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Omega wrote:
Desyncs at the world 7 ship, right before you fight those two crewsmen!
Which version of the ROM are you using, also? (Hopefully it's not PRG 0.) And did this happen when watching it all the way from the beginning in one sitting, or after loading some savestate to resume it? (It seems to play fine for me, in both 0.98.12 and 0.98.13.)
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Update: Got 0:34:60 in Techno Base 2, and 0:06:48 on the Egg-Go-Round.
EDIT: Finished Egg Utopia 1 with a time of 0:52:48.
Disappointingly, I found another route in Techno Base 2 that lets Sonic maintain a speed so fast that even his speed trails are way offscreen for quite a while (had to play mostly by audio cues), but that way ended up being slower because it was lower than the goal with no fast way to get up there. Oh well. An interesting thing that happened though is that I ended with exactly 99 rings, the last few of which were collected AFTER crossing the goal.
Also, I'll try to redo that boss before moving on, since it seems like it should be possible to beat it about 2 seconds faster somehow. EDIT: Got it to 0:06:48 by only picking up 1 ring and making use of the sliding kick attack which I thought was completely useless until now. I'll probably leave it at that.
NintenDan wrote:
Apparently, it says some of those videos aren't up, so I'll have to give em to Rolken to upload I suppose.
About 80% of the videos are down, both for Sonic Advance 1 and Sonic Advance 2 (not just the ones that say "Not Found", in case you didn't know).
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But right before it says "There's the 5/98 Drop ANYTHING rate" it says "These stats are only for the group of 5 [Flan Princesses] you find in the Room." That's for the whole enemy group, so it must be less than that per enemy (at least it seems like it, or where else did they get that 5 from?), and I don't know whether it only applies to groups of that particular type of enemy.
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Update: Got 0:39:80 in Sky Canyon 2, 0:07:32 beating the Egg Saucer, and 0:59:32 in Techno Base 1. Egg Saucer was much harder to optimize than any previous bosses - I couldn't hit it whenever it's vulnerable, since it's often in positions that are out of reach or impossible to hit without dying (Sonic ended up being about a pixel away from death for much of the battle). Techno Base 1 was even more of a pain to find a route through than the Sky Canyon levels, as it's such a long and sprawling level, but it still ended up being under 1 minute and it's the longest regular level in the game judging by the record times at the Sonic Center.
BTW, a note to anyone watching this run: make sure to set the Frame Skip to 0 in VBA, or the scrolling will be very choppy compared to what it should be (normally it doesn't matter so much, but when the screen scrolls this fast there is a big difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS).
Xaphan wrote:
by the way how did you find the shortest route in each act ???
Well, I go until there's a path split, then test to see if the paths converge soon (within a few seconds) - if so I try them both to choose the fastest one right away, but if they don't converge soon then I pick one and make a note to try the other one later. When I finish the level I go back and try all the other paths I noted, and keep the one that reaches the goal the soonest. I don't try paths that don't seem promising (beyond checking them once without optimizing), so I'm not sure if I've really found the shortest routes. Hopefully NintenDan will be able to take another look at this; he might know of some shortcuts I missed (and I haven't been able to find any videos for most of the levels).
Atma wrote:
but turboing right one frame and a the next [in Sonic Advance 1] gives some insane speed if left on a straigh long enough
Hmm, this could make for an unexpectedly fast SA1 run, since all you need is some level ground to go almost arbitrarily fast (and teleport through things). Something weird happens if you hit a spring while doing this, but I can't tell if it could help or if it always ends up killing you.
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Guybrush wrote:
Nitsuja: I've redone the first level and gained couple frames there.
But, I think I have to redo it again if your tricks work.
Nitsuja, could you be my boss fighter?
No, not right now at least (I'm working on something else, and I would probably want to do the whole thing and not just the boss fights, and I don't so much want to compete with Walker since he'll probably get around to improving it at least as well)...
That said, here are two things to look at:
An example fcm - shows a technique for beating the boss, although you could probably beat it faster by getting closer to the wall than the boss before it jumps toward it to keep the boss always in range. It also shows the acceleration and spike tricks, but the level is too slow overall and I haven't checked to see whether those tricks saved time compared to what Walker did.
Boss Fighting - read this if you haven't already; a lot of it applies to the bosses in this game
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
I got a desync. Right where the player is supposed to pick up a powerup right before it goes off screen.
This movie was made with left+right enabled (although I don't know why). I'm guessing that's your problem.
Dantetheblack wrote:
3:No Bombs (yes in the first boss battle I use them but I would like to redo that stage anyway and think its better to not use them in general)
I think you should reconsider this goal. The bosses take long enough to beat in Hard mode as it is without this limitation, and you have a limited supply of bombs so you would have to consider managing your supply of them and when it's best to use them. All of your other goals look good to me, though. Except maybe you should be more explicit about "100% kill" - you meant that you'll destroy everything, including non-enemy destructable objects, right?
