Wow, YouTube does not like that final fight. Framerate dropped to, like, 5. Probably all the damage flashes from Drac.
Looked good to me! Nice work on improving your previous movie, ForgoneMoose.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Well, sure, it wouldn't be useful in many cases, but it still could be interesting to look at for some movies. Maybe not worth the effort of implementing though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
A thought: might it be worth tracking how many frames are "played" in the process of creating a TAS? Like, if the player plays 100 frames from the start of the movie, then reloads from 5 frames ago and rerecords those 5 frames, then the movie length would be 100 frames but the "total frames played" would be 105.
Even more interesting would be tracking how many times each individual frame is played (i.e. the player recorded over frame 2040 a total of 50 times, etc.), so we could readily see which parts of a run caused the author the most trouble.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
In any case the "best ending" can be removed as there is no good ending run and thus no ambiguity.
The default branch choice for this game (i.e. "any%") would not get the ending that this run gets, ergo the "best ending" label is required. At least, that's my understanding.
If we only have one run for a game, and that run is a 100% run (where an any% run would be faster), shouldn't the run be labeled as "100%"?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
IMO, "Reallyjoel's Mom" in the branch should just be "hardest difficulty". It's more accessible and feels less like an injoke.
Is "Julius mode" accessible to people not familiar with the Sorrow games from the Castlevania series? Branches don't always have names that are immediately obvious. And "reallyjoel's mom" difficulty is not merely the hardest difficulty; it is explicitly meant to be impossible. It's a joke the developer put in.
If, say, Mega Man had a mode where every enemy was a Robot Master, would you say that the game was required to be played on that mode and that it should merely be called the hardest difficulty level? I mean, sure, it's theoretically beatable (as the TAS proves), but the difference between this and the "next-hardest difficulty" is night and day.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
More modern consoles can also render sprites at positions that are not an integer number of pixels, in which case the sprite is interpolated (i.e. the value for a given pixel is based on the values of the sprite pixels that are closest to that pixel). This can look pretty terrible so it's usually not used unless in conjunction with scaling or rotating, where you're stuck doing interpolation anyway.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I believe this is our first run on the site on a difficulty level that is intended to be completely and utterly impossible. That strikes me as unique value of this run, and would be a good reason to star it, wouldn't it?
One would think so, but as far as I can see Warcraft II isn't starred, which was our first proper RTS TAS.
Er? Radiant was talking about doing an impossible difficulty, not doing a new genre. Or was WC2 done on an impossible difficulty?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Ah, so we'll be seeing a revisit to that stage then. What a strange way to do upgrades. I bet they couldn't figure out a way to "dynamically" change the player character's abilities and so opted to just unload the entire level and make the player start over.
Also thanks for the info on collision detection!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Presumably Dot Eater shows more of the boss patterns, though given this is a scrolling shmup (and thus has fairly strict limits on the player's ability to output damage) I would expect most boss HP values are set to run through their entire patterns before they die anyway. The actual levels will be more difficult though, since every enemy is allowed to perform their full attack instead of dying before they get the chance.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm pretty sure this game was broken from the start. Though it is amusing to see the protagonist jump right through spikes as if they aren't even there.
Is that secret exit supposed to do anything special? It feels weird to not end with a boss fight.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Would it be possible to point Hourglass to the DLL you're expected to use? I.e. provide a path in a configuration file somewhere or something. Then you could point it at an "enabling" stub DLL without having to distribute that DLL with Hourglass or generally associate it with Hourglass in any way. Or just use the standard Steam DLL if you want to play a Steam game with savestates and slowdown without trying to make a movie file.
You can TAS games that use the Steam DLL already, syncability cannot however be guaranteed if the DLL does any sort of communication with the internet.
You could theoretically make a replacement DLL (kinda like a mini-image). A DLL that can physically replace the original DLL that the game wants to load. The tricky part with this solution is getting all the function locations the same in the stub as the original DLL. If something is off you can get really interesting results.
I guess I was thinking of something where you'd tell Hourglass "Here's my replacement DLL for X", and then whenever the game tries to make a call to a function exported by X, Hourglass would redirect the call to the same function as exported by your replacement DLL. I assumed it's already doing similar things for certain calls just to be able to do rerecording.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Would it be possible to point Hourglass to the DLL you're expected to use? I.e. provide a path in a configuration file somewhere or something. Then you could point it at an "enabling" stub DLL without having to distribute that DLL with Hourglass or generally associate it with Hourglass in any way. Or just use the standard Steam DLL if you want to play a Steam game with savestates and slowdown without trying to make a movie file.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing you'd have to do on a per-game basis, by identifying the logic responsible for playing the music and turning it into a no-op. As you may have noticed, the NES has a very limited set of "voices" which have to be shared between music and sound effects (thus e.g. the low-health beep in Legend of Zelda overrides half of the music); games tend to be very different in how they tackle the mix of sound effects and music.
It's not like you'd just look up a process responsible for decoding an MP3 and lock that out.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Holy hell, I knew that the Super Monkey Ball games would make good TASes, but I hadn't quite realized how good. This is awesome! I look forward to seeing it on the workbench. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
You can respawn life and heart max ups using the Infinity Glitch, so I'm not sure if they should count or not.
I'm not familiar with this glitch, but is it possible to get the game into a state where it is no longer possible to perform? E.g. if respawning is only possible within a certain window after getting each powerup or something.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I don't think you have to worry about "losing" the current TASes. Symphony of the Night is one of those games that really lends itself to TASing. I mean, for Super Metroid we have 100%, any%, and any% without using the X-Ray scope glitch, and we used to have realtime and in-game-time runs separately published. I can absolutely believe that any corruption/total-control run would be published alongside the existing TASes instead of obsoleting them.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
