And sorry for being so newbie/inquisitive, but turbo'ing A and B at the same time would be faster that holding B? I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean by this. I'm really sorry for being so new and not knowing this stuff, when I feel like I somehow should.
If you can dismiss the text by pressing either B or A, then pressing B on odd frames and A on even frames (for example) ensures that you dismiss the text on every frame. Turboing B means you're not pressing anything half the time, so there's a 50% chance of losing some frames during the dialogues.
...And that's if. I don't think anybody's checked yet.
Both real-time runs (the segmented SDA run and Saturn's single-segment emulator run) strayed toward the second option, but they both used the quickest sections to grind in, and I can honestly say I'll be there myself, though I'm keeping my time there as short as possible by taking some extra time to kill some slightly out-of-the-way enemies. Aye, that was a long sentence. >_>
That's probably how I'd have done it, had I continued. The problem is that you might end up slower than the SDA time. Kinda puts you between a rock and a hard place, and for that reason I'm not really sure this game is worth TASing.
My negative-nancyism aside, has the RNG been decoded to any extent? That's another thing that stymied me when I tried this- figuring out how to get criticals at will. Of course, I didn't know jack about disassembly back then. Figuring that out could give you a serious edge.
This seems destined for publication due to viewer response.
There are 53483892 SMB hacks, and I don't want 53483892 SMB hacks on the site. I'd like to keep the number down as low as possible. What do you guys think about this obsoleting the published air2 hack? This isn't a statement of "I'm going to this". I'm just throwing the idea out there to see what people think.
Sounds reasonable. If this practice were to be codified, it might make more sense to obsolete whichever hack/tier has the lowest ratings... Not sure if that's the case here, but I'm just floating that idea, too.
Oh wow, sorry then. I wonder then, if it doesn't use javascript, then why did they rate it badly? I should rate it well then to try to balance it out.
The only reason I can conjecture is that other subdomains on 2y.net host malicious sites.
Anyway, the movie you linked seems to be valid, but your link has an extra dot on the end.
Also, welcome to the community. I'm glad to see people working on this game. I don't want to seem too unfriendly. ;)
Edit:
EDIT: Wouldn't this be possible if one were to open up the movie file, and change the button input on the frame that you wanted?
Then the Web of Trust is literally worse than useless. :(
This community has been privileged to use microstorage for years without incident. I don't know why it would be generating a false positive, but seeing as it doesn't use JavaScript or require cookies, there's really nothing "malicious" it can do, even in theory.
I'm uninformed on pinball games in general, and how such games may differ from regular arcade games, but have you tried M1?
...Oh, look at that. It even says "and pinball games".
Well, good luck.
I must say that I really love all the hate you guys pile on about .cards/etc. Was it really that bad?
Not really...
/ignore -regexp -pattern "^\\." * PUBLICS
...But if it's worth ignoring, it's probably worth getting rid of.
I'm a little surprised people are so bothered by it. So often when I ask "doesn't [blank] annoy you?" the answer is a shrug, followed by some remark about how "everything on [venue/medium] is stupid."
I like Let's Play and the idea of "completionist" runs in general, but I'd hate to see that sort of thing popping up in the workbench. So much of what goes into that kind of a run is subjective, and so few people have any taste. As it is now, the workbench has a very high signal to noise ratio, and inviting arbitrary content would change that for the worse.
Maybe in a few years when we have a new crop of TASers and viewers who are less resistant to change, and probably a lot more LCD. By then, all the emulator movie formats may well have auto-executing Lua scripts that auto-play audio commentaries, so that style of run would be more applicable to what we do here.
edit: grammar
I mentioned .nforum in IRC. That was awhile ago, so in case you forgot:
.nforum finduser|findtopic|findpost "searchstring"
There was also a command like "?? microstorage", which returned the microstorage URL. Probably sounds ridiculous, but nobody seems to remember it offhand.
If there are any windows programmers following this, it wouldn't be hard to hack together a serviceable auto-hold feature through AutoHotkey.
A table of booleans* mapped to player 2's keys, which are toggled when pressing said keys on the physical keyboard. The frameadvance key would be mapped to scan the table and send the necessary keys with the frameadvance. A little UI window indicates what's held.
*Loosely speaking, obviously. I know AHK has neither proper tables nor static types.
One thing I must say about the rerecord limitation, I think that shouldn't be used, since it's easy to have a screwed up rerecord count by cut/paste or hexediting.
What are the odds that a troll will know about hex editing and the nifty things that it can potenially achieve? Many of the experienced players on the site don't even know how to hex edit.
That's the beauty of an unobtrusive catch-all; It doesn't matter what the odds are.
(Also, you're quoting SirVG, not me.)
Edit: One thing I must say about the rerecord limitation, I think that shouldn't be used, since it's easy to have a screwed up rerecord count by cut/paste or hexediting.
I think it'd be a confidence formula, rather than a series of black-and-white checks.
Also, Warp is right. Just dumping that bit altogether would accomplish the same thing with less work and probably a smaller margin of error.
I suggest something slightly different: for users with a postcount of less than 50, or submissions with a rerecord ratio less than a certain fraction of the mean, the submission is initially only visible to core users. It would be a kind of probation; if the sub is deemed not-junk, then it becomes visible to everyone else for actual judging. If not, then it never happened.
This way, trolls will think they're being ignored, and valid submissions may not even be delayed to any noticeable degree.
Edit: and we can't expect that people will read instructions, even if they can read them.
Dont know if this is the right place to ask, but I will anyway. Do any of you know of some sort of tool that will allow me to see the games memory and/or that will allow me to collect frame data?
What the heck happened in level 4? It looked like you sprayed bullets in the general direction of your targets instead of being precise. Was that necessary?
