Admitedly one of the hardest shmups in existence.
Here's what my progress looks like atm:
https://youtu.be/HaSEIaliJ7E
2382 frames, 3031 rerecords (+800 that were lost.) I'm currently redoing the section approaching the tower miniboss, as it is severly unoptimised (you can get the Hyper much earlier and grind hits on the orbs this way, making for almonst a 100 hit difference). The mistake I made was trying to stall out my meter for more points on the golden bees. A full explaination will be coming once I finish this segment..
A full round 2 score playthrough, which I'm aiming for, will last around 35 minutes.
Do you know anything about human records for this? I remember reading some posts saying that some Japanese player had some incredible records that were never vidded though. Would be nice to know the comparison. Maybe I’m thinking of a different game though.
Do you know anything about human records for this? I remember reading some posts saying that some Japanese player had some incredible records that were never vidded though. Would be nice to know the comparison. Maybe I’m thinking of a different game though.
1-1-midboss has been redone, finally beating the human record. This took a whole week of work, figuring out the very complex route and creating by myself one much riskier TAS route. I can say with certainity that this is one of the most complex segments in the entire TAS..
https://youtu.be/EVlaMytJR1E
2834 frames, 5046 rerecords.
This gets 450 hits at the miniboss and 4 781 670 score, compared to the 442 hits and 4 71X XXX score of the world record; a large difference this early in the game.
The game starts with Ship-A and Exy as our doll. Ship A is chosen due to it being more expert-friendly (more narrow shot, but moves faster, which is crucial in scoring). For the doll, there are three dolls: Shotia, who has a stronger fast shot and the largest number of bombs; Leinyan, who has a stronger laser and a little less bombs and Exy, which has both a strong laser and fast shot but only one bomb. In this case, Exy (which is a worldplay on Expert) is obiviously chosen, due to her advantages, we won't be using any bombs in the game, due to them reducing score.
You might wonder: what is a fast shot? Fast shots are done by tapping the shot buttoon, while the laser is done by holding down the shot button. There's a glitch related to this, which I call hyper shooting; shooting every other frame will reproduce the first frame of the fast shot, which shoots a volley of missiles. This means you can shoot a volley every 2 frames! (Well, as much missiles as the game can handle on screen: at some point, you are forced to wait for the other missiles to disappear, which is why I get so close to enemies I want to kill.)
However, we only use hyper shooting against normal enemies. Why is that? This requires an explaination of the score system. You see, each enemy has a base point value, which is then multiplied by your hit count (the big number on the top left of the screen.) The reason why I chose the BL version of this game is because the hit counter can go over 9999, as well as some other major gameplay changes (the charge time of the hyper, most notably.) Keeping up this counter can be quite tight: the hit counter vanishes in 3/4 of a second, and the only way to freeze is to use the laser against an enemy (in which case the counter will be frozen until the enemy is killed.) You can see this bar on the top left of the screen.
The other main thing that matters is our hyper gauge. Hypers are a double edged sword: while they give you huge power and allow to grind hits massively, they increase the speed of bullets of 10% while active, and only decrease it by 5% once ended! The hyper speedup vanishes upon death, however. This is what I call the 'hyper rank', and I'll be tracking it with my WIPs to let you see what rank we're currently at. The hyper gauge, in pink at the up left corner of the screen, increases with enemy kills and bee collection.
The last item that needs explaination is the golden bees. Golden bees increase your hyper gauge by a set amount and give you hit counter * 100 points, and require a fast shot followed by a laser shot to reveal. My route, unlike the WR route, takes advantage of those bees even further to get extra points.
The route you're seeing has been redone several times. I chose to go with delaying the start of the hit counter to allow for a route with more points at the start.
To recapitulate, there are three objectives:
1. Keep up the hit counter.
2. Fill the hyper gauge to grind hits.
3. Maximise bee score.
Enjoy watching.
