This topic is for the purpose of discussing #832: Maximus's NES Nightshade in 11:25.10

While much better, I'll point out that the menu manipulation is still not perfect. For instance, when you go to use the key on the statue in the beginning, it takes you 3 frames longer than necessary to choose "use". It seems minor but that sort of thing can add up, especially if more testing with frame advance would also speed up the battles (which is very likely). Actually, you can make the fights a lot faster by mixing in other attacks like kick and maybe high punch (up+b and up+a), and never knock them on the ground because then you have to waste time waiting for them to stand up. Kicking the huge guys especially does lots of damage compared to the tiny punch you do to them each time, which would save a lot of time. So, I think you can get this faster by at least another minute.

Woa, I see it didn't take you long to make a new version :) Well done, entertaining to watch. I agree with nisuja, this movie looks a lot better than the previous, menu navigation is faster and almost every room seem to be done faster. Good job :) But as nitsuja said, it's still improvable by perhaps a minute or so. I made a test-fcm to see how long time it would take me to play until I finish the first battle, and it ended up 19 sedonds faster than this run, the movie was 2m 26s long. Although the fights are still improvable, you did a better job this time, the fights look pretty impressive this time, so good job. :) I know that making a perfect run is very difficult, next to impossibe. Although this is a lot faster than your previous movie, I'm not sure what I'll vote, seeing as this could be improved by at least another minute. I'll just wait with the voting and see if you will try to improve it again. I'll post the short fcm here so that you can look at it and see what it looks like. Hopefully it will help you some, get it here. The battle is somewhat sloppy in this movie, I know =/ Anyway, I hope it's to some use for you. I used frame advance through out the whole movie, trying to squeeze in a few frames here and there. Feel free to comment or ask questions about this movie. Do you consider making another run of this game now? I know it isn't exactly fun having to redo a run over and over, but I think it's worth it if it can be improved by over a minute. Of course, I expect that movie to be at least as fast as my short fcm here ;)

Hopefully it will help you some, get it here. The battle is somewhat sloppy in this movie, I know =/

It sure is - I just gave it a try and finished that battle 374 frames faster than that. The battle lasted less than 3 seconds from gaining control to the final blow, meaning it was 3 times faster (and 4 times faster than in Maximus' movie).

I guess I'm still struggling with the menu manipulation, but I'll give it another whirl. Thanks again for the feedback. I did most of this at 12% speed, since I'm having some difficulty doing the frame advance through the menus. Maybe you guys could help me on that. If I want to navigate the menus, do I just keep mashing the direction i want the cursor to move and keep pressing Space or is there a better way? Nitsuja, I'll definitely take your suggestion and clean up the fights (especially the 2 against the big guy); see if I can get this under 10 minutes :P

Hold the buttons you want to press the next frame, and then press the advance button. Between buttons you usually need a blank frame (so that the game realizes that you pressed the button twice, rather than just holding it). There's some more info in UsingEmulatorTools.

nitsuja: Amazing, I knew that the fight could be improved, but not that much :) Could you explain your battletactics? Here's what I found out about the menus in this game when making my fcm: You can move the cursor one square every four frames. You only need to hold the directional button for one frame in order to moce the cursor. This means that if you press, say right, to move the cursor on frame 100, the next frame you can press right again to move is on frame 104. I hope this makes some sense, it's pretty hard to explain. Another useful thing that I found out is that in this game you often have to wait for exactly one frame before performing your next action. For example, when there's a dialogue, you would hold A button just long enough to end the dialogue window, allowing you to move again. But don't start walking directly when the dialogue has ended, wait for one frame before walking. If you try to start walking as soon as the dialogue has ended, the game will freeze. This goes for almost every action in the game, you often have to have a blank frame. You will probably find this out on your own if you use frame advance a lot. If you are unsure that your menu navigation is not as fast as possible, you could compare it with my movie, I'm quite certain that the menu navigation is as fast as possible in that movie. I don't know if you play this game on your keyboard or if you have a gamepad, but I suggest you change the map hotkeys if you haven't already done so. I use the A key for frame advance, the Q key for save state and the E key for Load state. I found this to work very well. Try out different combinations, having a good key placement helps out when making a TAS, you can at least make sure your hands don't ache because of bad hotkey placements :) Other than this, it's the usual stuff, use savestates whenever you find the slightest flaw and, this is just my own opinion, but I suggest you use frame advance rather than 12% speed. Frame advance is better than slow speed in many ways, mainly because you have perfect control of every little detail in your movement. You should definitely use the frame counter when using frame advance too. This way you can pretty easily optimize menu movement and fights. This doesn't mean that frame advance is always the best alternative, some people like using slow speed in battles, to feel some flow in the fight. You just have to find out what suits you best. Phew, that's about it. Looking forward to your improved run, Maximus. :)

Nitsuja, do you have an fcm of that fight; I'm a little curious as well :) I was actually going to start my next run using Randil's initial run of the first stage, seeing as it's SOO much better than mine ;) (but then I wouldn't learn anything, so if I can beat it by even a frame, I'm going to try). I think what I'm also going to try is optimize the characters position prior to executing a command, since the crosshairs move REALLY slowly. I like your placement for the vendor (well done), I think moving the crosshairs diagonally should save some frames as well.

