arkiandruski: Thanks for your list. I'll update mine a little based on what you've written.
Grincevent: I guess real-time playing and recording is only really necessary if you can't either a) record the gameplay from the emulator or b) run the game at full speed or it's otherwise more convenient to play outside the emulator. Is there something else I'm missing?
Cool, man glad I could help. Reading through your latest draft, I noticed that the common tricks sections was kind of bare bones. Maybe I can help expand on it. I also have some ideas for clips related directly to those tricks, some of which haven't been suggested yet.
Common tricks:
Damage boosting:
Depending on how a character reacts to damage, it might have different purposes. From (in my mind) least impressive to most impressive:
Sometimes damage is difficult to avoid so players take damage in order to keep moving forward (especially if damage doesn't freeze you for too long.)
Bypassing obstacles that would take longer to remove or go around using invulnerability
In games with knock back, it can be used to reach platforms that are just out of reach. (Castlevania bat boost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fM-_p0S_9E&t=1m and skeleton bone boost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fM-_p0S_9E&t=7m36s)
Some games a damaged character will be catapulted in a certain direction faster than they can normally move. (Super Metroid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JsGQiFxq6g&t=9m30s (there's another place two rooms later) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JsGQiFxq6g&t=6m5s)
Death Abuse
Some games will respawn you exactly where you were when you die. In these cases death may be used as a slower damage boost, of a way to allow yourself to take more damage. (Blues Brothers: dying on a platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgCWPVLy8c&t=4m7s)
In more open worlded games, dying brings you back to certain points like towns and entrances to dungeons, which cuts on backtracking (Ocarina of Time, Dragon Warrior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWufS8a0vnc&t=9m20s)
More rarely, in some platformers you can mess with spawn points, which will allow you to respawn farther into the level than the place you died. (Batman. Already on the list.)
Overriding maximum velocity
Games will often cap how fast you can go, but sometimes oversights allow you to ignore that cap, which causes the player character to zoom off in the desired direction.
Messing with boundaries
Certain objects will push the player character away to avoid sprite overlap. They can sometimes be manipulated to imbed you in a wall (Metroid doors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFd2SezV-v0&t=3m50s)
Sometimes by approaching walls at the right angle and speed, you can find a point where the walls don't prevent you from going through (Mario to first warp pipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYCOwxHa_sU&t=1m)
If you travel fast enough you might make it so that you completely bypass the wall's trigger.
Zipping
Walls ceilings and floors will try to push you back in bounds. Often at high speeds (Mega man 2 item manipulation)
Level wrap
If you can travel far enough to the left, you can sometimes end up on the right side of the stage. (Sonic)
Luck manipulation
By knowing the game well enough, or just trying over and over again until the right event happens, you can change the outcome of random events
Anything that has to do with corrupting RAM, sprite overflow, loading the wrong sprites, or calling from the wrong addresses I'm not as versed in, so you'll have to get input from someone else.
Links to clips incoming.
Page 4 of the thread gives Chrome a heart attack regarding malware from rphravin, anybody else having that problem? Is it possible to delete whatever is causing that?
Page 4 of the thread gives Chrome a heart attack regarding malware from rphravin, anybody else having that problem? Is it possible to delete whatever is causing that?
arkiandruski: I copied what you wrote into the draft (near the end) and whenever the section you mentioned will get done properly we'll use your ideas. If you wanted to help more though, could you please contact me via PM or so for coordination because otherwise you'll have a hard time telling what needs to be done and how...
Currently me and thatguy are working on this. I've right about explained to him my entire grand plan.
Just to announce a few things!
arkiandruski joined the writing team making it me, him and thatguy.
The project was moved over to another service similar to Google Docs due to compatibility issues we were having. Zohodocs tends to be a little slower to load but let us know if there's any other problems with viewing the files. The new links are in the first post.
Cheers! Svimmer
Hi guys!
#1 So here's a point where we wanted to get some community input again: The last section in the script is about the future of TASing. I looked at some of the things that had been written in the TAS Laboratory section of the forums but I didn't feel confident about what to focus on, what's actually relevant. What's actually possible (of course this is probably a bit debatable) or currently being implemented and what could happen in some years' time?
What are your views? Here's the current list of things we've got:
-real-time TASbotting (happened at AGDQ)
-More communal projects like Jetpack was?
