I tried TASing some of the games from hamumu.com in 2012, and all of them work fine within Hourglass. I abandoned my project simply because I had no idea how to manipulate luck to get destructive weapons as fast as possible.
Many games use the system timer to generate an initial seed for the RNG. See if changing the initial system clock value in Hourglass results in different random drops. If so, it may be possible to manipulate the RNG independently of your in-game actions using only the system timer, which means you don't need to "slow down" to manipulate randomness. Unfortunately, this also may mean you need to do a lot of experimentation with the system clock to get a sequence of random numbers that works for what you're doing, if you need many random events to turn out your way.
Also, not all games use the clock for seeding, so it may have no effect at all. Still, it's worth checking.
Apparently, running a MoleBox'd M.U.G.E.N. exe automatically advances frames even with Hourglass paused. Not sure why.
What would be the recommended settings for mugen.cfg? I was too fed up with the constant crashing, so I only finished 1 Round for now.
Link to video But still, it's a good thing that it's supported.
MoleBox is a type of software where you can compress multiple files into a single EXE file. I don't think I should share the link because it's not Freeware. Here is a GIF of an EXE file compiled in MoleBox, running in Hourglass.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
For a TASvideos submission I am not sure a MoleBox'd game can be accepted unless it was released that way by the creator. You should clear this with the staff.
For the pause bug, can't do much now, but I will try to get my hands on MoleBox and see if I can figure out the problem later.
Just to make sure - if I can get a game to work in Hourglass, and it plays back the same input with the same timing every time, but some other aspect of it is random (like monster AI) and is different every time, and it looks like the game needs multithreading to function (if you disable it you can't run it at all in Hourglass), are there any kinds of 'tricks' I can try to see if I can get it to playback deterministically entirely, or are such games out of reach of Hourglass for the time being?
(If you are curious, the game is http://asceai.nfshost.com/meritous/ . Plays back on Windows 7 with Multithreading Mode > Allow or Wrap. It crashes about 80% of the time, keep trying until it loads in Hourglass)
EDIT: Oh! I just noticed the game page has the sourcecode uploaded - http://www.asceai.net/files/meritous_v12_src.tar.bz2 - so that will help :)
EDIT 2: ctrl+shift+f thread has 0 results, ctrl+shift+f SDL has 320 results. Does SDL do some magic that transforms a threaded looking program into a multithreaded one?
Thanks, I'll have a look during the weekend and see if I can find something wrong here.
OK. You can look at the source code for the game too, if it helps. (If you discover anything, it will probably be something common to all SDL using games, since it just uses SDL + SDL_image for graphics things and rand() for randomness.)
Edit: Lol, looking through the sourcecode, it looks like it has a commented out replay scheme - open levelblit.c and ctrl+f RECORDING and PLAYBACK. Wouldn't be good enough for TASing without re-recording, but neat.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Patashu wrote:
Warepire wrote:
Thanks, I'll have a look during the weekend and see if I can find something wrong here.
OK. You can look at the source code for the game too, if it helps. (If you discover anything, it will probably be something common to all SDL using games, since it just uses SDL + SDL_image for graphics things and rand() for randomness.)
Yeah, I was planning on that, as well as trying to run the game myself etc.
Joined: 8/14/2014
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Location: North Kilttown
Just a little FYI, I found another game that seems to work well with Hourglass with generic settings. It's this indie game called Bombun and, oddly enough, it seems to work well specifically on win8. I tried it on XP and ran into problems with re-records (i.e. the PC would blue screen when ever I'd try to re-record).
I've been testing out a few other simple games like this and seeing if I can get them to work and this is the game that yielded relatively quick results.
The main question I have though is for some reason, somewhere along the line, something got messed up with the re-record count. I was at 200-something and suddenly the file was only reading 10. Has anyone else experienced this? (Or in other words, what did I screw up?)
I made a quick TAS here to show you. (I can also link to the wtf file but I'm not at my main PC right now.)
Link to video
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
TehBerral wrote:
The main question I have though is for some reason, somewhere along the line, something got messed up with the re-record count. I was at 200-something and suddenly the file was only reading 10. Has anyone else experienced this? (Or in other words, what did I screw up?)
Known glitch, the re-record count doesn't get restored right when loading states in certain conditions.
I am impressed that you found a game that works on Windows 8 and blue screens on XP, the norm is the other way around. :P
Joined: 8/14/2014
Posts: 188
Location: North Kilttown
Warepire wrote:
I am impressed that you found a game that works on Windows 8 and blue screens on XP, the norm is the other way around. :P
I notice a lot of Gamejolt games tend to be simple enough to work (or at least start up) in Hourglass since they tend to fit the criteria of "simple, no mouse, etc", especially in win8.
Sadly, two games that I think could have potential will start up in Hourglass, but won't read any inputs. (Not even the re-record hot keys, oddly enough.) And that's in win8 and XP.
The games in question are "Dashboy" and "Zzzz-Zzzz-Zzzz" (yes, that's it's name). Anodyne won't even boot the .exe, so there goes all of the games I run for now.
Is there a help file for how this program works? I haven't been able to find one. I can sort of almost figure out how it works without a help file but I'm getting this error where it says that the game was not given permission to write to its own application path.
Is there a help file for how this program works? I haven't been able to find one. I can sort of almost figure out how it works without a help file but I'm getting this error where it says that the game was not given permission to write to its own application path.
Have you tried moving it to a different directory and running it again? Games usually can't write to C:\, C:\Program Files (x86)\... and C:\Program Files\... for example.
The problem I have right now is that for the game I'm running (Knytt Stories), I can't click any of the menu buttons (tutorial, play, etc) on the "title screen". Does anyone have any solutons for this?
EDIT: this is also a problem with another game. I just can't interact with the game screen at all.
EDIT 2: also sorry, I just realized I probably should have made a seperate thread for this...
EDIT 3: i just read another thread where it was mentioned that mouse isn't supported. maybe this is the reason why.
Hi guys. Will Hourglass ressurection allow us to use savestates/loadstates in our PC games? I am looking for a program that supports savestates in *ANY* PC game. Are there any alternatives out there?
Hi guys. Will Hourglass ressurection allow us to use savestates/loadstates in our PC games? I am looking for a program that supports savestates in *ANY* PC game. Are there any alternatives out there?
No, there aren't alternatives. It only works in simple games and doesn't support mouse yet. If you just want savestates, your best bet is using a Virtual Machine. But you know, no rerecording, just savestates.
