Being technically impressive doesn't always equate to being entertaining. Perhaps we just need to simplify: stop worrying about showing the audience fancy new technical achievements and show them the speed-gaming they're there for anyway...just better than what they expect.
I think this is the key point to the criticism.
It is the very same reason we have vault, moons, and stars. There was a SM64 any% tas that obsoleted a starred movie but the camera angles were beyond obnoxious. We elected to have it as the top movie for the category but not inherit the star because it was difficult to watch. We also had movies that were technically impressive but very boring to watch and before vault existed, they were not accepted based on entertainment alone.
I think the same standards should be held for tasbot content. Only showcase content that can be considered moon/star material or have great commentary to make up the difference. There are movies here with great author commentary in some form that bring entertainment up a notch and I'm sure the same effect can be achieved at a GDQ with the right people.
Thanks, I'll take a look at the movie later.
I searched everywhere but unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of my movie anywhere. After getting the second frog to teleport on Shiki's screen by pure luck, I decided to finish day 1 and use it as a baseline. I was hoping to figure out the connection between enemy actions and the RNG so I can create a "perfect" day 1 but it never happened.
After I did an in-depth review of your boss battle in the video, I realized a major flaw in your strategy. In my video, Neku was constantly hitting the boss and only took an almost unnoticeable pause to reset and start a combo to optimally time the finisher. Here is the list of hits Neku does before he passes the puck including the finisher.
My video:
5 hits
11 hits
7 hits (no finisher)
Your video:
5 hits
7 hits
3 hits
That is a big difference of ~60 hp (Neku has an extra finisher) in Neku's damage for the battle. I didn't check total damage but I bet fixing that should make our times for the fight identical.
Nice job. Do you have the movie for day 1 available somewhere because I would like to do a comparison with my WIP to figure out where you lost time.
My Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3plYVg94pg
Some possible improvements:
8:03 - Fight with two frogs with Shiki.
I managed to save ~2 seconds from dumb luck. In my fight, one of the frogs on Shiki's screen teleports to the other in a position that Shiki can hit both frogs with a combo finisher. It cost about two seconds to wait for the frog to teleport but I was able to combo the second frog and hit both with the combo finisher for 54 damage. In terms of balancing damage, the first frog attacked by Shiki suffered 30 more damage than the other. The frog teleported late for the start of Shiki's second combo but if you can crack the rng manipulation to get it to teleport during Shiki's first combo, you could save a few more seconds off mine.
8:30 - Fight with Day 1's boss.
I need a frame by frame comparison because the rng and strategy we both used are completely different. I somehow beat the fight 2-3 seconds faster.
It felt like forever ago so I'm not sure if I still have the movie for that video. I'll let you know if I find it.
As I understand it, if you're trying to run Undertale through Steam, Steam and Hourglass don't play nicely together.
If you can get Undertale to run without Steam being in the way, you might be able to work something out with Hourglass.
The Steam version is just the game executable wrapped in a Steam api executable. You can extract the game executable and run it directly to avoid interference from Steam.
EDIT: Never mind, they seemed to have changed it since I last checked.
Remixes of Pony music are being taken down as we speak. Being blocked in 244 countries which is virtually the entire world. So what are gonna do now? Take a space shuttle to Mars? I don't think so.
If we think that worldwide operations aren't enough, we need to expand our networks across the entire galaxy.
Galaxy isn't enough either. Their plan is to expand across time itself and control what each period in time can see from past, present, and future. Got to maintain some sort of control when time travel happens.
Oh and by the way, if you wonder why the start and end are 0x1800000 apart, it's because this is exactly equivalent to 24mb which is actually the amount of RAM the GC and Wii uses for its games. The memory starts at 0x80000000 and ends at 0x81800000 in the real console.
I'm afraid to say it but you are missing critical information for Wii software. GC has a 24MB MEM1 memory which you've mentioned. Wii also has a 64MB MEM2 memory in addition to the GC memory.
MEM2 is mapped to the 0x90000000 - 0x94000000 region in Wiis.
I'm using r5962 and MEM2 is normally mapped to 0x8fff0000 on my Win 7 64-bit.
It may have changed but it is interesting that the region size for MEM1 is rounded up and there is empty padding until MEM2 to keep addresses round.
Interesting, did you ever found useful addresses in these memory region?
Because I am doing a lot of ram searching on Super Paper Mario and I never checked that memory range. if that memory part is important, then I will be sure to add a section in the tutorial. I really thought that the hardware being similar, they had the same ram system.
