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I suspect a clockwise route will be faster just because it doesn't need to cover as much ground. If you start by travelling clockwise, those two long horizontal segments at the bottom of the screen can both be avoided. The only potential hangup would be worm timing, but I think the worm's path is long enough that they won't come out of the yellow teleporter until you're done with that section, and that's really the only place it could be a problem in the clockwise version.
It's unfortunate, but it doesn't really seem like the teleporters can be incorporated usefully into the route.
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slamo wrote:
Level 1, now with sound:
...
I thought the teleporters would be useful here, but I just couldn't see a good route involving them. I'm pretty happy with what I came up with, especially getting the last gem. Fuel was tight but didn't hinder the route.
The sound seems off... only a few things seem to be making noise, when a lot more things should be. Compare to this video:
Link to video
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Radiant wrote:
Mathematicians place (0,0) on the bottom left, computer programmers place it on the top left.
Mathematicians also put (0,0) on the top left when working with matrices, and I'm pretty sure this is where the computer programming convention came from.
And on the note of floating-point variables... once floating-point variables became really standard, a lot of game programmers starting using them when fixed-point would have been faster as well as more accurate. Just sloppy coding.
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I was pretty entertained by the run, but I think that's mostly because I'm not familiar with the game. I found the narration and dialogue a lot more entertaining than any of the actual gameplay, so I think I have to give this a "meh."
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slamo wrote:
Here's a quick WIP I made of the first level
So there are several spots that stand out to me as having potential for improvement. Sorry for the crappy MS Paint scribbleyness.
1: I think climbing the ladder would be faster than flying up, since climbing gets to full speed instantaneously.
2: I'm not sure about this one, but you spend a lot of time turning around so it might be faster to land briefly and reset your vertical velocity.
3: You spend a lot of time accelerating to the right. Can you instead walk on the platform for a frame or so to get back up to full speed?
4: Clipping the ceiling here wastes a ton of time reattaining your vertical velocity. Start your ascent later to avoid that.
There are probably more, but these are the ones that stood out to me.
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I thought the entire run was gorgeous and I was thoroughly entertained the entire way through. Yes vote all the way.
SmashManiac wrote:
There's one big thing that I don't understand however. During the world 4 puzzle, once all the puzzle pieces are assembled, you wait for about 2 seconds before inserting the pieces properly into place. Why is that? It looks really sloppy.
It's a gimmick. It's actually fairly tricky to place pieces that match directly next to each other like that without them "snapping together." I really enjoyed that puzzle.
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Scepheo wrote:
Even in regular gameplay, FPS changes have an effect on physics. Variations in FPS affect, amongst other things: falling damage, firing speed and NPC behavior.
Really? Ugh. That's one of my game programming pet peeves. :/
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kooz wrote:
If for instance you play at 60fps, and you reduced the timescale down to 0.1 while still technically getting 60fps (and I assume therefore still recording inputs at 60fps), then playback at normal speed would mean 600 inputs/sec.
I remember reading some notes from someone who was TASing Portal, and I got the impression that the source engine uses discrete physics ticks at a set rate. The Source console even has a way to use frame advance, and in that case a frame is a predetermined length.
Though again, this is just the impression I got from this guy. You'd probably need to do some digging to verify all this.
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What do you mean by saying the level RNG is pointless? Does the game only randomize the order in which you encounter the levels, or something like that?
Also, I thought the video was entertaining. Watching the levels which required pressing buttons in the correct order end nigh-instantly was funny, and the more complex levels were interesting as well, especially when comparing your time to the "qualify" time on the more timing-based levels.
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Warepire wrote:
When TASing I think an FPS of 60 would be accurate, since the game will read input 60 times per second.
The description also leads me to think that the "frame advance skips lag frames" option should definitely be disabled, at least during levels. It sounds like physics steps are run every 1/60th of a second regardless of the actual framerate, so in the case that the frame rate drops below 60 FPS input will continue affecting the gameplay whether or not the screen actually appears to change. (Note that he says "the game step happens 0-n times per rendered frame", implying that the lower limit is 0 rather than 1.)
