Posts for Mr._Pwnage

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What I'm asking isn't the difference between Zoness and Sector X, but between the two paths from Zoness. On the paths leading to Sector Z, Zoness is listed at a certain value, but on the paths leading to Macbeth, it has a higher value, when it seems they should be equal (instead of letting a searchlight fail and losing points on it, shoot them all as though you're going to SZ, then switch path if you want Macbeth--missing searchlights definitely shouldn't make the score higher).
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Why is ZO worth less going to MA than to SZ? To keep up the path to SZ, you have to hit all the lights, conveniently netting +2 for each one over letting one spot you (and +4 over the one that actually spots you). There should be no difference, since you can destroy all the lights and change path to MA anyway.
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I noticed that the "magnet beam solidification" subtitle from v8 was retained in this version, even though that code extension wasn't actually used. The rest of the subtitle file was significantly different, so where did that come from?
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F4 goes to fast forward, and F2 returns to normal speed.
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Dr. Spud's zip file of everything used in his generator has the images for each tile. Since it's down, I've temporarily uploaded my saved copy: http://soniccenter.org/sm/files/bsgen.zip . Tiles that say A are for top right, B is bottom right (flipped vertically), C is top left (flipped horizontally), and D is bottom left (rotated 180 degrees).
Post subject: Re: Blue Sphere
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The algorithm was given in the first post:
Basically, each map is a 32x32 wrapping square, divided into four 16x16 tiles, and there are 128 possible tile designs numbered from 0 to 127. For level N, the top-right tile is (N-1) % 128, the bottom-right is (3N-2) % 127, the top-left in (5N-3) % 126, and the bottom-left is (7N-4) % 125.
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If Dr. Spud's site is down, you can use http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/sonic/gbs/anlz1-f.htm as another page for generating levels and codes.
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One thing to consider is that a 95-speed Snorlax isn't going to get the jump on much at that point in the game, so you'll end up going through a lot of failed enemy attack messages. The problem is that there isn't much to replace it. Golduck has the advantage of the fastest name to enter (AAA) but that's only worth a few frames, and Golduck is completely unspectacular. Confusion helps against the ghosts, even though it's weak, but you'd have to spend time teaching Blizzard to do much against Lance, and you're even more out of luck against Lorelei. Alakazam could just attempt to brute-force with Psybeam and Psychic, but can't do anything else if that doesn't work. I gave consideration to putting Sabrina's TM 46 (Psywave) to use, but most of the E5 Pokemon have more than 150 HP. What I see as the most interesting possibility is going with a lowercase y. From what I've heard, this yields a "copycat Ghost Missingno." Catch it, swap it with Gyarados right away, view your menu, and suddenly you have a level 185 Gyarados at your disposal (and if you ever decide to give your opponent a turn, you can make it change from Gyarados into that Pokemon). You might want to see what you can do with the shapeshifter, because it makes for a more interesting finish to the run in my eyes. (On a side note, it's too bad there's no special character that leads to a fight against Rival #8 and instantly ends the game.)
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This game would be the concept demo to end all concept demos. Blue Sphere (the game didn't even have an official name until it was released as part of Sonic Mega Collection) is what you get from locking on Sonic 1 to Sonic & Knuckles, and it consists of an endless loop of special stages using S3&K's engine. The trick is...there are 134,217,728 levels before it goes back to level 1. I believe that puts it in the running for longest TAS, ever. The idea I had here wasn't to manually play through all the levels one at a time; that would take far too long. There would need to be some kind of program that looks to see what level it is, and generates a valid input stream for that level, continuing until all levels are complete. For maps of each level, you can look up http://drspud.no-ip.com/bluesphere/ . Basically, each map is a 32x32 wrapping square, divided into four 16x16 tiles, and there are 128 possible tile designs numbered from 0 to 127. For level N, the top-right tile is (N-1) % 128, the bottom-right is (3N-2) % 127, the top-left in (5N-3) % 126, and the bottom-left is (7N-4) % 125. 