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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25485810655090243
Almost there now. Just 8 levels to go. 16-24 contained some of the hardest levels so far.
Unfortunately, I found an improvement to level 19 bonus which is also applicable to levels 3 and 11. I didn't have the will to go back and resync all of the levels, so I will have to concede ~4 seconds of improvement in this run. Generating mountains is simply too tedious to spend the time on.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25461917360020787
Alright, slow going but things are looking a little better now. Thanks for all your helpful notes Tompa.
I roughed out the rest of the first level and implemented most of the improvements you noted. Still having trouble on the second bonus in 1-3 though.
I'm about 5 seconds behind your 1.43 WIP. But most of that seems to be coming from 1-4. I'm moving much slower but not really sure why, but I haven't gotten that far in analyzing your WIPs so I'm sure I'll improve it once I get there in the comparison process, for now I just wanted to have something to work with.
Lag does seem to be particularly challenging in this game. Often when I squash a lag frame somewhere it reappears elsewhere, or in the loading times.
Still overall its not as bad as I expected. Slow and steady will get us there.
EDIT: Oh, it seems I have 1111 player points : ) For some reason I suspect this was done on purpose since I'm pretty sure I remember seeing 1110 there, so thank you to whoever did that!
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Samsara wrote:
For the most part, what we need are people who are actually willing to take the time to provide test cases on harder/easier difficulties for these runs instead of just having threads full of people assuming that one difficulty is "better" than the other.
I like this idea. I'm willing to volunteer to make a test case if the run is sufficiently short (ideally under 10 minutes, so rejection wouldn't be a big deal) What runs are best suited to this?
'One can argue endlessly about anything.' Sometimes you just have to actually do something and see what happens.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25426434681228682
Alright 16 levels done, half way there!
Once I got into a good pattern of how to figure out what mountain paths I wanted, I was able to move pretty smoothly. The only thing I couldn't get is the same timer at level 12 bonus, even though I'm sure I complete it at least as quickly as the published run. But the timer doesn't exactly work very well so I'm not worried about it.
At this point in the movie I am about 20 seconds ahead of the published run.
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Warp wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
My opinion would be that this should be stated as: hardest difficulty is always publishable/preferred, while any other difficulty is publishable if the audience finds it sufficiently entertaining.
What happens if someone submits a TAS of a game using the hardest difficulty and it gets published, and then later someone submits a TAS of the same game at a lower difficulty, and the audience finds it entertaining?
If the hard mode TAS was entertaining in its own right, they both can stay in moons. If it less entertaining it will go to vault and the easy mode one to moons. In the final case, where the audience found the easy mode one not entertaining, it is rejected.
So basically I'm saying that the default category for any game is 'hardest difficulty any %' For most games, 'Hardest difficulty 100%' will be another default category. These can always at least make it to the vault. 'Easy' mode TASes would need to meet the same entertainment requirements as any other potential category for that game.
Tompa wrote:
From an outsider's perspective, just knowing that the game was played on Hard will make the run feel more impressive by the difficulty choice alone.
I think that is part of the aim of TASes, after all most people aren't TASers and won't actually look into it any deeper, as you suggest in the next sentence there.
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sorry I don't have the original anymore, but when I tried it a second time back when this first happened it worked fine. I must have done something pretty silly somewhere along the way, I just don't know what it was.
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In my opinion the real difficulty is the question of what precedent, if any, publishing a certain game on a certain difficulty has on subsequent submissions of that game.
In the current case of Return of the Jedi, arandomgameTASer chose easy difficulty as subjectively the most entertaining choice. So if someone does happen to come along and submit a run on Jedi difficulty, what would happen to it?
Is arandomgameTASer setting a precedent that should be followed?
Can the 2 runs be published side by side?
Does a judge have to rule on preferred difficulty at the time of acceptance/rejection?
The difficulty guideline doesn't seem to address any of this, especially since the argument it is using is also subjective entertainment value.
In its current state, I see the difficulty guideline as at best determining whether a run goes to moons or vault, but in this case it should be made clear that essentially the same run can be made on 2 different difficulty levels and both are publishable.
