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Cpadolf wrote:
All souls is the only resonable 100% run for this game. And I don't think it requires a second playthrough.
Technically it requires a full playthrough on hard mode, as there's one soul you only get for completing a hard mode game. Unlike AoS however, hard mode in this game seems to do something, but I'm not sure what since I never really bothered to play through it (I know for a fact that zombies poison you in hard mode, but that's about it).
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Satoryu wrote:
if the latter's true, i'd propose that the nonSG run fight all bosses. if you're trying to make the runs as different as possible, including Puppet Master, Rahab, and Gergoth would seal the deal.
I'd more vote that it doesn't allow usage of the SG for anything, but anything else goes, including skipping bosses that otherwise do not need to be fought.
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Catastrophe wrote:
Isn't it unreasonable to expect me to be on IRC? If it's not the weekend, I'm not really available. And it's not like we had an appointment. You only asked me to be there.
Perhaps, but IRC is efficient and simple to use. I left it for a few days and you weren't on (though you did reply to the thread), so that's why I did what I did.
However, you desynch right after the second skeleton of the Monastery. I tried playing around with the U+D/L+R option and the sound options but all I succeeded in doing was moving the desync earlier into Ecclesia. :x I have no cheat codes on and I tried with and without frame advance./
Ok, this is odd. I've played it back just fine using the version of desmume I use and the most recent "officially endorsed" version linked in the desmume emulator thread. It synced just fine on both, so I can't really point my finger at a reason why it should desync. The only real thing I've ever had cause a desync was save files being present (as in the .sav file the emulator creates) in an earlier version of desmume somehow interfering with movie playback, but that doesn't seem present in the more recent revisions.
I'm back in Ecclesia because using the stylus to enter my name was a huge savings.
I'm glad to see you're going to redo it. If you had left it, by the end of the run you may have felt that it tarnished the rest since you would've learned much throughout.
Now, as for the boss fight, it was roughly 120 frames longer than the version that you did, but at the same time the run is at least 180 frames shorter from not stopping to kill things in order to level up. I believe it could be done even faster by keeping the last glyph union until the boss has enough health to be done in by a 4 hit version of it.
Shanoa's level is the same after the boss fight, so the only thing you gain by killing stuff prior is a level up animation (~100 frames to disappear).
Something that will help you if you don't already have them are addresses (all 2 byte signed):
02128C2E - Shanoa's hitbox - left
02128C32 - Shanoa's hitbox - right
021002B8 - Current MP
0210D728 - one of many enemy hp values, this one is used for the boss at least.
I didn't bother finding more as it wasn't necessary for the monastery, but the top/bottom hitbox should be near the left/right ones. There's no practical use for knowing the hitbox since you probably wont have enemy ones, but it's useful as it tracks your x/y position in the current room which is very useful for optimization.
TL;DR Stuff.
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Catastrophe wrote:
but I'll be able to make Atma happy with my first submission.
Sadly, I'd suggest that you're mistaken. Since you didn't come onto IRC so I could detail the mistakes, I figured I'd make a dsm(mkv) of the same part you did to show how many (and what) there (they) were. I stop at the frame of the boss death, but I think you'll see the large amount of improvement.
I have no intention of doing a full run of this game, but I felt that you needed to know what mistakes you've made, so that you don't make them through the entire run and have it being highly inconsistent.
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I suppose it'd be nice to show an idea of what this run could be like (~2 minutes).
It's not actually optimal, as I noticed after I'd done it that I could kill the initial golem faster with another bone or two, and I could kill the flying armor faster by keeping it on the ground instead of it going high and waiting for the mp to refill. It took far too many rerecords to get that far though since I kept fucking up and overwriting my progress by accident.
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Satoryu wrote:
yeah, i don't think much can be improved from groobo's run, aside from more optimized movement and BDCing.
I haven't seen the whole thing, but you'd be surprised at how much faster it can be. ingame time of less than 1:20 after beating the flying armor, and that's not including the fact that that can be improved even more.
maybe small things like getting more Axe Armor souls so it beefs up the attack to lvl2+.
To be honest, with the current version of desmume, that'd cause a ridiculous amount of lag where there isn't any on a cart, for basically every soul drop that you get, not to mention killing certain things. in a "normal" run through of the room containing 2 wargs/axe armors in the beginning and back, there were over 500 lag frames generated. If this wasn't the case however, I would easily suggest getting 5 axe armor souls as there are 7 axe armors almost directly in your path.
there might be a rare drop somewhere that might help out, too.
I had a look at the drop list of stuff, and the main thing that really stood out to me was blocking mail, as if it blocks hits without a damage animation, then it could come in *really* handy if you glitch the right combination of souls and equipment.
