Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Highness wrote:
Well... The problem with Ghostbusters is that it is not very friendly to hex editing at all. Otherwise I would be done five times around by now. :D
When I hex edit that game I always get desyncs. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
Have you ever managed to do that?
Edit: Watched Hot Sam's movie again, and I'm about 4305 frames a head of him when his movie ends. Give or take a couple of frames, because I just made a quick estimation.
Too bad I know nothing useful about Lua scripts or hex editing, otherwise I'd try to help in some way.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
This idea has probably been thought through a hundred times already, but I'm pretty new here so I wouldn't know.
I was wondering if it could be possible to implement the ratings given by the user into the movie info box. It would be very entertaining to browse through, for example, NES movie list while comparing your rating to the overall rating on the fly so that if the difference between them has changed a lot over the time, you could return to the movie and track down if you missed something before or should completely re-evaluate the given rating. That would also point out the unrated movies so you wouldn't have to browse them separately.
It would only be an esthetical feature to please the few who rate movies, but I think it would encourage users to rate more movies and watch them more carefully. Does this idea have any echo?
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
LaserSokrates wrote:
I have to agree with Warp. Cinematics are part of the game and count towards playing time. I usually skip them for games I played myself, and MKV chapters would provide a convenient way to skip them. But they are part of the game and the speedrun and thus should be included.
Yeah. This couldn't be any clearer. If you were to remove something from the static gameplay content, the final product wouldn't be a TAS in it's true meaning anymore. For all not willing to watch specific parts -> fast forward, it doesn't hurt that much.
But, of course, if someone has the patience to edit a movie and add a frame counter to it so that one can understand how long scenes are removed, I would happily watch videos about the games that are familiar or that I've already beaten. But those wouldn't still belong here as TAS movies.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
I've been wondering the same thing. This game definitely deserves a place among the good (or at least playable) Genesis games.
And worry not, I have the patience to wait and I understand complete that you want to keep the project unseen until it's finished. That makes me even more excited about the upcoming tricks because I hope the run can be improved even further once you reveal the new glitches and shortcuts.
Until that, I'll try to find the shortcuts you've found before entering the High Rise Building.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
nfq wrote:
looks good, much more optimized than mine... except a few boss fights seem like they were slower (the fire face boss and the boss before the snowman boss). and for the entertainment value, i would put on the light thing on the dark wooden house level, because it only takes like a half second.
Yeah, thanks for checking it out. I couldn't afford the phaser cells at woody house and I also missed the 3-way shot at the apartment since I bought a peking duck to get past the woody house's flame walls without dying. That ended up being a very bad choice because, for example, the woody house's stage boss has 90 HP and phaser cells do at least 16 damage per turn (4 damage per shot) where normal shot does max 10 damage per turn (1 damage per shot).
I think all of this will be trivial once we get to see the work of Highness though. :D
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Until we get to see the obviously huge improvements from Highness, I can share my WIP on this game. I decided to stall the run since it's obvious that Highness has found some major shortcuts, so this movie serves mainly as a basic demonstration and as my first true test of making a TAS.
Nothing special can be found in my run apart some of the boss fights (especially the first mini boss at High Rise Building). I hope to see the new stuff soon.
So, here's the movie: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/237141256/Ghostbusters%20%28W%29%20%28REV%2000%29%20-%20hotsam%27s%20test%20run.gmv
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Ummm... Would you mind sharing the WIP movie? I'd love to see where I'm getting that much behind your framecount. :D I'm doing my first full TAS on this game at the moment so it's pretty obvious I haven't discovered any major glitches.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Highness wrote:
Sorry for late reply.
I've been working on this for a long time now.
I'm up to the last level, currently fighting the snow man.
I reach the encounter sign at 47312 frames. The time is quite good. I can't really find any place where I can optimize right now.
I have found MANY glitches and shortcuts.
I do intend to release the final product soon.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Peachtotheinfinity wrote:
The title speaks for itself
Once you're logged in at TASVideos site (separate from these forums, I guess), while browsing through videos you should see the "Rate this movie" -link among the other video info.
This is from N64's Goldeneye:
AVI file via BitTorrent (size: 115.04 MB, length: 34:30)
Mupen64 movie (.m64) (date: 2007-10-03)
Watch on (www.youtube.com)
Watch on (www.viddler.com)
Mirror www.archive.org
Submission #1665 — Author's comments
Discuss this movie
Rate this movie — Rating: 7.0 (32 votes)
View Publication
Just click the link and you're directed to the rating page. Select your rating from the comboboxes and click then Send data -button and that's it.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
I was able to read the stage boss health in Ghostbusters and it didn't eventually need any scripting. I was distracted before because the middle bosses can be damaged at every frame but the stage bosses seem to normally take damage at only every 11 frames. So, thanks to inequality this case is solved.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Dromiceius wrote:
...I think that covers everything... except the basics. There should be some more example scripts included with the emulator, which will hopefully make everything clear.
