The run appears to be good so far. I see a few pauses after dialog ends while you are talking to the Goomba family though... Does the game process input frame-by-frame or is there a delay that you can't get past?
Oh, when I tried watching the video with Rice 6.1.4, it kind of stopped playing after showing the castle flying away due to Bowser's power. The quality was good, but it appears that Rice 6.1.4 may not fully work with Paper Mario (unless it works better with OpenGL, but I haven't tried that). But I ran the speed run with Jabo Direct3D8 and nothing unusual happened, although it flickered a lot... I remember flickering when I played this game with Jabo before, but not that much at the beginning... Oh well. Only if my video card supported all of Glide's functions...
By the way, are you absolutely sure that the first thing you did when starting the game was make a new save file with a one character name? If not, that could explain why the speed run did not work before and why now pressing A twice actually works (and there is no up or down arrow pressed during that, otherwise the selection would have been no). Hold on... That means that Mupen64 does not ignore the save files... So that means that in order to play back the movie you must have a save folder clean of Paper Mario save states so the game won't desynch when you create a "new" save state, or keep it the way you have it and instruct those who watch this movie to create a new save file in a slot before playing the movie. I will leave this up to somebody else with Mupen64 to think about this... Maybe a discussion over IRC will bring attention to this problem.
Why are all of the save states and the save file called "Paper Mario (U) [!] (bad dump)"? I hope you are using the "good" dump now...
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
I rewatched the movie and a file is opened that is called AA already and is at first play, although i tried to delete the save many times. As for the video plugins rices video seems to work almost flawlessly, a few flickering scenes but thats about it. As for the goomba's, i couldn't get it to go any faster the first time. When talking to grandma and grandpa goomba it paused after a few lines of text. It may be able to go faster but i was not able to make it go any faster.
As for the bad dump i dont know what that is. When played on project 64 or my xbox emulator the rom runs fine, and is not a bad dump. If i play it on mupen however it tells me its a bad dump, causing me to turn alert bad dump off so i can play the rom.
Well, I guess it is marked "bad" because it was a home-made ROM dump (right?)... The CRC is still the same though... After right clicking my ROM to show its properties, its RP Ini Code is 65EEE53A-ED7D733C-C45 and its RP MD5 is A722F8161FF489943191330BF8416496, whatever that is supposed to mean. But your rom might be ok to do the run on... I don't know.
So that means you are working on a save file that was made before the run started, even though the save file is at first play... We need a judge to see whether that is ok or not.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
No its not a home-made rom, its a rom i got online.
I'm pretty sure ill have to restart the run because i think you have to start from a new file. Dunno if it matters in this case though because all it is missing is the extra second it would take to make a new named file.
Actually, if all you do to make a new save file is (after selecting a file) press A, up, left, and A twice, you should be fine in the end. It would line up perfectly when there is no save file and when there is, there will just be a slight delay between when the first dialog box appears and when you make it go away. At least, that would be in theory. It depends on how long it takes to do everything after pressing A for the first time above... If you can get the delay to be less than the time it takes for the first dialog to print out its message you can still have just enough time to synch up again when you press B and A to make the dialog go away. If it takes too long, you end up one command ahead and you get a big problem.
Then again... The difference could mess up the game later if the two different actions affect the RNG. I think you should do this TAS as if there was no save file originally though because most likely most people would watch this run once. Even if they don't, you can add a comment to warn that the save file must be deleted before running the game. That's better than asking them to create an empty save file for you...
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
I have figured out the problem, and am redoing the movie. The ONLY way you can watch a paper mario movie from the start and have it make a new file is to delete the .fla file in the save folder. If you don't do that then it will load an existing file no matter what. Paper mario is an add game.
Joined: 4/18/2006
Posts: 179
Location: East Petersburg, PA
I'm uploading an H264 AVI of the WIP. Its like 277 megs. I used Rice video plugin on the OpenGL mode to make it past the castle takeoff scene. It flickers at certain spots, but it doesn't look like itll be a problem. Ill edit this post when I get the time to after its done uploading.
Edit: Here you go guys:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4M5ROAOK
"I think we can put our differences behind us... for science, you monster."