My opinion would be that this should be stated as: hardest difficulty is always publishable/preferred, while any other difficulty is publishable if the audience finds it sufficiently entertaining. This would put difficulty level on the same footing as any of the other category choices besides the default any% / 100% and be less ambiguous. It also means 'easy' difficulty TASes would be rejected/accepted on the grounds of entertainment value, not difficulty level, more in line with other categories.
If the community is specifically aiming for this NOT to be the case, and that each game have a preferred difficulty, my suggestion would be making something more clear and less subjective, but I'm not sure how this is possible.
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version 3
emuVersion 9816
rerecordCount 7990
palFlag 0
romFilename Ghosts'n Goblins (U)
romChecksum base64:jDybBBOS+O8G9rDHQyxYnA==
guid 0A767817-53D4-B7F0-18BB-74FACB9C0DFB
fourscore 0
microphone 0
port0 1
port1 1
port2 0
FDS 1
NewPPU 0
comment author Arc v9
|1|........|........||
|0|........|........||
|0|....T...|........||
Well, the published movie certainly does start with a reset. I see Gay's point though and am also not sure how starting from a reset wasn't noticed in the submission, and more importantly, the publication process. If the run relied on Arc's instance of FCEU already having existing values written to memory, I would think this would desync immediately when a publisher went to encode it.
But maybe the fcm file contains a savestate or something, I'm not really familiar with it, but I'll look into it now, along with when the spawn is set.
EDIT: well thankfully this site has really good movie file format documentation:
[1] Even if the header says "movie begins from reset", the file still contains a quicksave, and the quicksave is actually loaded. This flag can't therefore be trusted. To check if the movie actually begins from reset, one must analyze the controller data and see if the first non-idle command in the file is a Reset or Power Cycle type control command.
So it seems that is exactly what happened.
EDIT 2: The key to enemy spawns seems to be at 00C0. It is used to set the X register which effects locations of enemy spawns.
Here is enemy spawn being set at power on:
$8468:BD A7 84 LDA $84A7,X @ $84AD = #$A0 A:06 X:06 Y:03 S:37 P:nvUBdIzc
$846B:18 CLC A:A0 X:06 Y:03 S:37 P:NvUBdIzc
$846C:6D AF 05 ADC $05AF = #$60 A:A0 X:06 Y:03 S:37 P:NvUBdIzc
$846F:99 AF 05 STA $05AF,Y @ $05B2 = #$90 A:00 X:06 Y:03 S:37 P:nvUBdIZC
Here it is after reset.
$8468:BD A7 84 LDA $84A7,X @ $84B6 = #$68 A:0F X:0F Y:03 S:37 P:nvUBdIzc
$846B:18 CLC A:68 X:0F Y:03 S:37 P:nvUBdIzc
$846C:6D AF 05 ADC $05AF = #$60 A:68 X:0F Y:03 S:37 P:nvUBdIzc
$846F:99 AF 05 STA $05AF,Y @ $05B2 = #$90 A:C8 X:0F Y:03 S:37 P:NVUBdIzc
00C0 is 0 at power on, but after resetting the value does not get reset, it is at 3 at this point.
So, it seems that the true enemy spawn at power on is the 'bad' one, oh well.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25373110677269009
OK here is a test WIP of the first 3 levels.
I tried to do it just by watching the youtube encode to get an idea how difficult it is going to be to figure out tricks and just how hard this game is to TAS overall.
So far it seems to be not that bad, I don't think it will be too hard to make steady progress, especially with bizhawk and taseditor.
I put a couple passes into this WIP to at least get a basic level of optimization in it, but it's nothing special.
@Tompa: if you can look that over and see how much you can improve, it will give me an idea of how much effort optimizing will take versus just making rough drafts.
I also went back to level 1 after level 2 and saved some frames just to see how bad the desync will be. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't terrible, this game is no Umihara Kawase where it was a complete mightmare. So maybe I can rough draft more of the game while you are optimizing Tompa just to get more of the inputs in there. That is most of the work anyway.
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Seems to me like its a memory issue in FCEU 98.16
Everything I tested so far has no impact on zombie spawn.
