I read turnbyturn.txt awhile back and was amused throughout. The amount of imaginative problem-solving, not to mention serious breakage, in this run is great. Keep it up. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
SNES9x doesn't currently have rewind functionality, so if you want to back up, you'll have to use savestates. As for reading data outside the room boundaries, probably the best you could hope for is a Lua script that the creators of the glitch TAS used, assuming they did use one instead of just memory watch.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It's basically an arbitrary rule to keep us from having one game with an active hacking community taking over the hacks/demos section of the site. Eventually perhaps we'll get a "lesser publication" status that will allow us to publish good runs that don't strongly differentiate themselves from existing runs, but that would require a lot of software work and I don't think everyone's agreed that it's necessarily a good idea.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I've always liked this game, and this run is notably faster and more aggressive than the old one was. Great job, guys!
Thanks for the encode, Nitrogenesis!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm skeptical about the use of the J ROM, given the reason cited for its use, but I don't think that that should have any strong weight in the decision.
I think dodging NoA's goofy censorship rules is a reasonable excuse to use the Japanese ROM, especially given that the usual reason to use the U ROM (wanting to be able to read text) isn't an issue.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
xPi: so, if the user is using a Mozilla-based browser that is not version 5 or 6, write out some vacuous HTML to force a spacer of some kind; otherwise just write out a space. Okay.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I haven't yet tried running SNES9x in VirtualBox, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work. Dual booting would also work of course. But OSX native doesn't seem trivial to achieve.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Last I heard you can't get the TAS-enabled emulators on OSX, unfortunately. Unless you feel like figuring out how to compile them from source. So much for input display. :\
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
You can watch Cpadolf's run with input display on to see exactly what inputs he's doing; that should help you figure out how to avoid getting stuck in the wall.
As for the MB room skip, my understanding is that the offscreen "terrain" includes a lot of invalid objects that you have to avoid touching, without being able to see where they are (or where you are). Doing this without access to savestates seems implausible, or at least very difficult. I don't know if those invalid blocks change across runs (due to memory being different); if that is the case then an unassisted MB skip would be horribly luck-based.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The game is, as far as I know, very straightforward to optimize, to the extent that the existing unassisted runs are very close to perfect. What would a TAS add?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Even if all the bosses were killed, I could believe that it'd be worth it timewise to grab speedbooster and powerbombs early. It saves a lot of time revisiting areas to grab items after you acquire powerbombs at the "normal" locations.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I just wish this game weren’t so faithful to Zero Mission as to take out bosses like Phantoon, Spore Spawn, 2nd half of the Mother Brain battle, etc.
To be fair, almost all of those are in the game in some capacity, it's just that the only "bosses" needed for 100% completion are Mother Brain to trigger wrecked Tourian (only kind of a boss in this game anyways) and the boss formerly known as Draygon to trigger the escape sequence. Everything else is skippable, though this run seems to indicate that beating Botwoon 2.0 is faster than avoiding it.
Yeah, if I recall correctly:
* Spore Spawn is in Kraid's Hideout. Kraid himself is one room to the left of the speed booster.
* Crocomire is somewhere in Norfair, naturally.
* Ridley is guarding a teleporter to the Pirate Ship (Hoandjzj uses the teleporter from the other side, then immediately re-enters it, to reset the alert level at one point)
* Phantoon is reworked as Mother Brain's ghost; normally you'd fight it/her when re-entering Tourian but evidently that can be worked around.
* Both Torizos are visited but not fought.
Incidentally, the way Tourian works in this hack is genius. Normally the initial run through has lots of space pirates, and the metroids are all locked up; after it explodes, you fight Mother Brain's ghost, then work your way back through exploded Tourian, fighting off all the Metroids that were freed from their glass tubes. Makes much more sense than MZM's "whoops the metroids got out lol" approach, and feels nicely creepy.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm still kinda bummed that all the bosses (save Draygon) get skipped, since they provide nice breaks in the action and a way for Samus to show off her combat prowess. I think maybe the hack creator went overboard in making stuff skippable. :)
The run looked good to me, though I do admit my attention wavered at points. Blame that on a combination of the run being long and my being tired and a bit sick. I think this is a strong run of a good hack.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The SNES TAS includes a description of what the game looks for in an answer. IIRC it's basically that it expects a series of letters (e.g. MNKY for "monkey") and if your answer has those letters in the right order, regardless of what else is in there, then it'll be accepted (e.g. "MaNly KeYboard").
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
What little of the hack was shown didn't look bad (though it suffers badly from "Real Is Brown"-itis), but frankly this doesn't show off enough of the hack to be worth publishing IMO. If you look at our existing hack movies, all of them show off considerably more of the game, helping differentiate them from the originals. That just hasn't happened here.
On a semi-related note, I've felt for awhile now that BLJs (and related hyperspeed glitches like infinite wallkicks) make for boring movies, and this run hasn't done anything to change that opinion. Yes, we get that Mario can go fast enough to clip through plot barriers. It's not interesting any more.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yeah, the run has 30Hz flicker effects. You can safely assume that any Super Metroid run does, since Samus runs faster when toggling her aim up/down at 60Hz. There's also the elevators, which use similar flicker effects to fake transparency.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Each emulator has its own movie file format that would need to be updated for this, but otherwise the only complicated bit is automatically playing back the movie when the run is submitted to generate the screenshots. Bisqwit had a system to do that, but I don't know if it made the transition to the new ownership (nor if it's in any condition to be used right now).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
