Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6446
Location: The land down under.
Due to lack of information provided by the author I'm going to ask a simple question.
Compared to your previous submission's Whale Lagoon why does it have better 2nd and 3rd lap times compared to this movie?
Previous submission has a 5.366 & 5.333 compared to this one's 5.583 & 5.366.
Using your input I was able to drop Lap 2 & 3 to both be 5.316 laps^... but also I was able to drop your lap 1 to an 18.266 (compared to your 19.466) only adjusting the respawn and not the drive up.
Obviously it's not polished either by any means but you need to take care of that input.
I have a feeling that your input is done with a controller, which isn't a bad thing, but with what I checked you have not gone over your work.
And I'll repeat what I said on Sonic R (adjusted obviously).
Blazingmo6 please take your time in actually executing [...] the quick laps as these [are] issues in your runs that [can] be ironed out.
^It might be due to character difference, Shadow the Ultimate Lifeform and an unlockable character, but the time I have is .016 off of the single lap's fastest lap that's on speedrun.com.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Due to lack of information provided by the author I'm going to ask a simple question.
Compared to your previous submission's Whale Lagoon why does it have better 2nd and 3rd lap times compared to this movie?
Previous submission has a 5.366 & 5.333 compared to this one's 5.583 & 5.366.
Using your input I was able to drop Lap 2 & 3 to both be 5.316 laps^... but also I was able to drop your lap 1 to an 18.266 (compared to your 19.466) only adjusting the respawn and not the drive up.
Obviously it's not polished either by any means but you need to take care of that input.
I have a feeling that your input is done with a controller, which isn't a bad thing, but with what I checked you have not gone over your work.
And I'll repeat what I said on Sonic R (adjusted obviously).
Blazingmo6 please take your time in actually executing [...] the quick laps as these [are] issues in your runs that [can] be ironed out.
^It might be due to character difference, Shadow the Ultimate Lifeform and an unlockable character, but the time I have is .016 off of the single lap's fastest lap that's on speedrun.com.
I honestly don't know... the turning tech is very weird even when TASing the game. Also if you was able to lower the lap time by 1.200 secs, I'm begging you for you're help as though it's still only been a year for me properly TASing. And I did not use a controller, I used TAStudio and the Virtual Gamepad. And from all honesty, there be times where I feel like it'd be fine in the TAS and just ingore making better improvements... Is there like a way to mainly focus on saving frames rather than the end result?
Learning how to optimize sections is more of an acquired skill with different possible processes. There isn't any silver bullet method that works for everyone since different TASers have different methods on what to look for. That being said...
Since there are readily available RTA individual record videos for the courses of the DS version of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, you should definitely be comparing the lap times between your work and the known records available. If the RTA time is faster your TAS time isn't close, then it's worth taking a closer look at those videos and see exactly what's going on there.
It's also worth reposting the info I managed to find out about item RNG and how it can be manipulated, from my judging notes:
Darkman425, from the judging notes of the previous submission wrote:
One of the main things I had to check was if it was possible to RNG manipulate what the item capsules give. With a little bit of work, I figured out that this is determined by the in-game timer when the item capsule is touched. I managed to change what I got by switching between braking and accelerating on different frames so the item capsule is touched at a different time. With that knowledge in hand, it's possible to reasonably avoid getting hit and losing speed in the parts of the TAS where the player gets hit.
This does mean that there are possibilities where going slower can counter-intuitively save time on the total race. This does mean you might have to widen the scope to beating total race times rather than individual lap times. The core idea of what might work is the same since you luckily have readily available RTA times for comparison: focus on just one course at a time and keep refining it until it at least meets or beats known times. Of course this does usually mean spending a lot of your time to actually do all that research and production but you have to remember TASing is something that takes time and experience to become good at.
Learning how to optimize sections is more of an acquired skill with different possible processes. There isn't any silver bullet method that works for everyone since different TASers have different methods on what to look for. That being said...
Since there are readily available RTA individual record videos for the courses of the DS version of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, you should definitely be comparing the lap times between your work and the known records available. If the RTA time is faster your TAS time isn't close, then it's worth taking a closer look at those videos and see exactly what's going on there.
It's also worth reposting the info I managed to find out about item RNG and how it can be manipulated, from my judging notes:
Darkman425, from the judging notes of the previous submission wrote:
One of the main things I had to check was if it was possible to RNG manipulate what the item capsules give. With a little bit of work, I figured out that this is determined by the in-game timer when the item capsule is touched. I managed to change what I got by switching between braking and accelerating on different frames so the item capsule is touched at a different time. With that knowledge in hand, it's possible to reasonably avoid getting hit and losing speed in the parts of the TAS where the player gets hit.
This does mean that there are possibilities where going slower can counter-intuitively save time on the total race. This does mean you might have to widen the scope to beating total race times rather than individual lap times. The core idea of what might work is the same since you luckily have readily available RTA times for comparison: focus on just one course at a time and keep refining it until it at least meets or beats known times. Of course this does usually mean spending a lot of your time to actually do all that research and production but you have to remember TASing is something that takes time and experience to become good at.
