Emulator
- Emulator: FCEUX 2.1.1 -interim
Objectives
- Takes damage to save time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Aims for fastest time
Comments:
Ghoul School is now the first TAS submission I have done by myself. It was a fun project and a fun game and I've now gotten a bit better at spotting mistakes and optimizing.
I started helping Rick on his Ghoul School TAS over a year ago. A while after his submission, I noticed some minor improvements and I eventually decided to fix everything I could to clean up the TAS.
New Tricks:
- The double-hit trick: This was known, but I managed to optimize it some more. If you use the bat or towel and turn around at the right frames, you can double-hit any enemy.
- The door-trick: Turning around when exiting doors causes the character to spawn farther to the right, thus saving time.
Improvements:
The majority of improvements to this TAS were just from better optimization. Though the new tricks helped gain a few seconds as well.
- Room 1: I use the door trick right when the character spawns to save a few frames.
- Rooms 2 and 3: I optimized some jumps to gain 2 frames or so.
- Rooms 4-6: A turnaround on the stairs combined with hitting the character's head on the ceiling resulted in a much faster result.
- The locker room: frames were saved by hitting the zombies faster with the towel "double-hit" move.
- The Gym: I damage boosted as much as I could where the previous TAS did not. I gained ~3 seconds here.
- The Weight-lifting Room: Door trick used at the very start. I gained some time by killing the 2nd weight-lifting eyeball quicker. I later found a very small frame improvement, however when I tried to implement it, it caused horrible luck throughout the next few rooms. I could not manage to save any more frames here due to this. :(
- The Crawl Space: I gained a few frames because I managed to jump more times with the Spring Shoes. Each jump with these saves 1 frame, hence the excessive jumping.
- The Air Ducts: Door trick used right when entering here. I gained ~1.5 seconds because I zipped partially through the ceiling right before the door that leads to the basement.
- The Basement: I saved some frames optimizing jumps up and down staircases. Trying to preserve momentum often looks slower, but is a faster result.
- The Final Boss: I actually lose 1 frame here just because of the boss' position when entering the room. Had the boss been in the same place, using the same maneuvers, I think I would have gained 10 frames or so. This boss was very difficult to optimize because of the double-hit trick. I don't think this could be faster much at all if any.
- Total Improvement: 384 frames
Credits:
I'd like to thank Rick for his previous work on this and his very impressive run. I wouldn't have known about this game if Rick hadn't posted.
I'd also like to thank Supper for his zipping technique which he discovered back when Rick was first TASing Ghoul School.
And Grunt for helping me "hex edit" during my final examination of the game. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a failure in the end, but was some useful information for future submissions.
Hope you guys like my run! Enjoy
FractalFusion: Accepting as an improvement to the published run. Also, changing ROM name to one which doesn't have the background problem.
Flygon: I was once told that if I didn't keep publishing, I'm gonna lose my Roost... I dunno about you, but this Flygon is going to use that Roost TM on himself, encode a damn movie, and publish it onto the front page of this website!
...this is about as badass as I can make publishing.