Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4083
Location: The Netherlands
I found out today that this game was dumped a few days ago. To be precise, the dumped version is Zook Man ZX4, the Taiwanese release. So I decided to test it out for a few hours today.
It's the third and final game of the Zook series by bootleg developers Vast Fame, and the only one to be on GBA instead of GBC.
Compared to the previous twogames, this game is a lot less subtle about its 'inspiration' of classic Mega Man games, as several bosses, enemies, and level graphics are clearly ripped or edited from official Mega Man games (including Mega Man 7, Mega Man & Bass, and Mega Man Zero).
It also has a new engine, which doesn't allow the air-sliding/stalling trick that broke the previous two games apart in their TASes. In general I haven't found any game-shattering movement tricks yet, after a few hours of testing. I did find a trick to clip through two-block tall ceilings while wall jumping, which does speed up a few stages with vertical sections.
The game has an intro stage, then 8 boss stages, followed by a final stage. The final stage consists just of a linear boss rush with short revisits to the 8 boss stages (with a lot more enemies). There is no true final boss - the game just ends after beating the last boss from the boss rush. Unlike the previous two games, only the 8 bosses need to be defeated to access the final stage. Collecting all upgrades is not needed.
Since there are no canonical boss names that I know of, I identify them by the type of stage they reside in (from left to right, top to bottom): Factory, Sky, Volcano, Ocean, Space, Forest, Castle, Broadcast.
There are four upgrades in this game:
Head Upgrade, in the Space Stage. This allows Zook to exit any stage at any time. Most likely useless.
Body Upgrade, in the Forest Stage. Doesn't seem to do anything. Also useless.
Leg Upgrade, in the Castle Stage. This allows Zook to dash, although only with double tap (left-left or right-right) input. Dash jumping doesn't work, but it still speeds Zook up by a fair amount on the ground. Probably high priority.
Arm Upgrade: I haven't actually been able to find this, although it's claimed to be in the Factory stage. Probably allows charging weapons to do more damage, so probably this will be very useful.
I haven't been able to spot any boss weaknesses so far. Maybe I need closer testing, but it seems like there are no boss weaknesses.
Since I don't have enough data about boss weaknesses yet, nor where the arm upgrade is or what it exactly does, I don't have a route yet.
Every hit in the game does 1 damage to Zook (out of a lifebar of 8), including spikes. The only instant kills are bottomless pits, or getting crushed on the left side of the screen in an autoscroller stage (Sky or Ocean stages)
In the final stage, the bosses/stages are met in this order: Factory, Sky, Volcano, Ocean, Space, Forest, Castle, Broadcast.
This game does not currently run in BizHawk (1.11.6) or VBA-rr. It only runs in mGBA builds from 2016-06-26 or later. Therefore, it cannot be TASed yet until the mGBA core in BizHawk is updated.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Woah, I didn't noticed this thread already existed. Oh, by the way.
For anyone who doesn't know, this game was used for the 6th edition of Dream Team Contest. Since a lot of glitches, tricks, and strategies were found, I think we should use this thread to discuss about ideas and progress about the run to submit to TASVideos.
I recomment to gather all the useful knowledge about this game in the relative game resource page: http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/GBx/ZookManZX4.html
About the run development, my idea is to upload to userfile the WIP movie file, in order to allow anyone who would contribute to find improvements. In my opinion, this is crucial since the game can occasionally desync after changes in the inputs.
I made some stage maps that show where the enemies spawn but only got through two of the stages before the contest ended. Did anyone else do something like this? If not, does anyone want to help finish the project?
Stage 0Stage 8 (GIMP file that lets you toggle enemies on and off)
Stage numbering is based on the RAM value at 0x152C.
EDIT:
Each stage is divided into segments/substages. The data is organized as follows in the ROM: Each stage has a four-byte pointer, with stage 0 starting at 0x3CCF68. This points to a group of four-byte pointers for each segment, which then point to the actual enemy spawn locations. The location data consists of 18 bytes for each enemy, with bytes 0-1 indicating X-position, bytes 2-3 indicate Y-position, and byte 6 indicating the type of enemy. The X- and Y-positions are relative to the beginning of each segment.
