Posts for Personman

1 2
14 15 16 17 18 19
Posted: 6/19/2011 3:28 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
At around 5:00 in part 1, could you have kept that vertical koopa around and jumped off of it to get to the platform sooner?
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/19/2011 1:09 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I'm busy for the next few days doing things that require me to be running the OSX side of my Macbook. But yes! I'm going to do the hexing stuff I said, and see about incorporating your level 3, in ... I dunno, maybe a week? We'll see. Getting this done ASAP is not really something I can prioritize, but it's definitely something I'm going to see through over time.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/18/2011 1:16 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I have to say, since there is no difference between the difficulties except for the number of save points, which doesn't really increase the difficulty for TASing at all, and the presence of the saves allows for cool double jump abuse and platform positioning abuse, it really seems like Medium is a better choice for a TAS. Also, the way that run goes around the island before getting on the spike platform is great! ^__^ Though it's really boring in the post-boss segments.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/18/2011 10:48 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Done
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/17/2011 9:54 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I agree with ^. I see no reason why hourglass should be bound to the kind of silly existing TASing conventions. Another related feature that would be really nice would be if playback automatically paused on the last frame of input, so that you can resume recording more easily. And while I'm listing features, being able to set up an autosave that saves a state to a particular slot every time you record N frames after the last autosave would be wonderful, especially since you can't save state while holding down game buttons (at least not with the default shift+number binding), which makes saving states during long repetitive portions annoying. But then you screw up and really wish you had :P EDIT: Also, the ability to record over a segment without changing its length or destroying the rest of the movie. I believe, unless I'm just a total scrub, that this is impossible without a hex editor at the moment? Even better of course would be the ability to shorten the movie, but that's significantly more complex and would be useful only when you find an improvement that doesn't cause a desync. The 'record over a segment without changing the length' feature request may seem kind of silly, since obviously you're not improving the run's speed, and you can already use a hex editor. But I think if this feature were available, people would be much more willing to be fancy and entertaining in their runs, since they could concentrate on speed at first, and then quickly and easily test out alternate, entertaining movements by going back over already-optimized sections.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 11:05 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Mods, if you really, truly feel like removing the entire contents of a post is absolutely necessary (which I personally believe should only be the case for things like blatant spam and illegal content, but I'm not making that argument here) please just delete the post (and contact the user privately to let them know why). Replacing it in its entirety, as above (and unsigned, too!) just makes everyone wonder what it said and feel like the mods are being autocratic.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 10:57 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Aqfaq, NitroGenesis, Wak, Aglar, and Aqfaq again: I love you guys. A lot. And if this run becomes the motivating force behind improving emulator capabilities, something lastingly good will have come of it all! :D
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 8:02 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I uploaded your encode to youtube, since I couldn't get it to play in mplayer or VLC... Link to video Oh, and, extremely yes vote! Aglar, can you enlighten us at all about just how/why the collision detection is so broke?
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 10:22 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Given that he hasn't submitted it here, and that Japanese players probably appreciate the existence of a TAS in their language, this seems pretty benign. It would be interesting to know if there are any significant improvements anywhere in the run that could apply to future versions of the English TAS...
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 10:18 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
How did you go about finding these memory locations? I would love to be able to monitor x and y positions in Ninja Senki, but I have no idea how to go about finding the right memory locations. Hourglass doesn't have a way to report everything that changed from one frame to another, does it? And if it did, it seems likely that it would be many more addresses than in say an NES game, due to being written in a high-level language with things like garbage collection going on...
