The actual act of picking things up takes negligible time so long as you're close to the drop point...Sorcs and Assassins, though, kill from a distance, so that doesn't really help much. Assuming you have the gold, you can completely fill your belt with one click, so it's worth shopping for potions if you're in town anyway. But why would you ever be in town?
Depending on your need for potions, you could get most of them from champions and uniques, who drop multiple stacks (and champions, IIRC, show up in groups, so you get several group stacks). That would be an efficient way to refill, and a good chance to manipulate some drops while you're at it.
I'm extremely intrigued by the concept of making a TAS-friendly WINE, since it implies that we could TAS any game that runs in Windows. Of course, odds are that any TAS solutions would need to be special-coded on a per-game basis - mainly I'm thinking the code to generate a save-state - but man, there's a lot of potential there.
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That video makes sorc look good (and the other makes zon look bad) but I don't know how fast assassin would be.
As good as it sounds on paper, using firewall and blizzard as "fire and forget" is really not as productive at it might seem. When you arn't in line of sight with enemies, their movement becomes unpredictable to an extent, and getting them to stand in a firewall long enough to die might be hard/impossible to manipulate.
You mentioned that damage>plant speed, but there are 2 things wrong with that statement. First of all, damage is a prefix and speed is a suffix, so there is no reason you couldn't get both. The second issue is that damage is of little importance through most of normal, because only a few traps are needed to kill whole groups, so more damage would only really matter for bosses. If only a few traps are needed in a given room, the only thing affecting your clear speed is how fast you can throw 3 traps and move on.
There is one huge issue yet to be addressed-- immunities. In hell nearly every monster is immune to something, including many unskipable bosses. I suspect this is another area the assassin will have a large advantage, because specing traps can easily get you lightning traps as well as fire spells, and little has to be sacrificed to do it. The sorceress will have problems of not doing enough damage if her points are divided too much, because her spells tend to be weak without the buildup of synergies. (frozen orb excluded *somewhat* =P)
The Assassin has another highly valuable skill in that regard, but it's at the end of the other tree: Phoenix Strike.
...watching that run, there's no way anything but the Sorceress would be as good. Static field + teleport (+ telekinesis) are just insurpassable.
eternaljwh:
>> Cows have relatively good loottables. Not everything can drop everything.
baal, his waves and other monsters in act5 can drop as much as cows or even more. Once you killed baal, you should have everything you need that can be dropped there. The only additional items you could get on the cow level after killing baal is the cow king set, which you neither need nor want. Please look up the drop chances.
>> Why only forty? Hell Ancients (to get into the Worldstone Keep) required 60, I thought.
sorry, 60 of course, but those 17-18 levels on hell shouldn't be too much of a problem either. You're 41 after ancients, probably 42 or 43 after baal, that'll work out fine.
I'd actually vote for a full-quest-run, just to make the leveling time a bit more interesting.
>> Phoenix Strike.
unfortunately quite worthless on later nightmare and hell, you need 2 to 4 attacks to trigger something that'll still do only mediocre damage. It's a fine spell for casual playing through end of norm and nightmare, but that's it.
Twelvepack:
>> You mentioned that damage>plant speed, but there are 2 things wrong with that statement.
I just meant that speed-weapons like the flail you suggested are wrong. Go for damage first. Of course you can still get max-speed with the right items, but your primary concern is damage. 1 or 2 frames of plant- or cast-speed won't save much if you need another hit to bring the enemy down. If another skill-level allows you to kill higher monsters, that's usually a good choice.
Traps will disappear when you move about 1.5 screens away from them, if you want to get exp and still keep moving, monsters shouldn't take too long to die.
>> There is one huge issue yet to be addressed-- immunities.
a list of the required (immune) enemies is in my first post in this thread.
By the time we reach the first ones, we can have a merc with 5K dam/second, 100%CB, 100% DS against 5 to 10K life and maybe ~50% phys reduction. Teleport onto them, merc starts hitting immediately, should be down less than a second later. d'uh. It'll take longer to pick up the items needed to equip the merc in the first place.
A handful of required immunes won't be the deciding factor on the total time.
oh, traps without synergies aren't that strong either, excluding DS (which I admit is a pretty good skill the sorc wouldn't have).
Derakon:
>> Of course, odds are that any TAS solutions would need to be special-coded on a per-game basis
yes, they would. Absolutely.
