Posts for Lord_Tom

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Lord_Tom
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Ha! Great find! I just tested it and it saves *1 frame!* Also, killing the bug earlier made it not give missiles, so doing it that way could cost 3 extra missiles. Either way, 1 or 2 extra missile drops would need to be found somewhere for free. It's actually even faster (maybe 5 frames?) to just manipulate the bug into not being in your way when you go through, but I needed missiles (I originally did it this way, but came up short in Tourian), so I left the bug there.
Lord_Tom
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rrrggg...guess I should've proofread; was trying to get it in before going to sleep. Big of you to still vote yes, though ;) I don't see an edit button...can a submitter edit his/HER own text, or does one need to be an editor?
arflech wrote:
Lord Tom wrote:
As soon as Samus goes off the top of the screen, the game puts him
*her still, voted yes Also I noticed the correct gender is used elsewhere...
Lord_Tom
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mmbossman: Yes, I'll try to disclose as much as I can remember about how time was saved in the run comments. I'd be happy to help anyone working on an improvement to any of the runs if there's something that's not clear. Many of my improvements to platforming, etc, could be widely applicable to the 100%. Thanks for the well wishing on residency; only my 1st year is this bad...45 hours a week is outstanding, and a little depressing since I'm currently working a 30 hour shift! symbolic: I don't know in detail what you're referring to, but would certainly use whatever technique allowed for the fastest completion. I'm not intending to start such a run in the near future, however. If the any% took me a couple months, the 100% could take years...;)
Lord_Tom
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I'm currently on the zebetites/mother brain screen and am almost 30s ahead of the existing run. My current job (1st year medical resident) has me working 80 hours a week, which has slowed things down, but I'll finish in the next week or so nonetheless! Tourian has surprisingly proven to be the most interesting portion of the run. The existing run was just about frame perfect (I know, I mean as far as I can tell at least!) for the first two screens, but starting with the zig zag screen there were a bunch of little geometric, luck manipulation, lag reduction and sub-pixel positioning tricks I found that added up. As a side note, I'd intended to submit both the any% and 1-item runs simultaneously, but this game is way too time consuming, so the 1-item will have to wait for a new burst of time/energy...:(
Lord_Tom
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Almost done. I'm in the zig-zag vertical room in Tourian. There's a lot of luck manipulation and lag-reduction work here, so it's slow going. Those rings are really @*&% annoying.
Lord_Tom
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The zoomers can be killed using the regular beam without losing time; the 1st shot is upward on the earliest possible frame, then the jump is a little to the side to avoid getting hit before the second shot lands. This is very useful because it allows several frames on which to kill the enemy for item manipulation. A strange fact is that items from enemies killed using the normal beam (vs missile or ice beam) show up sooner because the death animation is MUCH shorter. It is possible to kill them using the ice beam without losing time, but there is only 1-2 frame leeway for item manipulation, and you'd have to then wait several frames for the item.
Lord_Tom
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Great question. It saves time b/c killing 1 metroid you can fire the ice beam at max range and the 1st missile a few frames later (thanks to zoizite's trick for this) while still running. Killing 2 metroids, the 1st missile is not fired until both are frozen. My testing showed that killing 2 metroids stops forward progress for about 84 frames. Killing 1 can stop progress for as little as 35-40 frames. The obvious question, then, is whether one can do without the extra missiles without losing more than half a second or so. As of the ice beam, I have 70 missiles left and, as far as I know, have only lost about 4 frames conserving missiles. In many places I save lag by using 2 beams instead of a missile to kill the crawling enemies in vertical shafts. By my calculations, as long as I can enter Tourian with 69 missiles it should be doable (20 for red doors, 5 for the metroid, 1 for the fire-missile-while-beam-is-in-the-air trick, 40 for zebetites, 33 for MB = 99; killing 1 metroid gives 30 = 69) And thanks for the encouragement...;P
Lord_Tom
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Still cranking along on the any %...finally got the ice beam, about 23s saved so far. Progress is slow in part b/c I'm trying a "missile conservation" strategy which should theoretically allow completion of Tourian killing only 1 metroid. Time savings is minimal (~30-40f) but I thought it'd be a cool (and quite difficult) departure.
