Playing jokes on the non-silly european :P
Fabian: You could try a BLT, although that might be another of those silly american things. I wouldn't know since my knowledge of europe doesn't go much past it being 15X bigger than Texas. That's a lot of Texas.
Some people object to left+right because it's not possible without damaging the controller IRL while the rest could be done if you had godlike reflexes.
What if you alternate left and right all in ONE frame? Would that still count as left+right? If so, then someone w/godlike reflexes should be able to do it.
I dont think its faster to do the super slide in Dampes grave because of the loading screen. If the record time is 36 seconds, thats pretty fast. The game time on this one is 48 seconds and actual time is like ~35 seconds I believe. I CANNOT GET THE DAMN BOOST! SOOO F'n CLOSE!
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=E0015EA365C2CB3D
I've been trying from the older save-state from a while back, and I've been getting close too, although I haven't been using frame advance.
I dunno what else to try, maybe a different style of jumping? Backflipping, side hopping?
[quote="thegreginator"For your character, I understand that you want to leave your signature, but speed should be a first priority. Your name comes up quite often in this game, and I think a significant amount of time would be made up if you named yourself "-" or even "P." For your rival, I know it costs more time to go to "other" and type something in, but this is easily made up in the many battles with your rival. Your rival's name appears many times in the game (every time he switches pokemon during a battle), and by saving 3 letters from having to be typed out you could save a lot of time.
[/quote]
This issue has been discussed a lot. The main consensus was that if a new submission beat's primo's just because they used a shorter name, it most likely won't be published.
If someone wants to squeeze every single frame out of a new submission that is faster for other reasons than the name shortening trick, it's probably in their best interest to shorten then name.
This new run was fast enough that changing then name would not have created a significant speed increase compared to the older run, although I imagine that if a new run is submitted, you probably need all the help you can get to beat this time :)
But you probably already knew that :)
Saturn, SDW and SDW - The Legend Continues are the same game.
Actually, I think SDW was an earlier version of SDW:TLC.
I think we often refer to SDW:TLC as SDW because we are lazy, and we don't care about the older game.
Seconded. The last 10 stars of the run were tool-assist worthy, if not better ;)
My favorites, in no particular order, include
1)Majora's Mask 100% (I downloaded it because I wanted to see the route, and I was left dumbfounded). It helped that there was a torrent up, and it was segmented.
2) Super Mario World; How can I not like a run of the game that got me into gaming, plus it's Mario
3) Mario 64 70 star run (nuff said)
4) Donkey Kong Country 2. This is the second speedrun I downloaded. Despite that one undeserved death, it is still perfect in my mind.
5) Zelda sub 5, which will soon be sub 4, or sub 3
6) Zelda, Link to the Past. Impressive run of one of the best games of all time
7) Mario Bros 2, because everyone likes Wart, and I like the almost flawless run
8) Snapdragon's DKC1 run :).
I probably missed other deserving runs.
Edit, this came to my attention:
Deviance?
Still at National Chess competitions?
A star! A moon! A green star! A green moon! Chuck Norris!
I don't care what people say, this is one of my all time favorite movies! It's entertaining all the way through (it maybe SLIGHTLY drags in Croctopus Chase, but you can't prevent that). I loved the "acting" when you had idle time.
Once again, you made me fall off my chair while battling King Krool (and yes, the music is awesome, to say the least!).
You made a mockery out of the game, and I loved it!
Can't wait for your future runs Arne! :)
But I've ran into a problem at the moment; the bot saves a list of 'actions' its tried to a file so I can play it back later (and make a snes9x movie file), but I find it desynchs (what a suprise)... I think this may be being caused by the code in snes9x that saves or loads savestates advances the game state a few frames each time it's called... but that seems very strange.
Does it desynch immediately, or is it successful until a point?
If nothing goes right, there might be a bug in your progam (like the duration between button presses is incorrect). If it works sometimes, then it's probably SNES9x's fault, or a hard to find bug in your program :(.
