AntyMew
It/Its
Encoder, Player (34)
Joined: 10/22/2014
Posts: 425
It's technically not disallowed, mostly frowned upon. I'm not sure if there's been a run which was rejected for using passwords. Either way, it refers to passwords which skip some or all of the game, like Megaman, or NES Metroid. Wondermail is a bit different, though in the same vein. It doesn't skip any dungeons, but it does allow receiving any item very early. Imo it would be much more interesting and entertaining to see TMs manipulated for instead of received via passwords.
Just a Mew! 〜 It/She ΘΔ 〜
Post subject: Re: Wonder Mail
Skilled player (1703)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4952
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
Likeanoob wrote:
I see what you guys are getting at... idk why TASVids would disallow anything that would make the game faster (isn't a TAS trying to make the game as fast as possible?) but I've never been apart of the TAS community so I wouldn't know these things. The thing is that we need a great amount of frustration TMs in order to accomplish the idea we are going for (1-2 shotting all the bosses in the game) so idk how we would do that efficiently that would be any faster than using wonder mail, the only thing I see is that we buy a frustration TM in the shop after Skarmory, then find a ton in Mt. Thunder and also finding a link box to link them all together (my original plan was to have 4x frustration on partner and 3x on starter with a move that can kill the Mankey in Uproar forest) I just think it's a little dumb that we cannot use a feature of the game to speed it up but what do i know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If it helps, try making a "test" run with Frustration, and one without. And by test run I mean the boss fights with the only difference being Frustration. That way, if Frustration via Wondermail ends up getting rejected, it would still allow others to know how much time it would've cost (rather than "it makes battles shorter" without an approximate time). Edit: Hopefully better wording: Find how much time would be lost/gained without/with Frustration, and hope that helps argueing why it is needed.
Judge, Skilled player (1275)
Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1645
Location: Italy
By the way, with some good luck-manipulation, it would be faster to get some Blast Seeds along the way, instead of having a Wondermail mission just for getting a TM.
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
Skilled player (1703)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4952
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
I was browsing through the PMD subreddit and I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MysteryDungeon/comments/6uvadu/is_bullet_seed_in_the_game/dlwowkm/
How to cheat Blue Rescue Team: *Start Treecko *Learn Bullet Seed *Learn Agility *Learn Bullet Seed two more times *Link all of them together *Oneshot every boss in the game
I have no idea how feasible that is for a run, but that sounded interesting.
Editor, Skilled player (1158)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1084
In Explorers, I was able to get "infinite" turns (or however many turns I had Agility PP) without linking moves. After using Agility, I travel a step, then use an attacking move, use Agility immediately after, travel two steps, attack again, then Agility, travel two steps, attack, Agility, two steps, attack, Agility, two steps... Out of Agility PP? Instead of attack, use Max Elixir. I don't know about Rescue Team, though. I was given the impression that rather few mechanics changed, so that crazy series of steps might actually work. Though, you're going to be a low level in a TAS, right? I recall Agility being a high level move for the starters that can learn it. Agility is just freakishly powerful in the Mystery Dungeon series. Somewhat weaker in Super, there Agility (and Tailwind) lets your allies get multiple attacks, but not infinite, in a single turn.
Player (74)
Joined: 8/26/2015
Posts: 70
I'm looking at doing a theory TAS of the current any% (meowth) route. I did a quick test up to the end of Thunderwave Cave but no point sharing it since I'm redoing the quiz now to be frame-perfect. I think this is the fastest quirky (Meowth) quiz:
Do you like pranks (1) Do you often yawn? (1) Do you tend to laugh a lot? (2) Are you a cheerful personality? (2) Can you go into a haunted house? (1) On vacation outings, you want to... (1) Can you focus on something you like? (1) Do you fall asleep without noticing? (1)
I'm still trying to get these questions to be the ones that come up, though ---- Edit: My planning was based on Bulbapedia, choosing the fastest options in each category, and changing the answers just slightly to get quirky. Working spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VlJZpUCGAlDtCx3bmnGTMm7tMmlXWLnsT1ocK63aY3A/edit?usp=sharing ---- Edit 2: updated quiz options
Player (74)
Joined: 8/26/2015
Posts: 70
Success!... ish I got a very fast quiz but I couldn't get all the questions I wanted to come up with the answers I needed to give to get Quirky, so I had to compromise on question selection slightly. This quiz loses I think ~4 frames but possibly up to 8 frames over one where we could get whatever categories we wanted to come up at any time. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43741669832139165
Post subject: I've started TASing this game! but I'm stuck... please help!
