It's good in theory, but the result has to be more than ten hours of the lone character healing every other turn.
To elaborate, I was/am planning to do a solo Black Mage run of FF1. All-treasure, full spellbook. The strategy would probably revolve around collecting money, and thus the route would take a significant departure from the published TAS. Would that make it interesting, though? It might be fun for me, greedy, power-mad bastard that I am, but the battles would still be the same: wait for the RNG, stab, repeat. And there would be a lot of that, and it's not that interesting once you've seen TheAxeMan's run.
Pokemon isn't a bad idea, but I don't think it would justify the length of the movie, which would necessarily be greater than that of the published TAS (which is already very, very long to most people.)
I'll say this, though: if someone makes a solo Tifa run of FF7, I'll watch it no matter how long/redundant it is. :D
Don't forget that Hellfish could also exaggerate some details due to his anxiety.
From experience, I'd say his anxiety has put him in denial that the chick is, in fact, stringing him along.
This kind of "paranoia" isn't paranoia; it's common sense having a head-on collision with something you don't want to accept as reality.
Work on the bot is progressing steadily. Rather than using brute force (which takes too damn long) it "evolves" the fastest possible sequence for an individual battle by means of a genetic algorithm. It's going well, in other words- the hard part is out of the way. :)
Just one thing I'd like some clarification on something before I move on to the next part:
Kirkq wrote:
On the other hand the sequence done by pison is only altered by the random number generator on the frame you hit A to pause, so I could run tests in real time through sequences.
To what extent can calling the menu affect the RNG? I thought that the only way to arbitrarily manipulate a dungeon/boss fight was to wait on the world map and wait for the tide to come in, then enter the dungeon. I know that using a seed advances the RNG, but are you saying that using it on different frames can give you more leverage?
Btw, do we all agree that the stars should signify not-completely-obvious movie recommendations aimed at newcomers, and not anything different? Just to be sure we are all on the same page.
For my part, I have no idea. I'm watching this thread thinking, "why not just star movies where entertainment > 9.whatever?"
I thought that was the point. Or close enough, anyway.
Or maybe Vista is Windows ME. Nobody uses it because it's a piece of garbage, and they'll get it right in the next version.
I listened to a podcast earlier today that said more or less the same thing.
98 was what 95 should have been. XP was what 2000 should have been. Windows 7 is going to be what Vista was supposed to be: a shiny abomination.
I mean, that's what the podcasters made it sound like; I've never used Vista, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use anything other than Linux as soon as I can do away with XP.
They say there'll be a feature so that you can type things like "ram" into the start button and have it tell you what your own hardware is. And more fine tuned RunAs control so can download hentai games on bittorrent and not worry about being rooted.
"That'll be another $500 kthx."
The podcast, incidentally, was called "Hanselminutes".
Ha! That was surprisingly cool. Bravo. The only thing I can suggest is to try and be less random in the autoscroller. IMO, the entertainment value that doesn't come from beating the game quickly, comes from the author communicating something to the viewer. Letting the enemy almost hit you (as you did) and moving in time with the music are things that focus the viewer's attention, because it shows that there's a human intelligence behind the sprite, rather than a robot just going through the motions.
Good luck with the rest of the TAS.
Dromiceius: I modified your script to work for FCEU (changed snes9x.frameadvance() to fceu.frameadvance() and changed to another condition), but once the condition was met, the script held down right the whole time, even when the condition wasn't met anymore. Seems there's a difference between FCEU and SNES9X in this case.
My bad. You need to add "myinputs.right = nil" to unpress the button. I fixed it and tested it again (carefully, this time! :D) with Gradius III, and I think it did exactly what you were asking for.
Apologies in advance if this technique doesn't work in FCEU- anything Snes9x can do, FCEU should do better, logically, but I can't test that ATM.
while true do
local myinputs = joypad.read(1)
if(memory.readbyte(0x7e020A) < 100) then
myinputs.B = true
end
joypad.set(1,myinputs)
myinputs.B = nil
snes9x.frameadvance()
end
I just want the lua script to run in the background, automatically pressing right for me when the condition is met.
