Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
The ps2 version can't quite be tased yet. So the gba version shall work.
I made a testrun of the first mission:
Link to video
That's from power on. So far its 2 minutes and 28 seconds(from power on)
About 1 minute and 20 seconds at the start of the mission. Embarrassing start :(
On the other hand, I take no damage. I also never played this game before, so embarrassing mistakes may occur.
That shooting at the end was pretty bad I think.. Did I even have to kill those people to progress? Or just pick up those 2 items?
Ok, I've played with the game around a bit now and can say:
Your movement is very bad. Optimising movement in this game is very confusing due to the left and right keys influencing movement in not exactly an intuitive ways, but there are some things you can do.
The first thing is sideways movement. Stutter stepping like you do doens't really help because it creates extra lag, and it's often better to just suck it and change your direction. However, the best way to do this is with jump: instead of slowly redirecting your speed, like with normal walking, you can instantanely redirect it with a frame perfect jump and turn. This saves about half a second on every turn, and is the best method for redirecting your angle. Jumping is also as fast as walking, discounting lzg frames.
When needing to g t the exit after getting the gun, just walk backwards instead of doing your fancy 360 no walk.
Movement with the gun is much easier, because strafing has the advantage of locked and instant sideways movement (hold R to strafe). It ends up also being faster than normal movement by a few frames, and is the king at sideways movement.
When in cars, move in straight lines. Again, doing stutter driving sabotages you quite a bit: suck it up and turn.
That's about all.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
The stutter moving creates lag? This is news to me.
About that shooting part, the strafing is easy, but not when your controls are on a keyboard. It felt so weird trying to get that right. My 'E' key is the R button, my 'F' key is the frame advance button, my 'Z' key is the B button. I have to press all four of those buttons to fire the gun(as well as the arrow on the other side of my keyboard)
I used bizhawk when making that btw. I should buy a PC controller one of these days to make tasing more easier.
About that shooting part, the strafing is easy, but not when your controls are on a keyboard. It felt so weird trying to get that right. My 'E' key is the R button, my 'F' key is the frame advance button, my 'Z' key is the B button. I have to press all four of those buttons to fire the gun(as well as the arrow on the other side of my keyboard)
Ah, of course. I also find myself often faced with the complete disability to remap my key bindings in any way.
Can you link your current movie here?
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
I can.
Here's WIP 2
Link to video
I took damage once, but thats it.
Here's WIP1 movie file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sqdc13hj57b8r28/Driv3r%20%28USA%29.bk2?dl=0
Here's WIP2 movie file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xi9uj4c3m79u1k3/Driv3r%20%28USA%29part2.bk2?dl=0
About that second mission at the start, I think it would be slower if I took a car. Its not that far of a walk, and getting a car is not easy, not to mention a full stop is needed to exit.
Is there any faster way of skipping text? I think the start button progresses to the next screen more quickly than just waiting.
All all in all. I will just finish this testrun then work on the optimized product once its finished. There's no videos on youtube of a full playthrough of this game anyways. Just the first mission and general reviews.
EDIT: Here's WIP 3
Link to video
That ^ was hardcore. The shooting segment became easier once I found out about autofire. This made things a breeze.
The chase was more intense than the last one. The car moves fast, so its hard to optimize this part without taking damage. But I succeeded with doing that despite being harder.
This is getting interesting
It's a little better, though there's still a long way to go.
Not getting a car and instead walking in the first part of the mission is the right call.
The movement is a little cleaner, although you're still not using jumping for big turns (at 0:31, most notably) and struggle a bit with small turns, opting to do stutter stepping a lot of the time. There are some situations where it isn't avoidable, but a lot of them can be done much better by simply redirecting your angle in a straight line in the corner you want to cut, then strafing for the rest of the trip. Here's an MSPaint example, using a simplified version of the walking part at the start of Mission 2:
Blue is walking, orange is jumping, green is strafing. The objective is the red circle, on top of a step in which you have to jump. Gray is the buildings and city you have to make your way across, although they are normally twice as wide. I mapped out the exact movement you've done.
