Hey, guys! It's been a while since I worked on this. I haven't really had time to play around with this game, but I did recently and I put a wrap on Magnet Man's stage. Have a look at the ol' youtube and tell me what you think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyYWBWwMVgM
First two videos were fun to watch, looking forward to the final product!
Thank you so much! I'll be honest; I haven't been working much on this of late. School and other games have taken a bit of priority for me, but I've got some time and I might get back to it tonight. In the meantime, here's the youtube of the redo of Shadow Man's fight, which I'm really proud of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vEt05waGMM
I think it's using second controller shenanigans to some weird effect, though I could be wrong.
In Mega Man 3, at least, the second controller can do all sorts of weird things, the most famous being the ability to high jump, even after falling into a pit. I'm not quite sure what all the tricks are, but the way the music seems to be stalled at the start of the video reeks of shenanigans. Normally, when you glitch the stage by skipping Proto Man's appearance, the music just stops dead after the whistle. The sound indicates that something's being played with, and the second controller is my best guess.
It's going to take me a while to learn to manipulate the bosses. These videos are more of a proof of concept than necessarily anything publishable. Since this is my first time TASing, I'm having fun and learning the system as much as I'm trying to put up anything worth watching.
Shadow Man can definitely be hit while throwing Shurikens, but there's some frame-perfect dodging I have to do to keep with my no-damage restriction. I think there's one spot where I gave up a shot on him, though, which really sucks. Ah well, lesson for the second run.
Edit: So, I'm a moron. I just shaved 225 frames off the Shadow Man fight. How, you find yourself asking? Simple, hypothetical reader! When he was down to 7 health, I switched to Top Spin and knocked his punk ninja behind out of the sky. Phenomenal finish and I may upload the battle to YouTube if anyone cares to see. Top Man is totally still first fight!
You get a yes from me. From what I can see, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game: The Large Three-Topping Pizza looks like a fairly pedestrian platformer, but you made the run a blast to watch. Well done!
Thanks for the YouTube correction; totally edited the post.
Yeah, firing when it wasn't hurting Shadow Man was a screwup. With Top Man, I kind of played Mega Man as impatient during the fight, but Shadow Man is a lot more exciting, so I tried to be more precise and messed up a couple times. I'm thinking that I'll stick with the precision firing rather than having Mega Man go crazy with shooting during the redo of the game, because it looks less sloppy. Mega Man still seems like he's high on "Energy Tanks" from all the hopping around, after all.
So here's my current thoughts on what route I should take when I go for the final run:
Shadow Man
Magnet Man (Free Rush Jet Here!)
Hard Man
Top Man
Spark Man
Snake Man
Gemini Man
Needle Man
Shadow Blades let me deal with a lot of the enemy spawn weirdness, while Magnet Missile lets me handle the rest. I could switch it up and move Spark Man to third or even last because there's no benefit or loss, and I might just do one of those because it could be more entertaining to see the usual pattern broken up more. We'll see, but for now I'm more concerned about getting through each of the eight levels for testing.
One quick note: I'm glad I was steered toward lagarinth. My AVI dump looks incredible now. I've never taken such a pretty dump before. (wakka wakka) But no, seriously, I can see why it and camstudio are so popular for this stuff. And I'll have a look at the 32-bit versions of those programs tomorrow. For tonight I'm just flat out tired of thinking about it.
Lemme tell you guys something: even under the conditions of a TAS, Shadow Man is a serious pain without the power of Top Spin. If someone can figure out a way to contact him without him contacting you back, that would be ridiculous. As it is, I'm giving serious thought to going after him first in the final run, just to get it out of the way and to glitch in a free Rush Jet for levels where that will come in handy.
The other problem area for me was the dark room, just because of the need for Rush Coil to take down those hologram machines. Here's the WIP so far - give me feedback! I need to know how much I suck so I can do less of it.
http://www.mediafire.com/?k409z2ivu5943v5
And YouTube fans can click here. Now in HD... somehow. Improved AVI dump is improved, I guess.
Well, commenting them out of the run script makes it run the encoding, though I'm sure there'll be some other issues along the way. Next I'll have to submit one of those logo thingies to the site. I have an interesting idea involving a mocked-up Link to the Past screenshot, but I'm sure it'll get rejected for too much on the logo...
I am having x264 load the script itself. I'm using the command line as seen on the page, except cutting out "--fullrange off" because it doesn't recognize that. As of now, the message I'm getting is "there is no function named ConvertToYV24." It recognized "ConvertToRGB32," though, so something may well be rotten in the state of Denmark.
Before I forget, thanks for all the help. I'm sure having to nursemaid someone through this kind of process can't be fun, and I do appreciate it.
Well, Lagarith seems to work, but I have a followup question: what are those converts at the bottom of the example script? I get yelled at by the program for having them in there.
I did that, of course, and it's supposedly active as a decoder, but it doesn't seem to help. I dunno if there's a flaw in the example script or maybe there's something wrong with my PC or maybe I just fail at everything.
Maybe I will try Lagarith. Worst I can do is not get to encode after using it, which won't change anything from where it is now.