Unfortunately, this TAS is indefinitely on hold. The reason for this is being unable to run in a ddpdojblk rom with the hardest difficulty instead of the EASY I currently use at the title screen. This has a lot of subtle influence on the run, most notably increasing overall difficulty. I've been looking for a way to make it work in FBA-RR, but either I am overlooking something obivious or this is impossible.
It was something that I overlooked, after all: the difficulty can be changed via the TEST MENU, which can be accessed simply by holding the TEST button for 75 frames. This means I have to effectively restart the run, but the huge difficulty change (as I will be playing on VERY HARD) has a huge impact on the game.
Link to videoUser movie #28571731779498274
13921 rerecords.
The hyper chaining in this game is so broken (in a bad way for TASing) it's starting to drive me insane..
Redoing the run on VERY HARD makes the game much harder but it definitely is more entertaining. All the runs I know of are on factory settings (this means NORMAL difficulty) and the TAS I'm doing ultimately aims to beat the score of the WR on NORMAL, while being on the hardest difficulty; there's nothing for that around on the web.
If you're impressed by the difficulty, remember that this is only the very start of the first level of two loops. Unfortunately, because of this difficulty, I lost one hit somewhere compared to my old WIP, and I'm investigating the issue atm, although the hit may not be recoverable and I'll have to deal with it.
This is one of my favourite shmups, so I just want to say I'm rooting for you :D Playing on very hard will be a very interesting stylistic choice. Though you could go all out by playing in white label (which is considered to be harder than black label), black label is much easier to get huge chains in, and since the goal is to get a massive score it's acceptable to me.
EDIT: TO contribute, here are the world records for Dodonpachi DaiOuJou Black Label.
First, with Type A, by HFD, 3.5 billion:
Link to video
Second, with Type B, also by HFD, 3.3 billion:
Link to video
EDIT 2: Thought of some things on the way home, probably stuff you already know to look for though :0
Your laser has an 'aura' which is a small, damaging rectangle around your ship. It builds hyper meter and damage very fast IIRC. Pro players use the aura on things that are invincible due to being at the top of the screen - or because they were left alive, because they become invincible due to being at the BOTTOM of the screen, too. Maybe there are opportunities to aura things at the top and bottom of the screen that pro players leave out due to being inconsistent or unknown.
With three different weapons (shot, laser, aura) I was wondering if there are weird combinations of the three that extract more or less points/combos/hyper meters from enemies. Bosses, too - the pods of boss 1, the falling guns of boss 3 final attack, the falling casings of stage 4's midboss, the options and discs of boss 4, the midboss of 5 that spews discs - can you take advantage of these by auraing (or otherwise) in ways pro players don't?
(btw, did you compare 'auraing the stage 1 midboss and never moving off it' to what you do in the TAS, which is go back to grab the tanks?)
It's also interesting that delaying things in weird ways (killing blows, bee pickups) will give extra points due to the multiplier being higher.
I believe there's a bonus for having maximum bombs that is given out per frame and increases every time you get another bomb - so I think getting bombs earlier will be a marginal scoring advantage.
Have you tried turning on 'C is Autofire' in the operator menu, and alternating A and C? Maybe you can get a 60Hz hyper shot.
Does moving diagonally shrink your hitbox? (It does in some other Cave games, like SaiDaiOuJou (AFAIK), so it's worth testing.)
Here's a guide on how Hyper Rank works in DoJBL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8z15uu28w2tath/dojbl_guide.pdf?dl=0
Chaining mechanics explained: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=315284#p315284
More up-to-date documentation related to score, using HFD's run as a reference: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=777219#p777219
A known improvement to HFD's world record: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=827392#p827392 + http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=827634#p827634http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=695296#p695296 'BTW using shot on popcorns increases your hyper bar way faster than lasering them'
And just for fun, a video of DaiOuJou White Label that includes a full chain of 1-3, which was thought to only be possible on Black Label, but is actually just extremely difficult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlzixxnGm0w&t=6m29s
To reply to your points, Patashu:
First off, hyper auraing is broken beyond comprehension. I have no idea why anyone thought making the hyper aura gather so much hits (just off a single enemy gives you a ridiculous number of hits) was a good design decision. Auraing out-of-bounds enemies is a trick that HFD doens't use much after 1-1 due to it mostly being difficult to manage, but I think its use, out of all the tricks, has the most potential and something that will be abused as much as possible in my TAS. I'm thinking of a potential strategy on the tower miniboss using out of bounds auraing which would lend for more hits.. need more testing on that end.
