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Hi, thanks for asking!
We're working on it, but it's a lot more effort than expected. At our current pace it's gonna take at least another few weeks until the TAS is finished.
The main source for this lies in the routing: In which level do we take an item with us, and where do we use it? In order to get a satisfactory answer, we tas most of the stages in multiple ways (differently, depending on the route).
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Wow, what a timing to come back to this site after such a long time!
It's a bouncing ball game sumbission! And it's from brunovalads! :D
Thanks for the encouragement! Amazing Lua-script btw, as always!
After playing around a bit, it appears that unused items get carried to the next level. Taking the item from level 3 and using it in level 6 saves some great time. I used your input up to level 3 and and with an unoptimized continuation until level 6, it came out 255 frames faster! -> Userfile
There are other levels where doing this seems promising.
It's totally a reverse-dejavu! Sorry, I can't help but ask: Do you want to team up like the first time and look for further improvements?
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Updated it. I hope you can edit the submission text now too, so you can add or change what you feel fitting :)
If you can't, then a judge or similar should give you the permission, unfortunately idk how this really works.
If you have any screenshot suggestions, feel free to add them :)
and a judge should change the movie file ofc :)
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Hell yeah! Great stuff!!
Since you wrote "WIP" in the userfile; if you want to continue working on this, I will just cancel this submission, this way you don't have to worry about time trouble or similar things :)
I'm probably not gonna work on this anymore (i kinda have to concentrate on other stuff), so i leave it up to you.
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Yoo very nice improvement! I tried changing the route at the end a bit more as that one shot coming from above at the end was a bit in the way and found four more frames. There's probably still more to save...
Userfile: User movie #637899393648723554
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Yes, it can be left wide! I've added this variant to the userfiles.
Here is an encode (I've also added it to the submission-page)
Link to video
Actually, i think i like this new variant more then the submitted one. If more people / the judge think(s) this is the case, it would probably be best to change the movie-file.
Thanks for the suggestion! :D
(minor) edit: typo, and removed a colon
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Yo, thanks a bunch!
Seems like we have a common interest in A2600 games :) If you want to, we can collab on a project sometime! (rn my time is rather limited :/ but in general i'm open for it :) ).
Btw, If you ever find yourself working on Miniature Golf or Skateboardin, feel free to dm me or to create a forum post about it! :) At the moment (for some months now) I've paused progress on both these games, and haven't uploaded any userfiles yet, since progress is either too little or too inevitable, so it probably wouldn't make much sense.
btw, there might be quite some frames to save just with the tech alone in this game by finding a better path. I haven't investigated it all too much ;) so feel free to still look into this!
(minor) edit: deleted some parenthesis, which made the readability worse.
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Hey, time to revive this 9 year old thread!
I got some free time on my hands, and played around with the current movie a bit and discovered a usefull tech (which is well known actually...)! When toggling the difficulty-switch, the lazer cannon (=player) changes its size! This alone probably wouldn't change much for us though, but the important part is, that the cannon isn't centered at the middle (where the lazer-shots come from), but at the very left of the sprite, thus pushing the lazer-shot-origin slightly to the right when expanding - which turns out to be very powerfull :)
I made a movie with this knowledge, but instead of using the
, i had more luck / got better results with the
strategy ;)
To be fair though, i didn't exhaustively look into both ways to approach this. So I encourage others/you to test these and other strategies if they/you feel like it!
That being said, my movie seems pretty improvable to me tbh... since it's quite chaotic and idk which of the strategies TASeditor presented actually is faster. The "probably fastest" one seems good, since managing the time between shots is better doable, but on the other hand the distance between the player and the invaders never becomes as short as in the "obviously slower" version...
My guess is, that some sort of a mix of both strategies is probably winning. I'm thinking of maybe something along these lines:
(Don't take the numbering too seriously, it's just an outline of what i have in mind.) This would allow for a faster descent of the invaders, while being able to manage the time in between shots better. OR i'm totally mistaken here, which might also be the case. I guess someone needs to try, to see if this is any good.
