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Is there anywhere I can find a precise description of the mupen 64 savestates?
For example anything similar to the descriptions of movie files on site would be excellent. Any information on the formatting or compression of data within the file would also be helpful. Also information on how the movie file is stored in the savestate. The last piece on information I will ask for is specifically how the save is loaded and how the movie file is rerecorded over.
Links to specific parts of source code would be great.
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actually sm64's frames are constant in game time (not real time). CBFD's frames are inconsistent in game time, therefore meaning that the game does not slow. If you can hex edit the m64 and it still synchs, then the game's frames are constant in game time (or very close to it) or hex editing isn't possible. SM64 slows when entering the second part of DDD for example. whereas in CBFD, it lags, but the speed is the same.
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I watched the encode. all the 2d objects do look like shit and half of the objects are 2d anyway. All fire, grass, and liquid drops are all 2d in conker's bfd. and if it renders incorrectly you lose the conker's bfd feel.
quick comparison between plugins:
plugin, reflectivity, shadows, Gouraud shading,2d objects, beer goggles
Jabo's 1.5.2 no no no yes black screen
Jabo's 1.6 yes yes yes yes random pixels (can be seen through background)
Rice's 6.14 yes no no yes yes but slow
Glide 64 napalm yes no yes no random pixels
I watched the encode and saw I stopped running at some point. It turns out this wasn't my wip at all, but a desynch test. After the cutscene, nothing is optimised, and I just used a little tool assistance to do the tricks. BTW for clarification conker actually travels in (reasonably) straight lines. I found the direction variable in MHS, and I tried to keep it as close as possible to one number. (it generally oscillates between two numbers about half a degree apart.) Why don't I have perfectly straight lines?: cbf. It would probably take about 15 mins to traverse a single straight line perfectly. This way, I can traverse a short straight line in less than one minute real time, with very little speed loss (probably approximately the same gain as employing this technique.
This would make an entertaining run. Please keep it up. :)
yeh I know. This was the absolute perfect game to TAS.
The worst thing about this is that you can't use tasedit with conker's bfd because frames represent variable timeunits, so it desynchs anyway.
EDIT: I just had a thought: because I was considering doing a Rayman 2 TAS and reading up on it, it seems like it has a similar problem. Anyways, it was initially blamed on the expansion pak being used, but personally, I think it's because the frames represent variable timeunits. Games such as MM don't seem to have many desynchs, even though they are reliant on the expansion pak to run. guess what"? MM's frame rate is always 20, or it's a menu, when it doesn't matter what the duration of a frame is. Banjo Tooie, for example I believe is extremely prone to desynchs, and it's framerate can lower, without lowering the game's speed. Therefore variable timeunits again. super mario 64 is one of the most sync-robust games that exist, and the time between frames is constant, meaning when the frame rate lowers, so does the game speed. Most games that use the expansion pak use it for cosmetic use (graphics). it seems logical that games that have lower framerates due to graphics would resort to the expansion pak, hence a possible misconnection. My theory is that the emulator does not store an accurate enough timestamp of each savestate, so when framerates start becoming weird, the game represents the time as somwhere between time A and time B. Loading the state will either give time a or b, therefore possibly dropping a frame. Desynchs ensue. it's a theory, however incomplete, but I think in real life it goes something like that. This claim has no real base, so feel free to disprove me.
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sorry if I got your hopes up, Antids mupen has the exact same problem, so does reset recording mupen. They're both crap anyway because they don't render with Jabos 1.6, which is the best for conker's BFD.
All I can do now is hope and wait for mupen 64 plus rerecording to come out. Come on guys! hurry it up already!
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This game is right up my arse:
EDIT: removed post
Okay, until mupen 64 plus comes out, this game is on hold. Why? this game desynchs so badly. I'm beginning to think mupen is not a robust emulator after all. With this game, desynchs can occur, at any time purely by rerecording.
I had this savestate where a cutscene was triggered in normal play, but with well timed jumps, you could avoid it. Loading this savestate would cause a desynch because some times when you loaded it, you would have to wait two frames to jump in order to avoid this cutscene, and other times you would have to wait only one frame. Therefore, giving the exact same input each time would give different results, only two frames after the state was loaded.
