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Hello everyone.
For a while, it was thought that you needed to use the ice blaster weapon to beat krazoa trial 5, since there are 2 flame walls which block your path forwards.
However, I was able to discover a way to get around them using just the ground quake, which can be seen in this video:
Link to video[/video]
Essentially, we can use the ground quake as we go over a platform's edge, and we'll get slightly suspended in midair. We can then ground quake again immediately after the last ground quake ends to advance forwards in midair without falling.
This room is especially brutal to get through without ice blaster because all jumping for the platforms in this room is disabled, except for the little edge of the platform which comes after the last of the 2 flames (in all other spots, you just fall off the edge).
Not only that, but Fox is disabled from being able to climb up/grab on to the walls, so even though we could roll past the flames at a height that would be high enough up to grab the other side, it doesn't work, since Fox just falls instead of grabbing the ledge.
To make this work, I had to roll at the very farthest point I could get to with this amount of magic I have, and then have fox's ankles be slightly below the platform top while fox is more than half-way inside the wall, which causes the game to push Fox up onto the platform instead of outwards like it usually does.
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Note that this trick represents 1/2 of a sequence break. Normally, we need to get the ice blaster because of this room. To get the ice blaster, we have to get spellstone 1, and do a bunch of other stuff.
The issue with what I found? Getting the ground quake normally requires getting ice blaster first, which of course negates any timesave possibilities.
However, we are very close to finding a way to get ground quake early, which would make this sequence break complete (and would probably save 10-15 minutes in the upcoming TAS of this game that I'm working on).
Just yesterday, Zachary Cannon was able to perform a glitch which corrupted the map of Moon Mountain Pass (where the Ground Quake upgrade is). This allowed him to unload the door that blocks the upgrade, but it also unfortunately unloaded the entrance to the hole where you get the ground quake.
We're still searching for a way to get the cave to load without the door loading - so hopefully we will have a way to use this trick to save time soon!
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If any potential glitch-hunters want to take a look at this game, now is a good time. This game has a memory leak glitch which can theoretically prevent some objects from loading, but it tends to either cause a crash or do nothing. There are also various other theoretical ideas for this trick which can be found here:
https://www.speedrun.com/sfa/thread/8ui24
If anyone is interested, you can post here or send me a private message, and I can provide you with what I know so far, along with tips on where to get memory-viewing resources and other things that would help with glitch-hunting
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As an aside, one dolphin developer mentioned in IRC that it was slightly more likely for a movie made with MMU enabled to desync as compared to a movie with MMU disabled. I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes (and it sounds like it only effects certain games), but I just wanted to bring that up here for consideration...
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feos wrote:
Since 5.0-11318, MMU must be explicitly enabled for TASes.
Go to Config -> Advanced and tick Enable MMU.
Just to clarify, is this post saying that MMU must be enabled for all future TASes on Dolphin? Or just that if you want to enable MMU for your TAS, you have to check it off in the settings?
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Snodeca wrote:
Why wouldn't it actually get published? Assuming it's a serious TAS, of course.
Because it probably either wouldn't be a serious TAS or wouldn't get made.
More realistically, there aren't enough TASers who make TASes for a particular system and are good at TASing for a publication to include 1000 authors. If that ever happened, it would likely occur in 200 years, as a result of a submission for a popular game being obsoleted by new movies by a frame (or handful of frames) occurring over many submissions. In other words, for the next 200 years, you probably won't see that happen (unless, as a social experiment, a TASer gave credit to a large group of people for a section of a TAS that they worked on, with other people providing suggestions for improvements and different inputs the TASer could use).
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With regards to the hypothetical 1000 author TAS, it's worth noting that a meme TAS with 1000 authors wouldn't actually get published, so it wouldn't be a real issue. Regardless, if it did happen, then a pastebin could be created with the authors' names, and the link to the pastebin could be in the description for the video on TASVideos youtube channel.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
"Growing" a virus is even easier than growing tobacco: all you need is your body.
What kind of Typhoid Mary is out there turning their body into a Coronavirus farm to try to grow as much of the virus as possible?!?!?!?!?
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
Replace "addictive" with "contagious" and replace "drugs" with "virus".
This doesn't make any sense. There's no pill you can take that will prevent you from smoking or cure a smoking addiction. There is a shot you can take which makes it virtually impossible to develop a serious case of covid-19.
