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Well, I'm gonna miss your runs showing up on the workbench.
I didn't know that intended gameplay feature that's been in nearly every Kirby game was actually a glitch, though! Dang, I guess you really do learn something new every day!
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When I looked it up, it said Bizhawk's VBA-Next core is a fork of VBA-M, so it should at least be AS accurate as VBA-M, if not more. The sound emulation bugs with Hachiemon and this game are fixed in the newest version, so that's not an issue anymore.
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Bizhawk's the preferred emulator for GBA now that GBAHawk is more functional. It uses the VBA-Next core, which as far as I can tell is based off of VBA-M, so it doesn't seem like the behavior would be too different.
Then again, I'm probably wrong on all this.
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Ti_ wrote:
I've not write that it's my run. You may see your as author in movie file metadata, so I've not steal your movie. :) Just beat a time record.
About how it's published on site, I don't know system.
The metadata is nowhere near enough, since hardly anyone who watches this movie is going to check it. You need to actually edit the submission to include him as a co-author. Where it says "Author's Nickname" you'd write "Ti_ and Ferret Warlord". Considering most of the input is his, I suggest you do this as soon as possible.
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https://www.mediafire.com/?kr33ocme337i5to
60 FPS download. It's a precise strategy and only saves 40ish frames over my test run. I might give it another go later but for now this is the fastest I've gotten.
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The spawn pattern I'm getting for Stage 6 would negate pretty much all the time I've saved so far, so I'd still have to check for a better pattern. It shouldn't be that bad to test a new pattern... Wait.
I think I could just walk away from Jennifer slightly after the Stage 5 fight and spend an extra frame or two walking back. I don't think I need to re-fight her every time.
Okay, that's a lot better. I shouldn't attempt to think or post when I'm tired. Bad things happen. I'm still not thrilled at running through Stage 6 multiple times, though I can do them in real time to test the spawn pattern and go back through to make it entertaining once I find a nice one. I just really hope the pattern changes every frame, but I'll leave that for when I get back to testing.
Since it might be a bit before the next update, here's a video...
Link to video
...and a fun fact: Jumping just before the post-Jennifer cutscene makes it look like Rick is just giving her a huge knee-drop before picking her up. That's nothing new: zallard does it in his record run and I rip it off paid homage to it in my test run, but what is new is that it actually saves 2 frames when timed correctly, which is lovely because I don't think Treasure Master had any time-savers I couldn't explain and I need to keep up that trend in my TASes.
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Well, I made it through Stage 5 and just hit a major roadblock in Stage 6.
The enemy pattern is, as far as I can tell, randomly predetermined: It's set at some point (most likely when entering the stage) and cannot be changed. This means that a fast boss fight may be impossible due to the enemy spawn pattern being awful. And, naturally, I get a really good pattern in my test run and a nightmare for the optimized one. This is (for my ever-dwindling patience, at least) a huge problem.
Stage 6 is a minute long auto-scroller that needs to be run over and over again every time I want to try a new pattern, and this is assuming the spawn pattern changes based on the frame you enter. I haven't tested it yet. The entire boss fight needs to be done every time to make sure I have an optimal spawn pattern for the full fight, and even after that there might be other, faster spawn patterns that exist. So that's all well and good, except for how terribly inconvenient it is to spend 15+ minutes testing one spawn pattern.
The problem lies in the new Stage 5 boss kill. It's about 40 frames faster than the test run, but it's extremely precise, meaning I'd have to find an equally fast strategy that I can actually afford some frame loss on, which means I'd have to redo that fight, and I might have to redo the fight every time I test a new spawn pattern in Stage 6 due to how awful optimizing that fight is.
How awful is optimizing killing your horribly mutated girlfriend? Multiple reasons. Jennifer jumps back on every hit, and when pushed into a corner she'll jump the opposite way. Every multiple of 6 damage, she transforms back into her normal self, which is an extremely long sequence where she can't be hurt. This has to be avoided by jumping over every multiple of 6: That is, dealing 5 damage in some way and then using a slide to deal 2 damage, jumping over 6 and skipping the transformation. The jumping back and the transformation skips aren't that bad until you remember that Rick automatically walks to the right when going to the next level, so Jennifer needs to be killed on the right side of the screen to save the most time. However, the new strategy I use ends up with Jennifer on the left side of the screen, meaning I have to hit her out of the right-hand corner, get myself into position with little time to spare, and hit her from the left so she moves back into the right-hand corner for the kill.
In short:
*You're usually barely out of reach even when you do time everything well.
*Your pattern needs to avoid multiples of 6 to get a quick kill.
*Every attack needs to be positioned and timed well to avoid losing time.
*You may have to pull off some serious acrobatics to kill her on the right side.
*And then you find out that Stage 6 has a bad spawn pattern anyway.