Actually, it might be beneficial to play time trials with your bot. It would be a better indication if it works or not, as it is less random, and might be faster for your bot to provide the fastest route.
Just some suggestions...
I'm not starting over.
That technique after watching it, will be used a lot from here on. I just need to find the best way to execute it. It would have been hard for me to use it after the spirit temple because I only had bombchu's. Now with bombs I can do it whenever. But I need a shield correct? After the graveyard, ill do it.
BTW mwl, why do I get squished by the last door in Dampe's tomb?
Squished: You warp to the start of the race.
I haven't watched Fierce's vid yet, as my work comp lacks the proper codecs (and I'm not allowed to download them, as we do analysis on video stuff), but it seems like you use a bomb boost to help you accelerate faster.
Could this mean that for a new route, getting bombs ASAP is faster?
If you have beaten this game in an hour and a half then you might want to try to beat the record. It's 1:31:30(non tool).
Heh, I'm pretty sure he knew that. Andrewg has been running various Mario games for a while. He's also a more active member at SDA than in this forum (a lot of us visit both :)).
1:31 is very impressive, and I remember the run (was it by marsh, or dagorn, or someone else) was very clean.
No new breakthroughs for the non-tas crowd has come through, so breaking the run would be an impressive feat, regardless if half the game is flying.
Eh, it's up to you. If you want your record to last for a LONG time, though, then those 10-15 seconds will matter.
I don't see anyone attempted a run for at least another 6 months after this run is done. It's a very good run regardless if someone will eventually beat it.
mwl wrote:
I believe AKA has expressed interest in doing a TAS after his single-segment console run. He's said that he would be willing to do 1,000,000+ re-records if it means optimizing every frame.
*shrug*
Considering how this run is going, optimizing every area would take around 1M re-records, let alone every frame ;).
Keep it up. I'll watch the WIP as soon as I get home (at work atm).
Good luck, it sounds like a fun project (about 10,000,000 times harder than the sudoku solver I programmed the other day)
What a coincidence, I made a sudoku solver a while back (In January).
Catch is, it solves grids of n size n^4 is the size of your puzzle:
For example, n=3 would be the standard 81 cell grid, n=4 would solve a 256 cell grid...
See the details here:
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp06/projs/01/doc/index.html
Back on topic. I guess you could program getting stars and going around cpu's on the fly, but it sounds like it would drastically increase the computational time.
Well, isn't the bot mostly just figuring out the best way to steer?
Right, which prunes a great amount of recursive calls, as you have a set of coordinates (probably a position, velocity, and time vector too), and a predefined track. You aren't testing randomly, you are testing to fit a situation, which is much easier (it's like a hot/cold thing).
My question still stands. Let's say you sucessfully get the shortest path for a track. What happens if there is CPU intervention in your path?
Won't that cause major problems? And how are you going to manipulate luck so that you get mushrooms, feathers, or stars to take shortcuts?
Due to my limited time, I've only been able to watch the .m64 once. (Just fast-forwarding it from the beginning requires nearly a half-hour now.) So I could be mistaken in some of the "corrections" I wrote above. What do you think, AKA?
Due to your limited ability to ... use a savestate?
I believe the first thing he did was too see if the run would not desynch. I don't think you'd want any user interaction during the movie especially considering how many problems we've been having with save-states...
Possibly.
Tested and worked perfecto. Im left with 1/4 heart this will mean I will have 3 when becoming an Adult, correct?
I didnt include a savestate, Im very very sorry, I will next time.
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=316C310021F3E47F
Up to Dodongo's Cavern. Check out my Re-records :)
Looks good. I didn't play it from the beginning (yet), as I played it from a previous save state I had (I attached it in a previous post).
It didn't desynch from there.
Why don't you combine the two concepts and make big-game palindrome movies.
It could work for short games like Donkey Kong, and Monopoly. I'd say that would be pretty damn impressive to watch.
If the movie times don't match, (monopoly is really fast), you should aim to bankrupt as many computers as possible...