128 designs per tile and 4 tiles would dictate 268435456 possible levels. But tile 127 can only ever appear in the top right slot, as none of the other mod numbers can produce 127. Likewise, tile 126 can only appear in the two right-side slots, and tile 125 can't appear in the bottom left. Furthermore, half of the remaining layouts are disqualified, as the mod-128 and mod-126 tracks can never have differing parities, so the actual number of unique stages is 128*127*126*125/2 = 128016000. Level 128016001 is the same as level 1, but with a different number and code. Basically, you play the 128016000 unique levels, then you play clones of the first 6201728 levels, then you start again from level 1. The easiest way to go about constructing a Blue Sphere run would be to take the same amount of time for all possible tiles, found by calculating the most time-consuming tile and if faced with anything else, killing time until you've taken up exactly as much as the longest tile takes, then moving on to the next. This is because the player is forced to speed up at regular intervals, and the amount of time spent on the first tile can cause a variance in how far you are into the second tile when the speedup hits, and therefore a desync. The next step would be to go through each tile "as fast as possible", with the program figuring out how much time has passed when it's done with each tile and planning for speedups accordingly. A third step would be to see if time could be saved with unusual cross-tile cuts, but that's significantly more advanced than the other two. One goal I have in mind for this run is "uses no warps". If you get all the rings in a level, you're awarded a "Perfect," and you skip ahead 10 levels instead of 1. The run is intended to show a game with 134217728 levels in its full glory, not just 13,421,780 of them. Care must be taken not to obtain all rings. In particular, tile 49's natural path goes right through the only ring on that tile. For level 25403954, which consists of four copies of tile 49, one of the tile paths (preferably the last one) will have to be rewritten, probably as a hard-coded exception, to take a detour through the bumpers rather than collecting the last ring. The biggest problem with such a run, besides being boring when watched for any purpose besides as a concept demo for large-scale computational construction of a TAS, is that TASvideos likely doesn't even have enough space for it, and neither does the typical viewer. Even if each level and its completion screen can be done in an average of 1 minute each, the complete GMV file is going to be somewhere in the range of 1.5 terabytes. ZIP compression could knock a good deal off the size--the bytes representing the path through the first tile will in all cases be one of 128 chunks, and the second and subsequent tiles will be similar except that the button presses involved will become closer together after some point--but at some point the file will have to be decompressed in some form. TASvideos currently limits movie file uploads to 100KB, and there's no way in hell the file would be compressed down to less than 1 bit per level. Oh well, at least it's nice to think such a thing can be done in theory.
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Joined: 6/6/2004
Posts: 223
N. Harmonik wrote:
I recall seeing a Moon instead of a Star next to the names of newly posted Mario runs on the Front Page. Let's do this run a favour and give it one.
A moon is considered a lower classification than a star. The previous S3K run had a full-blown star; no doubt this run will inherit that star when it gets published.
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On the subject of the Stadium 2 quiz, there's some amount of delay after answering the question when the timer is still counting, before it tells you you're right or wrong and moves onto the next question. I'd guess a perfect score would be around 150.
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You didn't save Tails from the ice cube on the Icecap boss. That and you had him die 6 times in LB2. For such obvious neglect, your TAS license is revoked. Come back when you're nicer to your fox friends. And when you do, I've heard there's a guy who looks like an egg, that has your tag-team marked for 225 counts of destruction of his master machines. What do you have to say in your defense? "Be thankful I went out of my way so that it wasn't 231"? Yeah, like that'll cut it. In marking your recap of the journey of Sonic and Tails, it appears you've gotten things mixed up with the past. The times shown for Flying Battery are for the old run; the improvements are correct and need to be applied to those times.
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You don't actually need 16 stars for any specific event in the game. 15 stars is significant because it makes the bunny appear, but collecting that star as #16 just wastes time. Rather, DDD's star has nothing to do with the fact that it's #16 and everything to do with the fact that until you get the Board Bowser's Sub star specifically, you can't get into Bowser 2's world. The entrance to DDD starts out in front of the pipe for Bowser 2, but when you board the sub and get the star, the entrance moves back making it possible to get to Bowser.
