I don't understand either. I just played the movie, but it didn't skip anything ?
I definitely saw the skips... Yakra just sort of stood there while the party walked out, Heckran sort of committed suicide, and the party walked right past Ozzie to the other side of the bridge. This definitely saves time over fighting the actual battles.
I'm using the 1.43 found here: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6471
As to the rom, I'm using the (U) rom. I don't know if there are any other versions but there was no version marker.
Just use the most recent version (v11 and later will do).
I like it when bosses are skipped. However, I don't know the extent to which leveling up can be skipped. One still has to level up to the most powerful unskippable boss.
What now is the most powerful boss for which a skip is not known?
I'd think generally you want to postpone leveling as much as possible, to minimize the number of fights you have to get into to get the levels you need. It's my suspicion that you get a better XP/time ratio the later you are in the game, regardless of your current power level (though, assuming you are capable of winning the fights, of course).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'd think generally you want to postpone leveling as much as possible, to minimize the number of fights you have to get into to get the levels you need. It's my suspicion that you get a better XP/time ratio the later you are in the game, regardless of your current power level (though, assuming you are capable of winning the fights, of course).
This relies on being able to find a location that you can easily call more enemies onto the screen repeatedly though. To my knowledge there aren't a whole lot of places in the game that are like that, that can be done in a quick succession.
Joined: 6/9/2005
Posts: 171
Location: Southern California
The fastest place I can think of is on Death Mountain, shortly after a save point, there's a screen where the party enters from the top right, and has to snake down a snowy screen to head bottom left, and there are a handfull of Krakker enemies who fall from the top of the screen to the bottom. If you tag the fourth one (I think?) you engage five of them in a fight--dispatch them for a good fast chunk of experience, exit back the way you came (upper right) and re-enter for a pretty swift treadmill.
But that is pretty late game, and will likely never come up in a TAS. :\
Yes, you need a Snes9x v11 or higher to watch the smvs on my previous post without incident.
FractalFusion wrote:
What now is the most powerful boss for which a skip is not known?
Black Tyrano, definitely. High HP, multi-target fire attack and absorbing HP tech, all of which would make the battle annoying and complicated. I'm almost certain that it will be the longest battle in the run and it would be inevitable to heal HP a few times in that battle.
As for the extra leveling up, I don't think it would be necessary. Yakra and Heckran don't have much EXP in the first place. Naturally, there are not many chances that party's level is greatly affected by skipping those bosses. Of course, I'll test to figure it out considering all the possibilities.
XkyRauh wrote:
If you tag the fourth one (I think?) you engage five of them in a fight--dispatch them for a good fast chunk of experience, exit back the way you came (upper right) and re-enter for a pretty swift treadmill.
It is possible to fight six of them at one time in your way. And, yes. As you said, it is a very good place for leveling up. I remember I once had a silly idea to climb up Death Peak without the first Poyozo Doll and level up there. Needless to say, all attempts just failed, and now leveling up itself is going to disappear from the run with the discovery of the instant kill glitch and Lavos shell skip trick. How ironic!
Just popped in to do the required OMG WTF XIIT. Totally awesome improvements, Inichi. I've been lurking around but (due to comp failure) haven't been able to check the smv:s yet. Now that there's a megaupload you can be sure i'll watch it closely ;)
Again, awesome, and keep up the good work.
Would just like to check (since the last few pages of the thread seem to be of two minds about it); will there be two versions of the run (skip-glitched and non-skip-glitched), or just one (which one?)
Sorry for the late reply, mmbossman.
mmbossman wrote:
Any progress on this inichi?
Haven't made any progress in a while, but that doesn't mean that I've given up. In the process of testing, I found another groundbreaking glitch which is available only in a new game+ mode. The glitch was so awesome that I decided to take a rest from the test stuff for an any% run and work on a new game+ run v2.
I'm guessing the new run will be at least 2 minutes faster than the current published run. But the problem is that the glitch only works on the (J) version in a preferable way due to minor changes in coding between (U) and (J).
Since the rules demand:
If there already is a published video, do not use a different ROM than what it uses, unless the new ROM is obviously better, and you can show how it should be compared to the existing movie.
If the situation arises that you do want to use a different ROM than the currently published run, make a post on the forum to make sure the differences between the two are large enough to warrant the change.
Postng a WIP and describing the details of the glitch, I'd like to hear your thoughts on whether the version change will be allowed or not.
First, here is a WIP to Inner Lavos battle.
