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adelikat wrote:
Also having minimal chips at the end is faster but requires some planning ahead. In the early levels I wasted all my chips after fighting the bosses. that saved about 20-40 frames after each compared with your run (and as much as 100 compared to walkerboh's)
While this means less chips at the end, we made up for by manipulating luck to get chips in the final levels.
Hmm... I considered this, but there were barely any enemies I was able to get chip refills from without waiting quite a lot to manipulate it and pick it up (enough to cancel out the 2-frame gain per level per chip). Getting up to 40 frames faster per level means having 20 less chips at some point which means 7 extra chip pickups to make, and they can't all be made in the last level or two since you'll need enough earlier to take down bosses 3-5 quickly. Maybe it's faster to get chip refills than I thought, though.
adelikat wrote:
I used the dynamite on the 4th boss, but by the 5th I was wondering whether it was worth it since it is pretty slow and has the same chips : damage ratio as the spread gun. Anyone who is going to improve this should look into that.
The dynamite does exactly the same damage as hitting it with your hair 3 times in a row, in the same amount of time. The only reason to use it would be to keep hitting something while it's out of reach or while you're unable to attack because of taking damage (or if you have 3 chips left and don't want 1 of them to go to waste). The spread gun is the only thing that does more damage per hit than a regular attack.
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Walker Boh wrote:
AngerFist wrote:
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Oh, I guess I forgot about that. So Nitsuja just couldn't wait for you to finish?
There is no such thing as waiting. Nobody has copyright of a certain run. There is no obligation to inform the author that you are planning to work on his/her run, but there are things called, respect, sportsmanship, fair play etc. You would most probably create a better relationship and atmosphere between you and the author of the run by notifying that you want to try improve his/her run.
I agree to this.
Yeah, sorry about that, but I knew that you already knew that some people were trying to improve on your run, and this beats what Guybrush had before. (I guess I didn't hear that adelikat working on this, though.)
EDIT: Also, I didn't think Guybrush was actively working on this yet, since according to his last post in the NES games forum, he was going to work on Captain America with Randil instead.
Walker Boh wrote:
But I think it is improvable further and I will certainly try to improve it.
Yes, you're probably right. Especially the instances of taking damage, which bosses to use which weapons on, and which refills to pick up along the way, could probably have been planned out better. And I'm pretty sure the boss fights haven't quite been pushed to the limit yet, at least the bosses that have randomized behavior.
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Did it work for you before? Have you tried not using N-Rage's input plugin with mouse control when customizing hot keys? Also, what OS are you running, Win98? I'm not sure what's happening because "Clear" isn't even what it says when a hotkey is cleared, it should say "(nothing)" in that case, and I don't think there's a Clear key on the keyboard.
EDIT: Well, there is a key code for a Clear key, and it obviously thinks you are pressing that key, but I've never heard of it before....
EDIT2: OK, supposedly it is what happens when you press 5 on your number pad when num lock is off. You're not trying to assign 5 to the hotkey, are you? (If not, is it assigned to anything in the plugin?) If that doesn't help, maybe try toggling the Num Lock before configuring hotkeys.
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Guybrush wrote:
I'll redo the first level and see what I can do.
Make sure Batman starts walking toward the blimp before frame 1670, or it's definitely not as fast as possible.
You should see if it's faster to wait for the 3rd spiked ball to rise and dash under it than to dash through it. The damage delay is pretty long so it might be. And, make sure you're on the ground when you scroll to a new screen, preferably dashing.
Guybrush wrote:
I don't know if every shot does damage (it seems it does though)
I took another look at this, and yes every shot does seem to do damage, but the problem is that every press of the B button doesn't make a shot appear. So you should check that a new shot actually appears, and wait 1 frame before pressing B if it doesn't. If you use regular autofire, about 1/4 of the button presses won't actually fire a shot.
Guybrush wrote:
But for the weapons: I think N-weapon is the best weapon around. ... it fires two rows of normal bullets rapidly which makes it deadly.
I think there is no best weapon. That's certainly a good one, but some of the others are better in different situations. For instance, the C-weapon does huge damage with every shot (and also bounces off to hit more), so you can fire it once to kill something then immediately dash, which saves some time compared to firing the N-weapon 3 or 4 times and then dashing. And the S-weapon seems OK, I wouldn't use B though except maybe on a boss that forces you to dodge a lot or is hard to aim at.
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Yeah, but that wasn't a complete description. At least the Zelda movies didn't have such horrible pacing and repetitiveness problems for their length. In a game with dozens of maze levels that have 12 seconds of waiting in-between, it's not entertaining to go in a straight line from the start to the exit in ~4 seconds for all of those levels in a row.
Oh, one other movie that should be easy to judge is NES Big Nose the Caveman in 26:10. It got 2 "this is really boring" comments and no further attention.
