When I was trying it out I just stood around and waited for a bird to hit me after picking up the McGuffin, but I can't remember how the bird cycles work so depending on when you did it, waiting around might take too long.
Maybe I'll dust off my old movie and try it, since that was the next level I had to work on.
This is my old movie, for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcJL6cv1O7Uhttp://uranium-anchor.com/speed/leander/
Couple of things since I worked on this years ago.
1) The glitchy graphics is present in the actual cart, the Amiga version's tempest blade is more functional (but still has the hover/zip glitch).
2) It's possible to death warp in the 1-5 cave, if you only ever touch floating platforms on the way in you can die and respawn back at the door. I'm reasonably sure this is faster though I didn't get a chance to time it out before my hard drive crashed and I lost all my notes (and thus all motivation to continue working on it). Did you try this out? Your submission notes are a little vague on the subject.
Haven't seen it mentioned in here yet, so here:
http://zeronoin.com/bm/0002.html
JP version has reset warping and less lag.
Guess you get to do the run all over again, again. :p
So thanks to the improvements that you guys found, this happened Sunday afternoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2BgIrVnc8
Wonder when/if any more neat stuff will be found. :)
How did I not notice this was published? I guess I missed it in all the post-AGDQ madness. :)
After reading your notes I have some comments I could make about memory addresses and whatnot, but it's also 4 in the morning so I'll have to remember to do it tomorrow.
Glad to see my Area 7 modification saved a good chunk of time. :)
Obviously if you were actually setting up to do this, you'd leave the tank on the right side of the breakable blocks rather than the left, I just threw this together using my TAS as a base to demonstrate.
I honestly have no idea how this didn't occur to me before. That's a pretty big time saver.
Amusingly enough, after beating a boss and getting its prize, you are warped to the entrance of the dungeon you SHOULD have entered by. If I didn't already want to continue-warp, I would have been screwed--miles away from the tank, hahha.
Just so you know it's entirely possible to get back to the tank in a deathless route, I've done it a couple times live myself. I think it'll save about a minute off my realtime deathless run. Thanks for finding this. :)
Oh wow, I think I can even use that in a real time run. That's crazy. How tight is the timing on that last bit?
Edit: Found a possible variant that might save more time.
Link to video
Timing is probably too precise for real time, sadly, for either yours or mine.
Just realized I had an infinite lives cheat activated when I recorded that, but it doesn't affect the outcome of the movie.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1587424827/Blaster%20Master%20%28U%29-15.fm2
The jump startup and also for 4 frames after you land, yeah. The game counts you as airborne for purposes of horizontal velocity. This produces some interesting behavior if you pause during the crouch, because it resets the crouch counter to 0, but then decrements it before checking it, which causes it to wrap around to 255. The same thing happens if you enter a gateway while crouched. Basically anything that causes the screen to fade out. If you pause during the jump windup, when you come back the game will make you jump after the crouch timer runs out. I don't think it's ever useful, but it looks funny.
One other bit of funny behavior that I just remembered: The sine-wave enemies base their movement off the frame counter (the one affected by lag), but the counter runs during screen fades, so you can actually manipulate their movement by pausing the game. Completely useless for a speed run but I found it amusing when I discovered it.
<h4><a></a>Basic Tank Physics</h4><div class="deeper">You count as grounded on the frame you press A but not after it, despite your tank having a fairly lengthy jump startup. <p>When jumping, there's a 4-frame delay between pressing A and the jump starting, e.g. if you press A on frame 771, your velocity variable won't become nonzero until frame 776 rather than frame 772. During this time the jump can be interrupted by falling, walling, or damage. Once it kicks in, your vertical velocity is set to -66 sp/f. After this point, there is a further delay of 16 frames before the game will count you as having released A for the purposes of jump height. As long as you hold A (or this delay continues to apply) gravity applies as normal. Once the delay has ended and you have released A, if your vertical velocity is still negative it is reset to 0. The acceleration of gravity is 2 sp/ff, and terminal velocity is 64 sp/f. So, e.g. if you tap A for one frame on frame 771, your velocity will be -66 sp/f on frame 776, -36 sp/f on frame 791 assuming you haven't hit a ceiling in the interim, and 0 on frame 792. </div>
Quick comment here, to clarify how this works. The point at which your vertical velocity it set to 0 is dependent on your speed, not how many frames it's been since your jump started. If your upward speed is below a certain threshold, your speed gets set to 0 instead if you're not holding A. This same rule applies underwater, but your initial velocity is obviously a lot slower. Not that it matters since you never jump underwater with the tank anyway.
