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Posted: 10/8/2005 3:58 PM

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nitsuja

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Maximus wrote:

Well guys, I've got a new route (slightly) and I think i've got the first fight down now.

The route looks better. The fight too, but I think the method you're using to interrupt the kicks is a few frames slower on each kick. What you should do is: the frame before the kick will make a damage mark appear, press the punch button alone (after releasing it earlier, of course), then wait 1 frame, then press and hold up+attack for 5 frames to kick again, and repeat. It won't make a huge difference in this fight (maybe 1/4 of a second), but those few extra frames will probably be necessary in the ninja / final battles since every frame that they could get hit but don't seems to count down a timer to their next teleport.

Posted: 10/8/2005 4:28 AM

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nitsuja

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I think the problem about sound not working is probably the fault of the other program. What are you using to play your music that is so greedy that it prevents other programs from having sound? (Once the "sound not working" dialog comes up, I'm not surprised it then crashes or freezes - I've had problems with FCEU doing that when dialogs or menus it doesn't expect to be open are open.)

Posted: 10/8/2005 4:11 AM

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nitsuja

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I also think this is pretty boring to watch. It is not played as badly as I was expecting - there are several places where imprecision is noticeable, but here they don't bother me nearly as much as the repetitiveness and simplicity of the game itself. There just doesn't seem to be room to make anything amazing happen in this game... edit: I almost forgot to mention that the sheer ridiculousness of the method by which the character is able to fly in the (second?) autoscrolling level was the only thing that really stood out to me. edit2: I'm not sure why I didn't vote No, but I don't think this should be published.

Posted: 10/7/2005 10:27 PM

Post subject: Re: I want to make a Spiritual Warfare timeattack movie

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nitsuja

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VMan wrote:

1) Is any one else working on/planning to work on a Spritual Warfare movie?

Not that I know of...

VMan wrote:

3) Does anyone know of any documented programming errors for this game? I haven't found anything useful while playing and searching online for this hasn't been fruitful (no pun intended).

There are two different versions of this game, 6.0 and 6.1. It seems that nobody knows what the difference is, but I would guess that 6.1 might have fixed some bugs, so maybe you'll have better luck finding bugs if you use the 6.0 version.

Posted: 10/7/2005 10:01 PM
(Edited: 10/7/2005 10:10 PM)

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nitsuja

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OmnipotentEntity wrote:

Possible to go through the ceiling? How? I can get the key through the ceiling, but not Mario. Finished the level in a slightly different manner which is probably faster anyway.

Did you see my edit? I was 1 time unit faster in 5-3 (maybe should have been 2 if I'd played more precisely). I also included a vbm of me going through the ceiling even though it's slower, in case it might be useful somewhere else. (Basically, if you do a handstand jump at the instant something pushes you partly into the ceiling you'll go through it.) Also, I think I know why you can't wall-jump off of that wall. It's because wall-jumps only work on the left side of walls, you can't do them unless you're facing to the right. Oh, and there's also a bug that lets you walk through spikes and survive, but it only works on spikes that don't have walls on the edge like in stage 3-1, and you have to jump from one of those edges to get away safely, so it might not be very useful. edit: looked at your 5-2 and I notice a pause on top of the mummie's head, maybe you can avoid that by doing a back flip and catching the hammer at the right time going over his head?

Posted: 10/7/2005 8:18 PM

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nitsuja

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OK. In that case, there's no position to jump from that causes the skidding animation on that part of the wall, however, it DOES work to wall-jump from the wall on the right of that (after getting up to the same height as the switch) straight up to the key, which is probably faster than taking the ladder up anyways. I think it's also fastest to not flip the switch (just glitch the key down through the elevators to the door, or it's also possible to go up through the ceiling but that probably wouldn't be faster here). EDIT: here are two vbm's of that level which you might find interesting: http://www.filespace.org/nitsuja/donkeykong_5-3_glitches.zip

Posted: 10/7/2005 7:06 PM

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nitsuja

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adelikat wrote:

for bigger events, the only potential problem with this method is that is would eliminate the possibilty of skipping the "goal" entirely. for instance if you were to try to make this play the wily stage of mm1 and one of the goals was to get to cutman as soon as possible it would never "discover" how to bypass the boss entirely.

