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I, personally, am not a fan of any runs that uses cheats. I took it that it wasn't allowed for TASes, but maybe I'm the only one that thinks that. Because of that, I'm not going to vote.
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Well done! There's a part of me that prefers these kinds of "minimal glitches" runs over ones full of glitches. It shows off more of the game. Yes vote
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Finally decided to upgrade to Bizhawk 2.9.1, and noticed the different video plugins. GLideN64 is the one with the better performance, but Angrylion is more accurate. That does lead me to ask: Which one is more preferred to use when making tool-assisted speedruns? Does it depend on the game, does one experience less desyncs than the other? Just trying to get a good idea on the two.
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I switched over to x264vfw, and formatted in the way exactly as the link said including setting the ratefactor to 15, and made a separate encode with it. Viewing it in VLC, the resolution was still blurry, but I rubbed that off thinking VirtualDub will fix that. After following the steps for VirtualDub and adding the filter and compression as the link said, I tried saving it as an AVI file, and this is what I get:
VirtualDub Error: Unable to initialize video compression. Check that the video codec is compatible with the output video frame size and that the settings are correct, or try a different one.
I cannot understand why this is much more difficult than Bizhawk. What am I missing?
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I chose uncompressed (RGB). I know the instructions said to choose x264vfw, but I didn't see that option in there. Unless I have to choose Lagarith because that's what I used for encoding?
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I just tried it, and although it uploaded correctly, it takes up a butt-ton of space. Like over 200 GB of space. I don't think that's worth it. I just won't worry about it.
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I did. I'm a tad confused on where to put the 720 pixels. I assume it's the section where it says Absolute (pixels), but do I leave Absolute checked as opposed to Relative? Also, pretty sure the height section is the one on the right, right?
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I just uploaded it to YouTube, and the different colors aspect was unaffected. However, the video is still in the lower quality as it was before. Not sure how else to approach this, or if I just have to live with the lower quality.
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Sorry. I meant to say VLC. That is, VLC Media Player. But I did check it in VirtualDub, and it looks great as far as I'm concerned. Not sure if this affects anything if I upload it to YouTube
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I decided to go with Lagarith and made a sample encode of The Legend of Zelda. When I replay it through VMC, the colors are off. And I did enable the following things:
Check Enable Null Frames
Check Use Multithreading
Select Mode: RGB (Default)
Do you know if any of this is the reason why the colors would be off?
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Decided to make personal NES TASes and uploading them on YouTube as backup. When playing them on YouTube, the video quality is pretty blurry. I wasn't able to find instructions to make them in good quality, maybe similar to HD? Are there simple instructions to encode FCEUX movies into high quality?
I had actually wanted to do an any% and even offered to do it a long time ago when we hadn’t heard anything from Kirkq. But I was stopped, being told that he was still working on it. That was 6 years ago. Not sure if it still holds 😂
Also, that was an impressive run you did there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you jumped over the barrier, did that give you a slight boost? If so, that was a nice touch.
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I decided to make some personal TASes of my own (because that's what I do) and wanted to encode it into an AVI file. When I do so and end it, I took a look at the file and found my entire AVI file had been separated into separate smaller files. Each file contains a portion of the movie that is roughly about 3-4 minutes. I don't think I made an error when setting up the AVI recording, but would there be any reason why this is happening? I'm stumped.
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Thanks for all the comments guys! It makes me happy knowing that many of you enjoy watching this run. To address some of the questions:
I popped off a little when you did the clip off of the generator thing to grab the safety vest in Magma Dam; I think real time runners had only discovered that one 2 years ago so I wasn't expecting to see it. How long ago was Magma Dam TASed? Don't mean to imply you like hid the trick or anything, mind, the only reason it wasn't known real time is because US 100% had gotten nearly 0 attention until just before I came across that clip. It's a little obvious even, so I'm just curious to know how long you had known about it
This one wasn't discovered by me. Over a decade ago when some of us were passionate about this, this trick was brought to my attention by the group I was working with in the Bomberman Hero thread. There's a couple of ways to go about that, including self-destructing before hitting the magma. But I was happy knowing I just had to make a precise jump to get over the dam.
EDIT: I’m sorry, I completely misread your comment there! That trick was inspired by your speedrun actually. Your run was where I first discovered it.
Death Garden was satisfying to watch, you made the cycles like perfectly. Did that just end up being the case with the fastest movement, or did you prevent having to watch Bomberman wait by discreetly moving a little bit slow at some parts?
Thankfully this was a result of just moving fast. In a lot of these levels, moving slow was a means of waiting for certain platforms or lifts to come by, but I got lucky with Death Garden.
Hard Coaster in general is such a snoozefest, and the long throw powerup makes dealing with the enemies even worse at the end. There's not even much you can do to make the downtime here entertaining. Like you can run around the platform or like move the camera around and that's it. I'm sorry you had to TAS that.
Me too. I didn't think I was going to find a level I dreaded TASing more than the Bomber Marine levels, but that one certainly took the cake.
