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Would you believe that I never actually noticed that there were more posts in this thread?
I haven't really made any progress past my last post in this thread, partially out of annoyance for things not going my way in the game, and partially due to the existing reason of "it's 5 and a fucking half hours long".
Janus wrote:
I started a 3rd time already... but this time, I might have found the way for less battles! I'm at the end of Mount Fubi, and i didn't need nerbs!
I'm going to assume you mean you don't need herbs by that. If you haven't already, I would suggest watching the run I did a couple of years ago, as I'm of the opinion that apart from maybe a couple of points, it'd provide a good reference point.
I'd say outside of a few situations, healing isn't something you should be concerning yourself with, rather you should be working more on not getting hit. A prime example of this would be the baba fight. If you aren't over leveled or manipulating the fight, you would end up just wasting a huge amount of turns healing until he just kills you with two crits in a row.
Anyway, I'm interested to see how this will turn out, although personally I'd rather see Breath of Fire 1 done simply because I've already seen (done) a tas of Breath of Fire 2 :P
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Here is how it parsed your post in this thread Ferret:
[22/10/08 01:55:57am] <@NesVideoAgent> New reply by Ferret Warlord (Sites: AutoSummary of forum posts on IRC channel): http://tasvideos.org/forum/p/182529#182529 -- AutoSummary: I figured it would produce like that. It 's to get just to see what sorts produce.
The results that it produces are pretty entertaining. I the best comparison to this that I can think of is running something through various machine translations, and then back into the original language languages to see how deformed the original "something" has become.
And this reply (excluding this edit), just for comparison:
Here is Ferret. Results that it produces. The comparison is running something. Back into the original.
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L337 wrote:
It is just smarter todo this tas on 'lets rock', just because there are more lag on 'damn I'm good"?
I just finished watching both videos, personally, I can't say I like the game if only for the poor quality sound it has, but of the two, I liked the first one, as more stuff died.
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mz: While testing some games with recording out of sheer boredom and curiosity to see how things would go, I found that the "black screen" issue was even more annoying than I had first thought. The game in question that I found this issue to be occurring in was Breath of Fire III (one of my favourites, so I thought I'd do the intro part when I was bored yesterday).
Trying to optimize the intro, I had savestated after the capcom logo but before the mural that scrolls by until you press start. Initially, I thought the ideal frame was somewhere around 1055. All was fine I thought, so I proceeded after seeing it sync with that particular savestate. I then got a bit further before replaying from the beginning. Turns out, the mural went by for a while, so I redid it. the ideal point this time was around frame 1025. Again, redid the parts, and checked sync, it seemed good. Then I replayed it again from the beginning, and yet again (this time through hex editing trial and error), the ideal frame had moved ahead to frame 999.
Less of a point is that I savestated, partially by accident, during a black screen transition between areas, and the resulting input after reloading a few times to get the right frame ended up desyncing when I actually played it back.
Basically, I'm just inquiring here about this (and this may or may not be related to the desync with eternal spu plugin): are the savestates saving *everything* (including audio related events and such) that the emulator is doing at the point in time of the savestate? If they aren't, this may be the cause of some of the desyncs that occur.
Oh, and there was a period when the game was checking for memory cards at the beginning for data in which the emu couldn't be paused, but if you pressed the pause key during it, it'd pause as soon as said period was complete.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I suck at describing things.
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Satoryu wrote:
hell no. just to add another long cutscene and another Alia cutscene? sounds counterproductive for a speedrun, dont you think? the cannon must succeed.
firing the cannon should be done asap because it spends 2 hours on the game's clock, which are needed to have Hyper Dash asap. for those that don't know, the bosses' levels determine what rewards you get. when they're at level 8 or higher, they give enhancement chips (Hyper Dash, Quick Charge, etc.) and the levels are determined by how much time has gone by and by rank.
