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Okay, I've been busy for quite some time, but I'm now finally able to get started on a complete TAS of this game. I currently have a WIP containing the first two levels (Country Farms and Shamrock Isle):
Link to video
There are a few route changes to mention:
- Hunter's Jumping Tutorial is done instead of the Country Farms haystacks, due to a new trick found by Ongnissim where you can fall into the water after talking to Hunter for each jump, making the camera follow you instead of him. You still have to wait for him to do the jumps, but you don't then have to wait for the camera to move back to Spyro afterwards, which make it ~150 frames faster, and is therefore ~120 frames quicker than doing the haystacks.
- In Shamrock Isle the edge running trick can be used to get to the imp minigame door more efficiently. This leaves two fountains to get at the end of the level after returning the horseshoe (instead of on the old way to the imps). This new route is ~200 frames faster than the old one.
There are also a couple of small optimisations I could mention:
- When collecting each firefly you can travel some extra distance by gliding as you collect it (because usually you are forced to be stationary when the 'collecting' animation plays). This gliding trick is also used in certain other situations, such as when encountering the Rhynoc at the end of country farms or when freezing the last imp in the freeze tag minigames.
- On the route from Country Farms to Shamrock Isle (after quitting and reloading to warp to the game spawn point) I intentionally avoid collecting any gems, which shortens the next loading screen (because your gems are tallied up in a slow animation). In general the difference between some gems and a lot of gems is negligible, and not worth taking a detour over, but if you can get 0 gems without too big a detour then it is probably worth doing, because this skips the tallying animation entirely.
Next up are Temple of Dune and Tiki Tropics, neither of which I am convinced I have the optimal route for yet, so they will take a bit more experimentation.
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Urgh yeah, that second Globox level... I tried everything I could think of to skip it somehow. You have to round up 6 teensies to step on the switch to open the gate. You can open the gate just by stepping on the switch with Globox, but it closes again when you step off.
I thought I'd found a way to skip the level by repeatedly activating plum juice and slowly nudging an enemy to the middle area, then having plum juice run out just as Globox pressed the switch so that he was scared towards the opening gate... Unfortunately, despite it being just possible to reach the gate as it closes, it turns out that the gate actually remains solid unless you've pressed the switch with the teensies. Damn...
EgxHB wrote:
Also, I'm hoping that, now that this is done, we'll be getting back to S2:SoF.
Well I'm a bit busy IRL for the next while, but as soon as possible yeah, that's the plan!
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I have now finished the run, but I figured I should mention my last discoveries here. It turns out that the dialogue combine trick I did at the end of the 'Pit of Endless Fire' boss didn't just affect that dialogue, but it affects all dialogue for the rest of the game! Fortunately it makes all conversations quicker, which is cool (although you do skip most of the conversations). It also has a bizarre affect on the closing cutscene, where the text cannot display, and glitches up the background for the credits for some reason. Strange.
Cheers for your support everyone.
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CoolKirby wrote:
It looks even funnier when he's floating in the middle of the screen the whole time.
I completely agree! I'm so happy that it turned out to be the fastest way of doing it.
I've been making good progress, mainly because these levels have been so fun and satisfying to do. Here's a new WIP with the next 4 levels:
Link to video
And here are my ramblings:
In these levels when you're controlling Rayman and Globox together, the usual approach is to step on switches with Rayman to open a gate for Globox (using Button Swapping - i.e. swapping characters as you press the switch, to minimise camera movement). Then you walk Globox through the gate and swap back when they are as close together as possible (again to minimise camera movement) and hop along to the next switch with Rayman. All of Globox's other work is avoided, since Rayman can just jump over any obstacles. The only other issue is that occasionally I have to kill an enemy with Rayman to let Globox get through more quickly.
There's one new technique in the first level in the video, called gate despawning. (Technically you're not despawning it, you're just getting there before it loads). It may not be obvious, but at 0:45 in the encode I pass through a gate before it loads, which means that I don't have to jump the usual 8 times in order to get high enough to vault over it, and then waste more time falling down to the switch. This is only possible because I was passing through an area with many loadzones and a large number of objects - there is nowhere else in the run where it is useful.
You may notice that I also despawn a couple of the switches and they only appear when I am standing on them. This is just cosmetic :P
(Also, the enemy manipulation needed to get Globox past those three enemies uninterrupted when he walks up to the finish at 1:21 was so challenging and the result is, at least for me, so satisfying.)
In the menhir level I use water hopping at 2:54 to get to a switch while the powerup is active, since punch-hopping is impossible with the powerup active. I'm pleased it makes an appearance in the run, rather than just punch hopping everywhere.