Therefore I conclude that mupen 64 is not robust enough to TAS this game, as there must have been an external factor (apart from input) that affects the game.
Damn, I really thought I was getting into something there. Perhaps in the future, I might do this game, but until then, I'm just going to have to find another game to TAS.
For interest's sake: here would have been my current WIP, what's supposed to happen is conker doesn't swim at all, but continuously jumps, and then skips the instructions cutscene and jumps to the log. It just doesn't work.
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glide napalm makes it look like shit and crashes, Jabos 1.6 generally crashes, so I don't use it, looks like rice video!
...
Holy shit! rice video is freaking awesome! OMG shiny brass effecs
EDIT: you were right, my extremely short video desynched ... At the menu! Now I have to do it all over again. For the 70th time. Funny tho, I just realized you can skip the intro by pressing L, which would have killed my run anyway.
also learned how to maintain straight lines even if the camera is turning through the use of lspiro's MHS.
Also rice video has a beer goggles! that was previously a black screen (first cutscene)
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EDIT: removed post
I figured it out, desynchs occur when loading a savestate during a cutscene. weird but true. BTW, found a little, (and possibly little known) timesaver, that allows you to skip some text and get the helicoptery tail thing (actual name) without invoking instructions. I also use chapters mode, so you don't have to watch two hours of cutscenes; I can skip most of them.
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sorry to bring this thread up again, but I did a short WIP of this game up to the part where you bash the key with the frying pan. Anyways, the game keeps desynching. I think it's to do with the length of the cutscenes when you hold down frame advance, but I can't put my finger on it, and I'd really like to TAS this game. So if anyone could help me out, that'd be great.
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Well seeing as fateful issue 502 is being considered and may be completed in the foreseeable future, I thought it would be appropriate to add this topic to the forums! For the first time ever (I believe) we may have a rerecording emulator for the current generation of consoles. anyways, Here's my list:
Metal gear solid: any
Super Mario sunshine
Zelda: all
Super smash bros. Brawl/Melee
any FPS
Yeh, just a few.
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26/01/2009 10:48:04 PM||Running CPU benchmarks
26/01/2009 10:48:05 PM||Suspending computation - running CPU benchmarks
26/01/2009 10:48:36 PM||Benchmark results:
26/01/2009 10:48:36 PM|| Number of CPUs: 4
26/01/2009 10:48:36 PM|| 1794 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
26/01/2009 10:48:36 PM|| 3997 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
I got these results from BOINC. Whetstone and Dhrystone are generally considered to have limited accuracy; however, it's much more accurate than clock speed
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I guess my computer must be really shit. I use openGL without any problems, Direct3D9 shades all polygons black for me, so I have the same problem the other way around. OpenGL gives as slow a framerate as direct3D9 for me.
EDIT: Happy Australia day for anyone here down under!
Also I got super mario sunshine running at 15 fps avg 20 fps max (up to 25 is an anomaly) and smash bros running at 25 fps avg purely by changing the partition they were on. I have no idea how that works.
EDIT2: FLOPS is an experimental value. there is no real way of telling the FLOPS of a processor without experimentation.
Coincedence; my specs are:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q660 @2.4GHz
4GB ???Hz RAM (I'm getting a figure (2GHz), but it's way above normal operation soit must be wrong)
NVIDA GeForce 8500 GT
32 bit XP
SVN build 1999
Super smash bros melee: 25 FPS max normal play (usually 15-20) 60 fps menus.
Super mario sunshine: 25 FPS max normal play (usually 4) 50 fps max menus
I got it running fast a couple of times (25 fps) now it's shitslow.
Since we're all using different processors, if possible, we should give the speed of a processor in FLOPS or MIPS as well as clock speed, so that we can compare. (I don't know the actual speed of a Q660 @ 2.4GHz)
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I can't get the damn thing to work. Apparently the configuration is incorrect, and reinstalling may fix the problem. Which is BS, I never installed it. I was just using the unofficial builds for convenience sake. Trying to build it myself was even worse; I now have about a GB of useless software on my hard-drive.
