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mklip2001 wrote:
(I have no problem with the wall-walking glitches... the prize world sucks, and you skip most of it, so props to you on that!)
Guess what? I accidentally stumbled upon a way to skip even more of it.
Link to video
I feel like this was already discovered for some reason. There's one problem with this, which is kinda plainly visible in the video: I'm right at the second wall-clip in the level, but the platform is slightly too far to the right when entering the screen, so I need to wait for a full cycle of the platform to be able to clip through. Even with waiting for the full cycle, though, it's still much faster than before (about 1500 frames), but the possibility of saving another 1500-2000 frames is too tantalizing to not spend a few hours testing. I need some sleep first, though. A lot of sleep.
EDIT: Okay, wow, that was fast (click for video). I gave it a couple more attempts before nodding off, and I ended up finding a faster way to fall after the screen transition. I was almost literally a frame late to getting the clip, but fortunately I found a very slightly faster way to fall that gave me the frame or two I needed to pull off the clip immediately. I was prepared to spend hours on this to no avail. This was actually kinda anticlimactic. I'll have the final file up after the aforementioned sleep, along with a brand new encode. The final time is looking to be around 19:17.68 now, give or take a couple frames.
However, that does bring up the most important part of this run: the health-underflow glitch. It clearly makes the run faster and way easier to plan (since you don't have to do health management as much), but it also destroys most of what makes this game interesting: the precise dodging and attacking with the radium-plated boots. Otherwise, you chug along and occasionally detour for some odd items. The glitch makes Worlds 3 and 5 more boring than they have a right to be, and it removes the chance for you to plan more deathwarps.
Admittedly yeah, it does ultimately make the run/game more boring... I'd love to see an optimized "normal" run too, though I don't know if it'd be accepted as a separate category since it seems arbitrary to not use health underflow when it doesn't outright horribly break the game... Aside from making it easier, I mean.
I might work on a no health underflow run in the far future, though it'd take a lot more time to complete than this due to all the extra planning necessary.
I have only one technical question: there's a door in World 5 where you use a key to unlock it. Can't you just crouch-walk through that door like you did in World 2?
Sadly, that's not possible. It only seems to work on the World 2 doors for some reason. I'm assuming it has to do with their size?[/frames]
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Spikestuff wrote:
Should I remind you he did it on the fly when he obsoleted your first stage? (Rhetorical)
He even pointed out that his was improvable when talking about pure optimization.
Improvements are still improvements, regardless of the circumstances.
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Thanks for the support so far, everyone!
Mecha Richter wrote:
The only improvement I could think of is damage boosting through the first crusher in stage 3 by getting hit by a bullet and walking through the crusher. Might not be faster since you have to wait to get hit, but worth checking regardless.
Ah, interesting! I hadn't considered that since pretty much every other form of instant death kills you even when you have invincibility frames. The game actually behaves really nicely when input is edited, there aren't that many global timers or anything, so it should be easy to implement that change.
User movie #15854276760212782
In fact, here it is. I just needed to redo that crusher section. The part right before the second crusher section is changed slightly too, since I tried to see if I could manipulate a shot to hit me again, but failed since the shot can't get the angle I need without wasting more time than I'd save.
I'll update the submission text after the file is replaced. Sorry for the inconvenience!
EDIT: Submission text updated. Thanks for the replacement, feos!
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Huh, that's odd. Probably something weird I did when saving it.
User movie #15838525573213727
Does this file have the same problem? If it syncs then it should be on the queue in a few hours.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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It's looking pretty good so far, though I do feel like the menuing is a little slow. Is that the fastest the game will allow?
The movement seems a bit choppy in places too: It seems like jumping is slower and the first jump looks unnecessary. Some of the movement is a bit shaky (literally so), notably the jump to the cliff. Walking on the cliff edge had a couple odd moments, too, the main thing being at 0:33-0:34 where it looks like you run into an invisible wall and stop for a moment. Is that unavoidable?
Also, it looks like you're using keyboard input for movement when the TAS Input plugin would be more optimized (and easier to use).
Overall, like I said, it's looking pretty good!
I don't know Dolphin all that well aside from a quick test I did long ago, but I'd assume it's possible to change the frame advance settings somewhere.
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User movie #15821523096605510
Complete test run in 20:16. As much as I want to write a plethora of notes, I'm holding back until I get all my optimization done. The game's been really edit-friendly so far so it shouldn't take long at all to get things tested and implemented.
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Anyone who's heard five seconds of this game's audio would probably thank you for uploading silent footage, so I don't see a problem with uploading only video.
Jokes aside, audio in WIP encodes isn't a huge deal since people are far more interested in seeing the video.