Well, it's nice to know that this speed run will look as well as it should with little flicker thanks to the Rice OpenGL plug-in, assuming that it will work faithfully all the way through. I wonder what's with this game and flicker... I already know what's up with the menu background mess-up and the fireworks at the end; you must have read every frame on in Jabo's plugin for it to render correctly since there appears to be a secondary buffer that is supposed to make the background of the menu semitransparent (and apparently that buffer is also used for the fireworks at the end), but Jabo does not seem to update that buffer unless read every frame is turned on... I don't know how Rice handles that since I haven't tried it yet. The flicker elsewhere must be caused by some similar non-standard way of rendering the game images. It always seems to be worse (with Jabo) when there are more characters on the screen.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
How problematic. Even though I did download FFDShow, I still can't watch the Paper Mario WIP without the music eventually not matching the action on screen... Say, is that what desyncing is? I hear about it but nobody ever explains it.
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
In Paper Mario, there is a load game screen. If there is no save file created, all four slots will be empty. When you choose one, it prompts for a name to be inputted so the save state can be labeled. After pressing OK, it prompts if you are sure that is the name you want and you push OK again. Then the game starts. This is how this speedrun should start out.
However, in the broken WIP, the input for the game assumed that a save state with no progress had already been created for the game. When you select it, it just prompts to make sure that you want to load the game and you push OK. If you had no save file, the game would desynchronize due to the lack of inputting the name for the save file.
Earlier I proposed that, if done fast enough, it may not matter whether the movie player had a save state or not if the input assumed that the game did not have a save state because there is time for resynchronization between the cutscene and when the first talk balloon appears. But then I realized that the game would probably desynchronize later due to possible extra or fewer modifications to the RNG seed or whatever the game uses for random number generation.
Therefore, the speed run must be made to assume no save state AND the player of the movie must delete any existing save states to prevent immediate desynchronization. However, the current movie assumes that there is a save state. So in order to watch it, you must create an existing empty save state so the game will play properly. As darth said, the future WIPs will assume no save state because that makes the most sense.
P.S. Whenever I say save state above, I mean the in-game save file, not the memory snapshot save states.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
N. Harmonik wrote:
How problematic. Even though I did download FFDShow, I still can't watch the Paper Mario WIP without the music eventually not matching the action on screen... Say, is that what desyncing is? I hear about it but nobody ever explains it.
Desyching is when the input does not match what the game should be doing at that time. The key presses are input that is supposed to make the character do a certain something at a specific point, a desycnh is where the input does not happen where it should, which results in the character moving funny and not interacting with the game the same way that you recorded it. What you are experiencing is something common with .avi's, where the audio has trouble keeping up with the video. This is due to compression, video quality, and your computer's capabilities. In the emulator itself, the music and sounds almost never desynch with what is going on.
How problematic. Even though I did download FFDShow, I still can't watch the Paper Mario WIP without the music eventually not matching the action on screen... Say, is that what desyncing is? I hear about it but nobody ever explains it.
audio-video desync is one thing, but doesn't come up very often on TAS videos, since the prominent desyncing that can happen is when the replay file doesn't work right. Like, if you do something differently early in a run, and paste the rest of an old TAS onto the end, something might be different in the game events or random number generator because of the modification, so the way the replay file says to play will have him e.g. jump over an enemy too soon and and on him and get hurt ad knocked back. the file will keep pressing buttons as if nothing happened but now the character looks retarded and starts running into walls and dying needlessly. That's a desync.
It can also happen where the emulator accidentally for whatever reason missed a button press record for a frame and the rest of the movie, when played back, even though it kept recording fine, will be not as planned.
Well i have to put paper mario on hold again, sorry guys. My computer broke down for a couple of days back in feb. Now i have track everyday after school so im too busy to TAS now. On May 9th track will be over so ill resume the paper mario TAS.
You need to check the controller plug in settings because it seems that it is configured to not have any virtual controllers active. Go to Options>Input Settings to see what is currently set up and see if you can fix it yourself.
I would suggest doing a simpler game than Paper Mario though. Not only would the route and inventory planning be difficult, but the game also experiences major flickering issues with most video plugins at the moment. It seems that the Rice video plugin does the best, but you will need a fast computer to use it.
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
I tried doing a speed run on Paper Mario on a regular console but was 3 minutes slower than SDA. I can't imagine what it would be like if it was tool-assisted. I want to see somebody try.
so did you find a good video plugin to get passed the castle scene, or is that not the problem here? because after i finish my 100% speedrun, i was going to try and tas this game if it was working by then
I don't think anybody has tested this game with Glide Napalm (or w/e that name is), so maybe the problem is fixed and nobody has tested it yet. Unless dartht33bagger has anything to say, I suggest you go ahead if you want to. (don't forget to report on your progress!)
<ccfreak2k> There is no 'ctrl' button on DeHackEd's computer. DeHackEd is always in control.