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This looks like a good game to run, but your movie of it so far is very improvable.
Probably the biggest thing is that you're not using the dash correctly. Pressing left or right during a dash slows it down, which you might want to do sometimes to regain control sooner and avoid hitting things, but most of the time you should only hold Down and A during the dash. It's much faster so it should get used a lot more. (You can use it to dodge under those spike balls, at least the first 2 of them.)
The other main problem with this is that it'd be faster and and more entertaining to take a more destructive approach. At least destroy the crates to dash through them instead of jumping over them. And it's a good idea to get some powerups for variety and more firepower. (It doesn't seem to be random, but you can shoot a powerup before picking it up to choose which one you want to get, although that probably isn't worth the time unless you're in an autoscroller.)
Oh, and there's something weird about the weapon damage in this game. Don't just use autofire because some of the bullets won't do any damage, you'll have to test more carefully than that to kill something as fast as possible.
Here is an example movie of that first level.
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What exactly doesn't work about it? It played back perfectly fine in Gens 9 for me... (And I just checked now and it still seems fine, at least for the first several levels.)
Maybe an AVI should be made of this movie though, now that there are newer codecs better able to handle all the motion (and apparently nobody working on an improvement to this run).
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Xkeeper wrote:
one thing I think would be neat is to have a speed display in addition to the frame ticker/input thing. It would simply read things like "50%" to show the current speed of emulation...
It already shows that under the frame counter whenever you change the speed, and you can also enable "Options->Emulator->Show Speed->Percentage" for something that stays up permanently.
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Looks good to me. The only things I can think of are:
- Are you sure all the corners are being cut as closely as possible? For instance around frame 4720, it looks like you could stay closer to that edge (one "pixel" away from taking a hit at each frame) to reach the heart zone a couple frames or so faster.
- When you hit the wall 3 times in that heart zone, it looks like each hit slows down your movement briefly, is it possible to move down a bit more first so you hit the wall only 1 or 2 times a little later, or am I wrong that each hit slows you down? (I know it was also done to affect your spinning but it looks like you could still squeak through with less pushes.)
- I think you should do some stuff with the L button, like putting it on autofire when you're taking a shortcut, or matching colors with the level or something, for what little extra fun you can get out of it.
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Acryte wrote:
Hey, guess what? It was the ROM. But I found ... a good 1.0 rom that gets me past ghoma.
Hmm, usually bad ROMs don't crash the emulator itself, but I guess I'm not that surprised it would happen for N64 emulators given the sorts of shortcuts they take to get reasonable speed. Anyway, that's great you got it working.
When you start actually recording something, be sure to post your progress (movie file) really early on, in case there's a problem with the movie settings or something that would require restarting the run to fix.
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Tailz: Here are the mistakes I saw in your movie:
- missed an edge boost at 2545
- jumped unnecessarily at 2715
- powered up at 3790 (this one's a huge time-waster)
- I must be missing something else... does this game have any (subtle) lag?
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/*- wrote:
the music would be even better if it werent for the N64's sound chip which blasts the sound, but its still good all the same
Actually, the N64 doesn't have any sound chip at all. That's a big part of why the sound and music are subpar in most N64 games, compared to even the average SNES game (since the SNES does have a sound chip). The N64 can sound about as good as the SNES could, but it takes a ton of extra effort to do that so most companies didn't.
About this run... it's a long game with a lot of prancing around, and it started out a little boring (where you made it look even easier than it was) but it got more interesting partway through as the difficulty started picking up, and it looked consistently done throughout (with a few nice surprises).
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I see now one place where I missed changing it (because I didn't look for the version number outside of the src folder), that's probably what's making configure overwrite it for you. It shouldn't be hard to make it only defined in one place in source, though.
Actually fuzi2's run of Cameltry is much faster, it's only longer because it chooses a higher difficulty and plays many more levels. But I think it should be rejected anyway because it uses a glitch that makes it boring to watch.
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FODA wrote:
(unless someone can help me hex-editing? i have never hex-edited a n64 movie file before, only fceu)
Actually I think hex-editing should work fine in this game (since there's barely any randomness), so you should give it a try, it will make it much easier to improve various stars if it works. Here is (I think) all you need to know to hex edit it, given that you already know how to do it for FCEU movies:
- You can edit the M64 file directly, no need to convert it to an FMV file like with FCEU movies. (There might be problems if you try to do it while the movie's open in the emulator though, so it's probably safer to stop the movie first and close the hex editor before playing it.)
- Each 'frame' is 4 bytes instead of 1 byte, so you'll have to multiply your frame numbers by 4 before using them in the hex editor
- The movie header is 1024 bytes, so add 1024 to those to get the actual position in the file
- There are 2 different frame counts shown in the emulator, so you need to know which one to use. Use the one that's smaller (the "input samples counter") and ignore the other one.