There are also some bigger abuses using hyper auraing that are possible, one which I call hyper grinding: most flying enemies are made of two hitboxes (front one, which is smaller and back one, which is much bigger): by auraing and applying laser at the same time between these two hitboxes, you are able to grind phenomenally more hits (usually a 2-3 hit increase per enemy!)
Hyper grinding this way can also lead to getting even more hits (1-2), what I call death grinding: if you position yourself in a certain way in order to kill and hit an enemy at the same time with two different weapons (eg kill with aura, hit with laser).. well that's my theory of why it happens; you will get an hit on that enemy 25-30 frames after the enemy is dead, a net 1 hit increase usually.
Regarding hyper shot, there's also a somewhat consistent trick you can use to get more hits: while the enemy is still out of bounds, hit him with one shot, then switch to hyper will lend a net 1 hit increase.
For the tower midboss, the method I use is the best (449 hits compared to HFD's superplay 443; I use his type-A superplay as reference for scores). Again, there might be some improvement using out of bounds grinding.
The C autofire doens't allow you to shoot faster, though it has a wierd interaction: if you do a C shot on the frame your normal shot would have reached the entity limit for shot and only did a partial shot (eg 1 missile instead of 4), it will bypass that limit and shoot the full volley. This is actually detrimental, due to the extra shots messing up with enemy management.
Moving diagonally shrinks your hitbox from my observations.
Thanks for the hyper rank resource: that's quite useful info to have.
Link to videoMovie file. 15497 rerecords.
Probably my very last take on this section.. redoing this over and over has been a nightmare.
In the first part of this section, nothing much has changed; some score optimisations that are not terribly interesting. Since there is a lot of downtime TAS-wise in these sections, I tried to cram in some entertainement.
The second part is where shit gets serious. As soon as I unlock the top-left bee, the game becomes a desesperate race of getting the hyper to grind as many hits off the tower as possible. From there, the route becomes complex; you effectively have to juggle between scoring on the popcorn enemies right before the hyper, without actually destroying the flying popcorn you grind hits off on the turret, all while trying to kill all enemies.
The solution I came up with looks a little sloppy, but it's the best by 1 hit and a bit of score: grind on the tower as hard as possible. This makes it so three tanks are left behind. Once I destroy the 8 rotating.. discs? around the tower, I start making my way back to the tanks I left behind earlier, destroying one and making two out of bounds tricks of varying lengths on the two left. While this makes me lose some hits due to not destroying the thanks and having a slightly lower score, the extra hit make up for it, and I end up with 451 hits instead of 450 at the end of this section.
A little trick I use at the end of the miniboss; by keeping it at 1 hitpoint for a few extra frames, I can delay its time of death without losing any score nor chain, and this way wait for a pattern to be fired to gain some extra points.
Up to the second powerup tank
Making slow, but steady progress.. I won't be encoding these mini-WIPs until the full stage is done. This section in particular is very tight because it is a race against the hyper timeout, and I have to resort to a particular TAS only strat in the end to keep the hit counter running.
Comparaison:
HFD | 8 478 920 score, 587 hits
XY | 8 524 990 score, 599 hits
Link to videoMovie file.
22005 rerecords. For reference, a rerecord is made each time you load a state.
Small update on this..
HFD | 8 478 920 score, 587 hits
XY | 8 524 990 score, 599 hits
Score at powerup ship.
This TAS is put indefinitely on hold until an emulator with rerecording features exists (BizHawk is on that path with importing a MAME core.) I've also made an embarrassing scoring mistake at the start, so that's why I'm planning to restart this anyway. This will probably delay it by a few months at best, unfortunately.
