Posts for brocoli

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Yes vote! Masterjun never ceases to amaze. As for the SRAM debate.. yeah, it's complicated :/ Whatever the decision, it seems to me it's important to at least inform the viewers about it when it's used. It's the same kind of reasoning behind why it's important to communicate that arbitrary code execution was used, or that tools were used at all for that matter (in contrast to RTAs). As for the risk that this may trivialize TASes to the point of making them uninteresting in the long run, or that banning it (requiring TASes to work on all SRAM, for instance) could lead to strange things like RTAs that are faster than TASes, why not let things run like they are for now and wait to see if they become real problems? It's not like these rules can't be changed retroactively in the future after all.
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Please accept it into the Vault! The neatest thing about this is that the chapter names make so much sense: "What might have been" -- The game could've been much longer if it was not for the password bug "Punctuality is the thief of time" -- And frame-precise punctuality apparently steals all of it.
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Quick question (since I won't have time to test this myself): If you time a section transition to the same instant a bullet hits a save point, would the save point coordinates be transferred into the new section? If that's the case, there will be more warps available, by pressing 'r' after the transition, and you probably could fine-tune the warp coordinates a bit.
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nitsuja wrote:
Well, those probably aren't the same thing, since a ceiling lamp has quite different collision properties from a ceiling. Also, I thought I noticed a slight variance in the time lost by doing regular jumps depending on how long jump was held or something, including the jump that's used to cancel a wallclimb very slightly early. But maybe I'm not remembering that right.
I noticed this too, some small jumps would not waste a frame randomly. I also got the impression that I lost a frame whenever Iji fell from too high (i.e. just one box's worth of height was not enough to lose a frame, but more than that, yes). I'd bet it's the vertical speed that does it: have too much of it when you hit the ground, and you lose a frame.
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Even though I wouldn't vote "yes" for a full run of this game, the end result of this movie is WTF and entertaining enough for a Yes vote for me.
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Radiant wrote:
Aren't you supposed to use the default difficulty for a TAS? Of course there's still several game modes to pick from. I would love to see this, but I'm having some difficulty envisioning a goal for this endless game.
The site guidelines say: "Where a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the hardest difficulty level (for more interesting gameplay) unless the only difference between difficulty levels is enemy/boss hit points, in which case the easiest difficulty levels are preferred in the interest of speed." There's also the fact that some games require a non-blank SRAM to enable hard mode, so to use hard mode they'd have to break a site rule...
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Adding some more good points: - This would be a minmax TAS, which is kinda unusual (normally TASes only care about the "max" part) - Under normal mode, there's a point where it takes longer to kill the boss than it rewards you with time, so the game eventually ends forcefully. - Customisable difficulty - we could make the time rewards extra short for added FUN. - The ship's shot type is a little weird: the default shot does slight more damage than the aimed shot, and moving while firing the default shot makes it more concentrated, dealing much more damage (and making the next boss become much stronger). Now, I can think three categories for this game... "Reaches farthest level" and "Survives the longest" which are the most obvious, and the intended "100%" of the game - "Fastest unlock of all bosses" For those who don't know, the boss can only take through customised forms of these 13 "skeletons". Some work would have to be put on finding out what exactly triggers each evolution.
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Just listened to it... WTF, it really sounds nice as an ambient sound for an alien technological dungeon, or otherwise mysterious spaceship... o_O
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Whoa, that was fast =P. Apparently he did the exact 3 keys / 2 time / wallkicks / speedboots route. However, I think that getting the stomp boots pays off in the long run, there are numerous times where he does two guardblocks to get the height, where a single stomp would be enough, also the added damage helps to take out bosses faster when you use the spike shooter. I'm sure that the lightsword deals more dps than the spike shooter, but I'm unsure about how the lightsword compares to spike shooter + stomp. You're also forced to visit the room before the room with the stomps to set a flag anyway (destroys the door that requires the 2 time powerups - you need it to leave the forest with the purple key). Also, Bunny runs so fast that damage boosts don't seem to be worth even the time to collect a single health pickup =P. And if 2 time powerups is enough to skip Lord Pumpquiche (I was very surprised by this o_O) in this case we may not need a lowest% run. Sure, a run without the wallkick boots would be very different, but also much slower. I had the impression that he could've used the walldash more often to get the speed, though..
