Why upgrade the standard weapon? Why not upgrade the laser rifle and just manage ammo smartly. The standard weapon can just be used to mow down most enemies with the laser rifle just used for bosses/enemies the standard weapon doesn't destroy fast enough.
Good point, but the RocketLauncher eats Ammo like crazy, so maybe its better to keep the ammo for that, but who knows - just another thing worth trying!
Here´s a rough suggestion for how to get the upgrade and Rocket Launcher in one go in Level 2 - its far from ideal, but shows how to get to the secret area from the right side, which is normally not possible!
I do not believe a death would be needed. Some luck manipulation would be needed, but I think it might be possible to get the enemies to fly around there? Although regardless, that would be much faster than the long way around.
I`m not sure it works without death, becasue you need at least one enemy to be low enough so you can jump on it.
Enemies tend to fly around the same height as the player, so in order to get them to go lower, the player needs go lower too. But maybe crouching works?
I did experiment abit with the speeder to follow me into the pit and see if it can be used as a jump pad, but it didnt really work,
as getting it into the pit was taking too long and jumping off it was less reliable than the death method.
I also believe this would improve 3:22 of my run, assuming the turret is taken out with 1 shot with the laser rifle, this should mean the player doesn't need to take a hit from it.
I`m pretty sure that is the case!
I also want to see if possibly the weapon upgrade could be skipped in favor of just managing weapons smarter.
I`m pretty sure that the few frames saved there wont be worth it, becasue later in the game the bosses (as can be seen in my original run) take way way longer to kill without such upgrades.
So you probably make that time back multiple times. Each weapon has a total of 2 UpgradeLevels, so for an ideal run you want to have the Standard weapon at UL2 and the Rocket Launcher at UL1, or Standard at UL1 and RL at UL2.
The question is - is it worth it, to do the rather big detour to pick up the Rocket Launcher and the upgrade in Level 2. But there might be a way to pick up both without losing too much time.
Having seen CasualPokePlayer´s superior version of my first ever TAS, I decided to create this topic to discuss potential improvements.
There is some big potential in this area to skip the long way around. I did some experimentation, but I dont know if it is actually faster, due to the death anim taking so long - but it is still worth exploring:
So I did Level 1 of this game, and was able to improve it by 268 frames.
This is exactly what I was hoping for, a TAS pro doing it properly.
This already looks way better than mine! Good job!
At 2:50 you jump to the right, is that so you can avoid damage?
You can just walk off that plattform and land on the lower one without taking damage, as can be seen here:
https://youtu.be/GER6szPPp6A?t=655
Maybe thats faster?
I want to explore the Laser Rifle in the box and see if it warrants the time it takes to pick it up). Also, the menuing in this submission is sloppy as hell (menuing being the keypads and cutscenes mostly). Those parts at the very least should of really been done in TAStudio.
I am pretty sure the laser rifle will be worth it in the long run due to the higher damage output especially against bossts.
Also, somewhat unrelated, but in making this TAS, I discovered a glitch that essentially locked the game in an infinite loop.
Ah yes, I had that also during my run. If I remember correctly it was a very hard bug to fix, so it was left in due to the low chance of hitting it.
Oh, huh. Then NTSC actually was the first released version, so that is an argument in favour of that one. I still think PAL counts as the original version here, though. And if the NTSC version is only available for the Mega SG and the physical Mega Drive release, then the PAL version is absolutely the one most widely available and will be the most known.
The Mega-SG version was released first, but it differs quite abit from the final release:
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- you can carry only 1 of the special weapons (in the final you can carry and switch between all 6)
- weapon upgrades arent permanent (in the final they are as can be seen with the little + signs on the weapon icons)
- the timer can overflow (in the final its limited to 999)
- some secret areas are missing (they were added to have more rewards for exploration)
- slightly different controls (Mega-SG is more Contra style, Final more how it was intended)
Only the Mega Drive / Genesis ROM Dumps are final and should be used.
So while the NTSC version is probably fine to be used for TAS and might mean faster runs, the PAL is still the original tho.
Given that the game is fairly new, the most available version being the digital Switch and PS4 release that came out last month, I don't think there's a concrete answer for this one yet. But retro enthusiasts tend to value accuracy the most, which in this case would support the PAL version.
I can answer this one - both Switch and PS4 versions use the PAL ROM.
The Mega-SG uses the NTSC ROM.
However, I just checked the NTSC version again, and it wasnt as bad as I remembered:
So I think its actually fine to use it if it means faster runs.