Yeah, you're right about that the crosshair. In terms of vertical speed, the crosshair is just as fast when moved straight up as when moved diagonally up. I'm glad you liked my run :) If you plan to improve it by a few frames, I think you can save some time when picking up the crowbar faster, I think it can be done about 10 frames faster or so. I could be wrong about that though... I suggest you compare your time with my time after every room, to make sure that your run is as fast as mine for each and every room. If you have any questions about how I did something in the run, just ask. If you want, maybe you could post your WIP-fcm here so that we can see how it's going, and give you feedback on it along the way. If you're wondering, I used frame advance during the whole movie, to optimize every little movement. And as you can see, I used lots and lots of savestates too, :) This is a little off topic, but are you active on Half-Life 2 speedrunning, Maximus? Because there is a user named MaximuSX on Speed Demos Archive that is active in HL2 speedrunning. Perhaps you just have very similiar nicknames.

Just a coincidence it would seem. I'm not a big fan of FPS' :P. If anyone wants to start a classic Sierra Speedrunning forum, I'll sign up for that :) I usually don't post the WIP since it only takes about an hour and a half to do the whole thing, but if i'm frame advancing, this could take a while. What I'll do is, if I think i've got a good time after beating the first boss, i'll post for comments.

It took me somewhere around 1 hour to record 1 minute of my Nightshade movie. This means that for me, it takes about 1 minute to record 1 second of the movie. This is of course, as you pointed out, because I used using frame advance practically the whole time. So don't be too surprised if this run takes you somewhere around 10 hours to make. Perfection takes a huge amount of time :) This doesn't necessarily mean that it will take you the same amount of time to do your run, but maybe it could be a guideline. Just make sure that every detail of the movie is as fast as possible, and don't be afraid to use lots and lots of savestates :) And if you look at my rerecord number, I load a savestate somwhere around every third frame. I think that posting a WIP now and then would be a good idea, especially now that you're using frame advance more and aim for perfection (I hope that's what you aim for now, seeing how many times this movie has been improved :) ). One person can't think of everything on his own, so posting a WIP makes it possible for the other users (me for example) to watch what you've done so far and give feedback on it. Another bonus is that if I, or someone else, finds a flaw in you're WIP, you don't have to redo the whole movie to correct it. But it's up to you if you want to post WIPs or not.

Nitsuja, do you have an fcm of that fight; I'm a little curious as well :)

Oh, sorry for being too lazy to post this before: nightshade_fight.fcm. Everything up to the fight is the same as Randil's. The main tactic change is to interrupt a strong punch with a kick, then as soon as that does damage in a few frames interrupt it with a strong punch, then after 1 frame interrupt that with a strong kick, etc. (I found this out by mashing random attack buttons at full speed and noticing that sometimes the delay between attacks is much smaller than usual.) On watching it again, I think I wasn't as fast as possible with the final blow, it looks like there's a long delay before the final punch, so I expect you can get this somewhat faster. Also, resist the temptation to uppercut the final opponent sky-high because that makes the game wait longer before ending the battle; the sooner the enemy comes to a complete dead stop the better. For menu manipulation, the general method is to pause the game right before the menu comes up, save it, and use frame advance and reloads until you find the earliest frame that you can press the direction button for 1 frame that still causes the cursor to move. In this case the menus seem to always follow a pattern of press, wait, wait, wait, press, wait, wait, wait, press, ... for left/right, and also require that same wait period of 3 frames before activating the next selected option. But you still have to use frame advance to test when the very first press happens, or you'll have too many waits before the first press in the menu, unless you want to count the number of frames between activating the menu and being able to move in it. And one more thing: don't waste time using slow motion and/or frame advance for things where they don't help. Specifically, if you're just pressing in one direction for an entire room to walk across to the other side, obviously you don't need to enter every frame individually; you can just hold the direction and unpause (and/or turn the speed up), then pause again when you reach the next room. Or if you need to jump the maximum distance in battle, that involves holding jump and a direction for many frames so you might as well do that at normal speed and pause just before you land.

Damn Nitsuja, now that's a fast fight. Thanks for the tips guys.

Well boys, I've been working on this for a few days now, and I'd think you'll be pleasantly suprised with the final result. All the fights are vastly improved and the menu navigation is almost spot on. Hopefully you'll see this up in the next few days. I'm trying like mad to get this under 10 minutes (i'm at 9:40 right before the last boss), but it may not happen.