Posts for honorableJay

honorableJay
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I've messed with networking, but I'm no expert. However, I think I know the main problem you're experiencing since I've tried this before as well. Since you're using your router as a switch, most of the routing capabilities I believe are disabled. When you try to upload to the server, your signal goes from the laptop, to the "switch," back to your isp, then to your server. This limits your transfer speeds to whatever your maximum upload speeds are. In order to fix this issue, you need duel lan cards on the server. The one port should be act as your WAN, the other for your LAN. Hook the "switch" to the LAN port on the server, and your modem on your WAN port. All traffic has to go first through your server before it can get to the outside world if you want true LAN speeds. Unfortunately this also kills your idea of having each system grab an external address. Another solution is to setup an actual LAN alongside the setup you have. Run a crossover cable from the server's second ethernet port to the laptop and create a two computer network there. Once that's done, you have to configure each program to bind to a certain adapter/address. This area I can't help you with though. You'll have to read up on each program you want. So long as the program supports it, it should be pretty easy with a shortcut. I have a similar setup at my house, with my computer getting an external address and everything else (gf's comp, ps3, xbox, etc) grabbing a LAN address from the wireless router. To do any type of LAN transfers I have to enable my wireless, connect to the router, then disable it when I'm done.
honorableJay
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The only problem I can think of when it comes to constantly doing dash jumps (aside from finding the most optimal ones) is the semi-slow turn speed. It's been a while since I've played the game myself, but from what I remember looking around was speedy enough for real time play, but definitely not fast enough for TAS tricks of the insane kind (think of dash jumping then spinning around to dash jump from another enemy without stopping, hitting a few shots along the way, etc etc).
honorableJay
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http://speeddemosarchive.com/XMenGenesis.html I forgot to put this up once the run was approved, but there it is now. Just ignore the blatant screw-up on lvl 4. Now all we need is the newer gens recording format and you'll be able to steal all of my work from me :)
honorableJay
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Just a question: I know it's possible on the American version of the game (I've done it on the real thing) but in the Japanese version, stage 3, when you get to the second floating rock (right after the fire bridge and barrier powerup) is it possible to jump directly to the rock from the right of the screen or do you have to go to the left first? Years ago I remember jumping directly to the rock by accident and couldn't figure out how I did it.
honorableJay
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One more thing I'd like to ask: did you test what happens when L+R/U+D and other weird button combinations are pressed? Maybe ULR or ULD etc etc. I hope there's at least some glitch that can help bypass some spots in the game, especially the jungle maze in the beginning.
honorableJay
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I remember playing this game until I could beat it in one sitting with no problems (yeah I had no life as a kid). At one point I even had all of the maps memorized, so watching this game get completely destroyed brought a tear to my eye :) However I'm gonna vote meh on this one just because I know most people will find it boring since nearly every spot in the game looks the same as the last (which is what made it so frustrating to everybody who owned it). I am surprised that there are no movement tricks that can be abused though, would've been funny to see your guy running around like a madman or warping through walls straight to the finish line.
honorableJay
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This might sound a bit obvious, but how do you plan on inputting all of the data you get from these programs into the game? Will you be playing it and manually putting all of this in or having some sort of bot accept the calculated data then make that happen on screen? An advanced TAS tool that I can think of off the top of my head would be a map route planner. Load the current map and plot out the course you'd like to take, and it could tell you 1) if the route is possible with current loadout, 2) what it would take to make certain jumps (speed, height, etc etc), and 3) how you would have to exit the previous map to make it possible (what weapons/ammo, velocities, etc). Another good feature would be exploit recognition, where it could find spots on the map that could be abused for tricks (for arguments sake, assume it'll only look around the intended route).
honorableJay
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I made the mistake years ago of renting this craptastic game. Soooo glad someone finally destroyed it :)
honorableJay
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wait, are you saying you've found a game that was properly coded AND tested for bugs?????? holy crap that's gotta be a first. GL to you sir, and make sure you don't rip out all of your hair :)
honorableJay
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Interesting game, short and sweet. Btw, the encode has a horrible audio lag. It starts somewhere near the first boss and progressively gets farther and farther behind the action. By the end of the movie it's almost 2 seconds behind the screen.
honorableJay
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eternaljwh wrote:
I don't suppose you could try dying in the 'after-shuttle' area to get it loaded properly? [/clueless] Been a while since there was a genuine "death as shortcut" than death-warping backwards.
