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lapogne36 wrote:
TIL the name of this RNG algorithm (pretty common for RPGs), not sure why it's "bad" though.
I'm assuming they mean it's "bad" in the sense that it's bad compared to other RNGs when evaluating them on what makes RNG good. A good RNG does not allow someone to determine the next number by knowing the previous results. A good RNG has a good distribution of all possible outputs. Etc.
This RNG doesn't have those qualities, so it's bad by that measure.
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I remember looking at the current run and thinking "I bet I can improve this", and then the game got desynced, and I was like "nah".
Thanks for realizing the improvements I was pretty sure were there.
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Hi, just wanted to say that I'm aware of the 4 frame improvement from Spikestuff, but I don't have more time to put into this run, so it's submitted as is, though Spikestuff is welcome to join as a 3rd author on this run ;)
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Very cool glitches. Some thoughts on improvements (?)
1) I'm somewhat amazed by the glitch involving the door spawning in a wall. Why can't that be used on the "no change" levels? My guess on what is happening: The door is loading early (?) when you scroll glitch twice. So if you scroll glitch in the right way, you might be able to spawn the door that is normally at the end of the corridor into the beginning of the corridor, just like that wall in level 14. It's just a guess, but something about it seems plausible to me. (I'm guessing level memory wraps around normally)
2) I understand that the staircases load you into "glitched" areas. Just like in other NES games with similar glitches, those areas are actually just data that isn't intended to be level data (such as enemy positions, HP values, etc). Depending on *where* in memory that is, that means you can actually control the *content* of those glitched worlds by manipulating enemies/hp/item spawns/etc.
This kind of glitch has been shown to completely destroy games like Megaman/Mario/Zelda/Metroid... I have the feeling that between these two glitches, there should be even more giant skips left.
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Watching the 2012 run was clear there was improvement to be had. The 2016 run capitalized on it. The 2020 run leaves me impressed that this is probably close to optimal now. Yes vote.
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Vote no: Movement isn't optimized, and I'm not convinced that the goal makes sense. "Fastest time to trigger (X) glitch" is a weird category.
My guess is that something like this is happening: It's probably causing a stack overflow, and then triggering a reboot. Maybe someone could dig more into the glitch and see if the glitch can be more-precisely controlled to, for example, jump to the credits.
But as it is, this movie is more like a glitch-demo than a TAS.
I've used the debug mode in Sonic many times, and it's pretty fun. On the surface, it's fairly limited to just spawning items and zipping really fast, and I would be interested in seeing a run where someone really dug into the tech here and figured out what was possible.
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Current RTA world record any% is just about 1:32 now. And it still has mistakes in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayr8P53g7sA
I'm guessing TAS would clock in around... maybe 1:20-1:25. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there is a lot of skips or fancy tech... It's like a non-stop collect-a-thon.
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I vote meh on my own movie.
Also, I don't know why it thinks the movie is 19:57.48. It is pretty clear on youtube that the last input looks like it's around 19:47.
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As far as I know there isn't a benefit to two players since the ball is only in one place and you can easily move the bottom paddle to where you need it.
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I'm coming for your Moon.
When a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the difficulty that would make the most interesting and entertaining run. Usually, this is the hardest difficulty, and as such it is the most preferred choice for a TAS. However, there are cases where harder difficulties do nothing but add repetition to runs
As far as I know, hardmode only adds ~6 seconds worth of menuing to the front of the run... and pretty much that's all (you get less time to finish each level, which is meaningless in TAS). I'd put my vote for not using hardmode, but I thought I'd ask before I get too much deeper in the run. There are only ~40ish levels, so you'll only get 2 of those seconds back. AFAIK it doesn't change enemy health, or spawn new enemies.
Any opinions on hardmode vs normal mode? My gut feeling is menus are boring, and that's all you're actually getting with the change.
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Hi, that file doesn't show it... and loads from a save which isn't very helpful.
