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Link to videoUser movie #17263986223054304
I whipped this together over the past couple days mostly because I wanted to see a run done, and this is a particularly simple game to TAS. I won't be submitting this, and I'm not sure if I'll work on an optimized version so I'll share everything I found out. Most of this is probably already known, but since there's no info or working WIPs in this thread (anymore) I feel validated in sharing it.
The fastest Rick can normally move is sliding: He'll move 1.875 pixels per frame, or 15 pixels every 8 frames to put it more simply. This speed can be kept by jumping on the last frame of a slide. When coming out of a slide, Rick will be in the crouching pose for a single frame, and then stand up. If you jump on the frame before that one, without holding any directional buttons, you can keep the 1.875 PPF for the entire duration of a jump. Jumping is 1.5 PPF, and walking normally is 1.375 PPF, so in most cases where sliding isn't an option you'll want to be jumping. The fastest way to start a stage is by walking for at least 5 frames, then jumping for a single frame into a slide as early as possible.
You can't cancel any action you make, meaning if you need to kick an enemy out of your way so you can slide, you need to kick as soon as possible to give yourself enough time to recover and be able to slide afterward. Kicking will stop your vertical momentum during a jump as if you let go of the jump button entirely, so enemy control is probably the hardest part of optimizing the run. Then again, there's pretty much no RNG at all in the entire game: Enemies and obstacles are preset and mostly only respond to your actions, and are otherwise fairly predictable.
Ladders, such as the one at the end of Stage 1, always fade out at the same time after reaching them. There's no advantage to being higher up or lower down, it's all about reaching them as fast as possible. Same goes for the end of any screen: Sliding off the edge of a screen whenever possible will save a couple frames, as will jumping into holes.
Speaking of things on set timers: The boreworms (the stage 1 boss) are also on a set timer, meaning you can kill them all or avoid them all, and as long as you kill the last surprise worm ASAP you'll finish at the right time. I avoid them all here mostly because it felt more entertaining to me.
You can pick up weapons while sliding, as long as you're close enough when you hit down you'll pick up a weapon at the end of a slide. Barring that, you can pick up a weapon in midair by crouching during a jump while you're over the weapon, and close enough to the ground for it to register.
Sometimes I feel like calling this game Scrollerhouse. Anyone who may want to optimize and run this game should be forewarned that you're going to have to make a lot of scroller sections entertaining to watch.
The poltergeist (stage 2 boss) fight is probably one of my favorite parts of the run, because it's just 4 quick-kill strategies in a row: The chair glitch (mentioned in the last post in this thread, even if it was three and a half years ago) is used, which saved a little over half a second compared to my previous fastest chair kill. What I think happens is that when you're up against the right wall, the chair keeps trying to "follow" you to the right. Normally when you hit the chair, it flies away from you, but for some reason even if you're up against the right wall and facing right, you'll still hit the chair from the left, sending it into the wall for a split second and causing it to bounce upward and continue on to the right (since it's "following" you). It flies over the wall and despawns, continuing to the knife phase. I do need to get hit there so I can be in the chair's hitbox to knock it over the wall. Any earlier and I'd run out of invincibility frames, any later and I wouldn't be able to get in position.
The second knife phase involves interrupting a jumping kick with a punch to send both knives into the same corner. Somewhat tricky to pull off, but very flashy. The hardest part is actually turning around and sliding into the painting to finish off the fight.
The Biggy Man (stage 3 boss) fight is probably the only notable thing about Stage 3. I do the RTA strategy in reverse, firing first and sliding afterward, which is slightly faster because of not having to take damage. The three-hit slide has pretty tight timing and requires a good position.
Just like Stage 3, the only noticeable thing about Stage 4 is the boss fight. You may notice I'm not preserving sliding speed: That's because of the quick kill (posted a few posts (and years) ago in this thread). The boss moves in that set up and down pattern while you're chasing it. Once you reach the end of the scrolling, the boss will continue its pattern until it reaches a certain point near the mid-bottom of the screen. Once it reaches that point, it'll start its arcing pattern over you. The quick kill works by waiting until the boss is past that point while travelling upward, giving you just enough time to get into position. Hitting the boss causes it to jump down further into its pattern, skipping over the trigger to send it into the next phase. The quick kill is pretty precise, requiring two hits to get the boss past the trigger point twice and two extra frame-perfect hits afterward to cut down on time.
