Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Sorry for not keeping you updated. Had to redo a small part cous I found some more optimizers. Right now I'm on vaccation and won't be home until sunday. But its sure looking good, and I'm thinking of releaseing the WIP, because frankly I don't know when I can get around to fix the rest of the run I'm affraid. The snowman boss is a pain for me to manipulate, and I really need the battle to be near perfect, because of saving energy enough to beat the other bosses.
nfq
Player (93)
Joined: 5/10/2005
Posts: 1204
Yeah, would be interesting to see the WIP :)
Joined: 4/29/2005
Posts: 1212
I really hope this gets finished. I mean, aside from the new PC game, this is the only other GOOD Ghostbusters game.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Sorry for not keeping you up to date so frequently. I have a busy schedule which keeps me away from doing TAS:es most of the time. Today however I did have some spare time to do some more work. I have decided to remake a great part of the game because I need more energy to clear out the bosses after the Snowman. The problem is that Snowman is a bitch to manipulate. In a perfect world, or with some understanding of how the snowman can be manipulated, I would not need the extra energy. In theory it is possible to clear him off without buying any more, and still have enough to clear out the upcoming bosses. However I am limited as it seems right now, and therefor I'm going back to get more energy tanks. So as far as I can tell, I will need to remake the entire castle, again, in order to have more for the bitch fight with snowy. Would be ironic if it changes the way Mr. Frosty behaves in his movement, letting me clear him the way I want right now. The most optimal way to kick the boss would be if he continued to move in the x axis, back and forth, in a height which I can jump easily, yet avoiding his minions. Then I could hit him 3-4 times with each phaser-shell. 4 hits is extremely hard to pull off though. Hopefully the next update I post here will be positive though. Stay tuned. Oh, and if either of you is good at making Lua-scripts, it would be very helpful to have hit-boxes and other useful things. The addresses for health I already have. Another thing that comes to mind that I very much would like is something that tells when it's possible to hit the boss again after the cool-down. Cheers meanwhile.
nfq
Player (93)
Joined: 5/10/2005
Posts: 1204
yo, are you still working on this? soon i might submit my crappy 3 year old TAS of this if you don't finish it :P
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Yeah. I'm still active with it. Whats your finish time in the old one? Would be nice to see a time chart on every level.
nfq
Player (93)
Joined: 5/10/2005
Posts: 1204
i downloaded my old gmv, and gens says it's 23 minutes och 35 seconds. there was some guy who had a faster one i think, on the previous page. feel free to hexedit the end of my run in yours if you have trouble finishing it.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Well... The problem with Ghostbusters is that it is not very friendly to hex editing at all. Otherwise I would be done five times around by now. :D When I hex edit that game I always get desyncs. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Have you ever managed to do that? Edit: Watched Hot Sam's movie again, and I'm about 4305 frames a head of him when his movie ends. Give or take a couple of frames, because I just made a quick estimation.
nfq
Player (93)
Joined: 5/10/2005
Posts: 1204
nah, i haven't hex-edited movies from this game... actually i have no idea how to hex-edit, but i can edit movies with the tas movie editor program (that's what i meant by 'hex-editing'). it's intuitive to use.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Highness wrote:
Well... The problem with Ghostbusters is that it is not very friendly to hex editing at all. Otherwise I would be done five times around by now. :D When I hex edit that game I always get desyncs. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Have you ever managed to do that? Edit: Watched Hot Sam's movie again, and I'm about 4305 frames a head of him when his movie ends. Give or take a couple of frames, because I just made a quick estimation.
Too bad I know nothing useful about Lua scripts or hex editing, otherwise I'd try to help in some way.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Cool. I'm also thinking of putting up a big archive of all the bugs, tricks, and glitches I've found. Quite plenty funny things.
Skilled player (1308)
Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
So hows it going on this Highness?
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
It's on again somehow. I quit job permanently now, and also I moved to Peru. I will have some more spare time on my hands now to work on this. Just need to find an apartment first. Right now me and my girlfriend is living in a hostel, and my priorities right now is to get the costs down. So as soon as this is settled, I will continue to finalize this project. So it should be reasonably soon now. :) Stay tuned.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Ok. So we've found a good apartment, and we're settled. Time to do some work now. Edit: So. The ball is in movement now. I restarted from hi-rise building to optimize buying the energy, instead of doing it once more later. Turns out that this was not all in vein. Somehow, even though I burn more frames by buying more energy, I save 30 frames from a shortcut I did not think of before. :) Motivation is essential to make me progress further, and I love those small boosts. I now reach the eye worm at 28606 frames. I so want to show you guys this run. I think it will be a masterpiece for this game. Cheers
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
I'm glad you could sort everything out. This is great news. Can't wait to see the run.
