Think I'm just surprised your card route is optimised enough to challenge that one guy in a tunnel between continents, and 6 hours+ in he was the only one.
Interesting Data on Hippaul. I know I used an autofire controller back in the day... It worked, but it sure as hell didn't get 5 level ups for long. It did get me to 80 though so not sure if that makes what I bought garbage, or the opposite.
Most of the rest of the disc seems to be self explanatory, so not many questions this time. Scanning over the rest of the gameFAQs guide, Disc3 wips will be the opposite I'm sure; especially with Combined Stats path.
Keep up the great work!
e; Oh one thing, cards again. What is the manip on your card level ups like? I saw you got two 'X' to pop up that game, one of which used to be his card, the Carrion Worm I think.
Well in term of optimisation, it doesn't really matter when and where I play Tetra Master, as long as there is no detour. I played this guy because he had 4 cards I needed when usual characters only have two. But I could have skip him also without changing the route. I just thought it would be a nice change of pace.
Rest of the cards will be won at Treno Card Stadium, Daguerreo, Alexandria and Black Mage Village later on.
About the Tetra Master itself. The Random Number table is not used. Everything is based on the frame you press X (to start the game, to put a card on the board, to choose a card at the end). If you press X on a frame which allows an upgrade, the card that wins the fight is gonna move to X (or A if it's already an X). It doesn't matter if it's one of mine or one of his since I'm gonna take them all. Sometimes a 10 frames wait will do the trick, sometimes you can wait 300 frames and won't have an upgrade. I tried to get 2 upgrades at least per match, while still making a perfect. Finally when you take the opponent card(s), it randomly increases the Attack or Defense stats of your cards. There again I manipulate it to boost the one I want even if it's not visible on screen.
About the turbo controllers, they're not really accurate on autofiring from what I can tell. I've watched some of CaracarnVi streams and he sometimes get a Random Encounter on the World Map where he shouldn't if the autofiring were to work correctly. For Hippaul, the game is looking for a pattern in every section of 120 frames. If your turbo controller for some reason, miss a frame, press the same button for two frames,... it's gonna work and you'll win.
Anyway thanks for encouragement :)
Neat strat. What level did Freya get to from that?
Regarding the cards, can you get all of them from just those 4 places? I could have sworn Fat Chocobo had unique cards? The last guide I read said a handful were unique to Memoria too, although that guide may be getting on to a decade old at this point.
Interesting stuff about the X/A stats levelling on the cards too. Thankfully a lot easier to manipulate than I had feared for you.
Freya gets to level 18. She's supposed to absorb all the EXP from Tantarian with the Lamia's Tiara, Mythril Gloves, Linen Cuirass and Pearl Rouge as stats boosting equipement in the Combined Stats Path.
For the cards, well not all of them indeed. Hades and Mog are taken in Memoria. Chocobo, Fat Chocobo and Boco from Fat Chocobo himself. As for Namingway, it will be taken in Kuja's lair but since I can't engineer its stats there, I'll got one from the Card Tournament by watching an ATE.
As for the X/A stats as I said it's based on the frame. As of now I'm bruteforcing every frame until one works. So if someone is willing to help me find out what frame would work instead of trying again and again, it would save me a lot of time.
Yeah I got a lua script doing it for me. But it takes 100 frames to test one possibility.
So when there's no upgrade during the next 150 frames, that's already 4 minutes just for one card. It adds up pretty quickly. And since my computer is a bit slow it adds even more.
Hope this is not seen as a nag. How is it going? From what little I know, that bloody book was just the start at this point. 100% Combined, makes itself felt big time in disc three right?
I'm currently redoing some parts of Disc 1. I've found that by manipulating the RNG I could get the NPC out of the way in the street of Alexandria where Puck was. This saves only 30 frames but give me access to earlier random numbers. By doing so I could get a RN where Cinna makes max damage against Steiner and beat him in one round. Giving me access to earlier RN again and I could attack Baku right away in the Prima Vista crash site. All in all it saves about 720 frames.