I don't preserve my sliding momentum because it isn't fast enough to save a cycle for the boss quick kill, so I'd have to actually wait around for a second or so if I preserved sliding speed the entire way. Better to make it slower-looking and smoother, I say.
The second screen of Stage 5 is probably my favorite in the run. The downward slopes actually allow Rick to move at 2 PPF, slightly faster than his normal max speed. Unfortunately, it's hard to keep this speed up throughout the entire stage due to enemy placement, but I do my best to control that as much as possible. Three auto-scrollers later and I'm at the boss. This boss is notable because you need to follow a specific attack pattern to kill it quickly: Certain attacks at certain times can trigger an extremely long sequence where you can't hurt the boss. It's kind of a sloppy quick kill, but it's one of the only ways to do it without the lengthy transformation sequence happening again.
The rest of the run is pretty standard: Some form of entertainment during the Stage 6 autoscroller, taking damage to save time on Stage 7, and quick kills on both the bosses.
There might be a way to kill the final boss slightly faster, but I think it'd require being able to take a hit: The first time it pops out of the ground, you can hit it three times with a slide and punch/kick 3 times afterward (a total of 9 damage). Hitting it with precision prevents you from getting hit, which is how I survive the entire time with just one heart. Now, a slide kick will do 2 damage every time it connects, while normal punches and kicks do 1: This is why all the quick kills are done with slides. I believe the boss retreats into the ground after taking a certain amount of damage, so... Since the boss takes an odd amount of damage on the first round (3 hits with the slide and 3 punches/kicks), it may be possible to jump, take the hit, and slide again, causing 10 points of damage instead of 9 for that round. He'll take 8 damage (3 slide hits and 2 punches/kicks) for the next three rounds, then on the last round you can end input as soon as you start the final slide instead of waiting for the extra hit at the end.
Apologies if any of that's disjointed. I'll clarify if necessary.
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KingCeszar wrote:
Hey.. I'm new to this and I've seen lots of vids on tas.. I want to do a KOF, FF one since those are the games I love to play.. What's the first thing I do? I already have ROMs do I just get the emu of this site and start testing? Are their NG ROMs already in this emu? What happens first?
If you're not already in the emulation scene, it's going to be a lot harder to get started. There's not much we can legally say about acquiring ROMs, but they're not included with the emulator. You'll have to find them yourself.
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Nach wrote:
Announcement for what?
plays the game when it's released
What game?
If I take your idea to its logical conclusion, we much now reject ACE for every single Windows submission, because we can point to this thread and say it's intentional and not ACE.
Okay, if you want to get pedantic, it's not an announcement. It's just public information.
take your idea to its logical conclusion
What idea?
All I said was that you just told a group of people that you're making a game that may or may not include an intentional exploit. Where did I imply that every Windows game has this intentional exploit?
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Runs have been obsoleted and rejected over inaccurate emulation, so I think it's a pretty big deal. Plus, if it's breaking known glitches then the TAS will have a distinct disadvantage compared to an RTA, and given how atrocious people can be when it comes to commenting on speedruns there's really no reason to just go ahead and make a TAS regardless.
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Nach wrote:
Where has it been announced?
Technically, this thread is the announcement. Anyone who reads the first post (and by definition the rest of the thread) and plays the game when it's released is going to know that there's an intentional ACE-like exploit. Admittedly it's a niche community and could only be a very small fraction of the people playing the game, but it's still there in public.
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was0x wrote:
No progress in 100% yet but I'm going to route soon and making tas actually.
I'm wondering if this is fine or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpQpF8z5nXE
This video shows I depleted a chest which can be hit multiple times instantly by screen transition. This works on such chests.
Those who don't remember what's 100% definition, "deplete chests" is one of 100% condition.
I think it's fine. The chest isn't skipped, it's still hit once, so it should count.
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Genesis Sonic 3 & Knuckles "Flying Battery Zone Act 2" in 03:55.7
Strike one. Single level videos aren't allowed, only full games. Single levels should be confined to game threads or userfiles.
Hi, I have done this Zone, Act 2 in this game because this is my first TAS video and i would like to see how I did.
Strike two. Never, ever submit your first TAS. There are always improvements to be made. Always. Finish a run. Try to improve it. Try to improve it again. Try to improve it over and over until you can't improve it anymore.
