My suggestion would be to try individual level TASes of dungeons (showing the TAS route, but not necessarily being as optimal as possible). That both serves the purpose of showing off what people want to see the most and being the most fun to do/the best practice :D
A TAS Puppet Ganon fight (e.g. no skip) would be sweet too, it would be interesting to compare to Cosmo's best Puppet Ganon fight.
I'm also interested in that Gohdan boss fight glitch (posted earlier in the topic) where you can hit his hands with bombs as well as arrows. Can it save time? What would a TAS look like?
CGF95, IMO you should make a testrun/testruns or do little playarounds/mini-TASes of just one thing, otherwise you WILL get burned out, because you start with 0 wind waker TASing skill and demand absolute perfection of the most minute, tedious, tricky, boring details right out the gate if you do it like this (ESPECIALLY if you convince yourself every superswim has to be 100% perfect and you have NOTHING else to work on). I suggest having fun TASing the game before getting into harder work.
First, your TAS must beat ALL known TASes and real time records for individual levels, segments or full game runs, unless differing circumstances (like the RNG being different, resources at the start of the level being different, emulator/game differences, etc) mean it is impossible to do so.
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Obviously no TAS is ever so optimal that no improvement can be made (even supposedly perfect runs are obsoleted soon or later), but if your TAS shows a consistent level of optimization errors that
1) aren't because of not knowing of a trick's existence at that point into the run (such as the yoshi's island any% TAS not using walljumps because they weren't known yet)
2) don't require a deep understanding of the game to discover (e.g. it's okay if your TAS is unoptimized due to the RNG being frustrating to work with, or if there are lots of chaotic side-effects of doing actions that make it hard to save frames without trial and error)
it's not optimized enough for TASvideos.
Also, this movie looks badly trimmed, in the end, there are 7948 frames (more than 2 minutes) of seemingly all zeroes input.
I wanted to let the end of the game.
You can end the input file on the last frame in which you put input. Encoders of TASes are instructed to extent the encode to include the credits even if the input file ended ages ago.
(If you need to put in input to reach the credits state, then that's ok to do. But you still end the input file on the last frame you input anything.)
Riking's post is not giving the new glitch the attention it deserves. Let's try again:
There is a new, game-annihilating glitch in Yoshi's Island that lets you put any sprite in your 'egg inventory' and bring it to any level!!!
It is discovered by Arne / http://www.twitch.tv/arnethegreat and is called something like 'Null Egg Glitch'.
Carl Sagan did a testrun of what the real time route would look like using the glitch. The glitch is first set up here:
http://www.twitch.tv/carlsagan42/b/434004918?t=25m35s
The glitch is similar to glitches in Donkey Kong Country 1/2 where you are able to hold a despawned sprite slot and 'grab' the first sprite to take that slot.
The Null Egg Glitch is performed by grabbing an egg from a Mouser while it despawns from falling off screen. When it despawns, it despawns its egg, even though it is now in your inventory, so your inventory contains an sprite ID that is not assigned to any active sprite. Any sprite with that sprite ID that spawns is thus made part of your inventory.
In this RTA route, the glitch is used as follows:
1) Perform Null Egg Glitch on 2-2
2) So your game does not crash, put a skull-wearing Mouser in the sprite slot of your null egg before finishing the level
3) Go to 1-8 (Salvo's Castle) and enter Salvo's room with only one egg
4) Kill Salvo by throwing the egg, then spitting his babies back at him. Don't destroy any babies except by spitting them at him (I think this is part of the setup)
5) When the Key cutscene appears that signifies you've beaten a boss level, it uses the sprite ID of your null egg - meaning that the key cutscene sprite is part of your inventory!
6) Go to any level. The key cutscene will immediately start. Because it is very glitchy used in this way, you have to do different things to finish the level and make sure it does not crash. (You also have to position yoshi so he does not get eaten by a pirahna plant, or fall into lava, and you have to make sure you do not lose the key cutscene sprite, and some rooms crash if you do not enter a door or pipe)
You can also use the Null Egg Glitch to bring pretty much any sprite to any level with experimentation (for example, you can bring a submarine morph bubble to Salvo and ineffectually pelt him with rockets from your sky submarine, or you can turn your null egg into a pipe warp and warp to 1-1)
Another interesting use - the Null Egg Glitch allows you to achieve a score of 0 on many stages you could not before, as with the keyhole cutscene active you can lose mario but still finish the level at 0 stars. This means low% (get the minimum score on every level) can go much lower than ever before.
