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Looking back, I see what you guys mean. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the moves are repetetive because they have to be, and in general this is a bad game for TASing. In addition, my education of the game was limited solely to the one article I could find about the character Gen, and through experimentation I could not find anything that would make the movie even remotely more interesting.
The submission has been cancelled.
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That's not true Baxter...
Let's take any two numbers a and b such that a=b.
a=b
ab=b^2
ab-a^2=b^2-a^2
a(b-a)=(b+a)(b-a)
a=b+a
a=2a
1=2
0=1
X+Y=X+Y+1
So there.
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I agree, stupid idea. And besides, if someone does do that, you can report videos. Just include a link to the submission page on this site and prove that the movies are identical.
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Titus Kwok wrote:
guy I know works for ATI, he's a programmer... works on the screensavers and stuff that they do. He was showing me one, and I was like, "yeah, I've seen this." He starts banging keys, and all of a sudden he's pulling up meshes, textures, all kinds of stuff, because they left the debug menu in. Sometimes it's easier to just hide it than to remove it entirely.
Especially if you'll need to debug it later. That's more likely than not why Nintendo left it in SSBM. That game went through two revisions, and I've personally never heard of the changes made.
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To get more powerful, you have to accumulate a certain amount of points, I can't remember how many. That requires killing enemies, obviously. There are some more enemies I could've killed without losing much time, but even then I doubt it would've been enough.
To get spells, you have to go into a demon gate. To do that, you have to kill a bunch of enemies until you get a key, then grab the key and then go up to the gate and press up to enter. After killing the demon inside, you'll receive a nice bonus of a certain amount of a certain spell, and then leave. Not worth it at all.
Getting more life is odd. You have to kill enemies and get red sphere powerups. When you die, you will come back with as many life bars as you had red spheres + 1. Definitely not worth the trouble.
I'm not sure how to manipulate powerup drops. I did discover, though, that if I know an enemy will drop a powerup, I can manipulate which one it will be similar to how I manipulate the bosses' movements.
I've hit upon a sort of laidback explanation as to how luck (and therefore luck manipulation) works. I don't know the precise specifics, but I understand that Victar (main character) always has a state, such as standing still, jumping up, jumping left/right, climbing up/down/left/right, attacking, standing still while climbing, etc. These states are tracked for a certain number of frames (I don't know how many) and are accumulated into one number. That number is used for random events. This number changes from frame to frame, of course. Maybe Bisqwit could disassemble this game...
Another thing I noticed is that Victar's movements are delayed by two frames. Whenever you press a button, no matter what the circumstances are, Victar will react the second frame afterwards. This is sort of confusing to a TASer as one will instinctively hold down the button until he reacts, which is not necessary and results in actions being done more excessively than they have to be.
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First, to answer Hyena's question:
curtmack wrote:
One of the first things you may notice is that there's some hesitation in the boss battles. This is for luck manipulation to try to keep them in the same place, but sometimes it's nigh impossible (you'll notice I have to jump at a few points in some of the battles to catch them). Some "wasted" attacks are used for the same purpose.
The key symbol does nothing unless I collect it. It would let me open one of those doors that you see in the mouths, but it's not needed to beat the game.
As for getting around the cliffs, I could clear the cliffs with a high jump if I wanted to from where I was. But I would have had to hit the bamboo while I was falling, which forces me into the climbing stance.
But yeah, thanks for the C+C.
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This is a glitch I discovered a while ago while playing around with Pictochat:
Put the thumb pad down at one end of the line, then put the stylus down at the other end at the same time (which puts the "touched point" somewhere in between), and bring up the thumb pad (which moves the "touched point" to the stylus). It's an awesome way to really quickly draw lines.
Now if only I had Canvas Curse...
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DOS still has frames. A frame is defined as the difference of time between two vsyncs. Even newer "flat panel" monitors that don't have an electron gun still emulate vsyncs to maintain compatibility.
As a matter of interest, if someone does do an FFIX run, they should do the level one run. That'd be fun to watch.
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Since FFIX and some other good PSX games have multiple discs, how would you make a TAS movie of them? Would you just offer each AVI seperately?
As for load times, I think the decision should be left up to the TASer, and the total loading time omitted from the time calculations regardless. Loading times are a consular limitation based on the medium used for data storage (both memory cards and discs alike). However, some TASes already exist that overcome similar consular limitations. For example, many NES games exhibit slowdown in different places, but that does not occur in a TAS because the emulator uses the PC's processor and a PC processor is faster than the NES processor. Load times are a similar limitation: because a .iso stored on a hard drive can be read much faster than data stored on a disc in a PSX drive, an emulator can be written to take advantage of this to nearly eliminate load times. I personally don't have a problem with this, especially for some games like the PSX Final Fantasy trilogy where load times are near constant (battles have brief load times before them).
Of course, omitting the total loading time from any movie's time should be done in an issue of fairness.
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From what I've seen toying around with the game, every single random number that is generated in the game works off of a single seed. That seed is never recalculated from what I can tell. The only way I could think to defeat the system is if we could find a way to force it to generate a random number really quickly (like opening the menu in Mother), but I'm at a loss for ideas there.
Saving and restarting might recalculate the seed, but that leads to its own set of problems timewise.
