Posts for Zurggriff

Post subject: ARZ2 Boss Pause Trick
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It appears the pauses wait for the value at address (0xFFF6F8), 2 bytes, to decrement to 0, twice. Sonic Retro shows the Git label as (Plc_Buffer_Reg18). I did not know about this when making TAS's for this game. I vaguely remember seeing a post discussing the details of this sort of pause trick, and it being in the Sonic 1 thread explains why I did not have this address on my memory watch. Nice to see the location in memory that is holding up loading the boss and what function that address performs.
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Great TAS! The complicated setups used to save A presses were very satisfying to watch. There were a few instances where I was rewinding the video to watch a segment that caught me off guard with no A presses. Going back to understand what just happened and realizing how much effort was put in to creating these solutions was impressive. The goal choice fits this game well and stands out from existing publications with the diverse movement used. Waiting periods are kind of expected to show up in goal choices like this and they were not long enough to detract significantly from the entertainment value. I am glad you did not stick to only improving an existing branch just because they were created first. This submission looks a lot different from the 'minimum buttons pressed' TAS that has been mentioned several times in this topic. It has a different goal and plays out differently to achieve it. The comparisons to A press counts are not fair either as, I can only imagine, some of the setups used in the 'minimum A presses' TAS would have required too many additional D,L,R,B inputs to save over current routes in 'minimum buttons presses', or at least not to the same extent. The 'minimum buttons pressed' is also arguably not the 'true' lowest of the low when compared to a 'minimum inputs' TAS, which would play out vastly different on its own anyway, so I do not think this is a standard that more obscure goal choices should be limited to following.
Post subject: Sonic the Hedgehog 2
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Never realized there was a forum topic for these sorts of TASes until recently. I have some TAS that I worked on back in 2014 and might as well post them somewhere, even if it is super late to when this topic had activity. The movie files were created using Gens v11. Rerecord count for minimum inputs is not accurate as I cleaned up some extra inputs in a separate file. The original had 9758 rerecords. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Rev01 in 320 presses Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Rev01 in 1886 inputs
Post subject: Shorter Input File
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Attached is a movie file that ends input 113 frames earlier than the submitted run. Input changes on frame 54751 (before the eighth hit on the last phase of the last boss). The change used a longer spindash charge to reach a remote location. From there, a 60-frame charge (out of 63) was used followed by an immediate and short speed adjustment, at which point the input file ends. From there, Sonic bounces around at a fixed speed for a while before coasting to a stop for the final hits. No further improvements for this submission are expected. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/48628374224248038
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When I saw that an address set already existed for this game, I figured there was a chance that someone was either working on this or planning to work on it, but I could not find any posts in the forums to support this. I did not make any mention of working on this game though which could have prevented this situation where I beat someone to this TAS. I am glad that you liked the work. As far as ending input earlier, this may be possible by spindashing earlier and dropping the speed to something that keeps the boss on the left and still arrives to land the last two hits and collect the emerald. I just did a test with an attempt that used some late inputs to keep Sonic on the boss and the emerald was still collected on the same frame. I do not have the time to look at it at this today but ending input with such an improvement is likely possible, and as a bonus, should not delay the ending. I could not find a way to determine who created the address set. The game appears to track position in several ways. I made some modifications to existing addresses to still make sense with the addresses that were added but it may need improvement.
Post subject: Incorrect Console
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Sonic Labyrinth is a Sega Game Gear game despite the title listing it as a SMS game.
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The speed to the tunnel was preserved by performing a spindash before the zip, which delays the camera's movement. This was used in the first Knuckles TAS and allows the character to jump through the moving ceiling before it has solidity, but a lot of speed is lost to drag. The other method should be faster if it is possible to avoid the lava. Also, I have yet to find a part of the run that just plain old sucked. It is ridiculous how well the movement was optimized.
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I did not find the run entertaining but I cannot imagine a high score run being more entertaining. There is not a lot of action and making the events longer to get a higher score would not increase the entertainment. The game is designed such that a high score run could be a technical achievement, however, aiming for fastest game completion is a valid goal and it is interesting to see the game completed that quickly.