It could find it if the logic was inclusive enough. For instance, checking if you're at or beyond the boss room instead of only checking if you're at it. If it has to go too far out of the way to bypass it, then it wouldn't find it due to the time constraints, but without those time constraints or specific guidance, it would take much too long anyway. This will still be something that has to be limited to relatively short encounters, unless you can come up with really good rules for dealing with longer things (which even for Super Mario Bros would be quite difficult, I think). Here's another idea: Something that takes in a goal and a set of input that reaches the goal, and attempts to modify that input to reach the same (or better, depending on how you define it) goal state in fewer frames by removing or substituting frames of input and checking that the goal is still met after each step. This could be used for taking input that another bot has generated and either removing unnecessary frames or verifying that there aren't any clearly unnecessary frames. Or maybe taking a very short segment of a run and seeing how precise the playing is.

Posted: 10/7/2005 9:16 AM

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nitsuja

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I made a test run of the first level: cabal_u_test.fcm. I'm posting this to show what kind of level of control is possible. I make a few mistakes such as not destroying the building before the level ends (since everything disintegrates after the level it's probably fastest to destroy absolutely everything before that, including your own protective walls and background scenery) and I fire a few stray shots (accidentally didn't re-record over them, I guess), but hopefully it gets across that this game can be played with more precision than you'd think and maybe illustrates some tricks with the controls.

Posted: 10/7/2005 8:47 AM

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nitsuja

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The instructions didn't work, as in, there's a bug somewhere so it didn't save the same input it used to play with? From the code, it looks like the problem that's making it so slow is that you wait until a MAX_FRAMES for the entire battle before deciding that an attempt has failed. It would be a lot faster if BisqBotTick returns BisqBotRestart whenever it has been more than 1.5 times the invulnerability time of the boss since the last time the boss was hit (maybe with some extra leeway for the first hit). And, even much better would be to have BisqBot optimize each hit individually, and only roll back all the way if it can't find any input that works at all for one of the later hits (or if it succeeds in killing the boss and wants to try again). That's what I had in mind when suggesting to try it in boss battles, that the segmented nature of the battle be taken advantage of to speed up the search. (I'm talking about boss battle optimizations in general so maybe I'm overlooking something specific to Gutsman here...) I have no idea if the input generation function is reasonable but that is also something that can likely be made smarter. (Also, I think the code would be clearer if you replaced numbers like 0x81 with INPUT_LEFT | INPUT_UP or whatever).

Posted: 10/7/2005 8:18 AM

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nitsuja

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Maximus wrote:

I think i'll hold off posting the finished product till i'm absolutely sure it'll pass your scrutiny

You know, it's a good idea to post partial progress in the NES game forum, so you can get opinions before finishing the whole thing and possibly avoid having to start all over if something wrong is found...

Maximus wrote:

no comments on the menu navigation this time though so i'll take that as a sign of progress ;)

Yes, it looks like the menu navigation is fine now. Actually I could've sworn some parts look slower than before, but I couldn't find any supporting evidence so I'm probably wrong about that. See if you can find any bugs or even more things that the game lets you skip. Also, is the bomb in the beginning on a regular timer or does it explode sooner if you go behind the wall? I'm wondering if it would be faster to take a hit there so that the instant the bomb goes off you get set free and save the time waddling over to the candle after the explosion.

Posted: 10/7/2005 12:56 AM

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nitsuja

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Maximus wrote:

Final boss isn't too bad, since you can only hit him once before he dissapears, but I've managed to get three in :) Prolly could be faster though. I'm actually kind of curious if you'd have a different strategy for the ninja's?

Well I had a sort of different strategy for the final boss that also applies to the ninjas. If you kick them on exactly the right frame it'll connect and prevent them from teleporting away, and you can keep repeating that with perfect timing until they die. Sometimes it requires waiting a few more frames than you would think. I didn't test this extensively, but did manage to beat the final boss before he sent out a mummy or was able to teleport more than 2 times, and I would guess that even less is possible with more precision and an earlier first hit. Note that I had to manipulate him to teleport in close to the wall so that I could hit him there without worrying about knocking him out of range. The ninjas seem to take less damage from kicks than any other enemies, so maybe uppercutting them could be faster, but my guess is that it still isn't (this should be tested, of course). About re-planning, that's always good and could uncover major time-savers, but I think it's mainly the lack of precision and experimentation while making the run that's the problem with this one. Little delays before attacking in some of the fights were noticeable. And I know it's not good to judge just by this (and I don't), but when I see only about 1000 rerecords made for this movie it makes me wonder how that could possibly be enough to get it close to perfect - I would expect at least 5000 would be necessary for a decent run of this game... (Personally I'd probably use 1000 before even getting out of the first room, but maybe I'm a bit wasteful of re-records.)