Lord_Tom
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Hmm, I always liked this game on the PC. I'm thinking of doing a mayhem-only run after I finish Metroid. I haven't started playing around with the NES version yet, but was thinking some entertainment could come from using extra jobs in amusing ways that don't affect the time (e.g. make 1 lemming a builder so he lags well behind the pack, then blow him up just as the last lemming is saved). We'll see, though, 25 levels seems daunting...
Lord_Tom
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Loved the run, nice to see such a big improvement here! The off-stair glitch is especially sweet because the setup made me wonder what the heck was going on for several seconds before I noticed Simon levitating... Would you mind saying (or pointing me to) a few words on how the falling through floor and off-stairs glitches work?
Lord_Tom
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Is this not the game the kid is playing at the beginning of The Princess Bride? Great job on the run; much funnier than I thought it would be. Is there some method to glitching the pitcher off the mound?
Lord_Tom
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An impressive achievement, though a little hard on the eyes and ears. Would it be possible (at the emulator or .avi level) to pull a trick like Bisqwit did with klmz's SMB1 run and have different music playing with the sound effects intact? If it were, it would be nice to have an .avi with only 1 game's music output (or even MegaMan X's), with the sound fx from all. I've gathered that there are people on this site who are intimately familiar with at least the early MM's source code, so maybe ROM hacks to disable music in 5 of the 6 wouldn't be too hard? Just a random thought...
Lord_Tom
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A couple things with this title... 1. A few weeks ago, speeddemosarchive.com finally published a speedrun of LOTW, time of 30:06. The runner makes impressive use of the two jumping glitches I discovered (without crediting me, hmph!) and uses pretty much the same route I used in my 1st published run, corrected for console sanity. Incidentally, the guy beats the game w/o the Dragon Shield, which I never thought I'd see in a single-segment console run...bad ass! 2. If anyone is interested in attempting an improvement of the published run, let me know...I know of improvements that could be worth perhaps 20s or so, and have a wip that gets the glove about 2s faster. I'd love to see this game abused even more, but don't have the time to do it myself in the near future.
Lord_Tom
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As of the defeat of Kraid, I am about 20s ahead of Hero's run. About 2/3 of the time savings came from a much faster final drop into Kraid's lair (thanks in part to SpiderWaffle's suggestion of popping out of the wall just after morphing off the top of the screen) I expect to save another 2-5s in the rest of the run, but I'm taking my time hoping to discover as many savings as possible.
Lord_Tom
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Yes, the actual run is just past Kraid now. Now just trying to master the platforming mechanics for those long ascents...
Post subject: Re: #1957: Lord Tom's NES Rygar in 15:43.32
Lord_Tom
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Sorry for the long time to reply, I didn't realize people were still discussing this submission.
Warp wrote:
However, what I'm thinking is whether it's reasonable to use death as a shortcut in a warpless run... (I also cannot help to feel that using death as a shortcut was a "cheap" trick to get a much better time than walker boh, who made his run with the mindset that using death as a shortcut is not ok in a warpless run.)
After beating Dorago, I jump into the water to kill myself and save an event-free backtrack to the door between Garloz and Gran Mountain. As stated in the submission, this death abuse saves about a minute. You can call it a "cheap trick" if you like, but I don't see a huge difference between improving a movie by 4:43 vs by 3:43. I simply made the judgement that the community would prefer a movie that was a minute shorter rather than spend a minute watching Rygar run in the desert. And based on the apparent prevalence of ADHD among site-goers, this decision may well have saved lives...;) Andypro: Thanks, glad you liked it so much, though the star system is on hiatus.
