I would just do one run for now and see if it's publishable; Smash Bros. gets a lot of attempts that don't work out. I highly recommend going for entertainment with speed as a secondary priority; the only published run is the run that had these goals. There are a few people around who really love a speed run, but the majority seems to agree that this game is rather dull when the same move is used over and over. (Maybe you already know all this, but it can't hurt to tell you anyway.)
Pikachu would be a good choice because he has a variety of very impressive one-on-one KOs (look at antdgar's videos for some ideas). Kirby can do a lot of damage, but he might end up being somewhat repetitive unless you use his copy ability prolificly. Fox, I think, is the least entertaining character, because he has one or two really neat ways to kill people and that's about it (I'm thinking of laser and reflector). None of his melee-type attacks are particularly memorable, and they mostly lack knockback. Feel free to prove me wrong, though!
I'd leave the possibility of that to more knowledgeable, but I think no, as that would be impossible since you only get points added to score on level end and continuing (if you need to infinitely repeat something) halves your (current) total score each time...no repeatable score actions seem to exist beyond damaging opponents, and that's at cost of time bonus.
I was browsing the japanese-youtube-like-site and came across 2 fun TAS videos of this game about 2 weeks old, kind of in the vein of antdgar's playarounds. (If you hate the scrolling comment overlay you can turn it off with the button that looks like a bird talking, next to the volume slider.)
one and two
I was browsing the japanese-youtube-like-site and came across 2 fun TAS videos of this game about 2 weeks old, kind of in the vein of antdgar's playarounds. (If you hate the scrolling comment overlay you can turn it off with the button that looks like a bird talking, next to the volume slider.)
one and two
Thanks bkDJ for that entertainment. Great find. [=
Joined: 3/14/2008
Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom
I gave up on this a while ago, for a few reasons, one of them being my gerneral lack of knowledge of the game compared to Blaze.
Anyway, here is a nice HD encode of how far I got before giving up (spent about 2 days and easily about 50-60 restarts on the BtT, but still couldnt match the best time): http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AXg2PPPuIas&fmt=22
Blaze and this other guy may be doing a run though.
In ssb the thing that determines if you will be hit by an attack in the next few frames is your position relative to your opponents. This is also known as spacing. To define it even more precisely take the position of 2 characters in a match and draw a line between them. Now find the length of this line and its slope (this could also be refered to as angle and distance). Other things like what the character (the state of the character) is doing are also important too (is the character doing and attack and what direction are they facing).
Now lets say there was an AI that knew all of the angle and distance positions that would result in getting hit in a few frames. If the AI moved in such a way to avoid these positions it would never get hit.
I am interested in finding what these positions are but to do this I would need coordinate information that describes where both characters are at all times and I am not sure how to find this. Can anyone help me with this?
I'm not a guru or anything, but I've written a bot for Street Fighter and... it's really not as simple as you seem to think. For one thing, if the AI is told to stay out of striking distance, how is it supposed to attack?
I am interested in finding what these positions are but to do this I would need coordinate information that describes where both characters are at all times and I am not sure how to find this. Can anyone help me with this?
You'll need MHS. When you've got that running and attached to Mupen, you'll want to load SSB and start a VS match.
Now you need to do a data-type search of type "float". I only found player 1's X-coordinate, but I can tell you that the middle of the stage is 0.0, and everything to the left of center is negative, while everything to the right is positive. The range that I'm able to stand on is about -1200 to 1200, so you'll want to do a "range" search with those two numbers as the "from" and "to" values.
Also, I found the address in the address range 400000-1000000.
Hopefully that's enough to get you started. :)
Joined: 8/24/2008
Posts: 19
Location: Brazil - Rio de Janeiro
I'm redoing the fastest time run of this game, with a ton of improvements.
About the entertainment problem, I asked a lot of online players and yt watchers about what they tought of the videos, most of the people
( experienced and newbie players ) prefered the fastest time completion run , that's one of the reasons that I'm redoing it.
SSB has a lot of random match TASes based in entertainment, but the 1p mode is pretty unexplored.
A speed based run of this game is not only more entertainment than a lot of other games that are published in the site but it is also, by the sight of a lot of people, even better than the superplay run.
About the new run: Many people said before that I should have done the btt stages in my last run instead of suiciding ( technically it's the same as deathwarping ), but on the other hand it may have unclear goals since It will be technically wasting time in order to gain entertainment.