The following ROMs are invalid:
• essential BIOS program ROM sm1.sm1 has a CRC of 97CF998B (correct is 94416D67).
• essential BIOS ROM 000-lo.lo is 64k which is too small (correct is 128kB).
• essential BIOS program ROM sm1.sm1 has a CRC of 97CF998B (correct is 94416D67).
• essential BIOS ROM 000-lo.lo is 64k which is too small (correct is 128kB).
• BIOS graphics ROM sfix.sfix was not found.
Well for the moment I may have an idea of what to do, thanks very much, but didn't you mean to write "N+1" frame rather than "N+4"?
No, actually- as I understand it, the PRNG in FF7 advances only every 4th frame.
Edit: Let's see if I understand this right... If I keep trying to roll the dice in the aforementioned manner, I will find a sequence, right? When I get back to the beginning of the sequence, then I find the exact probabilities?
(can't find anything in FAQ that helps me here) This is all assuming it is only time/frame based.
I'm pretty sure "100% POWs" would be the only qualification for a 100% run of Metal Slug.
Score is cool too, though- in the currently published TAS of the original Castlevania, one of the goals was to gain as many points as possible without sacrificing any frames. It can look really stylish, and people like the attention to detail.
Genious setup, can already feel the comfort in it. Thanks!
I was gonna test a few things, mostly the difference in enemy health in 2-player mode (something I know is true, just need to figure out how much), but as far as hard mode goes, I don't even remember there being more enemies. If there were, it was negligible. I think the main thing with it is that bullets travel a lot faster and enemies take more hits. Is that acceptable? Metal Slug is already extremely chaotic, so I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make.
If the enemy bullets go faster, I'd definitely say you should do it on the hardest difficulty.
2 questions here.
1st is for people that have controlled 2 players at once. What do you recommend for the button configuration? For first player I usually use up, down, left, and right to control, and Z, X, C, and D for buttons. But for the second player, kinda stuck since it's new to me. I know it's gonna be going frame by frame anyway, so it might not need to be comfortable, but I'd like it to be.
Player 1: 8564 for d-pad, and asdf for buttons
Player 2: UDLR for d-pad, and qwer for buttons
In Final Fight, there are only two buttons other than the directions, so asdf served for both players.
I set up the d-pads like that because I can control player 1 with my fingers while controlling player 2 with my thumb. The frame advance button goes on the spacebar in this setup, so that my left thumb can handle that.
2nd question is, when TASing an arcade game, is it acceptable to go to the debug menu in the beginning of the run? I was gonna run Metal Slug and then go to the debug menu to turn on blood and maybe a higher difficulty.
There may not be a precedent yet, but raising the difficulty will almost certainly be a requirement in cases where the increased difficulty makes the game more interesting. I don't know if that's the case in Metal Slug, but the rule of thumb is:
Adding more enemies is good; more chaos.
Making enemies take longer to die is bad; more repetition.
You should check the differences between the difficulties and poll the community if you're not sure which is best.
But turn the blood on in any case. ;)
Cool.
But why can't I access this site normally, I would like to do some TAS but am not allowed to. What the hell?
No idea. Just a suggestion: mention which country you're connecting from. The server was relocated recently, and the admins still getting the bugs worked out.
Random Number Generator state? I'm not sure how this differs from just pulling the lever 10000 times without frame advance.
In deterministic systems like a PSX, "probability" doesn't exist the way we generally understand it, because nothing is actually random. What we mistake for randomness is actually a calculation whose operands are simply very hard for us to predict. The outcome of a "random" event is often a function of a few bytes in memory on which are performed a series of mathematical operations several times a second. The numbers are "scrambled" but in a predictable way, which is why it's only pseudo-random. So just pulling the lever at arbitrary times instead of using frame-advance would bias the results depending on which PRNG states you happened to use.
To get the exact probability of a calculation based on time, you'd have to do a trial for each PRNG state, meaning that you'd "pull the lever" on an arbitrary frame N, record the result, reload a savestate from before you pulled the lever, frame advance to frame N+4, pull the lever, record the result.
And repeat that once and only once for each possible PRNG state. That would be exact, assuming time is the only variable. If you don't need it to be so precise, you could certainly be less stringent and still get reasonably accurate numbers.
I hope that clarifies things. It's late, I'm kind of groggy, and I'm still not sure why you want this information.
Shademp wrote:
Note: Would also be nice to know the probabilty of Cid or Tifa asking Cloud to Snowboard or play the Chocobo Races.
This is much more complicated. Unless you happen to know how and when the game decides the outcome of the event you're talking about, you can't very well test the probabilities, and so you'd have to reverse-engineer. Basically what that means is running the game in a debugger to decipher the relevant functions and memory addresses.
It's by no means an easy task if you don't know at least one assembly language, but PCSX has a debugger built in, and you can check romhacking.net for tutorials. All you really need are patience and time to learn the stuff.
Alternatively, we could have a "design an icon/mascot" competition and include Bisqwit's in the poll. Just so we can see what others can come up with ;-)
Can Frame Advance be used to figure out the exact likelihood of outcomes?
In a word, yes. You can try a random event on every possible RNG state and record the probabilities. You'd use frame advance to make sure your inputs are precise. The way you've phrased this question, it seems like you're asking about reverse-engineering the pseudorandom number generator, which has little to do with frame advance, but which is often a part of what goes into producing a quality TAS.
But you probably don't need to go into that much depth.
Assuming that the probability is frame-dependant, how do I go about this?
Yes; the systems we TAS are "deterministic" meaning that doing the same things on the same frames will always produce the same results... I'm guessing you're just trying to manipulate a good dice roll/slot machine pull or whatever, and don't want a primer on reverse-engineering, so that FAQ link I just gave you should answer your questions. Feel free to post a follow-up question, in any case.