In case it is more helpful than the above explanation, this is the Lua script I used to dump the data for those maps:
local stage_pointers = 0x3CCF68
local substages = {[0]=5, 8, 11, 11, 10, 11, 8, 11, 12, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 1, 1, 3}
local current_stage = 1
local current_stage_address, current_substage_address, next_substage_address, number_of_enemies
local current_enemy_address, current_enemy_x, current_enemy_y, current_enemy_type
memory.usememorydomain("ROM")
do
current_stage_address = memory.read_u24_le(stage_pointers + current_stage * 4)
for i = 0, substages[current_stage] - 1 do
current_substage_address = memory.read_u24_le(current_stage_address + i * 4)
next_substage_address = memory.read_u24_le(current_stage_address + i * 4 + 4)
number_of_enemies = math.floor((next_substage_address - current_substage_address) / 18)
console.writeline("=====================")
console.writeline("Stage " .. current_stage .. ", substage " .. i)
console.writeline("=====================")
for j = 0, number_of_enemies do
current_enemy_address = current_substage_address + j * 18
current_enemy_x = memory.read_u16_le(current_enemy_address)
current_enemy_y = memory.read_u16_le(current_enemy_address + 2)
current_enemy_type = memory.read_u8(current_enemy_address + 6)
console.writeline(" X: " .. current_enemy_x)
console.writeline(" Y: " .. current_enemy_y)
console.writeline("Type: " .. current_enemy_type)
console.writeline("----------")
end
console.writeline("=====================")
end
client.pause()
end
idk if you guys also found this but if you change weapons while you´re not supposed to be able to do so
this funny thing happens
http://imgur.com/0Mm6ABd
2-do:
Smurfs Nightmare, The (EU) GBC 10%
fin :
Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge improvement: submitted
Mega Man II Improvement: submitted
Mega Man IV Improvement: submitted
Mega Man V Improvement: submitted
future plan:
-n-
We can freely switch weapons when most projectiles don't exist. Here's some projectiles we found where we can switch anyway:
* Basic, uncharged shot
* Flame, smaller secondary shots
* Missile smoke
* Star, middle and lower shots
This generally screws up the graphics and hitboxes of these projectiles. Try it sometime, looks freaky. We've also noted that switching to Laser while a basic shot exists not only screws up the basic shot's look and hitbox, but also makes it a piercing projectile.
Additionally, the Laser itself adds 1 to 15DC and subtracts 1 when it should be done. It just subtracts 1 a few too many times if you fire it to an enemy just a little off-screen while walking toward that enemy, as the game rapidly spawns that enemy, the laser killing its clones every frame, and for some reason this gets 15DC negative. While it isn't exactly zero, we can't pause or switch weapons, but if it isn't too negative, we can fire enough lasers to make it zero, then switch weapons, for science of course. Yes, we can have multiple lasers, because the counter is negative.
Lastly, we can release a charge and pause on the same frame, but this usually requires a secondary glitch. In this pause, pick a different weapon and unpause. The Charge Swap lets every source weapon's charged shot do curious things while equipped with the target weapon. Some teams finishers do this.
Incidentally, the secondary glitch involves losing player control for a moment, such as damage, releasing B while out of control, and pressing it again just as you regain it. Charged shot is released, and a charge is maintained. You can always pause with this charge, which allows the above pause and switching crud.
Well, since the whole DTC6 thing happened, the most obvious thing to do is grab all the winning strats of the various teams and stitch them together to form a giant mecha the most optimal run we can. The two winning teams obviously did something right, and Team 7 has a trick with killing certain minibosses very fast.
It helps that the game is mostly sync friendly. At least, as far as we can tell, stages will sync perfectly without flaw every 32 frames. Who's up for mashing together the best?
Beside some laggy rooms and the item drops, the game should effectively sync well.
The level order is also something to discuss, as levels 8 - 7 - 1 are the obvious first 3, but then it's less straightforward.
Team 4 went for 4 - 3 - 2 - 5 - 6 (extra frames in stage selection : 6)
Team 3 went for 4 - 5 - 6 - 2 - 3 (extra frames in stage selection : 2)
Team 7 went for 4 - 3 - 2 - 6 - 5 (extra frames in stage selection : 6)
It's worth pointing out that in each case, the shield was only used in stage 5 and 6.
