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Joined: 9/1/2005
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Some bad news and some worse news.
Bad news: We still only got past squid adler, I didn't really do much on it past that point due to laziness and heat.
Worse news: turns out that converting it to the pcsx 0.0.6/7 movie format effectively destroys all the progress that we've made. It first desyncs right at the very start on the first capcom fmv, I added in a frame, and it synced past that.
"All good then" I thought. Turns out it's not quite so simple. It played through about 2 and a half seconds of the intro stage before Zero hits an enemy he didn't previously, causes hit lag as a result, and then proceeds to just kinda screw around until he eventually dies. "Maybe I can just redo the initial portion and it'll work out" I thought again. I proceeded to do such and then copied the input to the existing file. After a little bit of editing to make the text work out nicely I watched it some more. "It finally syncs! probably," but moments later Zero was about to jump up the wall towards the ladder that leads to sigma and chickened out, turning his back to it.
At this point I thought "yeah, fuck that. I'm not going to spend hours editing input to try and successfully resync this". All the progress we've made could *almost* be considered wasted, except for the fact we have 5 stages of routes and such we already know how to use.
So yeah. We will almost certainly be restarting this run from the beginning, so progress will be set back a fair bit.
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PSI Slime wrote:
the aim is fastest completion, after all. I mean, I really would rather see the boss battles not be plagued with dragon abuse, really. But that's not really the aim of the site. Which is a bit of a shame ; I'm pretty sure that runs that trade a lot of time for much more entertainment in battles (not using dragons) would be rejected.
In my run I opted for the emperor sword and attack buffing spells that put my damage greater than dragon attacks, which allowed for a better variety of killing stuff. Eg. start with g.dragon, then physically beat the shit out of the boss until it dies.
Atma wrote:
There's a villager named Daiye that can be recruited in house #6 who sells various types of fish, including Tuna, to cook WiseBL's.
Indeed, This is part of the "taking too much time to be worthwhile" I meant. recruiting and such, not to mention I believe you'd need to waste a fair amount of extra time in order to get the other 3 houses built.
Indeed, that's where I pulled a lot of information when I did my run. However, it lacks information about one key factor that I wasn't able to find: toasty hits. They're instant kill, but what are the stats and workings behind them? I was never able to manipulate one to occur, otherwise I would've tested to see if I could pull it off on a boss (highly unlikely) like deathevn, and end the game without using anfini :P
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janus wrote:
The game isn't over yet; I can use more dragons later ;)
True.
I can still cook it. And I probably get 2 or 3 at the same time
Getting the ingredients required to make wisebl's takes considerably more time than it takes to just use wfruit's instead. I recall that you need fish for it, and I'm pretty certain that each time you can only get one wisebl, not two.
mmm... speed or entertainment. The run with joker doom in FF6 did get approved; can't a similar one get approved too if it saves time?
Well sure, it's possible, but eh, outside of the battles this game is really lacking in entertainment, and if all the battles look the same, that's a pretty big hit to the entertainment factor.
As things go, FF6 goes for a reasonable portion of the game without the joker doom trick, you get dragons pretty early in this game.
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I can tell by watching that you redid a considerably large portion of the run, some parts look a whole lot smoother now. You also seemed to optimize attack animations from the looks of things too.
Now (outside of the obvious "he's still named "A"" thing), the only real things I noticed this time around was that you seem to be going entirely for speed, not really sacrificing any time for better weapons for fights, and mostly going for mostly dragon usage battles, and always the same dragon at that (no variety I say).
That and this time you completely skipped getting the WiseBL, which I'd say would be a somewhat costly mistake later on.
Somewhat unrelated to your run: I'd say my mid-endgame on BoF 2 would've been easily improvable had I not more or less gone out of my way to avoid using the dragon more or less exclusively for all the (boss) battles after I got them. I went with physical attacks and such more often simply because they gave better visual variety than seeing the same attack over and over again. Repetitive usage of attacks in a game this long is one of the factors that can kill entertainment. It might be the fastest way, but it isn't always the most entertaining.
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nineko wrote:
I explained my point of view about how things should work more than once in the past. I sound like a rude asshole, yeah, but I hope you can read beyond my words, I'm not complaining for the sake of it, as I said I don't care only about myself, because I can just get all the emulators and all the ROMs and watch movies in that way. I'm lazy, yeah, but I can live with that.
