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So this one STILL isn't emulated properly? I can understand getting desyncs with Perfect Dark or Metroid Prime, but Kid Icarus on Gameboy? Come on!
Regarding the short WIP:
Killing enemies ultimately wastes time, since you have to count up points at the end of the level. If I was doing this run, I'd go for as few kills as possible. It may make the wait for the moving platform less visually interesting, but every single frame is precious and must be saved.
Having to wait for the floating platform is lame. Is there no way to get to it more quickly, or better yet, get up there without it?
Have you found the memory addresses for screen position, velocity, subpixels, etc? Those could be a big help in determining the fastest method of movement.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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I own this one... it's pretty fun to run through once in a while, but I agree that it wouldn't be an interesting TAS unless there are some game-breaking glitches to be found.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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I like this Castlevania game - it keeps the old school feel alive, with updated graphics and totally-out-of-place techno remixes of the classic level themes. The run looks well done and on par with the other traditional-style Castlevania runs on the site, so I see no reason not to vote yes.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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Okay, I've decided to resurrect this run as my second major TAS project. I'm measuring my current run against Monthenor's unpublished run. I finished the Milk Sea, and I'm about to take on the Joker at Trump Castle. I'm 610 frames ahead, with 84 fewer frames of lag.
Monthenor's run is pretty solid, but there is a lot of room for improvement. I think his use of the Shuriken is questionable, so I elected to use the ?/Wing/Melody setup for my main character. For the later bossless stages, I'm going to use ?/?/Melody for maximum speed. The wing body is just so good at fighting bosses that nothing else can come close.
Back to dissing Monthenor's run - most of the menu navigation can be improved, since practically every input can be entered a frame earlier than he did. Also, there are many sliding boosts that he didn't take, and hill-climbs (which cost a frame each time) that can be avoided. Finally, I suspect that he didn't pay too much attention to lag reduction, since there are several instances of severe lag that can be easily avoided. In Trump Castle, its trivial to get the armadillos to throw their shells off-screen, but he has them remain on the screen for a long time, losing practically every other frame for several seconds.
I've found a few places in which I can take damage to save time. During the Milk Sea boss battle, if I get hit by a pirate, I can use my invincibility to move inside the ship, allowing me to do instant damage without waiting for my bullets to travel. In Trump Castle, I allowed myself to get hit by the first falling turtle, since there's literally no way around it and you have to waste time there anyway. This will save a few frames when my health bar ticks up at the beginning of the boss battle, since there's less health to count.
I'm also a little skeptical regarding the route choice. For this test run I'm going to go with it, but I can't help but wonder if there would be a faster solution. The route has to end on either Milk Sea or the Fairy Forest in order to rescue the Princess as quickly as possible, but AFAIK it can start anywhere.
Because my character moves faster than his bullets (or musical notes, in this case), I can't kill enemies directly in front of me to reduce lag. Furthermore, shooting bullets tends to increase the lag, since there are suddenly new objects on the screen. Even so, I've been able to avoid almost a second and a half of lag in the first two stages. One little trick that can occasionally save a frame involves slowing down a little bit right before an "unavoidable" frame of lag, then autofiring the direction until you're past that point. If you can keep your speed at a particular magic number, you can avoid a frame of lag without sacrificing a full frame of movement.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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I tend to use state 1 for major points, such as the beginning of a run or the beginning of a level when I'm sure that I won't need to go back and change anything. States 2 and 3 tend to be used for checkpoints within a level. States 4 through 9 are the workhorses, and get me through all the trial-and-error stuff. State 0 usually holds my best result, and anything that beats it becomes the new State 0 until it can't be improved any further.
If it was up to me, emulators would have multiple banks of ten savestate slots each that could be swapped, kind of like the "pages" in those old PS1 multiple memory cards. I always find ten to be far too limiting when exploring different approaches.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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DarkKobold wrote:
Tanooki Teabag wrote:
local Frame
....
Frame=int movie.framecount()
This is probably your only problem - lua doesn't need casts. Also, you don't need to declare everything as locals - you are probably better just typecasting them.
int Frame = 0;
...
Frame= movie.framecount()
or just
Frame = 0;
...
Frame= movie.framecount()
lua is probably getting all screwed up, because it wants to do a variable deceleration, not a cast.
That was it! I got th "int movie.framecount()" from the list of functions that came with FCEUX 2.1.4a but I didn't know that I needed to remove it. Thanks - writing to the file works now. Time to figure out how to read it...
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Patashu wrote:
Is it because you're not putting ;s after your statements?