You have no idea how this pains me. Everyone else gets everything working first shot. It's like being urinated on from a skyscraper.
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If so, I believe it's a textureless image of the level.
That's what I originally believed, but the "pseudo bob" is plagued with invisible walls. I have a few theories: another level's collision fields shifted bitwise or random addresses in memory being loaded due to overflow. the second option could also include a pseudo bob. My last theory is collision fields have a bit (0/1) less for all position values, making them overflow more than the textures, and also positioning this pseudo bob right in the path of the "everything overflow line" leaving the collision fields in a distorted mess right down the middle. When you are dealing with overflow, the computer can't tell between two of the same coordinates.
If you don't understand my gibberish, it's not really my fault; I'm too friggin tired.
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What they keep calling "invisible walls" are what I'd guess to be the boundaries of level coordinate space, where the ejection method differs from that of solid objects in that it negates Mario's velocity rather than stopping him.
SM64 doesn't have level boundaries. Overflow is present. You can blj off the map in BOB and see it from both sides at once. Typical characteristic of overflow; it repeats itself.
I experimented with bljing off BOB and I couldn't find the purpose of the collision fields off the map. I'm assuming that the ROM loads all the collision fields of BOB and some from another level, but no textures are loaded so they're invisible. Can anyone give a definitive answer to why there are collision fields off the map in BOB?
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There are many ways to increase the resolution of a video. The most obvious of which is stretching, which just enlarges individual pixels, making them blocky. Most likely, any graphics hardware that you do have has support for scaling. This generally doesn't help much as general scaling makes your picture look like shit.
Scaling is not like in the movies where some guy gets a picture and clicks "enhance" and magically, you can see everything clearly. But there are definitely ways to scale up images.
If you go on wikipedia and look up "pixel art scaling algorithms" you'll find a whole bunch of ways to scale your picture properly.
The first image has been scaled well: by hq3x interpolation. The second image has been up sized 3 times without hardware support. (ripped from wikipedia)
If you use the hq4x algorithm to scale images, the result will be a picture with resolution higher than 1080p. hq4x can be done real-time, so there's no real point downloading a video with hq4x scaling.
You cannot enlarge photographs with this method unless you use color quantization first. Therefore reducing the quality of you photograph anyway.
This only applies to raster graphics. Anything vector can be scaled up without any problems infinitely. Therefore any 3d game can be rendered in HD. In addition to that sal or hqnx filters can be applied to textures in 3d games to create even higher quality. Rice's video plugin has support for high resolution textures also, so if you need better quality, you can always seek third-party textures to replace the original ones. An excellent example is the Banjo Kazooie texture pack, which includes Photorealistic textures.
One last technique which is generally used to enhance the quality of photographs is vectorization, in which a raster image is converted into vector through the use of tracing and quantization. This process is generally very processor intensive and only works when you want your photograph to look like a cartoon. I cannot see how an entire movie would be vectorized as there are so many easier options.
vectorized imageRaster image
The images are fairly large, so I won't display them on the page.
Also can someone, if they have the privelages, enable the <IMG> tags?
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I thought I might clear some things up about "invisible walls" in sm64.
First I'll start off by defining invisible walls. These are walls that generally appear in the middle of nowhere and have no texture.
More specifically, these walls have properties such that you cannot wall kick off them, and you go into the pushing-a-huge-block animation when you walk into one. They also retain backward speed even if you are stationary. You can also bounce off them during a blj.
Invisible walls are part of an oversight of an intentionally programmed part of the game, I believe that it was included so that Mario would not be able to travel out of bounds or fall for an infinite period of time.
"Invisible space" is a set of co-ordinates in 3D space. A co-ordinate is in this set if it is directly above either a downward facing collision field, or nothing at all. Invisible walls are the walls bounding invisible space.
