Generic Tips

• The game should be interesting to watch. This is the primary factor. A game which runs slow, is repetitive, very easy, or ugly, is generally not a good choice.
• Your movie will always be judged on how entertaining it is to watch, never how much you liked making it or how hard it was.
• It's a good idea to choose a game you somewhat are familiar with. This way you won't make beginner's mistakes or miss shortcuts that everyone who has played the game knows about.
• Choosing a well-known game will get you more feedback and attention, but it also means that people can be more demanding about the quality.

See also: Guidelines - Select your game well

• You can select whichever keys you want, but you should design them so that they are quickly accessible at any given situation.
• Don't assign the Reset key anywhere near your playing keys. The save state key is another one you don't want to press accidentally.
• Some keyboards cannot handle too many keys at the same time if they are close together on the keyboard.
• Don't use Alt or Ctrl for your playing keys because they might activate operating system functions exactly when you don't want that.
• On some keyboards, pressing Alt, Ctrl, or Shift plus any other keys may cause one or more keys to fail to register.

See also Using Emulator Tools for the commands available and their default keys.

• Use frame advance. This will allow precise control of which buttons are pressed at which frame. If it is impossible to use frame advance, use extremely slow speeds, or find a better emulator.
• Use the frame counter. This will allow a movie maker to determine which route is faster when comparing routes, along with knowing whether a movie is recording or playing.
• Disable backgrounds/sprites/transparencies if it is easier for you to see what is going on. No sense making a movie in the dark.
• It is optional to use autofire, since frame advance yields the same result. If autofire is used, make sure that autofire really is the fastest/best way, and that you don't waste a frame by using it too early or too late. If in doubt, just use frame advance.
• Too many quicksave slots is bad (you may mess up).
  Not enough quicksaves is bad (it's important that you can undo all mistakes).
  Find your balance. See below for more guidelines.
• Pause the emulator to prevent wasting time when you shuffle with quicksaves.
• Use the cheat search^[1] to find out hidden values (e.g. invisible damage meter), and how the game calculates various things.

Note that quicksaves are for quick and convenient undoing. If all your quicksaves bypass a mistake, that doesn't mean the mistake can no longer be corrected.

It is recommended to use a system that allows 10 quicksave slots rather than one where changing the save slot is necessary.

• If a part of the run is straightforward, go ahead and use one quicksave.
• If a part of the run is more complicated (i.e. more accurate button presses or to see whether it works), or uses luck manipulation, two quicksaves are recommended.
• If it's even more complicated, three or more quicksaves can be used.
• Don't assign any more quicksaves than you need. Chances are you'll ignore all but one or two of them otherwise.

In addition to quicksaves, you can also set backup saves. Backup saves are for watching your movie without starting from the beginning. Sometimes, quicksaves become backup saves when ignored or not needed.

If you notice that you have made a major mistake that none of the quicksaves can save you from, stop the recording and watch your movie on read-only mode from any backup save. Make a quicksave where you would want to start rerecording, and then turn off read-only mode and load it while your movie is playing. You're back at recording.

FractalFusion: In a 10-quicksave-slot-system with frame advance, I set the saves as follows (function key for load, shift+function key for save):

• F1 is the most recent quicksave. This quicksave is simply an accuracy quicksave.
  • As of 2006, I now use T and shift+T because it is closer to playing keys.
• F3 is the second quicksave. Useful for trying out whether a move works. If F1 didn't solve the problem, try F3 again.
• F5 is a backup save. Done at the beginning of a level.
• F6-F9 are non-movie saves that I use to try and find glitches in the game.
• F2, F4, F10 are not used

The entire run need not (and perhaps should not) be done in one sitting. You can quit the program or end the recording and continue later.

To continue the run, load the movie file with read-only off and load the most recent savestate or whichever savestate you would have loaded before you ended the recording last time. That is all.

If you don't intend to load a savestate you made last time, watch the movie with read-only on and make a savestate where you want to resume recording. Then turn off read-only and load that savestate while the movie is still playing.

• Make a backup copy of your movie when you are replaying it.
• Make a backup copy of your movie before hex-editing it.
• Upload a backup copy onto the internet.
• Make backup copies of your quicksaves when you have time.

Backups are important. You don't want to lose a significant amount of progress.

Your first version doesn't have to be perfect. Just do something that looks good. It's important that you don't tire yourself with the first version. You will probably learn new tricks even while playing.

Then review it. Many times. Remember, or take notes of everything that looks bad, such as waits, unused shortcuts, and redundant actions. Read the guidelines.

After you are certain that you know how to play it faster, start making a new version - from the very beginning. (Because you have probably learned something, and because of the re-record counter.) Repeat as many times as necessary.

When you gain experience, you also start being able to do it faster.

Note: AVI files may be better for reviewing than input recording files, because you can browse back and forth in them. There are downsides: Recording the AVI is necessary, and you can't do a frame-by-frame analysis easily (at least not with most viewers).

• Always make backups. This is the first thing you should do, and it is the thing you should do most often. Backups provide insurance in the event portions of your movie are lost.
• Get an emulator or emulator version that allows out-of-order loading of savestates. It is extremely easy to slip up and press a savestate that occurs further back in the movie than intended. If out-of-order loading is supported, loading the most recent savestate (hopefully it's still there) corrects the problem. Otherwise, the movie is probably broken, unless that part of the movie had nothing important or you were lucky enough to realize you loaded the wrong state before any frames were recorded.
• Periodically verify that your movie is not broken. If it's broken (hopefully not too far back in the run), make a quicksave (during the replay) just before it goes out of sync and resume recording from that point. A good habit is to keep at least one savestate that you only use for watching your movie, and never save over it while (or immediately after) recording.
  • There may be some issues with games that naturally cause runs to desync. Sometimes runs desync when played back one way and don't desync when played back another way. It is best to report these issues in the discussion forum.
• Make sure the movie is actually recording when making a movie! This seems so obvious but it's amazing how many times the movie stops recording without warning. The emulator display may help in this regard; don't ignore it completely. Technically it isn't a broken movie, but no one wants to waste a lot of time on something like this. This problem is most likely to happen immediately after watching part of your movie and then switching to recording; If the movie finished playing before you switched, the switch failed because the movie was already closed, and you are not really recording. In most emulators, it helps to fast-forward for at least a few seconds before switching out of recording, to prevent the movie from ending as easily.
  • Even worse is if you accidentally replace the quicksaves with non-movie saves (because, say, it went past the end of the movie), then later load the run with read-only off and try to load the save. The emulator will not load the save but will chop off the run at the point where you attempt this (which is near the beginning). Although not all emulators have this problem, it has happened, and will happen. (This is a good example of how fault-intolerance can be insidious.)
• Be careful about loading save states when you are playing back your movie. Even if out-of-order loading is supported, you will get a desync if you load a savestate during playback that did not happen anywhere in the currently recorded movie. This can ruin your movie if you then proceed to resume recording from the now-desynchronized state.

See also: Desync Help

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[1]: Cheat search is a misnomer; it is more accurately called a RAM address search. A movie maker won't always be using it for the sole purpose of finding cheat codes.

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GenericTips last edited by FractalFusion on 2008-06-05 10:32:43
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