I still can't believe these weren't released for the 3DS...
Which version?
For, in addition to the version-exclusive Pokémon, there are also version-exclusive areas; Black City in Black and White Forest in White. Also, Opelucid City looks different in each version but I'm not sure whether there's more to it than just aesthetics.
Which Starter?
The choice determines which first Gym Leader you'll face: Grass-type user Cilan if you choose Oshawott, Fire-type user Chili if you choose Snivy and Water-type user Cress if you choose Tepig.
Which time?
Now there are seasons as well as day and night that affect what Pokémon appear. In spring, it rains in some areas and in winter, snowdrifts allow you to access places there are usually out of reach. Not to mention, day and night lasts differently for different periods of time depending on the season.
Which HM Slave?
...You'll have to work that part out.
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
Joined: 9/2/2008
Posts: 289
Location: United Kingdom
I still can't believe these weren't released for the 3DS...
It doesn't need to really, it has a better chance of doing well on the DS with the install base of over 120 Million than the 3DS with 400,000 (as of Japan Launch week).
Oh and did you search the forums before making this topic because we already have a topic here ;)
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10095
I still can't believe these weren't released for the 3DS...
It doesn't need to really, it has a better chance of doing well on the DS with the install base of over 120 Million than the 3DS with 400,000 (as of Japan Launch week).
Oh and did you search the forums before making this topic because we already have a topic here ;)
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10095
D'argh! No, I didn't, sorry!
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
<Kaphotics> 021F6388 - english white
<Kaphotics> black is probably +/-0x20
<Toothache> gotcha
<Kaphotics> it's got the same RNG constants as the main RNG right next to it
<Toothache> I wonder how manipulable it will be for a TAS
<Kaphotics> not sure how it's seeded, but it looks like it only controls battle results not NPC move decisions
<Toothache> ok that's handy
<Kaphotics> like I'm able to always crit
<Kaphotics> and always dodge
<Toothache> if that's the case, it should be easy
<Kaphotics> depending on the NPC's move
<Kaphotics> it looks like the formula for the 1/16 chances is seed>>60
<Kaphotics> 0 being proc
So there you go, one major step for a B/W TAS already overcome - the battle RNG location.
Which version?
For, in addition to the version-exclusive Pokémon, there are also version-exclusive areas; Black City in Black and White Forest in White. Also, Opelucid City looks different in each version but I'm not sure whether there's more to it than just aesthetics.
Black City and White Forest are irrelevant for the purposes of TAS, as neither can be visited on the way towards game completion. But, there are still more TAS factors in this game for version than there are for previous games.
1 - Of course, wild availability. However, there are very few version-exclusive Pokemon in either game (discounting post-game, anyway). The only one likely to matter is Reuniclus(W), who has clear advantages over Gothitelle(B). Rufflets/Vullabys show up far too late to help, and Whimsicott/Lilligant are far too narrow.
2 - Version Legend. Unlike previous games, catching Reshiram(B)/Zekrom(W) is compulsory. Furthermore, they automatically show up in the lead of your party for the final two battles, so either you have to use them, or you have to waste time switching them. One valuable weight to this is that Reshiram can easily OHKO N's Zekrom with a critical Dragonbreath, while conversely Z would require some combination of favorable IVs, poor IVs for N's R, and high damage variance. Reshiram also has a slight edge against Ghetsis.
So, for version, I'd say Black would be best. It certainly doesn't hurt that N's Stone and resulting Pokemon, for all the times they get referenced in speech, have fewer letters each (Dark vs Light, Zekrom vs Reshiram), so it'll save a couple frames here and there.
Which Starter?
The choice determines which first Gym Leader you'll face: Grass-type user Cilan if you choose Oshawott, Fire-type user Chili if you choose Snivy and Water-type user Cress if you choose Tepig.
I'm inclined to think Tepig/Emboar is the strongest and most versatile of the starters. However, NONE of the starters have an early move that affords them a particularly decent advantage against their monkey nemesis in this gym, and the free level 10 monkey you get in the dreamyard can only OHKO with the absolute most favorable circumstances... which all hinges on if it's even possible to RNG weak opponents.
...This one might take a bit of research.
Which time?
Now there are seasons as well as day and night that affect what Pokémon appear. In spring, it rains in some areas and in winter, snowdrifts allow you to access places there are usually out of reach. Not to mention, day and night lasts different for different periods of time depending on the season.
Winter. Twist Mountain is MUCH faster during this season. Route 8 is slower due to sliding, but not by much.
