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I've finally gotten around to encoding the redo of the 2 stages that I've done thusfar.
Sky LagoonVolcanoPXM
In the Volcano I get hit in the air from one of the flaming boulders. I checked for a "first frame I can hit the door" from there on both getting hit in the air and on the ground, and it came up to be the same frame for both.
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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Atma, I guess you have 2 options left:
1- get someone who has the original cd to make the required files for the plugin;
2- Switch to the US version, which doesn't require subchannel reading at all.
I've already done option 3: restart the run on the same version I'm already doing while not reading subchannels. I'm already further than I was before, and haven't had a desync yet.
Satoryu wrote:
Atma, can i ask exactly what your reasons for using Rockman X4 are? cause if it's just a personal preference about sound, i hope you don't plan on submitting a run. i don't recall any region-specific glitches.
If the pxm format and pcsx are accepted, I would likely submit this movie upon completion, as I consider that if there's a sound that you're going to be hearing throughout the whole movie, I'd prefer one that's less annoying.
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-Fixed another bug reported by Atma, where the frame counter didn't stay red after a lagged frame. But this won't be so useful anymore, anyway.
On the contrary, it's incredibly useful, at least, it is in RockMan X4 (for reference, fairly frequent desyncs in 0.002, so far 0 desyncs in 0.003), as it allows me to minimize the amount of time spent on the ground walking.
Definitely 2 thumbs up for this version mz, and thanks for your continuing work on it :)
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FractalFusion wrote:
By the way, this is how the game freezes for me if I have subchannel reading on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkctcrh3eJA
Fortunately, my movie does not use subchannel reading. I only used it intentionally.
Yeah, I get the same, only it happens before the boss fight actually begins as all bosses have a comment or two that they say before you kill them. This is what I get for doing all my realtime testing in pSX and not pcsx I suppose.
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mz wrote:
If you're using "Use subchannel SBI/M3S info file (recommended)", you need to create a SBI/M3S file first. Or, you can simpy select "Read subchannels (slow, etc...)". For either option, you need a drive with subchannel reading support (this shouldn't be a problem if you're using a virtual drive).
Also, your CD image (if you're using one) needs to have the subchannel information dumped (the ".sub" file on CloneCD images, I think), which some of the rips available on the internet are missing.
I just tried ripping my mounted image with clonecd to make a sub file, and then converting that to a sbi file. Still didn't seem to work, so who knows.
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hooray for emulation bugs~
Turns out that enabling subchannel reading for this game in pcsx with pete's cdr plugin pretty well just halts the game from progressing after a certain point.
This point in particular, for Rockman X4 is any boss fight. This point in particular for Megaman X4 would likely be the Colonel fight, or at the very least the Double fight.
Basically, what happens is the boss makes his voiced comment, which occurs in MMX4 at the Colonel boss fights, the Double boss fight, the General boss fight, and the Sigma fights. In RMX4, it occurs at every boss fight including refights.
So yeah, unless I had some incredible luck hexing the run back together, there'll be a bit of a delay before seeing some more progress from me (which is a pity, I made it up to magma dragoon before actually finding this out).
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I just finished uploading a youtube of the first stage, those who want to but dont have the JP iso, you can see it here. I added a tiny bit of silence to the loading between the stage portions so that the audio in the second half synced better.
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OK, I finally finished the intro level (yeah, I'm taking my time) after a countless number of desyncs that made me rage; pxm here.
Take note that as mentioned prior, I am doing this on the japanese version for a couple of reasons.
You will need to have sub channel reading set in the cd plugin. Something I noticed about that however (despite the fact it caused my run to sync where it previously didn't originally) is that somehow that actually seems to not cause fmv's to not load, and auto skips them more or less. This is probably why OgreSlayeR's run initially desynced, fmv's were there.
I know of one glaring mistake that I made in this which I didn't notice until I had completed the first level: I failed to press start to skip the "scrolling down" intro of sorts in the screen where you pick your stage, which probably cost me somewhere in the range of 100-300 frames.
