Hello everyone, I'd first like to say that I am a big fan of the work you guys do here. I have seen many of the more popular TAS videos and didn't realize it had a dedicated community behind it until I saw the Mario 64 superplay video today.
I am posting here because I think it would be fun to try doing a TAS video myself, but some of the techniques you guys use seem above and beyond me. For example, luck manipulation in RPGs I don't quite understand.
I was wondering if anyone had any game suggestions for a new user, I was thinking something along the lines of Final Fantasy IV or Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, two of my all-time favorite games.
I looked on the FAQ section and couldnt figure out how to do luck manipulation, if someone could post an explanation on how it works I'd be very grateful.
I looked on the FAQ section and couldnt figure out how to do luck manipulation, if someone could post an explanation on how it works I'd be very grateful.
It's pretty much different in every game. Try to attack in different frames, start battle in different frames or do something before attacking.
yes, and they turn us into mindless zombies that frequently go on killing sprees! Ask any mainstream media!
@FeelTheMagic: there's a list of game ideas in the FAQ. Maybe it'll help you choose a game to run.
Luck manipulation is explained somewhere else in the FAQ.
For example, luck manipulation in RPGs I don't quite understand.
There is nothing random in a NES or a N64 or a Sega Genesis. Barring any saved games on a battery chip (and most of the time one is NOT allowed to start from such a game), the game will always be in a specific state when the power is turned on.
(State: everything in a video game is defined by numbers or true/false statements. E.g.
Super Mario starts off with three lives.
Mario starts on level 1-1.
It is FALSE that Mario is Super when the game starts.
etc., etc. All of these numbers and conditions combinded make up the state of the game.)
However, things would be a bit boring if everything happened the same way every time.
Let's make up a fake game: Absurdly Simplified Princess-Saving. ASP is a computer RPG game for the NES, featuring one teenaged hero who must fight foes and kill randomly encountered monsters until he defeats the evil dragon at the bottom of the local cave.
Now, to make things interesting, not all of the teenaged hero's attacks will hit. Since we're cheap, we'll make determine if the hero hits or not with a simple table.
Hit
Miss
Hit
Miss
Hit
Miss
Critical Hit!
Miss
Now, if we were just to choose these outcomes in order, things would be boring. The hero would always hit, then always miss, then always hit..etc. We want to be random--but we can't. There's nothing random inside a NES. As it mentions in the site's FAQ, computers are calculators, calculators do math and there's nothing random about 2+2. Therefore, the game has to use a trick: humans are kind of random, so let's use the human to pick the random numbers for us!
Now, it wouldn't be fair if we let the human pick the number directly (he'd always pick Critical Hit!, no?), so instead, we set up sort of an imaginary roulette wheel inside the game. If the human hits the attack button in the first 1/60th of a second, it's a hit. If the human hits the attack button in the second 2/60th of a second, it's a miss. Since humans do not have perfect reflexes, the human won't always hit the button during the same 1/60th of a second and therefore won't always get the same results. This makes our game look random. It isn't--it's psuedo-random. (Psuedo meaning false or "not really, it just kinda looks that way".)
(NES games, or at least Japanese/American ones, generally function on 1/60th of a second intervals because Japanese/American television sets draw a frame every 1/60th of a second. The image looks better when the game and the monitor are sychronized. Each period of 1/60th of a second is called a frame because that's the term that the television experts use.)
Now, let's look at what happens when you have an re-recording emulator. When you have the ability to slow the game down frame by frame and even "rewind time" with save states, the game isn't anywhere close to random. The user can get a critical hit every time--all the TAS maker has to do create a savestate before the battle starts and them press the attack button during the first possible frame. If that creates a Critical Hit, well, that's great! If not, the TAS-maker can reload the save-state and then wait one frame to see if waiting one frame creates the Critical Hit. If that doesn't work, the TAS-maker can reload, wait two frames...etc., etc. Eventually, the TAS-maker can find the exact frame needed to get a critical hit and therefore can make a movie that beats Absurdly Simplified Princess-Saving in which the hero always gets a Critical Hit when he attacks.
Things get a lot more complicated than this--many situations call for multiple random numbers before the game asks the human to press a button. E.g., if the monster survives the first attack, it gets a chance to attack the hero. In that case, the TAS-maker may have to find a wait time that allows the hero to get a good psuedo-random number and the enemy to get a bad psuedo-random number.
There's also random numbers everywhere in an RPG game. Therefore, you'll see a person who makes a TAS of an RPG game doing odd pauses here and there. They're trying to get the "roulette wheel" to land on a specific "random" encounter or they are trying to get the "random" encounters to not happen at all or they are trying to win the jackpot in the village lottery game or...
After all, when the game has to rely on the human to pick random numbers and the human is allowed to try things over and over again, the human can eventually make all of the "random" events go his way.
To make a long story short, there is nothing really random about the games. It's all "pseudorandom". The games uses a pseudorandom number generator to simulate randomness in real-time. Everything is deterministic.
So it's just a matter of trying it out frame-by-frame (for most RPGs anyway). If you get the critical hit, you won't lose it later.
Wow, thanks for the detailed response! It helped quite a bit actually :)
I still need to figure out a game I want to try my first TAS on, but it seems all the classics have been done. (Secret of Mana is one of my all time favs, but it's already a WIP and I think a shorter game would be better for my first)
I'll figure something out, thanks for your help :D
Wow, thanks for the detailed response! It helped quite a bit actually :)
I still need to figure out a game I want to try my first TAS on, but it seems all the classics have been done. (Secret of Mana is one of my all time favs, but it's already a WIP and I think a shorter game would be better for my first)
I'll figure something out, thanks for your help :D
1) Yes, shorter games are better for a first run. It can take hours to plan even a minute of a TAS run.