Then there is the Chocobo Hot and Cold game. I didn't know how much Ore I would need because I didn't know which ennemy would drop some without wasting time luck manipulated it. Now that I've passed Tantarian and I don't need anymore Ore I've found out that I just need 1 from Chocobo H&C instead of the 5 I took. So that's where I am at the moment. I've already replaced the 3 from the first game by Phoenix Pinions or Gils.
Finally when riding Choco back to Gizamaluke's Grotto, I've spent more than 20 seconds on the World Map so I should have encounter the Ragtime Mouse, only I didn't know how it works at that time so I need to see if I could insert it and still hexedit the rest of the run.
Plus I've had several requests to explain what I do and why so I am also in the process of adding Lua notes (strategies, why I attack when it doesn't seem necessary, ATB wait trick,...) and drawing (HP and ATB of ennemies, random numbers and how they affect the game, filling of the Trance bar and so on.)
A new Disc 1 + drawings should be available in a couple of weeks. Then I'll do lua for Disc 2, and finally catch back with Disc 3 but not before 2015 I guess.
Would it be possible to get a raw encode (i.e. encode before uploaded to youtube) or at the very least, a 720p youtube upload? Having 240/360/480 video on youtube hurts quality something terrible.
Still, you're doing a fantastic job and it's a pleasure to watch, so here's my encouragement to you! Good luck!
Ah I see, well, still looking forward to disc three obviously, but sounds like the optimisations will make it well worth waiting for.
Regarding you're plans to improve your past route... That's one thing I noted back when I first saw the annotation for the missed phoneix down outside the Prima Vista crash site; sounds like editing past segments is (relatively?) easy. How much do you estimate the amount of fixing you need to do to get everything to sync back to Tantarian from your Disc One revisit? (If you can even guess; I imagine It can be a random process at times.)
What was the cause of your original uncertainty with your Ore requirements? My best guess is for how many times you'd need to heal Zidane to a amount for Lucky 7 to work?
The extra Gil from the Chocobo Hot and Cold going to save time anywhere you know yet?
Good luck with Ragtime Mouse, and looking forward to the lua notes stuff.
It really depends on where the improvment is. For the Phoenix Down for exemple the RNG was going 2 addresses per frame. 180 frames to pick it up so the RNG is 360 addresses further than where it should be. That's enormous.
To resync it there's 2 possibilities. Standing still on the last step before changing screen usually makes the RNG go 1 address less. Second possibility, find a place where the RNG is rolling fast and where you originally have to wait to get a good RN outcome.
That was the case just before leaving Dali Underground where the RNG was going 7/8 addresses per 2 frames and I had to wait to get a good RNG for Black Waltz 2.
So I managed to resync the RNG before Black Waltz 2 but everyting inbetween (Evil Forest, Ice Cavern) had to be redone.
Resyncing parts of the run when there's no major difference in RNG is a lot easier. Unless I find new improvments, I'd say I should be able to resync the whole Disc 2 in one week. The RNG still might varie from time to time but not by a lot which is easily fixable by walking or standing still on the last step before changing screen.
For the Ores I need them for the friendly monsters sidequest and I should be left with 3 for Tantarian to heal 4*(number of Ores) so 12 HP and go from 105 to 117 HP for Lucky Seven. If I have more it's no big deal I can sell them and waste something like 20/30 frames but that wouldn't look too clean. The biggest uncertainty was how many could I get from Bandersnatch dropping without losing time.
The extra Gils shouldn't matter but the more the better.
The RNG rolling crazy fast because of the rain in Burmecia and the fact that I had to wait a little before fighting Black Mages there gives me good hope that I would be able to insert the Ragtime Mouse and still resync the RNG few moments later but who knows. I'm gonna try anyway.
Sorry for the late reply.
I was nearly done refining disc 1 when I played back from the beginning to add lua notes.
Then, I hit a desync at Black Waltz 2.
Which kinda killed my motivation.
I'll be back to it but not in the near future I guess.
Ok, worked a little bit on it today.
Usually when you got a desync there's 50 000 desyncs after.
