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janus wrote:
i watched part of your video. I noticed you only buy a sword and no defense upgrade. Would not buying a shield and a helmet be worth it?
I didn't really bother with defense early on as the stuff was kinda weak, and I was of the opinion that it wasn't going to the difference between life or death of a character. Not having any defense also helps when killing your own team off for death warping.
as for the turbO: you need to find the right sequence... And besides, the flow of the text isn't always constant
Uh, not really. Lets say you hold the button that turbos "A" on the first frame, then you hold the button that turbos "B" on the second frame. Hold both after that until the dialog is done. It will be the fastest method.
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janus wrote:
really? I thought it only dealt critical damage, not instant killing...
No, it's an instant kill, which is why it doesn't work against bosses.
meh. it only uses more recording :P.
I usually stop pressing A at the second last character. I move one frame and then press A again, one frame before the arrow indicating more text.
would turbo move even faster?
It would (at least I'm fairly sure it would, it's been a long time since I checked) advance dialog at the earliest frame possible, at the fastest speed without there being a need to constantly check to make sure you've advanced dialog at the fastest rate.
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janus wrote:
after checking, I did save 41 frames for the harpy fight. Might as well start again. i've got nothing to lose :P
For the zombie fight: would you suggest putting bow in front with the scrambled formation? For the times I tried, je couldn't kill an enemy in one hit with his critical attack. I would lose frames to put ryu back in front...
and for the turbo : i'm not sure I get it. Would it be faster than
I don't mean with bow's critical, he has an ability called "shot", it's under his attack command. it has a "chance" of instantly killing an enemy that you can fairly easily manipulate. I did it in my run. on that note however, can you kill them in a single critical in scramble formation with ryu at the front? if you can, it'd probably be best to manipulate a killing critical and a successful "shot" attack.
As for the turbo thing, I'm almost certain it'd be equally as fast as normal, and removes any effort in regards to finding the first frame you can advance text.
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1) let's save as many characters as possible :p
I wouldn't consider the trade-off worthwhile myself.
2) if i remember well, i tried moving around, and it used more frames...
That's highly unusual, given it would take exactly the same amount of frames to move from one tile to another.
3) death is usually a good shortcut. other suggestion?
You did something I would've intended to do in a second run, which was save at the church and deathwarp back. That was a good idea. Upon checking through comparison, it is faster to attack (and crit) yourself during the beak fight.
4) lead-off attacks use up to 50 frames before taking any action. don't forget that ryu is faster
It doesn't matter that ryu is faster or not in this case. If bow is going to act anyway, you might as well have him OHKO the enemy instead.
5). Mmm... by what factor would it change? i don't want to start again :( :P
Given something I just checked, it would be unwise to not start again. the initial run I did is 505 frames faster than yours by the time you get to the adult phase. In regards to the actual question: against Augus, somewhere between 8-15 for normal hits, somewhere between 20-40 for criticals.
6) I want to keep the rock for the monkey fight (where I have to kill turobu in 3 rounds).
I doubt that's worthwhile, he only has 110 HP according to the highly detailed faq, which you could probably do off with a KmikzeBL instead (you get one in the cave where you get the second dragon transformations).
I'd recommend giving my run another watch over, and possibly copying the initial input through hexing. It'd save you near 10 minutes of gameplay, and it's definitely faster through means that I don't really understand (I gained almost 300 frames between the beak fight and the barubary fight).
Also, for text, instead of holding A, just turbo between 2 buttons. All buttons advance input, and having a button pressed makes it move faster.
That's all for this post.
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Ok, I just finished watching it now. I found a fair few points of questionable actions, so I'll outline those:
1) Given that the text is so slow and readable, even at its fastest speed, was there any real point to naming Ryu "A"?
2) In the village while walking to the mountain, you get blocked by a man and stand there until he moves. Had you moved to the right one tile, which you did anyway once you had passed the man, you wouldn't have wasted time waiting for him to move.
3) Is it faster to not attack yourself during the beak fight?
4) Why did you auto against the two zombies that you had a lead off attack on? It would've certainly been faster to use "shot" against them, as you wouldn't have had ryu attacking twice and not killing them.
5) Against Augus and the Frog kinda guy (and possibly the harpy sisters), why didn't you take advantage of the scramble formation? It increases damage dealt by Katt and Ryu by an amount I would consider significant enough to warrant it.
