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Gfx wrote:
Can you tell me which minutes on video?
I don't really feel like skimming the whole TAS (since, again, it was only a few times I saw it) but the first time I noticed was at about 1:24 when getting onto the stairs. If this was unavoidable given the zombie's positioning, etc. then I understand. It just looked a bit odd.
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Tangent wrote:
There's always the extra 15 minutes of dead input at the end as an obvious improvement.
Holy mother of smeg, you're right. Didn't look at the time(s) really. I'm pretty sure he can just go back and end the input at the last hit. There're still the other issues, though.
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Tangent wrote:
Not that other submissions should bear any weight on this one, but given how obviously suboptimal the other two RE runs he's submitted are...
I was kinda thinking the same thing, honestly. Though, from the few Claire B RTA's I've seen (or exist) and what I know about the game this doesn't seem as glaringly suboptimal as the other submissions. I do think (as always) more extensive comments would help the submission and maybe explain some things.
[edit] I should make it clear that I don't think this is a terrible first attempt, but there's quite a bit of optimization to be done. Given the community the RE games have, I'm kind of surprised there isn't a TAS of this game already (even on the PS1 version). Overall I feel like if Gfx went through and made a couple tweaks then he'd have a pretty good TAS on his hands and I'd love to see more done with this game.
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I can't help but feel like we're mostly talking about the branch(es) and haven't really established whether this is an optimal TAS in the first place. And if so, why so?
I say this because I noticed a few of times where Claire bumped into corners while running around them. The lack of comments doesn't give me any indication of why this is the case.
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As far as I remember, the zapping only does so much, so once you find a way to skip as much as possible in scenario B with the zapping in A, it should be easy to make a good verification save(s) with the most optimal setup for each character. I don't really feel difficulty therein should play a factor in this any more than the difficulty setting you choose (I only have (or had) the PC and PS1 versions growing up, so I don't know what difficulties there are in the GC version). You're playing with the highest difficulty/best AI that the game offers to you in this case. If you want it to be harder then let's work on a decent Dreamcast emulator.
Personally, I think adding both runs together would make the TAS fairly tedious to watch. The way I see it, speedrunners (as far as I've seen) treat each scenario as a separate venture.
As such, I think if a verification file could be provided I see no reason why all four (well, I guess six) branches couldn't be added, since there is a strong community for this game that recognizes all of the scenarios individually (even Tofu 4th Survivor, as I'm finding out).
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I'm currently making a temp encode. A temp encode is being uploaded. My internet is slow right now so it'll take some time to upload, but hopefully it shouldn't take too long.
Link to video
(Edit) Ooh, I forgot to comment on the actual TAS. By the way, Yes vote. Though given the nature of this TAS I had to go back and refresh myself with how the game is actually played in order to somewhat understand what was going on. The screen transitions do get a little tiresome, but if you like the game in the first place or have played it at all before then you're probably used to that.
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When I did my test TAS I was able to dump the audio, the only issue was it did this weird music restart in room 3. If that's all there is then I personally see no reason it should be rejected on those grounds. Iirc, the published Frogger: He's Back! TAS has similar sound issues. Unless there's a reason why that was an exception that I'm not aware of.
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I really want to see drunk speedruns of this just for irony's sake.
Anyway, I voted meh. Is it a good game choice? No, not at all. But is it a bad TAS objectively? No, not necessarily.
If I may make a suggestion, since most of the time you're just jumping is there anyway to shoot in sync with the music or something? You could go for the "this game is so easy the protagonist is just playing around" motif to make things a little more interesting. It might also make Dwedit's idea more viable since I did notice some lag in one of the stages.
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Holy jeez, this is random. I didn't know the game time could be pushed that far.
Honestly, I'm going to remain neutral on this one seeing as, yes, this is a high quality TAS from a technical standpoint (given the simplicity of the game and the fact that CooKirby isn't exactly new to this, what would you expect?) but... there's kind of a reason why I chose not to submit my TAS of it (and it has nothing to do with it being suboptimal being literally the first thing I ever TAS). I have a bit of attachment seeing as I speedran the game out of morbid curiosity over how far down I could get the time, but I don't know how this would translate to a general audience. Again, I'm going to stay neutral in this case.
Fun fact: I spoke with Kundeon and he said the 60's batman theme was an accident. He (or someone he knew iirc) wrote it in like 20 seconds and he only noticed after the fact.
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Long story short: since all I seem to do is handheld, licensed games I decided to try out TASing Brother Bear.
I've only been tinkering around with this game for a couple days and I've found a few things that should make for an interesting TAS.
- Like Nightmare Before Christmas, turbo-hopping up slopes is MUCH faster than running up them.
- Attacking is horrendously slow.
- On the second screen you gain a partner that you can switch to whenever you want. If the character you're controlling runs too far away from the other, the game stops thinking about the one you aren't controlling momentarily. This allows you to run through some obstacles if you time a switch correctly. You can actually get stuck in the rock on the second screen doing this.
- Avoiding as much screen scroll as possible during the character switching is vital. For a while beginning the switch the game lags every other frame. The farther it has to travel, the more lag.
I've only roughly TASed the first two screens but would love if someone wanted to team up for this one. There seems to be a lot of potential in the movement tech.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/22055215720059303Link to video
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Personally, I'd love to see a Lady Sia TAS (either Any% or 100%). There's been research going on for ages and no one (as far as I can find) has made a completed TAS yet. I know it'd be pretty baller once finished based on some of the WIPs I've seen.