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Warepire wrote:
Consider watching an action movie, any action movie, and when the final part of the showdown is about to start, the protagonist just stops and says "That's it, I'm going on strike!", and then there is footage of him just standing still for several minutes ... then roll credits. Would you not feel cheated from such a movie?
Actually, that'd be hilarious to me. It'd be such a drastic and sudden anticlimax that I'd find it brilliant.
I'm all for ending the input as soon as possible, personally, though admittedly I wouldn't object to a replacement file that kills the final boss instead of waiting for it to time out. Regardless of the ending and regardless of what happens, the movie and game were more than enough to keep me fascinated all throughout. Excellent run, excellent game choice, and pretty decent grindcore before each stage.
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Stage One done: User movie #15769420923926888
Encode:
Link to video
203 frames ahead, mostly from skipping the boots but there are other small optimizations all throughout. This is still only a test/reference run. I don't know if I'm going to work on a more optimized run after this.
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Dyshonest wrote:
When it starts to seriously impact the ability to understand him (and it does VERY often), yes, it is justified. I am not calling him stupid. I am similarly not calling him stupid forhaving poor English. But if you wish to take yourself seriously in a debate or something, be clear.
Almost every time he's spoken, you've mentioned that you can't understand because of his "poor" English. You're not even bothering to try to understand.
Oh the irony it hurts. Personal attacks are when you've run out of anything resembling a valid argument and thus try to discredit them with insults.
John: "1+1 is 3."
Bob: "No it isn't."
John: "Yes it is."
Bob: "Fuck you."
Bob has very little credibility when, instead of proving his part of the argument... merely resorts to petty name-calling.
Sure, except that's not what happened at all. But okay! Whatever you say! All I ever do is personally attack you as a "last resort"! Yep, sure thing, buddy!
I'd love to call you a retard in every post I make in this thread but unfortunately I do have relevant things to say that you're conveniently ignoring in favor of painting me as, well...
I know exactly how to manage hormone-driven keyboard warriors like you, pal.
Right, that incredibly false description of me.
By the way, are hypocrisy, ignorance and false superiority the EXACT ways to manage people like me? Because I've seen nothing else from you this entire time.
You're not special, unique or entertaining. zzz. Predictable, boring, and repetitive.
Sure I am, which is why you're not ignoring me like a normal person would. It'd be real easy to just say "Oh, it's that Samsara faggot again. Bo-ring~" and not address me in the slightest, but nope. You're too easily provoked.
The only reason you're ignoring me NOW is because you're out of ways you think you can feel superior to me, and you don't want to go back to being obvious about it like in the ACE thread. You're trying to focus on someone you determine to be "weak" and "inferior", ignoring anyone else who may have a salient point. You are getting played in the exact same way as the ACE thread. I am literally doing the EXACT same thing I did before, short of outright calling you retarded.
You have yet to not respond to anything I've said. If you want to prove your point about how I'm repetitive and boring, ignore me. If you want to continue being a hypocrite, you know what to do.
Let's go back to replying to a more intelligent topic than what's boiling down to "STFU! KURZE WURDS MAEK ME KOOL AN CORREKT AN TOTALLY DUN DIZCREDITT MEH!!!".
See? You already did it. You imply that you're done with me and then IMMEDIATELY turn around and call it back into effect.
Wait.
KURZE WURDS MAEK ME KOOL AN CORREKT AN TOTALLY DUN DIZCREDITT MEH!!!
TOTALLY DUN DIZCREDITT MEH!!!
Did you literally just imply that swearing discredits whatever I said? Is that a thing you just implied? Seriously?
Don't answer that. It's funnier that way.
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xnamkcor wrote:
As I said, I've been using "Published" for this entire thread to mean Publicated on this site. I have no responsibility for what he assumes.
And as I said, you were condescending as hell, implying that he and everyone else who brought it up were blundering idiots that you needed to educate with obvious material, and now you're blaming them for not paying super close attention to every minute detail of how you used a word with multiple meanings directly related to the context.
That's a level of narcissism so absurd that I'm honestly having trouble believing it's real.
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Dyshonest wrote:
You used ad hominem but wished to be taken seriously.
Sorry. No can do.
Samsara wrote:
On top of that, there's the matter of completely abandoning your stance to point out something trivial and unrelated in hopes that you'll distract everyone from how wrong you are.
Like, say, not acknowledging anything I said except for that last sentence. Now you're hooked on this ad hominem thing again. By your logic, no one should have taken you seriously as early as the start of the ACE thread:
Dyshonest wrote:
@Masterjun: How long before your next /ragequit? :)
And also by your logic, no one should be taking you seriously at all given how many times you've attacked feos' English.