That actually can't work, aside from what stickyman pointed out, BUT once you skip the shuttle there is no real way to die, even if you drop into the pit you just land on the floor and can walk around. It would be nice if you could trick the game into thinking the sequence is complete by killing just the first guy, or making the game spawn all troopers at once.
honorableJay
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Quickie update on the run I got going on SDA: I've changed my timing methods, so now I'm timing from the frame I gain control over Nightcrawler until the screen fades to black after I deal the death blow to Magneto (it's a little more of an accurate timing). My current best is 9:11, however that can be dropped by about 5 seconds due to various errors I made during that run through. I doubt I'll be able to get anything lower than that unless I get really really lucky. Once I'm finished I'll post a link to the video here so you guys can get a jump-start on doing a TAS of this once the newer recording format is implemented. I did also find two lovely glitches with the shuttle ride on lvl 2 (no clue if anybody here has found these yet). There is a way to get into the shuttle room w/o starting the ride sequence. By doing this you can get to the other side and to the start of the second section of the level, however the screen will not scroll far enough for you to trigger the deathbird fight unless the shuttle sequence is completed. What I did was grabbed the key to open the door to the shuttle, then with the door opened used iceman so I could walk out as far as possible. From the edge I did a teleport up/right and landed on the tail of the shuttle. However this doesn't have to be done the same way. When I originally found it (on the real genesis, completely by accident) I wound up teleporting straight through the door and apparently I ended the teleport with something under me (otherwise the game wouldn't have dropped me) and found myself in no-man's land. The other glitch I found is more of a funny thing. I'm not sure how I did it, but on the frame that the trooper exited the shuttle (either the frame the door started opening or the frame he became visible) I did a teleport and watched him get sucked out of the door into the abyss. Unfortunately it didn't kill him, and he was too low for me to kill so I was stuck there until I died, but it was still kinda funny to watch.
Post subject: X-men Gambit glitch hang-up
honorableJay
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I made a test movie demonstrating the glitch. It was recorded with gens 11a, rom name is X-men(U)[!].smd Basically if you exit the danger room and hold A with Gambit as the screen fades out the game hangs up. On the real system (not the emulator) when you do this it allows you to completely skip the level and brings you right back to the danger room (I own the real thing, using emulator to practice strats for a normal speedrun). Does anybody know if this is the product of a bad rom (tested on 3 different versions and same thing) or just something that gens doesn't emulate properly? I've also gotten this to hangup the game with Kega Fusion too.
honorableJay
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New time of 9:59 Same timing as before, going from the Sega logo until the final blow on Magneto. A few lovely mistakes makes this not worthy for submitting to SDA, but it's getting closer.
honorableJay
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Nice improvements :) Just a ? about lvl 6 at the end: is it really necessary to walk all the way to the left just to show the platforms or is it possible to just start jumping on them as soon as you get there? I remember doing that years ago on the real thing and the only problem I had to worry about was by the time you landed on the platform it was already disappearing. The other observation I had was with the mid-air landing (during the stickmen fight on lvl 6, and yes I mentioned this before) where you do the knee zip glitch. Would it be possible to use that glitch on lvl 7 to in the gear room? I've been thinking about how to skip the ladder, and the only thing I can come up with is to do the knee zip and get hit by a spike near the top of the jump. I also saw you get pushed into the platform then pushed out really fast, would it be possible to use that small glitch somewhere else to save time/warp to other places or is the game too smart for that to work?
