Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
The fireball ships are pretty threatening, but the brown two-sail ships are the real threat and MUST be eliminated before they get too close to your shores. They will deploy little grunt things that move around on your battlefield during the build phase, and guarantee death, period, even for TAS. They can destroy castles, too.
You can indeed shoot your own walls, if you must. It might even be a decent idea to shoot a wall you want to rebuild in the next phase, since it won't be able to get fireball'd if it's already destroyed. This would be a better idea to do with the trackball version of the game, since you can move your cursor extremely fast.
Yeah, you can't fully brute force the game; you need some strategy. Like I said (or I think I did), placing your cannons too close to the edge runs the risk of the fireballs landing right along the edge, rendering cannons/castles unable to be saved.
Unless you know a video of it, I don't think there's any completion of this mode, ever, regardless of coin count.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
Actually no, because the battle phase will always be the same length, regardless of how quickly you kill the ships. It will only delay if there are still cannonballs in the air when the ceasefire is called, to let them land.
edit: unless you mean, putting them close to the edge to shoot more cannonballs per phase, in which case, you may get an extra 2-3 shots. But putting cannons close to the edge introduces the giant risk of a fireball landing between the edge of the land and the cannon, which renders the cannon (and any adjacent cannons/castles) unable to be surrounded.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
It's actually slightly disadvantageous to use the joystick version - the trackball allows you to move the cursor much faster, but it's far harder to actually set up the trackball movements in TAStudio.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
If you played with frame advance, you might be able to do Easy deathless, but I'd have big doubts about any difficulty higher than that. The final 2 stages are absolutely brutal.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
For Rampart (both the Joystick and Trackball version), the service button simply acts like a coin button. Both the coin buttons also act like a coin button. Service mode can still be activated via the Arcade settings in bizhawk, but there will be no way to exit it when the game is powered on. No idea if this applies to other games or just Rampart.
This was done on the bizhawk dev build posted like 20 hours ago as of posting this (devbuild_0cbc65ba if it means anything).
EDIT: I hadn't looked until now, but this problem is mentioned earlier in the thread, with a slight solution.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
I need some deets. Does the verification movie play as intended, from start to finish? Does it access in-game races, with the timer at the top of the screen, and win them? At the very end, does it pause the game and save?
If not, you might have the wrong save settings active, causing a desync at the start since the verification movie expects a USA formatted memory card to be inserted (and if it isn't, it will prompt you to, which is different than the TAS expects and will cause a desync).
If so, when you tried to play the submission movie, did it load the save data or did it try to start a new game?
If it tried to start a new game, that means dolphin likely put the save data from the verification movie into dolphin's user folder > GC > USA > Movie. If there's save data in that folder, copy it into USA > Card A which should force it to load that data when starting the submission movie file.
If the game DID load the save data (spider-man appeared in the park outside the parlor), then... well, dang, I don't know. It might be like the goblin TAS, where the audio was set to stereo instead of mono and it caused it to desync.
Graphics backend might influence sync? Graphics card/processor might influence sync (like the mario sunshine movie)?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
Remember the days when, instead of just making one game and shipping it, companies made 30 different versions of a game disguised as ports? Not saying I miss those days, but I'm glad they happened. Without them, we wouldn't have moments like these.
Yes vote.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
How the hell did you crank this out in like a month?
Awesome TAS, yes vote. I like how frequently you trivialized levels by getting out of bounds within the first few seconds.
surf the web
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
2:39 in the provided encode.
If you're not going for speed (which you clearly aren't, I thought you were building speed to get past the DDD wall only to jump into it anyway), then why did you say you were in the submission notes?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
Impressive TAS. I had tried to make one some time ago, but I had no idea about the fastest route nor any tricks, so I'm glad someone with more experience got to it first. Yes vote.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
No public documentation. If you're in the game's secret store on 1.0 PC, you can literally see that there's a locked item, and this doesn't appear on any other version of the game.
Additionally, in the game's filesystem is a list of all the playable skins, where "PLRROSSG" is Alex Ross Green Goblin (the skin used in the TAS). It's the only one in the list not capable of being unlocked by either beating the game or using an in-game cheat code. There's a value for each skin that says if you have it enabled or not; the AR code simply sets the Ross Goblin skin to always be enabled.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
The difficulty in making rom hacks has drastically increased since the NES/SNES era, whereas the difficulty in making external codes hasn't increased by as much. Plus, gc/wii rom hacks are still going to be limited to first party games with tons of players, while just about anyone can easily learn how to make external codes for other games on those systems.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
I don't know if it would help, but you could try using the lua core for 5.0. I actually got about halfway through making the TAS in regular 5.0, then used lua the rest of the way, and then dumped the finished product with regular 5.0.
And there's a fairly easy way to have dolphin in its fully reset state (again, not sure if it would help). Just go into your documents and move the dolphin emulator folder elsewhere, then try the movie - dolphin will just make another folder in the same spot; you can replace it with the folder you moved to get your data back. And if you're in a portable version, just make a copy of the entire dolphin folder but delete the "user" folder within.
I also can't get this movie to sync, and I made it. I tried both of the methods I listed above.
I can't confirm whether or not AR codes affect sync across systems, but I do know this game as a whole definitely has a syncing problem.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
1. I'm not sure if you're asking me this or asking the judges. To me, this is probably just a vault-y April Fools' movie, and if it went for the same "go-right-while-spinning-left" that traditional bowling aims for, I don't think it would be very good.
2. Probably. This website has a number of published bowling movies already, right?
3. The web swinging is extremely consistent and I'm almost 100% sure you could copy/paste the inputs with the Lua/TAStudio build if you were just going for speed. My only worry is that the thugs bouncing in place before you kick them could affect their hitboxes, but I don't know if web-tied enemies actually have a moving hitbox like that.
This mode can be unlocked without a cheat, but it requires earning 10K Hero Points by simply playing the game (like, 4 levels done perfectly, I think?).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
For the most part, I don't really have anything to add. This was actually the main thing I was begged for in the Spider-Man community as soon as I started TASing and I definitely would not have done it otherwise, but all in all, I'm glad I did it. Also wow, this TAS became a year old on the 6th of this month.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
As a response to feos's post, I wanted to suggest this as well - allowing movies with AR codes, especially if they fundamentally change the way the game is played.
For instance, there's an AR code for Spider-Man 2 (GC) that allows you to swing fast - so fast that you regularly go double or triple the intended web swinging speed, surpassing 350+mph (560+kmh) that requires a drastic difference in the way the game is played.
That sort of raises a question on what determines if an AR code "fundamentally changes the way the game is played". There's an AR code for Spider-Man (GC) (the first movie game) that allows you to play as an otherwise unused model of Green Goblin. It does not change the way the game is played at all, but I have considered using it for another Green Goblin TAS simply because it doesn't make a gameplay difference.
I guess if the code does actually, legitimately nothing, (i.e. floor is lava for a game where you spend almost no time on the ground), then it shouldn't be allowed.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(622)
Joined: 12/30/2020
Posts: 47
Location: MI
Rampart has a major error in MAMEHawk that isn't present in MAME alone.
If you are in 2-3 player mode and complete a game, then go for a rematch, the game will fail to create a wall around a castle (often times building on water which isn't possible normally) and you won't be able to do anything other than close the game. Even if a castle is successfully surrounded by chance, the cursor movement will be too messed up for the game to be playable. Either version of this issue will always occur.
Link to video
Additionally, there's a small texturing error as shown here (the side of the castle is almost purely black, which is only supposed to be visible if a connecting wall south of it is destroyed). This also doesn't occur in regular MAME.