Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
I actually did a little TAS playaround of this game for fun a few months ago and made it just past the mandalia plains fight. Brute force is very time consuming and since I was just playing around with it I would settle for things that were probably not optimal. Critical hit brute forcing actually was not very bad at all to do, but the stats part was the real killer since it takes so long to check that.
My idea for a route was kind of similar to the SDA run, but instead of trying to get Ramza to calculator while progressing the storyline, I wondered if it would be better to get easy encounters at Mandalia plains and speed through the leveling process. I have seen a random encounter with one monster in my playthroughs on the console before, but could not get one after several hundred frames of testing, so I settled for 2 monsters. Even with that, it is still a very fast method of leveling Ramza. It gets even faster when Ramza learns sleep. The combination of sleep and yell gives Ramza a ton of turns by himself assuming that everyone is asleep. That being said, it might be faster to progress the story line along while you get Ramza to calc instead of powerlevelling.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
From my experience with the RNG, a lot of things are not manipulatable. For instance, critical hits occur on particular frames, and there is no way I could figure out how to change that. You can change the stats of enemy characters (and ally characters if you have never encountered them before), but once again I could only do this by delaying frames before entering a battle, and seeing the result afterwards, which is pretty much infeasible for a TAS. Do you know another way of manipulating the RNG in this game?
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Just wanted to say that I have been closely watching your progress and have loved all of the tricks that you have found so far. Keep up the great work!
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Oops, didn't read that part, but thought that might be the case anyways... That could still be a useful fact, but it lost most of its usefulness. Also, Celine's Bell doesnt work on bosses. This doesn't really change the fact that going to Dondoran seems unnecessary. I guess the main reason you would side track there is for the heroes potion which cant be gotten off of a random encounter until much later in the game. If there is ever a battle after Solvering where you need to refill mp more than twice, which I assume is going to be the case, then picking up items is still necessary. Otherwise, you could have a mint leaf and dewdrop in stock at all times for boss battles, later on a heroes potion as well.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
I don't know why I didn't notice it before, but there is a big guide on GameFAQs that had an extensive list of item drops. From what I understand, there are a ton of monsters that drop dew drops on the way to conner forest, and a few that drop mint leaves later on in the game. Manipulating the drops seems like an easy task as well. An item drops or not depending on when the final blow in battle is dealt. I hate to say this, but in my mind that makes going to Dodoran castle a massive waste of time. Pros: Two spirits, a healing pot and a heroes drink. Cons: The fact that the heroes drink will not be any better than a mint leaf for a majority of the run and in my rough calculations a loss of well over 10,000 frames. To me that seems like such a large improvement this early on that you should start over (but i won't blame you if you don't).
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Oh sorry for the confusion. What I meant was I first tried sleeping in the inn, grabbing the wing, get the spirit in the sand and then use the wing. Then I realized that I would save a lot more time to save the wing for after your death warp and walk into the castle. Once you exit the castle use it then instead of spending about 1000 frames walking from the castle entrance to the town exit. From the little bit of testing I did you can't use the wings in any buildings, forests, or any other place like that including the room where the first boss is.
Edit: I found two more things that *might* be able to improve your run.
1. I am not sure if you tested it, but there is a way to attack twice if you cast a long range spell while being able to attack another enemy with your staff. The damage of the staff seems to nearly equal the damage of the spell. This might have been quicker on your walk to dondaran because it looks like you could end the battle in three attacks instead of four (1.cast fire on the first guy 2. get in close range to him and cast rock on the other 3. repeat for both kills) the time it takes to position brian might take longer though.
2. I was completely unaware that you could win items from battle in this game, but I got a honey bread from a test fight. I will try to figure out the extent of what can be dropped and how to trigger it, because if they can drop dew drops then that saves the time collecting them in the monastary.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
I found a way to improve your run by about 600-800 frames (didn't really try to optimize it to much). The way to do it is grab wings in the starting town and the second one. If you use the wing after you collect the spirit in the starting town, you can save like 500 frames or so. The second town only seems to save 100 or so. Not enough to start a run over for, but something to keep in mind for later towns.
Edit: I forgot that you have to backtrack to the castle, if you use the wing after getting the earth orb and exiting the castle, looks like you can save 1000 frames.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Wow I didn't realize someone else was contemplating doing a TAS of this game. I wish you would have told me 10 day ago, because I would have put up no resistance at all to you doing the run and not me ;p. The reason you find my actions to be unoptimized is probably because this is my first experience with a real speed run of any kind let alone a TAS!