Joined: 4/29/2005
Posts: 1212
So, what's the progress on this at the moment? This is one of my most anticipated runs. :3
Skilled player (1308)
Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
Any news your Highness?
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Anything new to tell about the progress, Highness?
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Oh, sorry for not noticing the post here earlier. I just came back to Germany more or less, and soon I'm flying back to Sweden. The progress has been slow. I'm still stuck at the eye-worm as I can't get it to spawn and move as I want to. I will soon think to just do that boss as fast as I can, even though it will be slightly sloppy, and I will loose some frames, just in order to complete the run finally. If any one of you can help me find some interesting and useful data about that boss, I would be glad to wrap it up. The eye-worm I'm talking about is in the Hi-rise building. After that boss, everything should be more or less straight forward, as I am now more equipped with another energy tank to faster clear the bosses in deep-hole (final stage). I've tried a lot of things with the eye-worm boss, like delaying frames before encounter, or to randomly mash buttons to see if it can affect him easily, but so far I'm out of luck it seems. Of course I sometimes get different results, but nothing which is satisfying enough. And I can probably say that this is one of the hardest tasks in the game because of the dynamics this boss seems to have. I also was bitching about Mr. Frosty in deep-hole and did not manage to manipulate him good enough with the previous energy resources I had, so thats why I am back in Hi-rise to redo that part. This has been a good set-back all in all though, since I've found greater short-cuts during that run. You can expect quite a lot from this run to be honest. I've found quite a lot of glitches that can be used in a lot of places. Also there is one more potential shortcut in hi-rise building, but I have not yet managed to get it to work properly. I'm starting to get my energy and motivation back, and I am really feeling like putting an end to this now. Like I said earlier. If there is anything you want to contribute, or can contribute to make my progress faster/easier, feel free to do so. I can always do with some good LUA scripts of all sorts. Cheers for the attention in this game! I'll hear you all soon again.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Made a small improvement today. I was just testing something out to see if I could cancel out the time being immovable from taking damage. The result was that I could not regain movement, but for some reason I still ended up being 5 frames faster. Hopefully this maybe leads to the movement seed of the eye-worm boss changes to my favor, since the current movement pattern of the boss was not at all to help for me. 5 frames are not that exciting for the individual watching it probably. But for me, saving 5 frames in THAT location, right before the boss room, was very cool. We'll probably see tomorrow how the boss fight goes. Time to catch some Z's now.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
First attempt against the eye worm boss today. Turned out 48 frames slower than my previous attempt. Re-doing it again of course. It should be possible to shave about 80 frames from my time right now. I would be satisfied to get close to it at least to go on par with my old attempt. I'll keep you updated on the progress. Edit: FINALLY the horrible eye-worm boss is done for. Ghost get's contained at 28932 frames, making this go 11 frames faster than last proper time I tried to kill this boss. Edit 2: Just managed to pull off another shortcut. This is so far only faster in theory so far because of the circumstances. But hopefully I can embed this into my run and use it as a real time-saver. If this will be possible to execute under normal conditions it will save lots of time. Not just a couple of frames, but about 10 seconds or so. We'll see how it turns out. Back to crunching. I start to like re-doing bigger parts because of all new findings. :D
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Because of the circumstances around the shortcut I vaguely described above it seems that it won't be possible to pull it off in a fluent way without causing to much delay. So as of now it might cost more frames than I gain, and also it will cause the run to look sloppy. I have yet to test this further, but don't hope for to much. I have only proved to my self that it is possible to take that way if the circumstances are correct. When I finally publish my run I will probably create a page that describes all of my findings. Also, for some reason in my last track between the mini-bosses I ended up loosing 50 frames. As of right now I don't know where that is coming from. So I need to remake that part again. Otherwise it looked pretty solid, but I can't live with the fact that I loose that much time. As far as I can tell it is not from lag frames either, so I've must been doing something terribly wrong here. Back to the drawing board, to crunch some more.
Player (57)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 312
Location: Sweden
Awesome, bro'! :) Keep it up! I just watched it.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Diman wrote:
Awesome, bro'! :) Keep it up! I just watched it.
Cool. Please don't share it though. I want everybody to get a good feeling without sneak peeks when I submit the final product. Glad you liked it though! :)
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Such a great news. Keep it up! :)