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After Gnome is just Undine, then I enter Moria.
OmnipotentEntity: perhaps it works in some parts. I'm not convinced that it works everywhere. The Moon Folux took me a while to get in Dhaos' Castle, I kept getting the same lizard/archer fight no matter what I tried and I really needed the Folux for the upcoming fights. I redid a large-ish portion of the castle in the hope of triggering something else, and eventually it worked. After that I didn't rely on tweaking the enemies, it seems like such a waste of time.. I just fought whatever ended up on the plate :)
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Sorry about that Zero. The zip file was fine on my end, but seems broken after geocities uploads it. Try again now, I used winrar this time, it should be ok now.
Ife: yeah, I'm quite aware that it's not a proper submission, it's just for fun ;). If it was a proper submission I probably wouldn't be braking it up into 3 files, and I'd play more carefully and fix those "ERROR" comments. I started making it before posting this topic but took a break at one point, so the smv start dates are older than the first messages posted here.
> I'd think that turning off the skills AI and controlling party members spells manually would be more efficient, not to mention more impressive due to a general reduction in sloppyness.
Yes, all spells and summons are manual. Setting the characters to "call many spirits" or "use many spells" is not very good, since they still take "long" (in a speedrunning sense) delays between casting, so I force them to cast all the time. That's what all the menu toying is.
> I'm also not sure about the early TP strategy.
Early on I have only very few techs, like (eww) Poison bolt. Yeah, I don't particularly like many of the fights early in the game (well some are works of art, others are pretty average). I wish I had some holy bottles before Harmel.
> "Some of the holy bottle use strikes me as queer as well (using one, then getting a battle two steps later) but I'm guessing that's just to control the randomness of the battle type?"
No no, it's not random, it's timebombed. There's a step counter, which is set when you enter a new area (not adjacent rooms in a field, but a new area altogether) and counts down for each step you take - that's why getting pushed along walls can be useful, since you move in 2 directions at once for the price of one step. It's not set randomly, it's always around the same number (give or take a few).
The counter is reset back to a high number if you tweak the scout orb (it's in lower moria, no chance of getting it) or reuse a dark/holy bottle. I use holy bottles about 1 or 2 steps before getting into a fight, so that I can at least walk a little bit further. Unlike the GBA and PSX versions, the encounter rate in this game is quite high.
There is another thing which is set in stone along with the step counter - the enemy you will meet next. Pressing buttons or changing directions when about to approach the last free step doesn't affect it. The enemy can be tweaked by refreshing the bottle or entering a new area, or entering an adjacent room in the dungeon, but I don't think anyelse else works =/
My best fight is probably Gnome, since anyone who remember playing this without save states know how frustrating this guy is. My worst fights are probably Jahmir and NeoDhaos (even though my level was around 40 which is "about half way" from the max of 99, I was still incredibly weak for this fight)
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Righto, I'm done. It's about 4:37hrs on the clock, so the game can be beaten under 5 hours after all. I suspect it can go down maybe even 10 minutes faster with cooler optimisations on the fights.
geocities.com/spenev/ToP.zip
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Is it a steps or random chance thing? I remember walking quite a long way sometimes. And other times just getting hammered one after another.
It's steps. When you leave an area for the overworld, leave the overworld for an area, or finish a battle, you "steps" counter is assigned some random number. If you're wearing a holy bottle, the number is bigger than usual. If you're using a dark bottle, it's much less.
So you just walk around, for every step you take, the counter decreases. At 0, you fight. If you have 1 step left before you fight, and you reuse another holy bottle, the counter is reset back to some large number again.
The trick here is the jet boots item. It makes you run about twice as fast, if you hold the B button. This is great for places where there are no enemies, and it makes the game looks so much faster. It does not work in the overworld.
But in dungeons, using the jet boots sort of takes 2 steps for every screen step, so you decrease your counter quicker, and meet enemies sooner. It might actually end up being more efficient to simply use a holy bottle and walk normally - this way you won't fight for about twice as long a time (and refreshing the bottle gives you an extra bunch of steps). The idea is conserve the bottles so that you can leave the dungeon with 0 or 1 bottle to spare and stock up again in the next town =)
As for Klarth, he's probably going to be the most useful character after Cless (until I get Chester again, I reckon.. Chester can seriously pwn if you equip him well and set him to "go psycho"). Sylphs, Gnome and Undine are teh suck for most enemies, but Maxwell is where it's at. Sometimes a maxwell ball does around 10x damage of the other balls, which can make maxwell instantly surpass Ifrit and Luna for damage (Faqs often say "use Luna" but that's not true, usually Maxwell is the best).. but Luna may well have her uses.. she hits everyone on screen with light damage. Might be > Maxwell against "dark" enemies.