Post subject: Chelsea and the 7Devils: Bunny Must Die
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Having completed a 100% clear and an NGDJ run in realtime, and failing horribly at making one lowp+speedboots speedrun, I'm interested in TASing this game. (warning - some moderate spoilers below are untagged) However, I wonder what modes of this game would be good choices for TASing, though. I'm most certain that any% and 100% are good choices, but what about low%? There's an achievement for completing the game with under 15% items. Since each item in the game weights 2%, you can take 7 items. (Or, due to a bug, if you complete the game without ever saving, the game considers you finished with 0% items...). Now, you're only required to take 6 items - 3 Keys, 2 Time powerups (for the 1sec time door in Fool's Trash Dump), and your choice between the 4th key or the wallkick boots (to access the final boss) -- note the lack of the gears (the item that lets you turn around left/right). A lowest% would only take these 6 items, and I REALLY doubt any of these are skippable, since if by any means you clip through a wall, the game simply kills you. But if we define low% as sub 15%, then we can take one extra item - namely the dashboots, which would possibly make the run much more enjoying, specially since we're skipping the gears, which means we can only move fast backwards to where Bunny the Honeywhite is facing... since we can't backdash forward. (This would also be the first "low%-entertainment tradeoff" lol). The other thing is about the NGDJ challenge. This was a run published by DrGodPants on Youtube, where you skip the key movement items (Gears, Dashboots and Walljump booots), but collect all the other items you can reach. This includes exactly enough time powerups to get the "Alternative" time power, and we'll probably need a verified save with it. Although the 100% run could provide it, this could be quicker. It includes some points of interest, for example the fact that it skips the walljump boots (as opposed to the lowest% which gets it) means we get to see the Septentorium fully navigated in a low% scenario. We also get to see that knightmare of a room in the Evil King's Lair in its full difficulty (with the dashboots you can just jump across the islands normally, with the walljump boots you can just guard-block the spikes and climb the last wall. Without neither your only way of crossing the chasms is by manipulating the enemies' homing shots as stepping stones - in my NGDJ realtime run this is where 3/4 of my "reload" counts were spent). The problem of this is that it's an user-made goal, and would require an exception to the rule that prohibits them. So, what are your thoughts on all these routes?
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FreezerBurns wrote:
No one's mentioned Space Cadet Pinball yet? For shame...
This was mentioned in an older thread, actually =P ...but no one has mentioned Little Big Adventure 2 - Twinsen's Odysee here yet.
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I guess ATI Radeon strikes again =/ Store Video Memory in Savestates makes no difference, but chaging the graphics card to Core i5's Intel HD makes it work perfectly (sorry for not testing this before). Using the ATI card, loading a savestate in the same paused frame either works or hourglass decides that the game has crashed (rarely - DirectSound creation disabled doesn't fix this). Creating a savestate, stepping one frame, then loading the savestate always makes the game stop drawing, and most of the times makes hourglass say the game crashed. I'm saying that "hourglass says the game crashed" and not "the game crashes" because well, the game doesn't seem crashed.. even if hourglass closes its window at the end of the next frame, I can still listen to the game working for 1 frame, and in the case of loading a savestate in the same frame that it's created, I can see the game running for 1 frame. In any case, we should ask Upthorn if his card is an ATI Radeon... these cards are infamous for having compatibility issues, and lacking some useful instructions. When I run the game in windowed mode, there's a small margin in the bottom of the window that stays black normally. When I save, wait a frame, and load a savestate, with any of the two grafic processors, the game's frame "stretches out" to occupy the whole window, including this small margin. With the Intel HD processor, the game then keeps drawing without stretching (doesn't draw in the margin until I load a savestate) ; with the ATI card though, it stays frozen with the stretched image forever. ...maybe it's a layering issue? A friend of mine working on a game engine ran into a problem like this when working with ATI cards and Direct3D. For some reason, ATI cards would not render an object B created at z=1, when there was an object A created earlier at z=0. It assumed that B was completely covered by A.
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I'll explain step by step what I did because I don't even understand how this is possible. I tried downloading some older releases between r39 and r11 to see if any of them worked (downloaded r20 then r15). Neither did, so I tried to download again r11 to make sure it wasn't some config thing. I renamed the old "hourglass-r11" folder to "hourglass-r11-2" and extracted r11 again. ..it didn't work, so I tried my old working version of r11 (in the "-2" folder), and it didn't work. I was completely wtfed by this since it was working before I renamed the folder... I tried naming it back to "hourglass-r11", and that does make it work again. Now I have no idea why one r11 works and the other doesn't, and why the old r11 MUST be in a folder named "hourglass-r11" to work. Supposedly the only different thing about the two r11 folders is the bmd.wtf file present in the old one, but copying it around to the other folders doesn't help... EDIT> just to clarify things... hourglass lauches with no problem every single time, when I say "it doesn't work" I mean that when I Run and Record New Movie, bmd.exe doesn't create a window. Also, this is strange enough that I'll try to restart the whole system. No idea how this would help, but then again I've no idea how is it possible that in two identical installations, one works and the other doesn't. Would be double post> After restarting, r39 works. There was some unnamed process running in the background, that needed to be force-killed when restarting the system though - maybe some weird cached form of the old r11 hourglass.exe persisted in memory? ..I thought Windows had given up on using magic ever since the bad experience with Windows ME, but apparently they brought it back in Seven. Finally... the "bmd stops drawing forever (but keeps running normally other than that) after loading a savestate" still exists.
