TASVideos

Posted: 12/17/2005 8:31 AM

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nitsuja

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I wouldn't call using the weakest weapon a general rule. Keeping it as entertaining as possible is the general rule, which may involve using the weakest weapon to make it as hard as possible if you can get away with doing that, but it could be better to mix it up with different weapons, depending on the game. (I'm not familiar with this one at all.) Making mistakes is not good, so if any shots are missed by mistake, that's not good. Missing shots on purpose to shoot to the music or something could be fine (again depending on the game). Same for not getting hit - just don't take any hits that you didn't plan to take.

Posted: 12/17/2005 8:11 AM

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nitsuja

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DK64_MASTER wrote:

It's the plugin's fault, but it's not too big of a deal, so we decided to leave it be. Just for closure, some of the lighting is also messed up.

Well, I think it's the fault of the way the plugin works on Linux systems. But that's the only plugin that even worked for making an AVI on Linux, so that's what was used.

Posted: 12/17/2005 8:07 AM

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nitsuja

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Gigafrost wrote:

The shortcuts surprised me. Also, for some reason it didn't feel like it was only 3 minutes faster. I suspect it's because this is the second time I've seen the entire game through. Hmmm.

One reason it seems like it should be faster is that Ecco moved so fast already that even if I do a trick to skip an entire half of a level that trick might only save 5 seconds total (with taking into account the time to perform the trick). One of the skips saved so little time that I considered not doing it at all (but not for long). Another reason not too much time can be cut off is that so much of the run has to consist of going through the really long unavoidable autoscrollers, and it's hard to save much time during autoscrollers. My initial estimate was that I'd be able to save at most 1 minute, I guess I was way off.

Posted: 12/17/2005 7:40 AM

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nitsuja

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Well by "cutscene damage" I really mean the aggressive enemies that chase you forever in levels with crystals you have to talk to or wait for - that's not such a mystery, I just made extra sure to kill or avoid spawning those enemies on my way there (although there's a place where I instead leave it alive and squirm to manipulate it to just barely not hit me). Oxygen damage only applies to one level that's so long you would normally have to surface for air early to avoid it, but that's where I managed to surface for air as part of my new route... Avoiding damage in the Asterite (the helix of balls) battle and the final battle was much harder - they both do damage on any contact, the Asterite is covering the whole entryway to its room past the screen, and ramming the final boss usually results in damage (not to mention the harmful globs it spews out that have a much wider hit detection radius than they should). The spikes at the bottom of the level directly before the first Asterite's layer are almost impossible to avoid since you're in a tunnel that restricts your turning until you're too close to avoid the spikes, but if you're going at exactly the right speed in the right place you'll catch on a corner and turn before hitting them.

Posted: 12/17/2005 7:32 AM
(Edited: 12/17/2005 8:22 AM)

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nitsuja

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Gigafrost wrote:

However, there are sites that publish what you're talking about. I know I saw some people link to them over at SDA, but I don't know them offhand. They include emulator runs that did not use tools.

You mean like Home Action Replay?

Posted: 12/16/2005 11:38 PM

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nitsuja

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DeHackEd wrote:

Nitsuja, what changed? 2/4 GB barrier breaking? Something else?

There was some code in DoAVIVideoFrame that did this before:

	if(avi_width != Width ||
		avi_height != Height ||
		...)
	{
		DoAVIClose(1);
		return;
	}

But for some reason, Chrono Trigger increases the video height for a few frames right at the start of every battle, causing the AVI to close. I commented out those two checks and replaced Width/Height with avi_width/avi_height in the rest of the function.

Posted: 12/16/2005 11:23 PM

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nitsuja

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hero of the day wrote:

For some reason Snes9x wont let me make the avi file. Every time I start recording, the recording is abruptly stopped as soon as any battle begins, and a message saying "configuration settings changed" appears in the window. The avi does not record anything beyond that point. Does anyone know how to fix this problem?