Maybe a detailed explanation of that ram region would help me because that could change a lot for me (and the tutorial of course because I care to keep it as exhaustive as possible).
But yeah, I am very interested about this information.
MEM2 is just an extension to MEM1. The games I've researched generally used the smaller MEM1 memory for executable code and static data while using MEM2 as working memory. MEM1 is only ~25% of total memory available to Wii games.
In FFF: Chocobo's Dungeon, I easily found all the basic static data that would never need to be unloaded. When I started to search for more valuable information, it was nowhere in MEM1. I spent a total of 8 hours trying to figure out what black magic the game was using to hide the dynamic memory. It wasn't until I decided to look into the Wii's memory map that the mystery of missing memory was solved.
How I found the emulated MEM2 memory was really easy. Knowing what addresses I was missing, I just searched everything for the addresses and looked at the list of memory regions to get the start and size. The emulated MEM2 memory region was exactly 64MB so I didn't bother verifying that everything was correct.
Oh and by the way, if you wonder why the start and end are 0x1800000 apart, it's because this is exactly equivalent to 24mb which is actually the amount of RAM the GC and Wii uses for its games. The memory starts at 0x80000000 and ends at 0x81800000 in the real console.
I'm afraid to say it but you are missing critical information for Wii software. GC has a 24MB MEM1 memory which you've mentioned. Wii also has a 64MB MEM2 memory in addition to the GC memory.
MEM2 is mapped to the 0x90000000 - 0x94000000 region in Wiis.
I'm using r5962 and MEM2 is normally mapped to 0x8fff0000 on my Win 7 64-bit.
It may have changed but it is interesting that the region size for MEM1 is rounded up and there is empty padding until MEM2 to keep addresses round.
Unless each game has its own TAS bot, it would be almost impossible to sync. Crystals aren't perfect and any console is likely to drift and eventually end up +/-1 frame. Then there is the problem of the consoles possibly polling input sooner or later than the others for whatever reason and cause the TAS bot to increment an extra frame. Some form of debouncing could easily fix the second issue but would make the TAS bot more susceptible to the first issue.
There is then the problem of if a movie refuses to sync on real hardware. You can't just add or remove frames of input because it would then cause the remaining to desync instead. Just one misplaced lag frame and the game is done.
I believe if anybody could pull this off, it would be our wonderful engineers that are already making the impossible happen for our entertainment. 1 controller, 4 games HYPE!
P.S. Alternatively, each game could get its own TAS bot but we are already under enough scrutiny from the general public as is.
That battle went ridiculously fast! I almost asked if giving Freya a different spear would've affected her stat gains but then I remembered Freya doesn't have any stat boosting weapons.
I noticed you've been using Freya, Quina, and Steiner in your tests. Do you plan on changing your initial Yan grinding party once you figure out the best party combinations (and order)?
Progress is still going nicely.
Near the 13 hours mark.
If possible, could someone take a look at the script posted above about the 0 Mistodon Iifa Tree and explain it like in lua ?
I tried a lot and can't get any better than one Mistodon no matter what.
But I'm not sure I understand how it works.
I think I have a theory but I have no save files near it to test. Are you using the analog stick or d-pad?
It is possible without debugging tools but would require knowing the game's basic memory structure or luck.
Your best bet would be to create a large sample of save states with the address being in different locations. Then you can use the displacements to find the pointer.
Example:
Save state 1: Address at 0x02045350
Save state 2: Address at 0x02046420 (+0x10D0)
Save state 3: Address at 0x02042588 (- 0x3E98)
Save state 4: Address at 0x02045434 (+0x2EAC)
If I scanned each save state in that order, I would look for those differences to find pointers/offsets. It takes a long time but it works if you get a large enough sample to scan with.
I'm not in as bad a mood as I was before, btw. I accepted what happened, I'm just curious what's going to happen in the show's future.
But: I don't like the pattern of having bad characters become good in the blink of an episode. I hope Tiara isn't just completely brainwashed to good now... At least have them jump to their old personality from time to time. Idk. Her bad behavior having been caused by her mother whom we've not seen before - and I didn't appreciate her personality, it seemed childish - seemed too abrupt and unbelievable 109 episodes late into the show. And although I'm not in a bad mood anymore, I can say that I still have mixed feelings and feel rather concerned. Maybe I just need to see the "next CMC episode", but that may not even happen until late in 2016 next season ...
