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There are several bugs regarding the baby. - The baby can pick up a bomb after it has exploded. - After the baby leaves the table, a curve tile may become unclickable until the baby returns. - After the baby picks up a bomb, a nearby bomb may collide with the bomb even though it no longer is on the table. Score plates are dropped on the table depending on RNG. The RNG cannot be manipulated directly. It seems to be trial-and-error dependent to manipulate the score plates in order to get the extra bomb by the time you reach level 20.
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Perhaps not the cannon (which already looks 3-dimensional and fine), but the player sprite has a large amount of black stroke around it. I'm wondering if it could be further optimized. It seems that you are using Hq4x or similar upscaling? Yet I can see blocky pixels inside the character. It's just my thoughts. My suggestions might very well make it look worse in practice, though...
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I'm flattered that you are flattered... :P I know the CD version's voices and ambient music really add to the game. But in TAS, voices would be skipped and ambient music alone is just not enough to justify the long episode 7 (if the CD version was available for TASing to begin with, that is).
L1011Widebody wrote:
I'm thinking of doing a 'straight' Let's Play playthrough of it, and doing an alternate version of each mission as James T. Jerkface. (...) I should get in on a Let's Play of Judgment Rites soon.
I thought you already did one here. I'm not sure I understand, but I would suggest not to change the "recipe" of the idea behind James T. Jerk too much. A compilation of clips that delves into funny dialogues and bad scenarios is what was so successful the first time around. Interesting that Judgment Rites actually does not let you go on if you mess up, unlike 25th Anniversary. Please keep us posted, here or in the Star Trek topic. I think James T. Jerkface is at least as entertaining as a TAS would be! :)
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L1011Widebody wrote:
Hello there! A link to this TAS was shared to me by a friend, and when I saw you were inspired by my James T. Jerkface videos, I just had to register just to say thank you so much, and I am glad you enjoyed my series! And found it inspirational. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun to make them. It's an honor to see my work have such an effect. Thank you again! :-)
I'm very glad to see your message! Thanks It's a nice thing to meet other people who are interested in those old games. And I didn't know about Judgment Rites until 1 month ago; I'd like to play through it at some point. On that note, I would look forward to a Jerkface series of Judgment Rites, although I'm aware that it depends on your motivation and time. I'm sure there are loads of funny (bad) scenarios to discover in Judgment Rites. Again, thanks for your message
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Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2315)
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TAS is now in mission 6 "That old devil moon". 6min 11sec ahead of the speedrun. --- Found a new trick. When in the ship, sometimes there are messages that will come up in 1 or 2 seconds and you cannot press any keys until then (K, O, N...) as to prevent you from beaming, orbiting, or entering the star map. But you can press F3 to make the cursor able to select people on the screen. This allows you to click on people such as Kirk to beam over, or do other things when you're not supposed to be able to. This saves time at the end of mission 5 and may be useful in earlier missions. But I do not want to start the TAS over, since I can see my motivation for this project is vanishing. I will check for places where it can save time in earlier missions and list them here or in the submission. --- And I found yet another strange "dead end" bug. After mission 5, after getting the Starfleet admirals report message, the game automatically turns black and starts the next mission. But you can press O right before this happens to orbit the planet. If you clear the "entering orbit" message, the game would turn black, but you can prevent that too by opening Kirk's menu and beaming over. This makes your crew and Quetzelcoatl beam over to the trial again (although Quetzecoatl should be dead at this point and the mission is over.) --- In mission 6, you can orbit the planet mere frames before the first Starfleet message shows. The Starfleet message will show after you orbitted the planet. You can bring up Kirk's options before or after. Before: You can beam over. This leads to a dead-end (the skipped message will come up later to haunt you) After: "This isn't our destination".
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Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Expert player (2315)
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TAS is in mission 5. 5min 35sec ahead of the speedrun. (+- 10 seconds because I'm not sure if I did the comparison right) Rest of the game should be a breeze. All the hard parts of the game are done with.
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The situation in my school is getting really stressful and heated. Teachers don't care when I'm sick or can't finish an assignment on time. I got told something along the lines of "we see you will be heading towards big trouble in the future". Just because I handed in an assignment a day late. That one girl and me had yet another thing to work on and we couldn't come to an agreement who is responsible for what part of it. I SMS'd her and she explained she didn't care about those messages, she was angry at me for not messaging earlier, and she doesn't want to look at messages on the weekend. The teachers then looked at me as if I was to blame. And they didn't care when I explained I was in love with her and got turned down, and I kept messaging her in the Christmas holidays with no success. Basicly the teachers have full understanding of her migraine problem (she misses 70% of classes) but they have zero understanding for any of my problems. Understandably so, considering the job I'm aiming for, I have to be stable. But I cannot be stable all of the time and I have to call in sick some times. After this meeting (which was 3 days ago on Monday), we continued to work on the project and she agreed to meet today after school, but she then said nope, I got no time and that she didn't agree on anything. I then told the teacher about this, who doesn't give a shit, I'm supposed to communicate with that girl myself. This school is a huge clusterfuck of subjects that are shifted back and forth without notice, no matter what you do, you are to blame, everyone else's opinion is correct and yours is false. We had a meeting yesterday and one of those "your opinion is false" girls talked about me and started crying, in front of the class and the teacher. It felt like I was to blame. She apologized to me later and we are on good terms, but I don't know if everyone else saw that part of the story. In the mind of the teachers maybe I'm a huge disruptive factor/disturbance. It's hard to keep my composure in what I'd call a rather hostile atmosphere. My goal with this school is to later work in a kindergarten, with children and I didn't expect that dealing with everyone else's bullshit and compromising was such a big part of this job. At least not to the degree that I'm facing in this school. They expect that "everyone can work with everyone", which I think is not possible in the way that they expect or imagine.