You also can't manipulate the minigame on the list, or the event on Bowser's roulette.
You can, however, manipulate where your character lands after getting launched at Wario's Battle Canyon, and you can manipulate everything at a Chance Time, since those aren't purely random events.
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There was an arcade cabinet like that once. It could read further than the piece of plastic underneath the foot pedal would allow. Shortly after this was discovered, a lot of people got in trouble for removing that piece of plastic at their local arcade.
Honestly, though, I must say that 100% should be perfectly acceptable, simply because, if you sliced the cord from a controller and hooked it up to your central nervous system, you could convince the N64 that you're tilting the analog stick 100% in any direction. (Okay that's a bad analogy, deal with it)
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Weatherton wrote:
The Rainbow Road (RRd) video shows a method of tricking the game into thinking you have completed a lap but still putting you back where you jumped from. The specifics of it are not completely understood but it was discovered quite a while ago.
This is what I always heard (please note that I did not make the game nor have I disassembled the cartridge or decompiled the ROM, I'm just stating what I understand to be the case based on my knowledge of the glitches and the circumstances under which they occur):
1. When you drive backwards across the finish line, the game sets some sort of flag that prevents it from counting the lap when you cross it the normal direction again.
2. The game's internal finish line extends quite a distance in either direction of the visible finish line. That way it will still give you a lap if you are off the course. Note, however, that this internal finish line is still not infinite in length.
(For those of familiar with the Choco Island lap skip in the original SNES Mario kart, it works by driving backwards around this internal finish line by driving out into the ocean and veering at the last possible second)
3. Lakitu has a series of "drop-off points" throughout every course. When you fall, he will drop you off at the nearest drop-off point to where you last touched the track before you fell.
(This is how the Frappe Snowland lap skip works; since the snow is not considered on track, you can get a quick lap by driving straight from the wooden bridge onto the snow, crossing the finish line to get one lap, then veering out to get picked up by Lakitu, where you'll be dropped off on the bridge in good time for another lap)
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Of course you have to remember that since this was a TAS, he probably spent longer on this 7 minute run than you did when you originally played the game...
Anyway good work. I'd vote yes if I could.
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The only problem I can see is that there are some complicating differences between the games. For instance, in MM3, whenever you fight Protoman, you can't progress in the other games (since your third Megaman now has to run back and forth jumping and shooting, while the others do the same thing, and pray the others don't end up falling in a pit...)
Also, if you switch weapons for one game, you have to do it for them all, and you have to do it specifically matched to the menu. And that could mean wasting ammo, particularly for weapons like the Pharoah thing in MM4 which is an ammo guzzler. The way I see it, you'd have to abstain from weapons unless absolutely needed to get where you want to go (like using the Rush vehicles).
Another minor problem is that of keeping 4 NES emulator windows open at the same time without slowdown, unless I'm misunderstanding how you plan to do this.
Other than that, I don't see why you couldn't do something like this. If X and X2 could be completed at the same time (which still gives me goosebumps), I don't see why these couldn't be done as well.
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I'm pretty sure Wetrix 64 was designed to run faster than the PC version.
I'm not sure if we could do a TAS of Wetrix yet as there are still many graphical bugs in the emulation.
By the way, I can't remember, do Smart bombs work in the N64 version? That'd be a neat way to end a TAS: get up to like level 15, make a few intentional mistakes until you're pretty much doomed, and then BAM! smart bomb everything.
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Here's an interesting glitch that might help: Touching an enemy with the Fire/Cutter or Spark/Cutter blades will harm it, even if you didn't actually "attack" with it. You can kill some of the minibosses in about 5 seconds by just standing still.
Also remember that if you're using Fire/Cutter, you can use it to poke above you as well, and the same glitch applies.
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merick888 wrote:
Suck someone up with kirby.
Fall off stage with them in your mouth.
Spit them out at the last second.
Sometimes you'll get the win :D. Works better with some stages and some opponets.
(gah, foiled again by my archenemy BBCode)
This would probably be fastest, you'd have to improvise against Team Yoshi/Kirby though. For the Mario Brothers, you could drop them down below the bottom platform, spit them straight out underneath the platform (where they can't recover), and come back up, then do a full suicide drop for the second one, while your teammate marvels at your efficiency.
You could also try luck manipulating your way into someone like Fox or Pikachu as a teammate for the two teamed matches. I'm not sure if you can manipulate that with just savestates though.
Giant DK will be a problem, because spitting him underneath the platform wouldn't work (since he could easily hit the cannon or simply jump through it). There are two obvious solutions. One is to down a life by simply letting yourself drop, DK in tow, which is probably the easiest. The other is to rough him up a it, knock him off course, jump forward and suck him up as soon as possible (making SURE you're facing the side of the map), spit him towards the edge, and if he recovers, jump a few times and spike him into oblivion. This is certainly more exciting and allows you to get a no-miss bonus (and is also possible for those attempting one-stock runs).
Also, there's a collision detection glitch in the boundaries of the Metal Mine. Basically, it'll give you the KO for Metal Mario before it kills you if you do a suck-someone-up-and-drop suicide, which means you don't actually die. Easy way to shave off at least 2 minutes there (KOing Metal Mario naturally as Kirby, preferably on very hard and with one stock, would be a nightmare at best).