Interestingly enough, having the cannon succeed before beating any levels still only has the first boss you fight at level 3, kind of defeating the point of firing it so early outside of a virus level run. Thusly, firing the cannon has seemingly no effect on the current hour. If we beat one of the main bosses and get a GA rank, it should put the boss levels to 8 from that. Probably need to test that though.
Something I found while playing around normally and then transferring an almost complete memory card save from psx to pcsx is that the ability you get from the griffin dude more or less destroys the ability to do a sdc, at least at the rate available prior to having it (since it's executed by dashing and then slashing in a very short period of time) so even though the jumper upgrade might come in handy in other stages, the fact that it's bound to cost time on boss (re)fights is a downside of massive proportions.
Something else I pondered, and even just checked (but was shot down) was doing the first virus level, obtaining a PA rank from it, and then doing plantman's stage to get the z saber powerup. if it doubled the damage a sdc hit did, it might've evened out the time it takes to do the stage. This was shot down though by the fact you can only go up one rank/stage though, and that parts take 2 levels to make. A pity.
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Kitsune wrote:
Edit: Now I remember why I got rid of the pSX one though. Any time I load CoM&M, I get a...Illegal Opcode error.
Gotta find a way around that.
Perhaps the problem at hand is that your image is bad, not the emulator. epsxe might run it by simply ignoring the errors. psx and perhaps pcsx might come up to the error and just crash due to it.
Who knows.
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Kitsune wrote:
Yes, well. I've never been called "guy" before.
Really? I call tons of women "man" at work in a casual greeting style.
I do hope it'll be able to play my favorite PSX game sooner or later though.
Did you try pSX? It's the best psx emulator available, but if you've got an old cpu, you're going to get shitty results, as how the emulator performs is solely based on your cpu.
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Kitsune wrote:
ePSXe works without any problems.
It's this piece of crap emulator that won't work.
Won't run any games for me.
And if it does, it'll crash during the loading.
So it's useless to me in it's current state.
I find that rather unusual, but I guess there's nothing about it you can do if things just aren't working for you. It's a pity. What game were you wanting to tas with it anyway?
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Kitsune wrote:
Thanks for trying to help guys, but now the emulator crashes if I try to register the drive Daemon Tools creates when I Auto Detect it.
Did you try manually configuring it with settings show in mz's earlier post? Mine is set up pretty much exactly like that, and it seems to work decently.
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Use an image mounting program (eg. daemon tools). There are apparantely other plugins that dont require you to do this, but they're probably just as annoying to use.
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Cremator wrote:
What kind of run did you plan to do?
I know Angerfist wants to do a "classic style" zero (beat all 8 bosses before proceeding to the final area, although the specifications of this are currently pending, detalied later in this post). I may or may not do a low % zero independently of AngerFist though, depending on how things go.
Have you figured out the shuttle/cannon problem?
No, infact, it's gotten worse. Contemplating what FractalFusion had said, I tried various inputs to get the god damned cannon to fire straight away.
Finally, after a collection of crap, I had success! However, this success was short lived as the input following the stage was horrendously poorly optimized, as it was done through a lazy keymashing macro I made while turboing. "No problem," I had thought, as I believed that the input made during the "oh shit it's gonna crash! USE THE CANNON OR THE SHUTTLE, LUKE" scene was irrelevant and wouldn't affect the outcome of the cannon's success.
Lo and behold, after hexing in almost completely optimized input of alternate key input, when I had finally reached the firing scene, the colony was not destroyed. This leads me to believe there is a counter of sorts, rather than a specific "it will succeed/it will fail" 1/0 value. The tedious part here is that I have no fucking clue how I'd optimize or manipulate something that I have no idea how to actually find.
Other than this point, I did a bit of semi-optimized testing in regards to the boss "re"fights that would occur in a low% run. Let me just say that zero utterly rapes everything, so much that the only boss that x would even have a chance of beating faster is the final form of sigma himself due to his weakness location. Everything else falls to sdc without too much trouble outside of iggy glow due to his teleporting around, that bat dude due to his flying around, and the griffin type dude due to his running around and diving. The blob falls before his second form, the eyes die suitably fast outside of the green one, and ultimate armour X doesn't even stand a chance.