Judge, Skilled player (1275)
Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1645
Location: Italy
So, I've started TASing this game. I've picked up Blue Rescue Team because it loads dungeon floors much faster than Red Rescue Team, otherwise it's basically the same. Oh and the fact that the game screen is bigger makes it a little nicer. The stylus inputs don't seem to save much time for menuing. Here is my current WIP movie file: User movie #75972551996754762 And here is the Lua script I've made for bruteforcing floor layouts: User movie #76000472267214701 I've picked Totodile as player and Torchic as partner, as advised by AntyMew. So far I've only beaten the first dungeon. As you can see from the movie, I managed to spawn close to the stairs for all 3 floors of Tiny Woods, thanks to major RNG manipulation. The problem is that I couldn't use my Lua script for the second dungeon. For the script to work, it needs to overwrite the floor RNG value before that the game uses it for generating the relative floor. However, for the second floor, the game reads the value in the same frame that it has updated it. This is a problem, because BizHawk can write RAM values only at the beginning of a frame. Freezing the RAM addrasse with the cheat functionality doesn't help, because that does actually just overwrite the RAM value at the beginning of every frame, instead than actually preventing it from changing! So right now it looks like my script is unusable, unless BizHawk gets updated with a proper cheat functionality. Or if anyone has any alternative, it would really help!
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
Emulator Coder, Experienced player, Judge (593)
Joined: 2/26/2020
Posts: 691
Location: California
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
So, I've started TASing this game. I've picked up Blue Rescue Team because it loads dungeon floors much faster than Red Rescue Team, otherwise it's basically the same. Oh and the fact that the game screen is bigger makes it a little nicer. The stylus inputs don't seem to save much time for menuing. Here is my current WIP movie file: User movie #75972551996754762 And here is the Lua script I've made for bruteforcing floor layouts: User movie #76000472267214701 I've picked Totodile as player and Torchic as partner, as advised by AntyMew. So far I've only beaten the first dungeon. As you can see from the movie, I managed to spawn close to the stairs for all 3 floors of Tiny Woods, thanks to major RNG manipulation. The problem is that I couldn't use my Lua script for the second dungeon. For the script to work, it needs to overwrite the floor RNG value before that the game uses it for generating the relative floor. However, for the second floor, the game reads the value in the same frame that it has updated it. This is a problem, because BizHawk can write RAM values only at the beginning of a frame. Freezing the RAM addrasse with the cheat functionality doesn't help, because that does actually just overwrite the RAM value at the beginning of every frame, instead than actually preventing it from changing! So right now it looks like my script is unusable, unless BizHawk gets updated with a proper cheat functionality. Or if anyone has any alternative, it would really help!
BizHawk can write to RAM midframe by abusing memory callbacks. Although the DS core doesn't have that yet, so you don't really have many options other than trying random crap to coerce those two actions on separate frames. Also "BizHawk gets updated with a proper cheat functionality" isn't quite how it works. Most cores just call a function which will run a frame, which can't be interrupted to do writes to memory unless via memory callbacks, ultimately core dependent. This is what you get with a generic cheat framework, anything better requires adding in memory callbacks into cores and using those (not exactly fun) or doing the cheats inside the core (which is ew).
Judge, Skilled player (1275)
Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1645
Location: Italy
All right, thanks for the explaination, CPP... By the way, I've just remembered that I've actually already found a workaround for the problem I've just mentioned. It's just that I had to sacrifice much efficiency for my script execution. But there are still some more improvements I can do with proper RAM hacking, I'll just have to find the right addresses. So, I guess we can already proceed about talking about the routing. At moment I'm leaning towards the idea o manipulating generation of multiple Frustration TMs in dungeon. This is going to require extreme luck manipulation, but the result would repay very well. Note that Frustration has been used in this speedrun: Link to video I need to figure out as many RAM addresses as possible, and the most knowledgeable person I can think of is TheZZAZZGlitch, but I couldn't contact him in any way. Can anyone help me? I tried on YouTube and Discord, but he didn't respond. He had some activity on his GitHub account last month, but I don't want to open an issue ticket just for asking him a question unrelated to his repositories. Does anyone have his email address? Or any other public account on which I can ask him? Meanwhile, I'll post here his video about Blue Rescue Team: Link to video
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"