Finally, the 'Pit of Endless Fire' boss fight. There's nothing particularly sneaky going on here, he really dies in just two punches.
At the end, unlike previous bosses, the dialogue trigger to end the level is on a timer rather than just by walking up to Globox. I use a neat trick where I drop onto the first dialogue trigger (which I avoided at the start of the level) on the same frame as the end dialogue trigger activates. This has the nice effect of choosing the characters who should be talking as though it was the second conversation, but picking the textboxes from the first. Since the conversations had different numbers of textboxes, it quickly runs out of textboxes to display and simply ends the conversation, far earlier than just going through the ending dialogue normally. Neat!
I'm so satisfied with these levels, they went so much more smoothly than I would have ever imagined.
There's not much left now. Globox is done with - we just have a couple of Rayman levels to blast through, and then the final boss. Eep!
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Anty-Lemon wrote:
I see there's a new post by arandomgameTASer from the forum index, but I see no thread in workbench which has had a post since 3 days ago
That post was in the DOS Jill of the Jungle Thread while it was in the workbench, but it has now been published (and so moved to the published movies subforum). I suppose ideally the forum would be able to recognise this, but it isn't technically wrong.
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You can do it with Spyro deaths, but you have to trigger it by first opening the menu as you get hit or fall in water, then closing the menu, and then timing the next button press correctly just before the screen fades black. (This is similar to how you activate that 'pixel vomiting' trick, just when you have another life so you won't game-over).
Since it takes opening and closing the menu, it almost certainly isn't worth it.
Yadra121 wrote:
Does the music retrigger after a death?
No, it stays disabled until you open the menu or exit the level.
And I agree with you about the music settings. Since entertainment is the primary goal I wouldn't want to have no music throughout the entire run even if it did reduce lag, but glitching it off temporarily is arguably even more entertaining.
I personally find the lack of music has a weird eerie vibe to it, especially with the birds chirping in the background!
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Yadra121 wrote:
I assume a Game Over warp would put you back into the prior overworld?
Yeah, unfortunately. One other thing you can do is manually save after killing the boss and then quit the game and reload, which puts you in the boss level with the boss dead and the exit gate already there, skipping all the dialogue, but unsurprisingly that takes longer than just listening to the dialogue normally.
I guess if you were doing a low% run... :P
I've discovered another small timesaver which I might as well post here:
Link to video
From the video description:
During the Dreamy Castle gauntlet-skip it's possible to cancel the Background Music. It remains silent until the next time you open the menu.
The way you do it is by pressing start to open the menu as you are gliding towards the end-zone. While the screen fades to black, Spyro hits the end-zone, which stops the menu opening and instead ends the challenge. However because the BGM was stopped by pressing start (since the game thought it would instead be playing the menu music), the game gets confused and never re-starts it.
This isn't just cosmetic. Because the screen is already fading out when you hit the end-zone (and it has to fade out to finish the challenge anyway), it saves ~20 frames over just gliding into the finish normally. So ~40 frames in total since you do the gauntlet twice.
The timing is precise but it could be attempted RTA - it's only a small timesaver, but there's no reason not to try and you'll know if you've managed it because the music will stop. Just don't press start too early because then you will actually open the menu before you reach the end-zone, which will just waste time.
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This is the tiniest and least urgent feature request ever, but could there be an on-screen message to say the sound has been muted/unmuted when using the toggle sound hotkey?
Is there maybe some way to customise which actions display messages that I'm not aware of?
Obviously a lua script can do this, but it seems like it would be simpler as an inbuilt feature.
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You can skip the boulder upgrade (and health and warp) by exiting the level when the dialogue starts at the end of the boss battle. This returns you to the overworld you were in before, but you don't have to do the boss the next time you travel through the gate. Could this be what you were thinking of?
This method is slower than doing it normally though, because you have to sit through 1 extra loading screen. I'll keep playing around, but I haven't yet found any other way of skipping the dialogue/upgrades.
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WIP 2&3:Link to video
(The new Rayman stuff begins at ~3:00)
Rivers of Murk is another level that is completely bypassed due to punch hopping. This is the first level where I have to explicitly avoid score (At the start I jump upwards more times than would be optimal before moving horizontally, to avoid collecting a lum), because if you have even one point when you finish the level then it adds 3 dialogue boxes to the end level text.
Begoniax was tricky. If you hit her rapidly then she jumps haphazardly all over the place, so finding the perfect pattern where she doesn't jump too far away after each hit took a lot of attempts. I'm very happy with the end result though, especially since I remember how awkward she is to fight in real-time.