See the problem? Your movement is fragmatic, unreliable, and most of the time looks more like an unassisted speedrun. This is because you walk. Now, compare to the second picture, to which I have even an encode of:
Link to video
I made this in about five minutes, although the start with redirecting yourself to strafe can definitely be improved by some frames. It also turns out to be almonst slower than your current strategy, because of bad camera angles: in future runs, you should be looking at the wall you're strafing against to reduce lag, not forward.
(In case you're wondering how I strafe back instantanely turning forwards after jumping, that's by facing Up at the very end of your jump, then immediatly strafing again as soon as you land: this does backwards strafing, saving around 2 gameplay frames compared to having to turn around manually via walking).
This is the very present advantage of strafing over walking. Use it.
It is also, in TASing practices, usually a good idea to start moving at the earliest possible frame, rather than waiting one full second. For skipping text, you don't have to wait 20 seconds to skip: just press A at the end of each screen. Saves 20 seconds for each.
The car movement is much harder to optimise: I'm leaving that up to you. You've tried to move in more straight lines, which is a good effort: but make them straighter. Savestates are there for that. I'm not blaming you, as this game is hard to optimise, again, but some of these mistakes are just laziness, not understanable oversights. I'd suggest redoing your test run at this point, to include basic techniques.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
Again, I will just fix the mistakes in the optimized product.
This will just be a testrun of the entire game. Then a redone from the very beginning.
Thus seeing a dramatic difference.
Ah, alright. If you're doing a testrun unassisted, I'd say not to publish the runs in parts here, but rather encode and show the full finished testrun, as it is easier to follow in full. This way, reviewing certain parts of the game is also easier. Good luck!
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
Here's my progress so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1PcM9nZg70
I don't think mission 6 is done with. What happens is the last part of the mission(I guess), the map screen pulls. With no indication on what to do. All I see are 2 red dots. Which are enemies, but they're across the sea.. Do I have to swim all the way there? That sounds really slow..
On the other hand, once I'm in the water, a big red dot appears on the map. Could that be some helicopter? God I hope so. Another thing weird about this mission(or part I guess), is that the game saves unpredictably.
Whats more, during that wrecking part in mission 5, bizhawk 1.11 crashes at some ledge near the water at times. You can fall in there, but it doesn't crash there. It just crashes randomly.. I was gonna end the run there, but I fixed it somehow.
Current rerecord count: 539 in total. This number should be lower in the final product as some of those rerecords were done when "figuring out where to go" sorta thing.
About that 6th mission, you don't have to kill anyone on the yacht. You just have to set bombs.
Now that ^ will make things confusing on what to do. I guess just kill people if nothing else shows up? Did I have to kill all those people on the island? Or just pick up those bombs? If even there before killing the people?
Current rerecord count: 539 in total. This number should be lower in the final product as some of those rerecords were done when "figuring out where to go" sorta thing.
That rr count will be much higher. Route-planning usually doesn't take rerecords, but there a still things to test with the route. And other things will boost up the rr count significantly. A decent run would be 100-300 times that rr count.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
I looked on gamefaqs with this game, it said the difficulty is unforgiving, 38 hours of gameplay(probably takes that long for casual players), and only 6 people have competed it.
There are no completed runs on youtube so far. Only the first mission.
So just seeing this run recorded as a deathless run would be amazing.
I have to agree this game is pretty hard. You're timed for almost everything, hitting into cars from behind or front is almost an instant reset if timed.
I did run out of ammo in the run at some point, so in the optimized run, make every hit count. Do the enemies take one hit? Ideally, 2 should killed in fewest amount of ammo.
If you're out of ammo, the run is over.
Ammo management is very tough. Since the only way to recover ammo is with ammo packs, and there are a limited number of them on the map, you have to finish the game with a very limited number of ammo. I saw you missed one ammo pack at mission 3 (Baccus, after killing the gang members): that might be why you ran out.
As far as I know, enemies do have different health. With the handgun, you range from one to two shots. Other weapons deal different damage.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
I'm currently at mission 10
There are times where you don't have to kill anyone.
I found lots of ammo in this one area.