The fact that you're focusing on the ad hominem means that you have absolutely nothing left for your argument. Ad hominem doesn't completely invalidate a valid point. If I painted a wall red, specifically mixing the paint to the perfect #FF0000 shades, then pointed at the wall and said "This wall is red. Also, your mother is a whore", would the ad hominem make what I said false? It'd make me a douchebag, yes, and I will gleefully admit to being one if that's what makes you happy/gives you material for your next post, but no one would deny that my statement about the wall being red was true.
Then again, you'd probably claim that the wall used to be blue and I corrupted the memory to make it red.
EDIT:
xnamkcor wrote:
I've been using "Published" to mean being a "Publicated" run for this entire thread. He's the one who decided to use a new meaning. I never meant for "Published" to mean published in the game industry. Though he may have inferred it.
Radiant wrote:
You didn't answer my question. You've just implied that Air 2 has been published by some commercial entity equivalent to Apogee or Activision. I'm really curious as to when that happened, please show me a source of that.
If by "inferred" you mean "plainly stated it so it wouldn't be misunderstood", then yes. It would've been easy to say "I meant published as in the site terminology, not as in published as a licensed video game", but instead you took the smarmy "Heh, wow, you don't understand anything. Here's something that babies like you can understand" implication route.
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Dyshonest wrote:
Hey, didn't you post this? Practice what you preach.
Hey, what about your entire posting history over the past two weeks, where you completely and continually misunderstand what memory corruption and ACE are (after being told by literally everyone who bothered listening that you're wrong) and insult a non-native English speaker on numerous occasions by saying his perfectly understandable sentences are jumbled messes (while making grammar mistakes of your own)?
There's no point in actually arguing something with either you or that other guy. Your main tactic is to just completely ignore valid points in favor of what you perceive to be the truth, even after multiple people who know way more about the subject than you ever will tell you that things don't work the way you think they do. On top of that, there's the matter of completely abandoning your stance to point out something trivial and unrelated in hopes that you'll distract everyone from how wrong you are.
Like, say, pointing out the ad hominem in my statement instead of acknowledging the fact that I clearly pointed out his misunderstanding beforehand.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Published as in licensed and released to the public as a real legitimate cartridge/CD game, not published as in the site terminology. I love that you're being a condescending douchebag over shit you completely misunderstood.
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Interesting as this is, it's a ROM hack that doesn't really change the game in any way aside from adding new characters so I doubt it'd be acceptable.
ZX497 wrote:
(videos)
Excellent finds! Can't wait to see them put to use in a TAS.
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There's a high chance I won't get around to picking this game back up until TAStudio is up and running, since 99% of TASing this game is making subtle changes and manipulating the physics and figuring out that you have to go a frame or two back before your last savestate because you forgot to make backup savestates and then all that's kinda wasted because it desyncs anyway.
So yeah. I've had the run on hold for a while just because it's a complete pain in the ass to optimize, far more so than anything else I'm working on or have worked on before. If anyone else wants to take a shot, good luck.
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I edited together these two files almost painlessly (encode only because I still have work to do on the input file):
Link to video
The last conveyor belt is moving the other way in the new movie, which loses a frame, but everything else is the same aside from skipping the boots at the beginning. The most noticeable change is the submarine section, which still uses the old input even though the shark positions have changed. This will be fixed by the time I put up the next WIP.
Apparently I'm dedicated to working on this, now. Whoops.
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Tangent wrote:
Super Metroid isn't a hack, and hacks are evaluated under a different set of rules, so no, that's not what's happening here.
That doesn't invalidate anything I said, though. Sure, hacks are judged under different criteria, but not COMPLETELY different criteria. Simply saying "I don't like hard-type hacks" is the same level of white-noise shitposting as going into a normal SMB run discussion thread and saying "I don't like sidescrolling platformers". The guidelines for hacked games state that the hack must be "high quality", and someone saying "I don't like X kind of hack" doesn't exactly give a lick of insight on what that person thinks of the actual quality of the hack itself. Even saying "The blocks look randomly placed" is more constructive, but that point is ruined by the fact that the people saying that are getting defensive about it when the actual experts come in and say that every block and item and enemy is strategically placed in a position where it needs to be used in some way.
That being said, how does a slightly different set of rules excuse "Hey everyone, I don't like hard-type hacks so I'm not going to watch this run" in any way? It's arbitrary in every way, not to mention insulting and narcissistic.
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I'm starting to feel like the final TAS time could be sub-20.
