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I'm not sure if this was already discovered or not, but I discovered a strange glitch where a toad can keep taking damage without losing any health. It seems that the toad keeps alternating between a health value of 35 and 39. This can be seen in the following video, and via the following movie. Note that I've only tested this on the PAL version, so idk if it works in NTSC.
Link to videohttps://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638427841080321039
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TiKevin83 wrote:
This is so cool! I had worked on TASing Enters the Race but didn't have an obvious path toward manipulating the RNG needed at the start of the race - if you crash into someone immediately at the race start you can instantly accelerate to the maximum speed, so you need RNG to put another car close enough to you for that to happen faster than the RTA record.
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ViGadeomes wrote:
Hello there, I made a movie back in late 2020 of the game which is 60 frames faster than this submission with the same IGT found here: User movie #638257216678082214. The movie was made on 2.5.2 so the SHA1 seems to not match but it is the same ROM used in this submission.
I've never submitted it because I was struggling with different inputs on the TAS that led to a slower time, I had hypothesis but I needed to find the RAM value of the position of the car to understand but never quite understood back in the day how to find this value if it exists. That's why I let it on my computer and never touched it since.
I also started a TAS of Bedlam but never finished a complete version.
I changed the end of my TAS to produce this movie: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638257591633501722
This movie has a marginally faster real-time ending compared to your TAS, which it does by just ending input early (it also has the "End" screen appear 12 frames sooner than in your TAS). Regardless, it has the same in-game-time...
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Randomno wrote:
People should look into TASing more of the remaining games!
Any suggestions?
This video provides a review of every official Vectrex game in alphabetical order, in about 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKf-k2IjUOo&ab_channel=FrameRater
I'm planning to TAS Cosmic Chasm next, myself.
Some other games from this list that people could try TASing are:
1. AnimAction (you can draw things and make them move across screen - a great game for a TAS play-around by someone artistic - if you can get the lightpen to work with TASes of the game)
2. Bedlam (Flying around space and shooting the walls to expand them. may or may not be a definite ending to this game, though).
3. Berzerk (also not sure if this game has a definite end point/max score. Similar to the version that exists for Arcade/Atari2600 where you shoot all enemies in a room).
4. Blitz! Action Football (now that the triviality requirement for TASes is removed, this could be TASed).
5. Clean Sweep (PacMan but with Vaccum Cleaners and Money - what more could you possibly want?!?!?)
6. Heads Up Action Soccer (could make for a funny meme TAS, but other than that, would be kind of bad to TAS).
7. Minestorm (like Asteroids, except It crashes at level 13, so you could consider that the ending).
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Another example: in Battletoads, the player can hit the level-end trigger after dying (with their corpse). Would this be allowed in a glitchless playthrough?
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Realistically, since this game doesn't have a clear (reachable) ending, I don't think that it should be published. In this case, I think this should just be considered an incomplete and unbeatable game.
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feos wrote:
Lobsterzelda wrote:
I had a question about the game Cabbage Patch Kids for Colecovision. For this game, there are 10 screens per level, and there are 100 levels before the credits are displayed on screen. Aside from the credits, I think that unique content stops by level 5. What is the best endpoint for this game?
For games with a conventional ending, that ending is where it should end.
Technically, you can continue playing indefinitely after level 100 and nothing changes - but yeah, that makes sense to me (I figured level 100 is probably the most logical ending).
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I had a question about the game Cabbage Patch Kids for Colecovision. For this game, there are 10 screens per level, and there are 100 levels before the credits are displayed on screen. Aside from the credits, I think that unique content stops by level 5. What is the best endpoint for this game?
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Randomno wrote:
I started a spreadsheet here. It's adapted from this list. Documenting every AVGN game reviewed is quite a lot of work. The spreadsheet needs the games separated into rows and then a link to TASVideos's game entry.
You know, I could have sworn that I'd TASed some AVGN games that were on Colecovision. Then, I looked through my movie publications and discovered much to my surprise that I've TASed the Atari 2600 version of several games on this list, but I've never TASed any Colecovision game whatsoever. Who knew?!?!?!?
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...In any event, focusing on the movie at hand...
Some parts of the TAS (like the out-of-bounds clips) were cool, but I didn't find the movie to be very entertaining as a whole. How short the movie was and the fact that so much of the original hack was cut off likely contributed to this movie being less entertaining than other SMB/SMB Hack TASes.