The version choice was chosen from what seemed to be the consensus of the forum. The fact that it is in Japanese is irrelevant considering the last page's talk about subbing the text. So the only remaining question is about the difficulty. I do not believe that the time you gain from a few fights (i.e. the soldier fight, Octomammoth, and a few others) will shorten the game compared to the other changes that were made in the version, in fact I think it will make it longer. For instance, items are more limited in the original, and some bosses have been modified in the US version to make them easier. Not only that, the original abilities add entertainment value (for me at least).There is an FAQ somewhere with an extensive list of the changes that I will try to find.
The choice to not use save/reset was again made because of the input that I received from others. I am sure this will be a split issue in the run, and regardless of the fact that it actually saves time, some people might give it a meh vote just because it makes the run 'boring'. That being said it is your choice.
In terms of better optimization, the in game clock can be a little deceiving on how much time was saved. You pause a lot more than me in battle (to better optimize the run) and use the save/reset trick, all of this stops the in game clock. That being said, your mist dragon fight was at least 300 frames better than mine. So, if you are actually going to take the run up that would be more than fine with me. I would rather sit on the sideline and give my input and support.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Ya, as soon as beat Octoman I will put one up. Pause is my best friend in this run as far as I can tell.
Edit: I am somewhat satisfied with my progress, but there are a couple of things that might be able to be improved. Thoughts so far:
1. I don't think it is possible to kill the Mist Dragon much quicker than I did.
2. Battle with soldiers could maybe be improved but by very little.
3. Grabbing the ether in the pot in town *might* have unnecessary but it only cost my 20 frames.
4. Compared to Phil's GBA run I take a different approach with Octomon. Rather than have Tella recall virus 3 times I only do it twice. This is because it takes quite a deal more time for Tella to recall in this version. Also getting criticals with Cecil *seemed* like it required to much manipulation to be worth it. That is to say the crit damage was 160 versus the 120-140 regular. All that being said, it might be quicker to try it another way. I spent a good deal of time testing stuff here.
Enough of my rambling, please tell me what you think and where to improve.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/688324271/AtDamcyan.smv
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
On my way to Octoman, the Soldiers in desert town got killed in 1 hit by dark blade. Grabbed the ether in a pot in the town. Currently at 0:12, compared to 0:14 in the SDA run, of course they are also different versions of the game so maybe not the best comparison.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Personally, I would rather not do it, 1) because I find it boring as well 2) because that means another thing to worry about in the run. I do think abusing that trick would save 10+ minutes of real time in the end, but I will refrain from using it for a first run, because I am sure I will find other stuff to improve on IF I decide to do this game twice or more.
Edit: Mist Dragon goes down before it can go mist form, 5 crits and 1 Cain jump. Too bad it desynced halfway through battle... Time to fix (*Fixed now).
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Save and reset would definitely save time in the run. In my 'optimized' run to the mist dragon I had 4 random encounters in the cave. To run from a random encounter is about 335-350 frames, save and reset = about 600. After messing around very little, I was able to get 3 random encounters all the way to the desert town so that save like 300 frames i am guessing. I think I can get that down to two fights even. But if I use that trick that means I will be doing it a lot. Is that more boring than watching some one run from battle more? And is it feasible to reset the game a bunch in a run w/o desyncs?
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Nitrodon wrote:
Indeed, walking in the interior of Baron Castle does seem to affect the step counter (7E0686) just as if it was a place you could get into a battle. I haven't played this game on an emulator, so I don't have any saves to check any other locations.
EDIT: Deign gave me a savestate near the end of the game. It works anywhere with that tileset (I checked Baron, Damcyan, Fabul, Toroia, Eblan, Castle of Dwarves, Serpent Road, and Tower of Wishes). It doesn't apply to doorways, stairs, or red carpets, nor does it apply to the exterior (open air) parts of the castles.
Ya, I just found the step counter myself, but I didn't know why it worked. Thanks for the info. This could be somewhat helpful, but would only really be helpful if I could figure out how and when the game decides there should be a battle. I have been trying everything I can think of to reset or change the counter, and so far something else that does it is a save/reset, but that would only be useful if I was trying to get a rare battle because otherwise it takes too much time I think. Plus, it would be kind of boring watching me save and reset over and over again ;p
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Sorry for double posting, but this seems pretty important. I found a couple of very interesting things last night as I was doing a test run up to the mist dragon.