I shall youtube it or encode something later, as it's ridiculously late, and it took 2 1/2 hours to get the boss down nicely without desyncs.
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Ok, another post by me in this thread. Not so much bugs, as odd occurances.
1)Wwhen playing at normal speed, the frame flashes red to indicate that there's a lag frame. now, this would seem all well and good as at 60fps a flash is all it'd last for. However, in frame advance mode, it still only flashes for a moment (sometimes not even that), not really informing you that it's a lag frame.
2) Unlike the video recording plugin, the sound recording plugin doesn't (seem to) record based on if the emulator is paused or frame advancing. Instead recording from the moment the button is pressed until the moment it is pressed again, making it slightly more difficult to get a good audio track to use for video.
Any chance of getting the frame counter to stay a solid red colour during a lag frame to indicate such, and possibly updating the sound recording plugin to honour the frame counter (eg. if the emulator is paused, it wont record sound until it is unpaused, and only records frame by frame audio as opposed to everything if you paused it midway through and then unpaused which would screw up the audio).
Cheers
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OgreSlayeR wrote:
My Bin is the exact same size... The only thing I can think of is did you use P.E OP.S. CDR Driver 1.4 for the Cdrom plugin?
Meh.. seems like I should wait before I get serious about TASing PSX. It has awhile to go it seems.
Aha. I just got it working, had to adjust one of the options in the cd reading plugin to the apparantely recommended but not set by default option.
It looks fairly good, but at the same time I'd probably have done a few things differently, that would give me an equal time but would look more entertaining. I'll comment on the boss fight after I actually fight him myself, but I think there's minor room for improvement still.
The only thing that I would really question is taking the ride armor over going without, you could probably kill the other ride armors fast enough so that they dont slow you down, and the warning comes up the moment you enter the room from above anyway.
-edit-
I just watched my own short run with said option enabled. It synced where it previously didn't. How Peculiar. I think I shall resume recording then.
Scratch what was previously here, I was basing this off of the previous input without it syncing properly.
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OgreSlayeR wrote:
Really? I just played it back and it synced fine.. I should of mentioned that I used the US version of the game. I hope it's simply that being the problem.
How odd. I'm able to watch FractalFusions zero runs without them desyncing, but this desyncs so early (I tested with no sound, midas audio and the other pete's audio one, all to the same effect) that you dont even actually pass the first area. You get into a pause menu and don't get out for the remaining 8000 or so frames.
For reference, I have a bin/cue of x4 (file size of the .bin I have is 592,217,136 bytes), but given that FF has an iso, I doubt that's the issue.
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OgreSlayeR wrote:
I just started my Test Run. It plays to the end of Magma Dragoon. Not sure if my strategy was the best against him. Hopefully it syncs properly.
I have some bad news, and some worse news. The bad news: it desyncs. The worse news: it desyncs before you even actually start playing the intro level.
That was a partial reason why I raged a bit and haven't actually done the first level yet. While trying to make it look nice and killing as much as possible while not slowing down at all, the lag and inconsistancies in the desyncing caused it to actually be off by enough for me to sustain damage and not kill what I'd kill if I had loaded from a savestate I'd made (which was made after the text skipping input had ended, but before the window had completely closed and the actual intro level starting.
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Hmm, I only just noticed this when going to record a movie in frame advance.
The lag counter doesn't update at the same point every time. frame advancing over a 50 frame period many times, I noticed the lag counter would increase at its own choice while playing back and recording. Sometimes it would have a frame of lag 10 frames in, sometimes 40 frames in, sometimes not at all, sometimes twice in that period etc.
I believe this is likely a possible reason as to why runs would be desyncing, as I surprisingly actually suffered a couple while recording without sound still.
Also, just out of curiosity, why does pcsx use so much cpu time, even when no game has been loaded/the emulator is in the menu? I just found it odd, that's all.
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LagDotCom wrote:
Well, I tried the same thing on Blaze & Blade with this emulator, and... strangely enough it desynced even earlier. I pressed Down on only one frame to select the next menu item. Once I hex edited in two more Downs, it got past that part. This does not seem robust. However, it still desynced at the same place as last time, on the first card flip.