ThunderAxe31 wrote:
I literally explained in my previous post why I consider smoking to not be a choice. Please read that post and tell me if you find any faulty logic in it.
Peer pressure is not the same as having no choice. There is pressure, both from others and society (ex. ads, TV etc.), but people still ultimately have the choice to start smoking or not start smoking. Also, having COVID isn't addictive. No one can't go 15 minutes without inhaling a rag of fluid suctioned out of a COVID patient's lungs in order to reinfect themselves with the virus. Therefore, this comparison makes no sense.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
I wonder how many people have already died from the day that tobacco was introduced to the masses, and how many will also die in the future. I'm serious when I say that I hope for tobacco to be banned.
I am opposed to banning any drugs for private use. For tobacco, this would be especially complicated since it's a plant that people can grow on their own, as opposed to a synthetic chemical (think about how many people grow their own weed... now imagine how many smokers will start growing their own tobacco when tobacco gets banned).
As an aside, tobacco is also probably one of the most addictive drugs, so this ban would be even less likely to work (how many other drugs exist where a person can't go 15 waking minutes without using it?)
In my view, the job of the government is to protect the people from external dangers, to protect the people from external tyranny, to protect the people from tyranny from within, to provide for justice, and to help to ensure that its citizens are free from hunger, thirst, homelessness, etc.
However, the government has neither the right nor the obligation to dictate that people can't make dangerous decisions which will only impact themselves. That decision rests with individuals alone.
Thus, government intervention on tobacco should solely focus on protecting other people from exposure to second-hand smoke (which laws in recent years in the US have done a relatively good job of in public buildings), not on stopping people from smoking altogether.
In order to stop people from starting to smoke altogether, the best strategy is to educate people about the harmfulness of smoking. Beyond that, whether or not a person smokes comes down to their personal choice.
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Warp wrote:
The problem here is that the death rates are low, and the vast, vast majority of people will not die of it.
There's other issues at play besides just death rates. You also have to consider the long-term negative health effects which are caused by COVID, especially in those who are part of the vulnerable population. Even if they don't die, it doesn't mean that everything is perfectly fine for them.
As an aside, I wouldn't call something which kills an additional 500K people in a year in the US compared to the normal yearly death toll to be a very low death rate. I mean, it's obviously not like the black plague or something where 25% of Europe's population was killed off, but it's still pretty bad compared to the baseline condition of there not being a current global pandemic.
Besides the impacts on people infected or killed, there's also broader societal issues caused by refusing vaccination. Namely, that while rates of infection are high, schools and various businesses will be forced to close or operate at severely reduced capacity. This has far-reaching negative impacts on society - enough so that anyone who has no contraindications towards being vaccinated and wants to enjoy the benefits of civil society (roads, schools, military, super markets, etc.) should be required to get the vaccine. Otherwise, they can go establish their own anti-vaxer community in the woods, and go build their own separate civilization from there.
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feos wrote:
What constitutes difficulty in this game?
Number of bombs per screen, and how fast enemies shoot.
On your second playthrough, you have less bombs on certain screens (indicated by the number of squares in the bottom right corner of the screen), and some of the enemies fire two shots in a row instead of just one. The third and fourth playthroughs of the game appear to be identical to the second playthrough of the game, so I don't think that the difficulty increases at all after the second loop through the game.
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Challenger wrote:
Now Lethal Enforcers is the only surviving 2004 run.
I might look into seeing if I can improve that run as well, but Idk if it's possible. The only idea I can think of would be to use 2 players to kill the bosses faster (since the game is a point-and-aim shooter where enemies appear at a pre-determined rate).
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DrD2k9 wrote:
I'm not sure if this is the same bug that Lobsterzelda is experiencing, but it sounds related.
In my case, the screen just stays black, and the game never appears on screen. If you start from a fresh download of BizHawk 2.6 and try downloading and playing the Pinball Rom, does it work the first time? Or is there some other firmware that you need to download first?
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So, how exactly does this core work?
I tried loading the Pinball ROM for the Odyssey 2. The emulator accepts the ROM, but the screen is just black after that, and every frame is a lag frame (this is on BizHawk 2.6). Am I missing something?
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IronSlayer wrote:
Note, of course, how desperate Samsara was to distract from all the disasters going on in California, all of which can be traced to progressive policies.
Where is your ideal state which has your ideal policies in it?
