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Nice WIP! You managed to use the star in 1-1 to save time, awesome. And super corner boosting in 1-2, for some reason I never thought of using that in 1-2, dur :S
The WIP desyncs for me after 1-2. Are you sure you are using Desmume 9.6? I hope you aren't using some interim/svn build. It needs to be able to sync on an official release.
I tried to improve the pipe in 1-2, but I couldn't . I couldn't figure out why you have a delay, it makes no sense. I thought maybe it was weird x subpixel positioning so I varied subpixels, 1 subpixel at a time, and no effect. I thought maybe it was y positioning, and jumped down there with small variations in y position, and nothing. I think you guys are just a victim of TAS Rule #34 All Improvements will have worse uncontrollable luck than their predecessor.
Also, you were 30 frames ahead upon entering 1-1, what is up with that? Did I screw up walking to 1-1?
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Just make sure you run in frame advance when using background input. If you run at full (or slow) speeds, the two emulators can loose sync from each other.
Also, lol at this topic title.
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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The latest discussions (in the SM64 thread in particular) sparked an idea for me. What if we split the latest publications front page module and subsequent RSS feeds into New Publications and Obsoletions?
Those like mz who aren't interested in improvements can safely ignore the obsoletions if they choose, and it might make for a more tidy organizational scheme.
Discuss & Vote.
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The nature of RPG TASes have an a unique consequence in that they are more purely a popularity contest than any other TAS genre. Because as you said, either you like it or you don't. RPG games I've played all the way through I can follow a TAS of and enjoy it. The others are zzz. As such popular RPG games like FF games will get a large audience approval and thus be published, while more obscure ones get poor audience reception and a date with the grue.
The exception though is glitches generally. While many oppose glitched RPG runs (usually the fans of the game) they often have more general audience appeal, since you don't have to know the game to know that poor game is getting abused and of course the glitches make it shorter, and hold the attention span of the general audience better.
As for this TAS, there is more than enough examples of improvements in this movie. While a movie doesn't need to be perfect for me to consider publication, I think this movie falls short of the bar. As such, I am going to reject it based on technical quality.
This leaves the verdict of game choice open. The votes & audience reception is quite mixed on that issue, so I don't think there is enough to gauge that adequately.
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A debugger is the ONLY tool PCEjin lacks. And honestly I think that's more depth than anybody needs to be going on a contest of this nature anyway.
It has a nice lua implementation, RAM Search, and Ram Watch, that's the bulk of what you need.
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First of all, the other 2 dream team contests happened at very busy times in my life. I wanted to participate in something like that but couldn't devote time those weeks. Now is a great time for me, and I would like to enter the contest.
As far as ground rules, I'd like to make some points:
One month is better than two weeks, you don't HAVE to use the whole month, if you just want to do two weeks go for it. The point of one month is that most tasers are going to spend two weeks over the course of that month due to real life. It isn't like someones going to get two more weeks than you of sitting in their room all day TASing.
The platform of choice should be PCE, no questions about it. Everybody is going to enter this contest with an unfair advantage at one of the "common" platforms. Most of us know little about PCE and so we would be on equal footing. And PCE has a lot of nice publish worthy games. In addition, PCEjin is an accurate emulator that has a nice implementation of all the standard TAS tools we want.
Everybody is demanding certain platforms or not other platforms. This is more reason we should use PCE. The whole point of this would be to get out of your comfort zone and try something new! If you can do that, this isn't an ideal contest for you anyway.
I agree that no contest member should know the game choice until it starts. And even better if the audience doesn't know until the contest is over :)
I asked moozooh to try to pick a PCE game. I can't think of someone more suited for the task of deciding the game. He's got a good mix of objectivity & TAS skills. I don't know if he will do it, but one can hope.
I also think that anybody who does this be willing to have a strong IRC presence at least for the duration of the contest. Seriously, it is a huge disadvantage TASing with a partner who doesn't IRC.
And one more thing, the game should not have have the ability to use more than 2 players. Even a 2 player TAS might turn off some TASers, but at least it can be well done without the use of special tools.
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Indeed that was and would be an approved hack. Until a run that plays A-D is made, I don't see a FDS TAS obsoleting the SNES one. Even then, I might be a bit skeptical.
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So there is a glitch that could save HOURS on this TAS. How does avoiding increase the entertainment value? (This is a serious non-rhetorical question that I hope the author and others attempt to answer)
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Agreed.
but the flagpole glitch is missing in our currently published SNES version. By chance, does anyone know for sure if the flagpole glitch works on the port?
I don't know it for certain, but the flagpole glitch was well known at the time Cpadolf did his movie. Surely it occurred to him to try it out.
while only adding the flagpole glitch.
I think its worth noting that this is the most significant contribution this movie makes compared to the published movie. And it is well demonstrated in the exact same way in no less than 6 other movies on this site.
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Submission wrote:
Abusing glitches only of JPN rom.
Before this can be accepted for publication, I'm going to need this section to be elaborated on. U version is preferred over JPN unless there's a good reason. What's the reason?
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Ok, I updated the submission with a new final level. Its 708 frames faster than the previous. The trick klmz posted saved a few frames but wasn't useful in any other place. Redoing the final level I saved about 100 frames total from various small improvements.
When redoing the boss fight I discovered a trick to allow regular weapons to do 2 damage and allowing me to conserve a lot more special attacks. More special attacks mean a much quicker boss fight.