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Good luck. You might want to test whether you'll need a new Caterpie manip or not. It may be faster to not touch the options menu until after the Sandshrew fight, or it might be faster to turn off animations before fighting Pidgeotto and then turn them back on. Thundershock is about 60 frames slower with animations on, and Gust is about 30 frames slower, so the animations for 2 Thundershocks and 2 Gusts should be marginally faster than entering the options menu twice, but that's based on rough math.
One other early game wrinkle: Catching Pidgey in the Bug Forest slows you down when you use the Pokemon Center in Cerulean. It would be better to catch a Pidgey on Route 6.
I know that your current Caterpie has DVs of FEEF. The max Attack and Special are necessary; if you end up manipulating a Caterpie with more HP that will probably be a good thing for Take Down but I'm not sure how it affects redbar throughout the whole run.
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Mega Drain will be a hilarious move to use. Confusion had some utility in the final battle because its animation is faster than Psybeam, but I'm pretty sure replacing it with Mega Drain (instead of tossing TM21) will be worthwhile.
Edit: If you use Mega Drain on Giovanni's Rhyhorn, against Sabrina you can:
KO Abra with Take Down
KO Kadabra with high-damage crit Mega Drain (at least 21 damage, out of a max of 22) followed by Take Down
KO Alakazam with two Take Downs.
This leaves Butterfree with exactly 1 HP.
I'm not sure when is the best time to use Mega Drain before the Viridian Rival Fight - potentially on Giovanni's Dugtrio or Rhyhorn, or on the Rival's Sandslash (which would require two hits).
Also, I looked into redoing the Metapod section with animations on. It's barely worth the menu time: 234 frames saved from the faster Tackle animation, but about 190 frames lost from going into the options menu twice. There's also no benefit to delaying Caterpie's evolution, even though its attack is slightly higher than Metapod's.
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I made a test run that avoids the 9-minute detour for Hyper Beam. It's 5 minutes and 7 seconds faster than this video. I used your input for the first half, and my part is very sloppy - this is just a route test. A good version would save at least a minute with tighter input and some route changes.
Because of the need to use Take Down in more battles, this run has two additional Pokemon Center visits. They could be avoided by teaching Butterfree Mega Drain after it learns Psybeam - this would let it heal partially before it needs to use Take Down, such as by using it on Giovanni's Rhyhorn before Sabrina. That way, the run could stay in Redbar longer. It also saves a single turn against Lorelei's Slowbro.
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That's completely fair. I don't have the time to create TASes these days so I can only suggest route changes.
I wonder if you could avoid needing Hyper Beam by using Psybeam to confuse tough enemies into hurting themselves. Starting with Psybeam and then manipulating confusion damage would be easier than trying to manipulate Gen 1 Misses for some fights. My River City Ransom TAS defeated the later bosses by making them attack themselves.
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I agree that it's similar to the Princess Peach category for SMB2, and I enjoyed it. It's an interesting challenge.
RangerSquid said he never wants to do the Sandshrew fight again. But I think it would have been faster to turn animations on for the Metapod section, because Tackle's animation is faster than its flash animation when battle scene is turned off.
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This is a major route change, I'm surprised you kept it as the same submission. I suppose it doesn't matter, though.
I love the Rattata route. Some of my favourite moments:
- Rattata's first attempt to evolve is skipped, to avoid trying to learn a move.
- The Hidden Power detour, and despite its length (including the teleport back to Violet) it still saves time.
- In between the free Lance heal and the death warp, you become much more aggressive with PP.
- When the Poké Flute music plays for several seconds before the Snorlax fight
Great run to watch, I love the improvement from cry length. Yes vote.
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I absolutely love the way Clefable plays a major role in the Red and Leafgreen TASes, and Clefairy even plays a small part in the latest improvement for Gold version. This is an awesome, clever route, and a clear Yes vote. The work done to optimize luck manipulation is also very impressive.
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I missed seeing this on the workbench, I'm impressed with this improvement and Totodile route! Manipulating Pokerus was discussed after FractalFusion's TAS but without knowledge of the RNG mechanics, seemed almost impossible. Are there any points where earlier Pokerus would help? I don't think so, since J seems to outspeed and one-shot almost every opponent.
I love that Totodile has FFFF DVs, as well.
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Brilliant improvement. Yes vote.
I tested some shoe routes in the past, but I hadn't considered the route you used with buying Boat Shoes and backtracking; that's a big improvement to Ryan's stats. I appreciate how buying shoes means relatively more time in boss fights and less time running from place to place. Your Thor fight was two seconds faster than mine, and you improved the Simon fight by over ten seconds. The no-shoe route might be able to beat those times if the fights can be repeated without Boat Shoes.
With luck manipulation, did you find any methods of manipulating enemy spawns other than changing the frame at which an area is loaded? Spawning no enemies in non-boss areas would be a huge lag reduction improvement.
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Oops. This was my first Wii TAS, I was unaware of this problem. Is there an easy way to resync it with a different ISO? Is this a Wii-only problem or do GameCube ISOs have a similar disc image issue?
