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Toothache wrote:
Not in the least. First of all, the Initial Seed is set at the same time as the ID/SID, which is when the Red Gyarados cutscene ends at the start of the game. Knowing what date to set to will allow the Initial seed, after the number of RNG calls between starting the game and selecting your starter, to give you the IVs you desire.
The initial seed depends on the date, time, and number of frames from reset/load to the end of that cutscene; the actual stats depend on the initial seed, plus the number of RNG calls until the starter is selected. All of these are controllable (the last via waiting outside for NPCs to move around at random, IIRC, although from my experiments on an actual DS, that's rather slow), but only the date and time can be controlled without wasting frames.
So my question was, basically, about whether the shortest possible delay to dismissing that cutscene, combined with the fastest possible overworld movements, happens to lead to a date/time combination that gave perfect IVs; it would be rather interesting if it did, although it seems unlikely. If not, how many frames need to be wasted on luck manipulation?
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Toothache wrote:
One good piece of news for anyone wanting to TAS this is that it is possible to generate perfect IVed starters. Once the ID/SID and Initial Seed is known, it is possible using RNG Reporter to determine what date to set the DS to in order to achieve a max IVed starter. Unfortunately, Desmume does not offer the full range of years available in the DS, and will crash on a date set after 2038, but this has been brought to the attention of the devs and hopefully will be corrected soon.
Does doing so require delaying on the title screen to get a better initial seed?
Also, if you're planning to use a Pokémon other than the starter, are you planning to manipulate perfect IVs for the starter, or for the other Pokémon? IIRC, you'd have to do hours of waiting, or a game reset sequence, to get them both perfect.
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Hmm, I've started trying to do a glitch-TAS now, but the memory allocation routines aren't cooperating and I don't know why; I can't even find malloc's internal tables in memory. It does seem that the glitch is possible, in that it's relatively easy to maintain the glitch item slot as free even over multiple in-game turns; the issue is that other slots the same length seem to free too, making it hard to get data of our choice into the glitched memory block.
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Patashu wrote:
Could you improve the search slightly by making it look at every object in the room to see if they're cream pies/etc? I think there's a command that cycles through every object in the room.
The issue is that such seeds would necessarily lead to a suboptimal TAS, on the basis of needing to walk around the rooms to pick an item up. Given that it seems possible to find a seed that works perfectly with a day or so of bruteforcing, why not?
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Should we be worrying about TASing the boot process anyway? It would make more sense to optimise the game, than the platform it's running on.
Timing for DOS games in general can be a larger problem; a discussion on IRC we had a while ago lead to the observation that with several games, you could fill the keyboard buffer in order to end input earlier, which has a tendency to distort timings somewhat (leading to games ending before they started in some very simple cases). Timing from game load to the keyboard buffer emptying after the last input might make sense...
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dwangoAC wrote:
After discussions in #tasvideos about brute-forcing random seeds for the DOS version of NetHack I offered to volunteer some CPU time to brute-force seeds using an expect script that ais523 hacked together which looks for a character that "starts with IDed leather; we need unIDed GoP" and also looks for one cream pie and gloves in the starting inventory (correct me if I'm wrong on this).
No, I'm looking for a cream pie and gloves on a character who doesn't start with leather gloves (because they can't possibly be the gauntlets of power I need, and it creates far too many false positives).
I started four executions at a time between a couple of different systems and came up with 5 seeds that matched:
Start seed of 107121391 found 107743635
Start seed of 109000000 found 109073336
Start seed of 112000000 found 112781909
Start seed of 115000000 found 115168678, 116323878
Unfortunately, as I feared in IRC earlier, this really is affected by the phase of the moon, and there's a full moon at the moment. (It ends on Saturday in whatever timezone the brute-forcer happens to be running in.) So although 116323878 is would almost be a perfect seed, it's one that only works on a full moon, and it happens not to be a full moon at the time that produces that seed.
It looks like I've been brute-forcing seeds in the distant past based on the fact that my starting digits are one lower than ais523's, possibly as an accident in cut-and-paste from IRC. I'm going to re-start with a more current random seed of 1071026631 and let it keep going from there as it'd be a bit nicer if we found a seed that is after 1070719677 (6 December 2003, the date given for NetHack 3.4.3 in its changelog) but before today's date, which I believe is somewhere in the range of 1282848486.
Indeed, it seems that way. Hopefully the more current seed will produce a result with the correct sort of moon sometime soon; and there's certainly a large enough space to search in. (The fact that two of the seeds dwangoAC posted above work is heartening, as it implies that the events I need aren't so ridiculously unlikely we can't find them.)
