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Also, inside the tree, you had to wait for a door to open. The door is not bound to timer - it's random. Try different movements before the door appears, and you might have it opening faster.
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I only watched the first level, because that's what I can compare myself with.
You used a slightly different route than I did, but it might been better than my way.
However there were some flaws:
- You missed about half a second in the very beginning of the game, because you didn't use the Start key on autofire. The intro screen played longer than it needed to. (Note that when you do this, you have to verify that your recording is correct before you start playing the game - the beginning of the game is the most common moment of desync.)
- You collected too many gems. Not only was it slow to collect them (you explicitly distracted and jumped to get them), but it also took longer to count (to gain score) at the end of the level.
- At the long dropping down inside the tree, your controlling was bad. You got hurt, you stayed still. Perhaps you tried to avoid gems, but it looked bad.
But you handled the flying skull really fast. I'm impressed.
I hope you'll fix these problems :)
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It's difficult, but more importantly very long. I'd estimate that a minimal completion takes at least 40 minutes, more likely something like 1.5 hours.
Even more importantly, the physics in that game is somewhat clumsy and I don't recall seeing any glitches in the game. Meaning that a timeattack at this game wouldn't provide many surprises.
The game is not "impossible" - I have beated it on a real NES.
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Guess one of the downloaders is with a huge bandwidth and he eats you? :)
Can't really say without knowing the max-settings of all of the parties involved in that setup...
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Yes, you can copypaste any length of button sequences from FMV to another. The header doesn't need to be edited for that. It's only a matter of a number of consequent bytes transferred from a file to other.
But it might be difficult to find out the exact source / destination frame position.
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Shortly said, I refused the Track'n Field submission because its goal seemed to be "ego", not "entertainment".
Its only motivator was to "beat" Arc.
It did that - it found bigger score and better times in many tasks.
Arc aimed for that too, but he also tried to demonstrate what happens if you do even slight looking mistakes.
I like Arc's goal better.
I couldn't care less of the exact "best numbers". The mission "this isn't humanly possible" has already been reached, and I'm satisfied with that.
My site is not an ego collection. It's for entertaining movies. If a movie happens to improve records (especially someone else's) but is less interesting, I'll reject it. I did that once for Michael Fried's SMB3 movie, too.
Regarding Castlevania v8, the Akumajou Densetsu run wasn't an inspiring factor. I had just watched the faults of v7 movie long enough to decide how to improve it.
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I don't think the rerecord count is very much needed.
I don't actually like those subtitles - they are sometimes hard to read / distinguish from the text outputted by the game - i.e. white text on black background, exactly the same as on the screen anyway...
The dialog way was better, despite that it couldn't fit a very long movie name.
But the current technique (capturing the XPutImage calls) doesn't allow it.
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Is this really for Kirby?
I couldn't get it working on European or USA (PRG 1) version.
Anyway it didn't take me three tries to learn fluent controlling without reason :)
And I still learned things during the creation of the released version.
For example, I should have been more careful with autofire. From sound effects you can hear that I often start the "wheel" two or three times in row. It's slower than to start it once.
I should redo it sometime.
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Creating a movie-compatible emulator requires that you know exactly how the emulator emulates the system.
This means things like number of cycles per screen refresh, number of scanlines, vblanks etc.
I don't know all details but I know they're many and debated.
The actual movie format is insignificant.
Famtasia movie format looks like this:
144 bytes of header; data
Header has: FMV^Z at 0, flags (32 bits) at 4, rerecord count (32 bits) at 8,
emulator name (64 bytes) at 16, movie name (64 bytes) at 80.
Data is: 1 byte per frame. Byte has 8 bits corresponding to the states of 8 buttons: R,L,U,D,B,A,SE,ST, starting from least significant bit.
No savestates, no screenshots, no end tags.
I don't know the flags format or how FDS commands are expressed.
FDS commands (if applicable) and second controller (if applicable) are probably interleaved somehow.
I've been using the C3-less patch now for a long time without problems.
I use DrawFrame=1, Occupation=1, AutoFrame=0, Benchmark=0, FullSpeed=0 and vary the ExecSpeed between 5..900 very successfully - no problems.
People at Mkakikomitai (Morimoto's BBS) are apparently complaining of some problems with the patch I use, but I don't understand what problems they are having.
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I get that a lot on slow machines (P233), but almost never on fast machines (Athlon).
Sometimes Famtasia saves a quicksave that you can not load without getting an error message. Unfortunately there is no workaround. You just have to load another save and unpause.
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Surprising creative solutions
Awesome skill and precision
Game famousness
These are some factors.
Speed is good, because it feeds the skill and precision and it should prevent the game becoming boring.
I particularly like movies that make me think "no way, no one could play like that" and "wow, how did he invent that".
Game famousness helps people understanding the game better (and thus appreciating the play better), and famous games are also often better than unknown games. They might have good control (allows more impressive maneuvers) and complex overall design (prevents the game becoming boring and repeative after the first level).
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So far in my Rockman movie progress I've made 87 backups. That's about 12 per result minute :)
I stop the recording, make a backup copy, then view the recording (to check it's ok), and resume recording.
Sometimes I branch, creating alternate choices and comparing them, and sometimes I undo from a backup because I've made a mistake that I can't undo otherwise.
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I don't actually know how different they are.
I know that timings are unique to each emulator, but does it matter so much or not, is a question to me...