Posts for Pokota

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Pokota
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I'm thinking more and more about the route now... I've not actually completed the game myself so I don't know which Attack Pieces are required (I watched the video so I know Green Shell and Snack Basket are required), but skipping over some of them may be very beneficial - it depends on damage vs time spent as to whether some should be skipped or not. Also, Daredevil Boots from A-rank Jump Helmet in the Cholesteroad will be worth it since the only forced damage in the game goes to Bowser well before you can get it.
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Pokota
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Posts: 779
How I do it is listen to the sound cues. The lower sound is the B button and the higher one is the A button. You get a little bit of let as far as going late, but other than the first step going early will always knock you out of the phase so don't rush your way through it. I would imagine that this would be very difficult without the sound cues and I know I can't do it at all without them.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I don't know if there are any major improvements available to the route, but the battles... eeech. I want to say that Wiggler can be improved - I seem to remember that you can punch out the wiggler's 4th segment before he does his charge at you, saving a turn from this video each time. Plus the heavy reliance on the multi-hit abilities leads me to believe that a lot more luck manipulation than what happens here should be going on.
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Pokota
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Ah, that would explain it. I guess the lack of a season pass is partly due to how iTunes would occasionally "air" an episode early. Or something like that.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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He's an owl, he probably sleeps during the day. Night episodes aren't really a thing in this show. Is the new season not on iTunes yet, or am I just not seeing it? I don't get whatever channel Pony is on anymore, and I don't like watching them off of YouTube if I can avoid it.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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It sounds like you're ultimately looking for a ram map (a list of ram addresses with corresponding descriptions), which Data Crystal doesn't have one yet for Link to the Past so that may be a fun project for me to work on once I finish up with Metroid II. As far as doing it yourself? Record an input file that does the things you want to watch for first, then play back while either manually watching the entirety of the ram in hex editor (much slower but it can pick up on storage patterns and abstruse unknowns when you get to that address, with a key drawback of slowing down play speed) or searching for changed values (which this works a lot better for stuff like health or XY position since they're either known values or relatively straightforward unknowns). Reason for recommending the input file is because both methods tend to slow the game down a fair bit and you don't really want to be sending commands while doing most of this anyway.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Posts: 779
Desync at 32:29::41, enters the Bowser fight and does nothing. Or is that intentional?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, the three examples you listed don't just replace sonic graphically, they also replace his playstyle and mechanics with the new character in question - fundamentally it's a different game, just with scenery we've already seen
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Pokota
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I don't know enough about the game to be able to fairly say "yes it's good at what it's doing" or "no it can be done better but it's more entertaining than a faster one" or "no and the improvements aren't much better". Which is inherently the problem with Beat-Em-Ups. Either everyone knows if it's a good run, or nobody knows if it's a good run - moreso than other runs because Beat-Em-Ups have to strike the balance between peak efficiency and actual entertainment or else you'll have nothing but the fastest strong attack.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Call the category "All Badges", for one, since that was something you pointed out in your proposal. As far as no memory corruption and no glitch warps, I propose that a compromise could possibly be reached if Snorlax can be skipped going Vermillion -> Lavender since getting the Silph Scope and Pokeflute comprises half of the midgame fluff. Between luck manips and the inherent system, I don't think you'd need 100s to take down 100s - in fact I think that's part of the original proposal is to not grind if we don't have to.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Warp wrote:
Music is in some way "more protected" than other material. (I don't really understand why that is, but it just is.)
For a couple of reasons here in the states: 1) Copyright law makers and Music labels have been in cahoots since the introduction of the cassette tape player. 2) It's a hell of a lot easier to do unmentionable things to music than to video or even games. 3) (And this is the big one) Pretty much any replayable source of music can replace a copyright holder's approved source, so the laws have to be draconian to be anywhere near effective.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I would say leave the signed/unsigned writes in place for those who want them - even though the game won't see the difference, I want to say it's easier to spot bad input if we know to expect a small negative and get someone trying to put in a large positive instead.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I can get behind this idea for the reasons stated already. I'd love to be able to do a self-updating party stats block for Pokemon games (like as seen in the alternate encode for the current Fire Red run, as well as in recent visits to TPP) but there just isn't enough screen real estate to do it sanely.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Posts: 779
Warp wrote:
One thing I might have missed in this discussion: Why are we even considering accepting a partial completion of the game? This completes only one episode of the game. It has four. This run, thus, does not complete the whole game.
The same issue exists with the extant TASes of Jill of the Jungle and Hocus Pocus (moreso with the latter as we have both the shareware episode and one of the non-shareware episodes in the listing).