Mission 9 was a nightmare!
None of us have played this game I'm seeing.
I'll upload Miami completed once that happens.
About mission 9, the hard part was the ending.
You have to kill gator in a car with unlimited ammo. You shoot from the car. You can't let gator get too far away. Otherwise you lost. You also lose if gator reaches his destination. So you can't just take your time on this one.
Sounds easy? Well, from tas perspective, it wasn't..
I couldn't press the fire button(L) along with all other buttons. So I had to stop and fire and then move. Tag that with avoiding car damage, and you got yourself a challenge there. If I can figure out how to make auto fire on the L button, this would have been MUCH easier. I've already tried that, but somehow something went wrong. I'll have to investigate this issue.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
*Bump*
Game is "just about complete". I ran out of ammo on the finale objective...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o2jK3D60OE
Apparently I need to get more double kills(or better yet triple) to save more ammo for the finale. The game wants you to save as much ammo as possible from beginning to end. That final boss has waaay too many hit points. I hit him like 25+ times and nothing.. Maybe he has 30 HP? Does that sound fair? I think there were like 2 missed shots, but I don't know for sure.
*Bump*
Game is "just about complete". I ran out of ammo on the finale objective...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o2jK3D60OE
Apparently I need to get more double kills(or better yet triple) to save more ammo for the finale. The game wants you to save as much ammo as possible from beginning to end. That final boss has waaay too many hit points. I hit him like 25+ times and nothing.. Maybe he has 30 HP? Does that sound fair? I think there were like 2 missed shots, but I don't know for sure.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
jlun2 wrote:
InfamousKnight wrote:
*Bump*
Game is "just about complete". I ran out of ammo on the finale objective...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o2jK3D60OE
Apparently I need to get more double kills(or better yet triple) to save more ammo for the finale. The game wants you to save as much ammo as possible from beginning to end. That final boss has waaay too many hit points. I hit him like 25+ times and nothing.. Maybe he has 30 HP? Does that sound fair? I think there were like 2 missed shots, but I don't know for sure.
Have you tried RAM Search to find out?
I tried tonight.. but couldn't find it.. I'm not very good with ram search.
I'll give you my movie file for bizhawk 1.1.5
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/32530568575563825
Just fast forward to 1 minute by the end..
Very much appreciated. I was told to do some side quest, but I'm sure its theoretically possible to do without doing sidequest for ammo. Just get double/triple kills. Unless the final boss has an insane amount of HP. In that case, they're not sidequest anymore.
Hey, I just took a look. I'm having trouble finding his? health, but I did found the bullet count, which is in EWRAM and it's
03C806
I froze it and just kept shooting, and he doesn't seem to ever die until a long while. 0_o
Edit: I found that guy's X/Y address. Not sure if it will change next time, but for now, it is
03B760
03B764
03B768
Freezing all of these makes him stand still.
Edit2: I found something at least.
03B76C - EWRAM, 1 byte unsigned.
This rises every time he gets hit. Once it reaches 200 , he falls and dies. This doesnt seem to be HP. Wait never mind. Don't know why they did that, but it seems to be HP, and starts at 0. It rises by 2 every bullet, so assuming all bullets hit, this means 100 bullets. Just to make sure, I changed it to 190, then shot him 5 times. He falls at 200. Freezing it at 0 makes the battle never end. So this likely be HP, and it takes 100 bullets to kill him. Wtf?
Can't he be run over by a car? Or are there better weapons like a grenade or something? The way he zig-zags there is no way a human player is meant to hit him 100 (or even 20) times.
Joined: 9/12/2014
Posts: 543
Location: Waterford, MI
thommy3 wrote:
Can't he be run over by a car? Or are there better weapons like a grenade or something? The way he zig-zags there is no way a human player is meant to hit him 100 (or even 20) times.
You can't run him over. The game has a "security" mechanism where cars can't enter those shooting sections. There are other weapons in the game by doing side quest. Finding all bags in Miami gives you some ammo. Not sure how much though.
There are no grenades in this game either. It's like this game is "meant" to be tased. This game is that hard..