Smv: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1987486506/chronotrigger_newgame%2Bv2_WIP_inichi.smv
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iekSAg0JqqU
At this point, I'm 4890 frames ahead of the published run. Note that this doesn't mean that I really improved the published run by 4890 frames since (J) usually has less texts than (U), while 1.51 is usually laggier than 1.43. In this movie, I think you will notice that Crono and Marle are capable of dealing with 9999 damage on a critical hit like Ayla's Bronze Fist does. Yeah, that's the core of the glitch that only (J) allows.
Second is the detail of the glitch. Two newly discovered tricks are utilized to pull off and make most of the glitch.
-Loading a "No Data" on the load screen
By pressing A and Up or Down key on the same frame on the load screen, you can access to a data that is shown as "No Data". As with many other SNES games, at first, 96 is stored in all SRAM in Chrono Trigger. So if you use this trick on a never-touched "No data" on a new game+ data selection mode, 96 is stored in various memory addresses, such as for item inventory, character's status, exps, etc, then a new game+ starts. Naturally, that causes lots of strange things to the game.
It should be noted that the trick must be used against a never-touched "No data" and must be selected on a new game+ data selection mode in order to pull off the glitch. For exapmle, if you use the trick against a dirty "No data" on a normal data selection mode, you will only find a deleted data restores (which will be very important for the run though, I'll explain it later). Or, if you use the trick against a dirty "No data" on a new game+ data selection mode, a deleted data will be simply refered for a new game+ setting up. Finally, if you use the trick against a never-touched "No data" on a normal data selection mode, the screen just turns to black and freezes.
All right, here are some glitchy stuff tightly related to the new game+ run.
1)Except for some kind of weapons, all characters are able to equip all weapons, helmets, armors and accessories.
There are key defferences on newly equippable weapons between (U) and (J). Here are quick lists.
(U) Bow, Gun, Broadsword, Arm and Scythe
(J) Sword, Gun, Broadsword, Fist and Scythe
So what these differences mean? Well, in short, you can equip all kind of fists including Bronze Fist with all charaters on (J), not on (U). For those of you who are curious as to how come the defferences arise, you might want to check out these addresses: C293A8(U) and C293A5(J), an address that starts deciding whether each item is equippable for a certain character or not. FFFA1B(U) and FFF24F(J), an address that stores a value that loaded and used in that decision on a glitched data.
2) All characters are given only limited techs.
Remaining techs are only 2nd/3rd single/double techs. And there are no way to learn any other techs since none of enemies won't drop TP anymore in a glitched data. The thing is, you can use only six techs as follows in a new game+ run:
-Slash, Lightning, Provoke, Ice, Ice Sword 1 and Ice Sword 2.
3)Ayla loses the ability that automatically equips a certain kind of fist depending on her level.
Normally, Lv96 Ayla should automatically equip a Bronze Fist when you enter a battle. Unfortunately, that ablity is lost in a glitched data. If that ability was remained, I could simply use Deequip trick on Ayla and get two Bronze Fists for Crono and Marle. But it wasn't. I got stuck here for a while, but then I found another killer trick that would easily solve the problem. Here we go!
-Transfering items from one data to the other one.
If you reset the game one frame after you save a data on an exisiting one, only SRAM for item slot is overwritten. As a result of reseting the game in the middle of save processing, a target data is deleted and shown as "No Data". However, as I mentioned above, now that you can access to a "No Data" and retrieve a deleted data, that will be no problem.
Making a glitched data with "No Data" selection trick, getting a Bronze Fist with deequip trick in the non-glitched data, and sending it to the glitched data with this trick, I managed to make a glitched data in which has two Bronze Fists. In my new game+ WIP, that data was loaded in the beginning, and Bronze Fist was equipped with Crono and Marle. 9999 damage is definitely the result of that.
To summarize this, you can reproduce the glitch in (U) as well as (J). But (U) doesn't allow you to equip a Bronze Fist unlike (J). It's a fact that you can use some nice new weapon such as Wonder Shot in (U) as well. However, considering the fight with Inner Lavos that you have to cut off each arm with a single attack without Luminaire and Bronze Fist, it would obviously cost much time than the smooth way that I showed off in my WIP. The glitch might be helpful to save a few seconds in (U), but I suppose it would be almost impossible to shave off two minutes.