Apart from Bubble, I believe the weapon usefulness is Shuriken > Earth = Missile >>> Wind, so I would go for Team 3 level order. Is there any time to save thanks to the Earth weapon in stage 2, 5, 6 ? Or thanks to the Shuriken in stage 5 ?
Here I am! I don't know if anyone noticed, but I already uploaded a 6 frames improvement of stage 0, segment 3: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/38540088675097492
Also, I recommend to take a look at the run I and BoboTheKing, Dacicus, DrD2k9 and Dooty crafted: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/38526139451192829
Note the two zip with flame charge in stage 8. That was discovered by me, and I'm proud of it... Tough it probably won't every used due to the suboptimal stage order. :'}
Also, I have an idea for avoiding the massive lag in stage 12 (ocean, boss rush): just use charged earth attack to nuke all enemies instantly at once.
There's another effect in stage selection to worry about: Animation frame rules.
In addition to taking time to select the target stage, one also has to wait for the beam-in animation. This is on a 4-frame rule, and we can delay at stage select to see this frame rule in action.
I forget what the frame rules look like after each boss, however. But I recall concluding the route we took was among the faster ones.
As for weaponry, we already have the big ones we'd need thanks to what the first three picked stages give. So it largely boils down to whether the weapon was needed for something. As part of Team 4, I ended up using the drill weapon once on necessity in Stage 2, and the missile on the miniboss of Stage 6.
Though, if we can get the optimal time on just the three weapons we get from the 871 start, leaves 24 paths where s4 is 4th stage, 12 where s4 is 5th stage, and 4 where s4 is left for 6th stage. 38 potential routes to check frame rules on. Bosses appear on the door frame rule, which is the same 4-frame rule as animations, or the 8-frame rule on dialog, so for the most part, we'd be defeating a boss on the same time relative to the frame rule anyway, whatever improvements we make. Generally, we can assume the best boss wins will be locked in with the frame rule.
Of course, the difference in stage select is just a few frames, so if a weapon is needed to go faster than 871 alone, this makes it clear a route getting that weapon before going to that stage is almost certainly optimal.
EDIT: I recall throwing meteors down there in the aquatic part of the boss rush, instead of trying the flame charge. However bad the lag looked, the meteors made it worse somehow, including a few cases of doubled lag. And the ceiling still got in the way. I didn't look very hard, but I was burned out at the time.
EDIT2:
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Well, let's finish the intro with this improvement: userfile #38548674155850191
Did not attempt luck manipulation for ammo tanks, whether or not that is important.
USERFILE: Zook Man ZX4 - Intro cleared in f7993 wrote:
One extra lag frame during segment transition after the Ghost Fall and jumping off that object platform. Otherwise, it's a clean improvement.
Any ideas on that lag frame, anyone?
I base the name on what frame we can input something on the stage select, by the way.
I've done some experimentation with enemy spawning. This may only apply to horizontally scrolling segments, but it looks like you have to be scrolling the camera horizontally for enemies to spawn. When moving to the right, the enemy spawns when the value of 0x1500 is in the range 248-300 away from the horizontal spawn position. When moving to the left, the range is 32-40. If you destroy the enemy while moving within those ranges, it will respawn. The enemy doesn't spawn if its vertical spawn position is less than the value of 0x1504 (i.e., if it's above the camera) or if its vertical spawn position is more than 160 greater than the value of 0x1504 (i.e., if it's too far below the camera). That 160 value was determined by manipulating the value of 0x1504 via Lua, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.
For vertically scrolling segments, it looks like you have to be scrolling the camera vertically for enemies to spawn. When moving downward, the enemy spawns when the value of 0x1504 is in the range 168-200 away from the vertical spawn position. When moving upward, the range is 32-40.
Also remember that we (I don't remember exactly who) discovered a way to prevent the enemy spider to spawn, at the end of segment 4, when Zook lands on the platform object from the Ghost Fall. That may potentially save a frame or two.