honorableJay
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It's been a while since I've done any programming, but I do have a question with regards to how the script runs. Basically you have save slots 1-6, and if you're rewinding gens will count backwards until it reaches the save slot in 1. But when you save the states, it looks like you'll keep looping in a circle, meaning once you get to state 6 you'll jump back to 1 and start counting up again. How does this affect rewinding if you've been playing for a while and you start rewinding from save state 3? Will it rewind back to save state 1 then stop? Just to make sure I'm interpreting this correctly, this is how I'm visualizing the script working. Save states 1-6 are all in a line: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Once the game is loaded, the script begins saving in order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Once it reaches 6, it loops back to 1 and begins again in order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Now say I play a game for a minute and I happen to be on save state 3, the line is now in this order: 4 5 6 1 2 3 If I try to rewind to the earliest save state, which would be 4, the script will stop at 1 (if current_state < 1 then current_state = 1 end) meaning I've only been able to back up in this order: 3 2 1 Slots 4 5 and 6 aren't checked to see if they're older than state 1, giving me no access to them during rewind. Technically wouldn't it have to rewind to state 1, then jump to 6 and count down to 4? Maybe my logic is off, but with the saving constantly looping around, but the loading not looping wouldn't you miss out on a few of the save states if you don't start rewinding from the 6th save state? If this is the case, the only fix I can think of would be to have the loading also loop, but to check and see if the save slot you're trying to load is the same one you started on, in which case it will not load the state and stop rewinding.
honorableJay
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Very nice run indeed. The damage boosting was real slick, and even better when you take into account how unforgiving this game is with mistakes.
Sir VG wrote:
I just don't know why people keep skipping the SNES version. That version, I think, is the superior one. I'd rather see a run on that one over the NES and Genesis versions.
I'll agree that the SNES version is of a higher quality, but you have to remember that it was made 3 years after Ghouls N' Ghosts hit arcades and that the genesis version, which came out in 1989 (2 years prior to snes version) was simply a port. The SNES version was a direct sequel to Ghouls N' Ghosts, so it's no wonder the production standards were higher (along with more capable hardware). The one thing that I do like about this game over the SNES one is the speed of the gameplay. For me, the SNES version just feels too slow. Granted I haven't seen a TAS of it yet, but just moving around feels clunky to me.
honorableJay
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Very nice improvements, and a lot of "wtf??" moments. When this does get published though it might be a good idea to have two encodes, one with and one without the lua script enabled so people who haven't played the game or have a hard time following the glitched segments can figure out what's going on.
honorableJay
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I could've cared less about the first track, but Flowers on the Wall worked for me :)
honorableJay
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The run seems optimized and is played cleanly, but I gotta agree with Vandal. This game is a bit boring. The quest itself is meh enough (more like hide n seek, not save the children), but the utter lack of action (barely any enemies, long stretches of just jumping from this place to that, etc etc) doesn't help. If you've played this game before and loved it, this run is for you. If you haven't played it then you're not missing much. The outer wall section definitely was nicely done. I recently saw a non-tas run of this on SDA, and even so I was blown away at how quickly the child was found. overall I'm giving it a 6 for entertainment, and 7.6 for tech. If you love this game, add 2 more points to my scores an there ya go.
honorableJay
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For the win I have to go with Pokemon Yellow. My reasoning is based off of this: For a run to be truly innovative (in my view anyway) it has to do something so drastic that is breaks the game almost completely and is completely unexpected. Starfox 2 for me doesn't cut it since it's just a fast playthrough of a beta rom. It is cool that the game is tas'd even though it was never released, but it's not truly innovative since it's just following the tried and true "beat as fast as possible" mentality. The same goes for Sonic CD. Again, it's cool to finally be able to tas sega cd games, but they don't necessarily destroy the game in any way that's different from the standard sonic runs (going through walls, forcing the camera to play catch-up, etc). Super Mario Kart is getting closer to innovative. The routes and the way the definition of a lap is broken is cool, but in my book doesn't really push the game hard enough to the breaking point. Breaking the lap definition is akin to abusing any other standard game glitch. That leaves Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. Both runs abuse the save features of the games to break the standards, but Chrono Trigger doesn't go far enough. Yes the game is broken, yes he equips items he's not supposed to, but he takes a standard route and the only real diff between that run and a normal run is that he deals max damage every hit. For me, Pokemon is the definition of an innovative run. The game is completely destroyed to the point where even the game is going "Uh, wtf is going on here? I can't even figure out what to draw on the screen!!!" It's confusing to watch, and leaves you scratching your head. Before you even figure out what he's done the game is over, which prompts you to watch it again and pick at it piece by piece. The game literally gets abused like a prison bitch on his first day. Too bad Family Feud didn't get done last year, that would've put up a good fight against Pokemon.