At the start of the level, as always, I jump on the critical frame to avoid a dialogue trigger. That trigger is still there after defeating her, and it is bigger than the trigger to end the level (which is also next to Globox), so I have to land right next to Globox to end the level without activating the first dialogue.
The next three levels are the ones where you control both Rayman and Globox. The first one is actually the longest, because Globox has an unavoidable long path he has to follow, but the other two should be very broken.
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Cheers for the details Yadra. I'd actually watched your videos before, but I hadn't realised that the pause trick could be used for more than just that milk game (and Sheila levels). I'll definitely have to look into it!
Yadra121 wrote:
Another example in country farms:
When you enter the "fight" to get your fire breath back, you can nullify the first CS. It will be played once you defeat the magician and thus makes it impossible to get your fire breath back due to the fact the trigger for the 2nd CS has already been used to trigger the 1st one.
Ha, I'd actually found a way to achieve a similar thing: by gliding into the water as you kill the enemy (very tricky!) you can skip the 2nd cutscene, and when you get back to that part of the level the exit and firefly are both there (but even though you can get the firefly, you don't have fire breath, so again it would never be useful!)
Yadra121 wrote:
It is possible to skip the dialogue after boss fights
This sounds useful, but I can't seem to get it to work. At what point do you have to pause? For me, with Crush he just gets stuck waving his arms in the air and you have to restart the level, and for both Gulp and Ripto I can't skip the text at all.
I had actually worked out an alternate way of skipping all the dialogue after Gulp (since the extra health is not needed), by killing him while there's a rocket chasing you and you have zero health, and then dying from the rocket just as the cutscene starts. You respawn with the exit already there and you can just run into it. I'm pretty sure that's quicker than going through all the dialogue, but if you could just skip it by pausing as you suggest then that would probably be even faster.
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EgxHB wrote:
It just seems like a glitch that LOOKS game-breaking, but really isn't.
Ha, I agree, aren't those always the most annoying! I've done some more tests and I can actually only find one place this could be useful. It saves ~60 frames to get up to County Farms with this trick. I tried it in a lot of other places and none of them were worth it. The closest was getting up to Ripto's Volcano from Gypsy Road, which was a lot faster with this trick but it required you to collect one of the fireflies in the middle of Starry Plains earlier, and the time that takes made it end up with a net loss of ~50 frames.
Also yeah, I guess I'm a bit late to the party when it comes to glitches in this game. I've also never actually played AotR (or Season of Ice, for that matter), so if there are any other glitches in those games anyone can think of, I'd be interested to know. Even if they also end up not having much use!
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I was a little too young to fully appreciate this game when I played it. I certainly never got very far, although I do remember finding the elevators really amusing and would ride them up and down endlessly. I'm not sure what that says about my state of mind...
The horizontal movement and jumps are very finicky in this game, and the times where you manoeuvre between ledges while jumping, to minimise the number of times you have to land, look very neat.
Also, the blade was never meant to be used that smoothly :P
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Potentially useful glitch I found:
Link to video
Taken from the video description:
I don't know if this has been discovered before. It's a neat glitch where you can run around the edge of the map if you glide off the right side of the screen while holding the charge button. You have to be facing up-right to do it, and a lot of the time you'll just fall into the water, so it's probably too inconsistent to do live.
It seems to lift you to a really high height, because when you jump back onto the screen you are very high up, and if you run around to underneath the map then you can run over the top of everything for a bit without interacting with it, before eventually falling and landing on the actual map (shown here on Shamrock Isle).
Unfortunately, despite how cool it looks, I don't think there are actually that many uses for it in a speedrun. I might be able to get up to Country Farms or Ripto's Volcano a bit faster, but I can't think of any bigger use for it. What's really annoying is that it would have loads of uses if only you could jump off the left side of the screen, but it only works on the right side...
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I've finally completed the next (and last) Globox only level. This level is probably the worst in the game when it comes to lag, since you can't really avoid it with Globox because you have to follow such a set route.
Globox segments take so much effort to do, and it's a shame they don't look more exciting. I probably won't bother to encode this until I've more Rayman shenanigans under the belt.
In this level you have to escort a bunch of teensies around, which means you can't use fleeboosting (because they would run away and you'd have to hunt them down), and also as they follow you they can get in your way and slow you down. I think only someone who's played the game before would be able to appreciate how much smoother a TAS is than a normal run.
At least now we are back to Rayman again, although it feels like it's been such a long time since I was TASing him that I can't really remember how it works!
I've also made a video comparing the routes with and without each of the fireflies, to better demonstrate the time difference and because I always find comparison videos kind of fun.