6) Someone gets poisoned in the cave, as is expected. But you healed them with an antidote, and later used a helpbl on ryu in the fight with 4 hoods. I'm assuming that you've got a possibly better use for the FireRock planned than using it there? After that fight you get fully healed and status ailments removed, so I can't see a reason not to use it there vs lots of enemy and character attack animations wasting far more time.
And that's about it. Sorry if it seems a bit critical, but I can't think of a better way to describe what I mean.
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Nice work paul_t, it was only yesterday that I checked to see if there had been any posts in this thread :P
The only points I spotted where improvement may be possible were in the intro stage.
1) When you go down the ladder, you airdash. Fair enough, it gets you some distance, but it resets your falling speed again, so you'd possibly be able to make more distance simply by falling and then dash jumping instead, as in previous games air/ground dashing has somewhere between a 6-10 frame animation period before you actually move, while a ground dash jump has none.
2) When you got hit soon after that, you got hit at a rather high point, for the short knock back animation, and then had to fall to the ground to re-dash jump. I'm almost certain that it would've been better to do a small jump there, and get hit at the lowest possible point that you'd have been able to jump again (almost) immediately from.
Other than these 2 points, I don't really have much else to comment on, it looked pretty smooth. Keep it up :)
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As it turns out, a new version (0.9) of DeSmuME was released today. I was considerably surprised by how drastically different it is to 0.8.
In terms of tas usability progress, the emulator is getting quite close; it already has a frame counter, frame advance, and (albeit needing work, as there is no sound recorded) avi recording.
It needs work on the sound front, as that can be highly off in some games (for example sonic rush), the graphical front a little also as some games still suffer graphical issues, and the configurability front, as it's lacking massively in that department (multicore support certainly wouldn't hurt, although I wouldn't say it needs it as it runs better than no$gba apart from sound).
But yes, the emulator is at the very least one step closer to being usable for the purposes of NDS TAS.
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Derakon wrote:
Is it really faster to take the armor in the train level? It feels like the armor is slower on the ground (takes longer to get into a dash-jump, maybe?) and it only serves to save you from a few hits, as near as I can tell. I assume you took it because its hit-recovery is faster than Zero's?
With Zero, probably. He doesn't really have the luxury of offing almost everything in his path with unlagging attacks like X does (hopefully I will be able to progress through that area without slowing down at all). The ride armor has a better hit animation/recovery, and its own invisible HP meter, so it's faster to plow through enemies with it than it would be with zero alone.
In the first part of Storm Owl's stage, what triggers moving onto the next stage -- reaching the far-right edge of the stage, or being on the ground at the far-right edge of the stage? It might be the latter, in which case you'd want to land faster.
The "warp" trigger is getting to the rightmost side of the screen. The higher you are, the less distance you have to warp.
FractalFusion: I just played around with the web spider glitch, and it's definitely abusable by X, at the very least using the nova attack.
I think that the amount of time saved by using this glitch alone would almost make a completely absurd route potentially viable, and would allow to show for all the cool tricks that I otherwise can't use.
Said absurd route is as follows: Web Spider > Storm Owl > Slash Beast > Magma Dragoon > Colonel > Split Mushroom > Frost Walrus > Cyber Peacock > Jet Stingray.
Downside is that I can't take the shortcut in web spiders stage or quick kill two minibosses unless I get the plasma shot instead of the stock shot (although in this path, that might be a viable action), but I can take the shortcut in split mushrooms stage as a result. I'd also have to fight Colonel without his frost tower weakness, and Slash Beast without ground hunter.
I have no idea if it'll end up being faster or slower, but it'd certainly come close to the path already chosen regardless.
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janus wrote:
just wondering: has your TAS for BOF 2 been rejected?
No, it was never submitted to begin with. at 5 and a half hours long, even though it was pretty well optimized, I decided it would just be somewhat of a waste of time.
I just switched to BOF 1. Right now, I'M trying without marble 3. Luck manipulation for avoiding battle looks easy. Whenever changing screen, you have to move at a certain frame to delay it quite a bit. Some short dungeons sequences can be done without battles.
Got a smv of any progress you made on that? I'd be semi-interested in watching to see how it'd turn out.
I do give some critical, but I can dodge a few attacks
The more criticals you can get the better, but dodging is still important. if you can't get a crit, at the very least try for a dodge or non-fatal damage to a single party member.