Therefore, voting no.
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HappyLee wrote:
feos wrote:
It's impossible to have rules set in stone and to expect users to remain happy about them. So because users are higher priority for us, we always try to make our rules make the most sense. And to accomplish this, we rely on the best thing we have available: community consensus.
We discuss things together with our users, we brainstorm, we come up with solutions, and we implement those solutions if there's a balanced agreement about it. Which means it meets expectations of different sides. This is basically what I've been doing here for years.
Well said, but in this case, the rules are changed by the judge Samsara before community consensus was reached. My TAS was targeted by the new rule change, so I'm not satisfied, and then I got threatened and the topic got locked.
That doesn't seem friendly at all to me. I was targeted and my TAS would be rejected for this. A judge changed the MovieRules just to reject my TAS, how should this be allowed?
Movies which use level-select codes or passwords are more the exception than the norm when it comes to TASes on this site. In other words, there needs to be a good reason why the level-select/password should be allowed to be used, as opposed to it being OK by default. This applies to all movies which use passwords (which are few and far between to begin with, since it doesn't make sense to use passwords for TASes of most games).
Also, consensus on not allowing passwords is probably pretty uniform across the board here. I would be opposed to using a level-select code here, for example, and I imagine that if a poll was made on this topic, about ~90% of people on the site would probably agree with me.
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I'm looking for some help with creating a formula for the following situation:
Suppose that a script exists which can alter an input value based on a user's request (and the input is 1 byte, storing values between 0 - 255).
The User can alter the following parameters, and the script will alter (or choose not to alter) the input on each frame relative to its initial starting value, which will always be 128 for this example:
------------------------------------------
1. lowerSubtractionLimit - the maximum amount that could be subtracted from the input
2. upperAdditionLimit - the maximum amount could be added to the input
3. probabilityOfRandomInput - the probability (between 0 - 1) that the input is changed at all from it's starting value.
4. currentValue - a constant, which in this case is always 128 (not specified by the user).
For simplicity sake, I'll define the following 2 additional variables, which will effectively replace the first 2:
1. lowestPossibleValue - equals 128 minus lowerSubtractionLimit. This represents the lowest possible input that could be selected to replace the current one (even if it's less than 0)
2. highestPossibleValue - equals 128 plus upperAdditionLimit. This represents the highest possible input that could be selected to replace the current one (even if it's greater than 255)
--------------------------------------------
After the user selects the values for the non-constant variables, the following logic is applied on each frame in a while loop:
while TRUE
1. A random number is selected, which has the same percent chance of being in a specified range as probabilityOfRandomInput has (ex. if this value is 0.23, then there is a 23% chance that the random number is in the specified range). If the number isn't in the specified range, then the input is unchanged (i.e. it remains 128), and we skip ahead to step 6. Otherwise, we go to step 2.
2. A SECOND random number is now selected, which is a random number in the range of abs(highestPossibleValue) + abs(lowestPossibleValue). This number is then added to the lowestPossibleValue to get the final value that we want to set the input to. We'll call this "newValue".
3. If newValue is less than 0, then it is set to 0.
4. If newValue is greater than 255, then it is set to 255.
5. We now set the input equal to newValue.
6. FRAME ADVANCE HERE
END
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final Question:
In terms of lowestPossibleValue, highestPossibleValue and probabilityOfRandomInput, what is the formula to calculate the expected average value of the input after running the above logic for many frames?
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This movie isn't very entertaining to watch. Generally, a TAS of a mod is supposed to make for a more challenging/interesting playthrough of the game. However, this TAS features a ton of waiting for random frame rules - which makes the mod much less entertaining than the original game! The gameplay and the TAS itself also don't have very much entertainment value - the one part of this TAS that I liked was at 1:57 in your encode where you mashed swim to make Mario bump his head against the ceiling and make a buzzing noise. That was kind of funny.
Optimization isn't particularly good. I'm kind of skeptical that this TAS couldn't be over 3 seconds faster, but I'm too lazy to actually test that out. I guess the most I can say is that it doesn't look very technically impressive (although I do admit, that's kind of a subjective measure for a lot of TASes - so take this with a grain of salt).
Overall, voting no, because I was bored watching this TAS.
