Ecco the Dolphin is a game where you control a fast, but not very manoeuvrable at high speed, dolphin traveling into a lot of - hostile - environment in order to save its pods.
This run improve the last one by nitsuja by using better executions, new route and mostly new glitches. As it predecessor damages are avoided, as they mostly slow down ecco, and which may give a nicer result to watch. At the same time, for entertainment purpose, a major glitch allowing to go through almost every wall using the fact that you can lock the camera at one position while moving ecco and that all element outsides the camera's view is not loaded, has been forbidden because of the possible extreme repetitiveness of a run using it in almost every level.
As explained in the previous comments many thing can be seen as mistake, useless or random action, but may not be because of the behavior of ecco. Indeed, more than the fact that ecco can go very fast in few frames but on the other hand has no way to slow down (except colliding into walls), ecco turn following a wide curve double by the fact that he turn only at precise frames. This mean that you may delay your input by few frames you will still turn at the exact same frame and position, which drastically reduce the number of possibilities. Added to this the fact that creatures behave differently depending on parameters like your position, speed or other things, executing a level in a perfect way is hardly conceivable.
Finally the two last level (which are auto-scroller) are played without killing any enemies, which is possible thanks to the limit of two vortex drone on screen at the same time, even if the levels as not been thought for being played this way. (Last remark contrary at we may think, pressing C (acceleration button) at each frame is not optimal holding C for 11 frames.)
Notable Differences :
  • Medusa Bay : exit the level using a glitch with the sonar map which occurs when ecco is at the opposite side of the exit in a level near of the limit of the screen.
  • The Lagoon : Clip into a wall at the beginning using a glitch that occur when aiming a creature (when charging) while being at the limit of a current.
  • Ridge Water : Clip into two wall. One at the beginning of the level using a variation of the previous glitch, and the other one right after due to level design error.
  • Hard Water : Enter in a wall just before the end of the level due to missing collisions of the wall.
  • Island Zone : Skip the key glyph because the glyph that block the exit can be by-passed.
  • Marble Sea : skip the use of a pushable block to get through the current using instead the speed given by the auto-aiming when charging enemies.
  • Deep City : Use the sonar glitch at middle of the level to end it earlier.
  • Jurassic Beach : Finish the level earlier due to a missing wall leading directly to the exit.
  • Pteranodon Pond : Use a glitch that allow Ecco to be released by the pteranodon when releasing all buttons in order to be thrown into a wall teleporting ecco at the default position of the pteranodon and so clip into wall.
I hope that you will enjoy.

Solarplex : Added Temp Video Encode.
feos: Accepting to obsolete the existing run, with blank branch. Publishing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4349: Itresad's Genesis Ecco the Dolphin in 20:44.95
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What would a "camera freeze" TAS time be like? Also encode please.
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voting yes, im encoding right now and its really entertaining!
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jlun2 wrote:
What would a "camera freeze" TAS time be like?
i'd like to know what would be the duration of this too (maybe if it is not too long or boring to do you can submit a camera freeze one) yes vote! i never understand this game and was very frustrated when i played it on my childhood, now i can see why...
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a camera freeze time would probably be 15 mins or under most likely.
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the first ridge water glitch surprised the hell out of me (hi, this is vorpal btw). great queen fight. good stuff. uhhh I had no idea someone was working on a tas or I would have made a vid of this sooner. there's a mapskip in ridge water that I had written off for realtime camera-freeze runs. If you clip into the wall left of spawn and go left to the edge of the map then down, there's this invisible wall. Usually if you try to edge past the right edge and continue downward inside the wall, you either get frozen in the glitch terrain or you just get ejected back inbounds. But you can get past it somehow, and then there's a map glitch area further down. I would've recorded a video of this earlier, but I got it once last year while screwing around, and then tried for another couple hours to get it while recording but got frustrated and gave up. http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1216211824/ecco-ridgewater.gmv I'm mentioning it because I'm not at all sure what else that first glitch you do in ridge water is capable of. If you can get in the left wall w/ it, this may actually be doable. Thought I'd mention it. voting yes.
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jlun2 wrote:
What would a "camera freeze" TAS time be like? Also encode please.
It would look like this: http://www.twitch.tv/halfbakedprophet/c/3930917 The camera freeze glitch is too strong. It doesn't matter what the terrain looks like, you can always use it.
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Maur wrote:
the first ridge water glitch surprised the hell out of me (hi, this is vorpal btw). great queen fight. good stuff. uhhh I had no idea someone was working on a tas or I would have made a vid of this sooner. there's a mapskip in ridge water that I had written off for realtime camera-freeze runs. If you clip into the wall left of spawn and go left to the edge of the map then down, there's this invisible wall. Usually if you try to edge past the right edge and continue downward inside the wall, you either get frozen in the glitch terrain or you just get ejected back inbounds. But you can get past it somehow, and then there's a map glitch area further down. I would've recorded a video of this earlier, but I got it once last year while screwing around, and then tried for another couple hours to get it while recording but got frustrated and gave up. http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1216211824/ecco-ridgewater.gmv I'm mentioning it because I'm not at all sure what else that first glitch you do in ridge water is capable of. If you can get in the left wall w/ it, this may actually be doable. Thought I'd mention it. voting yes.