2) Your first run will be garbage. That's okay. Redo the entire game from the start and look for new stuff--you'll surprise yourself by finding new ways to save time.
3) Always look for ways to influence the game--sometimes the strangest stuff changes how the game plays because the game is depending on you to help it create psuedo-random numbers. The only way to completely understand how the pseudo-random number generator works is to reverse engineer the game. If you can't do that (which won't be uncommon--you will need to learn the assembly language used by your console of choice to pull this off), you'll want to make very careful observations as you play.
In my published Golden Axe run, I actually pause the game briefly during the beginning of some of the bonus stages to get a favorable psuedo-random number. It's much faster to waste a few frames with the game paused and to get all of the thieves to appear close together than it is to start the bonus round immediately and waste many frames chasing the thieves all over the screen.
In my unpublished Shadow Dancer run, I discovered that randomly hitting the buttons during the introduction animation of the 4th boss stage actually changes which pattern that boss uses. There's only one pattern that allows one to kill the boss extremely quickly--all of the other patterns allow the boss to escape hitstun or otherwise waste time. It took me awhile to figure out that random button presses at the beginning of the stage actually affected the game (after all, you cannot move your character at all during this time) and then it took several wild guesses before I could find a button mashing sequence set up the exact psuedo-random number I wanted.
Oh, and don't think that everything is random, either. If an enemy is programmed to always appear at a specific part of a level and then always run directly and your character, luck-manipulation is not going to help. On the other hand, a RPG will have many scenarios in which parts are psuedo-random and parts aren't--e.g., the final boss will always appear in the final level but that boss' attacks will be pseudo-random. (But, then again, you might just find a glitch that lets you avoid the final boss and win the game even if you aren't supposed to be able to do that...)
Not if your name is Arne or JXQ ;)
Seriously, you'll probably receive harsh, constructive criticism that will make you want to tear your hair out. But once you get the first run published, you'll be flying through other games.
But I probably don't know what I'm talking about, since I've never even atempted a run :).
You'll need patience and determination. Making a good TAS is not so easy as it first seems.
trazz wrote:
2) Your first run will be garbage.
That is a rather negative statement.
highness wrote:
Seriously, you'll probably receive harsh, constructive criticism that will make you want to tear your hair out. But once you get the first run published, you'll be flying through other games.
Posting first-time WIPs instead of submitting right away tends to take the harsh out of criticism.
No, it is not a "rather negative statement"--as long as you don't take it out of context.
trazz wrote:
2) Your first run will be garbage. That's okay. Redo the entire game from the start and look for new stuff--you'll surprise yourself by finding new ways to save time.
Doing a TAS requires noticing a ton of details and it's very, very easy to miss several details on the first attempt.
I though my first Golden Axe submission was pretty good but it had several severe problems. I used a trick to get a jumping-downthrust to connect once in the submission and never even thought about using that trick elsewhere. I missed multiple attempts to hit two enemies with one strike. I used magic 4 times and 2 of those times caused an unnessary knockdown, prolonging the life of the stage boss (even though I used magic correctly against the last boss). In short, I missed multiple chances to save time on all of the first seven stages (The eigth and final stage is very, very short).
My first run of that game was error-filled garbage. (It got published anyways--sometimes major errors aren't obvious.) That's okay, though--when I redid the run, I found and corrected those errors.
It takes a lot of screw-ups to learn a craft well. You don't see first drafts for sale at your local bookstore. Every Olympic downhill skiier started their career by crashing on not-particularly-steep slopes. In the same way, it's possible to make mind-blowing TAS runs--but it often takes several not-even-close-to-optimal-attempts to get good enough to make those runs--and even the good runs have rerecording counts in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. It's not "rather negative" to point out that you *must* fail thousands of times before creating a good TAS.
>That is a rather negative statement.
Perhaps, but it's probably true. I think we have several contributors here who are less than proud of their first ever movie. Very few people get it right the first time, if they do I bet they didn't submit the first version.
>highness wrote:
No he didn't. :P
Reminds me of something I read in the book "Game Design" (afaik); one of the game developers said "Your first ten games will be garbage."
So no matter what you do, only time and experience will get you good results.
I guess the statement is up to interpretation. Especially the word "garbage".
My interpretation was that a "garbage run" is a useless run, or a run which makes you think "I shouldn't have done this", or a run which you should delete from your computer without second thought.
I don't remember the exact wording, and it was translated anyway. The meaning was "they will be bad".
In TAS terms: Not usable since everybody who knows the game sees where and how it could be improved.
If someone just tries to reword this sentence to something like "your first run will most probably contain noticeable errors", could we proceed with the meaningful discussion?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I bet Arne and JXQ had some garbage runs that they didn't want to submit before they were satisfied with the quality. Which is ok, but it's also good to post WIPS and discuss at the game threads, so you can get feedback before finishing.
My first attempt at a TAS was Smash TV, but not the one published here. It was a 1-player, not turbo, very boring (and often desyncing) TAS. I quit after three rooms.
But it makes me happy to read what DK64_Master wrote :)
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
I guess the statement is up to interpretation. Especially the word "garbage".
My interpretation was that a "garbage run" is a useless run, or a run which makes you think "I shouldn't have done this", or a run which you should delete from your computer without second thought.
My definition is, "Ouch, it hurts to watch this. I know this can be done more efficiently." For me at least, my first published Golden Axe run definitely falls in this category.
You could be right--garbage may be too strong of a word. On the other hand, I do want to use a strong word--I've learned the hard way that just because one thinks one has done a great run doesn't mean that run won't be greatly improved by redoing the whole thing from level 1. I want to imply that it's okay to take that first run, analyze it, find its weaknesses and make then make that first run completely and totally obsolete.