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Vikingja improved his event 33 console record. Link He is now only 1 or 2 frames behind the TAS which is pretty insane.
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Does the emulator use a collection of "per game" hacks? There is no other way to tell that certain blocks should be 1 tile wide, while others should be 4 tiles wide, or that the map should be flat (Zelda) or horizontal (SMB1), etc. I feel like text and status bars should not be "3D-"dified. The Contra clip made me think, it looks pretty neat but it also hurts the eye (the close-up of the character). I feel like it could look better if instead of smoothening existing game sprites out, you replace them with more detailed sprites (perhaps even polygon models, depending how far this emulator is going to progress). This would then be excused as a "per game" hack. Here poor man's job at showing what I'm envisioning. I would like to play the game on the right. Keep up the good work!
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Hey there. As I replied to your inquiring PM, this game is a hell when it comes to bonus game manipulation. There are probably better choices for a first game to TAS out there. But you might also want to just do a test TAS, not worry too much about the manipulation, and see how it goes? Good luck!
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I found a few bugs, see my previous post. The mission 4 one seems highly interesting. I will check if it has bad side-effects later. The TAS is now in mission 4. 3min 30sec ahead of the speedrun. @DrD2k9, thanks for your investigation. I have also talked to Ilari and received the same information. I'm sorry I didn't post about it.
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While playing the Floppy version on Dosbox, a message came up rather unexpectedly along the lines of "insufficient memory, cannot play music or sounds anymore" and the game became mute. This happened 30 minutes into playing casually. I'm afraid something like this could happen late into the TAS. I found some little things: - You can use other characters on certain things in order to operate a device or open/close a door. Sometimes this allows you to do two things at the same time (for example, in mission 3 use Spock on the synthesizer machine while Kirk places the polyberylcarbonate inside it). - Pathing is not optimal, so you will want to click on the screen (multiple times) to make Kirk walk straight to where he is needs to go. ___ Mission 3 synthesizer bug: a) Have Kirk put in the polywhatevercarbonate or the cure sample. Have another crew member use the synthesizer controls. Have Kirk pick up the thing that he put in, at the correct timing. This allows creating the proper end product while also picking up the source material. For example, put in cure sample. Have Spock use the controls to make a hypo out of the cure sample. Kirk can pick up the cure sample and the hypo will still be created. b) Have a crew member use the synthesizer controls. Have Kirk put in the polywhatevercarbonate or the cure sample, at the correct timing. This makes it so that two things are in the output slot at the same time. You can pick both things up. If you keep both things in, if you use the synthesizer controls again, it will erase one of the two things (perhaps only the newest one is kept). Both of these exploits are useless for runs, although they are interesting. ___ Mission 4 Distress signal skip Normally you have to travel to (4)Harlequin, fight enemy ships, then you pick up a distress signal from Mudd and travel to (5)Harrapa and beam over. You can, however, directly go to (5)Harrapa. Upon doing so, your crew will still tell you "We have arrived at Harlequin". You can orbit and beam over - if you're too slow, dialogue will come up about enemy ships approaching. I will check if this can be used in TAS.
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I found a small dialogue skip bug in Mission 3. Normal behavior Normally you fight and destroy the ship, then dialogue appears, then you orbit the planet automatically, more dialogue appears, then you can open up the Kirk menu and beam to the station. The glitch But I found you can destroy the ship, and on the frame the dialogue would start I press O to orbit the planet manually (this uses the default "orbit planet cutscene" as opposed to the "mission specific cutscene", which is faster by about 0.6 seconds), Now, when you arrive at the station, the skipped dialogue would appear and you would orbit the planet (automatically), again. You can, however, open the Kirk menu before this happens, allowing you to beam to the station. EDIT: I was suspicious, because I feared if I do this skip bug, the skipped dialogue might still come up later. So I played through the mission and I was right. It did come up again. It sent me straight back to the station. You can basicly play the same mission twice. So this bug will not be used in TAS.
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I would prefer a run that merges "max coins" and "all items". You could 1st goal: get all items and then, as a 2nd goal, get all coins possible (Without hurting the 1st goal; Not the same coin twice) And as a 3rd goal, destroy all blocks possible (Without hurting the 1st and 2nd goal; Not the same blocks twice) And as a 4th goal, kill all enemies possible (Without hurting the 1st, 2nd and 3rd goal; Lakitu and his spawns; but not jumping Cheep-cheep and Bullet bill. As a stylistic choice, you might go for highest flagpole jump and 6 fireworks every stage. This "all items" run is interesting, but I think it doesn't stand out enough. I feel you could make the run feel more complete by adding more goals.
