Posts for Derakon


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Hmm...I don't see any obvious mistakes, but the game isn't very interesting to watch, either. Basically what you have here is a video guide to solving the puzzles; the TAS just looks like normal gameplay sped up a bit. Unless the later levels get a lot more interesting, I don't see this getting published here. :\
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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Nice! I especially liked the Rainbow Road one. Edit in response to Kyman, below: D'oh! You're right. I guess I call it Rainbow Road because I hated Rainbow Ride when I played Mario 64 (crappy music, annoying level design) and so never bothered to pay much attention to its name, whereas Rainbow Road was quite awesome in SMK.
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Yeah, the captions (like any knowledgeable commentary) really add a lot to the run. Thanks for including them! The run looks good to my untrained eye. Nice work!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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Well, presumably if you could use the sword to get to him, you'd be able to do the slide at the start of the fight instead of the end. You have to reach him in any case to enter the teleport thingy after the fight.
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It's the same type of run as the Julius run for Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, which uses "Second quest" and "Starts from a predefined save" (ditto the Maxim versions of Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance). I can't verify the run completes the game, though, lacking the needed equipment to run PCSX with SotN.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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I bet you could get a very accurate "encoding" of the bulk of the sound by just capturing a loop of the engine, then. Include start and stop times so you know when to play the non-engine sounds and you're good to go, probably in under a meg. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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I imagine that like with most movies, some people would like it and some wouldn't. :) The big problem you'll run into is that the people who know how to TAS Super Metroid probably won't be interested in making such a run, and Super Metroid's not a particularly easy game for newbies to TAS. So finding a runner to make this movie would be nontrivial. Of course you're always welcome to do it yourself. There's the added issue that if you're going to be skipping the baby Metroid and Mother Brain segments, then you have to use the X-Ray glitch or another OOB glitch that behaves similarly, and if you're going to use that kind of glitch, then you've really no excuse to not use it throughout the game. So this'd just turn into a slightly longer version of the existing glitched any% run, going up until you get to Crocomire so you have the grappling beam to make it to the X-Ray Scope unscathed (I suppose the pre-scope room might be doable with just the ice beam, actually). You'd have a very hard time selling a run that played the entire game normally only to glitch past the endgame.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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He's outlining a segmented speedrun as would be done on the actual console. Obviously you wouldn't need to do all that in a TAS.
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You should never start with save data already in the game. Doing so creates movies that cannot be submitted to this site. Just take the two frames of lag. :)
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I find this interesting mostly because I spent some time implementing a growing-tree maze generator and an algorithm for determining tile types for one of my projects: I'm leaving a hollow at the "end" of the maze, hence the open space/loop. Your love of short variable names and terseness makes it a bit hard for me to follow what your code is doing (my average variable name length is probably ten times yours :)). I think you're basically placing wall segments down randomly such that each segment hits another wall precisely once. However, your code to select which character to draw has me completely baffled. You seem to be constructing some kind of string and then indexing into it, but I've never seen the L"" construct before. Some discussion on approaches to your challenges is below; I'm not going to participate in the actual challenge because I have other work I need to do. Creating inaccessible regions should be straightforward; simply allow walls to touch more than one other wall. Doing this while still allowing the maze to be solvable (which I'm arbitrarily deciding means getting from the upper-left to the lower-right) is trickier; one possible approach would be to decide on the solution to the maze ahead of time using a random-walk algorithm, and forbidding any walls from crossing the solution. Of course, you'd need to make certain that your "solution" didn't take up too much of the maze. Similarly, creating loops just involves allowing walls to be created that don't touch any other walls. Longest paths only make sense in a map that has loops (since otherwise there's only one path). In any event, the page I linked above has some exhaustive maze solvers.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Post subject: Maze of Galious
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I did a search and didn't find any topics on this game, so I'm making this post just to encourage people to check it out. It's a bit like a cross between Zelda and Castlevania: a side-scrolling game with subweapons, different dungeons, upgradeable equipment, and various useful and useless items. The NES version is rather different from the MSX version (of which there is a fan remake), but I still think it'd make a good run. There's an English patch which makes the game more playable in a non-TAS context; however, since a TAS would only see text in stores and at the end of the game, it's no big loss to use the Japanese version. For a TAS, I see a few major issues: * Route planning. The order in which you complete dungeons is restricted (each dungeon completed gives you the key to access the next dungeon), but there's a lot of important items in the castle proper to grab. Additionally, the dungeons have detours to collect various items that make the bossfights easier, which might be worth picking up if they don't take too long. The most relevant in a TAS would be the Pure Water, which halves the boss's life. The other two items give you infinite ammo in bossfights and increased defense; the former might be useful but I really doubt the latter would be. You have to get these items once per dungeon, like the map/compass in Zelda. * Ammo management. Ammo is plentiful in this game; enemies routinely drop 5-packs and you only ever need 1 to fire a subweapon. However, since you don't have to stop moving to use subweapons, unlike with your sword, the subweapons will probably see a lot of use. Not only that, the ceramic arrows can hit enemies multiple times, which really speeds fights up; not to mention they can give you a head start on breaking bricks, which would reduce the slowdown required to clear those barriers. * Money management. Sadly, there's several items you have to buy in order to proceed. For example, to beat the first dungeon, you have to get 20 coins to buy a sword which can break bricks. There's a few places in the game where huge stashes of money are available, as well as some enemies that drop 50 coins instead of the default 1; it might be worth farming those as soon as possible, since money otherwise only drops 1 coin at a time (which, yes, means killing 20 enemies before getting that sword). * Lag management. Also sadly, lag is pretty common, especially for bossfights or rooms with lots of enemies. Finally, there's two characters you can play as, which you can switch between at any time: Popolon and Aphrodite. They have a few notable differences, but the most notable in my memory are that Popolon dies very quickly in water, but can control the height of his jump and can break blocks quickly; Aphrodite is the reverse. Shopkeepers will sometimes give more favorable prices to one or the other character, too.