-More categories and challenges? (low input count, short looping input cycle)
-More platforms (dreamcast is missing, PS3...)
-Bizhawk (is it just a similar emulator to other emulators except it supports very many platforms?)
-More emulator features? (per-frame rerecord count? what else?)
-heuristic botting? (lexicographic values, bot learns from "watching" the player play)
-???
#2
Does anyone happen to know either a) how to contact Ryuto other than PMs or b) if someone other than him has TASed Brain Age or understands how it works what he did with it?
You should also mention about the "Execute Arbitrary Codes" TASes of Pokémon Yellow and Super Mario World, which shows that you can program anything using a total control over the game glitch. Sorry if it was already said here, I haven't seen it if it was :P
THC98: Yes, that wasn't explicitly mentioned anywhere. They're already a thing but maybe we'll see more of that in the future.
Doesn't anyone else have any ideas?
I saw a few PS2 TASes on Youtube so I'm guessing the re-recording branch of Pscx2 was advanced enough to allow something to be made... But yes. In any case the situation can change again before this is out.
This shows you how lost I am with this stuff. The two links you posted look interesting. Thanks.
Maybe in the future we could have more assistance for the creation of a project? Like perhaps we can have available in the resources section certain Lua scripts which can be used to execute specific glitches for you, correctly identifying your current set up and desired outcome?
Maybe some sort of intelligent bot which could be used for recognizing and correcting errors? "Normally you move your char 3 frames after getting powerup, this time you moved your char 4 frames after, clearly 1 frame error!" Granted, that may be due to RNG manipulation etc, but maybe something like that would help in future.
Flip: The first idea sounds kinda like botting where you tell the computer what values you wanna end getting (desired outcome). Is what you're thinking of something more?
The second idea: that sort of stuff gets ironed out by using macros anyway doesn't it?
Still, thanks for the input. This deserves more discussion.
So another round of community input is called for! We (mainly arkiandruski) have compiled a list of common types of tricks to find in any average TAS or speedrun: https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=udqvhaeefa22459bb41718824008eea56cc40
(section called "Generic introduction to trick types used in runs")
There's two questions I'm posing you now, dear follower of this thread:
1) Are there any more generic types of tricks that you can think of that we're completely missing?
2) We want there to be one game that features at least one trick per trick class "movement tricks", "death abuse" etc. to be used to start each class off. Currently the games that were suggested were Super Mario Kart and Mega Man 2. Could you form your objective opinions about whether either of these games, or some other game altogether, would fill such requirements? If bad comes to worse, we might resort to using several games from one game series.
Relatedly, there was a discussion of whether MM2 features a death abuse. This was pointed out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SJ077P12cs&t=13m20s but was also deemed not ideal because we want to keep the general order of trick types (the bold headings) as it it and the clip unfortunately does the OOB things first and death abuse after it. They can't really be separated. Furthermore it's probably not the most intuitively clear example to begin with (being inside two rooms at once as it were).
So are there any other games we could also be considering? Thanks for any input!
Your link doesn't work for me (it just gets stuck at "Loading...").
I'm currently compiling a list of speedrun tricks common to a wide range of games myself, though. Comparing lists could be useful.
