Posts for Flip


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Personally I find it far more entertaining to call the main character 'Link' so the dialogue works properly, rather than calling him 'A' and saving half a second typing it in. That's certainly one speed/entertainment trade off which I'd like more people to consider, giving proper names to your character.
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An 8x8 board has 2 diagonally opposite corners removed. Try to cover the remaining board with 1x2 rectangles, or prove impossible.
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Any% Segmented Speed Run in 3:09:54 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egqhy_AHcpY Faster than the 3:56 record on SDA
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Apologies for the Great Wall of Text, but I have quite a lot to say here. Assuming you get what I'm talking about, future comments will be a lot quicker. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say it's great to see this being worked on again, I for one am excited to see what a TAS of an RTS would be like. With games like this though, it's certainly annoying to see the repercussions of every single action you take, to see which ones actually do end up saving time. What you need to consider for these levels is what event are you actually waiting for (IE which events take the longest), and only focus on trying to reduce the time of that particular action; since everything else happening meanwhile is almost irrelevant. Here's my take on the levels so far: Level 1: Now, we need a total of 4 buildings, but does producing farms/barracks enable us to hasten our goal of producing more buildings? The answer here (on level 1 at least) is 'no', since we don't need grunts nor do we need more farms to produce peons. Since the level is only complete once the 4th building is done, it essentially renders it totally irrelevant when buildings 1-3 are contructed. Delaying those buildings will not effect your final time, that's what you need to understand. After all, 1 peon making 1 building per minute, has the same outcome of 4 peons making 4 buildings in the 4th minute. The final time is still 4 mins, so to work out which strategy is better you gotta consider what else is happening meanwhile. The thing is, what's holding us back right now is resources. Oddly enough we can only build once we have the cash, and by sacrificing a peon for construction, you have now effectively lowered your income rate, thus delaying the earliest opportunity available to build the final farm. I'd say it's much better, to have the peons gather ALL of your resources first, and then get them all to build. (Naturally this is a bad idea on future levels, since you'd need more income for other things, and no doubt you'd need to train grunts, and thus need barracks early). But like I said, try to figure out what you're actually waiting for, and what can be done to improve it. For example on level 1, I notice the final resource you collect is lumber, so that's our current time blockade that we need shifting. Very easy solution, considering you only started collecting lumber quite late into the level; so just send a peon a bit sooner. Level 2: OK, get Zul'jin to the circle of power, so it's only him you need to worry about really. Make sure he takes the most efficient path possible (it's nice how going diagonal doesn't change speed), and everything else which is going on won't matter that much. The rescue so far looks kinda clumsy, since all the other ugly trolls get in the way of his escape, and he has to linger around his prison walls for a bit. It seems you don't get much use out of the grunts either, apart from using some to destroy the first wall. I would say for an improvement to this level you need to create another escape route, so here's 3 suggestions How about getting the grunts to destroy not only 1 wall section, but the adjacent one too? It'll automatically be weakened by the destruction of the original section anyway, and it's provide an ever so slightly faster escape for ZJ. Maybe you could even use the new trolls to destroy the wall once acquired? Naturally there's not a big time window there, gotta make ZJ move, while commanding the other trolls to attack, and then coordinate ZJ again to get through the new gap, while the payoff is only a mere 1 square saved, but there's one idea. Another would be to send the remaining grunts (and again, trolls once active) to destroy the top left corner of the prison. Get 3 grunts to destroy the first wall, and then claim the trolls, while you send the other grunts ahead to destroy the top wall. You could then even use the trolls to help destroy that wall section, while ZJ moves closer to it. No doubt that could be faster than using the right hand exit, then scrambling all the way around? Thirdly would be to sent the grunts to the end, to destroy an Orc wall. You gotta admit, that first wall you come across would be more convenient to go straight through rather than go around it. Level 3: When you built the final oil rig, you had 1500g. That's 1500g too much as far as I'm concerned. Clearly you weren't waiting for resources at that point, so that's not the problem. You weren't waiting for any previous buildings to be completed, or waiting for a nearby oil tanker to be ready, so that's not the problem either. What was slowing you down here was the fact there was a human oil platform there, and so to improve the time what you need to do is figure out a way of destroying it faster. But considering you had 1500g, I'm sure that could have been put to good use. When you have enough gold, reassign a few workers to get them to chop instead. Then train another demolisher, and get that platform down quicker. Level 4: It was mentioned earlier that you could put your units at the spawn location for the great hall, forcing peons to appear slightly closer to where you want them, did you look into that? I know at the start you use your army to destroy ships, but may I remind you that your shipyard isn't up yet, and so the ships are in no way a threat to you. You can delay killing them for a bit without consequence, so using your army in this way could give you faster income. When you finally did start your shipyard, you had a hell of a lot of gold, and a lot of peons. No doubt you could assign more than 1 to 'repairing' it? The more the better, since resource is not your limiting factor here, so make full use of it. I saw you always had at least 100+ lumber up, and so you can assign another peasant to repairing I reckon. Building Barracks on the island? Genius. Getting spammed with 'not enough gold' when you have idiotic peons gathering 1000+ lumber that you clearly don't want? Stupid. Reassign some lumberjacks to gold miners later on, and that wont be a problem. Also, there was a lot of lingering on the island, what gives? You have an army, USE IT. Ogrim Doomhammer would be ashamed.
