That GameFAQs thing is a lie... I recently started TLA, entered my password, and after the "item check" screen was able to rename my characters from the original game. No idea if the names stuck, I'm about ten hours or so away from that =/
I made a clip detailing various applications of Save Retreat Glitching as it applies to Golden Sun. If my explanations in the video were poor, feel free to ask questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKWZuCaLzWs
I searched out of bounds with a fairly high resolution of 400,000. This is probably twice as high as necessary
local Resolution = 400000
local MaxC = 4294967295
local DistOut = 4260000000
local DistWide = 170000000
local Quad1MaxX = DistWide
local Quad1MinX = 1
local Quad1MaxY = MaxC
local Quad1MinY = DistOut
local Quad2MaxX = MaxC
local Quad2MinX = DistOut
local Quad2MaxY = MaxC
local Quad2MinY = DistOut
local Quad3MaxX = MaxC
local Quad3MinX = DistOut
local Quad3MaxY = DistWide
local Quad3MinY = 1
(I searched from X of 0 to 170 and Y of 4260 to 4294 for quadrant one, and then similarly for quadrant 2 and 3.)
Door Exit Coordinates, Which Room is this, Number of occurrences
3670016 40370176 Room 3 Exit 1931
27787264 40370435 Room 7 Entrance 200
7864320 7340032 Outside 729
24641536 3473408 Room 7 Exit 104
99090432 8912896 Room 5 Left Exit 584
47644672 6029312 Room 3 Entrance 443
45613056 37224448 Room 2 Entrance 310
120061952 8912896 Room 5 Right Exit 180
86507520 29884416 Room 8.5 Entrance 69
109576192 18350080 Room 5 Entrance 657
109576192 34078720 Room 8 Left Exit 293
3604480 31260672 Room 9 Entrance 177
64487424 9961472 Room 6 Entrance 75
80216064 6815744 Room 1 Exit 191
4718592 3670016 Room 4 Exit 84
48758784 9961472 Room 5.5 Entrance 95
I recorded all the off-map coordinates, but as there are many occurrences I don't feel it would be worthwhile to post them. Since the resolution is so high, each door occurrence is recorded probably roughly 10-20 times.
I found 16 places doors lead to in Sol Sanctum. I would say with about 90% certainty that this is complete. It is possible that a door I found is unreachable in all cases due to obstacles in the way, but there are multiple occurrences of each door. Certain doors are much much more common than others.
Here is the list of places that doors lead to.
SOL SANCTUM:
Save Retreat Glitch can lead to:
Outside
Room 1 Exit
Room 2 Entrance
Room 3 Entrance
Room 3 Exit
Room 4 Exit
Room 5 Entrance
Room 5 Left Exit
Room 5 Right Exit
Room 5.5 Entrance
Room 6 Entrance
Room 7 Entrance
Room 7 Exit
Room 8 Left Exit
Room 8.5 Entrance
Room 9 Entrance
Room 9 was the best door I found originally. I labeled it previously as Sol Sanctum Door 1: 30, 4282.
Normal Retreat Glitch locations:
Room 3 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Room 3 Exit to Room 1 Entrance
Room 7 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Room 7 Exit to Room 1 Entrance
Room 9 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Room 9 Exit to Room 1 Entrance
Sol Sanctum is pretty much solved under the current knowledge as far as I am concerned. Enter room 3, save retreat glitch, find an off map door to room 9, complete the dungeon as normal.
------------------------------
GOMA CAVE:
Area refers to a new area of a room accessed. Area 3 is the only one you would enter twice in a normal path. Areas are defined with respect to the first cave entrance regardless of which side you entered to cave on.
Save Retreat Glitch can lead to:
ENTRANCE POINT "GOMA CAVE ENTRANCE"
13107200 12058624 Goma Cave Outside Vault Side 67
5767168 12058883 Room 2 Entrance 56
38273024 12058883 Area 5 Exit 82 (Up by Mars Djinni)
10092544 22937600 Area 7 Entrance 884 (Last Room)
12189696 31064064 Vale Room Outside 568
ENTRANCE POINT BILIBIN SIDE:
?