Also his description of the use of GetAsyncKeyState() implies to me that it only checks if a key is "up" or "down" once a frame, so it won't register something like a key being released and pressed again in less than 1/60th of a second. As such there isn't a possibility of a technique coming up involving mashing a button faster than 30hz, and so we won't need to do something like set Hourglass to something higher than 60 FPS to allow for it.
Unfortunately this isn't all that helpful in terms of the features Hourglass will need in order to accommodate Dustforce, but it should help work out the necessary settings once we actually begin work on the run proper.
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Another potential challenge is the existence of enemies; the cost of travelling from one point to another will vary depending on what position the enemies currently occupy, and as such you can't rely on reducing it to a travelling salesman problem.
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elitist_jerk wrote:
We also might need to find a way to remap Hourglass's keybindings because having esc pause the console is very annoying.
Hourglass is really flexible in that respect. You can both remap the shortcuts that hourglass uses and also what keys map to what in game terms; e.g. you could make it so that pressing Q maps to ctrl and W maps to esc to avoid potential hotkey conflicts. It's also useful if your keyboard has a hard time registering certain combinations of keys.
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elitist_jerk wrote:
The HiB version doesn't use steam_api.dll, is that what you mean? As far as I know, if you sign in as a guest and the internet is disconnected, it won't try to connect to the leaderboards.
I'll edit my post in a sec with the new info and you guys can tell me what you think.
I just checked, and I've confirmed that the HiB version runs just fine with no internet connection. I was somewhat surprised to learn that it still saves game data locally when logged in as a guest... that could be somewhat annoying if it saves in a way that Hourglass doesn't manage to interrupt, since having doors already unlocked would cause desync. It may help to look into that as well, I'm going to try to find where save data is stored.
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elitist_jerk wrote:
Since I don't know the engine's specs, I'd have to ask Hitbox Team themselves for more concrete info.
I think I might, in fact. They might be flattered to see this game TAS'ed.
That sounds wonderful. It would be nice to also get the low-down from them regarding things like the frequency of input/physics processing, so we know what to set the Hourglass framerate to. And maybe even some hints that will point us in the right direction for ramwatch values? Like whether their positioning info uses floating point values or fixed-point/subpixel values.
Though of course, even if we get information about what isn't working, we'll still need somebody who can make the necessary fixes to Hourglass to get it actually working. I'd love to help, but Hourglass's inner workings are much lower-level than anything I've worked with.
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Since the necessary mouse input is so simple (click "Guest" once the game opens) would it be possible to work around it using some sort of mouse macro? How possible is it to make Hourglass run two programs at once, or run a program that itself runs another program?
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I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that Nikujin is a MMF game. If you're still having trouble, look at the settings I used working on that movie and see if they help you load states without trouble. In particular, I recall that some functions could be enabled when playing back the movie, but had to be disabled while working or it would encounter issues like you described. Sorry I'm being so vague, it has been a long time since I worked on it.
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Ilari wrote:
BrotherMojo wrote:
In particular, when I try to use the FreeDos floppy .img file, it defaults to 1 Side, 63 Sectors, and "Unsatisfiable" Tracks.
2 sides, 18 sectors (giving 80 tracks) most likely.
Yeah, that works. It's also what "Standard Geometry" sets the sides/sectors/tracks to, but I recall testing it and "Import" remaining grayed out. Perhaps I was doing things out of order earlier.
The mediafire link should still probably be updated or replaced, though.
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The emulator resource page at http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/JPC.html has instructions that don't seem to work, as well as a mediafire link to a deleted file. I'm trying to set up JPC-RR, but I can't make a DOS floppy image and the bad mediafire I mentioned was the preconstructed one. In particular, when I try to use the FreeDos floppy .img file, it defaults to 1 Side, 63 Sectors, and "Unsatisfiable" Tracks. If additional steps are needed to import the floppy image, that should be mentioned in the instructions rather than glossed over with a vague instruction to use the same tool as when creating the game HD image (which, by the way, worked fine as written, so I doubt I'm missing a step).