Admittedly, I recorded the two movies I did in realtime, but in the same regard, the previous movies that I mentioned were also done in realtime and desynced quite quickly despite that point.
edit: Just testing it more in depth right now, an annoyance I've found is that while it does continuous frame advance, if you press a new button while doing so it wont continually advance until you release and repress one of the frame advance keys.
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I just tried recording two movies with the new version linked in the opening post. All I have to say is "NICE".
The last version of pcsx desynced on basically every game I tried after about 10-30 seconds worth of playtime. This version I played a good 10 minutes without a desync occurring.
I also tried recording a movie while having sound enabled so as to actually hear the music etc. while recording. I only recorded for a shorter period of time (closer to 5 minutes) but it still recorded and played the movie back without a desync.
I did however find one bug of sorts: when you're playing back a movie (not sure if this would apply to recording it too), if you press escape to go back to the main window, and then proceed to go back to emulator > run and continue to watch the movie, the movie will show input playing, but the input will have no effect on what's actually happening, and the character will do nothing. Or something like that.
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Cremator wrote:
I looked into that a while ago, and I can say that Plasma Shot is probably the upgrade you want. Stock Charge is uselful against Dragoon & probably Stingray if you kill it with the buster, but you'll lose time against Owl, Walrus' ice cubes and Beast's mid-boss. The Plasma Shot is also useful on numerous other occasions (although quite the lot of them can be circumvented with special weapons like charged Ground Hunter and Twin Slash).
Beasts mid boss can easily be taken down by a charged rising fire followed by point blank uncharged shots in an amount of time that would be negligible in comparison to the plasma. depending on how long that vulnerability window on owl is, damage could be taken first and precharged shots could be fired directly into him during that window, doing a fair amount of damage still. The ice cube issue is the only real one I can see plasma having the big advantage over stock with.
The plasma residue does laughable damage (along the lines of 1 or something) and still triggers the full invincibility, so you don't want that.
If you don't have the Plasma Shot while you're fighting Stingray, it probably does the most damage if you alternate between fully and half-charged shots while changing the distance between yourself & Stingray to get that small bit of extra charging time for the full shot, unless the full shot's power is much greater than the half-charged's power.
A half charge does 1.5 damage in comparison to uncharged at 1, a stock shot at 2.5, a non upgraded shot at 4, and a plasma at (an assumption of) 5 or greater.
The only way to really find out which will be better in the long run will be to do a run using both, though if the stock shot does turn out faster in a tas, it'd still likely turn out to be slower in a speedrun due to reaction time and windows of availability.
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OgreSlayeR wrote:
I was thinking of doing 100% with X. I'm wondering what the best route is though? Should I copy the route of the 100% on SDA? I would think Storm Owl first would be best if you could reach the Arm Capsule without the Web Spider weapon. I don't think there is a way though.
Well that covers the any%/100% categories then :P In regards to the arm capsule, unless there's a way to glitch up there, I don't believe you can as you can't wall jump off of the spikes.
I plan on doing an any% on Rockman X4 when either pcsx is more stable recording wise, or a rerecording version of pSX gets released.
Personally, I'm going for the stock shot storing upgrade over the plasma upgrade. I've found almost every instance that the plasma is useful in outside of boss fights can be easily substituted with another weapon (in particular either 4 consecutive stock shots+charged rising fire or charged rising fire+normal shots).
I'm not too sure how much damage the plasma actually does to a boss or enemies, but I believe each stored shot does 2.5 damage, but doesn't pierce certain enemies/objects. The main object that this would be troublesome for is the ice in frost walrus' level, being that the normal charged shot and the plasma shot pierce them, but the stock shot doesn't. I don't however see this being too much of an issue, but time will tell, as there's a lot of ice to push through.
I suggest fighting Stingray before getting the Plasma Shot. because his stun from Frost Tower is so long, it might be beneficial to fight him without it, using full charge shots on him until the last hit, where Frost Tower would be okay. i say full charges because his stun time is the same for full charges and half charges. i say before Plasma Shot because the lingering blast might mess up the charge shot strategy.