You've got a few minutes where season doesn't matter, so it's possible to time the run so it's Winter in Twist Mountain, but Spring in Route 8. However, the 'new season' message might cost some or all of the time you'd gain, not to mention it'd probably mess with the RNG.
Which HM Slave?
...You'll have to work that part out.
An HM slave will not really be required. There aren't many places where you'll need an HM. Usually it's just for optional items.
You will need to use Cut once in the entire game (entering the Dreamyard, after first gym), and you can teach that to the monkey you get for free right before said gym. You'll also need Fly once (Hunt for the Stone, after seventh gym), by which time it should be trivial to have coincidentally picked up the flyer needed beforehand.
If I remember correctly, you can use Strength as a shortcut in Dragonspiral Tower's second floor. Might be an odd place here and there where Surf is more useful than walking.
First a movie gets submitted, and ends up accepted despite breaking rules other runs have been rejected for. And when I vote less than spectacularly on this movie, I become the victim of harassment and threats.
Yay, favoritism.
Black is better, but for getting Sawk. You can pick it up before Gym 2 from Lv 12-17 (single grass) or Lv 14-19 (double grass). It can learn a rock and a dark type move via TM, so it can deal with its weaknesses. In the same area is a Pidove for your flyer. That's what we've been finding at SDA.
A possibility. However, for TAS purposes, I feel that Guts abuse might be more useful via Timburr/Gurdurr, getting paralyzed, and using the Quick Claw. (Conveniently, both Timburr and the Claw are available before the third gym.) Timburr's rock moves can also come in handy for versatility.
Sawk's pretty strong for a normal run, but when you have a always-on, no-drawback +50% Attack bonus in a TAS-boosted Guts, things look much better for Gurdurr.
(...though I guess it might get a bit repetitive if Ruby/Sapphire, the in-progress Diamond/Pearl run, and this run ALL rely on Guts abuse... whatever works for speed.)
First a movie gets submitted, and ends up accepted despite breaking rules other runs have been rejected for. And when I vote less than spectacularly on this movie, I become the victim of harassment and threats.
Yay, favoritism.
I guess every TAS from gen 3 onwards will have Guts abuse because its the fastest Way when you are "very lucky" :D
For gen V i think that lag could be an issue. On my ds winter lags heavily but fall doesnt. What do lagframes do with the rng?
And ive been following hov forums but saw no Big Progress so far. Maybe some Day someone will find THE glitch for a speedrun.
How should I know what I think before I read what I post?
2 - Version Legend. Unlike previous games, catching Reshiram(B)/Zekrom(W) is compulsory. Furthermore, they automatically show up in the lead of your party for the final two battles, so either you have to use them, or you have to waste time switching them. One valuable weight to this is that Reshiram can easily OHKO N's Zekrom with a critical Dragonbreath, while conversely Z would require some combination of favorable IVs, poor IVs for N's R, and high damage variance. Reshiram also has a slight edge against Ghetsis.
Note that the Legend will only be included in your party if you have room. Otherwise, to the PC it goes.
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
I seem to recall my brother mentioning N "insisting" on you making room for it. I didn't see this first-hand, as I saw what was coming from a mile away and purposefully stashed my Fly bird away for room. >_>
So I don't actually know for a fact what goes on during that scene if your party is full. I simply assumed they wanted to forcefully engineer the Zek x Resh fight.
However, as a random thought, even without the legend thing, another potential consideration for Black is wild Cottonees. Regrettably, no trainers in the forest use any Pokemon that can paralyze for activating Guts, so you have to use a wild battle... and Cottonee's the only one who can do it that early in the game. (Petilil, the White Version equivalent, won't know Stun Spore in the wild.)
It does create a nice situation where you get Timburr, Guts activated, and the Quick Claw all in or adjacent to Pinwheel Forest. (And Timburr, if level-manipulated to 16, can easily clear through the entire forest even without Guts, so you can wait until the very end to get paralyzed.)
First a movie gets submitted, and ends up accepted despite breaking rules other runs have been rejected for. And when I vote less than spectacularly on this movie, I become the victim of harassment and threats.
Yay, favoritism.
It does create a nice situation where you get Timburr, Guts activated, and the Quick Claw all in or adjacent to Pinwheel Forest. (And Timburr, if level-manipulated to 16, can easily clear through the entire forest even without Guts, so you can wait until the very end to get paralyzed.)
You can paralize it in the striaton city gym, because all the monkeys know lick
EDIT: would be senseless, because you get the quick claw at skyarrow bridge
How should I know what I think before I read what I post?
