Stadium Events
Stadium Events is a power pad game by Bandai that is famous for being expensive (due to limited availability). The game was repackaged as World Class Track Meet and managed to reach a fairly wide audience.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.4
- Tournament mode, win all medals/trophies
- Fastest in-game time
Controls
- select - mode select
- start - start selected mode
- 1 - left foot
- 2 - right foot
Note that in hurdles races 1 and 2 are treated identically, alternating them is not necessary.
Tournament Mode
This mode consists of 100M and 110M hurdle races against each of 6 opponents, TURTLE, BEAR, HORSE, RABBIT, BOBCAT, and CHEETAH.
100M dash
This is exactly what you think at is, alternately step with your left and right foot as fast as possible.
110M hurdles
This game doesn't seem to be designed for high speed, and the hurdles seem pretty optional. I'm didn't really figure out how the game decides if you're jumping or just between steps, but it seems very inconsistent which is probably part of why this game was so frustrating. At high speeds jumping seems to get confused or something, when you land you basically come to a standstill, presumably the game is confused about what speed you should be going?
Optimization
The inputs for the 100M dash are the same every time and 5.38 is the best possible time, but the hurdles in 110M hurdles don't behave consistently for each race. I did spend a bunch of time trying to optimize the handling of hurdles with lua scripting. The best method I found was to look at 0x58 which seems to be the state variable. When running full speed the states rotate through the sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7.
Improvements
- I was surprised at the inconsistency of the hurdles and jumping mechanics. I ran lua scripts for quite a while in an attempt to optimize, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some improvement to be made with higher depth or improved scripts.
- I didn't really check, but I wonder if it may be possible to affect the opponents and make them finish faster. If possible I don't imagine it would save too many frames.
Thanks to:
- feos for advocating for the in-game time goal, pushing me to make the improvements, and running some scripts himself
- The TASMania team
Screenshots:
21, 2755, 16778, 19660, 22460
ThunderAxe31: Judging.
ThunderAxe31: Un-claiming.
feos: Judging...
feos: The in-game time is a good goal, because it covers all the relevant gameplay and ignores the time the opponent takes to finish.
While the new movie doesn't have all best times overall, it's a matter of writing more and more elaborate scripts that do heavier search, or disassembling the code, because hurdles are incredibly unreliable. TASing them manually is a pain (I've tried).
I consider this movie acceptable, because my manual WIP was beaten hard. The feedback was unclear, but the game looks simplistic and repetitive, especially the dash. Falling on hurdles may also damage the entertainment value, even if it was a part of the strategy.
Accepting to Vault.
fsvgm777: Processing.
feos: Setting the branch to "Tournament", because "The Olympics" also looks TASable if you aim for score. Max score seems to be 100 in each event, so taking the shortest time to reach all 100s should be vaultable.