honorableJay
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Now that is a nice trick. I was wondering though how you did the other little glitch where you landed in mid-air, maybe that has something to do with the cyclone glitch? Do you think there's any possibility to make the game think you're on the ground just long enough to jump again or even do a special move (uppercut maybe)? The only thing I can think of with regards to the cyclone glitch is using U+D/L+R to confuse the game so it can't tell what height you started with. It's either something like that, or just a bug in the level itself. Maybe something along the lines of a straight line where the check that makes sure stuff like that doesn't happen is broken. Too bad we don't have some really technical person doing a hex dump of the game and figuring this stuff out like they do with mega man 2. I don't know how to do this myself, but try looking up the player position values and watching them as the cyclone is executed. Another one to check would be the height value. If the height value can be reset in the air or just have garbage data thrown at it you could do some really sick maneuvers. Btw, I take it you're an AVGN fan? Luv the Bimmy reference :) *possible brainstorm* I checked out the shortcut again in frame advance, and what I noticed is the frame you enter the exit door on still has Sr. Red in the "standing with mouth gaping" position. Maybe the game doesn't consider the player falling until he actually goes sideways. I did some frame counting and when your player gets hit with the uppercut he moves up for 15 frames in the "standing ouch" position and doesn't go sideways until the 16th frame (just don't ask me how many game units you move up, I don't know how to find that). Possibly you could get on the platform just under the exit and have both players execute an uppercut on each other to get them to the exit. Do you have any idea why Sr. Red went left and Sr. Blue went right after the cyclone kick? I noticed at multiple times during the run you were able to send both players flying in the same direction from a double hit and other times you'd have them go opposite. Is that cyclone glitch just something that you can't control?
honorableJay
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Don't worry, no matter how badly you criticize the run, I'm 10x worse than you ;) You basically nailed every part that I'm trying to improve. All the stupid little mistakes aggravated me when I was running it. The only reason I even bothered to keep it is that's the only run out of about 20-ish that I was actually able to finish the game with a decent time. At least this way I have a time to beat instead of just guessing how fast I have to do it in. What annoys me even more though is that I've had runs that come close to breaking the 10 min mark, only to have something really stupid go horribly wrong near the end. Half of the problem with playing this in real time is the shoddy controls, which I've mentioned before. So basically any place you see me either do something stupid (like stand+punch, hesitation, etc) is just the controls not responding the way I want them to. I've missed way more double jumps just because of that (my fingers go too fast sometimes). Savage Land: Normally that spear dude doesn't hit me at the first TP spot, but I came down from too high that time. Usually I kill him with the kick dive, tp through barrier, then kick dive an kill the other guy. The jumps unfortunately I missed since the double jumps didn't register. The hesitation came from me thinking I got too close to the edge and was gonna fall over, kinda shocking when it didn't happen. The waterfall elevators unfortunately are completely luck dependant. I can either get there with them in a good position or in a bad one, so it's hard to time that spot. Right now I'm just shootin for the moon and hoping I land there. The most annoying part is they're not that hard to land on from normal jumps, but if you're not lined up almost perfectly in the center you wind up landing then immediately falling off. The boss fight I'm working on manipulating the screen so Archangel hits her 3 times to speed up the fight. Shi-ar Fortress: At the beginning I can't help but use the smaller kick dives since the ceiling is so low along with the higher ground you can walk on. Once I get out of there, I have so much stuff to dodge it's near impossible to think about how high/far my kick dives are. Also, I hesitate near the holes in the wall (I use one of them to get some health/energy) because every so often you'll have the chance to jump near it, then go through it to the background. Also, if I can kick dive one of the foot soldiers as they're exiting the door I can kill them instantly, which saves me from getting shot. The deathbird fight didn't go as planned. I didn't manipulate the screen properly and Arch missed that last shot. Normally