Arche's most useful moves spells would be Thunder Blade (probably her most useful spell, considering how early you get it and how many enemies it hurts) and Indignation (but you earn it around half-way through the game), and perhaps Ray (see Luna). Her death spells (extinction, black hole and distortion I think) have a habit of not working no matter how many save states you use.
Oh, I forgot Flare bottles... a player should be well equipped with those. They raise Cless' attack about x1.5, I think. Ah, the wonders of drugs =)
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Bisqwit wrote:
And people would of course have to use the Japanese version, because our rules rule out fan translations.
Japanese text displays a little faster than English text and as that, it's not that important anymore if nobody can read it - most audience couldn't understand it anyway.
Also, the game is much better enjoyed by playing it (the audience of the movie is those who have already played it), so anyone who watches the movie without having played the game before is just shooting oneself in a leg.
Hmm, bummer. Text is alright t be in J, but I'm worried about the menus. There's a lot of item manipulation necessary, for in and outside battles. I don't want those names to be in Japanese...
But then it doesn't have to be an official submission, because I'd prefer to DeJap. It can be like that SF2T I made before, it can be just for fun. Can you even make an official submission if the smvs aer split over several files?
I agree that it's useless for someone who hasn't played it to watch it.
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Zurreco wrote:
This game would be great to watch, both as an RPG and an action submission, because of the whole Linear Battle System deely. The white/opal stone is supposed to let you escape from most fights much faster, but wouldn't you want to get phoenix/lionheart as quickly as possible?
Phoenix isn't Cless' best tech. It's a fire-based tech, so it works great against some enemies (such as plants and trees), but lightning is just as effective on those! The problem with phoenix is that its animation is very very long.. Cless concentrates for a few seconds, and then wraps himself in flames and then dives, which is nearly 2 lightning bolts! Lionheart has always been one of my favs. But it doesn't actually do much damage. It pushes the enemies to the edge of the screen, so you can hurt several enemies at once - that can be very useful, but you get the tech quite late in the game (yo get phoenix before lionheart).
Zurreco wrote:
Also, would it be safe to assume that Mint will be leaving the team fairly quickly? No need for a healer if every shot is dead on, right?
Lol, yeah, her main job is healing. When you get Chester back, giving him the first bow you meet makes his attack over 500, which is more helping than Mint's "defense decrease" I think... But Mint is just so cute, I can't boot her out ("Fasto Edo") =/
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Symphonia came out a few days ago here, and I'll probably get it soon. So I have an urge to go back to the roots and have another play through ToP. Might as well record stuff, since I have 9x now. I know that some people here are fans (eg. Bisqwit, otherwise he wouldn't have translated it) so it may get _some_ support.
Some things to consider:
a) It's a long game. I've never bothered doing anything quickly on it, but it's taken me between 25-30 hour to do ~100% completions. I've played the game fully thrice. Obviously a run can't be this long, it should aim for a fast completion, not full completion. I suspect that doing only what's necessary would take maybe 5 hours? This is still extremely long...
b) It's an RPG, so there's a lot of randomness (pseudo, of course, but from some prelim tests it can't always be taken advantage of, because the values are set way before they are used by the game). There's also cutscenes+speech, and the game is very linear. The speech and linearity will no doubt make some parts a little bit boring to watch.
c) Setting speech is "fastest" is just a little bit too fast to read for the audience. And there is a lot of speech. The audience will probably only catch half of what's being said.
d) Can't record over 2 hours on a single smv, so have to use several files.
e) Battles, argh! Early on you really desperately need Lightning Bolt (it does like 10x damage of your sword), but you get it around lvl 8 (or was it 10?). So how far should one level up early in the game.. how much fights should one avoid later on in the game? Obviously Holy Bottles will be a god-sent, but they only double the required steps until a fight, so they need to be refreshed a lot (iirc, using a holy bottle resets the step counter, but using any other items or vising an adjacent area doesn't reset the counter - so using a bottle and reusing another bottle a few steps before a fight is the most efficient way to avoid fights altogether). But some dungeons are long, you can't buy holy bottles everywhere, and this methods exhausts the holy bottles quite quickly. Jet Boots halve the amount of steps to meet an enemy, so holy+jet cancel out. I suspect that a mix of jet and normal walking while always using holy bottles would be a good idea, to conserve the bottles yet still make use of the jet boots from time to time. Getting into a fight is not the end of the world, as long as you can run away quickly (mist rune? white mist? formation -> Cless on the far left).