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And from finalfighter's link, I discover that the YouTube video was recorded in 25Hz. Is there some advantage gained by playing on a PAL ROM here? I took down some benchmarks to time between the runs. Because the start points are different, the runs are calibrated from a point of 0:00.00 = the frame when the number 400 first becomes visible at the start of 1-1. Times are noted from the point the screen fades in or out, depending on the occasion. The first number is the 4:54 video, and the second the 5:00 video. 1-1 pipe 1: 0:06.80 0:07.15 1-1 pipe 2: 0:12.08 0:12.36 1-2 start: 0:36.32 0:38.15 1-2 warp zone pipe: 0:58.92 1:00.56 4-1 start: 1:01.64 1:03.29 4-2 start: 1:44.76 1:46.69 4-2 pipe 1: 1:55.76 1:57.60 4-2 warp zone pipe: 2:05.00 2:06.85 8-1 start: 2:07.52 2:09.40 8-2 start: 2:58.00 3:00.43 8-3 start: 3:33.56 3:37.13 8-4 start: 4:08.24 4:12.09 8-4 warp 1: 4:17.36 4:21.66 8-4 warp 2: 4:24.64 4:28.93 8-4 warp 3: 4:30.84 4:35.02 8-4 warp 4: 4:45.44 4:49.49 axe grabbed: 4:51.96 4:56.15
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I just ran Babelfish on the submission text, and it gives "Super Mario Bros. Speedrun in 4:54 (tas) It is to try aiming toward fast attack clearing it is animated picture with Family Computer edition super マリオブラザーズ. The minute pitch integral it does the operation a certain human playing with the computer, plays to the コン pewter finally and the て is. After the play time the pushing doing the start button, until the last hammer - you step on, that it does, with proper form measurement 4 minute 54 seconds 15 is? ? ? ... (More)"
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If I could get a copy of the original file that was uploaded to YouTube, I could do frame count analysis in order to check for potential speedups. The YouTube video lists a site of http://mve.jp , which appears to be about TAS compilations, but I'm having no luck there either. Scrolling down to the Super Mario section, I don't see any videos that list their length as 4:54, and the closest possible candidate (the one just below the videos mentioning 1-2 and 1-1) says that it's 5:15 long, 20MB, and a WMV--but doesn't give any place to download it! There's no contact info that I can see listed at mve.jp either. Getting in touch here might be hard.
Post subject: SMB1 in 4:54?
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While browsing YouTube, I found this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fWDsJjI4su8 The description acknowledges it as a TAS, but doesn't give any place to find the corresponding .fcm or similar file. That video doesn't show the title screen, which adds a negligible amount of time (possibly enough to bump it to 4:55). 4-2 is completed faster than the current run (possibly not 21 frames faster?) and 8-4 is slower for some reason, but where does the extra 5 seconds come from?
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The Angel Island 1 map has two visible appearances of the Sonic sprite that probably shouldn't be there: one at the start of act 1 and one after the transition to the act 2 map (at the miniboss cutscene). Can those be cut out?
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The PC version doesn't have a savestate feature, and even if it did it has no provisions for creating an input movie file.
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I don't think there are any plans to enter a bonus stage (as opposed to a special stage) at any point in this run. They're all time-consuming, and the best result Knuckles can hope for is getting to 50 rings in order to go super. I don't know of any place where you could get to 50 in a bonus stage faster than you could get to 50 by progressing normally through the level.
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In the Japanese version there's no hit-stun after each target, so they can go between multiple targets faster.
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In Angel Island 2, after going through the S-curve, if you press jump when you're precisely level with the ground, you can do a controlled jump. This should enable you to avoid the wait for the rising platform. The first special ring in each Hydrocity act seems to take a long time to recover from. Perhaps you should skip those rings and use others? In Special Stage 5, you're traveling backwards through the room with 4 blue spheres, and after you get the second one and turn, I notice you pressed forward, causing redundant steps into a bumper and back. Is there a point to this?
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I'm getting the same error. I noticed on the RSS feed that there were movies marked as high as [685], when it was at 600 just a few hours before, went here to check it out, and got the error flood. Were 85 bugged movies added to the database for some reason? [EDIT] The links appear to work; as an example: http://tasvideos.org/movies.cgi?id=685 Looks like they're historic entries, rather than bugged ones, but something about the front page doesn't recognize their existence fully.
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The level restriction on Guillotine, Fissure, and Horn Drill is in GSC onwards. In this game it's a speed restriction, so you'll have to be faster than the high-leveled Pokemon. The misused comparator in the accuracy formula errs on the side of moves being less accurate, and a Pokemon trying to Guillotine a faster opponent has a true 0% chance of hitting. (Note that in Tilus's V1 TAS of this game, Onix had to be fed some X Speeds to be able to hit with Fissure.) One status affliction you didn't mention was paralysis, which reduces Speed by 75%, making it easier to find a Pokemon with enough speed for the job.
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