EDIT: Also, shouldn't "aims for fastest time" be one of your goals? It's an autoscroller, but it's still possible to lose some time in the levels and a lot of time in boss fights.
About your run so far:
First of all, I think it looks too obvious that one person is controlling both players. I mean when player one moves and shoots, then stops, then player two moves and shoots, then stops, then they both move in unison for a bit, then stop. It would look smoother if they appear to move more independently of each other, and didn't move in short one-directional jerks so much. It got a little better toward the end, though, but still not what it could be.
Besides that, I noticed that the secondary weapon that shoots those 4 or 6 mini-bombs is causing the game to lag whenever you fire it (from too many sprites onscreen), so maybe a different weapon/country is better for that plane to avoid slowing down the game too much.
It looks like you're being overly cautious about dodging enemy shots - for instance, the first boss battle looked much longer than it needed to be because of waiting for shots to go away.
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B.A.L.: This movie was made using a different version of FCEU than you were using to play it. Normally that's not a problem (between these two versions), but this is a game that was affected by mapper/emulator corrections made between them. Use this FCEU to play this movie: http://www.filespace.org/blip/fceu-0.98.12-blip.win.rar
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Guybrush: You're not really 137 frames ahead. You are actually 21 frames slower in the first level, except the game starts up 158 frames faster for you (I guess he didn't try holding Start before the HAL screen to skip it, since it looks unskippable if you wait until after it appears). So, you should redo the level, because just having a faster title screen won't make it a better movie if the rest of it isn't also faster.
Hints (besides what's in Walker's movie):
- When you jump off of the rightward-moving conveyor belt, if you stay in the air your speed eventually slows down to normal, but it's a little buggy so you can trick the game into not reducing your speed by pressing Down at the correct frame (there may also be other ways of making it not slow you down).
- If you land on spikes, they'll push you rightward if you press left for 1 frame before hitting them, and even better, if you then press left+right+A the frame after that, you'll zip rightward at double speed - it also makes you jump left after that but you can cancel it in mid-jump by pressing down for 1 frame then keep going right.
- Getting hit and pushed back by that enemy near the end of the first level is your most obvious mistake. It's possible to kill it with your hair after jumping from the first hook right before catching onto the second hook, so that it's not in the way when you jump from the second hook.
- End the level with as little Life and Chip as possible to save on countdown time. (Throw those shuriken things a lot, I guess.)
- If you hold Right and A starting on the correct frame just before the boss screen fades in, you'll start the battle in the air and a bit more to the right than usual.
- You can kill that first boss very fast by always attacking in the air and jumping the instant you hit the ground to avoid any delays. Jump to stay at about the same height as the boss or slightly lower within hair reach (press Down for 1 frame in the air when necessary). I did a quick test and beat that boss 124 frames faster than Walker Boh did it, and it could be faster, especially if there's some way to manipulate the boss to not jump off the wall out of reach.
- Regular shurikens do slightly less damage than a hair attack, so if you use one to get a hit in sooner, make sure it doesn't cause the boss to take an extra hit to die.
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Wow, good job - this should obviously be published. You found some pretty crazy time-savers that are noticeable throughout the run, in addition to more optimized play and other improvements that seem obvious now (like: running out of extra-effective ammo on Vile wastes less time than entering Volt Catfish's stage twice).
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Update: Got 0:44:07 on Ice Paradise 1, 0:34:90 on Ice Paradise 2, 0:05:50 on Aero Egg, 0:41:23 on Sky Canyon 1, and redid Leaf Forest 1 to be 0.7 seconds faster (0:26:48).
Atma wrote:
How exactly did you manage to hurt the hot crater boss cannon thingy without actually being a ball? the second or third hit you just kinda bumped it and it took damage, which surprised me.
Sonic starts to uncurl from a ball when the game thinks he's going to hit the ground soon, but it's purely graphical.
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Update: Got 0:43:02 on music plant 2, and 0:05:50 on the totem boss. Now onto ice paradise.
At this point I'm not completely certain about hot crater 2, music plant 1, or music plant 2 (because these had slow or backward-moving sections, which I think there could be some path around that I didn't find). Copypasting levels seems to work pretty well for this game, though, so I should be able to redo them later if improvements are found without having to redo everything afterward.
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qqwref wrote:
when I loaded the second one (the long-term savestate) it started *playing* the movie. I couldn't rerecord from there.
Make sure you're not in read-only mode if you want to continue recording. You can change the read-only setting in the movie play dialog (or in the menu, or with a hotkey).
qqwref wrote:
Is there a "continue recording from this point in the movie you're playing" function, or do I have to make a whole movie from scratch every time?
It's the same as for most other re-recording emulators: Make a save state, then load that save state (in non-read-only mode) to continue recording from there.
qqwref wrote:
Also, how would I use an analog controller for a game?