Soul wise, I'd recommend glitching an incorrect amount of golem souls, as you can get a ridiculous attack boost if you get enough, and if you combine that with the devil soul and a good weapon, the damage output is *very* nice.
Equipment wise, I'd try glitching a muramasa or valmanway and a chaos ring. I'm fairly sure I've once glitched a chaos ring into my inventory, but I can't remember if I actually managed to make it back to the game. The best I've managed to glitch equipment wise though yet is the katana 2 ranks below muramasa, so eh. If you combine these with a good bullet soul and a chaos ring, the overall damage output would be satisfyingly high.
klmz: unfortunately, to get the bad ending, you'd have to do the same exact stuff the normal run does up until The Pinnacle, more than half of the run.
That just makes the second half of the movie that much more awesome though.
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I'd suggest holding off on doing this for now as I'm fairly sure the current rerecording version of desmume still suffers from a hang in the second set of stages unless you're using the bios files/swis.
If you can somehow manage to work around these hangs, that'd be interesting, but given that they don't happen at a specific place or time, you're going to have fun if they're directly on your path.
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OK, I just finished watching this, so I'll offer up some opinions.
1) You seem to be a bit inconsistent when it comes to jumping up ledges, an example being the one in the cathedral or wherever it is you start (I forget) when you're leaving, compared to some in the monastery.
2) You missed an easy 20 frame saving on the entrance to the monastery by jumping into the entrance instead of quickdashing up the incline.
3) At frame 6448 it probably would've been the ideal frame to start jumping up to the ledge, but you delayed it until 6558. To further this, you didn't backdash off of the edge on the top one, which more than likely cost you some more frames.
There's quite a bit more, but I find it's hard to detail it when writing like this since there's many minor mistakes, and at least one bigger one. If you're able to hop onto irc, I'd be able to detail them better directly to you so you understand what I mean.
Also, you should get the gold chest, if only because it's directly in your path and it's nice to see the name of what you're killing as an entertainment factor.
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OK, a rundown of stuff.
1) You can fire the normal gun as fast as the machine gun, but an upgraded machine gun deals 2x as much damage per hit.
2) Why did you jump twice on the second wire? you didn't need to, and I believe it makes you stop for an extra frame or 2.
3) I'm fairly sure you made a mistake by not taking the rail car, that shit is FAST. you can kill the driver in a single bullet if you grapple to the top part (above where the homing powerup is) and then jump to the next one. I might be wrong, but I reckon that speed more than makes up for the grappling times.
4) You killed yourself at the boss. It looks bad.
5) When you close in on the boss, you should swap to spread, each bullet deals 1 damage, and there are 5 of them.
The upgraded flamethrower deals 5 points of damage if all the parts connect and has a great rate of fire, but isn't really plausible to pickup on the first level. The crush missile is similar, but at the same time damage it deals is preset in a way, and I couldn't find a way to change it.
Other than these, if you haven't already, I'd recommend playing through the game first (I just get the feeling by watching this that you haven't, my bad if I'm wrong), as it's an awesome game anyway. Keep at it either way :)
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That was pretty impressive, I didn't expect you to use shave ice there with rand.
Still, I'm wondering how you'll handle the fight with church dragon dude that comes up shortly, I'm fairly sure his dragon breath attack is undodgaeble, and that if you guts through it, you don't acquire the dragon skill to kill him with (or that even if you did, you couldn't pull it off fast enough to stop him from killing you on the next turn by using it again).
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IST wrote:
janus, what version of snes9x are you using? I tried to play your latest WIP, and it froze on the 1.43 version I had, and just plain doesn't work on the latest 1.51 version.
IST: are you using the settings in the movie file (in particular sync sound) on a multicore cpu? If you are, and you're using the standard version of 1.43 (any improvement version up to 16 will also have the same problem), that will cause it to freeze/crash at a random point in time.
Head here and grab the svn version linked on that page. It should sync fine and not crash on that version.
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Blaise wrote:
Well, we know nobody will be using nina or peco at least.
Nina, probably. Peco, possibly.
Peco is a blank slate of sorts anyway, and with the lavaman experience builder, you can get him to level 32 or so in a single fight. With the right master, his stats would put him right up there really quickly, although he'd be way behind in speed.
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mmbossman wrote:
Wow, conversation died quickly on this submission.
I'd probably believe that any psx game submission that doesn't have a provided video is likely to suffer from a similar fate.
From what I've read, there's a lot of time spent watching the door transition, so I could use some more input before I get to watching this myself. Does the extra amount of transitions make the entertainment and enjoyment go down more than, say, Super Metroid? Gimme some feedback...
Roughly 1/3rd of the run is door transitions or such, which is a considerable amount of time when you put into perspective that the movie is barely an hour in length, and that the transitions are nothing but a black screen.