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Sand wrote:
When I last changed my password on the forum, I thought I was pasting in 64 characters, but the password input only accepted the first 32. The forum login page similarly took only the first 32 characters, so pasting my 64-character password worked to log in on the form. But the main site login page was taking all 64 characters, which didn't match the 32-byte password known by the forum.
I've shortened my password to 32 characters so I won't have this problem any more.
Dude... don't take this the wrong way, but, what could possibly be in your TASVideos account that's so confidential that you need a 64 character password to secure it? Lol!
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OK!
I finally finished both making all of my improvements to this TAS and updating my submission text. I also changed the encode in the submission text to be an encode of my new TAS which EZGames69 made.
In case you already watched my original submission and just want to know what is different in this new TAS, I will summarize it briefly:
1. In level 4, I got a gameover after killing the last UFO before the boss fight, which caused me to respawn right at the boss fight. This in turn saved about 4.5 seconds.
2. In level 6, I hit the shadow boss into the air on my 10th hit on him, and then hit him as he was hitting the ground, which prevented him from becoming invincible and smashing across the screen several times, which saved about 13 seconds.
Nothing else in this TAS was changed, so if you just want to see what's different, you can just check out those 2 parts.
Also, I don't really have the time or motivation to continue trying to improve this game. As such, if someone else wants to optimize this TAS even further, they'll have to figure out how to optimize this movie file on their own.
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Samsara wrote:
Are these improvements in the process of being implemented?
Yes. It took a little while, but i've finished improving level 4 (which resulted in me saving about 4.5 seconds over the current movie). I'm currently working on re-syncing level 5.
I should be able to finish in a day or two. Sorry about the delay, I've been too busy with midterms and school projects for the last month to have very much time for TASing!
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Koh1fds wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgdgWqBXYZQ
There is also this time save. Should work great with 2 players.
edit: honestly, i can see like 1 trillion small time saves still left on the table. I assume you can get close to 16 flat if you do everything optimal.
Aside from the level 4 gameover strat and the improved Shadow Boss fight, are there any other improvements possible in this TAS that save multiple seconds?
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Koh1fds wrote:
>Also, after every 10 hits, he becomes invincible and starts smashing back and forth across the screen.
You can skip that if you land 11th hit while he is in the air. It saves like 15 seconds or something
https://youtu.be/jv4IF3dt4Po?t=1068
edit: i didnt discovered it by the way
Whoah! Thank you for showing me this timesave! I'm going to go add it to the TAS later today or tomorrow.
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PJ wrote:
Quick question: years ago I theorized (and I think I talked to feos about it) that it'd be faster for a TAS to use Jimmy and one of the green toads instead of Billy/Pimple because they have less startup time on their jumps. For most of the run it wouldn't matter, but I think for some of the void jumps (like the long 3-2 pipe skip) and extended interdimensional sky jumping in stage 5, the startup time on the jump is preventing the camera from advancing. IIRC Pimple and Billy have *slightly* higher jumps, which is required to hit the switches in stage 3 from the ground, but I could be misremembering.
Could you elaborate on the character choice for me? Did we test it years ago and decide it didn't save time, or is there something else I'm overlooking?
Hi PJ! Actually, it's funny you mention that, because before I made this TAS, I had tried to make another TAS of this game which used Zitz instead of Pimple. However, I ended up abandoning it because Zitz can't hit the switches from the ground in level 3, so I would have had to wait about a second for Billy to catch up and hit the switch for me.
As far as other choices go, the reason why I chose these two characters is because I wanted one toad and one dragon, and Zitz couldn't be used for the aforementioned reason.
Based on that, there are 4 viable combinations of characters:
1. Pimple & Billy.
2. Pimple & Jimmy
3. Rash & Billy
4. Rash & Jimmy
As for why I chose Pimple & Jimmy, that was really just because it was the combination the old TAS used, so in order to be able to copy sections of the old TAS to use in the new TAS, I needed to use the same characters.
Other than that, I never tested out the merits of the other 3 possible character choices. Realistically, if Jimmy has a noticeably faster startup time for jumps, then it would probably save ~5 seconds or so over the course of the run, with most of that timesave coming from levels 3 and 5.
For my own part, i'll leave that as an exercise for the future TASer who wants to improve on this game (since changing characters would require several more months of work, and if that happened, this TAS wouldn't be finished until 2021 at the earliest).