I had to test to be sure, but you can actually do that, as it turns out. Surprising.
while true do
local myinputs = {}
myinputs = joypad.read(1)
if(memory.readbyte(0x7e0030) < 250) then
myinputs.right = true
joypad.set(1,myinputs)
end
snes9x.frameadvance()
end
That's stuff I need to help me move on with this run in the future with regards to route planning. Dromiceius stated in the past that he could help to implement the run with regards to luck manipulation if I was able to lay out the realization.
I started on a bot yesterday. I uploaded what I've come up with thus far because I'm done working on it for now.
The finished design, as I currently envision it, will have two primary tasks: 1) find an optimal battle on the world map, and 2) find the optimal boss fight within a dungeon. Lofty goals, but check my pseudocode to see if I'm not on the right track. :D
It first generates input on the world map. The idea is to have the bot either find and kill S.Brains, or walk into a dungeon, and then kill the boss. It depends on when you execute the script, and whether you specify "targetcoords" that the bot should try to approach. If you were to execute the script standing next to Romus' castle, for instance, the bot might walk in there, and then, if you had specified a path for the bot to follow through the dungeon, try to kill Romus.
The bot will also manage the battles themselves, testing the use of defend, as well as a subset of items and magic, so as to defeat bosses as fast as possible.
When the battle is done, the script examines a set of memory addresses, and uses them to calculate the "fitness" of that outcome. You'll need to modify the script on a situation-by-situation basis to indicate what kind of outcome is most desirable.
function comparestats(init, current)
damagetaken = init.playerhp - current.playerhp
--[[for i,v in ipairs(init.enemy) do
damageinflicted = damageinflicted + (v - current.enemy[i])
endbørk]]
return -framecount
end
Here, for example, the user only cares about "negative framecount"; the higher the framecount is, the lower the return value will be.
You'll also be able to test for Lux' hp/mp/statistics as well as item drops and item usage vis-a-vis comparing the inventory chunks of the initial state vs the state of the current attempt.
It should be pretty thorough, if it all works in practice- most randomness within the bounds of reasonable testing should be accounted for, leaving almost nothing to chance... besides the user's choice of strategy, that is. ;)
Comments and suggestions on the design and its purported functionality are welcome; the code is fresh and untested (unfinished, in fact) so I may well have made obvious oversights.
Incidentally, has anyone any experience with the "corruption" this (Game)FAQ speaks of?
IFerrel wrote:
*Now I write the offsets of the items, I put 50 offsets,the game can have up
to 99 item spaces,but you have a high risk of corrupting the state,
Pokemon and Chrono Trigger have shown that a little deliberate memory corruption can go a long way.
I signed up. Can't promise I'll participate in any NES competitions, though- my experience with FCEUX has been less than awesome...
Anyway, I had an idea for another contest that I think more people will take an interest in: a "cooperative bot" competition, for a beat-em-up. The goal would be to reach the end of the game; the bot that gets closest to defeating the last boss wins, with high score being the tiebreaker.
The contestants don't know in advance which bots will be paired up with which, and in that way the challenge is intended as an example and/or application of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you treat your partner as an enemy and cause him to die, you lose his assistance and may not get as far as you would have otherwise. Conversely, the other guy may try to metaphorically kick you down some stairs when you're not looking.
What do you do? I can imagine lots of different approaches; myriad strategies and counter-strategies, like the war between spammers and the civilized world. It tickles my brain to think about it.
Nicely done. I see the reason behind your comparison of this to Monopoly, and it's fairly impressive in its own right, but... yeah. Not terribly entertaining.
6|8
Hyena wrote:
I understand if this isn't the most entertaining run in the world, but thought it might make for an interesting concept demo. I'm working on another run meant to showcase how you can abuse the bizarre word recognition program.
it accepted "cocks" as "cooking" earlier. :D
I'm very much looking forward to whatever insanity you can concoct for next run.
What DK said.
I saw the first one, and thought it was probably a good game for two players. It's impressive to see that the second player was AI controlled, but probably moreso to people who've played the game. Not a great TAS, in itself. I sat through the longer version easily enough, but I don't think I'll be compelled to watch it again.
Not sure how to quantify that. 6.5 & 7.5 -ish.
