It's an interesting idea, but he is (and we are) probably thinking very small compared to what the TASes would actually be like if this were possible. Let's say someone makes a standard "100% kills"-in-the-shortest-time run using the suboptimal character Average Joe. According to this article that run would be boring and trivial, but I disagree. If that TAS met standards similar to those we have in this community, almost anything we can imagine now would fall short of what it does, because a TAS of real life would by definition try to push all of reality to its absolute limits, whatever those are.
Sure, maybe a hypothetical "first revision" would just manipulate the right people to accomplish the goal in a few days using present-day technology. But in a more serious attempt, the speedrunner might first find a way to extend his lifespan by thousands of years (that's the easy part), then spend those thousands of years (many times over across rewinds as he tweaks things) cultivating advanced civilizations for the purpose of extracting the best of their technology into a form that could be introduced quickly enough at the very start of the TAS to beat the previous time. Things could even get confusingly recursive (create a simulation of reality+yourself that's good enough that you can breed the ultimate TASers in it and let them plan your run for you). And no matter what lengths the TASer goes to, the result would almost certainly be improvable somehow. For all but the most trivially simple definitions of winning, it's impossible to even imagine what the logical conclusion of such a TAS would be. Far from being "no fun", I suspect we would be totally awestuck (and probably simultaneously amused and horrified) if we were somehow able to see it.
That totally impossible stuff aside, I think most of the scenarios this article mentions are actually well within the realm of possibility, because a game or simulation could be developed that approximates actuality closely enough that somebody TASing it could attempt to accomplish goals in exactly the way this article is suggesting. It's probably even possible using technology from the not-very-distant future, since a simulation doesn't have to be all that accurate for a lot of the things we can easily imagine to be possible in it.
I'm trying that recording with a clear SRAM but not having any luck, it desyncs immediately.
1: Make sure you're running the right game (it's called "S1MMU.iso")
2: Make sure you're using Gens10a or later. (and you don't have to do SRAM or BRAM clearing tricks anymore)
3: Make sure you're using the v1.10 US BIOS file. (sorry, I forgot about this, adding now for completeness)
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Nice. Games like this should get more competition.
Given the rising standards here I knew it could be improved so I'm glad that finally happened. I think the worst case is when a TAS is imperfect and yet also fails to inspire anyone to improve it (of course the game affects this too), resulting in nobody really knowing or caring what the limits of the game are.
I wasn't exactly sure what to make of the author's comment embedded in the movie file that proclaims "I AM THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE AND LIKE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLIEZ", but I guess the earlier a TAS surprises the viewer the better, and here you already managed to surprise me before I even started watching it...
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My only problem with the Luigi is that when I try to click on a link, sometimes he "blocks" my click by running past the cursor, and I have to click again to follow the link after he runs off. Actually I thought it was neat and I wonder if it means he actually does some secret thing in response to being clicked on, but it's probably not the best thing for the site interface's usability.
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Yeah, judging by the times this is quite improvable. Here are mine from way back (I have to find where I put the GMV but the times alone could be some guidance):
Level This TAS Mine
------------- -------- --------
Azure Lake 0'15"56 0'07"67 (glitchy tree)
Balloon Park 0'15"32 0'04"03 (glitchy ceiling)
Chrome Gadget 0'26"69 0'25"22 (couldn't find any glitch)
Desert Palace 0'19"49 0'09"03 (glitchy laps)
Endless Mine 0'30"26 Never finished it but there's a major glitch here too
EDIT: Turns out my GMV was deleted but I eventually found a savestate with the right movie in it and recovered it from there. So here is the movie file. Requires the Sonic 3 ROM (with Sonic & Knuckles NOT attached).
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This was fun to watch, and an impressive accomplishment (at least to me), although I have to admit I'm disappointed that the end result wasn't more entertaining than this. It's the game's fault more than anything, but this TAS makes the game itself feel more lame than it is when actually playing it, instead of coming across as a celebration of the possibilities to be found in the game's engine (as my favorite TASes to watch do). I guess I should expect in a TAS that the challenges are bypassed with ease and the enemies die inexplicably fast, but it's sad to see some of the funnest stuff I've ever seen in a game get practically skipped and go unrepresented, while a lot of the unskippable leftovers are rather uninteresting. As I said though this was fun to watch anyway and it looks like a lot of effort went into keeping it entertaining wherever possible to do so without losing time. This is a good TAS, I just wish the game's limitations had ended up being slightly different.
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It's kind of surprising this hasn't been caught already (this being the 4th published run), but when going up to Nimbus Land you can climb a lot faster by jumping up the vines. It saves at least 450 frames and looks more impressive.
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upthorn wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
1) They let me see the path I took to get to my current position. That's especially helpful when I load a savestate and wonder what I did to get there.
2) They draw at the corners of the hitbox so I can see how close I came to any surfaces and keep a better sense of the character's size.
3) I can watch other savestates making their paths at the current time while I make mine (trying to go faster than them). I could do that with just a hitbox, but I like seeing more information.