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I think the biggest issue will be leveling from ~40-~60. This will take a lot of time to do regardless of class, but I really don't see how a sorc could do it faster then high speed trap abuse.
After seeing the run, I do agree that sorceress will *probably* be faster, but testing how fast she can level in the mid-late nightmare will be a serious consideration. It would warrant testing if someone were to try such a run.
Also: I love the way he handles Items in this run. the published one was so slow about it, but this new run was way better.
You get something like 7 levels doing ancients at 40 if you use an older version.
Similarly, jump from 20-25 on the first ancients.
On that test run, the item management was pretty good generally (I'm surprised more stamina potions weren't involved in the pre-teleport range, they're cheap), main issue I saw was not getting a staff that had +3 lightning.
combat-execution wise, a few more points of static field somehow would have made Ancients faster by getting them all at once, but it would've been riskier too...
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The biggest thing is that he could have manipulated better staves, like +3 warmth and +3 charges early on (or something like that) but that could take almost forever to find the perfect one.
Only other thing was that it seemed like his experience gain was not as consistent as it could have been. He very suddenly went from going out of his way for exp in act 3 to never slowing for exp at all in acts 4-5. Could be streamlined probably, but would likely only be a min or so at most.
The biggest thing is that he could have manipulated better staves, like +3 warmth and +3 charges early on (or something like that) but that could take almost forever to find the perfect one.
He did manip a staff of +3 Charged Bolt from shop. +3 chbolt/+3 warmth/+3 teleport would be better, but would take many more retries- and, more importantly, more manipulation of other items to have cash, if he manipulated from the store. If he could manipulate a dropped rare staff, +1 fire/lightning skills and +3 to charged bolt/warmth/lightning would be nice (maybe the other option being similar but teleport in place of chbolt/lightning, since it makes it cheaper)
For the warmth, a Leaf staff could've been made, if a tir had been along with the rals the Countess dropped.
>> He very suddenly went from going out of his way for exp in act 3 to never slowing for exp at all in acts 4-5. Could be streamlined probably, but would likely only be a min or so at most.
there's a reason why he did what he did. You don't get much exp in act4 before level 25. Watch his a4 video and see how much his exp bar rises.
(yeah, he got a bit too much exp overall, but it's difficult to predict and it was meant to be a test-run anyway)
A Leaf staff (TirRal) needs level 19, by then the only useful mods were +6 warmth. It's probably better to just socket as many Tir runes as you can find.
>> main issue I saw was not getting a staff that had +3 lightning.
he got a +2 at the beginning of act4. Getting +3 or getting it earlier wasn't an option if you watch his gold.
>> +3 chbolt/+3 warmth/+3 teleport
by the time you can use teleport, you don't need chbolt-charges ;)
>> +1 fire/lightning skills and +3 to charged bolt/warmth/lightning would be nice
but impossible. two hand staves cannot have +x to a skilltree, and +1 sorc isn't available until level 30. (by then, a TASer should have switched to a spirit sword and Visceratuant anyway). you'll want
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 2 mana, 3 energy with level 1
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 1 maek, 3 energy with level 2
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 1 maek, 6 energy with level 3
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, +3 static, 1 maek, 6 energy with level 6
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, +3 static, 1 maek, 10 energy with level 9
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 static, 5 maek, 10 energy with level 12
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 static, 4 socks with 4 Tir runes with level 13
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 teleport, 4 socks with 4 Tir runes with level 18 (maybe +3 chain lightning instead of lightning). Possibly even one damage-staff and a teleport-staff on your second slot.
Have you ever encountered an actual staff with +1 fire/light?
...I think I've seen 'em with one or the other, but it's been too long to properly make the claim. If we had control over RNG we'd be able to just manipulate an orb drop (and amulet and circlet) with those abilities, but that's out for a conventional run unless someone's willing to spend a looong time retrying Gheed.
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Tub wrote:
Have you ever encountered an actual staff with +1 fire/light?
Funny you mention it, because in many years of playing this game I don't even once recall that happening. I assumed the AS page to be truth, but you are probably right here.
Either that or I just didn't remember.
There are glitches that should be used often in a tas, mostly things like movement near shrines, they seem to call some sort of ejection algorithm if you move too close to a shrine before activating it. This can be used to move through a shrine, faster than just walking past it, and should save a few frames when used. (also gets the buff from the shrine)
Another glitch is that under the right circumstances (seems to only happen moving downward on the screen), it is possible to move through a closed door, without opening it. This would save most time in act 2, where the slab style doors take a moment to open. (the goo doors in maggot lair also come to mind, but I have never had the glitch move me through one of those.