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 9:32 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Hey, thanks! Wait, am I really that dumb though? I was sure I tested pressing buttons during the bonus time screen... (I'm booted into OSX at the moment, can't test it) As for the constant jumping, it's not meant to continue throughout the run. As I said in my OP, my vision was to have the first level of each world be done straightforwardly, and the second with some kind of movement gimmick. For World 2, I think I want to do some beat-matched jumping, since the theme has a nice rhythm for it. If that doesn't interest you, that could be a good way to divide up the work -- you could do first levels, and I could do second levels. I would be fine with giving up the all-coins goal. I thought it would add entertainment, but you're probably right that it's not worth it. My next steps are going to be to download a hex editor, clean up some of the unnecessary shuriken in level 1, fix a couple points in level 2 where there are some frames to be saved (mostly due to walking off of ledges instead of jumping such that I'm falling down more quickly by the time I get there), and see if you're right about skipping the time bonus. If you want to start work on level 3, awesome! If not, I'll get to it eventually :) And if so, I'll start on 4.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 6:55 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Wow, so much hate! Memory corruption has led to many of my favorite runs on this site (Pokemon Yellow, Mario Land 2..) and I'm all for it. It also (usually? I think?) has the convenient property of being pretty cleanly separable from a non-corrupted run, so there is room for two goals where desired. I'm intrigued by MESHUGGAH's point about the reset button not being a frame-aligned input. Is any work being done to emulate this? It's hard to even imagine how you would specify which instruction you want to trap from, and movie file formats would certainly have to change...
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 6:41 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Anyone want to encode Wak's run? And Wak, want to let us know where the 11 frames come from? Also, can a publisher weigh in on whether Wak should make a new submission or not? Seems to me like he should just go for it...
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 5:30 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I for one can't wait to see Wak's run. Seems like it should be it's own submission, especially if he redid it all from scratch without copying input, but if it would really save time for it to be a replacement here, whatever. All I care about is that baby moses be saved in the absolute minimum number of frames :D
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/15/2011 1:29 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
The reason I think that it's stupid (and of course you are free to disagree, and free to make your own run, though I think it would be cooler if we were working together if you end up wanting to work on this) is that you already get to see plenty of each type of enemy getting killed in a normal run, and it's not very different each time: you throw N shuriken at them on autofire and they die. Killing every single enemy doesn't demonstrate anything new, it doesn't add very much interesting route planning but DOES cost time in many places where you have to turn around or backtrack, and it removes three major sources of entertainment: near misses, tricky dodges, and taking damage to save time. There are also some enemy types (the turtles in world 2) that take forever to kill, and killing all of them would be ridiculously boring when almost all of them can be jumped over or run through faster.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/14/2011 11:57 PM
(Edited: 6/15/2011 12:55 AM)
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
The point is that time gives you bonus score. I think it's a great system, really. It is kind of unfortunate game design to have a score that seems to be meaningful but that is in fact rendered useless by one boss. However, I'm glad it is that way, since it makes it clear that a high-score run is stupid, which I strongly believe it would be anyway. I guess it would be worth testing to see if the gray ninja are actually infinite, though of course there's no way to prove the positive. Testing 50 sounds reasonable? I'll try it soon. EDIT: Proof that more than 50 ninja spawn, and that the timer running out at the boss doesn't behave differently. Levels 3-6 are terrible, mostly just me getting there in real time, ignore them. If anyone wants to see if they run out at 100 or 1000 or 9999999999, feel free to start from here...
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/14/2011 10:49 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
You seem to be missing the part where the time limit doesn't kill you.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/14/2011 8:17 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Highscore is meaningless in this game due to the level 6 boss, which produces infinite points. All Coins seems like the only meaningful additional goal, and adds some more interesting pathing. I don't really understand your statement that 'All Coins isn't entertaining' while you acknowledge that High Score, which is a superset, would be a worthwhile goal choice (if it were meaningful).