I think a good way to aproach this, is to first test which sequence of shooting the invaders in one column (with or without the uppermost one) is the fastest way of dealing with them (assuming there is a concrete fastest sequence).
Since I do have these improvements in mind, i won't yet submit my run as long as someone else or i haven't tried different strategies (like the ones suggested in this thread). I doubt I'll work on it the next days though, so until progress is made another 9 years might elapse, if no one else picks this up.
I'd also love to see some other game modes of this game TASed! Especially modes 1-8, 33-40 and 49-56 seem to be interesting for for TASing purposes. For reference, look at pages 4, 5 and 7 in this manual.
Here is an encode btw:
Link to video
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Thanks Spikestuff for filling in our real names :)
I didn't know whether I should add them, because they weren't fully attached in the previous submission.
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The fact that you submitted this yesterday, thus 361 days before Christmas, is really quite amusing :)
For me, this TAS was very relaxing to watch. The movement is really smooth and DUDE your lua scripts are MASSIVE! All in all a Yes from me.
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I really enjoyed watching the WIPs you posted from time to time. Now seeing the full movie was really amazing. The usage of the chain looks so extreme and so fast :D
Great run, easy yes vote :)
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I really enjoyed this movie.
I have to admit, that this was the first time watching a full playthrough of this game, since the other two submissions essentially featured no real gameplay haha.
The movement always looked really tight, and the pace of the game overall seemed quite fast, due to the very fast transitions between screens/levels.
Yes vote on entertainment from me :)
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Well, watching this was nothing less than a godlike delight! 20 minutes flew by like nothing.
Thank you very much for sharing! This is amazing, I'd love to see more of this eventually :D
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Yeah, I also don't expect console verifications to ever be the main files/movies for judges to work with. I never ever had something to do with console verifications, but it sounds like a LOT of work and thus it sound impossible to establish this as a casual thing for all end every movie.
I was just thinking about the ones that have such a console verification and how to deal with movies like these.
Wow, this is epic! I never knew about this website, this is amazing :D
Thanks, I'll look into the other thread adressed by you ^^
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Hm.. Yep, yep, the thing with the resets is hard, because it is literally impossible to verifie them in one single sitting. But from a tas-timing perspective it seems acceptable to add all the individual files up and go with the sum of these, doesn't it?
Isn't the purpose of making encodes the publication of a run? I don't understand why these exact encodes should be the main focus point when it comes to vailtity of a tas.
Furthermore, although I don't know how how he did it, TiKevin83 uploaded some very good looking movies of console verifications recently.
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Well then it seems to me as if verification on these consoles is pretty much impossible...
On consoles, where it is still very possible though, console verification just seems to be way more absolute then verification on an emulator.
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If I might throw my oppinion in: I'd say because consoles are the "real deal". Emulators aren't the real deal. They AIM to be the real deal, but in the end they aren't.
Another thing: http://tasvideos.org/ConsoleVerifiedMovies.html:
I totaly take Warp's side here.
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Alright, since this topic wouldn't go off my mind recently, I did more research on these two games. Now I absolutely feel like I have to apologize for some things I said before.
So first of all, I was confused and all in all rather harsh in general, so I apologise for that. Of course I can't undo, what I have done, so take this post as somewhat of a compensation.
The one part, that I constantly was thinking about was this one:
Now I think I definitely need to correct myself in some way here. After some more research if totaly feels to me like the two games are in a pretty similar relationship as the original NES Super Mario Bros games and the SNES Super Mario All Stars games. (or even the GBA Advance series, but I think the SNES series comes closer).
After searching for these games on this site, I realized they all were treated differently. Therefore I think this should totaly be the case for this game (and all the other Konami Collection games) as well. I don't see any logical explanation, for why this series should be an exeption.
Although I still personally prefer the konami version over the original, simply because of the colors, this is absolutely no argument for letting this run of the original GB Castlevania The Adventure be rejected! Everybody has their own preferences and ours just are different ;)
(Again, I might be wrong with all of this and additionally, I'm very new here (so I kinda feel like, I shouldn't have posted anything in the first place), but nonetheless, this is my opinion on all of this now.)