Nice movie, AnS.
It would be worth finding out if this is a time-effective strategy for the later races. The last couple of opponents have full upgrades on everything so it would take quite a long time to destroy the boat.
And it looks like if you start from the Easy levels it wraps to the normal and then presumably to the expert levels, so you could upgrade your boat a little (very little actually) before hitting the harder levels. Though I guess starting at expert would make it shorter.
Yes, if this is a true speedrun I suppose starting from the highest level will be necessary.
alden wrote:
I didn't do it this time, but in general I think a good strategy is to damage your opponent's boat as much as possible quickly at the beginning of the first race. Their boat can take 5 hits (and then becomes invulnerable:( ). The more damage, the slower they go, the more money you end up making because they give you more if you beat them by a larger margin. They won't make much money so it will be hard to repair their boat, and damage not repaired carries over to the next race (not to mention that they can't upgrade either...). You can either push them into obstacles, or more amusingly use a turbo boost or a jump to land straight on top of them which hurts them but not you... I'll post an example later tonight.
Does anyone know how many levels there are? If it's only 9 this will be a really quick movie which would be another plus...
Yes damaging your opponent is a good strat. In the overhead levels, you get $5k every time you force the game to catch them up to you when they slip offscreen [EDIT: Apparently this only happens in 2 player mode, doh]. And yes, damaging your hull is bad because you'll be slower and will have to pay for repairs.
Not sure how many levels, but the last race is a swamp course which is 4 lines long on the preview map.
See! I told you this game was great :)
Hey, nice!!
I agree about finding the optimal path through the swamp style stages for shortcuts and stuff. Isn't it a fun game?
Definitely you'd want to avoid taking damage at all costs early on so that you could maximize the amount of money you spend on engines and acceleration, etc.
An awesomely fun and fast-paced racing title with upgradeable vehicles. Several different racing perspectives and pretty good music.
Will someone who wants to do a game that's never been done check the game out?
Hi,
May I say 'congratulations' to both Swordless Link and AKA for this TAS. This was top-notch in my book.
Bowser 2 has always been my favorite stage to see TASed, and your perfect optimization of it blew me away. Fantastic job - *especially* on Bowser 2 and 3!
I think TASes should give that "roller coaster" feeling to the viewers. Until now I didn't think it was possible for N64 games to exhibit that, but I certainly felt it. Sonic couldn't have completed Bowser 2 any faster! ;p
Well yes and no. We're already at an uncertain stage in ambiguity, as to whether getting the lullaby and getting bombcu's from the well early is faster then the Spirit Temple, so we're taking advantage of our co-authoriness and splitting up, each taking the different route to time which one will be faster. Normally, here is the route and it doesn't show too much change in the child section, but we have to check and make sure which way to get bombchus is faster. Ordinarily our route wouldn't change until after Dodongo's, but can't hurt to check with two of us splitting and TASing at the same time.
Ah, thanks for that. Forking the TAS between you and Guano is a great idea. It will be interesting to see which leg is faster and by how much.
Looked good, Guano. Maybe now that the Deku Tree is just about frame perfect we can be done with it ;)
How far can we get now until the route becomes uncertain? Or is the route complete now without any ambiguity? I assume we can at least get through the child portion?
EDIT: Ah, my mistake. Good job Guano and ComicalFlop!
Yep, nice wip Rikku.
I especially liked your "flair" when fighting bowser 2. That enormous jump you took when the platform tilted was hilarious and awesome.
You're making pretty fast progress, keep up the good work.
Hey, you switched to sidehopping over the blocks in the water. Great idea and nice execution, comicalflop!
May I add that the amount of text you post daily on these boards baffles me. In a good way.
That would be a big fat 'no' sadly. :(
It's a shame, too. Freenom was getting really close! This game is the last "must-have" TAS that hasn't been completed yet (in my opinion).
Sorry, but what does "mylestyle" mean, and what is the origin of the word? Thanks. Just trying to keep up with the progress/plans here ;)
minor edit: 100th post, yay? heh.
Yes, the phantom ganon fight was nice and quick. I don't know if luck manipulation is possible in the boss fight, but from what I remember, the boss always recovers quite quickly the first time you get him down.
I can confirm the WIP plays through for me (using Guano's included savestate; I haven't tried from the beginning) using the gl64 plugin.
Nice job on the forest temple Guano!
I would make duplicate frames 0 bytes like DeHackEd but I don't use mencoder and I'm comfortable with x264.exe. Besides, overall video quality is VERY SLIGHTLY affected by that and these are not final encodes, only to help the m64-challenged, so don't give me grief over that. Also you all should know the final encode will be 320x240, so I thought I was kind of spoiling you with 512x384 encodes. meh. If I hard killed all but 20fps, then the 60fps file selection would be jerky, and the 30fps pause screens would also be jerky. Unless x264.exe has a mencoderlike decimate function?
I won't have time to encode it all until tomorrow night, what with only having a laptop, and a crazy class scedule. Thanks for your patience.
Cool, thanks for doing this.
You are right, forget what we said about making the output 20fps. I completely forgot that there were parts that ran faster than that. It's best not to decimate when you have mixed framerates since that could further make sound desync a problem in some cases.
x264.exe eh? I'll have to check that out. I didn't think there was any official x264 front end. I've been using mencoder and staxrip (which essentially is a front end for mencoder and a lot of other things).
Anyway, moving back on topic - good work so far Guano. I tried watching the latest segment but I was fast forwarding from one of my save states and it desynced at dodongos. I'll just wait until bkDj gets the vid made. Looking forward to the adult portion!
Duplicate frames in an encode cost nothing.
You can test out a 20fps output, it may look ok. If you're using mencoder it's as easy as "-ofps 20" if I'm not mistaken.
Yep, I can confirm that there are no desyncs.
Fantastic WIP so far. I haven't watched it in a while, and I must say your Dodongo's Cavern and Hyrule field bomb super sliding were extremely impressive.
Keep up the good work.
I'm using the same rom / plugin settings Mukki has with the exception of the TAS input plugin. It desyncs at the name entry screen (or before, perhaps). Suggestions?
I just wanted to point out to those people throwing around the term "AVI" as a video type: AVI is not a video type, nor is it a codec. It's simply a container format. I don't know youtube's submission formats, but rest assured it probably has more to do with the actual codec used than the container format.
bkDj: I do appreciate the vids you've been making for the many TASes in progress. You clearly know how to encode video properly for quality and filesize. I guess I don't mind watching youtube vids, but having a quality downloadable version is still the best imo.
I did notice that mplayer (windows) has some audio/video sync issues with your vids, however I don't really like mplayer that much, and media player classic / ffdshow plays them just great.
Thanks to those of you working on this game. This thread seems incredibly active now and it's great to see preliminary results. Keep it up!
Agreed. I think Freenom has disappeared from this board (maybe not from the forum, though), thus anyone should be able to pick up his WIP and proceed from there. He's really not far from the end anyway. Perhaps you could do it, FF?
Awesome game, I vote for it being TASed if it's technically feasable.
By the way, I got a hold of the guitarist, Erik Frykman, who did the OST for this game. He's a very nice guy, and he helped me dial in his awesome lead sound. I love the way his guitar sounds on these tracks.