So, I'm trying to learn how to do HD encoding, using the guide on this site, and I get an error message that says "AVISource couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc" but it doesn't say what fourcc it can't find. I've got FFDshow and I dumped the avi using ffv1, which, while not the popular choice seems to fit the "lossless, RGB32" requirement. I've google searched, of course, but nothing has turned up as to why it's doing that. Any help would be appreciated.
Joy2Key is a fine solution, but at least Snes9x 1.52 kind of teases you by pretending to be able to map things to the gamepad and then having them not work. I don't know if that's something that can be fixed easily, but, if it can, I recommend it. I can save and load state from the gamepad in ZSNES, so not being able to from Snes9x without Joy2Key kind of bugs me.
Thank you; I'm glad you like it! I just hope the final product is something worth watching.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Mister Morn wrote:
Enemy spawners, like those bees and the penguin generators in Gemini Man, can be handled with the following logic: if you kill the generator, everything it might have generated dies too. If it has time to actually spawn something, kill the thing it spawns. Simple.
Is this why you didn't bother attacking the bobcats' yarn balls, because they blow up with the bobcat anyway? Or is it because you would get fleas the instant after you destroyed them, then more yarn balls the instant after you destroy those?
Both of those are accurate. The real challenge there was killing the second bobcat before even the first ball could leave the screen, without getting hit, and in the fewest frames I could manage.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Mister Morn wrote:
The only section I can think of where it would be an issue is on Needle Man's stage, where there's a dead-end lower path with a Met and a large weapon refill. It would be silly to have to keep going back every time you kill the cannon, so going down once and killing the Met ought to be good enough.
I think this should make you have to plan your route so that you're never forced to leave an enemy intact just because you didn't have the right weapon to reach it. In this case, I think you could carry Magnet Missile to attack through the floor.
I thought of that, and Magnet Missile is an option, but here's the thing about that specific section: You have to go down there anyway, because one of the rules is that all items must be collected. It might be more stylish to waste the frames to switch to Magnet Missile and kill the Met a second time, and, as long as they can blast the rest of the enemies in that section, then it's definitely worth considering.
Well, I decided to take a crack at Top Man using the restrictions I placed on myself. I gotta say, it was fun, but very challenging to get through. Here. If someone can have a look and tell me how awful it is, I'd appreciate it, but be gentle; it's my first time.
http://www.mediafire.com/?uwdtcuddbkpvkaw
This was done with the US version, so do whatever you have to if you're using the J version of the game.
Edit: Now on YouTube for added convenience!
This is all a very interesting read for a newbie like me, and gives me thought into how to better utilize save states. I use Joy-to-Key trickery so I can play with a controller and have access to saves and loads and other useful things (pause and frame advance) via extra buttons. So far, I've been using one state for everything, but perhaps it's time to remap things out so I can better utilize states.
What about the rat (or whatever they are, the things you occasionally see climbing ladders in other stages) generators in Gemini Man? They spawn monsters infinitely and you cannot destroy the generators.
Also, do the walls you can destroy with Hard Knuckle count as enemies?
Hmmm... those infinite spider rat thingies are a problem. I figure they qualify as "kill one and be done" type enemies. Watching Aglar's TAS, he seems to only encounter each once anyway, so that helps.
The hard knuckle walls don't count as enemies, but most block your way to items, which also have to be collected for the run, so I'll have to take out a few. I'm not sure if they can be glitched through, but if they can that would definitely help the run.
Edit: another thought. Since they can't be killed and shooting them just makes the run more annoying in terms of lag, those cloud bullet thingies in Snake Man's stage should probably just be skipped outright.
There is a problem… well, two problems… well, three, with killing all enemies.
― Enemies are autogenerated by screen scrolling. Scroll back, and forth, and enemies reappear.
― There are enemy launching automatons, such as the bees in Hardman.
― Some enemies are invulnerable.
But I would indeed, probably, like to see such a run.
Excellent points. Allow me to clarify my thoughts on each:
1.) Scrolling generates enemies. In such a case, killing that enemy one time should be enough. The only section I can think of where it would be an issue is on Needle Man's stage, where there's a dead-end lower path with a Met and a large weapon refill. It would be silly to have to keep going back every time you kill the cannon, so going down once and killing the Met ought to be good enough.
2.) Enemy spawners, like those bees and the penguin generators in Gemini Man, can be handled with the following logic: if you kill the generator, everything it might have generated dies too. If it has time to actually spawn something, kill the thing it spawns. Simple.
3.) Honestly, I can't think of any completely invulnerable enemies in Mega Man 3, though I will admit that it has been a very long time since I've played it to completion. The way I would handle it, though, is to treat them as a stage hazard, like those robot pirahna plants in Hard Man's stage. If it can't be killed, you can't kill it, so clearly it wouldn't count towards the run.
I had an idea for a run on the game that I thought might be fun to watch: no damage, must kill every enemy and collect every item. I know it's feasible, but there are a couple areas that bug me in terms of actually doing it in a timely fashion, namely those egg sections in Gemini Man's stage and its corresponding Doc Robot stage. All those eggs are individual enemies, so it'd take a lot of time to clear them out. I don't know if that would kill the run by making it boring, so please tell me if my idea is bad.
Thanks a lot! I know the question was probably a silly one, but life experience has taught me that it's better to ask before doing something than to act and be wrong.