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So I started taking some baby steps with this, seeing as this WIP is much shorter that what I usually upload. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/20476944263506497
But before I went too far in I wanted to share what I had found so far:
Title Screen/Opening Cutscenes
Before you ask, no I can't reset to skip the language selection screen. I tried that with both a hard and a soft reset and I still needed to select it anyway. Besides, the game wouldn't let me soft reset until after the "licensed by Nintendo" screen goes away, and after resetting and watching that unskippable screen again, it would take more time than the language screen anyway.
Thankfully the option to "press start" can be done by hitting the A button while I can "Start game" with the Start button on the next frame.
Lastly, before the start of the first level, there's a cutscene you don't see since you can cancel it way before it visually shows up.
(Edit) Instead of double-posting, I'll place my update here.
Link to video
I've been working on the first level and found a number of optimizations to improve on some of my rough drafts. These techs in particular are used a fair bit in this WIP:
* There's a specific part (the bottom corners) of any given ledge that you can clip into to cause Jack to grab on and climb much quicker than normal.
* Using turbo to rapidly jump while running up slopes (let's say... Turbo Hopping) Jack gets pushed up the slope a tad faster and allows you to gain a few pixels by the end of the slope.
* Jumping for 2 frames after a standstill also pushes Jack forward a few pixels and gets him to running speed a little quicker.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/20567826649566765
I haven't done the boss fight yet since I'll have to search around to find Mr. Bospider's HP address to make this optimal. Plus I want to try out a few different boss strats to figure out how I want to approach the fight.
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Not gonna lie, there's not much to this really. It was short thankfully, technically sound I guess but... honestly it's just fairly entry-level, simple luck manipulation for the most part. Voted meh.
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Skykingcst wrote:
I'm not experienced with memory addresses but from what I've seen either I'm doing something wrong or x,y positions change every map. The most useful memory address to have would be the camera position to see where enemies are spawning off the screen.
Ughum, I was worried about that. That would explain why I've been having trouble trying to find the proper X, Y. Yeah, I guess the camera position would be the next best thing. I'm somewhat new to RAM watch stuff myself but if someone is able to find a pointer to correct addresses (or some bollocks) that might be an option.
I only stress this because I think knowing X, Y and if subpixels are going to play a significant factor in this game will help with some of the puzzle sections (i.e. things like the crate clip).
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Note: The full name of the game wouldn't fit in the subject box. I'm pretty sure we already know who Tim Burton is anyway.
So I was searching around and couldn't find a topic for this game, so I decided to make one. I've only been playing around with the game for an hour and I think a pretty interesting TAS(es) can come of it. Hopefully others will want to pitch in.
Some Notes (basically everything I know so far):
* Jumping and turning is much, much faster than turning around since it skips Jack's long turning animation.
* Jack starts off running slowly before getting to his max speed
* When ascending platforms where you need to run a certain distance before being able to make the next jump, turning around in mid-air just before landing does two things: for one you can jump up to the platform so that you land where you need to start running from in order to make the next jump; two, because Jack has already turned around in mid-air, once he lands he'll skip some of his slow jog before running at full speed.
* Later in the first stage, you gain a weapon. While standing on the ground, you can only fire (at most) 2 shots in the span of 4 frames. After that you have to wait another 11 frames before you can fire a third shot. In case you're using turbo, depending on which frame you start firing you may only fire once every 11 frames without firing two at first. In the air, however, you can spam fire to your heart's desire. It doesn't do too much good to this in the video other than being slightly more chaotic since the boss has a long I-frame cool down time. But this is useful for swarms of enemies, or big enemies with shorter cool down times.
Link to video
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Man, that WIP looks tasty! So glad that clip find didn't go to waste (I honestly thought it would end up being sub-optimal in practice.)
By the way, has anyone gathered some RAM data from this game yet; enemy HP, X, Y, attack charge / invincibility timers, crits (if they exist) etc? I think with that in hand this game could get pretty thoroughly wrecked. I could start poking around if no one's done that yet.
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http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/17178710904764276 I actually forgot I made this WIP a while ago. It shows off a more optimal crate clip and the enemy skip I mentioned at about the 12000 frame mark. The WIP is faaar from optimal, as I really suck at TASing beat 'em ups, but hopefully those tricks will help later on in the run.
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CoolKirby wrote:
Here's an encode of my short WIP, to make things easier for solarplex.
If you start boosting towards the crate at about 0:41 you can clip through it. Though, it would have to be timed so that the clip would be faster than having to wait for Katara to follow up behind Aang for the next switch. I have an example of it here. I hope CoolKirby doesn't mind I used his WIP file to show this off real quick. I started the edit just before the clip and didn't want to take forever with the fighting just before this.
Also, there's a screen of enemies right at the end of Omashu with Aang and Sokka where they can kill one less enemy than intended and still be able to scroll to the next section of the stage.
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CoolKirby wrote:
Could you make a topic for it and share what you've found? I was thinking of running that one sometime (preferably on mGBA when it's ready for TASing).
Sure, once I get a moment, but it's just a couple small things so far. I hadn't found much besides being able to avoid an enemy spawn here or there, or clipping though a moving obstacle once or twice. Nothing major, but I haven't gotten that deep into the game.
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From a technical standpoint, I like the TAS and appreciate the effort put into it, but I always found the game to be a bit boring for the most part.
Personally, I think the second game would make for a better TAS honestly. From what I've dabbled with there's quite a number more skips and clipping opportunities in that. But I digress... Meh.