What's amusing about this is how many tiers of any% there are now:
1) any% (the glitched any% TAS on tasvideos)
2) any% no L+R (2-2%, arne%, keyhole%...)
3) any% no L+R/null egg glitch (any% warps)
4) any% no L+R/null egg glitch/wrong warps (any% warpless)
^ and walljumps can also either be banned or allowed on top of that.
Completion's sake. The reasons why you pick squirtle in RB are almost the same as the reasons in FR/LG. It's not like in HG/SS where instead of picking Totodile you pick Cyndaquil due to being able to access Fire Blast very early (at least for RTA, not sure what TAS would use, still geodude?)
Actually, I plan on doing this game, myself, but I will have to test with all 3 pokemon, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, AND Charmander, meaning I have to make 3 separate TASes, and upload/submit the fastest of the three.
Squirtle is much faster. Don't even bother with Charmander or Bulbasaur.
If you could explain this for me? That would be great, thanks! :)
Here is my understanding of why you pick squirtle in rb and in fr/lg.
Bulbasaur:
-You don't get vine whip until level 13 rby/level 10 frlg, which is power 35. This makes Brock's gym an extreme pain to do fast.
-You don't get razor leaf until level 30 rby/level 22 frlg (as Ivysaur), which is power 55. That is a long time to wait for a merely ok move. There aren't really any grass moves to learn from TMs to tide you over.
-More things resist grass than do water: fire, grass, poison, bug, flying, dragon, steel. And when grass is resisted pretty much your only option is physical attacks, but...
-You can't learn Mega Punch or Mega Kick or any fire/ice/lightning attacks. You can at least get Earthquake as Venusaur, but your TM selection is very poor otherwise.
-The only HM you can learn is Cut.
-Later game, there isn't a very good grass attack - what should be the best attack, Solar Beam, is actually very bad due to needing a turn to charge, so it is hard to take advantage of good special/STAB.
-RIP Bulbasaur
Charmander:
-Brock is a huge brick wall for you. No move you can get then is good against Brock's pokemon.
-If you manage to get past Brock, you suck against Misty too (at least now you have Mega Punch and Mega Kick but the water weakness is no fun)
-Flamethrower would be nice, but you can't get it for toooooo long. You can't get Fire Blast for even longer than that.
-RIP Charmander
Finally, Squirtle:
-You get bubble at level 8 rby/level 7 frlg, only power 20 but just in time for Brock's Gym.
-You get water gun at level 15 rby/level 13 frlg, power 40 but you very quickly get an upgrade...
-You can use Bubblebeam after beating Misty, which is power 65. Nice nice.
-Not too many things resist water: water, grass and dragon is the entire list. Grass and dragon you can kick the ass of with ice TMs.
-You can learn Mega Punch and Mega Kick, and later Ice Beam and Blizzard, and as Blastoise grab Earthquake and Fissure.
-If you still need it, you can learn Bite at level 24 rby/level 19 frlg (as Wartortle).
-You can learn Surf and Strength, two mandatory HMs that are also nice moves.
Also, for reference, why the Nidoking route is a thing in Pokemon Yellow (at least in RTA):
-You can get a level 7 nidoran VERY early, and evolve it in Mt. Moon to Nidoking due to the moon stone there
-Nidoking has very good stats overall, better than Nidoqueen's as well (which is why it has to be male)
-Nidoking can learn damn everything: Double Kick, Thrash, Mega Punch, Mega Kick, Horn Drill, Bubblebeam, Ice Beam, Blizzard, Thunderbolt, Thunder, Earthquake, Dig, Fissure, (Flamethrower if it was a TM in rby), Fire Blast, Rock Slide, Surf (how does THAT make sense? It's an awesome mental image but still!), Strength. That's right - Nidoking has TWO different ways of using an OHKO move on you, and can get type advantage on whatever it wants, it has a magical horn you can teach how to shoot ice and lightning and shit. Nidoking is badass.
-Downside: Nidoking has some awful defense type matchups (2x from ground, ice, psychic, water). But everything else Nidoking kicks ass at.
In conclusion:
Actually, I plan on doing this game, myself, but I will have to test with all 3 pokemon, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, AND Charmander, meaning I have to make 3 separate TASes, and upload/submit the fastest of the three.
It would be immensely surprising if Bulbasaur or Charmander was the fastest in red/blue or fire red/leaf green. Unless you know something no one else does you don't have to waste time.
If you have time to blow in the marketplace, isn't there a farm animal that you can interact with that you can spam making the sound of? (I remember MetaSigma doing it on stream once)
how about some suggestions on what to do during the 14 minute desert waiting period
Could you abuse the fact that the encode will be done at 30Hz and turn around every frame while sprinting only on frames pointing in one of those directions, so you appear to be backwalking slowly (or forwardwalking slowly every time there's a lag frame, and back when there's another, etc)?