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/13/2011 1:14 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I've been enjoying browsing around the chip's challenge wiki quite a bit, there are some neat glitches and history documented there. One mystery that TASing tools might be able to clear up for them is whether Slo Mo and Jumping Swarm can be beaten with a time remaining of 1. They claim to know that Jumping Swarm can't be, but I don't see any evidence, and they state that it is unknown whether or not Slo Mo can be. If these two levels could be beaten that slowly, the theoretical worst score could be achieved.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/13/2011 12:17 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I thought about killing all enemies, but decided that later in the game it would be way too boring/time wasting, since there are enemies that come from behind you, or aren't on the optimal path (even in level 2, I would have to backtrack significantly at around 1:50 to kill all enemies and get all coins. In level 3 it would be much worse, and then much later in, I forget, 14 maybe, it would just be awful). I tried to only use extra shuriken when it made a huge flurry of them that looks cool, as at :50 and 1:51, or when I liked the effect of leaving one behind at each stair at 1:57. I agree that the missed and extra shuriken around :16 and :37 look bad. It would be super cool if there was an easy way to correlate positions in the input file with frame numbers so I could go take them out! I'm not sure about the title screen. I did try to get it on the earliest frame (even when you press the button on the earliest frame, it takes a while to fade out) but I also ran into some crashes when I tried to load savestates around there, so it could be that the actual best time to press it is on a frame that made it crash. I tend to like variety in my TASes more than killing every enemy on exactly the last possible frame. It opens up neat things like 'jumping on his head' at :24 and mixing up the order and timing with which I shoot at the ghosts from 1:02 to 1:05. Those are some of my favorite bits of this so far, so if they don't work for you I'd love to hear why.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/12/2011 8:37 AM
Post subject: Ninja Senki
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
Ninja Senki is a lovely freeware platformer. Go play it! I've begun work on an All-Coins TAS using nitsuja's Hourglass. I have a WIP through level 2 here and YouTubed here. I'm currently working on improving a few things in level 2, and I'll start on 3 soon. There are 16 levels in total, and I make no promises about when I'll be done. I'm planning to continue mirroring the two-act world structure in my movement styles, as I have above. I'll do the first level of each world pretty straightforwardly, and the second with some kind of obvious style. In this game, as long as you are holding right, you are moving right as fast as you can, which makes this a reasonable thing to do. I don't quite have 8 distinct ideas yet, but I have several, and I'm sure I can keep it up. This game is pretty straightforward. I'm not aware of any abusable glitches at the moment, though I'm keeping my eye out. The tricky part of TASing this game is holding and releasing jump for the correct number of frames to not overshoot ledges or lose too much vertical speed. I haven't got this down to much of a science yet, I'm mostly relying on doing it a few different ways, seeing which is best, and then trying a few values near that one. One important thing is that if you release jump for only one frame before you double jump, your double jump will be very weak and (so far) useless. This may come in handy sometimes though as well. If you want to run my input file instead of watching the shitty youtube encode, set the framerate to 60 fps and ignore the exe mismatch that you'll probably get if you downloaded Ninja Senki recently. There don't seem to be public version numbers, but I assume the author made some minor change at some point. So far it doesn't seem like an issue, but please let me know if you experience any desyncs. Feedback, criticism, and help are all very welcome!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/11/2011 5:54 PM
(Edited: 6/12/2011 5:26 AM)
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
I've got this working great with Ninja Senki! And with that, I've got my first real TAS project on my hands. It might take me a year, but I love this game and I'm going to get it done :D Nitsuja, you are amazing. Given that people (like me! OMG!) might actually start making TASes with this, a new subforum seems appropriate, as someone else mentioned. Even if TASes made with Hourglass can't be published for a while yet, it would still be nice to have per-game WIP discussion topics. EDIT: WOO! I've finished levels one and two, and gotten a (terrible) encode up on Youtube! Check it out! nitsuja, or anyone, suggestions for which encoding option to choose would be very welcome. I just started at the top until I found one that worked, and then converted it to mpg with TPMGEnc.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/10/2011 8:15 PM
(Edited: 6/10/2011 8:58 PM)
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
This video is currently being processed. Please check back in a few minutes. NOOOOOOOOOO! WANT MAH BABBY MOSES NAOOOOOOOOOOO! Edit: Yay! This was seriously great. I totally pretended that I could tell how much better optimized the general play was, and the level 4 trick was amazing. Seven yes votes.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/9/2011 10:53 PM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
This was lovely! I love the way you discard objects when you're done with them. It's like: Puggsy: "Yay! A key!" *clap clap clap clap* "I love this key!" two seconds later Puggsy: "Who the fuck needs this fucking key!?" *casually flings it behind him as he continues to bounce along*
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Posted: 6/9/2011 10:32 AM
Quote
Personman
Other
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 4/20/2008
Posts: 465
This was fabulous, voting yes. Aqfaq, please bring me more incredibly short, obscure, and well made TASes. Thanks!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
1 2
14 15 16 17 18 19