It doesn't appear to make a difference here. The examples at http://tasvideos.org/LuaScripting/Display.html don't use semicolons either and they seem to work okay. Just to make sure I put them in and ran into the same problems.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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Okay, I've been working on this for much of the day and I still can't get it to work. I keep on getting errors related to the frame counter, so I guess that I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find any documentation on movie.framecount() anywhere so I'm not sure what I'm missing. Even with the frame variable removed from the string, nothing actually gets written to the document. Here's what I'm trying to work with:
local XPosVar=0x0012
local YPosVar=0x0011
local Max=100
local Cur=0
local Rest
local Frame
local ScreenVar=0x0040
local PixelVar=0x0041
local SubPixelVar=0x0042
local SpeedVar=0x0046
local SpeedSubVar=0x0047
OutputFile=io.open('data.txt', 'w')
while Cur <= Max do
Frame=int movie.framecount()
XPos=memory.readbyte(XPosVar)
YPos=memory.readbyte(YPosVar)
Screen=memory.readbyte(ScreenVar)
Pixel=memory.readbyte(PixelVar)
SubPixel=memory.readbyte(SubPixelVar)
Speed=memory.readbyte(SpeedVar)
SpeedSub=memory.readbyte(SpeedSubVar)
outs = string.format('%d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d\n',Frame,XPos,YPos,Screen,Pixel,SubPixel,Speed,SpeedSub)
OutputFile:write(outs)
Cur=Cur+1
Rest=Max-Cur
--gui.text(0,0, "Dumping Frame " .. Frame)
--gui.text(0,10, "Frames to Go: " .. Rest)
emu.frameadvance()
end
The goal here is to grab various values (screen position, position within the level, speed, etc) from the memory and write them to an external file, along with the frame number. I feel like I'm missing something very obvious, but I'm not sure what it is...
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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DarkKobold wrote:
To be honest, this seems like a waste of extra effort (Hear me out, please). Since the 'older run' is done, you could easily do what I do for comparison -Have a dump script, and a read script.
First, the dump script starts at a known location - beginning of a level, battle, whatever - and then dumps all of the relevant stuff to a text or binary file (very easy in lua).
Next, the read script grabs that information (on load), and does a comparison for you, frame by frame.
No need to have crazy socket-based conversations over lua, which, for what you are trying to achieve, sounds like overkill.
That's exactly what I'm looking to do. My first thought was to have this be done on the fly, frame-by-frame with two runs open at once, but this sounds more reasonable. I'm just starting to figure out lua - I can draw values on the screen, but I can't get them to output into an external file. Could you give me an idea of how I should be doing this?
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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When I'm working on a run, I like to have two instances of an emulator open at once - one with the current run-in-progress, and one with a test run or older run with which to compare my progress. I go frame-by-frame, making sure that my current run is doing better than the older one. I just had an idea that could potentially make this easier, but I'm having trouble writing the LUA scripts to implement it.
My idea is that the two instances could use a file as an intermediary for sharing data, such as screen position, subpixels, character velocity, et cetera. The older run's emulator could write the values to the file, and the current run's emulator could read the data and turn the output text red if it's lagging behind the older run, white if it's the same, or green if it's doing better.
I've been trying to teach myself LUA, but the guide linked in the articles page is not particularly good at that. If someone could give me an idea of how this would be set up (of if it's even possible to implement), I'd really appreciate it.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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Has any progress been made on this? I've recently been going through this game again with a friend and now I really want to see it pushed to the limit.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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Watched the encode, and I have to give it a strong YES vote. My only real criticism is that there isn't enough daredevil maneuvering, but that's just a matter of taste. I loved the fancy blade usage and when the score counter would go nuts and show a seven-digit multiplier for a brief moment (maybe one of those moments could be the screenshot?).
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Posts: 108
Wow, I really don't see what people are getting so worked up about. I didn't find the new camera angles to be offensive, nauseating, confusing, or whatever - if anything, it was refreshing to see a game that's been run so many times from a different perspective. This run gets a firm "yes" from me. Now, if only someone can figure out how to get in the moat door and break the 5-minute mark...
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Would it be possible to make it so that you could re-map the controller inputs without having to close out of your current game and movie? Or is there a reason why you can't edit the controllers during gameplay? (IIRC, ePSXe didn't let you either)
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Dacicus wrote:
Another major series shown to be nothing but the same game repeated over and over ;). Anyone willing to try Zelda or Metroid next?
Metroid might be tricky, but the GB Zelda games might make a good quad run - Link's Awakening, the two Oracle games, and the GBA LttP port. Or even just the two Oracle games.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Wow, I figured it was only a matter of time before someone tried this! I liked it, but SMB1 finishes around the halfway point, making it a 3-game run for the second half. Could you have taken a longer route through the game (1-2-3-4-8, maybe?) and had it finish at the same time as the others?
Even so, yes vote.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
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Link to video
This run:
-Doesn't collect the sword
-Collects all 8 Instruments
-Defeats no bosses
Basically, I used the warp glitch to get to all 8 instruments in various ways without having to fight any of the bosses. The only items I collect are the Shield, the Magic Rod, both Power Bracelets, Roc's Feather, the Flippers, the Pegasus Boots, the Bird Key, and one Rupee that happened to be in the way.
This run is still pretty rough and unoptimized. If I was to submit it, I'd start over and try to tidy it up, particularly where lag is concerned. I might modify my route a bit as well, getting the Pegasus Boots prior to getting the Cello. I'd also grab the sword right at the end and only use it against the final boss.
Of course, this is if I actually want to submit this run. I'm not sure if it would stand a chance, since there are already a few runs of this game that have better defined goals than this one. Any advice would be appreciated.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
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Wow, that WIP looks awesome! It's too bad the PS version is so watered down compared to the PC... but, hey, that means there will be more missions to watch, so I guess that's a plus.
Rayas wrote:
Dunno if I'm really clear. I need to drink more.
<br>
adelikat wrote:
The idea was to kill off my family to avoid lost time to them getting sick and other inconvenient things.
[/URL]
It works! Thanks for the help, DarkKobold!
BTW, expect to see a run of Cocoron sometime in May.