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A cylindrical hole, 6cm deep is drilled through the middle of a solid sphere. Find the remaining volume in the sphere. You may find this page useful.
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The loot after the cabin fight doesn't disappear as soon the chapter finishes IIRC, it'll still linger outside for the duration of its normal despawn timer. So that means even if you're planning on killing the ganados outside by headshotting them, you can still get the cash afterwards (or maybe just the last wave, depending on how long the fight lasts).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player (1535)
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Good run, the occasional error, but still some improvements to be made. On the last boss as soon as Sonic says "I'm not done with you yet", he drops his defenses, so you can attack him then. No need to wait for the animation first, if you start a superspin and release as soon as he begins to speak, you can hit him before he finishes talking. Plus you can trigger Sonic casting the spell slightly earlier if you just run in the opposite direction to him, since he casts it once you're a certain distance away. If anybody gets bored, feel free to do a TAS of that fight.
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Welcome to the world of TASing. What you just described happens to every TASer, on every TAS. I'm sure in the long run those lost 4 hours wont be that much, especially considering that during that time you've learned what strategy you need to use in this section; so it's not 'down the drain' as you put it.
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Here's one which is easy enough to find online solutions to, but don't cheat. Show algebraically that when you have an Ultra Metric, IE a distance function satisfying D(x,z)<=Max{D(x,y), D(y,z)}, then: 1-All triangles are isosceles. 2-Any point in an open/closed ball can be regarded as the center of that ball.
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While watching that video in the thread, I kept pointing to the screen shouting 'AWESOME!'. Glad to see a cool glitch like that being used.
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K, nice wip. But you can do double jumps against walls, so you didn't need to climb the ledge for the first skateboard piece 20 secs in. Plus when skitching, grinding etc I'd like to see perfect balance please, otherwise it's harder to get drawn into the TAS nature of the run. Btw, I look forward to seeing a run of Hangover Cure in Moscow, that was my favourite goal in the game.
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Say it takes a normal player 4 hours to do a game, you could put a trigger in the game which makes the last boss only appear after 3 hours of gametime, so would normally go unnoticed. Now imagine a TAS. If gets through the game in 50 mins, well that'd be totally pointless since you'd be forced to wait for that last boss anyway; which I'm sure any real-time run could also achieve by then. Easy way to obsolete the need for TASes.
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You can find a TAS on the PS2 version here: http://www.nicozon.net/watch/sm11584873 final time 1:48:07. Since it's on the (ugly) PS2 version, the TMP+Stock glitch isn't used, but instead the big boulder before Dos Gigante gets skipped.
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Well I've finally concluded I'm not gonna get around to finishing it, so here's an old Wip for those interested plus some known improvements. http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/674312144/Sonic%20Spinball.gmv Improvements so far are using only 3 bounces on level 1, and a few frames saved on level 2. Not in the wip yet, but there's a few nice improvements in level 3: http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/867/sonicspinball000.png http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/9418/sonicspinball001.png http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/2759/sonicspinball002a.png First the much better opening strat, you can bounce off the left flipper, into the right bumper and that'll get you down that left hand tube a lot faster, and with some initial speed too. For a better refinement, you can clip off that red shocker thing for even more speed. In fact, if you do this properly, you'll have enough speed at the bottom to be able to bounce straight up to the above flipper, without using those steam piston things, which is always nice. Haven't found anything else in the main route, but the boss can be improved by launching sonic over the machine and getting him stuck bouncing parallel to the tube. http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/8903/sonicspinball003a.png Finally on level 4, a better method for getting the emeralds on the sides. These techniques have a few quirks needed to be worked out still; as I said I never got round to finishing them, but there's certainly improvements to the current run.