Link to video
Since the 4 fireflies from the imps are now clearly worth getting, you'd only need one of all of these possible fireflies. The quickest seems to be the haystacks, but the time is so similar to the time for Hunter's Jumping Tutorial and the Watertopia enemies that I can't be sure just yet. I'll have to spend more time optimising each of those levels with and without the firefly before I'm confident that skipping the Haystacks saves the most time.
I can at least rule out the other possibilities completely, which is a shame, since I think they're all pretty cool looking fireflies. I especially enjoyed TASing the lightning breath stuff on Moon Fondue, even if it's clear that it'll never be in an any% run.
I also don't think there are any other fireflies in the game that are even close to being worth it, so I feel like we're pretty near to the final list of 75 fireflies for any%.
Of course there's one slight issue with getting the Gypsy Road imps, which is that you now won't have enough fireflies to unlock Moon Fondue when you first reach it, but it shouldn't be too difficult to adjust the route through Starry Plains to go to Dreamy Castle first. It'll definitely still be worth it considering how quick the imps are, especially with the combine trick.
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CoolKirby wrote:
Does Globox move faster after he drinks the plum juice? If so, could you drink from the barrel at 4:00...
In general he does move faster when under the effects of plum juice, but it takes so long to drink plum juice that it actually loses you time. For the barrel at 4:00, it would run out before being worth it. Shame.
There is actually a different barrel you can see at 4:13 that could be drunk from instead which wouldn't run out before the enemy, but it's a bit out of the way and the time taken to walk over to it make it not worth it.
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I now have a WIP containing the first 4 Rayman levels and finishing with the first Globox level (which is more then half of the run so far!):
Link to video
The main thing new about the Rayman levels is that I've discovered there's a small window before the initial dialogue at the start of each level where you can enter input. Since the dialogue only activates when you are on the ground, you can jump during that frame and skip the dialogue.
On the Clearleaf Falls level it takes the same number of jumps to get high enough to vault the exit gate no matter what direction you travel. The route I take is therefore the one which spawns the least enemies and minimises the lag.
The Machine boss is interesting. Once the canister is active you cannot punch hop, so you have to wait for it to expire completely before you can jump up and reactivate it. During that wait you have enough time to destroy any 4 of the 6 machine parts, so the aim of the battle is to leave the two parts that are quickest to destroy for the second cycle.
You might think the best option was to leave the two parts that are closest to the powerup so you have the least distance to travel for the second cycle, but it's actually quicker to leave the cannons at the bottom, for two reasons:
- Firstly, they each only take three hits to destroy instead of four.
- Secondly, later in the battle the plum launcher throws more plums at you, and they really lag the game if they are on screen. By destroying the machine parts in the top left corner first, you spend as little time as possible with plums on the screen, and therefore the lag is massively reduced.
For the Globox level, there's a large number of small optimisations:
- For the first switch, by looking at the gate before pressing it I skip the camera cutscene.
- For many other switches I crouch one frame before pressing them, as this halts Globox's movement, stopping him from sliding a few pixels in an unwanted direction.
- For the floor button later in the level, I look over to the gate while my leftover velocity carries me onto it, which reduced the distance the camera has to move.
- Each point you collect costs a few frames of lag, so whenever it is possible to avoid them without wasting time, I do.
There's also quite a bit of enemy manipulation. All you can actually manipulate the enemies to do is stop and look around at certain points, before continuing their route. There are a couple of places where I cannot avoid having to wait, because there's no way of speeding up an enemy, only slowing them down (by making them wait), but I can use this manipulation in other places:
- Whenever I have to kill an enemy, I want it to be as close to me as possible (so that I can kill it on the earliest possible frame), because whenever an enemy is on the screen there is lag.
- The exception to this is when defeating an enemy will open a gate. In that case I need the enemy to be close enough to the gate that I will skip the camera cutscene. There's a place in the level where I have to kill four enemies in a row, and I need them to all be close enough to their respective gates, while also not out of the way (to reduce the distance I have to walk).
- There are also a couple of places where I intentionally make Globox flee from an enemy, because his fleeing speed is really fast. Since you cannot control him when he's fleeing, and he usually runs haphazardly all over the place, this takes really careful positioning of both you and the enemy to be faster than just walking.
That's all I can think to say at the moment.
Next is another long Globox level (sigh), before getting back to Rayman, and soon after that are the levels with both characters, which are probably the most interesting.
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Yadra121 wrote:
...I finished the first Imp game and got 2 fireflies, skipping the second game.
Ha, that's awesome! And yeah, your analysis of how it happened is right. I've been able to replicate it by freezing the last imp just as it unfreezes another, and it does give you both fireflies!
