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I managed to save 53 frames on the Tao fight by manipulating one of the defense gauge refills to only refill to 1 point instead of the full 16. This saved 1 attack and provided better positioning for the next series of attacks.
An additional 50 frames were saved on the autoscroller due to a couple enemies spawning faster. I'm pretty sure it has to do with RNG and my position relative to their spawn points. This mechanism still needs to be studied.
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I'm well over halfway done, thankfully. I'm confident sub 35 minutes is possible, and the run is at 21:20 so far (6 minutes and 20 seconds faster than the current movie).
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On this month's installment of Dragonball: Advanced RNG Adventures we have Tower of Korrin + Tao fight part 2 + Infiltrating Red Ribbon Army base part 1 input file
Catching Korrin proved to be more difficult to optimize than I thought. All of his actions are dependent upon your position, the direction you're facing, and ,as a matter of course, RNG. The only way to manipulate rng in this mini-game is to press the B button (the capture button) which takes 31 frames to complete. All other buttons are disabled. After capturing Korrin he will fade out and re-appear somewhere else. He will either fade-in in a position relative to Goku (usually a medium distance away) which can take several extra frames to catch since you can't touch him until he's completely solid, or he'll instantly appear in mid-air with several of his copies flying around. Catching him when he appears in mid-air is the fastest option, but it's definitely not possible to manipulate every time (unless you can correctly manipulate rng starting from 2 levels back).
The Tao fight was also difficult to manage. In all of the VS fights in the game you never want the enemy's defense bar to start regenerating or else you'll spend 30-45 frames going through the stun animation of breaking their defense without dealing much damage. The main difficulty in these fights is to manipulate the opponent to do an attack immediately after a ki blast. This depends on the rng and your height/position relative to the opponent. This will prevent their defense gauge from refilling since they won't be in a neutral position anymore. In this fight, though, Taopaipai's gauge will sometimes refill by a single point even while attacking.
Flying into the Red Ribbon Army base is the only auto-scroller in the game. The mandatory fights are the only thing to optimize. And in those fights the only thing you need to destroy are the blue hovercraft. Sometimes a gray one will also have to be dealt with. I don't make the level look terribly fun just yet. I'm just focusing on optimal fight patterns, and with so much free time between fights it should be easy to manipulate the right patterns when I go back to polish it up. The last fight of this section is the only one that I think can be made better.
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Saved a handful of frames at the end of the Underwater Cavern. The change in RNG allowed for a brand new strategy for losing the Taopaipai fight. Saved over 90 frames in total.input file
I block a lot of his early attacks so that he is able to throw out even more attacks. This lets him have just enough energy to fire off 3 Ki shots in a row. I also throw out an attack after blocking so that my guard gauge doesn't get destroyed and so that the next attack can come out which is a powerful attack and reduces my health just enough to get knocked out from the ki blasts. As a side note, once my guard gauge is depleted and my defense is broken, he performs the same combo into the knockdown. So I need to have him use the most powerful attack possible to break my defense while the gauge is at the lowest.
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You can skip a fight in Red Ribbon Army level which is coming up after you beat Taopaipai. This can be done in the second part of the level by going underneath the bridge (and thus going underneath the fight checkpoint).
I couldn't find anything in this thread or anywhere else online that mentions any other fight skip in the game, but it's worth checking into.
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Progress
Underwater Cavern is complete. This level went rather smoothly since most of the enemies took only 1 hit to kill. About half the time spent this month was used to re-work Muscle Tower. I had missed a couple movement optimizations which would've saved four frames, but I ended up saving 69 frames, instead. Half of that was from a better boss pattern at the end. You'll have to play the input file to see the changes, though. The video shows new content - the Underwater Cavern and the TaoPaiPai fight (part 1) where I have to lose as quickly as possible.
After losing the fight you play a training mini-game level up the tower where Goku tickles a cat 10 times to get stronger. Then there's a regular one-on-one fight with TaoPaiPai again where you're supposed to beat him. I wanted to add these two parts to the WIP, but there's more work to be done on the fight. After he knocks me down the first time it's possible for him to attack me up to 18 frames sooner than what's in the WIP. Finding the opportunities to manipulate the RNG without losing time is going to take awhile.
Other random thoughts include going back and adding in entertainment for the times Goku is just standing there. This would be a nice change of pace and would make it a less daunting task at the end. It really would be better to add in the entertainment along the way so that I don't have to worry about precisely matching the sub-pixel values all the time.
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Thanks MUGG. I use 2.2.1 because 2.2.2 and 2.3 have problems on my computer (don't know about 1.2). The good work does continue, too. Here's the next level completed. It's probably the longest in the game.
Here's a link to the .bk2 and the .lua's used.
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Hello LavaCanyon!
It's great to see new games on the site, and I wanted to question your goal choice of No Damage. The precision granted by emulation tools makes it trivial to avoid enemies and bullets (and I now see it marked in the improvements section). Given the length of the run it's especially important to keep up the entertainment as much as possible.
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It feels slower than the even the Pacifist run and less entertaining overall. (and I think that no vehicles should also be inherent to the category).