It seems that my journey into the world of TAS is only in the very beginning. Thanks for all the helpful info since now I'm even more excited about this. I'll return to you or the corresponding forums once I've studied enough and need more tips.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Kitsune wrote:
I hope this TAS gets finished. This is like, the only good Ghostbusters game on older consoles, aside from maybe the one for C64.
Yeah. I'm currently making one but it will take some time to optimize. It's a bit of a shame that there are a couple of bosses that are way too powerful and make the TAS look very boring at times. I'll try to make those parts as interesting as possible since I hope we get a published TAS of this game out someday.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Thanks for the enlightening reply. I'm currently working on Ghostbusters on SG as my first full TAS, so my questions emerge mainly from that game at the moment.
Dromiceius wrote:
... The game used some kind of pointer scheme, presumably because of how enemies stream in and out in large waves without necessarily being deleted at any given moment. You couldn't track the HP of any one enemy for more than a few seconds, because they all kept shifting around in some arbitrary looking way that I never uncovered.
That may be the case since the enemy in this case shakes numerous leaves out of its body that all seem to have an individual HP. Hitting the leaves seems to also damage the enemy's total HP but I can't tell for sure. A room before encountering this leaf-enemy the player faces a miniboss that has a separate HP for head and body but those two parts have constant addresses for health points, so the game's HP tracking in different bosses is either varying or then I didn't search deep enough.
There's also another similar enemy in the game in a room filled with flying flesh-eating plants that work in a similar way to the leaves in the boss mentioned above. I couldn't read the HP of the main enemy in that room either.
...Solar Jetman...Rock and Roll Racing...
Cool. Thanks for these priceless advices. I'll implement those methods into the search process.
Practically speaking, you might try generalizing the search to simply use inequality, rather than risk being misled by any assumption.
One other piece of advice, which tends to be too advanced (or at any rate, too daunting) to be of practical use to a layman is to automate (or at least accelerate) RAM searching using Lua scripting. If you're a programmer or CS student, it might be worth looking into. I can give you some starting-off code if you're interested.
Yeah. Inequality has worked fine until these latest efforts so Lua scripting seems to be inevitable (or at least a huge help) in some cases. I'm a programmer so scripting shouldn't be a problem. I haven't gotten into Lua yet though for I'm new to this environment, so any example scripts would be great to begin with!
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
I've been searching for RAM addresses in a couple of games and it seems really awkward at times.
For example, when I try to find enemy health during a hit in some games I cannot get a single value that is logically reduced in +-3 frames. I've tried searching with unsigned and signed values, so I'm wondering what's next. Can the health be scattered through various addresses and if so, how can I effectively find them? Or maybe there's an address that tells the enemy's max hp and another address that counts the inflicted total damage? Anyway, any tips would help a lot... And oh, I've been only searching for addresses in NES and SG games so far.
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
I'm currently making a completely new run on this game. Does anyone have a better route in mind regarding the previous attempts?
Ram addresses for enemy health would come handy as well since I'm new to ram search and it seems pretty hard. I've gotten some of them up but if someone has a saved list or knows some general rules for the addresses, please enlighten me. :)
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Toothache wrote:
Final frame of input is usually the place where you stop a TAS, as long as it goes to the credits straight after.
As for frame advancing, all it does is pause the game, so whatever is set to unpause the game will allow for normal speed again.
Hope this helps!
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 22
Location: Turku, Finland
Hi. I recently joined this community, so nice to meet you all.
After watching TAS videos for over 4 years I feel like I can't just sit back and enjoy the awesomeness - I want to contribute my share to the community as well. So, I've been testing some TASsing elements for a while and made recently a test run with Probotector on NES.
I feel ready for a full TAS now and I've chosen Ghostbusters on Genesis as the target. I read about it on the Genesis forum and found out that the previous run(s) were rejected for the boring bits (mainly for one hugely time consuming boss fight). That doesn't matter though since I think the runs I watched weren't all that polished anyway, so I'm willing to try to make Ghostbusters faster (than ever).
To the POINT! Here's a link including the first (polished) minute of the run: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/103576850/Ghostbusters%20%28JUE%29%20%28REV%2001%29%20%5B%21%5D%20-%20hotsam%27s%20test.gmv
It's played on Ghostbusters (JUE) (REV01) [!] -rom using Gens11a. I'm constantly wondering if there's something I should know in general (apart the basic rules) so I'd like to know before continuing any further. Feedback, ideas and criticism about TASsing this particular game is also more than welcome. I want to know if it can be worth the effort and if there's something wrong with the current movie.
---
I do have some questions at the moment too:
1. The final frame of a TAS movie... What stops the movie in practice? Is it compulsory to press a key on the last frame or can the movie be stopped, for example, on the "last hit" regardless of what the inputs are?
2. How do I switch between regular play and frame advance in Gens? I've tried a bunch of stuff but I seem to get trapped in frame advance every time I enter it.