I think anyone familiar with this game will agree that this is easily one of the most complicated SNES games to analyze for a time attack, probably on par with Star Ocean, and perhaps more complex than CT.
I really really don't want to get into situations like SMRPG where people are discussing the exact attack combinations at the exact level in order to defeat some boss with 0 extra hit points to spare just to save an extra round of attacking, because that could take months >=)
Fights will be fast because of save states, but the real issues are getting into as few fights as possible, yet having reasonably decent levels to learn cool techs (Teleport would pwn just about any boss in one or two attacks, but Cless gets it so darn late). Lightning Bolt and Tiger Teeth are two techs that you get really really early on, and they do a very disproportionate amount of damage compared to all other attacks you can do at the time, so those will probably feature quite a lot.
For Arche/Klarth, it's probably best to set them to passive. Their spell/summon animations take a bit of time, and I don't want them to execute spells if I don't need them (for example, running away). Setting to the next level above passive is useless for fights where I DO need them to help attack, because they will delay for a bit before summoning. So I think summons and spells will be completely manual.. at least it would give me full control of what's going on.
Mint is probably less useful than Chester. I've never really used any of her mana except for healing... do any of the other status-affecting spells help more than Chester could?
So yeah, does anyone know of any significant shortcuts to skip something in the game? Will anyone ever bother watching a ~5-6 hour movie split into several files? Has anyone ever heard of this game? Where did I leave my socks?
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You can do several in a row. See the first level here:
http://www.geocities.com/spenev/dkc2.zip
It's v1.1, but the first level should work on your v1.0. And it will desynch the second time I enter Lockjaw's, but it's "supposed" to get to Kreepy Krow. You can also see how to jump into the barrel in Lockjaw's as well, unless it desynchs earlier.
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Darn, I thought you were doing it for 102%, not just skipping all the levels.
And yes, it's possible to do a few tiny extra tricks for a few seconds faster overall. I only saw up to Kreepy Krow for now because it desynched (v1.1, downloading v1.0 now).
Edit: saw the rest. Yeah, it's very quick in the first two worlds since every level has a warp. But now you have to do a whole bunch of worlds without warping around the levels to cut down on time, so you'll have to go around the long way anyway. So I think it would be cooler to do it 102% instead =) But I'm sure the desynching is frustrating.
Your possible improvements are: roll in those "!" rooms when you warp, rolling is faster. Unlike DKC, you can often do a roll and keep your speed going (in DKC, 99% of the time when you roll and do NOT hit an enemy, you come to a standstill unless you do a hop) which means you can string several rolls together in this game (plus it looks cool).
The other one is that you can get into the barrel in Lockjaw's Locker by spinning down the shaft and then jumping (it's tricky) instead falling on the ground first and doing the piggy-back move. That's 1-2 seconds there.
I suggest you use Dixie all the time. You'll need her later on anyway, so swapping Kongs should be avoided.
Btw, you avoided all the rope climbing stuff so far, but when you have to climb any ropes.. just do quick hops in succession (won't work well on a single rope, but if there's 2 or more vertical ropes next to each other it's hella fast).
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How long does snes9x allow you to record for?
I once recorded 2+ hours of something, and it no longer recognised the save states as part of the movie. The SMV file had just exceeded 1,000,000 bytes at that point. Can't it record for longer than 2 hours?
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I already started making one, but I desyncs everytime you hold down the B button (dash/roll) and open a state and happen to land on the ground to roll - you'll roll in your game, but not in your vid.
It's extremely annoying because you have to keep checking your vid to make sure it's recording ok.
In short, don't bother ... until they improve snes9x =/
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Ah, but this game isn't like Super Mario Bros.