I've made a habit of derping around seeing what I can do on the games, and the RNG is one of my favorites.
As almost everyone knows, we have been able to control the IV / PID RNGs in every game (gen 3/4/5) for awhile. However, the RNG in Gen5 changed to a 64 bit RNG, and the battle portion of it was not apparent. I got haxed out first round at a VGC regional so I felt it was appropriate to smash the game back with its own RNG that it uses for battles.
Toothache already posted some information I gave him, but nothing really came of it... I've made a few research posts on the battle RNG over at Smogon, and corrected a few misconceptions in regards to protect rate and the "random damage" aspects of battle sims.
Here's a preview of what I've been able to do, pretty much full control of the battle RNG. I'm not a TAS kind of guy, so don't expect full on runs from me!
Link to videoLink to videorelevant posts regarding the battle RNG here
Toothache told me to post this here. Earlier yesterday I uploaded a version where I forgot to use a XP patched ROM, fixed that and extended the video up to beating the first gym.
Link to video
youtube descrip
WIP: [Start ~ Trio Badge]
Tool Assisted Speedrun of Pokemon White (english).
Abuse of the RNG for Pokémon Nature/IV/Gender in addition to the Battle Outcome (criticals), which makes this the very first Pokémon B/W TAS utilizing these mechanics!
Check out the Shiny Minccino that Professor Aragi has :D
Run comments:
Speed tie with Snivy, as Tepig has an Adamant nature. BRNG*2 = 0 for me to go first.
Tutorial Catching is completely scripted, it ignores Battle RNG and Battle Options (plays animations).
2HKO on the Patrat because Ember doesn't do enough to OHKO with my -SpA nature. If I changed natures, I would not be able to beat the first gym without healing first. I ended up having to use a healing item anyway, but the ingame battle UI is quick compared to out of battle.
The Gym Leaders are programmed to always OHKO if they can.
Since this will probably be my first and only TAS, I'm not too competitive / worried about frames. I just want to be as fast as I can without worrying about exact frames to press buttons on. I used the turbo button function because I'm lazy =)
I'm wondering if you should consider something like a nature that doesn't reduce one attack stat, like Naughty or Lonely. Looks like having stronger Embers will save a couple of turns in these early battles.
Changing the nature would change the Gym Battle a bit. Panpour's +1 Water Gun does 20 damage with the lowest random variation, 14 without a boost (against a flawless un-dropped SpD)
A change to a -defensive would decrease the respective defensive stat from 20 to 18 (assuming it was flawless IV'd to begin with).
Argument against Naughty: That SpD drop would make the minimum Water Gun (SpA 19 -> 18 SpD) damage 24, and that's enough to 2HKO (from max 43 hp).
Argument against Lonely: Take more physical damage from other opponents. You'd end up with less HP against the Panpour; then it wouldn't use Work Up because Water Gun would finish you off at +0.
Argument against Brave: Pretty sure you won't outspeed the leader's Lillipup.
The -Def might be the best option, if you're able to have 15 or more HP when against the Panpour. That's a difference of 3 HP from what I've done. However, after the many attacks absorbed I don't think a -Def run would arrive at 15 HP.
It's worth noting that all trainers usually have 0 IVs for their stats.
Cheren's level 8 Oshawott can't be OHKO'd by the critical max damage tackle. It's just not enough!
===edit
run playlist
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCF0C3F84EC9781C2
3:01:56 including the credits (sav file).
The last battle was completed before the 3 hour mark on both Total Time and Played Time.
uploaded a one-video of the complete run
Link to video
3:01:56, I do believe it is possible with improvements (this was mainly just a dry run figuring things out as I went along) it will be possible to get under 3 hours.
improvements:
- getting Pokerus earlier than after the first gym (OHKO lvl8 oshawott maybe?)
- doing it in winter to skip the hiker battle (saves at least a minute)
- different nature to use ember a little if needed (blaze is active when I have ember)
- managing PP a little better so that just enough is had for the gym & cheren battle before he heals you (no pokecenter heal needed)
- abusing the MTRNG for evadable moves in the early half of the run (dont have to use water during gym battle)
- Remembering to always talk to a trainer rather than having them ! @you (save a bunch of seconds overall)
- C-gear can be turned on earlier to avoid waiting for NPCs, maybe during the 4th gym wait period.
- did I even use surf? lol
was fun doing this :P
Some advice for the WIP: If it doesn't take too much time to manipulate, crits on the catches would be faster than regular catches like the ones we see there. (The animation for a crit catch is shorter than for a regular catch, IIRC.)
