Posts for Vaan666

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Posted: 12/31/2016 4:19 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
A couple things I noticed from skipping through parts of the video: The skip at the very beginning with the blue door. Have you tried jumping backwards towards the 2nd pot while throwing the 1st pot? You get hit from the Cadet in the fight in Tower 3 and from the video it seems like that took you roughly 50 frames. Instead you could try to do something else in rooms previously to adjust the RNG value to get a flawless outcome by default with hopefully less frames and possibly some additional EXP by for example killing one of the Whisps you have to run by anyway. Also you attacked a cadet in one of the rooms seemingly random to me to probably adjust the RNG value? With a possibly different RNG value you might even get a gold drop from the Cadet fight. In the Huball snake fight you just stand there doing nothing basically. You could take that time to kill all of the golden Huballs to not only gain EXP but also manipulate them to all drop some gold. Having more EXP would also lead into the free hits on the mask at the Shadowkeeper fight which saves roughly the time you take for a level up minus the textbox. It would also lead to a different pattern for Shadowkeeper which might mean that he doesn't move towards you at all. But yeah all in all this looks good to me.
Posted: 11/24/2016 9:06 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Link to video Motivated to work on this again I finished up another dungeon which was rather a short task to do. Next steps will take quite some time. Unless I feel like showing progress videos partially through parts there is probably nothing to come from me within the near future.
Posted: 11/20/2016 11:55 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Link to video Just a short video showing the differences in the TAS including the new skip. I simply deleted all Frames that weren't necessary any longer due to a much shorter Lars' Crypt and edited the part of the room that changed. Then deleted the leftover frames from that room too and it synced up again until the boss which I simply just redid then. I lost a 10 gilder drop due to some RNG changes and 2 frames too after leaving the room with the conveyor belts. All in all this new sequence break saved 3097 frames until the end of the dungeon. For people who haven't played the game or forgot what conveyor belts are supposed to do: If you touch them you lose control over Alundra and they move you into the direction the little arrows point to. Recently Spiriax found out the invisible wall that blocks you from jumping on the edge of them only extends so far as you can't make the jump without the "Item Carry Jump". Knowing that we simply jump around that invisible wall and land on a part where they aren't "active" and walk down to the 2nd half of the room. Additionally to skipping a part of this dungeon you don't need to use the key we grab in that room which makes us save time later in Elene's Nightmare and Torla Mountain.[/movie] Edit: I managed to find a 4 frame improvement over what I posted in the video above. Unfortunately those 4 frames lead into some very weird outcome. The text that appears before the boss fight starts has lag frames all over the place depending on the inputs you do and because of that I couldn't make use of all 4 frames I saved but only 3 otherwise it would lose more than those 4 frames just because of different lag frames during the text. Redoing the boss fight yet again I saved 2 frames on the fight and another frame walking to Lars after the door would open. Even though I stood on the same coordinates after the fight ended and I used the same inputs I could not open the chests because it would require an additional frame to reach them. Saved another frame on the 2nd chest just to lose it on the 3rd chest again and another frame on the 4th + another frame on the way to the teleporter. So overall I ended up saving 2 frames. Now what is with all that nonsense in saving frames just to lose them again for no apparent reason? Well we always more or less speculated that this game works heavily with Subpixels. We first confirmed it when TheSicks found a jump over a 3-Tile-Horizontal gap that would either 100% work or not by using a savestate but could be changed with some Subpixel manipulation (which we don't really know how to do). Being able to consistently manipulate our Subpixel value we could make use of it for the TAS in at least one area to save some minor time that comes into my mind from the top of my head.
Posted: 11/20/2016 8:00 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Thank you so much! This got rid of the freezes completely, apparently I wasn't aware of that autosave function. Guess my motivation is back and there should be soon a video of the previous dungeon with the new sequence break!
Posted: 11/20/2016 6:27 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Currently I am using 1.11.8.1. I upgraded from 1.11.7 not too long ago when I first encountered issues with the .tasproj file where it got corrupted multiple times and after updating it didn't corrupt any more but the first time you replay something after starting the movie it would just freeze for about 10 seconds after roughly 1950~ frames. But now both the TAStudios and the Bizhawk window would not respond any more after a couple minutes then work again after like 20ish seconds then freeze again after a couple minutes. Switching to a completely new file and just copying the Input log worked previously to restore the corrupted files but it doesn't prevent the issues I have now.