I didn't use glitches, only one, because glitches are boring and you can't know what is the fastest way defeating the level.
Strike three. The fastest way of finishing Flying Battery Zone has been demonstrated in much better TASes than this. Study other runs before making one of your own.
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trlky wrote:
Because, since the RTA being played by imperfect humans, it should not be faster than the supposed "perfect play" of a TAS. And it is trivial to compare different timings: the RTA community does it all the time.
One of the rules on this site is that a TAS must beat ALL RECORDS, including any RTA records. If it isn't doing so, that is a problem.
Comparing the two is required by the site rules.
Are you Dyshonest's alternate account or do you just have similar troubles grasping extremely simple concepts?
If you actually watch any recent RTA run and the ACE run, you'll see that the beginning of both runs is exactly the same. The same glitch (chuck-eat glitch) is used with the same setup (though the TAS does it much flashier, obviously). Even without any further explanation it should be obvious to anyone that the TAS uses the same glitch to a much, much better effect than the RTA is able to.
This particular application of the chuck-eat glitch crashes the game, giving a small window of opportunity to send input to open bus. Without the right set of input, the game stays crashed and the run is lost. Sending input to open bus means that the game's code is directly edited: Open bus is not meant to be directly accessible via player input, so anything that gets sent to it is executed immediately as it's not expecting anything except what it was originally programmed for. Therefore: Both runs use ACE. The RTA run scrolls the screen at that moment, as it's the most consistent way to prevent the game from crashing completely (though it still does crash completely fairly often). This gives the impression that it's not a major game-breaking glitch in any way, especially since chuck-eat has been used in other SMW runs without any extra effects (namely, getting the goal orb to skip Iggy's Castle, which doesn't crash the game to open bus at all).
It's not complicated. You don't need to have any coding knowledge or SMW TASing knowledge to understand it. All my information comes from the 20 times this has been discussed before, that you should have read before presenting your uneducated opinion.
If you really want to see an "update" to the warps TAS that uses the cloud, go ahead and make it yourself. Don't worry about optimizing it for submission to the site: It won't be accepted no matter how optimized it is.
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Yeah, those massive pictures are completely necessary to drive in the point that there's no reason to actually ask how many players each game needs when the first post gives a number high enough to account for every game posted thereafter. I seriously doubt that any GBA game worth TASing multiplayer would need more than four players anyway.
Unless there's some complicated bullshit that requires completely different coding for each game, there's no reason to project your own shortcomings onto everyone else by breaking the forums with massive pictures.
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Nice work on the 5.57! That's the first time anyone but the WR holder has gotten a time below 5.61 to my knowledge. I just got back from vacation and I finally have time again, so I'll be working on this just as hard as I was before... Probably starting tomorrow.
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calfd wrote:
The bar is blue for me also. Maybe there is another ROM where the red line works.
It's not a huge deal, to be honest. The most help that having the red line would give is just being able to precisely follow all the strategies posted in this AtariAge thread. The good strategies are on page 3 of that thread, I've been trying to follow them as much as possible.
I have things to do today so I won't be able to do any more work until later tonight. Hopefully I'll be able to find the key to getting that fabled 5.51 once I can get back to testing.
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Omnigamer wrote:
I did some very rudimentary testing on Stage 2 to get a feel of time advantages for each of the forms. As expected, Dragon/Blue is easily the fastest even after accounting for the time spent waiting for the gem. Green is the slowest overall, but is not all that different from Red. Green has some advantages in dealing out damage to bosses, but the delay on his dodge just kills any movement sections. I imagine this holds true for most of the other stages as well.
For now I'm thinking Blue x4 is the fastest strategy for bad ending, just because dragon movement is too good. For Good ending, I think the order is such:
Green -> Red -> Blue -> Silver
This puts Green in good position for the shortest overall section (Stage 2) where his attacks get the most leverage. Red can deal fine with getting through Stages 3 and 4 since 4 is almost entirely on autoscroller. Stage 5 is stupidly long, but Blue should be able to move and deal with bosses well enough. Still lots of room for testing, but we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the true ending form route I was thinking of, or at least it's very close to it. I may have had Blue and Red switched though, I can't remember. Also, excellent work on the hitbox script! I'll have to test it out soon. Sadly I've turned into one of those people who start way too many projects and can't decide which one to work on, so it may be a while before I get back around to working on the game. I ended up having a lot of desync troubles back when I was working in an older version of BizHawk which made me lose motivation pretty quickly, though hopefully that won't be the case the next time I try.