it doesn't happen, so I had to improvise at the end. The normal strat that I've been using is to hit her 3 times with Arch, then call Storm and make a mad dash to the elevator so it all happens off-screen (no lag that way). Excalibur's Lighthouse: This level usually doesn't go too bad. The sword I have to hit normally goes a little smoother than that (not getting hit is my goal). It should be said that doing a double jump + long tp + kick dive is faster than using Iceman's bridge to skip Sabertooth, but in real-time it's not as reliable and since I'm saving as much energy as possible for lvl 4 I'm gonna stick with the Iceman route. Once inside the lighthouse the only problem I have to deal with is whether or not the game is gonna let me TP to the elevator or not. What's weird is if I'm standing right next to the wall as I TP, I'll be in the elevator shaft in the wall and I'm fine. However if I stand back a step from the wall and make it so the TP will place me in the center of the shaft, the game thinks I'm in the wall and winds up moving me down and to the left, which yanks me out of the elevator shaft. I'm assuming you meant that the elevator would get me on it's way down when I change to Wolverine. Since the elevator starts out all the way at the top and doesn't start coming down until you to get to the elevator shaft (there's another trigger somewhere in the level, just can't remember where it is) there's no way for me to catch the elevator on it's way up. If I could that would save me a ton of time (along with not having to listen to elevator music so long). Ahab's Future: Yes those planes suck ass. Unfortunately I didn't get to the rifts quick enough to dispatch them, so I had to play the Blue Ballerina to avoid them. Apparently the only way for me to kill them with a standard attack is from the backside since the front of em is considered an attack zone or something like that. Hopefully the final run won't have me falling from the top level like an idiot. :) That purple guy at the end has to have at least 2 movement spaces in order to hit me. As you saw, I was too close and he went through me. I can take damage from the laser beam and fall through it, but that deals twice as much damage and I'd rather not do that on the off chance that Ahab doesn't play nice and teleports all over the room. I'm gonna try altering my strat for Ahab and see if Wolverine's spin attack can deal more damage than what I'm doing. I'll probably only get 1 attack (2 if I'm lucky) since I won't be recharging him after the Apoc fight. Mojo's Crunch: I took this level a little bit too conservative, so hopefully next time it won't look so bad. The dog I kill at the first ledge has a tendency to knock me over the edge, which can lead to an instant death if I'm not lucky (and if I survive it usually I can sustain maybe 1 more hit safely). Next time I'll just use a TP state to kill him faster. I'm assuming I didn't lose much time since I had to wait for the fire column anyway, but ya never know. The mini fire sprays are near impossible to avoid and still have a fast time, so I'm sacrificing beauty for sheer speed, especially at the last dash to the computer terminal. While it is cleaner to use Iceman, I'm pretty sure it's not as fast since I have to bring up the menu, select Iceman, jump and deploy him, then jump back up and start the kick dives. If I have enough energy next time I'll try to do a high jump + tp + kick dive to get across it a little cleaner. For a TAS though I'd suggest doing the Iceman route since you can get more height for the kick dives, but in real time it's a bit harder to do fast. Final Level: I jumped too many times at that wall because of unresponsive controls. The first jump I tried to teleport but it didn't register, the second jump wasn't high enough (chance to get sent back out of the wall). The guards are a pain in my ass in this level, either they play nice or I get hit by every single one of em I come across. I was given a lovely playthrough of the last level by Spider Waffle, and I'm definitely gonna have to use his strats since they are by far faster than my own. What I need to work on are the platforms I jump to, getting through the acid tunnel cleaner, and knocking Magneto in the right direction (which I goofed on when he was on the middle platform, I hit him left, should've been right).
honorableJay
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I assumed the lookdown was to avoid lag since the game doesn't have to render all the mayhem
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Okay, got a decent test run. From the sega logo until the final hit on Magneto it's about 10:35, which shouldn't be super super hard to beat so long as I have some good luck. I ripped the run off the dvd and uploaded it for all to see. Just don't mind the blurriness, I didn't bother to deinterlace it since I doubt this will be the submitted video.