If you have an analog joypad, you should be able to go to the input settings and configure the controls there to use that joypad. If you mean how to get analog control without actually having a joypad, there are various ways of setting it up to use the mouse and/or keyboard for that, although none of them are very convenient for TAS-making at the moment.
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hanzou wrote:
Well, the ceiling doesn't have any overlapping blocks so there's nothing to separate out. In case it might have something to do with the ceiling block type (e.g. the jagged rather than flat edge), here are two more test cases
I tried the nojagged case, and that also didn't work, but I think it did make it clear why the trick doesn't work for that wall: that type of wall tile (the one leftover) acts as a weird "frictionless" surface which also prevents changes in ducking status while standing on it, which is why Mario can't stand up to get ejected to the right even if he does manage to get a temporay foothold in that wall.
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hanzou wrote:
I've made an IPS patch that separates out the extra wall so that maybe someone here could test this theory
Is it possible to also separate the ceiling blocks? I tried briefly and the behaviour was basically the same as before (although the wall's appearance had changed).
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Here's a from-save-state movie of it: http://www.filespace.org/nitsuja/orange3.smv.zip
I think that some foot soldiers start out with lower HP than normal. The only really obvious case was in the elevator up to Shredder, where one of the groups of soldiers there would die from a single special attack that normally wouldn't be enough to kill them, but maybe there are other cases of it throughout the game.
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Hmm, the 3rd wall-jump done in Genisto's currently published SMB3 run goes through with a ceiling that's at exactly the same height as in this situation. The A button was held for 3 frames while running at full speed to get through the wall there. I have no idea why that doesn't work on this wall, though - it looks like you go partway in but get ejected normally. Either there's some pixel alignment problem or there's something about that wall/corner preventing duck-jumps through it.
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JXQ wrote:
Also, does anyone have any tips on duck-jumping through walls besides "fail over and over"? (my current strategy, hehe)
You need to have the right speed and jump at the right distance from the wall. Those seem to depend mostly on the height of the wall (i.e. how many frames you need to hold the jump button to get up there). When you want to duck-jump through a wall, I would check to see if its height matches with somewhere the trick was done in an existing movie, because the input required to get through the wall should be identical if they're set up the same. Otherwise it's not unusual for it to take several hundred re-records to get a success. Other random hints: It can help to vary the number of frames you slide on the ground holding the duck button before the jump, moving too fast can make it impossible to get through depending on where you're jumping, and I think it usually won't work if you hit your head on the ceiling/corner before getting to the wall.
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The autofire presses the button for 1 frame every other frame. Double Dragon requires the button to be held (or released) for multiple frames to do anything. (I've also noticed that the autofire stops working in many other games when they lag, since then the game thinks the button is either held down or never pressed.) If turbo gamepads work on Double Dragon, it's probably because they autofire at a slower rate.
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Update: Got 0:36:10 on Hot Crater 2 (with a fairly different route, although I'm not 100% certain it's the best one) and 0:06:92 on the second boss (I think I just barely got every hit in on the first possible frame despite the invulnerability period between hits being so short, except maybe in-between the 2 forms). Next up is the music zone. EDIT: Got 0:36:37 on music plant 1, but I had to go through one of those tuba tubes and go backward a bit, so I'm still trying to find a better route.
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NintenDan wrote:
Holy crap, 33 seconds on Hot Crater act 1?
This I must see!
I updated the movie file at that link above (this), and will try to do so whenever I post an update.
About the boss: It could be something specific to that boss, or it could be an emulator inaccuracy (losing 1 frame every hit). I guess we'll see on the later bosses.
NintenDan wrote:
Ok, so now you're going to have to deal with Hot Crater Act 2? ... Either way, the new champ has been sincere enough to provide a few new videos, including one for Hot Crater 2. Do the best you can with it, as I really don't know or remember jack about the level. I can't even view the video for some reason...I guess my computer just hates putfile
Thanks, and it works for me. (Although I can't find any way to download it as a file, which is a bit annoying. EDIT: never mind, found a way to download it... I think there must be a faster route than this, though.)
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EscapePlan9 wrote:
The only possible improvement I saw was when you were in an elevator fighting off various foot soldiers. There was a part with two orange foot soldier's on the right hand side. You punch one of them before throwing him off, then throw the other one off. Couldn't you have killed both simultaneously? It just seems you could save another second or two there.
No, it would actually take longer to kill them both at the same time, because the game would wait for them to fall to the ground and explode before counting them as dead. Throwing them into the screen skips that waiting time, which more than makes up for the extra time it takes to kill them individually, at least in that case.
There are at least a few seconds of improvement to be made throughout the run, though (such as from killing Slash much faster, choosing when/how to kill enemies better, and manipulating luck better in the first Shredder battle).