Normal Retreat Glitch locations:
ENTRANCE POINT "GOMA CAVE ENTRANCE"
Area 2 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Area 2 Exit to Room 1 Entrance
Area 3 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Area 3 Exit (to area 4) to Room 1 Entrance
Area 4 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Area 3 Exit (to area 5) to Room 1 Entrance
Area 5 Entrance to Room 1 Entrance
Area 5 Exit to Room 1 Entrance
Area 7 Entrance to Outside Vault Side
Area 7 Exit to Room 2 Entrance
ENTRANCE POINT BILIBIN SIDE:
Area 6 Exit to 11 9 off map ********
Area 6 Entrance to 11 9 off map ******
Area 5 Exit to Area 7 Exit
Area 5 Entrance to Area 7 Exit
Area 4 Entrance to Area 7 Exit
Area 3 Exit (to area 5) to Area 7 Exit
Area 3 Exit (to area 4) to Area 7 Exit
Area 3 Entrance to Area 7 Exit
Area 2 Exit to Area 7 Exit
Area 2 Entrance to Area 7 Exit
Area 1 Exit to Outside Bilibin Side
Area 1 Entrance to Area 6 Exit
---------------------
BILIBIN CAVE:
Save Retreat Glitch can lead to:
ENTRANCE POINT "BILIBIN CAVE ENTRANCE"
22413312 16646144 Bilibin Cave Entrance 556
20447232 34340864 Room 2 Top Level South 67
7864320 30932992 Room 2 Entrance 172
28835840 8912896 Outside Growth Entrance 1171
35127296 27918336 Before Reveal Door (By Elven Rapier) 62
52953088 16252928 Inside Reveal Door 109
ENTRANCE POINT IMIL SIDE (These doors are in the same off-map positions)
25690112 13107200 Room 1 Exit 538
22544384 11534336 Room 2 Top Level North 71
2147483648 65536 Outside Imil Side 166
56098816 8126464 Reveal Room North Side 1161
(No Corresponding Door Here?)
56098816 41418752 Inside Treasure room (Water of Life, Vial) 109
Normal Retreat Glitch locations:
ENTRANCE POINT "BILIBIN CAVE ENTRANCE"
Room 2 Entrance to Bilibin Cave Entrance
Room 2 Exit to Room 2 Entrance
ENTRANCE POINT IMIL SIDE
Room 1 Exit to Outside Imil Side
Room 1 Entrance to Room 1 Exit
----------------------
Hey guys, I'd really like to know, how many RN's do "Regular Hits", "Defending", "Critical Hits", "Unleashes", "Fleeing" and all the various items burn? I know that all enemy actions drain 1 RN for each time in a round, and I know all the amount of RN's that the various psynergies and Djinn attacks burn, but I don't know how many all the above burn. Could you please tell me?
In the first 5 minutes that I watched, a few paths could have been slighty more optimized and there doesn't seem to be any luck manipulation. Disclaimer: I don't know how RNG works in there.
In the first 5 minutes that I watched, a few paths could have been slighty more optimized and there doesn't seem to be any luck manipulation. Disclaimer: I don't know how RNG works in there.
Q: What is RNG Manipulation?
A: RNG stands for Random Number Generator, but in this game it isn't so random. In several instances, the randomness of the game can be manipulated to do exactly the same thing. Such a method is called RNG manipulation
Q: How do you do RNG manipulation?
A: It'll generally start with a save and reset, and then a specific set of events. Sometimes it involves using psynergy in the overworld, sometimes it will involve attack canceling, somethings it'll be timing when to trigger certain events.
Q: What does using psynergy do?
A: Using psynergy in the overworld will advance particular instances of the RNG. Using Mind Read against nothing, for example, can change the next encounter from 2 Oozes to a Gnome, and allow me to be able to flee from it instantly.
Q: What is attack canceling?
A: Attack canceling is when you go to attack, and then cancel that attack by pressing B. Simple right? This simple action can also manipulate the RNG, generally is used to change to RNG from not being able to escape battles, to being able to flee.
So you can reset, use psynergy, attack cancel, etc to manipulate RNG. There are also rooms with random scenery elements that advance the RNG every frame, but most rooms aren't like this (they make RNG manipulation impossible in RTA).
So you pretty much have godly RNG control all the time.
tl_plexa also has his own FAQ for Golden Sun with more information:
http://pastebin.com/mAJfK1FW
Here's werster's Golden Sun 1 All Djinn Speedrun in 3:57:42
Link to video
And here's tl_plexa's Golden Sun 1 'no intro any%' (basically you start from a savefile that skips the about half hour of boring intro cutscene/plot stuff) in 2:46:48
http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4415639
I think these are still the fastest times for their respective categories.