That's a really impressive glitch. Considering the sort of pointer error that seems to be exposed here, I wouldn't be surprised if the same trick could duplicate characters, or other things in the SRAM. Have you tried, Inichi?
4.4 million results for "porn" then vs 188 million today.
"lolcat" yields one hit. Results for "dramatica" are strictly related to the writing of fiction. I'm a little surprised that "Bisqwit" existed back then, but he had about 585 hits compared to the 19700 he has now.
Neat.
FBA-RR v0.0.2
I tested the rerecording features through a good chunk of the weekend, and successfully created a testrun of the first level of Sengoku 3. The desyncs and crashes I've experienced all seem to have been resolved at this point, but I should stress that I have no way of knowing if this be the case on systems other than my own.
Fast-forwarding and toggling read only mode cause desyncs, still, but at least they aren't as arbitrary now.
The UI is also now behaving almost exactly the way I wanted it to, with some exceptions that will be smoothed out later. You can find out more in the changelog.
Do report bugs and annoyances when you find them, either in this thread or on googlecode. I've uploaded my running list of issues to that page, if you want to know what I'll generally be up to next.
Further analysis of the token drop triggers may also significantly shorten the main table interludes if an effective manipulation strategy could be ascertained.
Lua scripting is pretty handy for this sort of thing. Seeing as you already know the relevant memory addresses, you could, for example, systematically test a subset of all possible inputs for a given set of frames, and find the best outcome that way.
As for the movie... I'm undecided. The action was good and seemed well executed- I particularly liked the minigames. But like the submission text says, half the movie is spent idling through fireworks score tallies. IMO, not a great choice of game, so I'm somewhere between Meh and Yes.
Ah. Well, good news for you: it's already possible to record (and in the next version, correctly replay) modifications to the DIP settings via controller input, including the necessary reset.
Oh, of course.
The dipswitches are stored in a kind of SaveRAM file. The next version of FBA-RR will do like most rerecording emulators and simply not load that on recording/playback.
Thanks, moozooh.
This is as good a time as any to update...
I've been working steadily all week and fixed a slew of bugs, along with at least one desync I stumbled upon. As soon as it's ready (Sunday-ish, hopefully) I'm going to release v0.0.2.
OmniLiquid wrote:
The settings in the test menu are not included in the fbm file, nor are they reset to default during playback. This means that the settings have to be set correctly before playback to avoid desyncs.
Hm. And here I thought I could get away with leaving the FBM format as-is.
Could you elaborate on which settings you're referring to? And what do you mean by "test menu"?
I also very much want to see what happens when this buggy piece of crap gets hit by a TASer using frame advance. If it's anything like the Dreamcast version, then the utter brokenness of this movie is going to be astounding.
I played with this over the weekend. I was surprised at how well it kept sync through a lot of savewhoring and speed throttling. KOF2k3 didn't desync even once in a 20,000 frame movie, though the sound cut out when I resumed recording from a savestate.
Lots of bugs like that aren't hard to find, or even duplicate, which makes me feel hopeful that I can do something to fix them. So, having shoehorned the damn source into GCC and successfully added shortcut keys to the menus (except for the main menu, which turns out not to be an actual menu at all) I'm thinking of doing some more ambitious fixes.
If anyone else is quietly working on this emu, it might be worthwhile to collaborate.
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Play on PC or Console? PC
Do you play:
[X] Alone?
[ ] Online?
[ ] In-home groups?
Do you take your gaming “seriously?” (want to beat friends, win tourneys etc.)
I play for challenge, and tend to be interested in older, arcade-ish games that require a serious effort/practice to reach the ending.
Where do you get your information about games?
Slashdot (though my interest in gaming news is passive.)
Favorite games?
1. Deus Ex
2. Grand Theft Auto
3. Baldur's Gate II
• Where do you buy your games?
Local retailers.
• Where do you buy your consoles
Haven't bought one in about a decade.
• Have you ever traded in or purchased a second hand game/console?
Probably. (Again, a decade ago.)
•
Your parents:
[]Support your gaming
[]Dislike it
[X]Don’t care
[]Not living with parents