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Ah, I was gonna make a topic on this last night but I fell asleep before I had a decent run. I'm working on this too and it's slowly making me lose my grip on my sanity, but in a fun kind of way. I managed a 5.71 last night at the very least, though that's nothing since the best human players are getting consistent 5.6X times. Only the WR holder and the computer have gotten 5.5X times.
There are a couple other times of note, even though they're cheated/hacked: There are a couple auto-shifting hacks of the game and someone managed a 5.44 using one. Obviously not legit, but I think it's worth mentioning as proof of a highly theoretical "perfect time". The best non-legit time I've managed is actually a 5.54, which I did by freezing the tachometer at maximum the entire time just to see what would happen. Still kinda funny how the WR is still faster than the best time I can get using illegit methods.
I'm testing out something I stumbled across yesterday that might at least get me into 5.6X territory: Shifting at very specific times are what give the extra speed boosts, it can't be too early after the last shift since they might actually slow you down further. Also, I've used several different starting shift sequences and I'd been consistently getting 5.77 or 5.74 using the same 4th gear shifting strategy for each one. What would matter most about the starting shift sequence is making sure each shift gives a speed boost. I've currently managed a 5.91 with only the starting shift sequence, and I think that needs to come down to 5.84 or less to get a good time.
Also, does the tachometer display properly for you? It's solid blue for me, making it a bit harder to judge if I'm redlining or not. I'm currently using RAM watch to tell me how close I am to blowing the engine but I still haven't figured out the specific value where it transitions from green to red.
EDIT: User movie #16719461653126596
Just as a proof of concept, I shifted into 4th gear as early as I possibly could and managed to swing my first 5.6X time with perfect 4th gear shifting. I'm gonna work on optimizing the starting sequence since I know for a fact that perfect shifts there will take away more time.
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
And also, one of the levels in Krazy Kremland had a few trys untill I beat the world.
Haha, okay.
Once again, this isn't a TAS. This is a very lazy speedrun with a couple savestates every now and then. It's over 20 minutes slower than the 102% TAS. If you're aware of other TASes of this game, perhaps you could... Oh, I don't know, learn from them?
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Thank you for posting that. That is exactly the response I want to see from a death like this: A rational explanation for what happened and why it happened, informing a wide group of people on the possible circumstances so that they can go out and hopefully prevent further tragedies from happening in the future. You're free to be sad, to cry, to look back fondly on his work, or even to shrug and say "Death is inevitable", but you absolutely shouldn't overlook what happened and how it can be prevented in the future.
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So when does the discussion about how to treat depression and alcoholism begin? Are we done waxing nostalgic and ignoring things of actual, potentially life-saving importance?
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Interesting!
I spent a while trying to get it to work in that same spot and I found a far more consistent way to trigger it: You need to be at the very top of climbing the ladder, like one of the top three frames (tapping down then tapping up should put you there in realtime), then just hold right and fall off. It looks like Mega just skips over the trigger because of the fast fall trick (that is, hugging a wall while falling to drop an extra couple pixels every now and then), so theoretically it should be possible on any vertical screen transition... But I doubt it. I tested damn near every ladder in the main stages and it looks like that one ladder in Napalm Man's stage is the only place I've found that works. I think the vertical transition there is just much smaller than all the others, and thus it's the only trigger possible to skip.
Either way, I'd like to do some more testing with this. I've gone out of bounds several times using the Rush Coil clipping and zipping that HTWT found, but I believe this is the first time I've seen a screen transition happen while OoB.
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It seems like you're just doing RTA runs with savestates and nothing else. I haven't watched any of the runs, admittedly, but that's more or less what it seems like judging from submission texts and general comments. Lurk around on the site a bit more and try to learn more about TASing and optimization and some of the techniques involved before submitting another run.
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Wait, the auto-generated tags don't include the name of the game? Shouldn't that be the most important thing to tag?
Just to make sure, I checked again on two more videos and the game name is never tagged. I think that'd make a sizable difference on its own.
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Keep a second FCEUX window open with the original movie + markers and work off of a copy of the file, it makes things a lot easier. It's how I've done nearly every single one of my movies: Immediately comparing to an older run and tweaking/trying new things as I go. Plus you won't have to worry about the markers changing.
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Getting closer...