The resource page should probably be updated, and some help in the meantime would be appreciated.
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Oh hey! Great to hear from you, Namflow. I'm glad to get your support. If you look, you'll see that Blaster Master is also only my second TAS. Like you, I did it because I love the game even if I still think the key is a dumb upgrade. I hope that all TASers can love the games they work with, so that making the TAS is fun rather than a chore.
And I wouldn't say the Area 4 shortcut was that obvious... It took players more than 20 years to find it! Including that shortcut, there are a great many tricks in the run that I wouldn't have noticed if I was doing this on my own, so I'm glad I got the help and inspiration I did from the community... which of course includes you. So you're welcome, and thanks again!
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So I found a VVVVVV TAS on youtube, and I thought it seemed improvable... plus No Death Mode removes the most interesting puzzle in the entire game... so I thought I'd mess around and see how hard it would be to do a TAS of my own. Unfortunately though, I can't even figure out how to get Steam games to run in hourglass. Anyone have any insight?
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UraniumAnchor wrote:
Twisted Eye wrote:
Amusingly enough, after beating a boss and getting its prize, you are warped to the entrance of the dungeon you SHOULD have entered by. If I didn't already want to continue-warp, I would have been screwed--miles away from the tank, hahha.
Just so you know it's entirely possible to get back to the tank in a deathless route, I've done it a couple times live myself. I think it'll save about a minute off my realtime deathless run. Thanks for finding this. :)
On the note of tricks that could improve a realtime deathless run, I know it's pretty tricky to door glitch underwater but you could probably use a triple door glitch to reduce the time spent exiting Area 5:
Link to video
Obviously if you were actually setting up to do this, you'd leave the tank on the right side of the breakable blocks rather than the left, I just threw this together using my TAS as a base to demonstrate.
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Invariel wrote:
I apologize then. I honestly thought he was hittable as soon as he phased in completely.
Ah, no. The frog can only be hit in the mouth, and only when its mouth is open. That's actually the most important reason to use the pause trick on the Area 4 and 7 bosses. Certain other bosses have specific weak points as well, but theirs are at least always present, so using pause tricks against those bosses only saves time so far as it reduces lag. The frogs, however, would otherwise spend a significant amount of time impervious to damage, so pausing saves a huge amount of time.
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Invariel wrote:
why do you take all of that damage against the level 7 frog boss if you're going to just drown yourself once the fight is over? If memory serves, drowning in those levels is an instant kill, regardless of health.
For the sake of consistency, actually. It's completely meaningless, but I did it against the first frog so I somehow felt I should do it again.
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JXQ wrote:
Anyway, this is all obvious. But I was wondering if at 21:06, you could have jumped less in order to hit the water earlier, thus getting dive speed for a bit more distance?
I only press A for 1 frame there, and I press it at the earliest possible moment without hitting the low ceiling, so no, it's not possible to jump less. It is actually possible to get into the water earlier by simply not jumping, and doing so would allow me to save 1 frame in that room, but between mystery lag and a different state for frame counters I wasn't able to preserve that frame saving for long.
As I mention in the submission text, stuff like this is what makes me absolutely positive that more improvements are possible, but the sort of exhaustive testing it would require to take full advantage of the long-term effects of such tweaks is daunting to say the least.
1: I think climbing the ladder would be faster than flying up, since climbing gets to full speed instantaneously.
2: I'm not sure about this one, but you spend a lot of time turning around so it might be faster to land briefly and reset your vertical velocity.
3: You spend a lot of time accelerating to the right. Can you instead walk on the platform for a frame or so to get back up to full speed?
4: Clipping the ceiling here wastes a ton of time reattaining your vertical velocity. Start your ascent later to avoid that.
There are probably more, but these are the ones that stood out to me.