Could you kite enemies around and repeatedly do crazy risky avoidance of their attacks connecting? (Could you do the opposite, repeatedly attack enemies in a way that looks like it should be connecting but is pixels short?)
Could you display RNG manipulation by getting a ridiculous string of misses in a row?
Btw, maybe tracing letters will be more obvious if you do large sweeps for each one and do an obvious stop between letters so you know that one is done. Not sure, would need experimentation :) Other shapes would be awesome, too - things like perfect circles, perfect polygons, perfect sine waves, hyperbolas, stars would all be interesting in a game with 8 directional movement.
Very very very - I wonder why these are hardcoded in, rather than it being a feature of the engine to generically handle 'verys'?
444901 FLYING
444901 SKYBORNE
444901 VERY FLYING
444901 VERY VERY FLYING
444901 VERY VERY VERY FLYING
6be601 HORN-MAD
6be601 MAD
6be601 MADDISH
6be601 MANIACAL
6be601 PSYCHOPATHIC
6be601 PSYCHOTIC
6be601 SOCIOPATHIC
6be601 VERY MAD
6be601 VERY VERY MAD
6be601 VERY VERY VERY MAD
43af01 AZURE
43af01 COLORISTIC
43af01 COLOURISTIC
43af01 LAZULINE
43af01 POWDER-BLUE
43af01 SKY-BLUE
43af01 VERY BLUE
43af01 VERY VERY BLUE
43af01 VERY VERY VERY BLUE
Two interesting things to map together (also missed gryphon- spellings, or does it autcorrect well enough?):
If the bad ending is just 'good ending, except you do one decision wrong and end the game early' then it's not interesting enough to warrant its own TAS.
If the bad ending and the good ending require a lot of differences (such as sonic - collecting the emeralds vs not collecting the emeralds - or such as pokemon fire red/leaf green - collecting 60 pokemon along the way so you can rematch the elite four, or collecting only what you need and ending after the first elite four) they're worth being different TASes.
Regarding the script - I thought of that idea as well, but the problem is that you also get regular letters in the garbage data as well. Filtering those out means you might see stuff like "ACAR" in the list, whereas leaving the garbage characters in means that those words automatically get flagged as fishy ("@3 *ACAR").
That is a good point - you could leave in the garbage characters and also extend the length you read by the number of garbage characters encountered, as a compromise.
This was meant to be a quick hack to get the data out of the ROM anyway, so give me a break! :D
Edit: The link is now posted in the submission text as well.
Cool! This looks like a really useful list, so do you think it could get a more permanent upload home? (Sendspace links go stale relatively quickly, dropbox and mediafire are good choices in my experience) Then it can be edited into the notes for the TAS where you talk about object mapping.
(Also, it seems like you could edit the script to notice that when the first n characters are non-printable characters, it should advance n characters before reading the ROM. That should fix most of the erroneous cases.)
I realize that's the rule for the time being, but the way it's worded makes it seem like they'll want to stop accepting Snes9x movies completely sometime in the future. Given how long this run took to make, I'd hate to potentially find out halfway through a new run that the emulator I'm using is no longer acceptable. So I'd rather just not have that be an issue at all, and switch to a new emulator (only problem is, the newer ones seem less user-friendly).
When snes9x below v1.51 was deprecated there was a system of continuances, e.g. if you say that you started your run before the deprecation and cannot/do not want to swap, you'd get a continuance and be allowed to submit it when it's done (this is how the Yoshi's Island 100% and Super Mario World 96 exit runs got accepted for example)
If snes9x v1.51 or higher gets deprecated I imagine the same system will happen. So as long as you start soon it is a non-issue.
A lot of glitches happen because you have two things happen on the same frame, and their side effects are processed out of order (many glitches in SMW for example)
Interesting, you'd think the detail would have an effect on it.
It might load the same amount of level information no matter what detail it plans to render (e.g. the stuff in the level is not separated in such a way that it could do faster loading)
Sorry, I wasn't clear: setting the -ultralowdetail mode reduced loading times, but didn't reduced the variations of loading times between runs.
Oh my goodness! So many of these level solutions gave me the goofiest grin on my face, for example: 4-3, 4-11, 5-3, 5-4, 6-7, 7-4, 9-9, 10-2 but also many others. I want to vote this Yes twice, it's exactly the kind of TAS to show someone to give them a laugh :)
