth including as a separate category, but I think that's up to the voters.
Recruiting Ivan is the fastest way to get four members of the party. Gary or Rick require starting with only one character, and Conan requires defeating thirty Generic Dudes.
Understood. Then, let's not use "Secret Events" category.
@feos chose "secret bosses", do you agree with this category? If yes, then I believed this should answer @arkiandruski 's concern.
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arkiandruski wrote:
So, the more I try to look into this run, the harder time I have giving it a succinct objective goal.
This run and Chamale's run before it seek to unlock a final boss fight where Slick calls on three others and you fight four people. Other than that, it basically follows an any% route, except they both go out of their way to recruit Ivan, which requires talking to multiple NPCs.
Yes. REX and IVAN are both recruitable allies which are the fastest 2 allies you can get apart from RYAN (playing as ALEX+RYAN), GARY (playing as ALEX only), and RICK (playing as RYAN only). The other recruitable allies require decently high reputation score, which is not feasible to do in a Crazy difficulty speedrun. Also, just found out recently, there is another way to recruit 3 allies immediately, by defeating the Generic Dudes gang 3 times, defeat the gang of any type on the street where they spawn from, and then recruiting the Generic Dudes with CONAN as the leader, but you require RYAN not to be in your party at the start. I'll try experimenting with this a bit more now that we've got Reputation nailed down. I do not think recruiting CONAN and the Generic Dudes is feasible, because:
- ALEX + RYAN / RYAN + ALEX => You cannot recruit CONAN and the gang, and you can skip GARY and RICK unavoidable cutscenes.
- ALEX => You can recruit CONAN and the gang, but you will accrue additional time with attempts to defeat Generic Dudes 3 times and GARY's unavoidable cutscenes.
- RYAN => You cannot recruit CONAN and the gang, and you will accrue additional time with RICK's unavoidable cutscenes.
EDIT: I did the experiment, and found that recruiting CONAN takes too much time. It's unfeasible. However, you do get the opportunity to RNG the lottery ticket winnings and earn 1st Prize.
Refusing their invitation to let them into your party means => More unavoidable cutscenes and dialogues, and you don't want those things taking up valuable frames. Declining IVAN doesn't mean you get to recruit them back into your party later on => Failing to satisfy SLICK+3 secret event condition.
I was trying to save as many frames as possible when doing the run, but in the end, I only ended up saving about 120 frames. A single dialogue can run you past 150 frames (including dialogues before and after player accepts/declines the offer), so I cannot miss any opportunities to reduce the amount of dialogues I cannot skip.
arkiandruski wrote:
Currently the run is listed as "Secret Bosses". The justification for that is unlocking the final boss fight with four enemies, but if that counts as a secret boss, shouldn't those other fights mentioned be as well? Also, there are bosses that are optional which can be seen as secret or extra, like Benny and Clyde who require going on a branch from the main path, Alex/Ryan (depending on the PC you choose, you can fight the one not chosen) which requires returning to a previous area, and Jesse who requires beating a certain boss five times.
That "Secret Bosses" category was not me who decided upon it, as I originally wanted to be called "Secret Event", based on GameFAQs walkthroughs. I thought that "Secret Bosses" category is the consensus of many, so I left it at that.
In my opinion, mine and Chamale's run both should've been categorized as "Secret Event" and not "Secret Bosses", because that SLICK+OTIS+DRAGON TWIN (or called SLICK+3) boss fight battle is just a secret event, not a "secret bosses" thing. Optional boss battles, like BENNY + CLYDE (unlocks JINNY side quest), JESSE (unlocks TURK+JESSE event), TEX (requires IVAN side quest), RYAN/ALEX warehouse battle (must not have allies for secret event), and TITUS (unlocks secret ending), only contribute to additional story elements in the game, much like side quests, that rounds out the main story and character interactions. You only battle these optional bosses if you wanted to unlock more story cutscenes, see how their special techniques perform in battle, or if you just wanted to earn reputation / money. They do not contribute to the main story, and they do not block your progress to reach SLICK.
The special techniques are unlocked once you are in NG+ mode, in which you will be given access to obtain the 3 CUSTOM scrolls in Merlin's Secret. Those scrolls will allow you to be anyone whom you've met before and use their techniques. For example, if you defeated JESSE, you will then be able to turn into JESSE or copy JESSE special techniques and apply it to your ALEX character. And then you can play as ALEX with JESSE techniques, if you're familiar with how the techniques are activated.
If we still wanted a category that differentiates from Chamale's run and have a more succinct goal in mind, may I suggest "warping"? I did use warps/teleportation, allowing my run to be faster than Chamale's "warpless" run, and my whole goal in this run is try to use the most optimal RNG possible to make warping feasible in a TAS run.
arkiandruski wrote:
The decision to recruit Ivan is also difficult. Like the Slick boss fight, I can't really say it's the only character recruit that has hidden conditions to happen. There are some characters where you have to refuse invites in order to have a chance of recruiting them for example. Also, having Ivan is not a requirement for the Slick fight, nor do I think recruiting him is the fastest way to fulfill those conditions.
IVAN is definitely not a requirement for the SLICK fight, but it's one of the known fastest way to satisfy the requirement of "getting a total of 4 allies in your party" for the SLICK+3 boss fight, because it is the only recruitable ally that does not require any reputation. There will be more experimenting to do, now that we have an updated information of things to research (e.g. Reputation, and conditions need to be met to recruit others into your party prior to fighting against SLICK+3).
Let me know if you need anything from me. I'll do my best to answer them.
So, I decided to look into the Reputation system to see what was happening with it.
Total Reputation is stored in IWRAM value $0242 (Combined WRAM value $040242). This only changes on screen transitions. IWRAM $0246 (Combined WRAM $040246) holds the value you've currently gained or lost on the current screen. On every screen transition, this value is added to $0242 and resets to 0. Both of these are signed, 1 byte values.
Running into walls gives you 1 Rep each time you do it.
Defeating a boss gives you 2 Rep.
Dying gives you 4 Rep.
Clearing a field of enemies gives you 5 Rep.
Recruiting a character gives you 16 Rep.
You can gain Rep while fighting, though I don't exactly know how this works.
Losing Rep comes from fighting dirty (hitting enemies while they're on the ground, hitting bosses while they're still talking, etc).
Recruiting Rex, as done in this run, only requires your reputation to not be negative, i.e 0 or above. What this means is that this run has a lot of wiggle room for fighting dirty to save time. 32 points of Rep, in fact:
Also, since Rep only changes on screen transitions, clearing out the gang before Rex can be done however you want, as Rep cannot change between entering the screen and Rex appearing.
This information is really important, as it's the one of the 3 main holy grails to obtain a better RCR EX TAS run. The other 2 are: 1) What determines the Gang Type when entering a new area, 2) How to manipulate the enemy NPCs to obtain optimal attack/action patterns.
The screenshot depicts the stats multipliers.
EDIT: Just noticed now, it's "stats modifiers", not "stats multipliers".... Bah.......Also, since Rep only changes on screen transitions, clearing out the gang before Rex can be done however you want, as Rep cannot change between entering the screen and Rex appearing.