Good job on the other wip, though. I'd go back and try to optimize that run as much as possible to make a worthy submission.
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So yah, I am the only person TASing this game atm. mugg dropped out during the first level. His work was excellent, but it did get improved on later. Thunderaxe31 created the initial .lua for displaying enemy information and helped find a couple tricks, but has not supplied any inputs. xy2_ has also found a few tricks, and he helps in modifying the lua script as needed for the game. But also likewise, he has not supplied any actual inputs for the game.
This TAS would not be half as well-optimized without their help thus far, but I am the only one logging inputs.
On a different note, here is another improvement to the fights. 322 frames faster than the previous wip. I'm now completely satisfied with the fights and will be moving full steam ahead into the next level. The 3rd Ki upgrade is acquired at the beginning. Time to see how useful it's going to be.
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Thanks for the cheers! It really does make the slow work feel worthwhile. I've also updated the encode. For some reason I had uploaded the .avi dump instead of the muxed version.
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.bk2 file
Completely redid the fights. Apparently launching the enemies into the air is way slower than ground combos even though I have to wait for Goku to go back to a nuetral position more often. The sooner I was able to get the enemy to jump the faster I could deal damage to them since I can do more hits during an air combo, and the shield doesn't regenerate between the combos. Having the enemy airborne also creates the best angle for firing the energy shot to get the maximum damage. In total I saved 636 frames over the 3 fights from the previous wip.
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Gokou versus Klilyn. And some others, I guess. I wish those were typos.
bk2 file http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/48147382444843705
Edit: Apparently I didn't spend enough time on the VS fights. Just found a new strat that saved 47, 71, 220 frames on the first fight alone. I'll add a new video once all three fights are completely done.
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
I'm not entirely keen on switching the region just to skip a few levels.
I feel ya. It took me a few days to come to terms with it, lol. The fact of the matter is that Meerkov has a better understanding of the game mechanics than I ever did, and the tricks used in this run clearly demonstrate that my time can be beaten even using the US version. I was certainly dismayed at hearing about the flood fill algorithm since I spent so much time figuring out all the optimal, irregular shapes in my run.
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I remember reading somewhere that in the event of a tied time the more entertaining submission is the one that will be accepted. I think Happy Lee and Mars608 should submit their run if it looks all around more polished.
And obvious Yes vote, btw
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Neat. I look forward to seeing your run. All I know is that when I tried using both players as the fast character I had to continuously add lots of frames each level to make up for all the lag (in addition to the extra 218 frames it takes to switch characters in the beginning). If nothing else, it'll probably increase the entertainment factor since the game slows down enough that you can actually see what happens in every level.
Best of luck!
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Interesting. Well, if you do submit a run using both of the fastest characters I'm not really sure what will happen since you would have the fastest in-game time and I would have the fastest real time (although the movie rules seem to suggest that you need to follow the precedent I set for real time).
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I never took the time to try and collect them all since it showed her being freed in the end anyways. The mirror itself is actually sentient and it was only after the kingdoms were swapped that it decided to also trap the princess. For absolutely no reason. There's also no reason there would be mirror fragments to collect in the first place (the mirror was never broken).
And don't forget about the fairies (even though the storyline does). Each one you collect shows up at the end of each world when the pieces are shown, but the excess ones fly past the edge of the screen.
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Radiant wrote:
The run spends more time on level transitions than on the levels themselves :) while technically impressive, I do not find this entertaining; I'd call this prime vault material.
That sums it up perfectly. There's about 1 minute of actual gameplay the other 7 are pauses and transitions. I was a little put off by that, too, but I've been wanting to see a game of this style TASed for awhile now. I hadn't heard of those other games before.
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MUGG wrote:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/44154534917594887
Fadeout after the 2nd fight, at frame 2229.
I noticed you can fadeout 1 frame earlier by using LR rush, apparently it's hitbox magic or something...
Edit: Same with running attack.
These also trigger the yellow exclamation marks 1 frame earlier
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MUGG wrote:
[*] When landing from a downkick, let go of pressing right to preserve some speed.
Holding right:
928→768
Preserving speed:
928→864→800→768
I think this only works when you don't hit an enemy with a dive kick
MUGG wrote:
[*] RNG affects enemy spawn locations(?)
Yes, but only a few of the enemies can be manipulated with it
MUGG wrote:
I think Bizhawk 2.x should be used if possible (mGBA 0.6).
I had a lot of issues with 2.0, but I just tried out 2.2.1 and it seems to have cleared everything up, so I'm good to use mGBA 0.6 now.
Still working on trying to get the second fight finished, but on frame 2095 the enemy spawns from the left side instead of the right side. I haven't found a good way to get it to change.
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/44073605584227896
-Edit- Got past the second fight with losing only 2 frames. I skipped the second divekick down the slope before the first fight (1 frame lost), and then did a slightly worse divekick than xy2_'s right before the second fight (1 frame lost). http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/44081303871256447
Also would like to figure out how jumping affects Goku's x-position. Just a simple jump before the second fight causes it to desync. I assume it's sub-pixel nonsense, but I would need someone to show me how to look at that.