I restarted the whole game, since I figured I can greatly reduce the number of fights (4 so far, and I'm up to Augus)
How does it compare timewise to the smv that I made ages ago? At only 4 random fights at Augus, you'd most likely be infront by at least 800 frames unless your battle strategies were poor. Either way, keep up the progress :)
That was a pretty interesting find. I'm guessing it might also be valid for X, since zero's jump slash gives bosses invulnerability periods also.
Good stuff I say.
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Turns out I'm lucky, I had sent AngerFist the pxm before I had deleted it, so I got it back off of him. Downside is that it was made in pcsx 0.03, and doesn't convert successfully to the .05 format.
Either way, since it's still about, it should allow you to do some frame comparisons if you so choose FF: movie file along with pcsx 0.03 (don't worry about it being on rapidshare, it's a direct download link).
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FractalFusion wrote:
I started version 2.
Intro stage, Magma Dragoon, Split Mushroom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It0fykhJBJA
Because RR v0.0.5 has far fewer desync problems, I was able to complete the three stages in a couple days.
Blargh. It would appear that I no longer possess the movie file for the intro stage (black, not that it makes any difference outside of visual and a 9 frame delay) zero run I did. It's a pity, as I think it was ever so slightly faster, and I now can't send it to you for frame comparison -_-. I don't think I actually linked it here, so I don't know if you've seen it FF:
Black Zero intro stage.
I think there are a few parts that are ever so slightly faster, which I shall outline:
1) Not killing the two enemies at the start, and instead jumping between them.
2) Delaying entering the door on the earliest frame so as to allow for the dialog to appear sooner (as you have your falling speed seemingly reset when going through a door, thus making you take longer to hit the ground).
3) Different method of destroying the first block (I think it was a frame or two faster, but if it wasn't, it certainly wasn't slower).
4) Not destroying the second block and instead jumping over it.
5) Avoiding the whole lot of the flying bugs without delaying movement.
That's about it really. Using black zero doesn't make a scrap of difference as it solely a visual modification, but I did it because it looks nicer.
Regardless, what you've done so far looks pretty damn nice, keep it up :)
edit - I forgot to ask: how did you get the audio/video to actually sync for such a long period of time? did you adjust the frame rate to one lower than 60fps?
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upthorn wrote:
Incidentally I just watched the speedrun and I'm looking forward to this TAS. Perhaps it will fill the hole in my heart left when the Minish Cap TAS was abandoned.
I wouldn't say it's "abandoned" so much as it hasn't really gone anywhere in a considerable period of time. What I want out of where I am and what I can actually get (manipulation wise) aren't the same, which is why it hasn't done anything. I asked Tompa if he'd be up for giving it a shot, but he wasn't able to get a satisfactory result either (I described to him what I thought would be best, he more or less agreed to what I thought would be good). I'd say I just don't have very much patience trying to get the right result for this room given how long I've been there, but I'm not really willing to settle for something that would be obviously sub-par (I'm aiming for less than 5 seconds, but I haven't gotten it).
In regards to the actual topic at hand, I haven't seen the speedrun, but sub one hour seems pretty decent for this game. Hopefully it has some parts that you do in a non standard way (like the way you've found already, which is certainly interesting). I'll check it out when you've gotten to the first boss.
I'd also say you should to a point use the existing wip for comparison to see if you're faster, equal, or slower at certain points. It may not provide much use, but a reference point is always good to have.
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Unless you're getting the japanese version of platinum, you're certainly not getting it for christmas, as the current NA release date is apparently march 22.
A couple of random points:
1) There isn't a ds emulator that's plausible to use for tasing at this stage. Desmume is the likeliest candidate for a ds rerecording emulator, but the project more or less stalled a fair while back when the main (only?) coder got interrupted by life, and pretty much said not to expect anything from him at any point in the foreseeable future
2) A 4?? pokemon run? that would be the least entertaining run I could possibly see happening. not only would it have ridiculous amounts of grinding, it'd just be horrendously repetitive with no worthwhile results entertainment wise.
So yeah, unless you're fairly knowledgeable in the field of both programming and ds hardware (and bring desmume to an acceptable level of tasability), then I doubt you're going to get to tas this game anytime soon.
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mz wrote:
I think this is the first almost-max-quality-60fps video of a PCSX movie; at least the first one with proper sound. :P Unfortunately, this was the only game I could make a video of with its audio not sounding like complete shit...