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Actually playing a baseball game would involve manipulating the AI to hit 27 infield pop-ups, while the player would hit 24 infield pop-ups and one home run. I don't think it has any potential compared to Success Mode with the extremely lazy, extremely successful player character.
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When I was planning this run, I was hoping for something similar. I soon realized that unfortunately, the optimal strategy is to only hit a single almost every time. It's funny how little baseball gets played in this run, with A reaching the major leagues after only 21 at-bats. But the ratio of gameplay to menu time is low as a result.
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No problems on single or dual core. I used the latest dev build, exact same graphical glitches. The ROM's hash is correct. I tested Super Mario Bros DX and Link's Awakening in triple core mode and didn't see any graphics glitches.
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I'm getting some graphical glitches with Crystal version in the 3x version that don't appear when running 2 cores. This is three Crystal games, and this is Crystal, Yellow, and Silver. Changing console mode or CBG in GBA don't help. It appears to be only visual, with the underlying emulation working properly, but I haven't verified that. Any tips?
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Wow. You're right, that's exactly what I did to test this - I simply assigned the same keys to each game to play simultaneously. Now that I'm trying it with three asynchronous games, everything works as it should. Thank you!
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Ah, thank you. The link buttons are working in the console window, but the games are responding as if they aren't linked. Here's a savestate of three Pokemon Yellow games prepared to trade, which aren't successfully linking.
I appreciate that you're setting up this feature that may only be useful for one TAS. Hopefully I can get it working.
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Yes, that's the build I'm using. The log window doesn't display anything when I press a link button. Does it work for you? I'm not sure if the problem is only on my end.
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Pressing the button for one frame doesn't resolve the issue.
Which log do you mean exactly? The log window and the trace logger both don't display anything when I press the link buttons I've configured.
Is everyone else experiencing the same issue on this build, or is it just me?
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It's not working for me at the moment, I mapped the cable toggles to keyboard keys in the controller settings but the games are not linked to each other. With Display Input turned on, I see L, C, and R when I press the corresponding buttons, but the games each act like they aren't linked to each other.
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Is it possible to record a TAS of three Gameboy Color games, with no more than two games linked at any one time? Either directly with the multi-disk bundler, or by somehow using a lot of movies that start from savestates in order to switch connected games.
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This is the platonic ideal of an Arbitrary Code Execution run - a second of button mashing, a byte of RAM rewritten, and the game is over. It's a huge programming accomplishment, but it's not gameplay. I vote yes on this run and I think it belongs in Moons, hopefully with an accessible explanation of how this is possible. However, I don't think there's much benefit from producing more ACE videos for other NES games.
What if we had a rule that any% runs can't enter more than one input per frame? Would that break any runs other than ACE? We could still have a category using whatever controller port inputs break the game as quickly as possible, but whenever we use TAS tools to enter thousands of inputs per second its only use seems to be extreme abuse of ACE.
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The definition of a glitchless run in Pokémon Gen 1 is tricky. I'm going to compare the 1/256 miss chance, the Poké Doll Marowak skip, Trainer-Fly, and Brock Through Walls.
The 1/256 miss chance is a glitch or programming oversight, but it's commonly encountered during normal gameplay. For RTA runners, it would be impossible to avoid. For a TAS to use 1/256 misses seems perfectly appropriate, because it's taking an event that sometimes helps RTA runners and manipulates luck in order to encounter it as often as possible. So, it's allowed in glitchless RTA for obvious reasons and it has always been used in Pokémon TASes.
The Poké Doll Marowak skip is also a glitch or programming oversight. It was discovered in the early days of the original Pokémon games, and Nintendo made no effort to patch it in Yellow version. Anecdotally, some players used the Poké Doll on Marowak instead of the Silph Scope on their first playthrough of the game. The RTA community allows it because it has been known for so long, and because it makes narrative sense - it doesn't skip any of the cutscenes related to the Marowak battle, and it doesn't cause graphics distortions or strange teleportations.
Trainer-Fly and Brock Through Walls both involve the player clearly doing something that shouldn't be possible. Trainer-Fly causes two unrelated animations to play at the same time, followed by an out-of-place wild Pokémon appearing some time afterwards. Brock Through Walls can let the player walk through any wall and go anywhere on the map. Each of these glitches is unlikely to be discovered during normal gameplay.
So, why allow programming oversights like 1/256 Miss and Poké Doll Marowak Skip and call it a glitchless category? I think these oversights are distinguished from glitches because they only affect the game for a moment. Unlike glitches which fundamentally affect how the game is played, 1/256 Miss simply causes an attack to miss, and then the battle continues, and nothing appears out of the ordinary to a casual player. Poké Doll Marowak Skip requires the player to use a Poké Doll instead of a Silph Scope for a single encounter, and then the game proceeds normally. For these reasons, I think it's justified to publish this run in its own branch as a glitchless TAS of Pokémon Yellow.
Edit: I had written about the Instant Text glitch as well, but apparently I was not up to date on the RTA community's rules.