1-1 is much more irritating to TAS than I initially thought, for a few reasons that I'll outline, but the main one is definitely the hypers. In this first half of the stage, most of the scoring opportunities are present while hypering. This already leads up to some roadblocks, that I'll call 'limits'; these block completely any further scoring until you pass that limits. Hard limits are impossible to get through, and are represented in the form of bees and hyper timeouts; since they control hypers, it means that scoring is forcibly limited to these hard limits. The other type of limits I will talk about are 'soft' limits: these are limits that can be extended with skillful play, and are mostly chaining related (how much enemies do I need to leave to continue my chain?).
And this is where TASing comes in! While normal scoring segments can't really be improved upon (although they can with a particular glitch I'll talk about later), these soft limits can be extended almost infinitely, both through the use of precise play and glitches. In fact, the only soft limit I meet in this segment is fully extended to its corresponding hard limit (hyper timeout). I'll mostly talk about how I managed to break these soft limits here, as they are the main limiter of scoring gameplay.
The other huge hassle was the tower miniboss. The problem with the tower miniboss is that it structures all the future hard limits we come across, because we're dependant on it to grind a bunch of hits on it thanks to our first hyper, and so the chain of hard limits gets structured as this:
First hyper (tower) > Timeout > Second hyper > Timeout.
We have very limited control over when hypers start, and because of their fixed duration there's not a whole lot of breaking new strategies you can do (especially in 1-1), so my route for this segment is akin to HFD's route and the hard limits are the same. Given that, there's is only one soft limit in this segment: at the moment of the first hyper's timeout, just before the second powerup ship. In scoring, you would need to leave some enemies unscratched by the hyper, even though it would be possible to hit them and get more hits + score. This is the soft limit I was referring to earlier. So how do I get past it?
Before I continue, I first need to explain how big ships work. Take for example the medium-sized turret ship, after the turret miniboss. One particularity of these ships, found in all big ships is that they have two hitboxes: one at the front, smaller and in the middle, and one in the back and wider. This interesting quirck makes for some interesting results that allow for more scoring, thanks to the hyper's behavior. First, we know that the laser is actually two weapons: laser + aura. This would not make a single difference if we weren't under hyper. Furthermore, there is a failsafe present to avoid hitting the two hitboxes with the same weapon; it will simply not register the hit. But what happens if we hit the two hitboxes with two separate weapons? There isn't a failsafe for that, and so we get more hits. However, this is extremely precise to do, as if any of the weapons touch the hitbox that doens't belong to them, the hit is cancelled. I refer to this as 'diagonal grinding', and is also the source of the wierd movement you see when I laser enemies.
Going back to our soft limit, the way I handle it is give zero fucks in regards to that limit and extend all the way to the hard limit. This results in a big problem; we only have a single ship, the powerup ship, to somehow keep the hit counter up for a ridiculous amount of time. We know that hitting a big ship with laser will set our hit gauge to a fixed height. What I do is what I call hooking. Because of the gauge set mechanic with hitting a big ship with the laser, if we hit the powerup ship for one frame, then hook off him, our gauge still get sets, then lowers slowly. At the last possible frame, simply hit the powerup ship again to get the gauge set, and repeat! Because the gauge reset with lasering lasts exactly 9 frames, we are able to hit the powerup ship once every 8 frames instead of once every other frame, essentially making the powerup ship last four times as long and keeping our chain easily.
All of this had to be done by hand, since FBA doens't have ram search, any precise values and doens't work at all in general. I believe the switch is the best decision I can take, so you'ill have to wait a few months on the run.
So... imagine this run were made on White Label, and instead of the maximum score possible it were the lowest score possible.
Apparently, somebody went and did exactly that:
Link to video
Second loop starts at 38:25, and that's the one to watch. The final score is 0.
The author says this was done on FBA 0.2.97.43 and they experienced no desync problems while making it.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
