Posts for Derakon


Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
These forums are more for making TASes of games than for help with unassisted play. You might have better luck at GameFAQs or searching for videos of other, more skilled playthroughs. Short of that, yep, these games are bloody hard. Practice, and learn the levels.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Over a minute saved already? Niiiiice.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
TS2 is, broadly speaking, a bunch of disjointed missions with various stereotypical settings, e.g. wild west, space station, 1960's evil scientist lair, cyberpunk, etc. The first mission is set at a Soviet dam, gee I wonder where they got that idea. Each mission has nothing to do with the other missions. TS3 basically takes the settings from TS2 (which, for all I know, were originally made in TS1) and shoehorns a plot onto them. It's nothing special, but parts are moderately amusing. I can't remember if the cutscenes are skippable. Otherwise the main gimmick is that each level has a segment where you take advantage of time travel to team up with yourself -- which means that most levels have what amounts to an escort mission. They tend to be short, but still. Most missions also have a normal AI sidekick who travels with you, though I never seemed to have any trouble with them getting killed. They might be invulnerable. (The crowning moment of awesome in TS3 is a segment where you team up with yourself four times in the same room) Both games are frankly excellent and would make good TASes.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
*whoosh*
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
sameasusual wrote:
Two videos side-by-side would be much easier to follow than 8 or 9 at once, which is sort of the point for these kinds of TASes, is it not?
It depends on if he's making the TAS for people to watch as a normal video, or if he's making it as a technical challenge, in which case you'd watch it at a more technical level. You could make a horribly baroque house that looks terrible yet nonetheless demonstrates impressive mastery of the techniques of housebuilding, and can be appreciated for that fact if nothing else...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Mister Epic wrote:
Of course it's me! I even got Epic in my nickname! :P
Hard to argue with logic like that!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Functionally the 100% run is not anywhere near "low-glitch", though. Okay, so horizontal underflows aren't used; that doesn't stop Sonic from going through just about any wall he feels like. If you want a low-glitch run, go watch SprintGod's run instead. About the worst you can say for it glitch-wise is that Sonic runs over the top of the screen for about a second at one point.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Thanks for the encode, Noob Irdoh! The run looked good to me, though I feel kinda bad for the enemy army. All sorts of cool toys, but that lavender uniform is rather unfortunate.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I know one of the UQM devs, and yeah, he was rather surprised to get the bug report "Game crashes if you free the Chmmr without ever visiting the Starbase". The main issue I'd see with doing a TAS of this would be how horrendously slow hyperspace travel would be. Your ship moves at a crawl, you'd be continually interrupted by probes (which IIRC spawn at a significantly increased rate so long as you haven't visited the starbase), and all of the fights would look basically identical. Once you get the Quasispace portal generator things would be slightly improved, but it'd still be a slog.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Ehhh, as a non-fan of the Simpsons, this wasn't amazing. Just a technicolor beatdown of several hundred badly-drawn clones through various uninspired terrains. It was a solid run though. Voting meh for game choice (and recognizing that I am definitely not in the majority here). As for runs I'd like to see, there's already a thread for that, so no sense cluttering this one up with game suggestions.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Well, what's the cost for recording each input poll separately? As far as I can tell it'd mainly just add a lot of redundancy to the movie file (which would be almost entirely obviated by compression). Whereas the cost for only recording input once per frame is that you risk making it impossible to do things that would be possible on the console by changing inputs between polls. My personal inclination would be to record input for each polling event, and then to accept compressed movie files (using zip or gzip or some other common compression scheme). Also, glad to hear that progress is being made in Dolphin! I'm looking forward to seeing some "next-gen" TASes. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
If GGG would just post to threads outside the workbench/published movies forums, this wouldn't be such a problem.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Personally I have enough trouble watching the quad-run, and the lack of synchronicity made it basically an audiovisual noise storm. Go ahead and make whatever run you most like, but I suspect it'll be incomprehensible when played back. Have you decided which hacks you would add to the mix?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I'm guessing Dark Kobold encoded a date somewhere in the run.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Oh, fantastic! Thanks, that makes things much easier. :) Someone should upload that map to vgmaps.com. Someone who can legitimately claim credit for having generated the map, I mean.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Well, that was insane. Nice work, guys! And thanks for the encode, Flygon!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I don't suppose any Super Metroid masters would know how to go about doing this? I think the main difficulty would be loading a given room's data without actually manually going through a door in-game. Then again, I know next to nothing about how Super Metroid actually works. I can program, though I've not done any TAS-oriented scripting; if someone wanted to tell me the appropriate bits of memory to poke/invoke/etc., I could probably sort out the surrounding infrastructure without too much difficulty.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Sorry, what I meant to say is "There isn't an Atlas map for the entire game. There is one for the Space Colony and one for Norfair, but everything else is a low-res map. I think a pixel-for-pixel map of the entirety of Super Metroid would make a pretty cool poster. Seems ilke it ought, in theory, to be possible to collect the image data with a Lua script, something along these lines:
For each room:
    Load room data
    Set save state
    for x in room width:
        for y in room height:
            Move Samus offscreen (to (x - 256, y - 256)?)
            Move camera to x, y
            Emulate one frame
            Save screenshot as "%d-%d-%d.png" (room, x, y)
            Restore save state
That would get you images of all of the rooms; then it'd be a comparatively straightforward matter to crop out the HUD and stitch the room tiles together (I could write a program to do it in Perl with ImageMagick, probably take under an hour). Then there's a fairly tedious process of aligning each room with the other rooms, since as I understand it room physical locations aren't actually stored anywhere. I don't suppose anyone with more knowledge of the Super Metroid ROM than I have would be willing to write a script that would do what my pseudocode blocked out? I should be able to run the script locally in VirtualBox, so no need to worry about transferring several thousand 256x224 screenshots.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Hoe wrote:
Have you considered symphony of the night? That might be nuts :)
SotN's map actually doesn't look very interesting when you can see more than one screen at a time. Most of the rooms are well-separated from each other, and when they do come close, there's often gapping that gets "fixed" by lengthening screen transitions. Hmm...seems there isn't an Atlas map for Super Metroid. A pity, that.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
<3 The screen transitions were a bit jarring, but otherwise, stellar work as usual!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Ah heh. The Wheel of Time series is notorious for getting bogged down after a strong start. Hundreds of pages go by without anything of significance happening.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Why is SDA faster? The N64 version is laggier or something?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Noob Irdoh wrote:
However, there is something that really bugs me. This shouldn't be called "newgame+", as that description was kind of specific for another game...
"New game+" has become a generalized term for playing a game through again but with benefits from your previous playthrough. It happens that Chronotrigger created the term, but it's been co-opted. I don't have a problem with it being re-used here.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Now we just need an Atlas movie of the sextuple run. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Sounds like we may need to add "can submit movies" as a user role...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.