*Edit* For some reason the screenshots dont show up, but they work...
Oh, sick, Longplay/TAS crossover! So this is what it's like when worlds collide!
Not really collide, as we are on the same side, just different goals ;)
I'm watching the run right now and seeing a few immediate, though relatively minor issues. The TAS feels more like a really good RTA run as opposed to something clearly tool-assisted, which gives me some doubts about the overall optimization of the run.
Yeah it isnt really perfect, it is meant to be a start for others to optimize!
The submission notes don't really help either, with most of it being variations of "This could be faster, but I didn't try it". The movement looks good, but I'd have to look closer at the actual game to be able to tell for sure, and good movement doesn't mean optimized if there are routing improvements like the submission text seems to be suggesting.
Well to be fair, I could have just left out any of those potential improvement suggestions and let people figure out the game themselves. But I think it would be counter productive to hide those suggestions when it can help another runner to do something better!
There's already a 9 frame faster WIP that's been posted on Discord. Of course, that's a matter of a handful of frames.
Thats exactly what I was hoping for, other people improving on it! 9 frames are 9 frames! ;)
Now, as I understand it, this submission is meant to expose people to the game and attract people to TASing it, rather than actually providing an optimized run. I do appreciate that in a way, submissions tend to get a lot more notice than anything else on the site.
That was the idea!
My main point of concern is this, though (emphasis mine):
Could you explain this further? Our rules state that NTSC is almost always preferred unless PAL runs at 60fps
It means the game was never made for NTSC to begin with. Being developed originally for the Amiga - a 50Hz PAL computer - it was only created for that, before it was ported over to the Mega Drive.
The US/JP ROMS are basically just quick hacks to make them work on those systems. But not only do they run faster than the developers intended it, they also render less of the map, which means some of the gameplay elements disappear. Before the final boss, you use a lever to drop pieces of metal on a walking robot, in the NTSC version those pieces are invisible. It makes following the gameplay really hard - there is a few other small instances of this problem. Here is a video of the NTSC version: https://youtu.be/niqNranTs5U
So the only "true" official version is the PAL release, and its quite likely the game would have only released in Europe if it didnt get cancelled back then.
But maybe that doesnt matter for TAS`es? Are PAL only releases that were hacked to NTSC allowed as runs - like say something like Probotector?
There is also games that have constant click sounds, which does not seem to happen in Mame:
https://streamable.com/zuxgbe
It also appears in NeoGeo games, but slightly less noticeable!
Its already pretty good for what it is, it seems to work in the games I tried so far - good job :)
Heres a small problem I noticed:
http://abload.de/img/bizhawk-cutoffqvj8t.png
2 pixel lines are missing in Bizhawk at the bottom!
I assume the alternative would be waterbox, as then the bad savestate implementation per driver doesnt matter anymore.
But I guess that will be way more difficult to do.
However I noticed a new issue, audio becomes very out of sync during emulation.
The reason for that is bad savestate implementation in the MAME driver the game is using. There is nothing that can be done about that unfortunately!
However, even if the music or sound breaks during playing, it isnt a problem, as once you dump the movie file to AVI, it wont break :)
I asked to post here because I don't want to be searching through random PM archives just to remember what I want to find.
Well you might not know this, but unlike TASvideos we longplayers are more hesitant to give out our "source" files, as anyone can go and claim it was their recording :)
Thats why I sent it to you directly via Discord :)
A quick test with a game showed that the input movie file synched.
However, once you start AVI dumping that file, it randomly desychs!
Out of 5 tests to dump it on 2 different PCs, it desynched 4 out of 5 times.
Good job!
Is there any way to change the internal Vectrex rendering resolution to 2x, 3x, 4x etc, so its more highres?
Bizhawk outputs it as 260x388 - which looks very pixelated and un-vectrex like.
Maybe its also possible to have some sort of fake HDR filter shader that makes lines glow more?
Overlay support would be also nice :)
I was the person who comissioned the Re-Recording feature of WinUAE a few years ago by donating all my Action Replay modules to Toni.
Unfortunately as mentioned, it never really worked reliably and I only ever managed to record one game with it. Unfortunately Toni wasnt too interested in that feature. However with Waterbox this shouldnt be a problem anymore now :)
I might have someone at hand who could potentially port it :)
So I think its actually fine to use it if it means faster runs.
*Edit* For some reason the screenshots dont show up, but they work...