I'd personally suggest that in the first place for most people, if only because the size to quality ratio is, outside of certain ridiculously short movies (and the newly submitted psx castlevania movie), guaranteed to be better.
My main concerns are for all the occasional visitors, which come here and have to deal with starving torrents to download videos that require you to update your codecs three times per day, all to save a few kilobytes in an era where DSL users are always more and more.
On the contrary, Having DSL or high speed internet does not necessarily mean that one will have infinite (or even a reasonable) amount of bandwidth at their disposal. Also, I've never updated my codecs on this machine after their initial install. Things still work just peachy.
My personal opinion is that this is very wrong, file formats should be as simple as possible, and download options should be as simple as possible. Many and many people are going to be disappointed by this, I don't know if TASvideos' policy is to scare newcomers to keep them away, but I really have the feeling this website is getting more and more elitist as time passes.
To begin with, h264 isn't a "simple file format" that people would have just sitting around on their pc for no reason to begin with. Nor would xvid or divx be for that matter.
The people who would most likely watch these videos could check the faq (ok I just checked, and there isn't really much of a help section for mkv, but there is a mention of how to get it to work in the avi section anyway) for help on getting it to work.
Take this as an advice, not as a complain per se. I will enjoy my stay in this community anyway, but try for once to do what I do, and stop thinking only about yourselves, as there are other people in the world, and not everyone is a computer expert.
One does not need to be a computer expert to realize that moving forward is better than stagnating. Just because something works, it does not necessarily make that something good. Although in the case of microsoft OS', the opposite can be said to be true.
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I'd say that both screens should of course be captured, not doing so seems kinda iffy.
Perhaps the only thing that could be considered an issue is whether or not to insert a filler bar of something to such an effect for games such as contra 4, sonic rush/adventure, yoshi's island 2 etc. where there is roughly a 48 or 64 (it's been a while since I checked, it's most likely 64) pixel gap between what's displayed on the top/bottom screens.
In contra for example without the gap, it appears that bullets just magically disappear for several frames and then appear quite a fair amount of pixels to the right of where they should be if you don't factor in the between-screens space.
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
It's running really slow, but we'll see if it works.
On the assumption that you have a system with a dualcore cpu or higher, and are encoding with x264, set the number of threads higher than one in the configuration window of the encoder. That made an incredible difference in the speed that I encoded a personal test with.
I did find that most of the results I had after that hung pcsx (most times it happened after the movie had finished playing and was then auto-paused) and caused it to break the avi file after closing the non-responding process through process explorer.
Also mz, I noticed that the kkapture capture window bug gets even weirder when you use higher resolution captures (eg. 640x480 HQ2x un/stretched).
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mz wrote:
I'm afraid I don't understand this. Savestates are saved as movieFilename.pxm.000/1/2/etc, so it shouldn't be possible to load a savestate that is not bound to a movie (but it might still be remotely possible to load a savestate from another movie, which in that case this is the expected behaviour if you're loading a savestate from a longer movie in read-only mode).
I believe what he means is that there's a small window of oppurtunity (I'd estimate about one second, tops) before the movie is actually "loaded" in which you can load a regular non-movie bound savestate. I haven't had any ill experiences with this apart from having to go back and reload the movie file again.
I just finished watching it, it's definitely a lot better than your previous run. I still disagree with naming Ryu "A", but eh, I'm not the one making the run :)
A few points that I feel are worth bringing up:
1) You probably should've manipulated the fight with Baba so he didn't drop the Stamina (you'd manipulate it on the frame of entry iirc) unless you specifically wanted it for something.
2) Was skipping the silverDR faster than not getting it? I recall it doing a bit nicer damage to the boss that follows, but the time to get it might take longer than it saves. Also, I'm sure you noticed, but spells can crit too, and you didn't seem to abuse this point in the first boss fight with nina.
3) In nimufu's tower, you go straight for the platform that has the wisebl on it. Did that platform arrive sooner than the one on the left? (I've fast forwarded past it twice now by accident, so I couldn't actually see).
4) Before the Boss fight in Simafort, you head down to the shops and buy something/iron bow. You go down that way again later on your way out. Was it neccessary to get some wfruits or something? if so, could you have bought them on an earlier pass to save the trip there, and then gone again on your way out?
5) You take Bow alone to trouts mansion. Wouldn't taking Ryu also be faster?