Also, the nico TASer uploaded another part:
Link to video
Watching the last video, paths seem more optimized and RNG is more manipulated.
When he takes the water Djinn during the level, he chooses to heal his team during the fight, which takes time, but a few times the healed characters don't take any hit after being healed, so maybe a few time could be won here.
I don't know if it's possible to avoid every random fight like in Pokémon Red. This would save a lot of unnecessary fights.
Watching the last video, paths seem more optimized and RNG is more manipulated.
When he takes the water Djinn during the level, he chooses to heal his team during the fight, which takes time, but a few times the healed characters don't take any hit after being healed, so maybe a few time could be won here.
I don't know if it's possible to avoid every random fight like in Pokémon Red. This would save a lot of unnecessary fights.
I know that in RTA it's not possible to avoid every random fight. RNG only advances when you do something that advances RNG (any random visual or battle related thing). Maybe there's something for TAS I don't know about.
That run didn't use retreat-save glitch, so it already lost more than two minutes at the first dungeon. Although it benefits a lot from RNG manipulation, it looks fairly sloppy comparing to what real-time speedrun achieved.
12.5 second improvement to the OOB glitch discovered today, so that will set me back a bit in terms of needing to resync everything from frame 50k onward
Joined: 25 days ago
Posts: 2
Location: 🇦🇷 Argentina
Two questions:
- Will there always be a monster encounter after a given period of time or does the time between battles vary? In other words, does the amount the counter is incremented by stay the same per step?
- How do I view the counter?
Hi! Sorry if I'm a bit late... (heh, just 18 years late, huh...), but I was looking into this too...!
I'm also a newbie (in coding, TASing, and gaming in general), but I would like to try to help too :3
- How do I view the counter?
Several emulators have memory viewer tools. I think TASVideos might have resources for this somewhere...
but I kind of went my own way here. I used the one that comes with mGBA (Tools ---> Game state views ---> View memory...).
Another tool that comes in handy is "frame advancement" (or however the technical term is...) (in mGBA: Ctrl + P to pause, and Ctrl + N to advance frames one by one).
The combination of these two will let you feed whatever inputs you want to the GBA frame by frame, and then view the state of the memory live.
You'll want some basic knowledge of the GBA's memory layout, though. Think of it as looking for a photo on someone else's PC, among lots and lots of folders - even if you don't know how the owner manages the files and folders of his own PC, it's more sensible to look up the image on a folder named "Pictures" than on unrelated folders :3
- Will there always be a monster encounter after a given period of time or does the time between battles vary? In other words, does the amount the counter is incremented by stay the same per step?
I have no idea! It's hard to figure stuff out with rigurosity without the source code at our disposal e.e
But after experimenting with it a bit on the world map, I can try to come to some conclusions (thought they might be off!).
Me personally I like it more when people explain things to me in very simple terms, no matter how verbose the explanation might get. So I'll try to do just that here :3
Introducing our three fellow friends, the ones Acmlm mentioned... $2000478, $2000479, and $200047A!
From their names themselves, you can already see they are contiguous positions of memory on the GBA.
Since they all live next to each other on memory, so you can think of them as neighbours :3
From my experiments though, $2000478 is a bit of a weird fella - it behaves very intricately. Sometimes it moves it's it's high byte by Ah (10 in decimal) every frame that you move (so like: $2000478 += 160 every frame), sometimes it doesn't move at all and stays at zero. It moves consistently, but in weird patterns. I don't know what this value
does, and it doesn't seem relevant to encountering enemies per se (maybe it has to do with like drops or something, though).
So yeah, let's try to focus more on the $2000479 and $200047A here!
Due to how they behave, I reckon they actually might be one single array in the code. But again, without the source code, we cannot know for certain... so it's only a guess/hypothesis.
When I enter the world map (when first starting up the game, or when coming from a city), all of these values start at 00h 00h 00h. I tried moving around.
It seems that the value at $2000479 increases by either 2 or 3 for every pixel you move on the world map (while walking) or by either 5 or 6 (while running)? (Maybe it's a decimal number between 2 and 3, and another one between 5 and 6, implemented with fixed-point math. Because I don't know the exact values, let's approximate with 2.5 and 5.5 for the rest of this post for the sake of simplicity ":3) And when it reaches value FFh (er, 255 in decimal), it goes back to 00h, and increases $200047A by one. When $200047A reaches 10h (16 in decimal), a battle occurs. Once the battle ends, our three fellow memory address friends all get reset back to 00h 00h 00h.