I'm not thrilled about this. The mere thought of having to continuously re-do the most frustrating parts of the run isn't exactly doing wonders for my motivation. I wouldn't say I'm giving up, but I do think I need an extended break. I'll probably post my current BK2 after a couple weeks in case someone with more patience than me wants to take a stab at it.
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The best course of action might be to upload the file to Mediafire or some other site and post it here so we can take a look at it and see what the problem is.
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Aqfaq wrote:
If I have a personal computer and enough free time to make a single good TAS, I probably already belong to the top 1% of the richest persons alive. So, no, I do not need money to support my insanely sophisticated top-tier hobby. Neither do you. It is just stupid and narcissistic. The same is true for anyone who would pay just to see a TAS instead of donating that money to some charity.
Echoing this.
I'm absolutely all for charity events, I love that TASing is getting a lot of attention recently, mostly with AGDQ this year and the upcoming block next year. I'd definitely participate in a TAS charity event if it was well-organized in an entertaining way. But... As for crowd-funding a single person, I wouldn't expect anyone to shell out the cash. It's just a hobby. It doesn't require any money to keep it up, so the only incentive is just giving a stranger on the internet money to buy pizza and beer or whatever nerds eat and drink these days. Plus, there's a lot of downtime between quality runs: You can't just put up a good new TAS every week unless you specifically choose extremely short/easy games. You'd need a month or more per run, and I don't think that's often enough to hold peoples' interests.
I could see a bounty system working, possibly: Someone offering a set amount of cash for a run they'd like to see at some point. GameFAQs does it with FAQs, so it doesn't seem too farfetched to apply it for TASes as long as the paying party recognizes that it might take a while to be finished. That'd be the most direct form of getting paid to TAS that I can conceivably see happening.
...Damn, now I actually kinda want a TAS charity event to happen. I have no idea how it'll work, but TASers and speedrunners are known for coming up with incredible ideas...
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Archanfel wrote:
P.S. Apologies about bad video quality, i have no idea how to do encode with higher resolution than 320x224 in Gens :(
AVI recordings from emulators will always encode at the standard console resolution. You have to manually resize the video using AviSynth or some other video editor.
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Graphical bug. The tachometer displayed as solid blue instead of green and red. It was only a minor nuisance, but the bugfix is always appreciated in case anyone decides to come back and work on this again.
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GameFAQs Cheats Section wrote:
Get All Items
Go into the kitchen and get the salami first, then jump up and get the cat. Continue left to the next screen with three doors and enter the first door, you will be in the children's bedroom. Now press Pause, hold Up + Left and press 1 + 2.
Note: To get the space suit you have to sell the pearl.
Yeah, this is obviously a code.
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General consensus so far seems to be either "I'm excited about this run" or "You three pathetic plebeians better have Rain Man levels of savant syndrome or else this run is going to be complete fucking garbage".
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1. It wouldn't be funny.
2. What Patashu said. You'd have to add them to the encode directly.
I can't believe I'm actually giving legitimate advice, but try Aegisub. You get Avisynth support with the 32-bit version, so you can just add the subtitle file directly into the .avs script using a little bit of code and then... I dunno, push it through MeGUI for the actual encode since it has drag-and-drop .avs support.
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zallard wrote:
Hey Samsara! It's really cool to see someone picking this up for a TAS! I'm really glad to see some of the stuff I posed in this thread years ago actually being put to use!
They're excellent finds, and the run probably wouldn't look too different from an RTA without them. I'm glad I was able to figure them out relatively quickly and put them to good use.
I recently tried to improve my old TG16 run and ended up finding another oddity in the Stage 2 boss fight. Basically, I punched a knife once and it fell through the floor and de-spawned itself. I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up being possible on all 3 knives if it were looked into. I'll link both a youtube video and a video at 60fps in case you want to analyze it by the frame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1R2yltXNPQhttps://www.mediafire.com/?8tf25149s78envt
This is interesting... I'm not sure if it'll save any time in the TAS since the setup looks like it'd be longer than the normal quick kill. Looking at it on Youtube, it initially looked like the same sort of thing as the chair glitch where the knife is punched into the wall but going through the 60fps video frame-by-frame both knives are in the same position. I feel like it could still be the same sort of thing, though.
As for ideas on things, I've been kicking around a few things since I watched this TAS. I have a feeling you might be able to avoid getting tagged by the final boss if you try jump kicks into slides after your first slide. I remember when funkdoc was trying to figure out the stage 5 boss on stream, he was going about it by taking hits, but if you do a jump kick into a slide, you never have to take any hits. The window is probably super tight though, since for whatever reason it's less forgiving to chain slides into regular attacks than the arcade version.
So my thoughts are that cycle one for stage 7 boss could be one of these:
1) slide hit, slide hit, slide hit, jump kick, slide hit = 9 damage
2) jump kick, slide hit, slide hit, slide hit, jump kick, slide hit = 10 damage
If the final boss works like the stage 5 boss in terms of how it handles the final hit being a slide kick, you should be able to carry that extra hit into the next cycle with method #2, which should save 1 hit in any subsequent cycle. I don't know how feasible this is, but I think it's worth looking into.