Posted: 11/20/2016 3:47 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
A new sequence break was found yesterday saving roughly 4 minutes: Link to video As the video description already says this allows you to keep a key for a later part in this dungeon and also skips a part of this dungeon. You would keep the key throughout most of the game until Torla Mountain to skip a part that is roughly 3 minutes long. Also having a key affects Elene's Nightmare where Meia shows up in certain rooms earlier due to having a key on your inventory. You can also do stuff out of order like killing the bosses prematurely and cut some backtracking through the dungeon because of that. The time save for Elene's Nightmare so far is unknown as it first needs some proper re-routing. I already tried implementing this new strat into the TAS but Bizhawk keeps freezing on me every couple minutes and has in general tons of issues with my .tasproj file so I don't really feel like working on this at all. If and when I will continue working on this might rely on Bizhawk finally working properly.
Posted: 10/25/2016 7:51 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
New video showing off the progress I made since the last update video. Really happy with how this dungeon turned out overall. Link to video
Posted: 10/25/2016 3:15 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
I first wanted to even try to restore the movie at all and then upgrade to 1.11.8.1. I kind of got around the crashes and corrupting the file by doing roughly 5.000-10.000 frames at a time without setting any branches. It still happened from time to time that the file got corrupted but making backups after every portion made it a lot less stressful. I'm at a point now where the movie was once fully loaded, branches are set corresponding to the markers and backups are done frequently for every state. Will try to upgrade to 1.11.8.1 now and see if the movie runs from frame 0 to the last one without having any crash. Edit: Played the movie in it's final state in one go in version 1.11.8.1 and there was no problem at all. Edit2: After going back to a previous branch I set to record the progress I made so far it kept freezing at the same frame for 3 attempts I did. After that I closed Bizhawk and opened it again just to see it telling me yet again: "Movie system Id () does not match the currently loaded platform (PSX), unable to load" I'm not sure what makes the file corrupt itself so frequent and making it unable to play older parts of the movie. It might be related to the branches since ever since I started using them that problem occurred more frequently than ever before. But not using them at all isn't a solution either since I don't want to sit here every time I want to go back to something that is ~500 frames ago and watch 30+ minutes of the movie.
Posted: 10/25/2016 3:18 AM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
I've tried that now and it worked perfectly fine. But in the process of replaying the full movie and making the branches along the way a "Fatal Error" happened. When I try to reload the movie I get following error report: "Movie system Id () does not match the currently loaded platform (PSX), unable to load" I've had that happen before and what I simply did was to copy the Input file from the .tasproj file into a new one. Though I personally don't care about the loss of the amount of rerecords for example that I did ever since I started, it gets quite annoying having to redo that over and over. Is there any solution on how to fix that error or prevent it from happening? Even after copying the InputFile into a new .tasproj file it keeps throwing those Fatal Errors at me after a random amount of frames watching the video. This is what the error message looks like: Bizhawk version I tried for this was 1.11.6.
Posted: 10/25/2016 2:42 AM
Post subject: Problem with loading video from a set marker
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Hey, when I try to start the movie from a marker I set earlier during the process of making a TAS it usually either sets me back to 2-3 previously set markers or even to frame 0. I never bothered too much with it as I would just let the couple hundreds or thousands of frames play until it reached the point I wanted to rewatch. For some reason though when I hit about 120.000 frames it would always set me back to frame 0 when I wanted to revisit parts that are older than ~500 frames ago. Now the question is: Is there a way to always start a movie from any given point as it really gets annoying to rewatch 100.000 frames just to test new ideas, compare it to other strategies I came up with and so on? For reference: I usually set markers everywhere throughout a room until it feels like I'm done with it where then I delete all of them and only leave the ones at very significant parts of the TAS such as: Start/End of a dungeon Bossfights So roughly every 10.000-15.000 frames I have a permanent marker set so far. Thanks for your help in advance Greetings Vaan
Posted: 10/18/2016 5:39 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
As PSXJin still is accepted until the end of this year I thought I would mention it.