The audio still has some artifacts/static consistently throughout it however (could that be due to it being 32Khz/96Kbit mp3?), and the video resolution seems really odd (256x240, would've thought it to be 320x240), but it's definitely a good step in the right direction :)
I take it that what you've got going on right now doesn't play nicely with sequenced audio or such? If sotn works, I would've made the assumption that other XA audio using games (the x series comes to mind) would work without much hassle.
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I absolutely must make the distinction that it's Luigi running about on the front page, not Mario.
Also, this problem is seemingly limited to opera out of the browsers that I use. it goes up to 25% (a single core) when Luigi is running about or doing something, but doesn't really do anything at all out of the ordinary when using say, firefox.
Personal opinion: the only thing that opera ever had over firefox (better tab related stuff) it lost in newer versions anyway, as they removed certain functionality from it.
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Without reading any of the resulting posts from the submission rejection, why not just link to this submission in the 6% description along with something of the lines of "if you are interested in seeing the game beaten at the lowest % without using the x-ray glitch, you may wish to have a look at this video"?
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Bablo wrote:
Also if people have problems with finding the ROM, some sites may have it as Sky Blazer (U) (without [!]). That should be the same ROM.
The version of the rom that it syncs with for me is labelled "Sky Blazer (Beta2).smc" so that might help some people.
I just finished watching it, it wasn't too bad, I liked the glitchyness of the game, but the way of movement used for a fair portion of the run was kind of blah since it was so jerky.
Overall, it was quite well planned and executed, good stuff :)
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I watched this earlier. I'm glad you decided to follow my advice and redo it, it definitely looks a lot better (and faster) in comparison to before.
I'm of the opinion that not taking damage was perhaps not the best choice as several bosses would've benefited from you taking damage to destroy them faster, but I'm not the one running the game, so it's not really my problem.
Would it perhaps have actually been faster to attack the first boss normally as opposed to waiting for it to slowly walk down to you, only to die in something like 6 hits?
Either way, nice work :)
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For what it's worth, I got the movie to sync and playback fine. While I can't comment on the actual topic requiring assistance, I will comment that if you were to submit this run as it, it would likely be received poorly.
There were several parts, mostly in dungeons, that seemed rather unoptimal. Boss fights in particular seemed to have considerable room for improvement. Some of them even looked like you were playing them in realtime.
I don't mean to crush your hopes or such, but I'd recommend redoing the run from scratch, as there is definitely visible room for improvement in it. This would also give you the chance to fix the "start from reset/poweron/whatever" issue as opposed to from a savestate.
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I myself use, depending on my mood, a G5, or a MX600. I dont actually have a desk, so I'm saddened that my old mouse actually passed on (it used that cheap-to-make-and-impossible-to-fix-yourself kind of wiring), given it worked *perfectly* on the various bed related surfaces I use my mice on.
Extending the topic to keyboards as well, I mostly use a G15 that has usb wireless dongle for my MX3200 (and my MX600), which I don't use all that often. I suppose I should otherwise it'll get ruined from lack of use.
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I haven't checked the rest of the thread, so if this has been asked (and answered) already, my bad.
In fceux 2.0.2 (and 2.0.3), I can't get the turbo hotkey (and possibly others, I didn't bother checking because I don't really tas nes games so I had no reason to check more than that) to actually function.
I tried mapping it to a few different keys, but all had the same result (of nothing happening).
I use xp64, would this be a possible reason why this occurs?
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krohn7master wrote:
So I gave you my proof, and if you guys STILL think it is fake
I don't particularly care about SM64, or much in this thread for that matter, but I shall comment on this.
Perhaps the only plausible proof that people would accept regarding the underwater door entering would be the following (all in the same video, in the style you did before with the tv and such visible):
1) you jumping into the water and having it behave like normal when you enter the water
2) proceed to get out of the water and get on top of the castle
3) proceed to do the blj to get underwater as seen in one of those videos
4) opening the moat door while there's water in the moat
I imagine that this would be more likely to be believed than the alternative, but it's entirely your choice on what you do in this matter.
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janus wrote:
there is only so much manipulation i can do. the harpies in Fubi only attack ryu; he can only dodge so much.
Something that just came to me: if he can only dodge so much (and you can't get something that works out), try for a manipulation that get him killed and has him self-revive.
the fights I had with baba needed at most one healing; none with katt
Given these 2 fights are 1v1, I am of the opinion that the need for healing is out of the question, as it simply wastes a round. I would suggest, with the katt fight at least, to try and make ever action a critical, as each critical is roughly equivilant to 2 rounds of combat.