Lord_Tom
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That is correct, however, only 3 bullets are allowed to be on the screen at once. CAD's demo fight which gets Kraid down to 44 hp gets into a pattern where Kraid takes 1 point of damage every 4 frames. It is on the frame where Kraid takes damage that the animation counter for his feet advances by 1. Hence, while he is being fired at every frame, he is still able to act at 1/4 speed relative to Samus. Kraid's bullets do not appear to fire in concert with his animation counter, but I have not found an independent counter that controls their action. Incidentally, missiles do 4 points damage, but beams only 1. The existing 100% run fires missiles at Kraid, but only hits him with the first 1; the rest of the missile "hits" are ignored and he only takes 1 point damage at a time (beacause the beam is also being fired)...this could probably be improved in a 100% improvement. EDIT: A couple of interesting discoveries... 1. Firing every frame confers no advantage on bosses; it only increases lag. With proper pixel alignment and timing, one shot every 4th frame suffices to maximally stun Kraid. 2. Kraid's projectiles are controlled by counters at $2d, $429 and $42d. $2d is the frame counter and can be manipulated via pause/unpause; at multiples of 16 frames Kraid has a chance of firing. $429 and $42d are animation counters, NOT affected by pausing, and count down from 156 and 256 when Kraid starts moving. When they reach values of 1 and 100, Kraid will fire no matter what the frame count is. 3. So, a definite no go on killing Kraid without dodging his projectiles. I cut about 1/2 second off Hero's Kraid fight by minimizing the time in the air dodging. 4. In case this isn't widely known, the partially commented source code is available: http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/m1/m1source.txt
Lord_Tom
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Thanks, will look into all of the above. My current thinking is that it is impossible to kill Kraid w/o him firing his spikes...:(
Lord_Tom
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Yeah, that's definitely on the list; impressive result, by the way, getting him down over halfway before he fires. It seems that early on it's possible to get Kraid not to fire projectiles by pause-unpause at strategic points. However, after a few cycles it fails to work, so I think at some point he enters a pattern where he will definitely fire no matter what Samus does. I'm guessing that your movie enters the room with him starting further (but not quite far enough) from this auto-fire-pattern. I'll see if varying my entry changes anything. All total speculation, of course. I also noticed that while Kraid is being hammered, the mod 33 frame counter at $18 is pegged at 32; it resumes counting the instant he fires the missile. Doesn't explain why, of course...
Lord_Tom
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I'm working on improvements to the 1-item and any % run right now. My preference would be for one or the other of these to obsolete the no-mini-bosses run as well; I'm not really interested in improving it and as has been noted it doesn't really show anything all that great.* For the any %, I've found faster ways to get to Kraid's elevator and the ice beam, along with a small improvement to the Wrong-Way Door Glitch (which is about the awesomest glitch ever, IMO). The final descent to Kraid and the Kraid fight itself are on my list to look into improving, but haven't gotten to it yet. I sorta doubt there's much time left to squeeze out of Tourian, but I'll try. The 1-item run will benefit from these improvements as well as a bunch of time using tricks from Hero's any %. The internals of this game are a bit wierd...Kraid has hp ($40b) whereas MB and the zebetites store "hits taken" ($99 and $77b, respectively) Anyone have any bright ideas they'd like to see included or explored? Thanks... *The no-bosses run does show how Mother Brain does not heal, even after you leave her room, which I didn't know until just now.
Lord_Tom
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Great looking run, yes vote.
Lord_Tom
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Well ha. I think the awards you linked to are great, though I think it says something about their visibility that I won an award for a run but didn't even know it... Thanks for anyone who voted for me ;) Were these presented somewhere with links, that would be great; I think it's, heh, unoptimized, to have them languish in a forum post.
Lord_Tom
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I, for one, think the site suffers from the loss of the starred movies. Without them, I think the content is flatter and visitors are left perusing giant lists of movies or searching for particular games. My suggestion is a "player's choice" (or member's choice) section with say five categories...Best Overall, Most Innovative, Glitchfest, High Speed, and Nearly Perfect. (PLEASE don't criticize these categories; they're just examples, and PLEASE don't write for the umpteenth time that xyz is subjective; I know, trust me, I know. Really. I do.) Anyways, each voting member (ie non-lurker) can have a link in his profile to nominate up to 5 published movies in each category. The member's choice section lists all movies with at least 1 nomination, most to least. Members can change their nominations at any time, and maybe nominations are removed once a movie is obsoleted/no longer published. The advantages as I see it are that it's community driven and thus more likely to stay up to date. This page would have much fewer movies than, say, the NES page, so would be less cumbersome. And on the data side it should just be a cross-reference table with a reasonable query. I really don't see this as telling people what to watch, it's just a way to make the site's content less monolithic, build a sense of community, and even give player's something to aspire to.
Lord_Tom
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Wow, I just listened to it. That really has to be heard to be believed. Awful.
Lord_Tom
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I agree. Entertainment would be enhanced by slowing the menu's down enough to be readable...they're pretty slow anyways for a TAS. As it is, I don't know what's going on without pausing to read each menu, and the graphics are really terrible, but it's a treat to be reunited with Cedric the faithful owl! Voted yes, but would definitely vote for a slower movie with readable text to obsolete this one.
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