Aims for maximum score without sacrificing Frames
This keeps getting brought up and misunderstood. With how this is worded, it could be interpreted to give priority to higher score or to shorter time. Based on the first objective listed, it is obvious that frames were prioritized over the score. Of all series of inputs that get the fastest completion, those which maximize the score are used (After reading the text, it looks like this only applied to 110 Meter Hurdles unless I am missing something) so this objective is met. The objective could have been worded differently to avoid ambiguity.
Post subject: Improvements
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When looking through the forums, it appears that there has been interest in an updated Any% TAS for a few years so here is a WIP: WIP through HTZ2 All of the known improvements were in the first half of the run. It looks like the rest of the levels will likely be unchanged from the published run.
Post subject: TASVideoAgent breaking links
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In the submission text, TASVideoAgent fixes a link containing a "-" by removing it, which is a page that does not exist. The link referenced is a TASVideos wiki page. Is there a way to reference these pages without them being broken?
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Destroying nothing except the boss in Stage 1 does unlock one of each item. It also disables unlocking additional items that would have been unlocked by score on that stage only. I figured this was more like an in-game cheat and starting off with all of the items available kind of hurt the point of playing on the hardest difficulty.
Post subject: Perfect Bonus
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The only thing that controls getting the Perfect Bonus are the individual rings located throughout the level. Collecting rings from the slots with neither count toward the ring count needed for the bonus, nor prevent it from being achievable.
Post subject: Ring Attack
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SmashManiac wrote:
Also, the submission text indicates that an extra ring can be collected in the main stages when playing normal Sonic the Hedgehog 2. (It would also be greatly beneficial in the special stages due to split ring paths.) I'm not sure how if would affect the entertainment value, but it terms of pure rings count, picking the Knuckles version seems sub-optimal and arbitrary to me.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 are two separate games and one would not obsolete another, just as there are separate published runs for fastest game completion with neither being superior over another. Regarding the in-level rings that were not collected, efforts were made to collect them but all attempts were unsuccessful. As far as doing the impossible goes, Mystic Cave 2, Oil Ocean 2, and Metropolis 2 were previously believed to be impossible to collect all of the rings. And just to point out, this Knuckles Ring Attack collects 5163 rings while the Sonic with Tails run only has 5104 rings in total to collect due to Knuckles only ring monitors (this is a separate game).
Zamasu wrote:
Naming it "Ring Attack" is because the objective "PERFECT BONUS" is unreachable?
Even if this run managed to get the missing rings in Aquatic Ruin 2 and Casino Night 2 which would subsequently get the Perfect Bonus in every level that has a bonus display, it would still be a "Ring Attack" because it aims to collect the maximum number of rings possible in the levels (excluding the Casino Night slots and the respawning ring monitor in Oil Ocean 2 which are both trivial and boring).
Post subject: Sky Chase Zone
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None of the previous publications of Sonic 2 maximized the score in Sky Chase Zone; I did not check all of the rejected submissions. The high score in Sky Chase Zone is not a TAS only achievement and this score has been matched by several people in real time. Of the ideas I had for going through this stage, high score happened to be my choice. I did note that it had not been in a publication before. Regarding real time versus in-game time, I thought the second bullet in the Objectives clarified the priority but I see how the opening paragraph could cause confusion so I changed it. The real time by itself never mattered. However, when the work in progress that looked like it would never overcome the losses from the Mystic Cave 2 bonus came so close to matching the publication, I was amused that the submitted movie file managed to be just 3 frames faster.
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When breaking the capsules, looking up would be faster. I did a quick check of this by comparing EHZ2 in the published run with the EHZ2 in the Knuckles submission. After breaking the capsule, looking up was 50 frames faster in this comparison. The capsule timers started the same number of frames after breaking the capsule but the Sonic movie spent a significant amount of time clearing the animals after the capsule timer expired. The bigger problem with this is looking up is not known to be possible in most acts. Sonic usually does not have a way to have the camera high enough as the boss fight is starting to remove the low camera limit. As an example, even the hang time the Sonic movie had going into the EHZ2 boss fight was not sufficient to have the camera above the low camera limit when the limit is enforced.
Post subject: Submission Edit
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The first paragraph was changed to distinguish in-game time from real time. The column labels in the second table have been changed for clarification. The first completed revision of this movie file was 5 real time frames slower than the published movie so information explaining why the movie file should obsolete the published movie while having a longer input file seemed appropriate.