I found only 2 ways to get the 'good' spawn. One is to start the game and let the first wave spawn in the normal 'bad' spot and then reset the game. The other is to wait on the title screen until the demo starts. If you reset at this point you will also get a 'good' spawn.
All gameplay videos I see online also seem to have the usual 'bad' spawn. The one video that had a good spawn had a non-zero high score on the title screen, so clearly it started from a reset.
DO you have the memory address of enemy position Arc? With that we can trace back to see where it is set and know for sure.
but right now it looks like unless you can verify on console that you can get that 'good' spawn from power on, the spawn from FCEU 98.16 probably is an error.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25327477891633667
First 8 levels, 1/4 of the total done.
I made a mistake in level 1 bonus and had to fix it, which turned out to desync everything else not surprisingly. It was very tough getting the other levels to sync, but enough runs of my script eventually got it working.
Level 8 was the first one I was able to do more or less constructively. I could decide where I wanted openings to be and put conditions in my script to match them. I'm pretty happy with the results.
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Great! Let's make this run happen!
I don't expect this to be a fast or high energy project, so for now this thread should suffice for collaboration. It wiil take me a few days to wrap my head around the game and try to understand what's going on in your wips. I'll put together a test WIP of the first few levels in my usual fashion and then we can start really optimizing it from there. I usually learn the most from iterating runs anyway.
Thanks for the offer to collaborate Tompa, I'm sure this will be a very interactive project, especially since you are already the expert at this game. Hopefully it doesn't go the way of your other attempts. I don't mind revisiting things a few times to get them right, but after that I tend not to look back, so I hope we can keep some forward momentum and not endlessly restart.
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I'm surprised that DKC 101% hasn't been updated in so long. It was one of my favorite games growing up, and I've been wanting to TAS a higher profile game for a while now, so I think I'll be giving it a try!
Does anyone know if there is anything more recent out there? Or if anyone is/was working on anything already?
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When I try recording a .m64 it always makes the first frame blank, when i need it to be 'down', is there a way to fix that?
But I'm not sure why you can't recreate it, I'm not even using a controller, I just load the save state, press down on my keyboard, and frame advance.
Here is a savestate where mario is already in the sideways state and groundpounding though if it helps.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sxpwkjp7rh2ofa3/Super%20Mario%2064%20%28J%29%20%5B%21%5D.st2?dl=0
If anyone else can get a .m64 from that save file please let me know how to do it.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25271447164618248
First 5 levels done. The bonus on level 5 still needs a little work since I couldn't get the same timer as Walker Bo, but the first 4 levels are done.
Overall about 8 seconds saved so far. In particular a much better bonus in stage 2, and a much faster stage 5 thanks to my random guessing script make up the majority of the savings.
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So I tried messing around with bob-omb's and coins and such looking for collision detection anomalies, and this happened.
For 1 frame, Mario got snapped to wall horizontally (sorry for the bad pic) while being pushed into the grating by the bob-omb.
Not really sure what to make of it, anyone seen this before? He pops back out normally the next frame.
Here is a savestate, just hold down on the control stick after it loads to recreate this effect.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9lpfcs66wk3kxkm/Super%20Mario%2064%20%28J%29%20%5B%21%5D.st1?dl=0
You can do other interesting things from that savestate too. If you hold left on the control stick until the bob-omb explodes, you get pushed out of bounds.
EDIT: you can even do a ground pound while in this orientation. and he ground pounds towards the wall instead of the floor (but hits the grating instead)
EDIT2: also, the game thinks mario is under the triangel at -5365, even though he is only at -5211, so it must have put him there at some intermediate step
my only guess is that the game can't resolve what to do with Mario, so it rotates his sprite to at least fit him in the wall for a frame and hopes for things to change. Does anyone know the address for mario's sprite orientation?
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Awesome!
Every level looked really smooth.
I can rarely watch any TAS to the end, even short ones like this, but something about Umihara Kawase makes it really fun to watch, and I'm impressed at the level of improvement too, well done!
Do you think you have leveled up enough to try your hand at flagitous' run Samsara? I've always wondered if there was a frame to save there, even one, but could never do it. Even TKDL just copied flagitious in all the levels in the any% run.