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Nightwatch wrote:
Comicalflop wrote:
Submissions need to be recorded from a power on with cleared SRAM; under no circumstance can submissions be recorded from a savestate, as per the rules. Mupen doesn't support start from SRAM options.
SRAM isn't a savestate. I don't believe that any movies that start from a savestate have actually been accepted, although I may be wrong.
Several movies that start from sram have been accepted, although I believe in most cases this is something that's been arranged prior to the submission.
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Alrighty then, while I can't provide coding help, I do have a couple of suggestions (and a question) for further expansion of the movie format, or something.
- A flag/indicator or something in the movie file signifying whether or not bios images are used, and if bios swi's are used as a follow up (perhaps also have one for firmware, although I highly doubt that would be used, just as a possibility specification).
Some games wont run (or will hang at some point, sonic rush for example) without bios swis, and others (movie wise) will desync with them. Having them ignored or used as determined by the movie file would possibly help/solve this particular issue.
- As above, except for savetype if required to be manually set to either save correctly or load the rom to begin with.
- Perhaps date created? It's a nice albeit unnecessary feature.
- Will personalized firmware settings (name, preference colour, etc.) potentially affect movie sync? It doesn't seem to matter in the case of NSMB, but for games that pull things like the default character name from the firmware settings, this could be problematic if it isn't also included.
- More movie information in the play/record movie dialogue boxes. I noticed that you can only see the rerecord count among other things if you open the movie in a text editor or submit it, as the dialog provides exactly no information apart from the filename. Again, not exactly necessary, but is nice information to have.
Hmm, I think that's about all the possible improvement suggestions I have for now.
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nfq wrote:
Hm... the first page on this topic still says that v006 is the "latest version" even though v007, v008 and v009 have been released. Which version is one actually supposed to use? Are there some problems with the newer versions, or is there some other reason why the first post has not been updated?
The first post in this topic is outdated.
0.0.6 Has some fatal flaws that prevent it from being usable.
0.0.7 Would be the version that I recommend, although I've had more problems with it in the last couple of days that's causing a bit of irritation.
0.0.8 Also, for me at least, had a fatal flaw in that it wouldn't loadstate at all, making it useless for recording (also corrupted a movie file).
0.0.9 Is the only version I don't really have any experience with, as since 0.0.7 work, I don't feel a great need to change. The fact that the new cdrom plugin doesn't detect my cd burner/dvd reader drive and my daemon virtual drive is enough incentive to not bother switching while I'm working on a fairly large project (I don't like the iso plugin).
FractalFusion said previously in this topic he got movies to sync with it, as have I using the iso plugin, but I don't know if he's recorded anything with it to test that stability factor. I know I haven't.
Essentially, 0.0.7 or 0.0.9 are your choices for making a TAS using pcsx. I don't know about movie backward compatibility from 0.0.9 to 0.0.7, but the other way around works.
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mega_man_3 wrote:
I HAVE TO GO BACK AND REDO ALL 4 STAGES!!! EVERY SECOND HAS TO COUNT!!!
OR
you could duplicate your movie file, and then test if it's improvable. If it isn't, then you can submit the movie and write the submission info afterwards, so as to satisfy those who wish to watch the completed movie :)
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Are you sure that's ideal? Your method of avoiding fights seemed far smoother than the method I used, so I would suggest going from where you start(ed) doing things differently to how I did them in/after the town.
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If it isn't because the first battle is faster, then it's clearly because the game recognizes "Ryu" as the superior name and gives a frame discount for using it :P
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Put bluntly, this game, while technically impressive in a TAS sense, is absolutely horrendous in an entertainment sense. Personally, I'd suggest doing PS4 instead if anything.
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janus wrote:
but for the second option, i realized it might be shorter if I bought the knuckles BEFORE the blue roaches... should I risk getting them then?
Well yes, getting them when you're at simafort is the logical idea. if you're at the shop section, that would be the time to buy them.
However, that isn't what I meant. I meant test that the knuckles are worthwhile at all first (as in, stop tasing it properly, and get the knuckles, then tas the fight properly with them), before deciding to redo it all, only to find out they're not useful at all.
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janus wrote:
I face a dilema : the battle against the paladin could be shorter if I attacked it for one round. But to do so, I would need better gloves... geting them in highfort is quite a detour, but it's the best pair available. Would the ones in simafort be sufficient? would it be worth it?
Clearly this is something you will need to test. However, as you mentioned earlier, it'd take nearly 400 frames to get the ones from highfort, so those are basically out of the running. The easiest way for you to test this would be to just go back to simafort, buy a pair, and then do the fight (with the getting them part unoptimized since it's for testing purposes). It's your choice on the matter, but given how frame hungry you are, it's worth checking out :P