Something that could possibly be sped up: Are all Super Effective hits strictly necessary? Several parts early on look to me like Rock Throw would have done the job as easily as Low Kick, and not have to display another "Its Super Effective!".
OK, watched the whole testrun now.
Some things I noticed (most of the run was very good, here's some other places I've noticed potential improvements, depending on what exactly you were trying to do):
- You do indeed never use Surf (I was checking); it might have saved time in Victory Road given that you learn it, but I don't think the length of time it takes to learn is worth the length of time it saves there.
- Why are you training up two Pokémon (with redundant type coverage, at that)? Does the new exp formula make that the best method, or is soloing still going to work best?
- You seem to spend a lot of time on attacks with extra messages (notably things like Arm Thrust that have a long animation with animations turned off, and several messages coming up; Rollout has a different but related issue). It may be worth optimising attacks for short animation speed (and this is easier to do with a more highly leveled Pokémon, which is the reason Pokémon speedruns normallygo solo).
- You spend quite a while in the middle of the TAS with Gurdurr not paralyzed; was there just no good opportunity? (Arguably you could save Quick Claw messages like that, but Quick Claw was mostly activating anyway.)
- Why did you delay attaching the Lucky Egg to Emboar? (Only thing I can think of is that the exp difference didn't matter so you were trying to optimise when you attached it.)
I'm no expert, but I am pretty familiar with the game mechanics.
- Critical capture is out of the question. The odds of it happening is 0 if you have less than 31 species caught.
- The new XP formula makes is very hard to overlevel mons, so two Lv X mons might be better than one Lv X+2. It would need more study, but this strategy seems sound.
- As for getting paralyzed, you need to rely on enemy attacks, and the plot occasionally heals you. Trying to get paralyzed more often means more encounters.
- Gurdurr is slow enough that it needs a Quick Claw even when healthy.
- TMs are a lot rarer because they became unlimited use, and the good ones are usually out of the way. That means to abuse Guts, the price is a poor movepool. Also, TMs don't restore PP, so they can't be used avoid healing. The second fighter also doubles as a second clip of PP to use.
I'm pretty sure the usage of 2 Pokémon at the same time was for PP management, and thus time saved by going into less Pokémon centers.
The greater amount of forced battles (emphasize on the Plasma plot) and the new EXP formula as mentioned above allows such strategy which likely wouldn't have been possible in other games without wasting time.
I was surprised to see that in a Pokémon TAS too, but this worked out really well IMO.
Surfing through Victory Road is WAY slower than going around the water. No discussion here !
dem questions--
input file:
The battle RNG can be abused online; for this reason I won't upload it because I do not want to openly share the information on how the battle RNG operates. I've demonstrated this to my friends at Smogon and we've decided to keep battle RNG under wraps due to BW being the active game.
critical captures:
It's impossible to get a critical capture with a low Pokedex; I've seen that the current hypothesis on how CC works is not entirely accurate, it'll eventually be debugged but we have other priorities at the moment.
surf:
Last time I played through the game was almost a year ago, nobody had an answer for me in IRC so I just taught it anyways just in case. Surfing in Victory Road would be slower than biking through it.
criticals:
I was trying to PP manage, although low kick and rock throw are quicker I just don't have enough PP. patsen29 and GimMick explained this well :)
duo-run:
Mainly for PP management, switching took only a few seconds compared to many Pokecenter runs if I didn't. EXP is reduced when you get overleveled, and it gets boosted when you are underleveled.
item attaching:
I didn't want to waste time opening my menu so I think I did this whenever I had to switch Pokemon or something. The lost xp might have made a difference on what I could KO, idk.
paralysis:
there's really no opportunities to get paralyzed until the 4th gym, so I got it then. when I got healed there wasn't any quick opportunity; I didn't exactly need it at the time to KO stuff so I just got it at Victory Road.
PP:
The final stretch before the 8th gym was kind of hard; I didn't know if I was going to be able to take out the gym and cheren without healing. I ended up playing it safe and just healing. The plasma's Garbodor was the reason I switched, I think it was because my current pokemon couldn't OHKO with a crit.
TMs:
Kinda out of the way, ended up needing none of them. When a TM is taught the current PP won't change, only the max&move will.
---
Last night I did an entralink abuse using the RNG to get a flawless beneficial nature Pokemon. Since it doesn't use the battle RNG (100% capture in entralink by default), I don't mind sharing it.
Link to video
I used (5215 - Pokemon - White (DSi Enhanced) (J).nds) ROM from the net, and a modified MAC address desmume (this is included in the zip)