Basically, SDC is king in x5.
Now, on the topic of a "classic" run, there's one main point I can think of:
- Should the cannon be manipulated to fail as opposed to firing either right away (and succeeding), or after all 4 parts have been gotten (and then succeeding), so that the spaceship parts aren't completely worthless to actually get? This adds a bit more time onto the run due to the extra cutscene that it would incur, but would make more sense.
I was previously under the impression that if you succeed in firing the cannon, dynamo and all related events would no longer appear after boss fights, but after checking, that would not seem to be the case. Oh well.
/end wall of text
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I now know what Angerfist was actually referring to with his comment about the black screen that I misinterpreted as him misreading the lag counter.
I savestated on the black screen that appears before the capcom logo in x5 (during a point where the frame counter and related items aren't visible). After reloading the state a reasonable amount of times, the difference between when I got to a certain point in the fmv had drifted roughly to be 20 frames longer than where it should be. I have no explanation for why this would occur, but strangely it did.
Also, sadly I encountered the same kind of desyncs that occurred when pcsx was first rerecording enabled when I was using eternalspu. this is a disappointment as it has the best sound quality by far :( Oh well. back to midas I go.
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mz wrote:
So... Lag counter should be saved within savestates? I only have to add "gzfreezel(&lagCounter);" in a couple of places, so if this behavior is fine for everyone, I'll do it for the next version.
I'm not fussed about this myself. To me, the previous fix of having the lag counter staying red and telling me when there's a lag frame is far more important than knowing how many lag frames I've had in a run.
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mz wrote:
-I don't think there is a source-code for Eternal SPU, but if you can find it I'll gladly take a look.
This is the one I'm referring to, but I dont know if it'll actually help or even be of any real relevance.
-There is a "pause at frame 0" workaround now... Pause the emulation in game ("Pause" key by default), and then start recording/replaying a movie with the corresponding hotkeys ("Ctrl+N/R" by default).
I guess that works.
-Memory cards inside the movie files sound more useful than "start from savestate" option.
Starting from a savestate still has it's own merits however, so I wouldn't go about removing it.
-I think reset recording is really useless for the PS. I can't think of any good use for them, it takes like 3 billions of minutes to reset. It would probably only be used to corrupt memory-cards saves, something I really hate in recent runs...
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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Yeah, SEGU is much better than N-rage.
Really? I should try it then at your suggestion, given segu wasn't available in the previous versions.
For movie recording, Midas is better. (yeah, I know you recommend NoSound... but I never had any problem in SotN)
Damn straight, midas or eternal are the best for recording if you want sound, although sync will vary depending on what you use (something that syncs with nosound, midas, and dsound might not sync with eternal even though it's the best quality).
apo123 wrote:
Is there a tool to hex edit these movie files yet? I have about 30 seconds of a Riven run, but it desynchs.
Currently, the only option you have is a hex editor. It's tedious but it works.
Also, the game is multiple disks. How would I go about making a TAS? Would I record one video segment for each disk change, and then force people to pause at the end of the movie? Even then, data has to be sent between disks... Is it possible to support recording from a savestate?
I'm of the opinion that Riven is a horrible game, but anyway: yes, recording from a savestate is possible, and has been for a while. I don't believe disc changes are supported by the format (or perhaps the emulator?) though yet.
mz: another couple of things to report and suggest, even though you just promised it'd be the last time:
1) Recording the disc id (eg. SLPS_009.02 is rockman x4) in the movie header to make things more like fceu's movie loader, which has a md5 hash in the header or such to auto load a list of movies associated with a specific rom.
2) The new version crashes on the movie dialog if you have old format pxms in the movie directory, or load an old format pxm.
3) I believe the source to the eternalspu 1.50b2 plugin is available, or at least it would appear to be, so perhaps consideration of modifying that to be the ideal plugin for recording audio (some changes would need to be made so that it records to *.wav or such instead of *.spu)?