6) You can ring the bell to call the whale while in that beach area after you get it, walk to the water and press A, it saves like 100 frames or something.
And that's about it for my comments. Keep it up :)
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computerbird wrote:
Thank for your answer,Atma.
Hmmm...maybe you are right.But i don't think giga attacks are best used...i think i will have a test when i finished my megamanzero run...
By the way,how about use the "black Zero"?(i don't know how to call it in english...hope you know what i mean)?
Same deal, it's only attainable through a cheat code entered at the title screen. Unlike X4 where it has no benefits apart from looking better (in my opinion), you are given 4 powerups automatically through using it in X6.
In regards to the giga attack:
Well, I don't know about X5/X6 actually, given that at least in X5 you have the hyper dash, but in X4 the giga attack (probably also the nova strike) is the fastest form of horizontal movement obtainable.
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computerbird wrote:
Good run,i like it,but i have a question:why not use X's Ultimate Armor?It's very usefull in a speedrun(Gate 1,or VS HIGH MAX for example).I need some reason of it.
In this game (and X4), X's ultimate armor is only obtainable via a cheat code, and as a result is available for use almost instantly.
It might be useful, but if you're going to cheat for the armor, you might as well use it the whole time through (and then there's calculations on where the giga attacks are best used, and all bosses will essentially die with the same strategy). Not to mention the ultimate armor in X6 looks like shit.
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mz wrote:
LagDotCom wrote:
Decent SPU plugins tend to work with anything you throw at them. I know Suikoden 2 / Alundra sound perfect with Eternal SPU Plugin, but all of the ones mz recommended (before, haven't kept up with the thread so well) butcher it.
Yeah, Eternal SPU Plugin is the only one decent, but it desyncs a lot and it can't be fixed because it is closed-source. That's why I can't recommend it for TASing.
I've had eternal sync for me with some runs, but desync with others. Given that I'm not a programmer, I can't backup my random comments and thoughts on such things: If a savestate catches all possible (sound?) information related to the emulator at the moment that it is saved, wouldn't it sync with whatever plugin it was recorded with (making open or closed source irrelevant)?
Sorry if it seems presumptious or insulting given what you've done already done for us, but I'm just kind of wondering.
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X5 problematic convert - I may or may not have already fixed the initial intro desync in this, but if not, I recall that it required adding 1 extra frame before the first button input.
Movie referenced with savestates - The movie that I referenced in my earlier post, requires rockman X4.
However, the problem is very easy to replicate, at least in terms of the read only bug.
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mz wrote:
Let me see if I undertood correctly what you said: do you mean when you load a savestate at frame 2000 in read-only mode it still replaces the current movie input at frame 2001? Is that correct?
Yes, that's pretty much it. I don't think it'd apply if the savestate was made at the last frame of a movie, but then again, it might just make the next frame have no input. I didn't check.
Is there also another different issue apart from this one or the other one is just a side effect of this bug?
It seems like it could be a side effect, but it might not be related. I didn't check, because a) the movie that I could test one breaks when converting (AngerFist might have asked you about it), and b) I don't have savestates for it to test. But basically I think read-only mode isn't quite as read-only as it should be. loading a savestate that causes a desync while in read-only shouldn't make the desync present in the movie next time it's played back from an early savestate.
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mz wrote:
Uh, yeah. I broke that functionality for the third time now, I think.
Well, it will be fixed for 0.0.7, thanks for reporting. In the meantime, you can download an interim version with that bug already fixed from here: pcsx-rr-v007-beta.7z.
Thanks, that worked great :)
However, I seemed to have found another problem, this time with savestates and read only that's likely to be a rather sizable cause of rage and desyncs.
The biggest issue here is the savestates , which as a result cause part of the read only issue (which in itself is quite a big point though). Savestates seem to save one extra frame of input for the frame after they're made. Eg. in the current movie I'm (re)making, a savestate (lets call it SS3) I made at frame 2037 contains all the input upto and including frame 2037, but also the input that was present on frame 2038.
I'm able to use the savestate to record new input on frame 2038 and beyond, but the savestate replaces the input that's present on frame 2038 when playing back with that which it has stored (which is different to that which is is used in the movie). I have another savestate (lets call this SS4) at frame 2100 or so just to test other things, and to save the new input I had made.