My list has a bunch of explanation for many of them, and none for some of the others, because it's unfinished. Here are just the titles, though, with some brief explanations:
Entering solid objects (causing two things that shouldn't overlap to overlap, typically one of which is the character)
Ejection abuse (in games which work by allowing things to overlap and then separating them, get the game to separate them in the wrong direction)
Seam glitches (exploiting small regions of space where objects are not solid, not slippery, etc., typically due to the way in which the level was put together)
Shooting through walls (if you can't clip your character through a wall, clip their projectiles through a wall instead, it's normally easier; bonus points if the projectile is a playable character in its own right)
Shooting from outside LOS (aim at targets you can't see, while they can't shoot back)
Skipping triggers (the game is trying to work out when to start scripted events by monitoring the character position; go somewhere it doesn't expect, and you break the script)
Offscreen despawning (things don't exist while you don't look at them in many game engines)
Zoning (run through a loading zone and destroy everything on the other side of it)
Escaping, skipping and overlapping cutscenes (cut down uncontrollable time by making it controllable, preventing it starting, or causing it to be overriden by some other uncontrollable time)
Pause buffering (while the game is paused, change which buttons you're holding; this gives you more precise inputs in realtime, and sometimes lets you give inputs that would otherwise be impossible)
Single frame standing (while performing certain actions in mid-air, the game thinks you're on the ground for one frame)
Mid-jump physics change (do something that changes your character's physics, like changing equipment or entering water, while you're already going very fast)
Damage boosting (move faster or further as a result of being hit than you could do using your own actions)
Enemy boosting (if there's no platform somewhere, stand on an enemy instead)
Move cancelling (while doing move X, you can do move Y before it's complete; if you can cancel Y back into X, this can sometimes completely break a game, and even without such loops, it often lets you do things you couldn't do otherwise)
Invulnerability abuse (the game tries to stop you going somewhere by killing you? go there while invulnerable, maybe due to taking a hit)
Variable confusion (the game is trying to track whether you're doing X by looking at whether you're doing Y, X and Y are not the same, and you can exploit the difference)
Out of bounds (escape the area of the game your character is meant to be in)
ais: I'm sorry to hear it doesn't load for you. ZohoDocs isn't the most reliable.
Here it is in another format: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6VbXOZpnj6MbkZweWNRNUZpaGc/edit?usp=sharing
Your list looks interesting. It has things ours currently doesn't. Great stuff! Are any of them from first person shooters like Golden Eye? I think Arki was thinking mostly about 2d-platformers.
Shooting through walls, Shooting from outside LOS: which games are you thinking of?
By "zoning" do you mean you skip a trigger that normally loads up the next area but if the enemies are already loaded you can clear them easily or what exactly?
Pause buffering: is this a common technique or just a technique? Which games again?
Mid-Jump physics change: sounds a bit strained but what did you have in mind with it?
Enemy boosting, Move cancelling: These we just plain didn't have.
Variable confusion: can you give an example?
Pause buffering: is this a common technique or just a technique? Which games again?
Mid-Jump physics change: sounds a bit strained but what did you have in mind with it?
Pause buffering: SM64 is one of these games.
It's also used in the speedrun community in the Zelda 64 games.
So I'd call this a common technique.
About the Mid jump, the only one run I can recall that abuses something, if I remember correctly, is one of the batman games Adelikat TASed. It jumps in the mid airs because of the way it is programmed.
I agree that Super Mario Kart is a good choice for demonstrating the "movement tricks" you listed on that page.
Svimmer wrote:
Relatedly, there was a discussion of whether MM2 features a death abuse. This was pointed out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SJ077P12cs&t=13m20s but was also deemed not ideal because we want to keep the general order of trick types (the bold headings) as it it and the clip unfortunately does the OOB things first and death abuse after it. They can't really be separated. Furthermore it's probably not the most intuitively clear example to begin with (being inside two rooms at once as it were).
So are there any other games we could also be considering? Thanks for any input!
The New Super Mario Bros. run features a clear case of death abuse that saves time by activating a checkpoint later in the level. (Even if a viewer doesn't know the game, they can tell that the mushroom flag right before the death happens is a checkpoint.) Here is where the trick happens in the encode.
I don't think I expressed myself clearly: We are looking for just one single game (or at most game series) to be used for demonstrating some one trick out of all these categories of tricks as they are subdivided in the draft.
[Edit: a more complete list found in a later post)
Like I was saying, Mega Man 2 (or possibly some other MM game) has something for each category so it's currently a strong contender, though we wish it had a more suitable instance of death abuse. Do any of the other MM games have the death abuse without the zipping? At first glance the MM1 TAS seems to have a death abuse of some sort looking at its short description, but this is the sort of thing I was hoping that the community would help us out with to save us time.
niamek: ah yes, I now remember seeing that pause buffering usage in a Zelda Wind Waker run. Yes, we'll add it in then especially since I just remembered the pause tricks in Mega Man 1 AND Blaster Master.
ais: I'm sorry to hear it doesn't load for you. ZohoDocs isn't the most reliable.
Here it is in another format: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6VbXOZpnj6MbkZweWNRNUZpaGc/edit?usp=sharing
Your list looks interesting. It has things ours currently doesn't. Great stuff! Are any of them from first person shooters like Golden Eye? I think Arki was thinking mostly about 2d-platformers.