<div class="deeper"> I'm not 100% sure here, but it seems like, while on ice, the game only actually reads your horizontal input once every 16 frames and otherwise keeps your velocity constant. Strangely, the "once every 16 frames" counter seems at least partially independent of lag. Some things actually manage to change when your left/right input actually matters, but I'm not sure what, since at least once in my run there's an area where it's reading ice input only on frames that are congruent to 3 mod 16, and then there are 8 frames of lag, and then it continues reading only on frames that are congruent to 3 mod 16, rather than 11 mod 16. </div>
There's two frame counters. One goes up *every* frame, and the other only goes up during non-lag frames. The one the game checks to see if it should change your velocity is the one that goes up every frame, but if that frame is missed because of a lag frame, your velocity won't change. Also, the game doesn't bother checking if you're on ice if your tank is 'crouching', but it looks like you knew that already judging from how quickly you do the climbing in Area 6.
I have a pretty extensive memory/code map of this game but there's nothing useful that I've found that you don't already seem to know.
One last thing: The RNG is at 0x13. It only gets advanced when something reads it, and starts the game at a fixed value. However, the hopper enemies that you run across throughout the first room read the RNG every frame that they're not jumping, so in a real time run it immediately goes to hell.
Nice to see a long overdue improvement for one of the best NES games in existence.
But not everybody who wants to store the files also wants to have to go find something that will play 10-bit encodes. People do like to use their PS3s as a media center, for example. You're essentially forcing those people to watch it on youtube or re-encode it themselves.
The Kindle Fire I use for Android development won't even play back the non-MQ (ie non-baseline profile) encodes available over on SDA, so I'd be shocked out of my mind if it could play 10-bit anything. I'm curious now if it it'll even play the mkvs available here. I'll have to try it on Monday.
Encoding NES videos at 1080p is essentially harmless to the people who don't care that much about quality, but limiting everything to 10-bit encodes is going to shut out a lot of people who can't be arsed to install something new. They'll just watch it on youtube instead.
Edit: Also, if "QUALITY" is the rallying cry here, isn't telling people to go watch the youtube encodes if they can't play the files sort of contradictory? Not everybody wants to have to resort to youtube, maybe they want to store the files locally.
Who is actually working on hard mode? I still have an old-ass WIP that made it up to Wily 5. I found some interesting tricks, but I'd have to go digging for it.
I never said it wasn't improvable, I said I was skeptical of your lag claim because I knew the game would lag up at the drop of a hat.
You'll never see me complain about an actual improvement, though, that's just silly.
Yeah, it works on my other machine, so maybe I just have to update this one. Can't remember if I have recently. VLC chokes no matter what, I get no video stream even with the latest version.
They probably decided getting the player stuck in the wall was a bad thing and tried to make it so it would eject them instead of forcing a reset. It IS possible to get stuck in the wall without abusing any other bugs. Just destroy a block with the tank, stand on it with Jason, and then pause... when you unpause you'll be lodged in the wall with no way of getting out (on the U/J version anyway). Granted, forcing the player straight up isn't exactly the best way of fixing the problem... the tank doesn't have this issue because the tile you're standing on gets destroyed if you get stuck in the wall.
No idea about the pause-jumping though.
Ehh, full gun power for 5 makes it easy, but not necessarily fast. I don't know what the damage is for the max-power gun, but I'm almost certain it's still a lot lower than grenades.
It's exactly the same (2hp per tick), it just makes the game lag to hell most of the time. Fun fact: the game has a fractional multiplication routine that it uses for anything involving a sine wave, including the two highest levels of gun power. It's about as slow as you might imagine, even though it's actually a pretty clever routine.
Full power gun is faster for realtime, the other option is grenade spam in the eye like the TAS which I have never once gotten to work once he starts moving around, I always get killed by bubbles. And if you're doing a speed run you're already going to be low health when you get to the boss.
As far as the entertainment value of the boss fights, they're both so incredibly difficult to fight in realtime that seeing them made to look pitiful felt like a fun way to go. See how much of the time I get to just stand still? That's not normal, har har I'm strong. Makes sense that it seems less fun to watch, though, especially to someone who hasn't played through the game.
Having actually done real time speed runs of this game, it's surprising how much the boss fights are a non-issue once you pass a certain skill threshold. Except 5, that one is always a pain in the dick. I haven't discovered a reliable way to do that one quickly, short of bringing in full gun power.
Well, in this case it not only significantly changes the movie's length but I don't think you could reasonably pull off the pause-jump glitch in real time, where the other glitches are quite possible (I've done the backwards door glitch on console), so maybe that could be an additional metric?