Post subject: Ring Attack
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It appeared that there was a plan to go back and improve the run anyway so optimizing it sounds good.
Post subject: Ring Attack Oil Ocean 2
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I realized that the last file wasted time trying to get the exact same position so I fixed that and the 7 frame wait. The y-subpixels should not affect the zips anyway. GMV file
Post subject: Ring Attack Oil Ocean 2
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So, I arrived at the OOZ2 rings with a position that was only 2 y-subpixels off and the inputs would not synchronize. Then I forced Knuckles to have the exact same position and the inputs still did not synchronize. Not sure why that happens but I was forced to rework that section and I managed something that was approximately one second faster. GMV file I forgot to fix the error of not moving for 7 frames. With OOZ1 being redone, this can be easily fixed when splicing this OOZ2 to the OOZ1 file.
Post subject: Ring Attack
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Evil_3D, Oil Ocean 1 has 4 Knuckles-only ring monitors for a total ring count of 297. I will join the efforts in getting the rings quickly in Oil Ocean 2.
Post subject: Ring Attack
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Evil_3D, I will be unavailable for the next week. I can take a look at OOZ2 later if it is still a problem. Getting good positions to collect those rings is quite a challenge with that much acceleration.
Post subject: Mystic Cave 2
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Evl_3D, from what I can tell, the minimum velocity needed to glide through a ceiling of that thickness is -8225 as displayed from the highest possible pixel and subpixel (634 and 0 in this instance)
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Evil_3D, in this instance, it is better to point out how the capsule animals can be improved rather than identifying a sequence of inputs that make it faster. This is caused by a few reasons. The capsule animals will stay in sync once every 32 frames and with improvements coming before this point (hitting the capsule earlier, more pausing before the boss fight to save in-game time, CPZ), the animals may have different timing to jump. Hitting the ARZ2 capsule as is, there is a timer that will allow animals to spawn until it expires, then the game checks for animals on screen. In this case, the timer is at byte 00FFB59F. Ideally, this would count down by 1 unit per frame from 179 to 1, then change to 180 for 1 frame (this is when the check for animals occurs), and then change to 0 (indicates all animals are off camera)[all values given are Unsigned]. In the file provided, the timer stays at 180 for several frames because a flicky is late leaving the left side of the camera. Without changing anything before the capsule hit, the fastest way is likely achieved by deleting 1 animal spawn, in this case it is the animal that spawns at the 40 bytes starting at 00FFB8C0. This post in the Sonic 2 thread by marzojr describes deleting and adding boss explosions and animals, along with a Lua script, which contains a lot of information http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=423921#423921 Alternatively, the animals that will be loaded can be manipulated prior to hitting the capsule. In most levels, this is done by deleting or adding boss explosions but there are none in this level. However, destroying badniks also manipulates the animals and there is an opportunity to so during the time spent waiting for an air bubble (this would require redoing some of the level).
Post subject: Ring Attack
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I also do not know the proper way for splicing movie files. I have been doing this process manually. This maybe worth figuring out how to splice movie files some time. Evil_3D, It did not make sense to me to ignore potential real-time savings just because the game has an in-game timer but if you do not care to have this in the movie, that is fine with me. If you decide to try it yourself, I can provide some guidance on how I have been doing this; it is really not that bad. Below, I have provided a movie file that has the animal manipulation in EHZ2. I had to redo some of the inputs because the capsule was hit 3 frames later than the earliest opportunity. While I was copying the inputs into this file, I could not help but to feel that the section with the block cycle interference was slow, so I tried to get there sooner with the same route. CPZ1 is incomplete and I did not notice any obvious improvements in the rest of CPZ1 or CPZ2 (except for CPZ2, where at 1:39 into the level, there is a big up loop jump that gives Knuckles a lot of speed exiting the water) so I will leave this up to you where to proceed from here. GMV file
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Now that I am aware that changes before the CPZ can cause a desync., the capsule animals can be manipulated to leave the screen sooner. (CPZ2 in the 'any%' WIP I posted was over 40 frames faster than without animal manipulation) Most of the zones can be completed before going back to make these improvements but the EHZ capsule should be done before completing CPZ. I can help optimize the capsule animals. Sorry for the late notice, WST.