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Posts: 779
It shouldn't be dividing by zero ever as there are no enemies with a max health of 0 (Oddly, items have a nonzero health value as well), but I'll take another look at how the data is stored during the Queen battle. If necessary I'll add in a sanity check during the byte scrapes to set max health to 1 if it's 0. The relevant range of bytes is from 0x0600 through 0x06FF; I've been monitoring the region via the hex editor function. It's really interesting to see what pops up there and what doesn't - an example is there is something in the Space Jump ruins' catacombs, where there's the alpha and gamma metroids in those rooms full of netting, near the cast off shell for the gamma.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I just have to remember to call the selector from the right table - I kept bumping into bugs where I was calling the entire table instead of the value at i Also updated script below:
Language: lua

--[[ General scripts for Metroid II: Return of Samus for Gameboy/GB ]] enemy = {"indicator","health","maxhealth","frozen","lifeperc","isdrop","isupgrade"} enemy.indicator = {} enemy.health = {} enemy.maxhealth = {} enemy.frozen = {} enemy.lifeperc = {} enemy.isdrop = {} enemy.isupgrade = {} samus = {"basehp","maxhp","perchp"} bombs = { } bombperc = { } ubite = memory.read_u8 sbite = memory.read_s8 circ = gui.drawPie rekt = gui.drawRectangle bawx = gui.drawBox function core() getSamusLife() getEnemyStats() updateBombTimers() calcPercents() drawBombTimers() drawHealthBars() end function getSamusLife() za = ubite(0x1051) upda = string.format("%2x",za) za = tonumber(upda,10) zb = ubite(0x1050) zc = ubite(0x1052) samus.maxhp = 99 + (zb*99) samus.basehp = za + (zc*99) end function getEnemyStats() root = 0x0600 for i = 0,7 do enemy.indicator[i] = root + i*32 enemy.health[i] = ubite(enemy.indicator[i] + 12) enemy.maxhealth[i] = ubite(enemy.indicator[i] + 17) enemy.frozen[i] = ubite(enemy.indicator[i] + 11) enemy.isdrop[i] = sbite(enemy.indicator[i] + 13) enemy.isupgrade[i] = ubite(enemy.indicator[i] + 4) enemy.indicator[i] = sbite(enemy.indicator[i]) if enemy.maxhealth[i] >= 250 then enemy.health[i] = 0 end if enemy.maxhealth[i] == 0 then enemy.maxhealth[i] = 1 enemy.health[i] = 0 end end end function updateBombTimers() bombs[1] = ubite(0x1d31) bombs[2] = ubite(0x1d41) bombs[3] = ubite(0x1d51) end function calcPercents() -- first, calc percents for the bombs since it's a simple loop with a bound check for i, v in ipairs(bombs) do if (bombs[i] ~= 255) then bombperc[i] = bombs[i] / 95 else bombperc[i] = 0 end end samus.perchp = samus.basehp / samus.maxhp for i = 0, 7 do enemy.lifeperc[i] = enemy.health[i] / enemy.maxhealth[i] end end function drawBombTimers() for i, v in ipairs(bombperc) do circ(i*10,8,8,8,-90,bombperc[i]*360,"Green","Green") end end function drawHealthBars() bawx(0,136,64,143,0xFF666666,0xFF666666) rekt(1,137,samus.perchp*62,5,0xFF333333,0xFF333333) for i = 0,7 do if (enemy.indicator[i] ~= -1) then -- Is the enemy slot active? if (enemy.isdrop[i] == 0) then -- Make sure it's not an item if (enemy.frozen[i] == 0) then -- If it's not frozen, use red rekt(150+i,0,1,100*enemy.lifeperc[i],0xFFFF0000,0xFFFF0000) else -- otherwise, use cyan rekt(150+i,0,1,100*enemy.lifeperc[i],0xFF00FFFF,0xFF00FFFF) end end end end end event.onframeend(core)
Still need to figure out how to handle doors and the spring ball enemy, but it no longer shows health bars for projectiles and Gamma Metroid barriers. EDIT: Removed one check since it was ultimately redundant. EDITWO: Added a sanity check to getEnemyStats()
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Alright, new lua HUD time - this time for Metroid II: Return of Samus. EDIT: On second thought, look two posts down.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Okay, question time. Do the readbyte family of commands accept decimal numbers or just hex numbers?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Hey, I'm working on mapping the wram of this game; is there a bk2 movie that runs through the game, or should I just take a couple hours and do it myself? Speed/optimisation is not necessary for what I'm working on, though if you show off some frame-perfect glitches I won't complain ;-)
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Post subject: Re: Jabo Download
Pokota
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Captain Forehead wrote:
On a side note, I got Bizhawk to work, so don't ask why I'm not using that.
  • Visits the community that makes Bizhawk
  • Admits that Bizhawk works
  • Wants to use a different emulator anyway
To parrot the others, why?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Once the Jill games become available for purchase, I'd love to donate a set to the TAS community. I've got all three of the games but don't have the patience to set up JPC-rr at all, let alone three different times. Plus I kinda want to focus on what I've already started.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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As has been said before, an external AI would have difficulty seeing how its actions would influence the game outside of the general "Are these parameters X? Then do input Y." It can has perfect knowledge of the game, but only in the moment. To use Metroid II as an example, an AI would have difficulty judging the optimal time to shoot the first missile at a metroid that has a transition sequence, such as the first metroid of the game. Humans can already account for it because we know to expect something unusual already. Ideally, an organic AI would be better than a simple In-The-Moment AI, but that's kind of more difficult to write.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Posts: 779
I feel right at home with ridiculously overpowered Turn Undead - my first brush with AD&D was Darksun: Shattered Lands, and it did the same thing there. Coup de Grace is supposed to be a full action and can't be done with a ranged weapon beyond 5 feet. Casting defensively isn't something that I'm familiar with but I want to say is the idea behind the Concentration skill. Most low level touch spells are fizzle-on-miss, and generally don't get used by non-luckhax trueclass mages because they rely on melee. Range touch is supposed to be a completely different thing from touch but I don't think any of the spells in the game are supposed to be range touch. Spells healing downed characters is supposed to stabilize an unconscious character and restore hp in one go, but it feels like a simplification thing in this game rather than any kind of technical limitation (and because casting times it's better to stabilize first and move the line of battle in P&P anyway)
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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FatRatKnight wrote:
This would be a very good time to figure out the Attacks of Opportunity mechanic and have the whole group of enemies just systematically walk to their deaths against your Wizard with pointy dagger. You might want Combat Reflexes, to have more than one attack, and enough Dexterity to get the necessary number of attacks.
Removed, see below EDIT: Okay, so Combat Reflexes is a lot more helpful than I thought now that I've actually read the description of it.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I'll poke around in ram and see if I can't adapt that to work for all metroids and not just the queen. I know Zetas will be a lot less stressful with visual progress being made.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
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