I don't think Tiara is good, she only learned how to use her talent to get what she really wants with alternative methods. She tried really hard to use her talent of giving orders to become president but it completely backfired and lost her everything. She then learned why her methods weren't getting her good attention and decides to try helping. She used her talent to get her peers what they want and in exchange got the attention she always wanted. She isn't good, she is just being good when it is in her best interests. We may need another episode with Diamond Tiara to find out if she is on her own side or actually sided with her peers.
Is this the character John de Lancie was known for prior to MLP? So the things Discord does is actually a play on this.
Yeah, Lauren Faust was trying to explain the character while pitching the first two episodes of season 2. According to her, the executives didn't get the character so Faust had to use Q as an example. Then the executives suddenly understood the character and wanted to try getting John de Lancie to play the character.
I don't know what capabilities psxjin or bizhawk's psx core have that can help. With only Cheat Engine, it is just endless trial and error until you find something interesting.
I hope somebody who knows more about those emulators can point you in the right direction. I'll look into it later when I get time because I am highly interested in finding out myself.
Cheat Engine is actually disassembling the emulator instead of the game. The best it can do in this case is count how many times the address is written to or accessed.
Can I get more information on the Colorado pics? I can't take the low resolution jpeg image seriously because any fine details have been washed out.
I can probably say that the images were taken on a Winter night with the moon, well positioned clouds, and skyglow (very bad here in Colorado Springs and a good sign it will probably snow that night).
Kurabupengin,
Please realize that the BizHawk team (and probably other coding groups as well) reserves the right to be rude to anyone, for any reason. Accepting this, and also assuming that the reverse situation is not a right (being rude to the BizHawk team, for whatever reason), is probably for the better.
I respectfully disagree with this paragraph. This implies that I cannot say anything with the devs just because they are the devs and they can insult and make fun of me just because they are the devs. That's honestly unfair, realizing their responses and everything else. They shouldn't have that priviledge to insult whatever they want just for being devs. I can get it for the admins, but the admins are the most mature, correct and respectful people I know.He isn't being like this and thus I'm not going to let that go.
Admins usually deal with both front and back-ends. If there is drama, it starts with the community which then escalate to the mods and reach the admins if needed. If there are server issues, it starts with the developers in general which then escalate to the developers in that specific area and reach the admins if needed. It is common for the developers to avoid talking to the general public because it isn't their job to talk to people outside the team/company.
As for being rude, it is because they (usually) have to get deal with shit from self-entitled idiots and end up under-appreciated regardless the result. This is only a hobby and they receive nothing in return for their work (in some cases, not even recognition). Unless you give decent contributions, they don't owe you or anybody respect. As for being rude to the devs, you are only burning bridges and don't expect to get anything after that.
The important question is why should the devs NOT be rude to you. Come up with a good argument please.
Can we get a collapase function for posts?
Like if I want to post a LONG script, I should be able to put it into a tag of some kind and have the user click on "Expand" and they can see ALL the text. It may be called Spoiler on other forums. Where you can take a block of text and put it into a special box that can be compressed/expanded.
If you like to inject css:
.code {
max-height: 300px;
overflow-y: scroll;
}
Makes all code blocks larger than 300px scrollable.
Linked lists can be converted into arrays for the purpose of display. Fancy things like iterators and what not can solve that problem.
But sometimes the game really is complex. You need trees or even webs to show how pieces are interconnected.
We understand we can simplify complex data structures. The problem is that the tools needs to be flexible enough to read whatever data structure we throw at it. Sure the idea seems simple but the GUI needs to be able to display every possible variable and the tool taught how to read everything. This is almost impossible to do and if it was, would require a ton of programming to cover every edge case. You will have to sacrifice several features to reduce the complexity to a manageable level (even Cheat Engine hasn't been able to pull off everything in your request without scripting).
I would much rather build my own cases into the emulator/tool than try a "one size fits all" tool. There is just too much to anticipate and I have gone as far as writing python scripts to analyze memory dumps of individual frames.
Question about the Darkside fight. I don't have everything with me right now so I can't test it myself. When you reloaded your cards for the final 4 hits, could you have hit him sooner if you charged during the downtime from waiting for Darkside to attack first? It looked like you attacked as soon as the cards were finished reloading so you could've attacked sooner if you reloaded sooner.
It may have changed but it is interesting that the region size for MEM1 is rounded up and there is empty padding until MEM2 to keep addresses round.