Oh, and one thing. For the sake of clearing up doubts on SRAM, I recorded the whole setting up process for the new game + run, starting from clear SRAM. I uploaded the smv on MediaFire instead of Microstorage since the smv size exceeds over its limit. Here it is.
http://www.mediafire.com/?aiiaiiaaaig
(Note: Make sure that your Snes9x 1.51 is v5 or newer. Otherwise it will desync around the savepoint inside Lavos's body. The reason is v4 or less contains a bug that doesn't properly emulates a reset timing in playing back the movie.)
The movie itself wouldn't be entertained at all, even with fast-forward. Because it is over 10 hours and the same battle for leveling up repeats at the same spot for roughly 7 hours. However, if someone were to throw out doubts on SRAM, like SRAM can be hacked or something faked into SRAM, it would work as a good reference.
Please feel free to post your thoughts about the version change or WIP or anything else. As usual, any suggestion would be appericiated. Thanks.
-Some favorable screenshots showing the glitch well:
[URL=http://imageshack.us][/URL][URL=http://imageshack.us][/URL][URL=http://imageshack.us][/URL][URL=http://imageshack.us][/URL]
I… don't know what to say. O_O
So, what do you think the projected times will be for a run on either version? If the difference (beside the language change) is more than just a few seconds, I guess you could as well make it on the J ROM.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Trying to obsolete a movie because of using different version. = Normally it's No.
But since the said published movie is just a demo, why not... Anyway, just do it, I'm sure it will be even more interesting. ;)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
moozooh wrote:
So, what do you think the projected times will be for a run on either version? If the difference (beside the language change) is more than just a few seconds, I guess you could as well make it on the J ROM.
Somewhere in that beast of a post Inichi said the J ROM would be 2 minutes faster than the published run, the U version only a few seconds faster than the published version.
I say use the J for the new game+, because the improvement would be far, far more than merely faster text.
Somewhere in that beast of a post Inichi said the J ROM would be 2 minutes faster than the published run, the U version only a few seconds faster than the published version.
Um, I'm not sure inichi wrote exactly that. What I understood was that the major glitching is possible in either version, but the J has more favorable conditions and faster text.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
This is clearly a situation in which the J ROM is preferable to the U ROM. The whole "use the old ROM" rule is, as I understand it, in place to prevent people from making new TASes that are faster solely on the basis of having less text to scroll through, or other similarly trivial differences. This is not a trivial difference.
Generally it's also preferred to use the U ROM for RPGs since that makes the text legible for more of the audience, but you'd only watch this TAS once you know how the game goes anyway, so I don't see that as a big deal.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Thank you for your comments!
I'll continue on this since I got enough positive feedbacks for me.
I'm not still sure how it would be treated in the workbench forum. But even if it gets rejected, I don't mind at all, because it's a side project for me after all. The rest part is not hard at all, so I think I'm going to finish and submit it in a few weeks. After that, I'll pick up the test stuff for an any % run.
Phil wrote:
maybe it should be done with both versions so people can give their opinion of which one should be published.
I've considered that, but I just don't feel like setting up a maxed-out data from scratch to see a few seconds improvement, while it is expected that two minutes improvement will be done soon. Yeah, I know I'm lazy, but it makes life easy.
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"I used the (J) version of the rom because the new glitch made it 28% faster than a comparable (U) run" sounds convincing enough for me ;) And anyone who bothers to read the full explanation will be convinced too, I'd imagine. I say go for it, and good luck!
Awesome glitch once again, inichi! You are, hands down, the most creative TASer I have seen so far when it comes to find totally unexpected and absolutely crazy glitches. I just have no other words to describe your crazy work that you show us over and over again.
As for the ROM question, I think switching to the (J) version just because of the new trick will be a good choice. This is a NewGame+ run that uses a existing SRAM to get all the maxed out stats and best equipment anyway, so I think it's fine in this case to do absolutely everything that is possible to save time, even if it will require glitches that screw up the game. The "Bronze Fist" simulation on Crono and Marle is just so special that it's definitely worth the show off, and in which run would that be more suitable than in this one when it already allows you to have the needed level of 96 or more? A obvious case IMO.
Joined: 9/7/2005
Posts: 143
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
inichi, I'm watching your setup movie and I'm having a hard time following how you're able to skip bosses. A couple of them, like the Guardian and Nizbel 2, are skipped through what looks like multiple trips into the menu to avoid triggering them. Others, like the Mud Imp, seem to be using a bug I missed you setting up that lets you save anywhere. Can we get a little bit of clarification, please?
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