It's much longer and much more complex, and requires lots of creativity sometimes - so you can't rule out the possibility that someone can figure out some extra roll in some place that can save 10 frames... and do everything else exactly like I did (or recycle my video up to that point in time and re-record from there) and end up 10 frames faster because of it.
So why should I spend those extra hours to save 1 frame when the strategy is only 99.9% optimal (because we can't know _everything_) and possibly improvable by someone with a lot of free time on their hands?! :)
Alexis' video had a roll from a tire back to solid ground in Blackout Basement near the place with 3 tires in triangle formation - I haven't yet been able to do, for example. In this vid I jump just before about to snag the edge of the ledge. It's a move similar to rolling across the Necky surrounded by two dips near the end of Millstone (not in this vid, since I warp and ignore that place), the roll under the second rope in Blackout or the two tires in Rope Bridge - it has to be pixel perfect. Even with states it takes hundreds of attempts and tests your patience.
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> Why did you lose time in K Rool and Poison Pond?
K Rool was one frame slower, and Poison Pond was about 3 frames slower. Poison Pond was perfect in the previous run, so that's one reason. The first time I completed the level it was 10 frames slower so I did it again. I'm not bored enough to spend more than 10 seconds trying to save a single frame >=P
>> Rambi and Expresso go at the same speed no matter what you do with them
>
> Is that just for level ground? I'm pretty sure you can go faster by jumping with Rambi if you're going uphill.
Na, you gain time with Rambi only if you jump as soon as you get control of him because he starts up slow and takes a bit of time to accelerate to his top speed. Jumping up/down slight inclines doesn't save any time.. it's only the first jump that saves frames.
> Edit: In Millstone Mayhem, why did you switch to Donkey Kong and then immediately get hit?
You can't make it into the barrel with Diddy alone. If I kill Diddy (no switch) I have to play with DK after the bonus for a bit and he's much slower. And it's faster to get killed than to switch Kongs inside the bonus. If I did something that looks odd, there's a probably a good reason for it.
> Edit 2: As I was watching the movie, you died in Tanked Up Trouble.
Nope, I'm not meant to die. The ROM sounds right. Try closing snes9X and reloading the game and movie and fast forward to that place again... it has happened to me before that in some place a movie messes up, but restarting it makes it works.
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Here we go, new SMV ('39 mins):
http://geocities.com/spenev/DKC_101pc_NTSC_v1.0_39min_40sec.zip
For Misty Mine, you have to press "9" on your keyboard to remove the haze layer, otherwise you can't see anything.
Everything was faster than the 40:25 run except I think 3 parts - K Rool, Poison Pond and Torchlight Trouble (each about 1-5 frames slower). I got Squawks early on in Torchlight so you can at least see what's going on (trade off of 10 frames).
I looked at the game's internal timer a lot, and it's surprising how many different rolls or jump combinations end up with the same amount of frames (especially when exiting the level). Rambi and Expresso go at the same speed no matter what you do with them, as long as you don't snag an obstacle and lose momentum. I made up lots of time not from the rolling, but from entering/exiting bonuses quicker.. sometimes you can enter or exit a bonus in several different ways that look very similar/identical, but they can actually be up to 3-10 frames apart. It all adds up since there's over 60 bonuses (x2 for entering and for exiting) which is probably 10 seconds all up! Add to that the 20 seconds gained from the Millstone and Vulture Culture warps, and that's already 30 seconds.
The hardest parts were:
- The upwards-moving platform at the end of Elevator Antics, very tight fit.
- The two tires in Rope Bridge Rumble. ARGH! The second one is easy, but the first one is hell.
- Rolling underneath the second swinging rope in Blackout Basement. By far the hardest trick in the movie. The light are off and you can't see the rope, so you probably won't notice.
- Barreling the final bonus in Forest Frenzy. Looks very cool though.
- I decided to kill one of the Krusha's blocking the Millstone warp because it was too hard, but it's possible to move the tire underneath all three without slowing down much.
- Jumping over the 9th Army in Platform Perils (the middle of three).
- Thinking of ways to make the K Rool fight entertaining =/
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Yes, collectively we probably know more about this game then anyone outside Rare =D
Iron Knuckle tells me that in PAL, the frame counter stops at 184 on the 11th "5 seconds chunk", which is precisely 3000 frames (50Hz @ 50 fps x 60 seconds = 3000, so it appears to be correct).