It would be fun to see a dancing carpenter dash make a fool of himself (narrowly escaping barrels) along with a computer player getting bankrupt on Baltic.
Actually, I think beating Donkey Kong itself as fast as possible with a palindrome style input would be pretty cool.
Is there no way to get past the owl dialogue in the Lost Woods? I CAN fast forward through his dialogue though. Once I get to Goron City or maybe Dodongo's Cavern, Ill post the WIP. I beat Barinade with 3 minutes left under an hour, I did the missed jumpslash and now know what you mean. It took me a while to figure out(I know, I'm retarded)
Nice progress :). You beat that dungeon in 2 days! Looking forward to seeing it!
Now a bit of bad news. It turns out it's faster to break the deku tree up into segments. You save-warp right when you get the slingshot. But your deku tree run was a bit rough (no offense), so this is just info for future runners :).
I credit Yautja and TSA for finding this out (and mayocheese for testing this on a console).
Yes, I said mayocheese ;).
What makes you think that having bombchus implies that you can skip owl dialogues? Most of them aren't triggered off of floors.
Did I say owl dialogues? I just said "dialogues". This could mean Navi dialogues too...
I don't understand:
No, J-J -> ZD -> LH -> Owl warp -> HC is what caused major problems.
Did you take the warp from ZD to LH in this route?
How should it cause problems if you take the warp? Do we really need around 12 hours (game time) to get into Hyrule Castle? Time doesn't flow in ZD and LH (well it does, but you are talking to the owl). That leaves us from a bit past Noon to midnight (or does the sun not set at midnight) from the HC to the princess courtyard.
Maybe the sun does set at 6pm? I dunno.
I'm just throwing around ideas.
1. Is the Well really faster than Bombchu Bowling?
Bombchu Bowling requires three goals, and each bombchu can be released before the previous wall has completely destructed. With any luck it can be done in under 1'30". Plus, the ground jump saves at least another 30". Having seen videos of the Cucco Dive on Youtube, I'd estimate that at least two minutes are needed for the diversion (begin with cornering the Cucco).
Don't forget, that in my route, going to the well is on the way to Kakiro, which is an added bonus. Well, you could say the same thing about Bombchu bowling (that it's on the way to ToT), except you are left with no bombchus before you bowl (in other words, bomb boosting owl dialogues are impossible due to limited capacity of bombchus). I know for certain that the owl in the river can be skipped (on a return trip).
mwl wrote:
2. How much time is wasted by going to Dodongo's the conventional way?
Going to Dodongo's through the village gate is much slower than going through the Lost Woods because of the 1-2' guard dialogue (none of which can be fast-forwarded) and the overviews of each area that you're forced to watch when you enter them for the first time through their main entrances.
Fine, then ammend my route to this:
Child Spirit - Death - Links House - Hyrule Field - bombchu boost past owl (if possible) -Lake Hylia - Fishing - Gold Scale - Bottle - Zora's Domain - Jabu Jabu - Warp to Lake Hylia (from the river outside ZD) - Hyrule Castle (through owl @ Lake Hylia) or if you have time, through the river, skipping the owl dialog - Zelda - Well (get bombchus), Death outside Well - Link's House - Lost Woods - Goron City, - Death Mountain - Dodongos - Great Fairy.
I can't see how that's faster, than my previous one. But if you say so :). I guess the keaton guard is a slowpoke. But just remember, I'm already in Kakiro Village to begin with...
We could skip the owl in the Lost Woods too if we use the ammended route (either way it's all good).
mwl wrote:
You'll want to do the seamwalk on DM Trail anyway, because climbing the skulltula wall takes quite some time.
Didnt' realize that. This only means more bombchus for us :). Using my route, we have 20 bombchus to use (well 19, since 1 bombchu is used to blow up another bombchu treasure chest). It would make a no bombs single segment speedrun feasible!!