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itsPersonnal wrote:
All new Cheat% TAS dropping this Thursday, Oct 13th, most optimized TAS of BfBB by wide margin. Sub minute end-time if loads times are converted to Xbox length (TAS was made on Gamecube emu because better tools, despite slower loads). Stay tuned...
Are you planning to submit this TAS to the site now?
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CoolKirby wrote:
I didn't find it as interesting as I thought I would. I think it's the pacing, with space sections, airswims, ladders, and some movement all being slow.
Fair enough. I suppose the many cutscenes and backtracking have the potential to make this movie feel slow/with a lot of waiting for some people. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to watch/vote on my movie!
Also,
CoolKirby wrote:
I liked the time you carried your pink eye state to another save file with ESW
I've never heard someone refer to Fox having a Krazoa Spirit as his pink eye state, lmao! I'm going to have to start calling it that from now on! XD
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I was kind of hoping my movie would have gotten more feedback in the thread/votes by now (but I think a lot of people didn’t watch it because of how long it is).
As such, since no one has posted to this thread in over a month, I’m posting here in the hopes that more people will watch the movie and vote either yes or no (you don’t need to read the full submission or watch the full movie to vote, btw - you can just skim through the movie for a few minutes to see if you like it or not).
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TheAmazingAladdin wrote:
Dolphin on my PC was nearly finishing the TAS playback around 80000 to 100000 input frames when suddenly a blue screen of death appeared with error code: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
Yeah, I once got a blue screen of death while playing back a TAS on Dolphin. It's pretty rare though - I think I've had it happen like twice in the last year and a half. If you try playing the TAS back again from power-on, the odds are it'll play to completion with no issues this time.
EDIT: Actually, I just noticed that you're playing the TAS back on the wrong version of Dolphin. It needs to be version 5.0-13963.
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TheAmazingAladdin wrote:
Rendering Error?
You’d think so, but this is actually what it looks like on console as well! This area loads as rainbow boxes due to us getting the camera out-of-bounds in the previous area, which causes the game to fail to load objects in the next map. The same thing happens to speedrunners of the game (the game is programmed to use rainbow boxes as a default placeholder when it fails to load an object).
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Very nice movie! I liked the optimization of grabbing the ladders as you went by to warp to the left/right a little faster.
Also, the absurd mid-air block spawn/jump combos were really good.
The cherry on top was the glitch to get out-of-bounds at the end of the movie and then walking through the random jumbled text until you reached the final boss!
It's a yes vote from me, and I also think that this is one of the best NES TASes of the year!
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Is there a reason you didn't tried to create the warp 2 levels ahead object?
edit: my question applies for the warpless TAS aswell [4267] NES Battletoads "warpless, 2 players" by Lobsterzelda in 19:15.11, which also does the "go to next level" ABSTUDLR trick.
edit2: Because of the short "payload" part of memory corrupting in the any% TAS, I've only tried to warp 2 levels ahead with very limited possibilities. I believe it's possible to fix the remaining object slots and jump to a desired PC point.
I did look into this. To see my research into this glitch, you can check out the Battletoads thread starting on this page: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=196&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=450
Basically, it's already known how to get PC to arbitrarily jump to go ahead 2 levels, but this is too similar to the GEG glitch for it to make sense to allow this in any other category - similar to how most games ban ACE for all categories except for any%.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to actually spawn and hit the warp portal to advance forwards 2 levels - but I never could find a way to make it work. I even put a $50 bounty on finding this trick! (although the bounty expired without being claimed at the end of 2020).
The main thing we need is a way to consistently get a non-zero value to be stored in address 0X21 - and this has to have some value that can act as an object ID value (which is the majority of possible values). 0X21 holds temporary values, but it's very hard to manipulate it to not just have zero stored in it, and I haven't found a good way to do that.
I would welcome anyone finding a way to spawn and hit the level warp object, and if they can find a replicable way to do so, I would still pay out the $50 bounty in any event.
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Hello everyone.
I'm making a follow-up post to announce that Zachary Cannon discovered a way to get ground quake early using complex zone-loading manipulation to despawn the door in front of GQ.
As a result of this, we can now skip getting the first spell stone, the moon mountain pass key, and the ice blaster entirely! This will all save 15 minutes over the old TAS of the game in this segment.
Here is Zac's video showing the GQ door skip below:
Link to video