First, you can pause the game in order to get a critical with Kain's jump or Cecil's attack. This will be useful at the very least in this fight, because I can possibly prevent the dragon from going into mist form.
The other, and much more complex/confusing thing that I discovered is that there is at least one way to manipulate random encounters. Before you go to bed and enter the cut scene with Rosa, you can change the number of steps before your next random encounter, and the ones after that. How you do this is take a step. No amount of advancing frames seems to make a difference, but moving around changes the value. What memory address it is, if it is simple one address I don't know, but I do know that this trick doesn't work before other cut scenes (village of mist bombing, taking Rydia to the inn, sick Rosa cut scene). This made me wonder if you walked around in some strange path before you go to your bed, could you max out steps until the next random encounter for all random encounters in the game?? That would be cool.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
I wouldn't necessarily mind doing a sub of the run if people really wanted that. Since I don't really speak Japanese I would probably use the J2E translations for the sub. I do not really think that subbing the chat would be that helpful and would be where a lot more of the work would come in. Plus the fact that people wouldn't be able to read it anyways because it will be scrolling so fast in most places. But in a 3+ hour run, subbing the 50-60 fights would not be that bad I don't think. But I might be wrong.
In terms of what to use for the sub, I bet I could find something. I am an avid anime fan, so I could ask some friends what they use to sub the anime.
Plus the fan sub guys don't seem to check their email so...
Edit: just found a really nice list of memory addresses, so I might be able to start the run soon!
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
After watching the SDA run, which is incredible for a non-tas, and playing around some more with the game itself, I feel that the 3:00 mark is possible for a TAS. Possible ways to get there are 1.) minimize random encounters (which I have no clue how to do) 2.) much better manipulation in battle 3.) less leveling 4.) less shopping 5.) frame precision and other little things I noticed during the run.
This brings me to a question I have: Do you think it would be beneficial to disassemble the game to figure out some big question that I have? (ex: luck manipulation, random encounters, etc) And if so how would I go about doing that or trying to decipher the code. This is way beyond my league in terms of programming knowledge but to me seems important in this type of game.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
The hacked version that I think would be best to use would be the J2E version of the game, which is mentioned in Wikipedia. The translator's website seems to say that he is finished with the project because it has a *finished* by FFIV. I sent an email to the translator to verify this and ask what he thinks, and to double check that nothing else has been changed between versions. I hope that once I get a reply from him we can clarify all of the issues brought up by using this version.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
There is a 10th Anniversary Edition of FFIV which is apparently the original release translated into English (like what you talked about Highness), but I am not sure if anything else was changed about the game, even though they said that nothing else was changed. I would not know how to test this and I assume that I would have to either show that the game was preserved in the hacked version or have someone who actually knows how to do that show it :).
On another note, after messing around with FFIV's memory I was able to find some interesting values (like the counter for a monster's attack), but have been unable to find any value that deals with damage calculations. After using frame advance for about 100 frames it looks like the damage changes ever 5-20 frames or so, but I am not sure when the value changes. If anyone has had experience with this game's memory or any general tips searching through memory it would be appreciated, since I am new to this.
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
I have spent most of the day messing around with battle mechanics for the GBA version, but most of it has left me really frustrated. The problem is that there is no real way to ensure that you are having the best battle possible, because the damage is predetermined. The only way that I found to change this is to do something in a random encounter before entering the real battle. I feel this is the main reason why I would rather do a SNES run than a GBA run, because it will look cleaner and possibly be faster (even though you lose the move speed). It would be interesting to see the differences between the two runs, but I'll be sticking to the SNES.
All that is left to decide now is should I use the JP version or the US version. Since no one will be able to read the chat either way because it will be scrolling so fast, and because the Japaneses version is the 'hard' version, I am leaning toward it. What do you think?
Joined: 7/8/2007
Posts: 27
Location: North Carolina, USA
Still not sure if I am going to use the GBA version, but the double hit glitch would look cool in the instances where it would save time. The game does look a lot nicer on GBA. In terms of manipulation it seems impossible by using frame advance in game, but there is hope. Somewhere I read that you can manipulate by using quick save, which after testing is true. It takes a little longer to do a quick save then run away from a battle, but it will still save lots of time. After playing around with frame advance at different spots I could make the move counter count up or down from a certain value. So, for example in the mist dragon cave I think two quick saves would mean 0 random encounters. I still having not tried using it before battles, but I think it might have the same result. That would be much more time consuming to manipulate though, but I still need to do a lot of testing.