That's a possibility... The shortest timeframe between a jump and a slide is 32 frames, and I need to lose less than 40 frames with that 10 damage cycle to save time with the early input end. I need to test to make sure a jump kick into a slide won't get me hit, which I'll probably do once I make it to Stage 7 proper. It should definitely save time if it's possible, though.
Actually, now that I think about it, I just thought of something. I'm gonna leave it here to remind myself later: Leading with a jump kick each cycle might save frames, since I can hit with the kick on the last frame possible and go into a slide within a few frames of that.
In the meantime, here's an updated Stage 3:
Link to video
38 frames faster than the testrun for the same reasons as the last two stages: Better jump/slide route and a slightly faster boss kill due to better positioning at the start of the fight and a slightly delayed slide delivering the final blow a couple frames faster. Stage 4 won't have much time improvement unless I can get an early cycle on the boss.
---
Wait. Shit. There's Hard difficulty. I'm playing through it right now to document the changes. So far, the only really noticeable changes are in enemy/boss health. I think some of the enemies move faster, but I don't think it'd be noticeable in the TAS since most of the enemies don't move before they die. If anything I'd just be jumping and sliding in slightly different places to account for the enemies that do move. Boss fights would take longer: The knife quick kills don't work, for example, though the chair despawn and painting quick kill do work. Biggy Man has double health, the Evil Smile takes 2 more hits with the cleaver, and I'm assuming the rest of the bosses (Jennifer, Mother and Hell Chaos) have extra or double health.
Overall, I don't think restarting for Hard difficulty is worth it. The only interesting thing would be using that knife despawn glitch, which I'd have to properly figure out. The new Biggy Man strategy required for the double health would probably just be bringing the shotgun from the beginning of the level, using both shotguns to full capacity, getting the three hit slide afterward and hitting him twice quickly with jump kicks. Not a very interesting strategy, and it'd be ~5 seconds slower, not counting the time it may take to bring both shotguns into the fight.
The Evil Smile pattern lock still works, and it accounts for the two extra hits needed, so that's no big deal. The last three bosses would just be longer versions of the same patterns. Jennifer, though reasonably entertaining as a fight, would just need a longer version of the same general pattern. Mother would just be the same "slide, walk left for a couple frames, jump kick, repeat" pattern for a longer period of time. Hell Chaos, with its long downtime between cycles, would become far less interesting since more cycles would be needed for a kill.
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Well, I will stick myself to the original intention (watching a new NES TAS by a "newcomer" and help if I can). So I will finish the movie alone and add you (Zephyrz) as coauthor once done.
Not because of mercy or anything like that, but since I literally learned the game by watching his input and I don't see "value" in ruining newcomers motivation in anyway.
This should be done more often: Co-authoring and crediting people who may play a huge role in a run's creation even if they didn't work on the input file themselves.
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I think he meant not holding a direction when you land, judging from the input logs he posted earlier. So instead of pressing Right+A, you'd just press A as soon as it'll let you jump, and then start holding Right again the frame after.
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Link to video
Guess I'm committed to doing this now.
Stage 1 improved by 28 frames with a better jump/slide route that allowed me to keep sliding speed more often. No change on the boss fight since it's timed.
Stage 2 improved by 2 frames with a slightly changed jump/slide route and not sliding into the hole at the end, which for some reason saves a frame. I think I mentioned that jumping on the same frame as the crouch after a slide will preserve all sliding momentum. If I did, I was wrong: You lose .125 PPF off sliding speed. Still faster than normal jumping or walking, but I gained a frame from avoiding it. As far as I've tried, there's no way to jump into that hole because of the hanging corpse and the jumping mechanics. The scroller section is lifted from the test run, though the end is changed slightly. No time gained, but it looks a little neater. 9 frames were saved on the boss fight with a more optimized double knife phase. The chair skip is actually oddly frame precise: You can knock it over the wall on a number of frames, but most of the time it'll be just as fast as a normal kill. The one specific frame I hit it on both movies is the only frame that'll let you save the extra half-second or so.
Overall, 39 frames faster than my test run so far. I'm aiming for 12:15 for a submission. The test run is decent, but there's still room for improvements. Stage 4 needs better entertainment and I still want to save a cycle on the boss fight if possible. Stage 5 has a lot of potential for optimization, specifically with the tech-heavy second screen and the boss fight. Stage 6, I'll probably just lift the input from the test run. I didn't spend that much time on Stage 7 in the test run so I feel like I might be able to save a couple seconds there alone.
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quo wrote:
Execution-wise, Tompa's run is probably better, but time wise, mine is faster by a long shot.
No it isn't. Faster text doesn't mean a faster run. Better execution does. So if Tompa's run is better executed than yours, then your run is slower by default.
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