Also, I've discovered a way to make the spider to spawn multiple times. I wonder if that may lead to an useful game-breaking glitch.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2174
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Team 1s (my teams) Lua script was posted in the DTC6 thread by Fog, linking to that post here for archiving: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=451958#451958
It may contain something useful. Extract what you need (if anything) as you please.
Let's talk about some mechanics. Stages are in segments, and strictly speaking, the game secretly teleports you from one segment to the next as you get to the end of each one. If a miniboss is involved, destroying the miniboss puts the player in the next segment.
When the miniboss state is reached, there usually is only one thing to hit: Some part of the miniboss. Things we discovered are that the miniboss state isn't cleared when we leave the miniboss room for other reasons (death, leaving the stage, etc), and the game assumes a miniboss dies if we destroy other things. Taking advantage of the quirks mean we can steal this miniboss state by simply leaving the miniboss room after getting there, then skip the first segment of another stage.
Now, two clear methods come to mind:
Stage escape by head upgrade: Well, just exit the stage after reaching the miniboss. Next enemy killed activates the next segment quickly. Problem here is that we have to traverse the stage until we reach the miniboss to escape from. This, in itself, takes a lot of time, and difficult to justify revisiting several segments just to skip visiting one.
Game over, lose to the miniboss: This method allows us to use the save platform found before a number of minibosses, so repeat usage is possibly faster, although still not as fast as we need it. After a game over, we're kicked back to the title screen and can load our game from there, and this doesn't clear the miniboss state. We have two save files: Load Game takes us to stage select, and Continue takes us to the save platform. Now, we need to lose the 3 spare lives given, probably before we step on the target save platform, and a reset every time we want to try this trick. So how much time we can save by skipping a few segments might be lost to reset, Continue, game over on miniboss, Load Game.
If there's some way to set up the segment skip quicker, then yes, it would save time. Unfortunately, the set-up needed to do the skip outweighs any segments we'd want to skip. We have two different, yet still extremely costly methods available to us. Would be nice to find a faster set-up.
If I recall correctly, continuing only gives you one life, so the first time you do it it'd be a pain, but every other time (as long as you avoid extra lives) it'd be easy.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
Also, I've discovered a way to make the spider to spawn multiple times.
I looked into this and am pretty sure it's due to a segment transition occurring in that room. The spider spawns in the same exact location in both segments, so what you're seeing is not a glitch, unless you've spawned more than two. The same thing happens with the platform to the left of the spider and with an enemy near the top of that segment. I updated the stage 0 map to indicate which enemies may spawn twice because they are defined in the same location in different segments.
I have some suggestions about aesthetic choices in the crafting of the run:
1) Avoid getting it whenever it is possible without losing time, even if it's very hard. Many teams in DTC6 didn't bother trying dodging some midboss attacks that are almost impossible to, but that's specifically what makes the movie more impressive.
2) Use different attack and movements as possible during boss fights.
3) Avoid breaking the background music in stage 0 by firing and picking up the drops in moments that doesn't result in overlapping the sound effect with the main instrument notes.
If someone is interested in handling this matter, tell me, otherwise I'll do it myself.
Edit: so, for two days I've tried hard to:
- Save the lag frame at the end of segment 3;
- Save the extra frame in boss 0 dialogue that is not present in Team 3 run;
- Skip midboss 0;
- Skip midboss 1
and I failed for all of these tasks. I'm pretty sure that are impossible to accomplish.
Basically inserted Team 4's Stage 8 without issue. userfile #38588774020402943
Changed something in Segment 3 for not-lag frames, but threw them away later for lazy-sync. At least the intentional delay is easy to spot and remove once we know how to keep the frames.
I don't want to deal with making things entertaining myself. Intro and Stage 8 minibosses could definitely go with the treatment. Most bosses, too, except Stage 8 boss needs that doppler effect on the shots, which greatly reduces downtime for interesting nothings in particular. So anyone who wants to dance, go for it.
EDIT:
Analyzed the early stage routes using the best numbers of each team. Having dash and spike ball from stage 7 speeds up the stage and miniboss of stage 8 by 968 frames. However, stage 7 first means 2-damage shots for the first boss instead of 3, and that alone costs 960 frames, based on best teams' efforts. That leaves 8 frames advantage for stage 7, which is quickly lost when we realize we haven't accounted for the stage portion of Stage 7, and what the laser and arm upgrade brings. The miniboss skip doesn't remove enough advantage of Stage 8 first, but it was still worth theorizing on.