4) There still doesn't appear to be a "start paused (at frame 0)" option when recording or playing back yet.
5) I know I'm being unreasonable here in these suggestions, but this is probably one of the more important ones I believe: Support for disc changing. A possible way of getting it to work would be having a "disc change" hotkey, which inserts a specific set of input into the file which you're normally guaranteed never to use in a game which pauses the emulator until the next disc is inserted (disc id being recorded at this point, and once confirmed input recording resumes). A disc change header or something perhaps. Or something that just came to mind: having the game disc id's (for a specific game, with the person adding them in on creating the movie file) in the header, with the mentioned pause/check thought and only allowing continuation of recording if the correct disc is inserted.
Other possible ideas:
- Having "none" as a selection for controllers when recording a new movie.
- Having an "ignore memory cards" "use memory cards" option for recording new movies, which would treat the normally used memory cards as being not present, or would create 2 memory cards specific to the movie file.
- Reset recording :P
And that's it from me for now. Good work on the new version mz :)
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Sir VG wrote:
Question. When it comes to the shielded rollers near the end of part 1, why did you attack the one and damage boost through the other? Why not damage boost through both, or attack both?
I'm not FF, but I shall try answering this in his place (given I did the first stage as black zero too, more or less completely optimized): He attacked the first one because it looks cool. He took damage from the second one because he'd otherwise have to wait for a short period of time so that he doesn't cause a damage animation while jumping between the enemies following the second one.
Frame wise, I believe it was something like 5-9 frames slower (it's definitely slower, I just cant recall exactly how much by) to destroy the shield-like things in question.
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I've found that fmv's and such don't actually support frame advance as it were, so the only real way to get through them is to just find out what button presses will skip them, and then just hex them in as a turbo input or something.
It's a dirty way of doing it, and it might not necessarily be the fastest, but it works. Most of the time.
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Tompa wrote:
It is WIP time!
Watching it, I have a question, relating mostly to stairs.
Why is it that only sometimes you skip the stair climbing animation, while other times you climb stairs normally? I thought perhaps it only worked one way, and without Zelda following you, but then you did it while Zelda was with you.
The biggest example of this is doing it in the main castle room when Zelda is following you, and then not doing it in the throne room.
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You do realize that the glitch I was telling Fractal Fusion about also applies to frost tower. I'll admit, it is harder to apply the glitch with X, but it's still very possible.
Actually, I found it's relatively easy to apply the extra damage with frost tower, as it basically sits on all of his invincibility periods. As it turns out though, frost tower is far better (3 damage/hit vs 2)than a stock shot against Colonel, as for some reason he's more "solid" than other bosses, and takes only one damage from a half charged, and 2 from a stock. Blargh.
Try more like increase the amount of time it takes to kill the Split Mushroom miniboss by at least 10 seconds (IIRC). It's actually not very hard to get through Walrus part 2 without Soul Body. Well placed fully charged shots blow through the ice walls quickly, and it doesn't take a long time to charge the buster.
You must remember that stock shots are unlike the normal charged and plasma shots, which do more damage and pierce things like the ice bricks or the flaming boulders unlike the stock shots. A reasonably rough test puts soul body through ice at roughly 3.5-5 seconds faster than the alternative.
Stupid Colonel. If only he didn't force a battle halfway through the boss fights everything would be fine, as he screws up every alternative that could work. Doing web spider is required to get the lightning web/leg upgrade. Doing storm owl is required to get the arm upgrade to do the miniboss skip. Doing magma dragoon is required to do the miniboss skip. Doing split mushroom is required to get through the ice in frost walrus stage quickly. Doing frost walrus is required to beat colonel in a timely fashion. etc.
The game is against doing things that look cool -_-
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This one's more of a request than anything else: is it possible to add the feature of starting a movie paused at frame 0, as opposed to it automatically playing and then having to manually pause it? when making small testing movies it's a tad annoying to have to either start it from a later frame for timing (comparison between movies wise), or pausing it as soon as you can, but still missing out on an input frame.
