Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(187)
Joined: 7/2/2024
Posts: 6
Hey guys, when you start TASing on libTAS + PCem, I’ve got to tell you something from my personal experience…
1. After running the winxp installation movie, when you get to your game setup movie, ALWAYS, go to bottom left, click that start button -> control panel -> mouse -> pointer precision -> turn it off. For any games that require mouse inputs to play it, turn it off if you want coordinates to work how they’re supposed to.
2. Even frames: mouse clicks only work on even frames, key presses can work on uneven frames, and coordinates only register on even frames (I’m not too sure about this, but from my testing coordinates didnt register on uneven frames).
3. Coordinate movement limit: sometimes, moving the number way too fast will cause the mouse to not end up in the same position, you should not use for example on first frame 0, and then on second frame 230, you need to charge it up by 100, or by 50. I think the limit is ~200 frames, so you may be able to move by 200 x/y coordinates safely sometimes…
4. CURSED coordinates: NEVER, and I mean NEVER, input x coordinates: -170, -86, 86, 170! They will cause your mouse to not end up the same afterwards! (Well, at least if starting from 0, but feel free to test if you’re for example at coordinate 80 or 160).
5. Re-centering the mouse: in case anything goes wrong (after you’ve turned pointer precision off), you can recenter the mouse… just find what edges it’s closest to, for example if bottom and right edge is the closest, just charge up the x coordinate to 400 then back to 0, and y coordinate to 300 then back to 0 (since default resolution is set to 800x600, you just do half of it).
6. You start from center, (0, 0) is center of the screen.
7. How coordinates work: they don’t work like coordinate system used in math, basically y coord is inverted, inputing positive will move the cursor down, and negative will move the cursor up. The x coordinate stays the same as math coordinate, positive being right and negative being left.
8. How to start using coordinates: when you start your TAS movie, on the welcome screen (on windows xp), I recommend you to put “mouse button 1” (left click) for 3 frames, or on one even frame, basically without it mouse coordinates won’t respond.
9. In your game setup movie, you don’t have to make it fast, you can just use recording mode and set up your game manually without bothering about optimization, also it is IMPORTANT that you SHUT DOWN windows in your installation movie, in order for you not to have that annoying “checking disk” screen on the boot of your TAS movie.
10. Coordinates getting stuck: often times, coordinate numbers will just refuse to get dragged further and they'll stop at some frame, the fix is to just add a key or mouse click input (and remove it, ofc), then try dragging the coordinates again.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(187)
Joined: 7/2/2024
Posts: 6
Randomno wrote:
There has been a TAS created with the 2GHz CPU:
Link to video
Actually, I believe the guy who made that TAS (I helped him set up pcemcompiled, his name is LookingForDreams) ran the game on both 800 and 2000mHz, and he chose to do 800 because of the same loading speed, but I made a TAS of the game that only worked on 2000mHz, even though the requirement said Pentium II 450mHz, when I tested the game, it lagged drastically. As for the emulation speed, only the Windows XP startup slows down drastically, everything else feels about the same or tiny bit slower than 450mHz.
Here is the TAS:
Link to video
And also, I posted LFD's Zuma TAS on my channel, I encoded it myself (there's an encode on his channel too, but due to it being on original resolution, 800x600, the youtube converted the 50fps video to 30, so I wanted to make sure high quality encode is uploaded somewhere, along with his permission, which he gave me), the movie does sync only IF everyone has the same hashes as the TASer's, so I asked him to send me .img, .nvr, .bin, and everything synced perfectly.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(187)
Joined: 7/2/2024
Posts: 6
I was curious about The World's Hardest Game TAS, and thought "Is there a TASVideos submission?" so I checked, and it turned out that there was only a submission if the 2nd game.
I knew what I had to do, I wanted to make a submission for TASVideos so it can get published to TASVideosChannel.
I asked them if perhaps they made a real TAS (when I say a real TAS, I refer to the movie file TASVideos uses) that was unpublished, got a reply to check pinned messages, turned out it was a TAS mod.
I got to work, but I knew I had no knowledge of the game, tried my best until level 2, then DimRom sent me GGG502's ruffle TAS, and told me to compare to it and not the flash TASes since ruffle has inaccurate emulation compared to flash player.
I essentially "copied" the rest of the levels, but made slight tweaks to make it at least a bit different.
When I asked about the credits, they told me to link the original TAS video they made for ruffle using their TAS mod, I did link it, and I thought that it was enough, since I was the one who made the movie file, but after reading Fraims'es post about his mixed feelings about this submission, I felt guilty, since the community had spent years making the TAS tools and optimizing their TASes, and I, a completely random guy just came in their server and basically stole their work, but on an actual emulator instead of the modified sfw.
I take full responsibility, and I am sorry for stealing the community's hard work.
I am willing to make the things right, either by changing the description of the submission, adding more authors and putting me in the last place, or just taking this submission down completely.
And once again, I would like to sincerely and deeply apologize to the WHG's comminity, for essentially plagiarizing their hard work and taking all the credit to myself, I realized it was wrong to make myself an only author, so I added original authors of the ruffle TAS, though I am yet to make more changes to this submission, to make things right. Not sure if I should add the TAS mod makers as authors or just in the submission description, I will discuss about the additional changes with the WHG community.
Best regards.
-Dado
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(187)
Joined: 7/2/2024
Posts: 6
The reason I've picked up "slow" powerup is because it is easier to trap the balls, also you don't have to follow the balls as much, and "accelerate" because it is just faster to trap them, both of them have adventages, they trim down the time, that's why i chose to pick them up.