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I completed the boss fight with 1 upgrade, it takes ~1020 frames from first frame to last in the room.
Compared to ~770 for the original movie
Currently the movie is almost done and I don't think many more frames will be added.
1 upgrade run: 71200
current: 71700
I expected more savings honestly
EDIT: well bad news, I had always assumed the final weapon in the game has set damage, but it seems like that is not the case. It is effected by upgrades you get as well. The last boss takes significantly longer with only 1 upgrade, quickly eating up all the savings I had and then some. Final time is 72000 frames.
Well at least that question is answered.
I'll go back to my other file and give it a check for any additional frames to save, but it looks like it will be pretty much the final version.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25216805130435765
Here is the improvement file, it contains the zips Arc just mentioned in his post above. Saving about 5 seconds
Not having to worry about that boss sure does make things easier.
So now it's time to see if skipping an upgrade is faster. My gut feeling would be that it is, especially since I can also zip through 2-1, since I don't need to collect points.
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Ahh ok I just needed the older version of fceu, thanks.
Well it turns out finding how the game built the levels was pretty easy, but I doubt I'll be able to manipulate it in any constructive way.
But, it does seem to lend itself to the same type of random guessing that Super Pitfall did. My plan is to press random inputs, then count how many open spaces the lower level of blocks has (that is the random part.) Then I can just keep the level with the most openings. This way I can test many possibilities extremely quickly.
I'll need some other heuristics, like if the openings are actually close to the players or in convenient places, but I'll probably be able to eyeball that.
@jlun2: hmmm, I think it gets initialized the same way, it's just dependent on instruction level timing, since it is constantly doing ROR and LSRs and such.
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This is really cool! Well done Arc, under 20 minutes!
New finds like this keep TASing fun, at least for me.
I remember back when I was working on this that the level 3 boss caused me a lot of trouble. He has a couple different patterns and if you get a bad one it costs a lot of time.
There were even some improvements I had to leave out because I just couldn't get the right pattern, but now, that difficult boss is skipped!
So, I'll go over this and implement the improvements I know are there. I think this can stay on the workbench though, it shouldn't take long (level 1 and 3 will be identical still, only level 2 will change.)
Also it might be faster now to only get one upgrade, so I'll test that too.
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I tried posting it just now and I got parser error, so must be something wrong with the file.
I tried just now converting it again and it worked this time, so I must have done something wrong along the way.
Here's the broken one:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/30li0sy4f6fpgkz/ice%20climber2.fm2.bk2?dl=0
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Hi,
I am trying to import an fm2 movie from fceux 2.2.2. After converting it using bizhawk I tried importing it and got this error:
When I hit ok, it just pops up again (I hit ok at least 20 times and it kept repeating)
The movie is a 2 player movie of ice climber.
Bizhawk 1.11.1
So I tried messing around with bob-omb's and coins and such looking for collision detection anomalies, and this happened.
For 1 frame, Mario got snapped to wall horizontally (sorry for the bad pic) while being pushed into the grating by the bob-omb.
Not really sure what to make of it, anyone seen this before? He pops back out normally the next frame.
Here is a savestate, just hold down on the control stick after it loads to recreate this effect.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9lpfcs66wk3kxkm/Super%20Mario%2064%20%28J%29%20%5B%21%5D.st1?dl=0
You can do other interesting things from that savestate too. If you hold left on the control stick until the bob-omb explodes, you get pushed out of bounds.
EDIT: you can even do a ground pound while in this orientation. and he ground pounds towards the wall instead of the floor (but hits the grating instead)
EDIT2: also, the game thinks mario is under the triangel at -5365, even though he is only at -5211, so it must have put him there at some intermediate step
my only guess is that the game can't resolve what to do with Mario, so it rotates his sprite to at least fit him in the wall for a frame and hopes for things to change. Does anyone know the address for mario's sprite orientation?
When I hit ok, it just pops up again (I hit ok at least 20 times and it kept repeating)
The movie is a 2 player movie of ice climber.
Bizhawk 1.11.1