If the plasma shot does 5/hit, and you're not able to fully charge one by the next opening (and there is a plasma orb there still), that orb will still give you a slight damage boost, putting your overall kill ability above the stock shot depending on how short his window of invincibility is.
There's a 3 ball limit on screen, so if he fires 3 ground hunters first then you'd be free from a ball staying on him, but it'd probably take longer for him to do that than for you to get in another hit.
Stage wise, I'd probably mirror what's been said. dragoon > spider > owl > walrus, but after this the rest are personal choice really. I'd probably go with stingray > beast > dragoon > mushroom > peacock so as to get maximum use out of the nova strike in a 100%.
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MattyXB wrote:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night- 100% Items (own every Item at least one time at the end)
- 100% Enemie Items Drops (all the Rare ones, that the list by the Shop Owner is complete)
I dont think either of these 100% tasks would be possible on an initial run, as I believe you can't actually get the ring of varda unless you start playing a new file while having a clear save on your memory card.
It would also require grinding the sword familiar to level 50? to make it an equippable weapon.
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Out of interest I tried out playing as X in Rockman X4 (as opposed to Megaman X4, as X sounds like a sissy little girl in the US version, while he doesn't in the JP version).
A few things I noticed were as such:
1) X can only fire his buster once every 6 frames after the initial shot, regardless of being right next to an enemy or not.
2) You can't jump on vertical spikes while invulnerable to damage (this ruins the chance of doing storm owl first for a plasma/4 shot upgrade).
3) A level 1 charged shot seems to be equivilant to 1.5 normal shots, while a level 2 charged shot is seemingly equivilant to 4. the level 1 shot however takes far longer to charge than it does to fire multiple normal shots, but it does of course have its uses.
I had a similar issue to FractalFusion when I tried recording a run initially (as Zero), with it desyncing, but I'll try again later.
On the note of Zero, something to consider if a new movie format is released and you had to redo the movie would be using the black Zero code, purely for a different visual appearance.
Otherwise, some really nice work there Fractal :)
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arkiandruski wrote:
Azure Dreams
While I'd like to say "this would make a great tas" it would be quite the opposite.
Given that the game has randomly generated floors, you could within reason have each floor generate an exit that's ridiculously close to your starting point, and finish the game in about 10 minutes.
There'd be basically no action in the run, and it would thusly be somewhat boring to watch.
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pirate_sephiroth wrote:
hey, mz... why do you insist on using 1-9 to save and F1-F9 to load? <...> Change them to the snes9x standards... F-key load, shift+F-key saves... press ] for frame advance... shift+8 for toggle read-only.
The snes9x standards are only acceptable because you can change the damn things. I always change the save state keys to 1-0 anyway, as I hate the shift+f key input due to requiring more keys than necessary and causing pain on my finger after a while of repeated use.
If plausible, I'd say make all relevant and useful keys like save states, frame advance, etc. be re-mappable so that each person can adjust things to their own preferences. That way everybody wins.
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Personally, I'd rather see these (x4/5/6) done on the jp versions, if only because of the slightly different names, and not so sissy sounding VA's.
There isn't exactly much of a story for these games anyway (something happened! In the end, sigma was behind it. Again.), so I don't see it as being that bad of an alternative.
On the topic of the actual run, the third one is certainly a massive improvement over the first, but as mentioned, there still looked to be minor room for improvement in it. Keep it up though :)
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This was definitely a lot better than the previous movie.
I just finished watching both of them, and the first one had me holding tab from after the first fight. This one however it didn't get touched in.
Personally, the two things that could make this slightly better would be speeding through the credits and hitting everything, and the fighting and utterly humiliating the Ness cpu.
Yes vote on this, as it's certainly the best of the SSB runs that have been submitted thus far.
Edit - Forgot to mention the other big point that would've been nice to see: in the Giant DK fight, you should've tried to manipulate the small DK into KO'ing him with the punch, as opposed to KO'ing him yourself. DK had that punch stored for a large portion of the fight and didn't do anything with it.