I was mostly aiming cross-genre. Ideally, I wouldn't add a trick to the list unless it existed in both 2D and 3D games, on both older and newer consoles; even more ideally would be if they weren't restricted to just platformers (e.g. clipping through walls is normally confined to platformers, but it's also possible in some RPGs, such as Final Fantasy 8 and Earthbound).
Shooting through walls, Shooting from outside LOS: which games are you thinking of?
For shooting through walls: I was originally thinking about 3D examples, like Banjo-Tooie and Pikmin (both which have playable projectiles, Clockwork Eggs and thrown team members respectively, so clipping those through a wall is very valuable). There are some 2D examples, too: Super Metroid and Yoshi's Island both have one-way barriers that open when shot from a particular side, and in both cases, it's possible to shoot a projectile through the barrier from the wrong side and get it to open anyway.
By "zoning" do you mean you skip a trigger that normally loads up the next area but if the enemies are already loaded you can clear them easily or what exactly?
I mean despawning or respawning enemies by going to another map or level. This exists in pretty much every game in existence; even the Goombas in SMB1 stop chasing Mario once he ends one level and goes to another level. I remember being very surprised when an enemy was chasing me in Neverwinter Nights, I ran through a loading zone, and the enemy followed me through the loading zone and kept chasing me; zoning's the exception, more than the rule.
Pause buffering: is this a common technique or just a technique? Which games again?
There are multiple ways this works. The very simplest version, which works in pretty much every game, is if you need to do multiple button changes on the same frame (e.g. "let go of L and press A on the same frame", which is useful in Sonic Advance 3 if I haven't got L and R muddled); while holding L, you pause the game, then you hold A and unpause the game. This is useless while TASing, but very useful in realtime play. This version exists on pretty much every game and platform, but how useful it is rather depends on which other glitches exist, and on not TASing.
An evolved version is when the pause screen has fade-out lag. This most famously appears in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, where even realtime players can enter long frame-perfect sequences of commands by repeatedly pausing; by pausing during the fadeout lag, the game will be unpaused for exactly one frame, making arbitrary sequences of keypresses easy to enter. Super Metroid has a weird variant of this version of pause buffering, as was famously demonstrated in a recent submission where the physics of the game work during fadeout lag, so you control Samus for well over one frame, but various other things stay paused (such as heat damage and the gametime clock).
Finally, pause buffering gives an advantage even for TASers in Super Mario 64, because the way it interprets keypresses, it lets you press the same button on two consecutive frames without holding it down (a physically impossible sequence of keypresses without using pauses to confuse the game's input routines). This increases the rate at which you can spam keypresses, from the engine's point of view, which practically translates to a higher top speed on BLJs.
[/quote]Mid-Jump physics change: sounds a bit strained but what did you have in mind with it?[/quote]
You have an equippable item that changes your physics. This mostly comes up in Metroid games (e.g. the Gravity Suit in Super Metroid, which changes your water physics) and Zelda games (e.g. Iron Boots for water physics or Hover Boots for air physics). You jump, then you change your physics, and you go really really high (because you keep the momentum from before you jumped, but now have a different air/water resistance value). If it turns out to be a Metroid/Zelda-specific glitch, it's probably not worth including it, even if that's two different major games series, and it appears in both 2D or 3D. Perhaps it is. I suspect it may also come up elsewhere, though. (I know you can pull off the trick in An Untitled Story via ducking into and out of vertical water bubbles, but it very strongly seems to be intended there, so maybe it doesn't count.)
Enemy boosting, Move cancelling: These we just plain didn't have.
Variable confusion: can you give an example?
In Metroid Fusion, if an enemy can only be hit from in front, you can hit it from behind by turning round just before the projectile hits; it checks which way the player is facing, not which way the projectile is facing. In several 2D games, you can enter walls by turning round at the instant you hit the wall; it checks your facing, not your horizontal velocity, to see which side you came from. It's possible to become small Fire Mario in SMB1 for similar reasons, although I can't quite remember the details of that glitch; basically, it's checking the wrong value to see how many hits you can take. You can get pushed downwards through the floor by a descending ceiling in the Genesis Sonic games by jumping on the right frame, because it assumes that if you're jumping, you're not standing on the floor.