I spent a lot of time routing Dark Maze for my runs, maybe more than any other stage, and seeing your TAS come up with more or less the same route was super validating. There's a lot of interesting routing decisions to make swapping between the normal and salt bombs. I really love the bomb kick to hit the box in this stage
I remember spending a lot of time trying to plot out my route with this. Definitely one of the hardest to do. The idea to kick the bomb to the box came from real time speedruns (including yours) where they would do the same. With the slugs appearing all over the level and other enemies (and boxes) spread all over, there was no easy way to do this without having to backtrack.
In your notes for Mad Coaster you mention the slugs regenerate when they die right as you leave their range. Do you happen to know how far this range is? And do other enemies share the same range? There have been a couple real time runs of 100% where the bomb rat in Warp Room respawns and we weren't sure how to replicate it well. There's also the tree beneath the Adok Bomb in Great Rock that you can duplicate too, though that's done by dropping the killing blow bomb from all the way above on those small floating platforms and waiting a second before dropping down, but that one doesn't seem to be timing based
I never did look into how far the range is because I didn't think it would be useful in any given situation (I could be wrong though). The Great Rock strat I know has been used, but were moving so fast when TASing that I would end up wasting time waiting for the bombs to drop. I can see it's useful for realtime speedruns though.
Eye Snake seemed tough, were you manipulating the movement of the snakes at all or are they actually just random? Never been able to tell
The snakes actually follow you throughout the level. They do however move in a weird way where they shoot up vertically, shoot towards you, and then after a little bit go down, and repeat. As I said before, I wanted to defeat them as I progressed throughout the level, but they don't move fast enough that by the time I'm out of their range, their health returns. A little frustrating, but it can't be helped.
The wait in the Cronus refight was super unfortunate, but as I understand it the RNG value only advances on certain events and isn't tied to any global timer or anything, and I don't think your actions as Bomberman can ever affect it directly. Really, really unfortunate that you got stuck with Cronus not playing nice
I am still baffled by how to manipulate that one. No matter where I move, what my actions are, or even when I entered the level, I was not able to manipulate it where it would rise up earlier. Might be worth looking into. If this were the Japanese version, you can easily defeat Cronus before it even goes back into the lava. Kirkq made a video about that some time ago.
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I figured out what happened. I uploaded a backup of the movie from my One Drive instead of my actual PC. This was my mistake. I'm thinking the right move to do is to cancel this submission, make another one, and upload the right movie. What do you think?
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The movie file can be downloaded, extracted (it's just a zip), and manually examined to verify the site is looking at it correctly.
Doing so will show that the movie file does in fact have a frame count of 44712, and the re-record count in the header is in fact 24279. 44712 frames at 60 FPS is 12:25.20. The site is not parsing the movie it has wrong.
So, it would be a fact that this movie seems to be wrong. Why it's wrong could be a few possible reasons:
1. The server mangled the movie file, somehow (this would be seriously concerning, but this is frankly extremely unlikely).
2. You uploaded the wrong movie and the correct movie is elsewhere on your PC and you just did a mistake when re-checking to see if the movie submitted was the correct movie.
3. You uploaded the correct movie. The correct movie is wrong, and you don't have the correct movie on your PC.
For 3... well assuming you didn't do a mistake then that seems to be the most likely possibility. By "the correct movie is wrong" I mean while it is the movie you have on your PC and what you intended to upload, it's not complete, due to some event making you lose your progress (granted, since you have an encode, this is also just unlikely). I would hope then that you just made a mistake in re-checking that movie :|
I verified that too, and see that you're right, it is the 12 minute one. I might have read the instructions wrong and sent my movie into a zipped folder instead of just uploading it "raw". I still definitely have the entire movie on my PC, but I probably messed up in not uploading that on its own. I wish I can go back and send in the right one, but the interesting thing is I never saved a version where it was only 12 minutes.
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Never mind. I just confirmed the movie I uploaded to the submission is correct. The information that was gathered from it shows as incorrect for some reason. The TAS is almost an hour and a half long, and definitely has more re-records to it. Not sure why it's showing differently.
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Guess it's been a long time since I submitted something. Somehow the wrong movie was uploaded, even though I was sure it was the right one. I'm trying to edit the submission, but I'm not able to find a way on how.
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Just want to give a small update that after years of putting it off, I have started over on this run and am fully intent on finishing it hopefully sooner rather than later. I have finished World 2 with great progress using Bizhawk 2.8. Hopefully you all won't have to wait too long to watch the finished results.
I just did. It just seems to be like Bizhawk. When I tried to load the game, it either wouldn't, or asks me which system it runs on, which arcade is not among the list.
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I tried MAME before I settled on FBA, and although I downloaded the alpha version, for some reason, I couldn't find the actual application anywhere. So I tried the beta version, and Vs. Castlevania was running perfectly fine. I opted out of it though because it was not only hard to figure out how to record a movie in the first place, but whenever I changed the buttons for the hotkeys, everytime I reopened MAME, it would reset to its original settings.
In other words, I'm pretty sure that my game isn't the problem. I'm fairly certain that you use a zip folder to load the game.