What should I do ?
Do the bonus run for entertaiment or skip it for a faster time?
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
I've always been in favor of the fastest time being a good goal for the site. It's my personal opinion that because there's been so many sub-par and repetitive SSB submissions under fastest time, that the playaround offered something new, hence why it was published. The first fox fastest time one by nico (when he switched to hard mode) should have been published, had it not been for a stupid judge coming in to reject it based on his arguments with the author, not because of any regard to how people liked the movie. (read through the discussion thread, you will see that at the time, everyone was mostly in favor of it being published, then he came along, and rejected it out of spite for the author, using bullshit justification.)
Anyhoos.
I am in favor of you doing two things:
-I support you all the way for a fastest completion, especially if you have improvements in mind. In order to justify the full completion of the bonuses, you could make it your goal to include them as part of completing the game, and that any faster TAS would have to obsolete the bonuses as well; for instance, an obsoleting TAS would not be able to beat yours simply by skipping the bonuses, but copying all the rest. If the bonuses became an agreed part of the goal of beating the game, then it'd be able to be included. Which is good, because people whine about them being skipped. And, since you seem to do a really good job at making those bonuses look cool. Which brings me to my second point.
-You could also do a runthrough (one .m64) of the 8 BtT/BtP stages for the 8 main chars (since you can't start from SRAM). I like your bonus vids a lot, and wish they could be morphed into one playthrough. The playthrough has been suggested many times; and since you managed to beat every single TAS WR, I don't think it should be too hard to redo them all as one run.
About the entertainment problem, I asked a lot of online players and yt watchers about what they tought of the videos, most of the people
( experienced and newbie players ) prefered the fastest time completion run , that's one of the reasons that I'm redoing it.
Gee, I wonder why that is.
You should do a fastest time run. They're clearly better than these "entertainment" runs.
Joined: 8/24/2008
Posts: 19
Location: Brazil - Rio de Janeiro
I really liked the idea of a btt/btp compilation, it is also possible to do luigi's btt and btp without a .st.
Some times may be different from the japanese version like at luigi's btp since the compilation will probably be on the american version, but I really liked the idea.
About the 1p mode run , I don't mind about doing either since I have already TASed both , it's just to know what the people here would like better.
While doing the bonus stages makes it more entertaining as a superplay movie, it makes it less entertaining as a speedrun, because it contradicts the goal of pure speed. At least to me.
This always ends up being a divisive topic...
The way I see it is, we have three relevant categories of audience members, with some degree of overlap:
* The group that cares about speed above all else (of which ComicalFlop is an example)
* The group that cares about entertainment above all else, but accepts that speed can be entertaining (e.g. Alden, myself)
* People with a lengthy past history of playing / watching SSB
The first category isn't going to care in the slightest if you use the same combination / set of moves repetitively, so long as you're fast. The third category knows the game inside and out, and thus doesn't mind so much that a speedrun doesn't show off everything the game has to offer. You won't have any complaints from either of these two groups for a speedrun. The second group, however, is rapidly bored by repetitive gameplay, and vaguely knows that there's lots of stuff to do in SBB (though less than in Melee or Brawl, of course), and thus is distressed that the run doesn't really seem to represent the game very well.
In short, you have a game that has vastly different entertainment potential depending on the viewer's background and personality, which is why I think these runs tend to generate so much heat.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I personally think that the first and the third category apply to me (hence the overlap). That being said, I want to see the ultimate fastest possible run, but I also would like to see BtT and BtP accomplished. The aformentioned solution of having a seperate BtT/P table solves both issues. Entertainment is against the nature of speed in a game such as this. Beyond that, I can't input much.
On another note, I am working on a very hard Mario non-TAS run, and if anyone has anything to offer, please let me know.
I think a run for the fastest time on this game would always be very boring, but for me that isn't reason enough to not publish it as I find lots of other published runs to be boring too. It would at least be less boring than most other fighting games.
And an all characters break the targets / board the platforms (concept demo >_>) run is a must for this game imho.
The second one, with Fox, Kirby, and Pikachu, was by far the best, because of the sheer amount of "lots of stuff happening at once."
The other two are impressive damage-wise, but there are multiple delays where one character holds the victim while the others set up for something else. This isn't as fun as rapid hits from multiple angles!
Nice work, though. :)