The desired items are for a glitchrun, by the way; gauntlets of power produce the longest item names in the game (thus making buffer overflows easier and faster), and the cream pie is by far the simplest way to trigger the glitch in the first place (there are others, but they require both more realtime and more gametime to pull off, not to mention rarer items).
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I didn't mind the noise, and unlike WarioWare, at least there's something to aim for. Unfortunately, the optimal strategy for all the minigames just seems to be rather repetitive and not fun to watch.
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Personman wrote:
Confession #1: I've never watched a TAS longer than 20-30 minutes, and that only on rare occasions.
Confession #2: That is about to change. And then, I suspect, I will vote yes.
This one takes only about half an hour to watch if you skip/turbo away the cutscenes (of which OoT has a lot). It might be nice to see an encode which has the cutscenes pre-removed, incidentally, for the benefit of people who are too lazy to fast-forward them. (It's kind-of hard to do anything interesting to watch during the mandatory waiting in cutscenes...)
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BadPotato wrote:
Starting as Wizard sound good to me, because he can have an interesting inventory with luck... but I'm somewhat unsure how quickly you can reach the expert skill for jumping farther.
We can probably manage it some time in the first 2000 turns. NetHack has a massive "turn rule" in that respect; I'm not entirely sure how full the slack time is going to be, in a pure-turncount run.
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Scepheo wrote:
And I'd like to second Noob Irdoh on the suggested screenshot.
I'd prefer Sonikkustar's screenshot, personally; it makes it clearer what's going on in the TAS, and is more interesting ("why is the board set up like that?")
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I've actually voted No on this one; I managed to get bored after two minutes, when it was clear that it was much the same throughout the whole TAS apart from the first level. The boss fights were the only breaks in the flying throughout the sky thing, which gets old quickly, and they weren't massively striking or obviously even tool-assisted.
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Bad goal choice, I suspect. This is the same sort of thing as warping right to the end of the game using a level password; and those runs are rejected for good reasons.
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This time, on the subject of actions per turn and maximum movement speed. (Thanks to nht from #nethack for discussing this with me.)
The fastest way to move in terms of actions is to jump; if playing as a wizard (nobody else can gain the necessary skills), this can go up to 4 squares in a straight line north/south/east/west, or manage a shorter distance in other directions. (Ideally, we'd move in a jump-friendly line as much as possible when jumping.) However, jumping has a weird timing rule: it always costs the rest of the turn. Punishment (throwing an iron ball) has similar rules, but allows movement of 5 squares every 2 actions (4 being pulled by the ball, 1 moving to the ball's location and picking it up in the same action using autopickup); although this seems slower, it doesn't cost the rest of the turn.
Clearly, it's faster to be in a faster form than the slow human/elvish/orcish form our wizard could start in. The fastest form in the game is the air elemental, which with manipulatable luck gets 4 actions a turn when hasted. However, air elementals are immune to punishment, and so the fastest speed they can manage is 7 squares per turn: walk, walk, walk, jump. (It's possible for air elementals to jump if they have both the Eyes of the Overworld and a range-4+ light source, like the Candelabrum.) Air elemental form is the fastest for non-movement actions like quaffing cursed potions of gain level, but by luck-manipulating controlled (or even uncontrolled!) polymorphitis, we can switch between forms at will, so we can abandon the form whenever we need a different one.
Many forms tie for second-fastest, but probably the most useful for a gametime TAS is unicorn form (this surprised me, and may surprise many veteran NetHack players too). A lucky unicorn can get three actions per turn, and does not need the Eyes to see to jump; it's also capable of being punished and of throwing items. So the fastest possible turn movement-wise would be to throw the ball, then move to and autopick up the ball, then jump to end the turn; this is a total of 9 squares per turn, although with strong constraints on which directions it's possible to move in. (It's worth noting that even if the ball hits a wall, you stop one square short of it, and so cannot pick it up on the same action.) Thus, on Astral, and possibly on some of the other planes, punished unicorn form will be the fastest (especially if aiming for the central altar); although polymorphitis can change us to unicorn form in one turn, reading the scroll of punishment will cost one action, but it pays for itself later, and I think all other causes of punishment are slower. (Who knew unicorns could read?)
This is such an unusual and surprising result that it may be worth using a gametime-related speedrun just to use that particular optimal solution.
In other news, kerio and I worked out a faster sequence-break in Gehennom; I think that you can do it one action faster if you get Rodney to steal the Amulet and carry it out of the tower himself, rather than spending two actions to throw and teleport it; even though you spend one action taking it off Rodney's corpse, you saved two earlier. (Arranging for Rodney to move and die in the right way may take quite a bit of manipulation, though; it would be especially problematic if there was a "frame rule" (or "action rule" in NetHack's case) concerning Rodney's timing. Although I can reproduce the sequence break in realtime, Rodney behaves very slowly; kerio suggests that making him take damage from an aggressive pet is the best way to manipulate his AI.)