Here is a quick fix for the problem: http://www.savefile.com/files/7859035

Posted: 12/16/2005 8:42 PM

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nitsuja

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Yeah, I don't see why a tool designed to view or edit the input needs to know how many no-input frames pass by.

Posted: 12/16/2005 8:33 PM

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nitsuja

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Wow, nice find... that's probably enough reason alone for another version of the movie to be made.

Posted: 12/16/2005 8:12 PM

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nitsuja

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Truncated wrote:

Highly annoying bug: If pressing + at 100% speed, 50% and 100% get switched - 50% is full speed and 100% is 50% slow mode. Moreover the speed below 100% is 25%. I think it's somehow related to the slow mode checkbox in the menu.

I can't get this to happen normally (pressing + at 100% speed leaves it at 100%). I think you must have your "Toggle Slow Mode Key" assigned to +, which conflicts with + increasing the speed.

Posted: 12/16/2005 12:43 PM

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nitsuja

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FODA wrote:

Ok, making it short, you want to store, for each frame, a 2 bytes long frame number? that is uncessessary because the movie already stores that info. It's the position each 4-byte is. That is the frame number.

No, it's not. But you don't really need to know the frame number, only the number of input samples. The frame number isn't used for anything anyway. As for multiple controllers, I think it's actually pretty safe to assume that the N64 reads all of the active controllers in a row (in increasing order) (despite what I may have said about that before).

Posted: 12/16/2005 5:15 AM

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nitsuja

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You only have to watch the whole movie one time (or, maybe a few times to be safe, but not 70000). Here's an example: You have a save state on frame 50000. You want to re-record from frame 52000, but you don't have a save state there. So here's what you do: Load the movie in read-only mode. Load the save state at frame 50000. Now the movie's still playing, and you just skipped over 50000 frames. Now fast-forward only 2000 frames and make a different save state. Now switch the movie out of read-only mode, and load the new save state, and now you're re-recording from frame 52000 even though you only had to fast-forward past 2000 frames. EDIT: "How does one save in the very process of recording"? You just hit the save state button while you're recording, it's as easy as that.

Posted: 12/16/2005 5:09 AM

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nitsuja

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I wouldn't object to an actual discussion of this game being revived, but... that was pretty random. And the law system is ridiculously easy to get around. You can just pick what laws don't bother you before starting the battle.

Posted: 12/16/2005 4:40 AM

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nitsuja

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He does use ABABABABAB... It's the fastest way possible since he's pressing a button to advance the text on every single frame. I don't think any time was lost on it. (And even if it was, fixing it wouldn't help that the movie is over 2 hours long.)

Posted: 12/16/2005 4:26 AM

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nitsuja

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OK, I have to question something that I think you're doing some unnecessary waiting on. After leaving the red door at frame 2860 and 8850, you go right to the escalator down and then go left and wait a while for the elevator to come back up. Wouldn't it be a lot faster to go left from the red door onto the top of the elevator, and glitch into the inside of the elevator when it starts going down so you don't have to wait to get into it? (Maybe it just postpones the waiting for a different elevator, though...) Also, wouldn't it save on some walking time to be further left when the elevator gets to the ground floor at the end of the first level?

Posted: 12/16/2005 3:44 AM

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nitsuja

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Phil wrote:

Imo, it is better to fix those bad ROMs than implementing some hack in FCEU.

Right, nobody's trying to argue that. He was just pointing out that you can still play those bad ROMs in FCEU if you want to without fixing them or hacking FCEU.

Posted: 12/16/2005 3:37 AM

Post subject: Re: FCEU's movie-skipping question

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nitsuja

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xyzzy wrote:

Is there any way to make a game run faster than 800% faster at turbo speed?

In addition to what DeHacked said, if you're using the newest Windows version of FCEU, it goes up to 1600% speed (and it skips frames so it's not limited to about 400% by the graphics).

