Hi, im Rolanmen1 (normaly called Roland) and i have been watching TASes for a long time here, so i now decided to try it myself.
I started TASing today and did this little TAS on the Intro Stage of Megaman X3.
You can see it on Youtube, or you can downoad the movie file here.
Any Feedback is realy appreciated, since i have been trying this only one day :)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2160
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Hello Rolanmen1, and welcome to TASVideos! It's nice to see a new TASer entering the stage.
First of all, it seems that the two links contain some errors in their addresses - in the youtube link, you should remove the first "h" and the "url" at the end, and in the .smv link, you should remove the "url" at the end. Just a heads up.
Your TAS looked very good for a first TAS, and you certainly seemed to know what you're doing, so I'm hoping to see more stuff from you in the future. :)
The movie was pretty decent for a first TAS.
I haven't watched or read up on Megaman X tricks in a while, but if I recall there's a lot of subtleties to the movement in order to gain frames. From observation. it seemed that the only obviously slow portion was your handling of vertical shaft wall jumping.
I would recommend taking a look at the published TAS and comparing portions to see what could be done faster. It's hard to see the possible improvements in this game unless you count frames.
Another thing for later is that you should always try to be interesting during wait times. The boss fight was very plain. This game is particularly difficult, because you have so many weapons available at no time expense.
Overall pretty decent. Try to look at the published run to see where you could be faster. If you ever plan to make a publishable run, you will have to be more entertaining during wait periods.
First of all thanks for your feedback, i will try hard to improve on this.
About the entertainment during wait parts, i tried to think hard on something funny/entertainment, but my mind was just in blank :(. So i leave it like that since it was just my first TAS.
I will post someother stuff that i can think off, untill i plan to submit something.
Thanks again.
PS. BTW i fixed the link, sorry for that :P
Kirkq mentioned exactly the two points I was about to mention. One can learn a lot from looking exactly where you gained and lost frames compared to the published movie, and why. Keep it up!
I saw FractalFusion's TAS carefully, and the Intro Stage of his TAS have 8920 Frames.
While mine have 9897.
How many seconds did i lost here exactly? (Assuming frames can be calcualted to seconds, if isn't please enlight me)
9897 frames - 8920 frames = 977 frames. The game runs at about 60 frames / second, so 977 frames / (60 frames/second) = a little over 16 seconds.
I usually open the emulator two times, and allign them side by side, one of them with the published TAS, and one with the version I'm working on. The goal obviously isn't to copy the input... since that would produce the exact same movie, but to check every now and then at points where the movies are at exactly the same point in the game if you have lost or gained frames in the part you just TASed. If you lost frames, check where they went, and redo.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Baxter wrote:
9897 frames - 8920 frames = 977 frames. The game runs at about 60 frames / second, so 977 frames / (60 frames/second) = a little over 16 seconds.
I usually open the emulator two times, and allign them side by side, one of them with the published TAS, and one with the version I'm working on. The goal obviously isn't to copy the input... since that would produce the exact same movie, but to check every now and then at points where the movies are at exactly the same point in the game if you have lost or gained frames in the part you just TASed. If you lost frames, check where they went, and redo.
Sorry to use this thread for this but, a question appears!
Is it possible then to open two emulators, use the same rom on both, play a published movie on one of them with write protection, and record a new movie on the other one (have both emus with background input enabled), so both start synced, and you can TAS the new one while the published movie also goes back and forth as you save and load states? That way you can TAS and visually know how ahead or behind you are, in real time.
Of course, keep in mind to avoid messing up the savestates names (each emulator needs to save on different places or with different save names).
Sounds like that's technically possible, if like you said have one on read-only, and one on read+write, and then make savestates on the same frame. It must obviously be different savestates, and the emulator must support background input... but yeah, it sounds like that's possible. From what I've withnessed in the quadrun though is that if you don't go frame by frame, or at least check regularly, the framenumbers can desync a bit. So yeah, this should be possible.
I myself don't do it this way, and I can imagine running into a bit of trouble when wanting to rewatch a part that you just TASed, the background input will turn the published movie into read+write. Nice idea... but I don't think there are a few things that make it a bit unpractical (for instance, I hated having to switch off background input every time I wanted to write something at irc, while making the quadrun, and then turning it on again at both when I continue TASing. Background input is not something I would work with if there is a way without having to use it), but I'll stick with my current method ;).
Seems like all you'd need would be to replicate the input from one emulator to the other, and there's any number of ways to do that. For arbitrary one-to-many communication (say you wanted to have four movie windows open), sockets wouldn't work too well (they're one-to-one), but you could have one of the emulators write all user input to a file, and have the others tail that file and react as appropriate. (Note that user input is different from controller input)
I wouldn't be surprised if there were Windows apps that mirror input in this fashion too.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Well, i did another try and now it's on Megaman Zero.
Here is the video link, and here is the movie file.
Comparing to computerbird's TAS, i lost a second (game timer). I tried to count the frames on his TAS, but he included the first cutscene, and i skipped it.
Again it looks pretty good. If I had to guess you probably lost most of your time damage boosting ineffectively.
The best way to compare is to take computerbird's TAS and write down frame numbers at very specific points, and then compare these to your frame numbers.
If he includes the first cutscene start timing after the first cutscene closes. Maybe he's at 1000 and you're at 500. Subtract 500 from any frame numbers after that to see how long you took in a given short segment.
Comparing specific portions of your run vs. a published run is very important for seeing if you are optimizing a segment. You should do your best to match or beat the TAS time at every crucial point if you want to produce a publishable run.
Hmm. After the cutscene to the slash on the boss. He have 3209 frames.
While i have 3292, making a difference of 83 frames, and if my calculations goes right, i lost 1.38 seconds.