Posted: 10/18/2016 3:30 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
New video showing the latest progress I made in the TAS: Link to video Most of the things are explained in the video though if you have any questions don't mind asking me. A little note regarding loading times for this game on Bizhawk compared to PSXJin and PS2 with FDS enabled: From the end of Coal Mine starting with the loading screen after leaving them until the video is done I lose about 6-7 seconds just in loading times compared to the existing TAS and all console RTA runs. If you do an only room by room comparison with no loading times involved I probably save somewhere about 30 seconds compared to the old TAS just in Coal Mine. Though if you consider the longer loading times it ends up being "only" 13 seconds at the end of the Video roughly.Link to video
Posted: 10/11/2016 8:14 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
partyboy1a wrote:
Perhaps it's tied to the screen transitions
Yes. And even more so, as Snes9x 1.43 emlulates even less lag than Snes9x 1.51.
This is exactly what I assumed as well in the Discord-Channel for this TAS. The best thing to do would probably be to compare room by room and assume because of only having a video for Saturn's TAS to go and take the result and add/subtract lets say roughly 5 frames for human error to it. You can't really grant that the numbers you get are correct unfortunately. Also we don't really know if there is no difference in the PAL and NTSC-J version so you can just compare them like that.
Posted: 10/10/2016 12:33 PM
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
For the Magirocks there is no need to pick up more than 1. You need exactly 5 + the free BonePin you get from progressing in the game to warp out of Areas. One of the Magirocks will block your optimal path in Ra Tree so it basically only takes the amount of time to pick it up. The other 4 are provided in form of the GrassPin you get from the Ra Tree after defeating the Parasite boss. Equipping the Magic Chest when doing the menu in Grecliff to drink the Strength Potion and equipping the RocSpear will be the only time loss aside from -I would assume at most- another second casting it since there is exactly one frame at the Stormkeeper boss in Zue where the animation of the spell doesn't play but you get all 4 Magirocks back from it. Picking up 4 Magirocks manually would definitely be a bigger time waste as the only other somewhat fast to gather Magirocks are in Tower 2 and Zue. The other 2 are probably the ones in Grecliff you get somewhat close to. And since you want to have 5 at the end of Louran you are somewhat limited in where to get them.
Posted: 10/9/2016 3:53 PM
Post subject: Alundra
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Vaan666
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player (32)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
So I decided to pick up this game a while ago as a project to make a TAS for it. For a very long time there has been no real speedrun community for this game other than a segmented run on Youtube and much later some RTA runs from a Twitch user named Vayarda. Very recently though a couple people namely Puri_Puri, Sk84uhlivin and Spiriax decided to pick up this game and run it actively. Ever since this game saw some major improvements in the route as well as with glitches and skips. That not only inspired me to also take part of finding said things but also much rather than running it myself to give it a shot at making a proper TAS. If you are also interested in the Speedrun for this game we have a Discord-Channel where we share all the discoveries we made and also very detailed stuff such as RAM values, timing differences for Emulators/Console etc.: Link to the group The Leaderboards with all the current PB's and the WR can be found here: Leaderboards The main source for new strats and discoveries can be found on those Youtube channels: TheSicks Spiriax Vaan666 There is already a TAS on Nicovideo for this game that was done quite some time ago. Though if I were to judge it I would say no real effort went into it. Not judging the fact that the TAS is outdated due to a much more optimized route nowadays. Even the most simple tasks like advancing text in the game are not optimized at all. On another note: There is no information about what Emulator was used to do that TAS. We assumed it was done on PSXJin due to the fast loading times given from watching the video. For convenience Puri_Puri uploaded the segments as one video on Youtube: Japanese TAS from Nicovideo I started this project using Bizhawk 1.11.6 but i will most likely switch to newer versions as they come since this project is likely to take quite some time until it will be finished. (Currently i am on Bizhawk 1.11.7) Since the loading times are much longer compared to PSXJin and PS2 with FDS enabled (which is the standard for running this game) I lose quite some time over the course of the TAS compared to the current one and all RTA runs that are done on console. I already uploaded some videos showing the progress i made so far on my Youtube channel but here is the Link specifically for the playlist: Alundra TAS WIP playlist Since the Speedrun of this game requires quite some planning before you can even think about progressing with the TAS it's making a rather slow progress lately also due to the standards I set myself which are basically that I only work on this if I know I can invest proper time into it. I already have plenty of Notes for how things are supposed to look like for future parts not only made by myself but also thanks to Spiriax who provided me with some Notes I requested from him for this project. With this I hope I not only provided you with all the important informations about this but also gave it a nice little introduction for both the Speedrun and the TAS of this game. If you feel like i am missing something or have questions about anything regarding the game feel free to send me a message on either: Youtube, Twitch or in the Discord-Channel linked above.
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