- The movie lengths are stored in the header, but I don't think you have to worry about editing those, at least not if the change you're making makes the movie shorter.
- If you want more info about the format, like if you want to know what button presses the numbers translate to, see http://tasvideos.org/m64.html
- Besides that it should be basically the same as for FCEU movies.
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Phil wrote:
-DFCEU_VERSION=\"0.98.13\ here
Then you must not have the right source, because I just downloaded it from the link I put above (http://www.savefile.com/files/7104156) and checked inside "fceu-0.98.15-src\src\Makefile" and found -DFCEU_VERSION=\"0.98.15\" in there.
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Phil wrote:
Are you sure the source is updated because when I compile it myself, it says it is the 0.98.13 version in the about dialog and in you binary, it says 0.98.15.
Did you make the resources file with windres and recompile drivers\win\main.c?
Phil wrote:
I haven't tested the "Fixed the reset bug with the MMC1 mapper saving" if it is really ok but I trust you.
Well you can test it pretty easily with that state you posted, except make a new state on that frame to test with.
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JXQ wrote:
From what I remembered, I thought you needed to collect more pellets than you did to complete levels.
You just need a certain number of tail segments, which can take different numbers of pellets depending on which colors you eat. With 2 players, each player has a color that gives them more than it gives the other player, although yellow gives a little more than either. (Same color=2 units, other color=1 unit, yellow=3 units, each tail segment=4 units.) The act of eating (and getting a powerup) is also much faster with two players due to the cooperation that's possible to cut out the waiting, and the parallelization. And each stage starts out each character with a certain number of units already eaten, which with 2 players means up to 2 less fish to eat overall if you give each player the right ones. The score countdown is also faster as a result of less fish per player. (On the other hand, 2-player is also considerably more difficult, both in normal playing with 2 people and in TAS-making, for other reasons.)
JXQ wrote:
Are there any differences over that concept in general from 1-player to 2-player?
I'm not sure what you're asking - did I already answer this?
JXQ wrote:
However, I also I don't think this should obsolete a 1-player run.
Well, it seems this game was meant to be played 2-player, but... so many things are different (some faster, some slower) that I agree on this (or at least, can see a good case for it), although the 1-player run could be obsoleted pretty easily by doing some of the same things done in this 2-player run in a 1-player run. (Which I might do if this doesn't obsolete the 1-player run.)
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Acryte wrote:
in Mupen I still can't see it
Still can't see what? Jabo's plugins? You put them into the folder called "plugin" that's in the Mupen64 directory, then opened mupen64.exe and went to Options->Settings and clicked the dropdown box under "Video Plugin" (in the Plugins tab), and saw nothing starting with "Jabo's Direct3D" in that list?
Oh, here's one more thing for you to test: Try downloading Mupen64 1.5.1 (the official one, not the re-recording version) to a separate folder and leave all the options alone (except for choosing the default plugins that come with it and configuring the control keys so you can play), and see if the emulator still crashes at the same point in that.
Acryte wrote:
It gets to 96% loading for the room
Is that just a guess? (This game doesn't show loading percentages that I know of... you do mean room and not rom, right?)
AngerFist" wrote:
How is the delay btw?
I'm not sure what you're asking. If you're asking if there's been any progress fixing it, no, there hasn't. It's doing just fine. If you're asking what the delay is: it's something like 10 extra seconds of waiting while the music plays every time the menu is opened.
But maybe you're right that it's better to leave the delay there for now, since it will make things easier for everyone in terms of actually making the run. The downside is that time-savers that require opening the menu might suddenly become time-wasters just because of the delay, unless we pretend it isn't there or something...
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qqwref wrote:
But the minigames timer isn't so useful, so I'll just have to guess there.
Or you could hit '.' to use the emulator's built-in frame counter which is always accurate to the frame even when the game doesn't show any timers. (To find out how long a minigame took you can just subtract the count at the start from the count at the end, of course.)
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KDR_11k wrote:
I'm unsure whether a full run of the game would offer enough variety in kicking ass to remain entertaining throughout...
If it was as long as this I might agree, but a full run that aims for fastest time would be much shorter than this; you have to take that into account. (Maybe 20-30 minutes shorter? I don't really know.) And there is a decent variety in the levels already, and some levels with shortcuts much crazier than others.
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Acryte wrote:
It gets to 96% loading for the room and then stops completely. Then gives me the stupid crash and "do you want to send..." crap.
This same thing happened on another emulator also? If so, that means it's probably a problem with one of the plugins you're using. Try saving before the room and testing it with different plugins. (In order of most likely to least likely to be the problem: video plugin, RSP plugin, general emulator settings, input plugin, audio plugin.) Also, it might help to update your video driver (and maybe DirectX) since buggy drivers can cause crashes like this.