But, all of this would become unneeded once teleportation starts, but could easily combine to several seconds before then.
Nah, I'm pretty sure it happens in single player; I've certainly walked through doors without opening them.
Edit: Yeah, I'm not confusing it with that 'door looks closed' bug. It seems a lot of doors in Act 2 tombs seem to allow running through before opening.
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I am 100% sure it doesn't require that someone else has opened the door, because it has happened to me in games blocked from others joining. This is different from the graphical glitch where a door looks closed even when open, because the door stays closed through the process. (i.e. you need to open it if you want to go back through)
It is possible that its lag related, so it may only occur in online games, but it definitely does not require others to open the door.
It can spawn on orbs, yes, but not on staffs.
I think someone needs to make this possible asap, I want to see a Diablo TAS :)
Theres absolutely no chance that anything other than a sorceress is even remotely close to being the fastest, by the way. Teleport is just way, way too good in a TAS (or a regular speedrun for that matter).
That said, I think any other class would be more enjoyable and cool to watch, and I would support a non-sorc run more.
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If a Diablo 2 TAS were possible, it would be one of those things where a run for each character would be completely valid, as long as it was "as fast as possible" for the chosen character. I also think a Sorceress run would be the fastest one, but that doesn't mean a non-sorc run would be invalid in any way.
But really now, Diablo 2 is a Windows PC game, and there is no way to make a TAS for it, is there?
The suggestion was made earlier in the thread that something might be possible using WINE. Here's how I'd envision this working:
1) Hack WINE to wait for user input after a system call that is made every frame (e.g. the draw-to-screen function -- though this would skip lag frames). This gives you frame advance.
2) Hack the get-current-time system call to return times based on the current frame. This stops D2 from trying to compensate for perceived slow frames because of (1).
3) Use a utility to read the memory being used by D2 and save the relevant parts to disk. This gives you save states, and is also almost certainly the hardest part of this whole thing.
4) Figure out how to read those saved states back into memory. If (3) isn't the hardest part, then this probably is.
5) Hack the RNG to start from a fixed seed.
The rest is just a matter of figuring out a good format to store inputs in, and implementing all the useful UI widgets. And then, y'know, actually making the TAS.
Annoyingly, (3) and (4) would probably have to be done on a game-by-game basis, which prevents this approach from scaling well to do general-purpose Windows game TASing.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Start from fixed seed? Why not just have (optionally, or this would be a PITA) RNG call request user input? (answer: then you have to tell WINE to give older input before that appeared to the program, so that this rNG input wouldn't screw with your TAS inputs)
...right, duh, start from fixed seed AND allow input (and store in movie file)
The RNG needs to start from a fixed seed so that when you play the movie back, RNG calls made at the same point in the movie give the same results. You shouldn't otherwise mess with the RNG because that would mean you weren't playing "pure" Diablo 2 any more. I don't know what causes D2 to invoke the RNG, but I'd guess it's dependent largely on what dynamic objects (creatures, spell effects, rats/scorpions/fluffy rabbits/etc.) are in-frame. It almost certainly doesn't directly depend on use input.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I figured that the same-results was necessary after I posted. But if the only way to screw with the RNG is to call it, and it's just using the "OS" RNG, then we could call it with another program to advance it between frames as many times as we want, right? Or even re-seed it. (OR I'm completely wrong about how this works, I admit)
That aside, idle MOBs' AI probably does involve RNG calls, as do those little critters, some NPCs, and obviously any item drop and every attack and damage roll (Quite a few times: hit chance, critical strike, deadly strike, crushing blow, open wounds, pierce (for zon bows/Buriza do'Kyanon), at least 1 each normal/magic/fire/poison/lightning/cold damage, more if it's programmed inefficiently- i.e. each +damage item rolls separately- possibly block, dodge chances as well, and any chance on-hits), map generation(numerous times: actual map boundaries, item/house placement, obv-mobs, shrines, champions/named mobs/their bonuses), shop generation, gambling...
Charged Bolt pathing is fixed, though. I'm unsure about effects graphics' impact on/use of the RNG-
Something nobody brought up yet: manipulating double health/mana potion effects. So I guess they each would advance the RNG.