I'm assuming we can kill KD w/bomb flowers since we have the silver gauntlets? Which doesn't make any sense to me, but oh well :) This is the whole reason why we did the spirit temple, right?
If not, don't we need to get Saria's song and the power bracelet? (that's not in the TAS route in your sig). If we do have to do this, having an extra bombchu for the forest meadow skip would be awesome! That's more than another minute saved! mwl wrote:
3. Can the Castle Courtyard be reached in time?
The biggest bet is the river and the trek across Hyrule Field. You don't know if the castle gates will be open when you make it there. Otherwise, Zora's River downstream (you can skip the owl) + the short trek to Hyrule Castle should be faster than backwalking all the way to Lake Hylia and to the owl.
You don't backwalk to Lake Hylia! ROFL, you take the warp from ZD to Lake Hylia!! Then take the owl to Hyrule Castle. Or am I missing something? This faster than the river route (maybe if we can't skip the river owl), and time doesn't advance at all (well it does for a few seconds). And since it will be Noon, when you exit Jabu Jabu, it will still be around Noon (my estimate is 12:30pm) when you get to Hyrule Castle because you didn't backwalk.
Even if you don't go to the well, this should still be used (unless taking the river is possible, faster, and we have enough bombchus).
The only flaw that might occur is that the owl never appears. I hope that doesn't happen :(.
All in all,
Big advantages (independent of going to the well): We could get the gold scale/bottle, and then directly go to ZD/Jabu Jabu. Then go to Hyrule Castle via Lake Hylia warp/owl. We save at least 1 traversal of Hyrule field. It SHOULD be done regardless if you go to the well or not, unless you want to take the risky Zora River to Hyrule Field to Hyrule Castle route, which caused us MAJOR problems a few weeks ago.
Big advantages (if you go to the well): You have more places to skip dialogues due to a greater capacity of bombchus.
Disadvantages: We don't know if the owl appears. We don't know if it's really faster, although on paper it looks faster. I'm a dumbass, and missing something obvious.
Irrespective of going to the well or not, I feel that we are going across Hyrule too many times.... And my route saves us 1 trip.
The only major problem that we might face (if my route is 100% correct and that's a big IF) is dying because of lack of health. So we might want to pick up a heart or 2 along the way.
just an update, I've wired up a stub of the bot to snes9x.
The stub successfully creates input, reads Mario Kart's variables, and saves/loads game states to/from arrays.
Now I'm ready to start working out the quadralaterals and the 'meat' of the bot.
Just working out the shortest path for each level won't do much especially if there is CPU interaction.
It would work for time-trials, though :). You could eliminate most of the computations by "hardcoding" the track width, length coordinates. Instead of taking a million years, it would only take about 100 ;).
Or are you just going to be using the bot for short segments? Like bisqbot?
Actually, I'm quite interested to see some of the pseudocode you have. I probably won't understand any of it, but I'm mainly interested in how you managed to interact with SNES9x remotely? Did you call some DLLs? Viewing fmod.dll just gave me a bunch of sound/music functions...
I'm a dumbass. I forgot about the great-fairy...
So we do go through the lost woods to get to Dodongos! That's good.
I'm still wondering if it's faster to get another 10 bombs from the well can completely skip bombchu bowling since:
1. Saves us a trip across Hyrule Field
2. Bombchu Bowling takes a while too!
3. Bombchu boost to skip owl dialogs
4. No seamwalk/glitching to get to GF
So, here's how it could go:
Starting from Child Spirit:
Child Spirit - Death - Links House - Hyrule Field - bombchu boost past owl (if possible) -Lake Hylia - Fishing - Gold Scale - Bottle - Zora's Domain - Jabu Jabu - Warp to Lake Hylia (from the river outside ZD) - Hyrule Castle (through owl @ Lake Hylia) or if you have time, through the river, skipping the owl dialog - Zelda - Well (get bombchus) - Death Mountain - Dodongos - Great Fairy.
We don't even go through the lost woods now.