Luckily after fixing that desync, the next one was in the Festival of the hunt, so nothing to change up to that point.
Also if you have any questions on Disc 1 that you want to be answered in the lua notes, ask them here and I'll add them.
Nice to hear you're making progress again, hope your luck with the desyncs continues.
As for questions; How did you manipulate max points from every encounter in the festival of the Hunt?
Also, what were your goals during this round of Chocobo hot and Cold? I know about the Oak staff Chocograph of course, but what about the other items you dug up along the way? Were you looking for specific items, gill or just raising your beak level and points in Menes store?
For the festival of the hunt, the game takes Random Number 2, when the screen goes full black. Then it does a simple modulo 3. If equal 0, you got the lowest points, if equal 1, the middle points, if equal 2, max points.
Then you just need to find a battle where your ATB is faster than the ennemy and where you can either attack right away or wait a little for the RN to be at the good value.
Then there is Zaghnol. Here for the max points, RN2 modulo 50 must be 49. So it's a 5/256 chance. Once again I delayed a little the final blow for the RN to be correct.
For the Chocobo H&C, only 2 items were necessary. I need a Ore for the Friendly Monsters/Tantarian and a Cacusha for the Ability Up. Rest is for Gils and I also took the extra rare items (1/1024 odds each, Barette, Anklet,...) well because it looked cool to dig up those.
For the festival of the hunt, the game takes Random Number 2, when the screen goes full black. Then it does a simple modulo 3. If equal 0, you got the lowest points, if equal 1, the middle points, if equal 2, max points.
Then you just need to find a battle where your ATB is faster than the ennemy and where you can either attack right away or wait a little for the RN to be at the good value.
Then there is Zaghnol. Here for the max points, RN2 modulo 50 must be 49. So it's a 5/256 chance. Once again I delayed a little the final blow for the RN to be correct.
For the Chocobo H&C, only 2 items were necessary. I need a Ore for the Friendly Monsters/Tantarian and a Cacusha for the Ability Up. Rest is for Gils and I also took the extra rare items (1/1024 odds each, Barette, Anklet,...) well because it looked cool to dig up those.
Disc 1 is completed with some small RNG related scenes improvement at the begining, a few changes in the Chocobo H&C games and one extra Ragtime Encounter at the end.
Subtitles are done for Disc 1 since about a week.
I'm still struggling with the encodes though.
Hopefully, will be done before the end of next week.
Suppose I'd prefer you had them with encodes rather than the run itself if you had to have problems.
Good to hear you are still finding improvements like that on your redo. I assume jumping backwards is a drag, but 'route' improvements like Ragtime mouse must help mitigate that feeling.
After spending God knows how many hours on the encode, here is finally Disc 1 with commentary.
Link to video
I'm still not satisfied with it but this'll have to do for now.
My computer being a little bit slow, the commentary were fine when playing on the emulator but on the encode at full speed, I figured I didn't let them on screen long enough, so you'll have to pause sometimes.
Now on the run itself, I'm back at Cleyra's invasion. Thanks to Burmecia's rain and the RNG rolling like crazy there, I managed to remove the Ragtime Mouse after Dali which was a 10 seconds wait and resync everything, as there will be better spot for the Ragtimer encounter.
Nothing short of miraculous. I only scoped out 10 minutes in the middle and I'm ecstatic. The overlay is also very revealing and well done. Fantastic work, man.
Currently obsessed with: Mega Man 2 hacks, SFA3, Super Metroid Zero Mission, MM8BDM (Skulltag MegaMan mod, it's amazing!)
Thanks !
Good and bad news.
Now that I fully understand how Ragtime Mouse encounter works, I have been able by carefully selecting when and where to fight it to save a whole minute of the Disc 2 redux after Hilgigars.
Bad news is that I'm now way ahead of my old RNG which means I can't resync without wasting lots of seconds, so I have to redo everything from there.
But motivation is back and progress is going nicely :)
EDIT : Forgot that I removed the Card game in Fossil Roo, so only 30 seconds came from Ragtime encounter.