I know, I did that in this TAS with the RNG, and the ILs are in Time Trials which uses a x3 Shoe item. So either way it'd be slower. If the Wheelie drifting technique worked while going backwards, I'd use that but it wasn't possible due to the drifts trying to put you back in the right way. But if I can find a bit more useful info, it might help me a bit. Hopefully I'm able to make it better one day.
Hi TheBlazingmo
I am taking a look at the speedrun.com's individual level record page:
https://www.speedrun.com/ssasr_ds/levels?h=Glitched&x=9d8g537k
It seems that many of these records are faster than the ones in your submission. Looking for example at 'Studio Amigo' (@2:45 in your encode), their time is 1:31.566, while in your movie this is 1:52.41.
Am I missing something here? Am I looking at the wrong speedrun.com page?
Hi TheBlazingmo
I am taking a look at the speedrun.com's individual level record page:
https://www.speedrun.com/ssasr_ds/levels?h=Glitched&x=9d8g537k
It seems that many of these records are faster than the ones in your submission. Looking for example at 'Studio Amigo' (@2:45 in your encode), their time is 1:31.566, while in your movie this is 1:52.41.
Am I missing something here? Am I looking at the wrong speedrun.com page?
So the ASRDS communitty says Big has the best stats but since he wasn't unlocked, I had to finish the cup with Shadow to unlock him a bit quicker since he was the only bike character unlocked at the time.
Hi TheBlazingmo
I am taking a look at the speedrun.com's individual level record page:
https://www.speedrun.com/ssasr_ds/levels?h=Glitched&x=9d8g537k
It seems that many of these records are faster than the ones in your submission. Looking for example at 'Studio Amigo' (@2:45 in your encode), their time is 1:31.566, while in your movie this is 1:52.41.
Am I missing something here? Am I looking at the wrong speedrun.com page?
So the ASRDS communitty says Big has the best stats but since he wasn't unlocked, I had to finish the cup with Shadow to unlock him a bit quicker since he was the only bike character unlocked at the time.
Hi TheBlazingmo,
Thanks for your answer, but I am still not convinced that character selection is enough to account for the difference in lap times.
First, Spikestuff showed that your movie can be significantly improved without much effort, and brought the solution much closer to the RTA one, even with the difference in character speed.
Second, as pointed out above, your time for 'Studio Amigo' is 22 seconds slower against RTA in this 90 seconds-long race. This is ~25% of the total running time, which implies that Shadow is 25% slower than Big overall. I'm not savvy on this game to tell whether this actually true, but I think some hard evidence towards this should be presented to justify the difference in time. Furthermore, this being a TAS, one would expect that some of the 'character' disadvantage can be offset by the ability to polish every turn much better than an RTA player can.
I also still have concerns about the difficulty selection. I don't think a strong enough point has been made to justify the choice of 'easy' mode against 'hard'. Does rubberbanding slow you down or boosts the CPU players? If the latter, then why is it a problem still?
Bottom line is, although this submission is vastly superior to the previous one, it still falls short to the expectations of a relatively well-polished TAS. I would suggest you to do another optimization pass, and provide a time table showing your times for all races.
They use 3 Shoe Boosts though. The ILs on speedrun.com is all Time Trials and not Single Race. And trust me, I tried doing Wheelie Drifing backwards but when it happens, it tries to turn the player the right way or cancels the boost. Therefore the TAS might be slower than the ILs but it's faster than the All Cups WR. And the difficulty is set to easy because it makes the CPUs faster, it may not look like an issue, but it is. CPUs will rubberband, boost like 70% of the race, and also put more pressure on the RNG because of how the AI works when targeting.
They use 3 Shoe Boosts though. The ILs on speedrun.com is all Time Trials and not Single Race. And trust me, I tried doing Wheelie Drifing backwards but when it happens, it tries to turn the player the right way or cancels the boost. Therefore the TAS might be slower than the ILs but it's faster than the All Cups WR. And the difficulty is set to easy because it makes the CPUs faster, it may not look like an issue, but it is. CPUs will rubberband, boost like 70% of the race, and also put more pressure on the RNG because of how the AI works when targeting.
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, this movie is clearly faster than the single race RTA speedrun in speedrun.com and the IL times cannot be used for comparison in this case.
With regards to the difficulty, I still don't see how the CPU boosting would affect you, since you are driving perfectly. It being a problem for TAS would mean that it is impossible for a human to beat the game in harder difficulties. Regarding RNG, I also don't see why this would be an issue for a TAS, but since I am not an expert I am not going to take this as a blocking issue.
The comments on optimality remain as a big issue, however. Especially with regards to Spikestuff's observations. I cannot accept this movie until you at least match Spike's times and possibly do the same to all other races.