Couple things to report:
*I ended up redoing that test run I posted. There's a bit of inconsistency with water, it seems, where sometimes the oxygen bar appears a frame later and you start moving downward a frame later than usual, or vice versa. That and enemy manipulation are things I'm still trying to figure out. I think it just has to do with simple timing and when screen transitions happen, but I need to do some further testing to be sure.
*Speaking of testing, the invincibility glitch: From a quick test, health is located at RAM address 00F6 (1 byte, signed). It starts at 4, of course, and drops to 0 when the invincibility glitch is done. It decreases by 1 (0 to -1 to -2 and so forth) with each hit until it reaches -128, then the next hit wraps the value around to positive 127. Or, in other words, the invincibility glitch gives you 256 health.
*Adding on to the above, I did a full-game run with re-records, mostly at 50% speed, and I ended with a health value of 120, so there's absolutely no risk of running out of health even if you take as much damage as possible over the course of the run.
*Skipping the boots seems to save around 45 frames (from another quick test, could be more with precise optimization) on its own, plus the time saved from not having to switch to the bomb (looks like around 70 frames, so ~115 total frames), so if avoiding damage takes less time than that then it's most likely worth it to skip the boots.
EDIT: User movie #15704559200517787
From a quick test, skipping the boots is definitely the faster option, saving 80 frames over my WIP up to that point.
A few more things I tested/found out:
micro500 wrote:
and my new code is
3D0001DNQV2WYTV4S91Q0H85
This actually ended up inputting slightly slower than the current prize code (likely due to the 0 and the H being almost as far apart as possible), so another one would have to be found.
*User movie #15704169183404063
I redid the WIP I posted earlier and continued it before testing skipping the boots. It's 31 frames faster than the WIP from 2011. There's mostly just minor movement optimizations in certain places (the most notable one being clipping into the conveyor belt right before using the second bomb, which saved 10 frames).
*One thing of note about that file: There is a trick I use on the way to getting the air canister that's worth mentioning. Jumping for more than 10 frames will cause a screen transition when jumping into the water where the air canister is, but holding A as soon as I reach the height of a normal 10 frame jump will slow my fall as if I had jumped for 12 frames, giving me some extra distance and saving 7 frames by cutting one jump out of the water.
Hopefully this can all be of some use.
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Scepheo wrote:
Really? Like what?
Tangent wrote:
You know what generally don't make for particularly entertaining TASes? Mazes and puzzles. They're designed to only have one solution and play is tightly constrained within that solution. And here, we have a hack designed to narrow the corridor of possible actions for the player as tightly as possible.I also really don't understand this "inherant beauty" you seem so keen on.
Glitcher wrote:
Mehhhhh, this is just another one of those annoying ultra-hard Mario hacks that are unplayable outside a TAS. I see enough of those for Super Mario World, so I can easily ignore this one.
Radiant wrote:
I'm saying that there are dozens or hundreds of Mario romhacks that are extra hard, look like random blocks thrown together, and can only be played with savestates.
Radiant wrote:
SMW romhacks with crappy appearance and ludicrous difficulty are a dime a dozen. I fail to see how this one is notable.
Also, I found it boring to watch, and the levels look like line noise. I suggest this should be rejected for poor game choice.
There are people watching the run expecting to not be entertained because of the hack, there are people ignoring the run entirely because of the hack, there are people who want the hack to be rejected for bad game choice even though it's miles better than the currently published Air 2, and there are people who don't make an attempt to look below surface level because they're just writing it off as "annoying" and "random", going as far as to dispute its "notability" by a quick Google search and a serious misunderstanding of how notability works, basically discrediting all the effort put into the hack and the run just because they're too stubborn to open their mind slightly.
It's alright to not be entertained by a hack or a game or a run or whatever, but I honestly feel like arguing with a group of experts is crossing the line, and announcing to everyone specifically that you're going to write it off as just another "annoying, unplayable" hack and specifically ignore the run is taking the line and strangling the creators with it.
I mean, I'm not entertained by Super Metroid. I own the game, I've played it, I can see how people find the game entertaining and I can definitely see the skill behind the runs, but it's not for me. That being said, I don't go into the run threads saying "Super Metroid sucks and this run should be rejected for poor game choice" or "Oh look, another Super Metroid snorefest. I'm not even gonna bother watching." If I did, I'd get chewed out immediately. That's basically what's happening here, isn't it? Maybe it's a little exaggerated, but it's more or less an accurate comparison.
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McBobX wrote:
To my mind,this run must obsolete the GT code run,because they are similar,also,it dosen't use the X-ray for ending the game unlike the current run that does,so this last,also must obsolete the previous X-ray glitch,in my opinion.
