Posted: 5/29/2007 10:07 PM
Post subject: TAS request - Eliminator Boat Duel
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Andypro
Joined: 5/24/2004
Posts: 262
An awesomely fun and fast-paced racing title with upgradeable vehicles. Several different racing perspectives and pretty good music. Will someone who wants to do a game that's never been done check the game out?
Posted: 5/29/2007 10:56 PM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
here's a taste i WIPed up for you http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/5787/ElimBoatalden.fcm (if you think that's bad you should have seen me try at 100% ;) haha hippy boat racers there's a lot to optimize... race games are usually poorly received though :(
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 5/30/2007 6:34 AM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
slightly less crappy version: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/5795/ElimBoatalden2.fcm The coolest part in my opinion would be taking shortcuts through the surrounding "swamp" areas you're not supposed to go through.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 5/30/2007 8:24 PM
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Andypro
Joined: 5/24/2004
Posts: 262
Hey, nice!! I agree about finding the optimal path through the swamp style stages for shortcuts and stuff. Isn't it a fun game? Definitely you'd want to avoid taking damage at all costs early on so that you could maximize the amount of money you spend on engines and acceleration, etc.
Posted: 5/30/2007 8:50 PM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Yeah, it amused me...
Andypro wrote:
Definitely you'd want to avoid taking damage at all costs early on so that you could maximize the amount of money you spend on engines and acceleration
I could probably figure it out myself, but do you mean that taking damage lowers your winnings, or that you need to spend money on repairs? Also, it seems that you make more money the faster you race, so it seems like you'd need to strike a balance between damage/speed (like most games I guess ;) I'm hunting for ram addresses, got speed down but would like damage, direction, and a timer on the nitro boosts (both how long it lasts and how long you have to wait to get a new one); think I'll keep chipping away, it's a pretty addictive game...
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 6/1/2007 12:54 AM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
More WIP action... I realized there were different difficulty settings! (Yeah, I'm solw...) And it looks like if you start from the Easy levels it wraps to the normal and then presumably to the expert levels, so you could upgrade your boat a little (very little actually) before hitting the harder levels. Though I guess starting at expert would make it shorter. The movie above plays the three Easy levels pretty quickly, less than 3 minutes. I didn't do it this time, but in general I think a good strategy is to damage your opponent's boat as much as possible quickly at the beginning of the first race. Their boat can take 5 hits (and then becomes invulnerable:( ). The more damage, the slower they go, the more money you end up making because they give you more if you beat them by a larger margin. They won't make much money so it will be hard to repair their boat, and damage not repaired carries over to the next race (not to mention that they can't upgrade either...). You can either push them into obstacles, or more amusingly use a turbo boost or a jump to land straight on top of them which hurts them but not you... I'll post an example later tonight. Does anyone know how many levels there are? If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 6/1/2007 3:15 AM
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Andypro
Joined: 5/24/2004
Posts: 262
alden wrote:
And it looks like if you start from the Easy levels it wraps to the normal and then presumably to the expert levels, so you could upgrade your boat a little (very little actually) before hitting the harder levels. Though I guess starting at expert would make it shorter.
Yes, if this is a true speedrun I suppose starting from the highest level will be necessary.
alden wrote:
I didn't do it this time, but in general I think a good strategy is to damage your opponent's boat as much as possible quickly at the beginning of the first race. Their boat can take 5 hits (and then becomes invulnerable:( ). The more damage, the slower they go, the more money you end up making because they give you more if you beat them by a larger margin. They won't make much money so it will be hard to repair their boat, and damage not repaired carries over to the next race (not to mention that they can't upgrade either...). You can either push them into obstacles, or more amusingly use a turbo boost or a jump to land straight on top of them which hurts them but not you... I'll post an example later tonight. Does anyone know how many levels there are? If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
Yes damaging your opponent is a good strat. In the overhead levels, you get $5k every time you force the game to catch them up to you when they slip offscreen [EDIT: Apparently this only happens in 2 player mode, doh]. And yes, damaging your hull is bad because you'll be slower and will have to pay for repairs. Not sure how many levels, but the last race is a swamp course which is 4 lines long on the preview map. See! I told you this game was great :)
Posted: 6/2/2007 10:22 AM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
I wrote:
If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
Nope, it's 15 levels, and they get incredibly long. Here's a boatthrough that's over half an hour, and while not optimal, it's pretty fast and I don't know how much it could really come down. Plus tracks are reused ad nauseum so there would have to be a lot of entertainment to make up for it. It does look really cool at top speed though :)
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 6/2/2007 9:27 PM
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AnS
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (727)
Joined: 2/23/2006
Posts: 682
The game's really cool, but it's hard to make good TAS with such long and repetitive games. A year ago I tried to make one, but lost motivation somewhere at the beginning. But I have some notes to share: In most of races (especially at the beginning and at the end of the game) it's faster to destroy green boat rather then rush forward. At the beginning your rivals use weak boats, so you can quickly tear them apart. After several levels they power up defense of their boats, and it may be faster to just win the race normally. But near the end of the game levels become way too long (while power ups stay fixed at the maximum), so again it's faster to crush your opponent. Here's an example, very unoptimized. There should exist more clever tricks to deliver damage to green boat. And I did it without Memory Watch, thus it's only proof of concept. Also, for quality run of the game it's essential to manipulate nitro drops (in backview mode) so that you'd have 9 nitro at the end of each lap. I beleive it's possible to run the game in smth like 20 minutes, which is quite bearable for racing games. Well, maybe adding some artificial variety can keep it interesting for whole 25 minutes.
Posted: 6/4/2007 12:25 AM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Wow, awesome! I originally thought that destroying their boat would be faster but wasn't persistent enough and thought it wasn't possible. The ram value I found for their "damage" decreased by 1 until it got to 0, and stayed there after I damaged them a couple of times so I stopped trying to hurt them... grr. Looking back the value probably had to do more with the status icon on the screen showing the damage. This is clearly the best strategy (plus it looks cooler!), unless like you say they get super tough later on.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 6/4/2007 9:47 AM
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alden
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Finally figured out the damage addresses. The one I had originally measures the "damage" meter that can be refilled after the race. For the boat to be destroyed though you have to lower all their stats to 0: 40D Damage 413 Hull 415 Steering 411 Acceleration 40F Engine Each of these values lower to 0, in that order. In your movie, AnS, the opponent automatically gets everything but damage reset to 2 when they are destroyed, but they have to pay to upgrade again. Maybe for higher opponents get reset to something higher which would make it harder. So it looks like it would degrade into a jump-fest. The last opponent was harder to damage with jumping though. More testing I suppose...
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 6/4/2007 2:56 PM
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Andypro
Joined: 5/24/2004
Posts: 262
Nice movie, AnS. It would be worth finding out if this is a time-effective strategy for the later races. The last couple of opponents have full upgrades on everything so it would take quite a long time to destroy the boat.
Posted: 6/4/2007 6:21 PM
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AnS
Emulator Coder, Experienced player (727)
Joined: 2/23/2006
Posts: 682
Unfortunately, it seems the strategy actually IS more effective on every level, so yes, the fastest movie is gonna degrade into jumpfest and it isn't likely to be entertaining after first 5 minutes. I don't know jow to solve this. At first I triet to search for some balance, where some tracks are played normally even if it's slightly faster to crash the opponent. But soon it became not so "slightly", and this speed/variety trade wasn't fair (you lose too much time for not obvious entertainment), so I stopped working on this.