So actually, yes, both the NTSC and PAL versions correctly adjust for the frame counters, and increment the "minute" variable when the frames reach 3600 and 3000 in NTSC and PAL respectively.
The difference in the timers must come from somewhere else... Iron Knuckle has an idea already, I'm asking him to provide me a bit more detailed explanation.
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Ya I can send you the SMV movie (find me on AIM, alexpenev1). Presuming you've got the emulator and correct rom, you can watch it. I'll make a movie of 39 soon, so that's going to contain every trick in the (NTSC) book and will be the most comprehensive one to watch, so you can wait a few days for that if you want.
What I said about the free frames isn't quite correct. In NTSC, when 2nd byte is at 14 (ie the final 4 second chunk to make up a minute) the frame counter only reaches 16 (not 256) before incrementing the minutes, which equates to 14*256 + 16 = 3600 frames per minute, which is how it should be.
I'll have to check what the PAL version does in this regard. It probably also cuts the frame counter off when it's near 59.something seconds in order to not give away any frames.
But in any case, I still think something is not quite the same with the timers.
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Here's the deal with PAL and NTSC (after a lengthy discussion with Iron Knuckle).
Both games use 3 bytes to keep track of your time. As was mentioned, time runs during kong-swaps or bonus games or the Kredits or even the win/lose dance in the bonuses, but not during fade-in/fade-out, pausing or the overworld, candy's, cranky's or funky's.
In NTSC:
The first byte keeps count of frames. It goes from 0 to 255 and back around to 0 again. The second byte counts 4 second blocks. Each 255 frames is considered a 4 second block. After it reaches 14, it goes back to 0 since 15*4 is a minute. The final byte counts minutes. It only goes up when the second changes from 14 back to 0.
In PAL:
The first byte also counts frames. The second byte counts 5 second chunks. 255 frames is considered 5 seconds. It goes from 0 to 11 and back to 0 (12*5 = a minute). The last byte counts minutes.
There's a fourth byte for hours too, but it's rarely used unless you're slower than an hour.
Now, since the NTSC game outputs 60 frames per second, 4s*60hz = 240 frames which means that each 4 seconds you get a gift of 15 frames free of charge, since the chunk counter increments at 256 and not at 241 as you'd expect.
In PAL, similar story.. 50Hz*5s is 250 frames so you get 5 frames for free every 5 seconds.
Over the course of the game, this turns out pretty bad... 5 free frames for 5 seconds (PAL) vs 15 frames for 4 seconds (NTSC)... that's about 6600 frames advantage to NTSC over the course of 40 minutes, or about 2 minutes worth. Keep in mind that these are frames given away for free, which is just dodgy/lazy programming and can be easily fixed in 1 line of code.
In other words, PAL is impossible to beat in 39, or probably even 40, since the NTSC minumum is about 40:10 so far with the current strategies.
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I played the game again and got 25:19 (22 in-game time with 23%) using Alexis' timing method (he stops when he delivers the final blow). This is several hundred frames better.
I first made a run that was about 150 frames that even this, but it desynched at the end of Blackout Basement, so I had to redo Dumb Drum and the last world all over again and didn't spend as much time on it.
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Aha.. yes the 40 mins is improvable too (not by much), there's no doubt about that.
You'd had so much practice from DKCCC that I'm pretty sure you've got level 1 worked out to the exact pixel. I didn't use many save in it either since I was familiar with it as well. I've done the first 5 levels in order with 3 mins on the clock at Candy's without saves, mostly thanks to DKCCC.
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It's a very good run, mainly because he's using most of the optimum strategies (no prizes for guessing where he most likely saw them).
I can think of 3 places you lost some time. Two of those places are probably worth less than a second each, but neither appeared in any of my SMVs so you might not have seen them yet. One is the second Gnawty fight, the second is a chasm jump in Torchlight Trouble.
The last place you can improve is Manic Mincers and Platform Perils. I caught up to you by over 100 frames (= 1.5 seconds) on those two levels.
I've already done a 22 minute run (also a 22%) a week ago, so that "25 minutes" is way outdated - you should change the caption because it's wrong/misleading! =D
Daniel V compared both mine and yours and said that your run is about 1-2 seconds faster overall (d'oh).
This run is beatable, but only just.. by mere seconds. Unless we come up with new strats again.