This leads to the read only issue. Since I haven't reloaded SS3, the input recorded and present in SS4 is what plays back when loaded from SS1 (a savestate made at the beginning of the stage) in read only mode. I can load SS1 and get the same result time and time again without issue.
Now, when I load SS3 in read only mode, since the movie progresses further than frame 2037, the input that's supposed to be present for frame 2038 is replaced by the input stored in SS3 and the movie desyncs. You'd think "ok, that's fine, just don't load that savestate then" but the problem doesn't end there.
When loading from SS1 again without having switched from read only to read+write, playing back the movie again, the movie has all the input from SS4, except for the frame that was replaced when loading SS3, causing the movie to desync when it reaches frame 2038.
Regardless of the fact that the movie shouldn't have been affected by loading SS3 while in read only mode, it seems to replace the input with whatever was present in the savestate and just uses whatever is left in the movie file to fill the remaining frames. Loading SS4 fixes the input that SS3 busted, but at the same time still overwrites input while in read only despite the fact it shouldn't alter it at all.
And that's it.
I hope this wall of text gets through what I mean, because I absolutely suck at describing things.
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Blargh, I just noticed that the frame counter no longer goes red to indicate a lag frame now, it simply updates the lag frame counter. I tried swapping the graphics plugin for an older version, but it seems to be unrelated to that.
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mz wrote:
I've written a new guide to capture AVIs: AviHelp. This one is much easier, faster and less buggy than the other one. It should work 100% of the time.
Hey, now that was useful. I tried all 3 methods on the previous one, and still couldn't get a successful reproduction at all. I found out the crashes while recording sound, at least, were related to me not using the tas sound plugin, and instead using the eternalspu plugin since the run still synced with it and sounded better. I need to try that with this one.
It needs the "TAS Graphics Plugin" v0.2 to work, which will come with the next version PCSX-RR. In the meantime, it can also be downloaded from here: tasgpu02.7z
I used v0.1 to record the avi I just made, but there was one glitch of sorts I encountered with it: despite having the screen resolution set to 320x240, it captured 320x240 in a 640x512 avi. This may or may not be solved with the v0.2 plugin, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Cheers mz :)
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Cpadolf wrote:
True, it saved 13 frames.
I had a feeling it'd save at least a few frames.
I did that in my submission, and kind of wondered why no one else did it in the following ones.
I'm going with a 9/9, I love the movement sound :)
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Sir VG wrote:
I wouldn't call the monster form 3rd form, since the constant rotating spheres isn't really a 2nd form. In my opinion, anyways.
The rotating sphere portion is a second form. It has it's own HP value :P
so that extra axe saved some time on the third form.
I honestly wonder if you wouldn't be able to save a little more time by saving an axe for when it's only got like 20 or so HP left, so you can throw the axe and end input immediately following.
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avi recording seems to be bugged somewhat, as of the, 6? times I've tried using it, 3 times it's crashed at a random point while recording.
2 of the other 3 times pcsx crashed when trying to close it.
The one recording that I thought would've been successful failed miserably, as I found a pretty big flaw in the avi recording of pcsx.
The avi itself seemed to capture decently enough, the problem however was in the audio that pcsx captured: it was realtime, not on a per-frame basis. As a result, I had just over 16 minutes of stuttering audio for an 8 minute avi.
So yeah, might need to get that looked into.
Impressive, I just finished watching it. I take it that you'll be doing one more version?
Also, your choice, but I would suggest aiming for in stage frame counts as extra loading can come out of nowhere and destroy your comparison.
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I don't know about that. I didn't because I didn't think it'd make a big enough difference to be worthwhile. If you plan to death warp, spend as much money as you can prior though, since you lose half when you die. Do all armor/weapon (outside of accessory, which would likely never be equipped anyway) changes during battle, as it's much faster.
The first time I thought that armor would make a difference, although I don't know if I had any at that point outside of the k.sludge rare shield drops (armygl/some kind of shield, first is a katt equip, second is a ryu/sten equip that can neutralize magic if you're not on full hp), was at the fight with Ray at the grand church. You need to survive an attack or two that hits all party members that's pretty powerful, and I doubt without armor that I would've survived.
Also, when plausible, get better weapon drops through fights. I'd suggest trying to get a meowst for katt, as the difference in power between that and her previous weapon is pretty big. Check the FAQ to see which enemies would drop worthwhile weapons.