USERFILE: Zook Man ZX4 - Inserted Team 4's Stage 8, with minor change wrote:
f08322 *** STAGE 8 ***
f09003 Segment 0: 681
f09231 Segment 1: 228
f10034 Segment 2: 803
f10184 Segment 3: 150 (T7:162 T4:165)
f10317 Segment 4: 133 (T7:133 T4:121)
f11107 Segment 5: 790
f11229 Segment 6: 122
f11893 Segment 7: 664 (T4:661)
f12024 Segment 8: 131
f12924 Segment 9: 900
f13310 Segment10: 386
f13556 Segment11: 246
f16111 Segment12:2555
=== END OF STAGE 8 (Frames: 7789) ===
Apparently this run is largely independent of item drops, so we beat the boss with 1 HP left.
If we can save that lag frame in the intro without losing the frame rule, this stage should sync exactly as before. Actually, this stage is proving sync stable.
The one change was to take the ladder down instead of ledge clip in the middle of Segment 3. Apparently, this is 3 frames faster than Team 4. The saved frames were thrown away intentionally at the ladder after the miniboss, marked with Select presses, to sync the remainder of the stage.
If it's still worth trying to take advantage of the miniboss skip in early stages, then what about starting with stage 3 or 5?
About the improvement of 1 frame by Tompa: I easily resynced it, but it look like there is an miniboss contact damage frame rule.
Old movie:
Here's an unoptimized improvement that kills the boss faster using an enemy: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/38597146366561439
Based on an IRC conversation with FatRatKnight and Exonym, so the idea wasn't mine.
EDIT:
The helicopter enemy spawns at coordinates (2072, 52). Based on my experiments earlier, you want to move left between camera X-coordinates (0x1500) 2104 and 2112 to respawn it moving in the right direction. Camera Y-coordinate (0x1504) should be 52 or less.
And here's my quick and dirty optimization. userfile #38597559581868308Zook Man ZX4 - Optimized intro boss skip. wrote:
f01011 *** STAGE 0 ***
f03277 Segment 0:2266
f04060 Segment 1: 783
f04186 Segment 2: 126
f04465 Segment 3: 279
f06680 Segment 4:2215
f06845 Segment 5: 165
=== END OF STAGE 0 (Frames: 5834) ===
Mostly optimized, anyway. Probably a few frames to get in there, though. May need to get ourselves higher on that last walljump
We never see the boss. Just gone instantly.
Clearly, the boss was so impressed with us defeating a tiny enemy that he just exploded.
We looked into the intro miniboss for a bit, but the flying enemy is further away. I looked into keeping the miniboss state after death, but it's only maintained if we game over, a regular death isn't enough. Shame, there's a nice trigger available if we can do the segment skip.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
Compared to the previous two games, this game is a lot less subtle about its 'inspiration' of classic Mega Man games, as several bosses, enemies, and level graphics are clearly ripped or edited from official Mega Man games (including Mega Man 7, Mega Man & Bass, and Mega Man Zero).
It also has a new engine, which doesn't allow the air-sliding/stalling trick that broke the previous two games apart in their TASes. In general I haven't found any game-shattering movement tricks yet, after a few hours of testing. I did find a trick to clip through two-block tall ceilings while wall jumping, which does speed up a few stages with vertical sections.
The game has an intro stage, then 8 boss stages, followed by a final stage. The final stage consists just of a linear boss rush with short revisits to the 8 boss stages (with a lot more enemies). There is no true final boss - the game just ends after beating the last boss from the boss rush. Unlike the previous two games, only the 8 bosses need to be defeated to access the final stage. Collecting all upgrades is not needed.
Since there are no canonical boss names that I know of, I identify them by the type of stage they reside in (from left to right, top to bottom): Factory, Sky, Volcano, Ocean, Space, Forest, Castle, Broadcast.
There are four upgrades in this game:
Not really useful but idk
And there seems to be a few crash bugs, this is one of them that we found:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1707822396/Zook%20Castle%20Crash.bk2