Unfortunately it it isn't possible for Shamrock Isle. You can activate the glitch, and Sparx tells you you've completed the game twice, but you aren't awarded both fireflies and so have to do he minigame again anyway.
Still, this means the Gypsy Road fireflies are a lot faster than before, so if there was any doubt about whether they were worth adding to the route then that's gone now.
I'm still working on testing the times for some of the other slow fireflies, since there's now four that can be removed from the original route. I think I'll also test out some of the fireflies that would be too tricky in real-time but could potentially be faster. I'm thinking specifically of the ones needing lightning breath in Moon Fondue, but there may be others.
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Cheers guys, yeah I figured one of those sites was always a possibility I just wondered if this site had its own options. Having said that, I'd never heard of rghost.net before, and it has such a cool looking ghost icon I figured it would do nicely :P (I'm sure there are worse ways to choose an upload service!)
I've edited the link into the submission text.
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Cheers EgxHB, that's good to know. I imagine the physics are identical between games, so anything you can point out will be very helpful.
I've test TASed the imps, as suggested, and yeah, they're definitely worth it:
Link to video
The times are approximate, since I'm sure they can be done faster, but they're already quicker than some of the other fireflies on the route:
What do these times mean? Well I originally thought cutting out a level entirely would be best, and I could do all 4 imps instead of the ToD thief and Moon Fondue and save ~150 frames, or do them instead of Winter Mesa and save ~300 frames, but that turns out not to be worth it.
The better option is to find some individual fireflies that are more out of the way and take them out of the route instead. Doing the Shamrock Imps instead of Hunter's jumping tutorial and the ToD thief will already save ~950 frames, and I expect there are a couple of others in the run that are similarly slow. I just need to find two which together have an average of greater than 1300 frames and it will be worth doing the Gypsy Road imps instead of them.
Off the top of my head, the fireflies remaining in the route that are slowest are perhaps the haystacks in Country Farms, or one of the sets of torches in Tiki Tropics, or killing all the rhynocs in Watertopia. The next thing I'll do will be to test run those levels (and others) with and without the slow firefly to see how much time it would save to skip them. Then we can work towards an idea of what the optimal route is.
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Ahaha! Well I'll have to play around with that and see if it's helpful, but as you said, it's probably just an entertaining but useless glitch.
As for the intro skip, unfortunately for a TAS we tend to start with clean SRAM (i.e. no existing files). Assuming I've not misunderstood how the trick works, it wouldn't be possible in a TAS because you need a save file to delete. So unless it can be activated without an existing file I'll have to play through the intro normally...
Oh well.
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Season of Flame is one of the isometric Spyro games for the GBA, a sequel to Attack of the Rhynocs which EgxHB has already done a run for. Similarly to that game, it'll be great for a TAS because you can charge around everywhere, and the routing will be really interesting as you have to choose 75 firefiles to unlock the last level. It's a game I've always wanted to TAS at some point.
To practice, I made a test-run that blindly followed the WR route by Ongnissim (actually an old route of his, as he found some newer tricks recently):
Link to video
It can obviously be improved, as I got better as the run went on (which was the whole point of making the run). Also I'm sure a TAS would take some different routing choices. For example, the firefly from hunter's tutorial at the start is a reliable one for a real-time run, but a TAS could probably get a riskier one more quickly.
I intend to plumb the depths of this game in the future, looking for any other tricks that could be used and fully exploring the different routing options.
Has anyone else played with this game?
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Unfortunately, editing in the changes does cause a desync...
It will annoy me for a while that I didn't realise those things earlier, but I still don't think it's worth redoing the entire thing yet when there's a chance there are other, better, tricks out there that could save even more time and haven't been found yet.
EDIT: About the subtitles, I have now put them into .srt format since that seems a lot more useful than having them scattered across a bunch of .avs files which is how I had them. Is there any standard way to submit them? Should I include it with the zip file? Or package them in with the bk2 file? ...Or even make a userpage on the site and paste them there?
I could just send them to the publisher I suppose.
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Ah, good point. I'll admit I didn't consider commentary for an official encode, and they've been kind of ad-hoc thus far. It's in a really bad format for that at the moment, since the subtitles aren't even matched up to the correct frames, but I can obviously extract them and match them up correctly, given time.
I'm not sure what format would be preferred, though. Is there any way to upload commentary easily? If it gets to publication would it be best to wait and talk to whichever publisher is going to encode it and see how they'd want them?
As an aside, I've always found subtitled commentary a bit distracting when watching runs, which is why I added them under the screen in my video rather than on top of it (and also why I made a video without commentary), but I presume an official encode would have them on the screen?