There are collision fields below a lot of levels. A single enormous collision field below a level will mean it is possible to fall off, otherwise, if a collision field were not present, invisible space would occupy the entire outside of the level and falling of WF would not be possible for example. Mostly, before you encounter the collision field, you will die of "falling infinitely to your death". The main exception is the wing cap tower, where flying directly downwards at full speed will allow you to reach the collision field at the bottom of the level before dying.
Invisible walls are so easy to overlook, because they are not directly the result of programming. The co-ordinates of invisible walls will not show up anywhere within the rom image. Also that fact that they're invisible makes them incredibly hard to detect during testing.
Keeping this in mind, a lot of normal walls have invisible walls behind them. The requirement of forward facing superspeed is that a non-vertical collision field connects with an invisible wall. Perhaps getting to some invisible walls behind normal vertical collision fields is a possibility, in which case BITDW could benefit, but I doubt it.
Also just for the sake of knowledge, the blj is not only useful for gaining speed, but can be used to traverse short distances of invisible space sometimes.
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MrRobertZ wrote:
With which wing caps? :P
I mean the semi-ridiculous-jump-that-people-forget-about-because-there's-a-ridiculousl-ridiculous-jump-ten-seconds-afterwards jump at 1:17. Not the one that's so high that it forces the skybox to cut through half of the polygons on the ground so you can't see them. We've got a speed glitch, now we have a height glitch. What more could you possibly want from this game? I thought you'd see the significance of this leap sooner. (this is assuming that it works on other levels.)
EDIT: BTW the BOB video is insane (the super high jump described is demonstrated at 1:45 I think)
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PSX TASing is up!
For those who suggested that a new platform would increase that TAS flow: well here it is!
Castlevania - Symphony of the night has been TASed. For those who have internet bandwidth capable of getting ISO's of PSX games, now is the chance to get an easy TAS done. N00bs can now run their favorite game from PSX!
Absolutely amazing. If there are no significan desynch issues, I think I'll get my hands on some PSX ISO's.
Also, I have a question for anyone who knows. Since I have limited internet resources, It's quite hard for me to get a PSX ISO. I live in a PAL region, so If I get a PSX game, would it be possible/within site rules to provide a PPF to patch my PAL ISO to an NTSC one on site? If it's possible this might help noobs on their feet, and it would be easier for many to acquire ISOs. (This being that the PAL and NTSC ISOs are fundamentally different in such a way that a force NTSC for a PAL game would not prevent desynch)
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I think the ridiculously high jump could be used in BOB to get to the top of the spirally mountain quicker, or in CCM its possible that it could be used in the cccless run to get to the top of the mountain and in the chimney without getting the coins. Or possibly the most useful thing would be to use the super massive jump to get to the top of the castle in RR. It's probably not possible, but it's worth a shot.
Johannes wrote:
Your mileage may vary
Sorry if you took offense at my earlier comment, but I though I implied that when I said "Personally, I think".
The first image has been scaled well: by hq3x interpolation. The second image has been up sized 3 times without hardware support. (ripped from wikipedia)
If you use the hq4x algorithm to scale images, the result will be a picture with resolution higher than 1080p. hq4x can be done real-time, so there's no real point downloading a video with hq4x scaling.
You cannot enlarge photographs with this method unless you use color quantization first. Therefore reducing the quality of you photograph anyway.
This only applies to raster graphics. Anything vector can be scaled up without any problems infinitely. Therefore any 3d game can be rendered in HD. In addition to that sal or hqnx filters can be applied to textures in 3d games to create even higher quality. Rice's video plugin has support for high resolution textures also, so if you need better quality, you can always seek third-party textures to replace the original ones. An excellent example is the Banjo Kazooie texture pack, which includes Photorealistic textures.
One last technique which is generally used to enhance the quality of photographs is vectorization, in which a raster image is converted into vector through the use of tracing and quantization. This process is generally very processor intensive and only works when you want your photograph to look like a cartoon. I cannot see how an entire movie would be vectorized as there are so many easier options.
vectorized image
Raster image
The images are fairly large, so I won't display them on the page.
Also can someone, if they have the privelages, enable the <IMG> tags?