4) The white line turns bright red if I dip slightly below maximum speed (used to only do that on the ground but I fixed that and the hitboxes as you can see in the new image), and it turns green if I ever exceed the maximum speed by even a little (speed here is calculated using the actual distance moved in X divided by the delta time in frames), so there's no way I can accidentally miss either of those things happening even if I don't notice it on the frame it happens.
5) Who doesn't like bouncy curves?
One more note, you might notice I turned off the lag counter, that's because it's completely useless in this game the way it's implemented now. Popful Mail frequently skips updating the input for a frame, but it practically never actually lags.
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SXL wrote:
it looks like a regular platform game, hope it allows some speed abuse.
It'll never be super-zipping-fast or anything (although the ice level will be crazy because the max speed skyrockets there) but the character is very responsive and it's a nice platformer RPG that isn't completely trivial to optimize.
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
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Is anyone else interested in seeing a TAS of Popful Mail? Here are my conclusions so far:
There's a lot of room for high-precision optimization of the movement.
Taking damage rarely saves time, because every 1 HP you lose costs 1 frame later.
Buying 2 weapons like the speedrun does is unavoidable. But in a TAS it will save a lot more time to buy the Boomerang instead of the Electro Cane, since you would never have to wait for it to recharge, and you wouldn't have to switch characters every time to use it, and it can also hit some bosses when they normally can't be hit.
Getting the 3100 gold (edit: oops, I think I meant 4100 since the fire breath costs 3000, not 2000) to buy the weapons will take a little planning. The speedrun gets most of it by selling gold bullions and other items, but in a TAS it's probably fastest to collect the money by killing certain enemies along the way. I don't know how long it's best to wait before collecting the gold, though. Probably starting in the Wind Cave or Hot Springs.
Some "impossible" shortcut jumps can be made by switching characters to combine their strengths. The running speed of Mail plus the jump power of Tatt plus the flying power of Gaw makes for a really big jump.
the gmv actually desynch'd for me at the first loop in SSZ act 2 =/ I don't know if I'm playing it with the wrong options (just using defaults, clear SRAM, etc. with Gens 10a).
Hmm... Sound has to be enabled in Gens or else it will desync there. It seems related to the PCM audio. For now, always keep the sound enabled (use the volume control instead if you want to mute it).
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You have to define SONICCAMHACK and SK in hackdefs.h, not in any .cpp files.
Also, there is some extra stuff that currently doesn't have its own define, so if you don't want to see hitboxes and tile solidity displayed everywhere, put a return at the start of DrawBoxes() and DisplaySolid() in SonicHackSuite.cpp.
EDIT: actually, as of the latest SVN revision there are defines for disabling those in hackdefs.h too, but you probably won't be getting that code yet.
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Then there must be some trick I can't find to making Knuckles do that. Is it a special button combination? Do I have to unlock something first?
EDIT: I found what the trick is. All of the preferences have to be set to their default values. Changing anything like "Super Sonic Music" or "Camera Style" or "Boss Time Text" will make Knuckles drastically slower. Now that I've deleted my SRAM and refrained from changing any preferences, it's easy to get times like 9:19 in GHZ2. (Normally I would disable the boss text to make the bosses appear faster, but due to this bug that can't be done when using Knuckles.)
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FanoTheNoob wrote:
I'm trying but even with sonic the best I can get on the first level is 29ish >_> (I'm horrible at this...with Knux I'm getting 35 =/)....mind posting a gmv of those times?
Oh, right, here's the gmv. Obviously SSZ3 needs to be redone, at the very least, if 54'56 is possible, but I haven't looked at it yet since then.
Also (edit: not anymore, see my post below), I doubt the validity of the video that Aitamen posted above, because Knuckles seems to retain full speed when he starts gliding whereas he's supposed to always slow down (to 1024). Well, I hope I'm proven wrong because it would be pretty cool if Knuckles can really do that.
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I don't know why it seems like the interest in this died down after the last release, which looks like it will make for much better TASes than any of the previous ones. Maybe it's because people like me never post... well here are some S1MMCD times I got a few weeks ago for the most straightforward category, Sonic with no emeralds. Has anyone gotten better (or tried TASing this at all)?
SSZ1: 0:23:20
SSZ2: 0:21:65
SSZ3: 0:54:80
DFZ1: 0:23:05
DFZ2: 0:31:35
DFZ3: 0:49:96
COZ1: 0:23:10
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upthorn wrote:
Both of these possibilities would provide very different routes from the main TAS, and very different routes from each other. The question is whether all three are side-by-side publishable and, if not, whether the "destroy the machines" or the "collect the time stones" version would be most entertaining.
Neither sounds that compelling on its own, so I agree with Paused that doing both in the same run would be most entertaining (and it would be more different from this run than either on its own), even though the game has no particular reward for doing it.
LagDotCom wrote:
I like the (J) version more because at least it's trying to be music
ugh what
Don't get me wrong, I think both of them are among the worst boss music I've heard in a game, but I'll take weird disco over repeated evil laughter and burping noises and mashing notes any day, especially with a boss like Robotnik who it doesn't seem is meant to be taken completely seriously.