A specific variant of this, which maybe should have a separate heading: you can reach the final boss area of Ocarina of Time with two medallions, because the game assumes you must have the other four; ditto two keys to reach the final boss of Donkey Kong 64, because the game assumes you needed the other six to get them.
BTW, with respect to one single game, most of these glitches/tricks exist in Donkey Kong 64.
Thanks for all that: added several things in...
Just for clarity: "shooting from outside LOS" - is that just another name for "shooting through walls" or did you mean something else altogether?
"zoning" (perhaps better "zone-hopping"): are the principle uses for this just XP/item farming and despawning/not allowing dangerous or otherwise unwanted foes to spawn or are there more clever applications that you know of?
"mid-jump physics change" is probably best named just "physics change" because it seems to apply to horizontal motion as well, inside Super Metroid too (morph ball tricks of various sorts looks like). Another example for you: Thief 2 has an item called the slowfall potion. It basically just adjusts gravity except it doesn't usually allow you to jump any higher. If you jump right before consuming one, however, you do get that benefit.
"variable confusion", I'd like to suggest renaming this "faulty game logic abuse" or some subset of those words. Those last few examples fit into this catch-all snugly. I made this a category of its own because I deem it sufficiently widespread and not really belonging anywhere else.
Are you well-versed in Donkey Kong 64 yourself or should I ask someone else to fill in my "assessment sheet"? Does it really have one of each? Are they suitably recognizable and easy to understand without a ton of explanations? See my post above for the full list of categories as we currently have them.
Thanks for all that: added several things in...
Just for clarity: "shooting from outside LOS" - is that just another name for "shooting through walls" or did you mean something else altogether?
In many games, enemies are on the map, but don't attack you until they come on-camera. In many such games, your shots persist off-camera. So you can shoot the enemies before they get a chance to shoot at you, if you know where they are. (Sometimes they'll be woken up by the first hit.) This is particularly dramatic when you do it to bosses; there's a famous intentional example in Yoshi's Island, but it can also be done in some other games (e.g. at least once in Metroid Prime 2).
"zoning" (perhaps better "zone-hopping"): are the principle uses for this just XP/item farming and despawning/not allowing dangerous or otherwise unwanted foes to spawn or are there more clever applications that you know of?
It's mostly just despawning and respawning enemies, or postponing them until later (I was just playing Neverwinter Nights, and zoned an entire two areas' worth of enemies until later in the game when they weren't hostile, leaving a bunch of peaceful enemies milling around at the edge of the map). Sometimes enemies lag as a result of being zoned (e.g. Final Fantasy 12), meaning that you can gain a few seconds to attack them unmolested and then run away again; that isn't common, but I imagine other games have similar tricks. "Zoning"'s the name for the glitch that I'm aware of, but it might be restricted to one or two communities; as usual with glitches this widespread, it's been independently discovered many times.
"mid-jump physics change" is probably best named just "physics change" because it seems to apply to horizontal motion as well, inside Super Metroid too (morph ball tricks of various sorts looks like). Another example for you: Thief 2 has an item called the slowfall potion. It basically just adjusts gravity except it doesn't usually allow you to jump any higher. If you jump right before consuming one, however, you do get that benefit.
Thanks for the example; I wasn't aware of the game. Also, I hadn't considered things like the mockball, but it really is the same glitch in horizontal form; that's a pretty clever idea.
"variable confusion", I'd like to suggest renaming this "faulty game logic abuse" or some subset of those words. Those last few examples fit into this catch-all snugly. I made this a category of its own because I deem it sufficiently widespread and not really belonging anywhere else.
Yeah, that seems fine.
Are you well-versed in Donkey Kong 64 yourself or should I ask someone else to fill in my "assessment sheet"? Does it really have one of each? Are they suitably recognizable and easy to understand without a ton of explanations? See my post above for the full list of categories as we currently have them.
I don't own the game, and mostly only know it from other people's speedruns. One of each wouldn't surprise me, though, given how generally broken it is.
It probably wouldn't be as easy to follow as a 2D game would be, though. In general, if you want a really good example of a particular glitch, you have to go to a specific game; games where cutscene overlapping saves time, for instance, are much more obvious if you can see the game playing both cutscenes, rather than if one gets interrupted (like in DK64), because a missing cutscene saves a lot of time but because it's missing, it doesn't look like anything has happened.