Edit: I played around a little bit on that screen and I was able to do it (Bizhawk 1.11.6). I clipped about 16 pixels below the normal ground (just below the yellow bricks) and was able to continue walking. You can fix the movie above by jumping 1 frame earlier to get the glitch to work.
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I didn't actually watch all 6 hours, mostly just skipped around. I voted "meh". It's very long, and the story of the series has never been the strong point IMO. Doesn't appear that there are any shortcuts/skips (at least not that I could discern from the description).
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is a work-in-progress
Speedrunning work-in-progress hacks seems against the spirit of speedrunning in general. That said, it does look like development is "paused" since 2012, which I guess makes this stable enough (though it's not obvious what version of the hack this is even running).
Removing the "Boss Battle" screen seems like cheating. In the video, it shows it takes ~5 seconds. If it was cut from the YouTube video, that'd be one thing... But actually removing it to gain 5 seconds on bosses, really means you are running a hack of a hack. As a result, I vote "no" for breaking the rules.
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It looks like there's a couple frames by choosing a different ordering for the minigames (minimizing movement of the cursor). That's because the last flip is free, so you would want the last flipped tiles to be as far apart as possible.
Though, tbh, that's trivial compared to skipping 5 stages.
Edit: Could be a buffer overflow. Maybe too many sprites were loaded, and when it went to do the damage routine, it ended up writing over the sound pointer and "next level" flag, with whatever it was trying to load.
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Just to post an update: I have confirmed that indeed ACE is possible. I've gotten code execution at 0x0, and written instructions carefully over bytes which would have otherwise jumped to useless parts of code, etc. I now have it executing at 0x0120, which is the timer section.
I'm currently trying to figure out what part of the code executes the "Awesome Mayor" screen. This is my first ACE run so I'm happy to just get a working PoC, instead of anything too showy. (At least at first. Once I have the PoC, I'm open to suggestions of alternate payloads).
Do you think the ACE needs to return to normal gameplay, or is it ok if I just leave the game in a broken state?
Edit: For the curious, we are blessed because 0x72 is a 2-byte opcode, and 0x62 is a 3-byte opcode. This means 62 can be used to skip over an extra byte, if clobbering it would have broken the game.
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I found the glitches neat, but I am always on the fence when it comes to accepting a run that uses heavy memory corruption glitches, but stops short of just jumping to the credit sequence. Probably wouldn't create a whole category for it.
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I actually have to vote "no" because the play-around is nausea inducing rapid movement of the camera. Other than that, it's like a 20 minute autoscroller...
I would usually agree with "vote meh, and vault it", but I think this doesn't even reach that bar.
Edit: And yes, while the first level is the worst example of bad camera work, the other levels where it holds "right" constantly are almost as bad.
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The human element of the run is far more entertaining than the game itself. If it wasn't for someone lying about their record 40 years ago, I don't think we'd take a second look at this run/game.
Meh vote.
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I also played around with Metroid a few months ago, and noticed there was frames to be saved in the first couple rooms. I also gave up at Kraid (haha). The faster door skip (~250 frames!) is very nice, I didn't find those otherwise I might have kept going.
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Well, the big complaint about the previous one wasn't that it was too long, it was that there was too much loading/cutscenes. When I saw that it would be ~60 seconds faster to cut the mirror cutscenes, and ~20 seconds faster to use the (J) version due to better loading times, it was a no brainer for me to re-run the game with the (J) version. Having 3 less levels was a bonus for speed running purposes, but even without that, playing on the (J) version is still just more exciting due to less lag compared to the US version.
I blame the people who imported the US version one year after the japanese release for adding levels that weren't there to begin with.
It's widely known that for whatever reason, at this time in history, it was expected that US consumers wanted harder games than their Japanese counterparts, so games that imported to the US tended to have difficulty added for seemingly no reason. In this game, it comes from repeating world 5 again, but with higher percent required. No content is actually new, it's just repeated levels to make the game longer.
Given all the factors, I think it's fair to use the (J) version in this case, so I did. It's the US version which increased the length of the game, but I don't think the increased length is more entertaining than the faster loading times and overall quicker playthrough.