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More minor testing and some thoughts, although no actual progress as of yet.
On a test against slash beast(leo), I decided to find out the boss damage caused by the stock/plasma shots. A stock shot is equivalent to a normal charged shot damage wise, as it does 3. A plasma, I'm not entirely sure about, since I had varied results on how many shots it took to kill him. I averaged somewhere in the range of 12-14 shots to , usually coming closer to 14. The plasma residue always seemed to get another hit in of one damage , also causing him to go invulnerable for however many frames his period is.
I'm thinking (without actually having done any testing) that it may actually be ever so slightly faster to go without the ride armor in storm owls stage, but I don't know if I'll be able to kill things as smoothly by doing so, given the ride armor has a homing charged shot.
Another is that since colonel still requires 16 hits even with the frost tower, perhaps it might be reasonably possible to down him relatively fast using the stock shot (although not very likely, it'd probably just bring down the overall shot requirement by a few notches instead of being just as fast).
This would allow me to do a different stage instead, as soul body would cover the no-plasma issue for frost walrus' stage (it dominates the ice, and you can still fire normally while using it), but at the same time would slightly increase the amount of time that it takes to kill the split mushroom miniboss without frost tower/aiming laser.
And that's my random musings for the night.
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Turns out that took way longer than I had planned. As usual. Good thing I TAS after work and not before it :P
Web Spidus
I was a little surprised to actually realize that there's a different damage set for things with a life bar in comparison to normal. A standard shot does 1, a half charged does 2, and a fully charged does 3 (with special weapons presumably doing a steady flow of 3 or above, I haven't got any weaknesses to test with :P). This would probably explain why it looked like a fully charged shot didn't do all that much damage in comparison to a half charged compared to normal situations.
I was going to try and do parallels with legs/no legs/stock/plasma to see which was best, but in the end I presume it'll just be way too much work to either redo everything multiple times, or manually sync all the input to work.
Oh well. Another stage gone, another pain in the ass stage to come.
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mikwuyma wrote:
Does jumping really low to the ground somehow take away the 6-frame firing cap? It looks that way, but I'm probably just imagining things.
No, it's still there. I mostly only stay that low for the purpose of not actually overshooting the enemy, as for the first few frames of firing the bullet rises or falls as you do, unless you turn around after firing it.
Does it really save time to skip the armor in Magma Dragoon's stage? It looks impressive, but you have to climb up instead of just smashing through the rocks.
Indeed it does, by, at the very least, 100 frames. In realtime playing however, I'd probably suggest still using the ride armor on the basis that if you were to skip getting it, there's a fair possibility of screwing up and landing yourself more damage and stun time than if you'd just taken it.
Anyways, good work guys. I'm eagerly awaiting more levels.
In theory I'll have the next one up in a couple of hours :)
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Ignoring the last half dozen posts, I decided it'd be a useful idea to do some testing for various things.
Firstly, getting the leg upgrade to perform the miniboss skip in split mushrooms stage actually turns out slower overall by about 200-400 frames. Right now I get the feeling I'm not going to find those frames elsewhere through using the leg upgrade, so I'll probably skip it after all, despite the fact I've already collected it.
Second, stock shots can be fired just as fast as normal buster shots, and all 4 can be on screen at once. You get the first 2 at 93 frames (the same as a normal charged shot without an arm upgrade, and presumably the charge time for a plasma shot), and the remaining 2 shots at 30 frame intervals after the initial 2.
If someone could point out a ton of frames, say, in excess of 400, (other than the split mushroom miniboss skip) that's guaranteed to be saved by having the leg upgrade, please do point them out as X looks better with the leg upgrade than without (although he always has really, so eh).
I'm not entirely sure on when I'll have web spidus' stage finished, but in theory it'll be within the next day.
Also, people like explosions, even if they're the cause of not really visible delay (in this case, 5 frames waiting for the gun animation to dissapear so I can climb a ladder), right ?