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dawnshadow wrote:
I can't get this one to play in Gens 9.5c, although the non-texty one plays. When loaded, the "play movie" button is disabled, and both controllers are listed as UNKNOWN instead of 3-button, as in the non-texty TAS. (Everything else-- number of frames, rerecords, length-- also come in as 0s.
I think that probably means you downloaded the gmv wrong. The link he gave was not a direct link to a file even though it ends with ".gmv", so if you right-click and choose save-as on it you'll just save a web page. Gens doesn't know how to play HTML.
EDIT: Might as well comment on the movie too. I enjoyed it (fast + weirdness overload), although I thought the first game made for a better paced movie.
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SmashManiac wrote:
That's really odd. Every other time where I tried booting the game/playing the movie with a 64kb SRAM, I was always getting an error message saying that SRAM was not initialized, and the only fix I could find on the intrawebs was to remove the whole SRAM. Why has the message magically disappeared now?
The message was because of a bug in Gens that I fixed (in Gens 10 Movie), at least for the 64kb case.
By the way, I don't know if anyone has noticed that the CD audio is kind of low quality and crackly, but it is, and it's because of a different bug (which goes back as far as Gens 9j). I think Upthorn has already found a fix for it, so it will be fixed in the next release.
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SmashManiac wrote:
I'm using Windows XP SP3 and I'm having desyncs issues when attempting to play this video.
...
This is what I see: A new game is started, Sonic looks up for no apparent reason, then starts running right, jumps, and fails to pass the 1st loop.
...
Anybody can help?
In Gens 10, go to "Option > Sega CD SRAM Size" and change it from "None" to the default value "64 Kb".
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There are actually at least three different warps you can take from the level selection screen:
- press Left+Right: warps depending on number of coins
- press Right, then Left+Right on the next frame: warps depending on number of red coins
- Press Right, then Left, then Left+Right on the next frame: warps depending on ????? (maybe the RNG)
I have sometimes been started at a midpoint ring instead of at the level's beginning, so there might be a better warp available than the one to the start of 6-8.
Going to the glitched-title 1-1 is better than going to the real 1-1 because you skip any messages and Start+Select can be used to exit the level instead of dying.
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upthorn wrote:
That is intentional. It seems to me that any hotkey that alters the emulation state should require a "shift" or "control" to be pressed, so as to avoid accidental activation.
Intended behavior:
0 - 9 select savestate
shift 0 - 9 select savestate, and save
control 0 - 9 select savestate, and load
I tried this out, and I find it pretty much unuseable. I understand your reasoning, but "control" is not a viable modifier to use the way Gens has its other hotkeys set up. Here is a typical example of what happens when I load a savestate:
before this change:
- Press Del to pause. Press 5 to load savestate. Hold C to start jumping. Press Del to unpause. Result: The character jumps.
after this change:
- Press Del to pause. Hold Ctrl and press 5 to load savestate. Hold C to start jumping. Press Del to unpause. Result: Gens stops recording and closes the ROM because I didn't let go of Ctrl quite fast enough.
Also, loading a savestate is such a common action when making a TAS that needing to press two buttons at a time for it makes TASing significantly slower, unless you can get away with holding that modifier almost all of the time (which in this case I can't). And it creates some confusion because now there are 2 different modifiers for savestates, making it possible to press the wrong one and load when you meant to save, whereas a single modifier is easier to use consistently.
The hotkeys should really be made configurable (including all savestate save and load button combos), but until that happens, seeing as this is already an optional feature, I would prefer it be turned off by default (if you feel it is unsafe) instead of changed liked this.
upthorn wrote:
AKA wrote:
Its probally too much to ask but is it possible to have the lag counter not to count frames where there is a black screen since often thats part of a transition screen.
Yeah, that would be much more difficult to implement. And besides, you can just note the total before transition and hit ctrl-r to reset it to 0 afterwards. Then none of those frames will be counted.
I don't know whether the results would be desirable, but that doesn't sound so hard to make an option for... You have access to the rendered pixels, so you can check if any of them have a different value from the first one and not increment the lag counter in the event that none of them do. CPU usage will stay roughly the same during non-loading screens if you early-out as soon as you find a difference, except for some game I have never heard of that has almost the entire screen black during normal gameplay.
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Soulrivers wrote:
Mind explaining where and how you improved? Unless you state these things I think it's kind of rude to vote Meh.
It's a perfectly good reason... It will probably become clear in his eventual submission (which I am looking forward to seeing), if he doesn't wish to explain it earlier.
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Yes vote. I was hoping you'd find a way to improve my 1-1 strategy or use it on some other levels, but the opportunities for it are surprisingly limited. The only place I can see it being used to save more time is in 4-1, but even there the distances are probably too short for it to be worth it.
One thing that should be taken note of is that nitsuja did not have access to the movement speed memory address, but I did.
Not only that, I didn't even realize there was such a thing as movement speed in this game. I thought it was the same speed whenever the running animation was playing.
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)