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Kerio wrote:
heh, we should get as many unique monsters in the vanished creatures list - also... tsurugi? don't you mean vorpy?
ooh, sarcasm. got it
Not sarcasm. We're probably using a pet with Vorpy for the Quest and Sanctum bosses, and artifacts can only be generated once.
I only just noticed that Vorpy generates randomly and the Tsurugi doesn't (and thus they'd have to be the other way round...)
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Kerio wrote:
well, abusing the speed system you *can* move to up to 7 squares, as an hasted airE; get a monster to strike the two doors, and i guess you can solve the whole of Astral in 3/4 turns. It's lame though :(
getting a seed that allows for an empty route between monsters will be a challenge, though
Use conflict and get them to all kill each other in your path. Bonus points if you get a player-monster with the Tsurugi to one-shot all the bosses.
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Kerio wrote:
After some chatting with ais523 we came up with a really good strategy for astral: get a random summon nasties that creates fire giants in a corridor, bringing boulders; genocide H and bam, instantly stuck; #pray to get ported over your altar and #offer - alternatively, bring boulders as a H (titan? although that screws up Water's strategy), dropping them and teleporting them, making them appear all around you - this strategy has the bonus of having no setup time, but requires you to be in a slower form.
Unlike Kerio, I'm not convinced that this is fastest. In the 3 turns + 1 action that it takes to pray, plus the time it takes to set up the strategy in question, I'd be surprised if you couldn't reach the altar the regular way.
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jlun2 wrote:
Uh... There was an article on every glitch of this game on GameFaqs, but it seems to be gone...
Fortunatly, I found it again!!
The "Create an invisible box." glitch detailed there has effects that look very much like uncontrolled memory corruption. If so, it might be exploitable for a large-skip warp by corrupting memory in exactly the right way. (Hard to tell, though, without details of what exactly is going on.)
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rhebus wrote:
ais523 wrote:
Most notably, the MAJOR_TROUBLE_STUCK_IN_WALL sequence break does not work on the plane of Fire. Amazingly, the NetHack devteam had thought of that; the rescue teleport will always leave you in the same third of the map, meaning that it's not nearly worth the time it would take to set it up. (Also of note is that that sequence break requires you to be surrounded by immobile boulders, thus requiring twice as many boulders as might otherwise be thought necessary; I wonder if it's possible with monsters instead?)
What about TROUBLE_LAVA? It should be pretty easy to get stuck in the lava, similar to drowning on the plane of water. AFAIK it's still subject to the same teleport restrictions, but it should be faster than any other method.
Unfortunately, I typoed my post. The problem isn't on Fire, but rather Air (I've corrected the post now), where there's no lava to drown in.
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I've been testing some sequence breaks to see whether they work.
Most notably, the MAJOR_TROUBLE_STUCK_IN_WALL sequence break does not work on the plane of Air. Amazingly, the NetHack devteam had thought of that; the rescue teleport will always leave you in the same third of the map, meaning that it's not nearly worth the time it would take to set it up. (Also of note is that that sequence break requires you to be surrounded by immobile boulders, thus requiring twice as many boulders as might otherwise be thought necessary; I wonder if it's possible with monsters instead?)
The same sequence break does work on Astral, in that there aren't artificial restrictions from ending up right at the altar like there are against ending up right at the portal on Air. However, I'm not at all convinced it saves time; sourcing the necessary boulders would be a major issue (you can't just wish for them, as that comes with a forced increase of prayer timeout which would cause the subsequent prayer to fail despite all luck manipulation), and prayer itself is also rather slow.
I've also discovered a potentially faster way to do the sequence break on Water; if you're punished and carrying your iron ball, you can throw the ball into the water, and as long as it doesn't hit a monster (trivial to manipulate) and you're strong enough (trivial to arrange in advance), it'll drag you far enough into the water that you have no option but to drown, allowing the sequence break to be pulled off in just one action. However, air elementals are immune to punishment; although this gives an obvious way to ditch the iron ball afterwards, it would mean that beforehand the player couldn't be using that fastest of forms. So although this is optimal from the point of view of minimum actions, it may not be from the point of view of minimum turns.
Also of note with punishment is that it allows a rather fast form of movement, 4 squares and 1 square on alternate actions, via throwing the ball. Unfortunately, it isn't quite as fast as jumping.
EDIT: Fixed the plane, I meant Air not Fire.
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A Meh from me. Technical quality's good enough, but the game continues to make no sense, and not in a particularly good way. I'm not sure that even a TAS can improve this game to the quality where it's particularly watchable.