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I'm having some trouble running Bunny Must Die.. the strange thing is that it worked with the r11 version - now in r39 the bmd.exe *32 process launches, but it doesn't create a window (or even change the graphic style back to windows classic). The issues I had with r11 were that on loading savestates, the game would stop drawing forever (game logic and sound still worked fine), unless I used Surface Memory -> System Memory, but this caused the game to run much slower and with bugged sprites everywhere. In r39 I've tried running fullscreen, windowed, with multithreading disabled, without DirectSound creation.. with neither combination bmd.exe creates a window. Also, when I hit "stop running", the bmd.exe process lingers in the memory (although it stops running at 25% CPU time (expected? CPU with 4 "cores"..) and making my computer seemingly explode from heat). Any ideas on what could be happening? Also why did it work in r11 and not in r39? Running bmd.exe with the update patch and english patch; Windows 7 64bit, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650. (On a side note... why all the interest in Perfect Cherry Blossom? If it's about scoring.. in this game it's pretty much all about "milking" spellcards - meaning waiting until each one of them almost times out, while you accumulate points from grazing bullets...)
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There is both acceleration and deceleration in VVVVVV, and it's important to consider it to bypass even the first moving enemies of the game. There are some unintuitive edge mechanics too (I believe pressing away from an edge when edge-cutting can teleport you 1 pixel "downwards" and forward ; pressing towards the ledge can make you grab the ledge if you would very narrowly miss it). Also there's a route to think of, and there are multiple possible strategies for each room (or you can bypass them..) I'd love to see a TAS of this game.
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There are some fairly long games flash that would be worth to be TASed, VVVVVV comes to mind.
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Warning Forever sort of has a goal : being able to make the game AI spawn all of the 13 possible bosses (pure heart + 8 intermediate bosses + 4 ultimate bosses), so making a speedrun that gets to (and kills at least once) all of them could count '-'. Also, while we're at Hikoza's games, a superplay of Ray-Hound may be interesting. Starcraft, specially Broodwar, has a LOT of potential for strange strategies and glitch abuse.
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Awesome! ..love the fact tat Doukutsu.exe is the default executable in the Executable box =)
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It's kind of weird for a tool to call itself "the tool that lets you make tool-assisted things"... maybe somthing along the lines of Windows Re-recorder? "WinRec", or "WRec" (the tool that destroys windows games)... On a side note, is Scarlet Weather Rhapsody TASable with this? Not that this should be nowhere as near as a priority, but strategies for speedrunning its story mode saw some popularity in Nicovideo... however the game has some hairy programming...
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Amazing run =) But... if a 1 frame improvement coupled with entertainment and score improvements can obsolete a movie, then will there be a time where score and entertainment alone will be enough to update a movie? I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not (at least not as long as score isn't an "official" secondary objective).
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Little Big Adventure (also known as "LBA" or "Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure") Long DOS 3D game, there are probably ways to skip a lot of the game =)
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MegaMari would be an awesome candidate for a TAS =) I'm also interested in this, I'm pretty certain that a TH09.5 - Shoot the Bullet / TH12.5 - Double Spoiler TAS can be quite awesome under the right conditions (all scenes; and then either max bonuses or maybe even max score) Even if it turns out not being good for a TAS, it would be a handy tool to plan runs ; the only tools we have at our disposal at the moment is slowdown and frame advance.... but no rewinding is possible and thus, no luck manipulation =/
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Scepheo wrote:
Any button released will first have to be pressed, any button pressed will have to be released before you can press it again. It doesn't matter whether you count presses or releases, they will be equal. (Although, for the ease of writing a counting program, presses might be better, as you don't have to add one for each button held at the last frame.)
Seriously, at least read the last few pages. When I mentioned counting releases, I obviously meant counting both presses and releases. As in "counting releases is better than not counting them". Besides, you said it yourself how the number of presses can end up different from the number of releases.
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Sorry to ask this only at page 5, but... I fail to see how a movie in this category could be even remotely entertaining compared to the minimum speed goal. The only thing I can think of, would be watching enemies stupidly missing the hero as he continually moves in a straight line (i.e. in platformers / shooters / etc) ; or maybe, just maybe in a few puzzle games. And even then, in the first type of game, the runs becomes boring as the player doesn't do much. IMHO this is more of a RL challenge goal than a TA one. The low number of presses also makes it more feasable in RL, there will be few glitches (mostly, only huge skips will be worth the extra input). Of course some games may have enjoyable videos, but then we can make an exception for these movies (such as Kirby's Dream Course primary objective of achieving the best score over speed). But as a general TAS concept, I am pretty sure it will fail on the enjoyment side. Also, I think that counting releases is better: imagine a game where you control a rocket and needs to touch the point of coordinates X. If there's some gravity involved, you may need to stop accelerating not to miss the target, thus adding one meaningful "release" input.
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Still need to watch the run, but I'm currently favoring voting no. TASes get better and more entertaining as the game lets the player showcase more diverse abilities. Sometimes one ability is strictly better than another and the "worse" one ends up being sub-optimal. In these cases, a run with restrictions is more entertaining, because it ends up adding more variety to the run (think S3&K without underflow). If this was done in Sonic3&K, I'd totally approve of this, since we would see more creative shield and Tails usage. However, here, all it does is remove one tool from the player. It seems backwards in my eyes. My vote in the end will come down to if this run is Much more entertaining than the original one or not. EDIT:*would, since I can't vote...