So yeah, that's all I found out about it. To oversimplify the explanation above, you can think about it as a number that starts at 0, goes up by 2 - 6 each frame you move (depending on your speed), and triggers a battle once it reaches 4096.
I will give two numbers for the random encounter rates now: one for lower bounds ("there's at least X seconds between each encounter"), and another one for approximation/estimation ("there's roughly X seconds between each encounter")
- If you're walking all the way, that's less than a random encounter every 34 seconds. My estimation is roughly one encounter every 27.3 seconds.
- If you're running all the way, that's less than a random encounter every 11 seconds. My estimation is roughly one encounter every 12.4 seconds.
So uhhh yeah there goes that haha. It was fun to experiment around!
Sorry if the data provided here isn't super precise. I kind of tried to ballpark numbers according to what I was seeing in the three addresses mentioned by Acmlm.
This is my first post so I'm very nervous hehe. I hope this info was useful! Because I looked up everywhere on Google and couldn't find a lot of technical details on Golden Sun's random encounter rates. So even if this info isn't perfect, I hope it's "better than nothing".
If someone has more accurate data and numbers, or source code, I would love to see it! ^-^
You'll want some basic knowledge of the GBA's memory layout, though. Think of it as looking for a photo on someone else's PC, among lots and lots of folders - even if you don't know how the owner manages the files and folders of his own PC, it's more sensible to look up the image on a folder named "Pictures" than on unrelated folders :3
Introducing our three fellow friends, the ones Acmlm mentioned... $2000478, $2000479, and $200047A!
From their names themselves, you can already see they are contiguous positions of memory on the GBA.
Since they all live next to each other on memory, so you can think of them as neighbours :3
From my experiments though, $2000478 is a bit of a weird fella - it behaves very intricately. Sometimes it moves it's it's high byte by Ah (10 in decimal) every frame that you move (so like: $2000478 += 160 every frame), sometimes it doesn't move at all and stays at zero. It moves consistently, but in weird patterns. I don't know what this value
does, and it doesn't seem relevant to encountering enemies per se (maybe it has to do with like drops or something, though).
So yeah, let's try to focus more on the $2000479 and $200047A here!
Due to how they behave, I reckon they actually might be one single array in the code. But again, without the source code, we cannot know for certain... so it's only a guess/hypothesis.
When I enter the world map (when first starting up the game, or when coming from a city), all of these values start at 00h 00h 00h. I tried moving around.
It seems that the value at $2000479 increases by either 2 or 3 for every pixel you move on the world map (while walking) or by either 5 or 6 (while running)? (Maybe it's a decimal number between 2 and 3, and another one between 5 and 6, implemented with fixed-point math. Because I don't know the exact values, let's approximate with 2.5 and 5.5 for the rest of this post for the sake of simplicity ":3) And when it reaches value FFh (er, 255 in decimal), it goes back to 00h, and increases $200047A by one. When $200047A reaches 10h (16 in decimal), a battle occurs. Once the battle ends, our three fellow memory address friends all get reset back to 00h 00h 00h.
So yeah, that's all I found out about it. To oversimplify the explanation above, you can think about it as a number that starts at 0, goes up by 2 - 6 each frame you move (depending on your speed), and triggers a battle once it reaches 4096.
I will give two numbers for the random encounter rates now: one for lower bounds ("there's at least X seconds between each encounter"), and another one for approximation/estimation ("there's roughly X seconds between each encounter")
- If you're walking all the way, that's less than a random encounter every 34 seconds. My estimation is roughly one encounter every 27.3 seconds.
- If you're running all the way, that's less than a random encounter every 11 seconds. My estimation is roughly one encounter every 12.4 seconds.
So uhhh yeah there goes that haha. It was fun to experiment around!
Sorry if the data provided here isn't super precise. I kind of tried to ballpark numbers according to what I was seeing in the three addresses mentioned by Acmlm.
This is my first post so I'm very nervous hehe. I hope this info was useful! Because I looked up everywhere on Google and couldn't find a lot of technical details on Golden Sun's random encounter rates. So even if this info isn't perfect, I hope it's "better than nothing".
If someone has more accurate data and numbers, or source code, I would love to see it! ^-^