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I see that the Wikipedia article on Desert Bus has already been updated to note the maximum score, complete with a link back to this thread.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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[--------------------------THIS long!--------------------------] Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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Ver Greeneyes: so how far would a swordless run get? :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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I always found the different physics in Redesign to be annoying, myself. I just can't get used to the non-floaty jumps. That said, it certainly looks impressive when TASed. Are you doing infinite 1-wall underwater walljumps by canceling spin to stop your horizontal momentum and then immediately starting spinning again?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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Does PCSX support Lua yet? This would be an ideal situation to make an encode that skips the door animations (like people have made encodes that skips the door/item-get pauses in Super Metroid). Obviously we couldn't use that as an official encode, but it'd be nice to see.
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All of the SNES Star Wars games suffer from random desynchs, as Tompa noted. If they didn't, they'd've been TASed long ago.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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I've made it through once around about 250 deaths. Didn't have anywhere near as much money as you do, though, since my strategy was basically to get a sceptre, then dive for the last level, then kill the boss as quickly as possible.
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Awesome run! The disco in the sewers was a bit distracting, mind you, but the rest of it was all very nice. My only question is, against the dungeon 7 boss (the one you need the two wands for), you charge up a spin attack while his shell is exploding. It looks to my untrained eye that this caused a lot of lag; mightn't you have avoided that lag either by starting the charge earlier (when there are fewer explosions onscreen) or by sending the swordblast straight into a wall instead of down the screen? Or am I just seeing things?
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What happens if Julius kills Chaos? What ending do you get? Agreed on it not really being relevant to this run concept, though.
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Thanks! Let me see if I understand: When Samus "runs" without holding the run button, her run animation plays like 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, or something similar (i.e. for each time her run animation advances a frame, multiple in-game frames pass). As her boost increases, it goes to something like 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, etc, then at maximum boost it's going 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
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I have a couple of random questions just for my own curiosity. If anyone's willing to answer them, that'd be awesome. 1) How is Samus's hitbox altered when she's running (as compared to when she's standing still)? If it's wider when running, how does the game handle her running into a wall? 2) When she is running, how does the game alter which frames of the run animation are displayed as she speeds up? I assume that the game is simply dropping frames as she reaches higher speeds; is it selecting from a subset or doing "frameIndex += 2" instead of "frameIndex += 1" or something else entirely?
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There are certainly some TASers here who explicitly do not want their videos uploaded to YouTube/Rapidshare/Vimeo/whatever. Get permission from the TASer before you do anything with their work.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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gia wrote:
Metal Warriors (SNES) is easy and isnt on tasvideos. This has all tricks I know: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1033A03D2F53C7B4 Only trick missing is that you can shoot while moving backwards if you press Left+Right at the same time.
Soulrivers made a [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNeRUEEdtFc&feature =channel_page]WIP[/url] of the first Metal Warriors level; here's the thread for the game. He said it's really hard to optimize, though, so it might not be a good newbie project. Mind you, I'd love to see a TAS of it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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Olé! Olé! Olé! (I'd be interested in watching such a run, but I don't know how much of a help I'd be on route planning) Edit: just throwing this out here as a starting point. I expect it's all kinds of flawed. I'm assuming you don't use any out-of-bounds traveling, too, which means the map is actually useful. Basically work your way around in a clockwise circle, starting with Creaking Skull, then Big Golem, Headhunter, etc. After killing Manticore, it might be worth teleporting back to the beginning and going down to the Arena and Underground Cemetary, then getting to Great Armor via the Forbidden Area (Julius can get through the waterfall with careful use of the backdash, right?). This would replace the run from Manticore to Great Armor with a run from Legion to same, which I think is worthwhile. If it isn't, then you'd tag Great Armor and then backtrack to the chapel teleporter before doing the arena/cemetary run. There's a pretty big "lag" (lack of bossfights) between Death and Manticore. Fortunately Manticore itself is right near a teleporter. Edit: duh, if you have to go from Great Armor to a teleporter anyway, you might as well go to the Chapel one and kill Manticore on the way; thus, after killing Death you'd teleport and sweep the lower half of the map.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.