It does take a while to get bombchus from bombchu bowling... And w/extra bombchus we don't have to glitch to GF, and we can potentially skip owl dialogs...
Any opinions or fallacies with this route?
What's the difference between desynchronous and asynchronous, then?
desynch: lack of synch - music and gameplay doesn't go together properly, for example. Such as when you take a hit, you hear the hit a few seconds later/earlier, when you're supposed to hear the hit right when you get hit.
asynch: absence of synch - you see the gameplay, but you don't hear the music even though it is SUPPOSED to be there. Such as when you take a hit, you don't even hear the hit sound.
Well, that's what I found by using Dictionary.com. I could be wrong though.
Hmm. I was getting that inkling too. However, it doesn't fit in with the computer science definition of "asynchronous" (or how I feel asynchronous is defined in terms of what CS uses).
My example is asynchronous I/O (more specifically interrupts). Interrupts function independently of the cpu clock, and can eliminate the need for polling I/O (thus keeping your CPU idle). This means that despite synchronization of CPU stages (instuction fetch, instruction decode, ALU, Memory read, Reg write) with a clock, the CPU can stall one of theses stages (assuming pipeling) if given an interrupt. I hppe I got that right, as my knowledge of computer architecture is failing, as I move toward more of an EE background (rather than CS).
This isn't an absense of synchronization, it's more of something that doesn't need synchronization to function. Interrupts are asynchronous, and fit more in your definition of "lack of sync" (desync(h))as nothing is "missing".
Well I guess it's a matter of semantics too. I've just never really heard the term "desynchronous" used before, because it would be correct to use "asynchronous"...
Edit: I think Blublu's definition is a lot clearer :).
upthorn wrote:
Desynchronous isn't a word.
asynchronize isn't a word.
Dictionary.com disagrees with the former, and I'm sure you can have asynchronized signals...
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This is way off topic. I didn't mean to threadcrap, so lets put some on topic discussion.
I just want to recap why we didn't go immediately to Zora's Domain, and Jabu Jabu after getting the bottle.
My understanding is that, as soon as you complete Jabu Jabu, it is noon. It is quite difficult to get to Hyrule Castle, seamwalk, and enter the castle after completing the castle. Is this the only reason?
Right now, we have to listen to the owl and traverse Hyrule Field once more (to go back to ZD through Lake Hylia (see my previous question a few posts back)). This a lot of time.
If we had gotten the bottle, gone to ZD (via warp), complete Jabu Jabu, and go back to Hyrule via the river (another owl conversation, maybe skippable), it would be quite tough to make it to Hyrule Castle before sundown? Is this quite difficult, if not impossible to do? The river doesn't seem that long... But then I'm probably underestimating the time it takes to get to the castle and do the seamwalk...
That situation seems ideal.
With the current after Jabu Jabu, what do we do?
We go to dodongo, right?
So, we kill ourselves (takes us Link's House), and then go to Goron City via lost woods? Does that require 1 too many bombchus? If not, then we proceed to Dodongos (exiting the City through the normal exit.
If we dont' have enough bombchus, we don't kill ourselves, and enter Dodongo's via Kakiro, and listen to that keaton crap...
So far, if we had 10 more bombcus (via the well) we could have gone to Zora's Fountain faster, and maybe potentially Dodongo's faster. Plus we could have left going to Hyrule Castle to some other time (since we don't go to Dodongo via Kakiro). Will getting 10 extra bombchus earlier save more time than waste?
Hell, can we skip going to Hyrule Castle completely? (if we go to ZD via Lake Hylia)
What's stopping us from getting the 3 spiritual stones w/out Zelda's letter or lullaby? Do we need her lullaby at all for the child segment?
I think this what we were talking about earlier, needing the lullaby for the shadow temple (adult segment). Is that the only location we need it? Pity... We could skip Zelda all together...
I'm just throwing out ideas, and experimenting with death and times (killing Link after exiting Dodongo's cavern at anytime will make Link start at Home at the same time, sadly...
I'm sleepy now (2am).