Posted: 12/16/2005 3:28 AM

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nitsuja

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IdeaMagnate wrote:

My brain just exploded. Twice. I can reproduce and optimize probably optimize it some, but it looks like one of those excessively disruptive bugs, like left+right in smas/smb3 and Tiny Toons. I doubt a tas with such a bug would be accepted. Still, it's an incredible find.

No, it could be accepted. For one thing it's NOT a left+right bug; you can do it very easily in normal playing. And it's not all that disruptive... since when are 'normal' bugs off-limit in a TAS, anyway? Also, it's not that easy to optimize - I didn't really optimize it mainly because I wasn't sure how; there's still a lot of things to consider in when to use it, when to run normally or if you should dash to gain electricity, when to spend time using volteccer to gain height because being higher up allows you to perform the trick for longer, etc. It requires you to gain running speed before doing it and go left quite a bit before going right, and the volteccer will only go leftward so you have to either cancel it immediately or position it perfectly to bounce, and your speed reverts to normal as soon as you touch the ground, so it's more limited than it looks. But, it's different enough that it shouldn't obsolete a run that purposely doesn't use the bug - the physics of the game are pretty interesting either way.

Posted: 12/15/2005 9:38 PM

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nitsuja

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Maybe Phil was responding specifically to your response about bad ROMs, not your workaround (which is nice to know, I guess).

Posted: 12/15/2005 8:33 PM

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nitsuja

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FODA wrote:

hey nitsuja that file is giving me a 0 byte content zip file.

Oh, ok... Try this: http://www.savefile.com/files/3206040

Posted: 12/15/2005 11:52 AM

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nitsuja

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Isn't there already a submitted movie that runs through the whole game? It's probably still in the workbench forum, unless it got moved to the new rejects forums. I'm just wondering why nobody here has mentioned it.

Posted: 12/15/2005 11:39 AM

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nitsuja

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Did you try using exactly the same plugins? Well, I think maybe it's necessary to have the copy framebuffer to RDRAM on for recording and playback, since the delay when it's off is incorrect and possibly arbitrary/random enough to cause desync. (And about the small delay that's still there when it's on, I think that's a combination of the very small delay that's really supposed to be there, and an additional delay outside of emulation that's your computer loading something.) In any case, I realize it's not a very satisfactory solution to require that 1 plugin and setting which runs the game so incredibly slowly, but I haven't found any other fixes yet.

Posted: 12/15/2005 11:11 AM
(Edited: 12/15/2005 8:38 PM)

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nitsuja

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Whoa, actually I was just fooling around a bit and found a huge movement bug that's a little hard to do but will probably save a lot of time. Here is a GMV demonstrating it: http://www.savefile.com/files/3206040. (edit: Oops, that's odd, some bug in my build of Gens reset the re-record count to 1.) I didn't attempt to seriously optimize it for speed, and I'm not sure if there isn't a faster variation or combination of moves possible (I don't know that much about the game). But, maybe you should consider starting over after all, this could make things pretty different... Are there any right-to-left stages or rooms, btw? It helps the going-left case even more drastically.

Posted: 12/15/2005 10:14 AM

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nitsuja

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How hex-edit-unfriendly is the game? Sometimes even if a game has a lot of lag, it can be made to sync up by only hex editing at 8-frame boundaries or something like that. Anyway, if it can't be hexed in without editing all sorts of things after it in the movie, I'd say it can wait until another version of the run is made. Unless you don't think there will be a v2, that is.

Posted: 12/15/2005 9:43 AM

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nitsuja

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The thing that bothers me most about this hack is the ridiculous number of minibosses - either he really liked boom-boom or he couldn't figure out a better way to end the levels. But, you managed to kill most of them instantly or very quickly, so it didn't really hurt the run (and it was surprising to see a shell would have such an effect at first). As for complaints about the graphics, I'm guessing it's the way the backgrounds are all lacking basically any detail, which may be for technical reasons of needing to support the background weather effects in the same levels using the same game engine. BTW, this hack has its own palette file that you're supposed to temporarily configure FCEU with to view the game, I wonder if anyone forgot to use that?

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