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I pinpointed the issue with the audio bug. When using dumpconvert, the output tells me it sets to 1 channel (= the section on the BIOS screen), then to 2 channels (= the game). I assume it means it switches from mono to stereo. Somehow this information is lost or not interpreted correctly by VLC / MPC. All my test recordings had started after the BIOS screen was done with and the game already started. It uses 2 channels and never switches. And audio is fine. All my TAS recordings included the BIOS screen, so it uses 1 and then 2 channels. Audio is messed up. So encoder will have to create a dump of the BIOS, then of the game and merge the two. I can now continue TASing.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
"Truncate event stream" simply removes all input events beyond the current point in the loaded movie. Savestates will always have all their input events. When loaded as a movie instead of a savestate, it will play to the end of the savestate's event stream. The savestate itself will retain its event stream even if you truncate the currently running movie. To change the savestate, overwrite it with a new save after truncating.
It does what I needed. I had loaded a state from 400 ms before the end. I "truncated". This made JPC show that the movie length is now until the current point, and it does not do the 400 ms of input. I saved new states and continued.
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So this is my 3rd test recording, playing the game casually and slow. Link to video All of my test recordings had perfectly normal audio. I now just need to find out what goes wrong in TAS that makes the audio bug happen.
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Plan to TAS soon Just a heads-up, I'm probably going to pick this game up as soon as I'm done with Star Trek. I would start at the latest available level (13?) and go through to level 30 as fast as possible. Some testing will be required to see in which levels it is beneficial to have 1 or 2 bombs, and how to get that amount of bombs by the time you reach said level. Level 20 requires 2 bombs. Level 25 might or might not be possible to complete with only 1 bomb (on hardest difficulty). Other levels can be completed with 1 bomb no questions asked - but 2 may speed thigns up maybe. Perhaps you can abuse the spectators and the baby, to end levels quicker. It needs to be tested how to manipulate the RNG. Editing the game You can edit the game's file "game.fic" to edit the maps. Though I don't understand the structure much... It seems to start tile by tile from the bottom left, going up, then the 2nd column, and so forth. 0x0b is a goal tile, 0x0c is a water bucket, ... Difficulty The only thing affected by difficulty seems to be the longevity of bombs, before they explode. As a rule of thumb, a bomb takes ~0.9 sec to travel 1 tile. Easiest - 120sec Easy - 105sec Medium - 90sec Hard - 75sec Hardest - 60sec Hotkeys P = Pause X = Gameover Scoring - For each bomb you save, you gain [level number] points. So in level 1, you'd get 1 point for each bomb. In level 15, you'g get 15 points. etc. I will refer to this as "splash points". - Cherries = extra bombs - You gain 1 extra bomb for every 1000 points. Game mechanics - Only one "action" can happen at a time. Actions include: Bridge disappears, silver tile is moved, curve tiles are moved, a bomb is splashed, ... - If a bystander tries to cause an "action" on the board, a) if he does it, you cannot do an action until his action is done. b) if you do an action, his action will be queued and finished right after yours is done. Routing - It is best to go through levels 13~19 with a single bomb. You need 2 bombs in level 20. It seems possible to barely get an extra bomb by reaching 1000 pt, by the time you reach lv 20. - In level 20, only 1 bomb survives. Unless you can somehow get the 2 bombs going right next to each other to bypass the auto-switches. Go through level 21~24 with 1 bomb. - In level 25, you can go through with 1 bomb. Having 2 bombs would probably be a bit faster, but you cannot get an extra bomb. And going through earlier stages with 2 bombs takes too long, I think. - Go through levels 26~30 with 1 bomb. In level 28, it might be possible to have the baby grab the bomb and speed things up. You might get an unwanted extra bomb by the time you reach level 28. Needs testing to see if it can be avoided.
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I'm restarting the TAS, this time with an additional line, as per slamo's suggestion
set BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6
Test recordings had me believe this line fixes the audio problems in my previous videos. I managed to save 4 seconds in the tutorial fight. But when I recorded a video of it, the audio problems are still present. Have I used bad parameters in the set BLASTER line? Is the line case-sensitive? I have written it lowercase as such: set blaster=a220 i5 d1 h5 t6. What should I do now? Perhaps it is a glitch in the game, I'm going so fast the game cannot initialise audio stuff? In my test recordings, I was playing slow and casually, hence the audio ended up being normal in those recordings. Link to video
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To my knowledge, it doesn't work with savestates. A savestate is a memory dump, so it will always load its original image.
Hmm.. I deleted the "Sound Blaster Pro" image and selected the "Sound Blaster" one in Assemble, so I thought that was enough to switch. But you're saying the emulator somehow still loads the old image. If it does, then I can see why the audio is still crap. --- About the read+write thing, my problem was as follows: I lost my leading savestates, so I played back the movie and got new savestates. But when I loaded those states, the emulator would play until the movie's original end each time. I deleted the movie file and the savestate's backup file, but it didn't fix the problem. The "Truncate" option worked for me though.