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The condition n<k isnt quite right, the case n-1=k still works, corresponding to the minimum working value of X, so the restriction needs to be n-1<= k. k can still be made arbitrarily high, since a working dice combination can be done using the general formula (1,1,1, ... ,1, k-n+2) This gives X=k, as long as k>=n-1 as claimed.
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Well it'd certainly be impressive for a real time run, but I doubt you could do Wild Canyon like that in a non TAS. Speaking of which, anybody have perfect knowledge on how the treasure hunter levels work? I was under the impression that all 3 emeralds existed on the map from the very start of the level, so either it's different in that version or he just took an extremely inefficient route to get them all. Assuming you can't manipulate all three into being right next to each other at the start (it always dumps one in each main area doesnt it?) then I'd presume collecting them the normal way would be faster than abusing death resets. As long as you make sure the ones you do get are the closest of their respective areas, then it'd woudnt be too bad. Well, other than on the huge ones like Mad Space/Meteor herd of course, then I'm sure two deaths would be faster than searching the planets for them.
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The only thing you're missing from the boss fight is shooting the Tuba out of the Magnet. The sooner you do that, the sooner the magnet turns around, and the sooner it brings back a crate for the boss. You let it reach halfway along the line at the moment, ought to get it as soon as it enters the screen.
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Funny Wip, I liked the the new miniboss strat, but have you checked out all of the old test runs on this? Sadly there is no 1 movie to compare your run to, since everybody seems to have come up with their own unique improvements; but there are certainly ones you've missed. I believe mine has the fastest opening, it's 22 frames faster crossing the first chain, and 4 frames faster on the tyre bounce.
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http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/610243085/Earthworm%20Jim%201.gmv First 3 levels done. A couple of improvements on level 2, like a boost off the ramp, damage boost from spikes, jumping over a gate, running across emeralds properly and a faster boss fight. Still unsatisfied with the boss though, and gonna have to redo it. It's far from perfect, I've yet to determine how the timing of Evil's gunshots work, I just tried random jumping so it's far from perfect.
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Wow, very nice glitch. Yay at another Rockman 2 run being made!
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OK, looks like I wasnt paying too much attention here, took me quite a while to realise that there were 2 submissions. With the cross of improvements between the two movies, does this mean that there are still improvement to be made?
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I was gonna do a run, but that Wip completely demolishes the quality I was aiming for. Very nice exploits on the levels, keep it up
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Desynchs for me at Spirit Temple boss, cant get it any further right now. It's still further that the average Zelda run gets to on Mupen though :). Although there were new glitches and many improvements to the current run, it didnt stop me from feeling somewhat disappointed. The problem with the current any% run is that it skips too much of the game, so there goes all the fun. Great news when this run was accounced, or so you'd think. Granted you collected all the stones and medallians, but you used too many glitches in order to do so. It still skips too much of the game, and makes me wonder why you bothered in the first place. Water temple especially. I was looking forward to seeing how fast you could defeat Dark link, but disappointed to realise all of the water temple could be skipped anyway. This seems more like a helpful glitch video, a demonstration of how broken each dungeon can be, rather than a meaningful run intended for submission. Basically I prefer the 120 star run over the 0 star one, and dont see why there should be a 70 star version. But then again, thinking about it now I cant imagine what actually would satisfy me. I'd like to see all rooms of the temples get TAS'd, so each puzzle or group of mobs getting done quickly, and then completing each room of a temple in the intended order. But then trying to define such a run will cause even more problems. There's debates about dungeon map, compass, skultula rooms, and which glitches are allowed. Collecting the boss key in the spirit temple for example, it may be a minor glitch but it still renders all the puzzles in the room pointless. So a confused status on this run really
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Very nice stuff, try pausing E.Gadd on 0:40 and it looks like he's smoking a cigar, lol. And speaking of a program to convert pictures into automatic Mario Paint problems, I know of a similar one existing: http://www.mkdsc.com/decalmaker.php That one gets used to convert picture files to help create Mario Kart:DS logos, converting them to the correct resolution and colour sets. Not much use, but I'd thought I'd post it anyway. If you're gonna do future pictures, lets see a Wind Waker picture. The cartoony graphics would make it easy enough to convert to a stunning picture I bet http://www.gccafe.com/news/media/staff/Images/NTR_ZeldaDS_char01.jpg
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Hmmm, to me that's further proof of how inappropriate MP1 is for a TAS. Nearly an hour long just for the minigames, and with a really anti-climatic ending. No fancy animations or credits, so kinda dull. The alternative MP1 TAS is of course the regular single player mode, which would pretty much be the same thing just with a few dice rolls in between. Either way not too impressive. I'm still glad somebody finally had a shot at it though, or else we would never know
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