Link to video
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a camera freeze time would probably be 15 mins or under most likely.
I won't be so optimistic, 10 minutes are already consecrated to the 2 autoscrollers + ending. 5 minutes is already half time of the part you can use that glitch, I think that 17 minutes would be reasonable due to the time of execution of the glitch. Nice find Vorpal, I'm not sure that you can expect more from the first glitch here but it always worth to look. However as there is water current near from the place where is located the "alternative" exit, trying to exploit the misconception of those currents to go inside a wall is something that has to be done.
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Congratulations, Ecco the Dolphin now makes less sense without killing entertainment. Yes vote.
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I'm going with a Yes vote. It's quite the run, and improves upon the previous one quite a bit. The out-of-bounds water current trick made me go "woah!", not particularly because of the trick per se, but because of the sheer amount of force it took to do that! I knew those currents were strong, but that was just insane! Judging from the stream Patashu linked to, quite a few tricks done on this TAS are pretty similar to the camera freeze glitch. Which makes me think, would the goal to not use the camera freeze really be that important? I mean, some of the glitches used here are almost the same thing, and there are other glitches throughout the run that are repeated often (crystal sliding), which rules out the "it becomes repetitive" argument. Plus, games like Sonic 3 & Knuckles have TAS that use wall warps in almost all stages, and those are still enjoyable. I can't imagine there being such a monumental difference between this run and a camera freeze run. Hence, I'm not really comfortable with the idea of this run avoiding it, and the potential for another run to use it.
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I see your point since more of the glitch used consist to enter inside a wall in order to cut a part of the level. After for the repetitiveness I am not considering only the fact that it can be use in many level almost at the beginning of it but also the time of execution of this glitch which is "really" slow (compared to similar clips in other game). In my mind it is surprising when you see it for the first time but then as soon as you see ecco stoping and starting to "slide" you already know that you will enter into a wall and then guess that the exit will be probably next to the wall you enter. This remove a part of the surprises that a TAS can give you. After for me if in the future new method are found to reduce the number of use of this glitch or that it is made less predictable that would be perfect. But I won't deny that some people would prefer the run without constraints while some other may not like it.
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I made an unoptimized tas awhile ago using the camera glitch that beats it in 17 mins and 46 secs. You might be right. I was just trying to be optimistic :). Anyways, the main reason players don't really want to use the camera glitch is that it is uninteresting for the people who play it. It trivializes the difficulty and skill needed to beat the game. However, for the people who have never played this game, that glitch probably looks interesting and crazy. I guess I could call it similar to not orbing in smw. (kind of) That said, this is well made, optimized, and faster than nitsuja's. Though, if someone were to ever make an optimized run using the camera glitch, I wouldn't mind seeing this be obsoleted. Mainly because I do think the line between camera freeze and the other tricks in this game is very thin.
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The equivalent of camera freeze is if you found a glitch that gave you noclip in Doom and it works on every map. Sure on some maps you can find creative ways to clip through a corner or past a narrow gap or through a door, and those take skill, setups and research - or you can just noclip through everything. It's technically interesting that it's possible, but that's about it.
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Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2630] Genesis Ecco the Dolphin by Itresad in 20:44.95
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The only glitch that doesn't seem possible or nearly impossible to do in real time is the first in the ridgewater level. anyway - Lagoon skip is doable faster than the regular way in a tas (still need the position but there's no need for any wait) - I don't know how to reproduce but i managed once to instantely get out of the wall cliping in ridgewater. This could save a lot of time - The machine is a bitch , don't except to clip out of that. Unless we found something like (At X level : Clip into the vortex queen room)
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Console verified: Link to video No loader program or manual input modifications were needed. More info: http://notaz.gp2x.de/md/verification/
MarbleousDave
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17:54 is the current world record. A new TAS is warranted. Using RTA timing, this TAS is 18:39, which means that the next TAS needs to be over 45 seconds faster than this TAS for it to beat the current unassisted record.
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PikachuMan wrote:
17:54 is the current world record. A new TAS is warranted.
THANKS SHERLOCK. It's not like it's been the World Record for 3 years now. There's a lot of TASes that warrant for a new TAS due to either the RTA community closing ground, or there's new techniques not used.
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This TAS deliberately didn't use the camera freeze glitch, and that RTA run did. The fastest no camera freeze real time run is 22:16.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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This could use a 60fps YT video...