Posted: 10/6/2005 11:10 PM

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nitsuja

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OK, better, but the fights are still not optimal. You need to be more sure that it's not possible to be faster, and you can't be sure of that since I already showed you how to do first fight faster than you do here... (And besides that fight all the other ones can also be better, especially the ninja boss and final boss.) It's not good enough just to be faster than you were before. To be fair, this game's combat system is not easy to get as many frames out of as possible.

Posted: 10/6/2005 9:11 PM

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nitsuja

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The route looks good, and there are some nice optimizations here, but there are also quite a lot of unnecessary pauses and minor imprecisions (such as waiting too long after a bomb explodes, hesitating before jumping off some of the ropes, getting stopped once by the moving bumpy ground, firing a flare that gets in the way later, etc.), so I'm also voting no.

Posted: 10/6/2005 8:03 PM

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nitsuja

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asteron wrote:

Out of curiosity how does the boss life meter lie? I'm assuming it puts more life into the lower bars to make it more 'exciting'?

That's what I meant, but actually upon checking it more carefully, the only way it "lies" is to round up the health to the next bar. The bars are 32 hit points each, so for example a boss with 33 hit points shows 2 bars full even though he has much nearer to only 1 bar. That must be why it seemed to skew the health display upward. But it makes sense when you think about it that you wouldn't want a boss with 1 hit point to show as having 0 life bars. So I guess the only problem with the bars is that they don't show the health with much precision.

Posted: 10/6/2005 3:23 PM

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nitsuja

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I wonder if either PRG0 or PRG1 lags more than the other, or if there are any real differences between them. (I was using PRG1, he was using PRG0.)

Posted: 10/6/2005 5:56 AM

Post subject: Re: Cabal

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nitsuja

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Tailz wrote:

That's right, one guy (or two) against an army

Sounds like a large percentage of all video games to me...

Tailz wrote:

I decided to complete the movie. I'm probably going to redo it before submitting it, though I may not need to.

After watching this a bit... it's definitely in need of a redo or two. There's no need to miss that many shots, even if what you say is true that it's unavoidable to miss some shots. And it isn't true; you should make every single shot hit, including grenades, because it's definitely possible to do that without wasting time. (Bonus hint: B+left+right moves the cursor right very fast without moving you or firing.) Also, you let the enemies survive much longer than they should. You should kill them the exact instant that they appear, but instead you let them walk around for seconds on end while you shoot buildings (which you should only do when there aren't any enemies alive onscreen). Also, manipulate luck to make soldiers drop grenades for faster boss fights and weapons for... cooler sound effects and crosshairs?

Posted: 10/6/2005 5:03 AM

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nitsuja

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OmnipotentEntity wrote:

I'm having a bit of trouble with 5-3, the route I planned isn't working out, could anyone with the inclination help me confirm that you can't wall jump off of this wall:

As far as I can tell, wall jumps don't work anywhere in 5-3. I tried briefly and couildn't do better than 236 time units there, but it seems like something smoother must be possible.

Posted: 10/5/2005 11:57 PM
(Edited: 10/15/2006 6:47 AM)

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nitsuja

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OmnipotentEntity wrote:

I think it's an intentional easter egg, because you can't kill Sluggy early, but you should have ample oppertunity to, because it's a similar situation (you run up to the boss).

That's not the reason to think it's intentional... as Michael Fried said, the fact that there is a special message specifically for the event proves that the designers put it there purposely. And, usually even if you could kill the enemy before it gets transformed into a boss, the game would ignore that it happened and make the boss appear anyway, so it's a nice bit of extra interactivity. Sort of like that boss in Gimmick! that you find sleeping if you reach him too fast by a shortcut, and exactly unlike those battles in some RPGs that you're not supposed to win that the game pretends/assumes you lost even if you really did manage to win. (Or, maybe you were just proving yagz wrong, which you did if he meant that it happened that way naturally or due to a bug, but I can't tell if that's what he meant.)

Posted: 10/5/2005 11:20 PM

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nitsuja

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I think the GBA version has 2 sets of new levels which are even more difficult, depending on what armor you get. I'm not sure if it still requires playing through twice, but even if it does you could probably play through a different level set each time to avoid the boring repetition of levels.

Posted: 10/5/2005 11:14 PM

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nitsuja

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If each submission is faster than the last one by more than a few frames then we probably won't mind. It doesn't seem like there are that many more times that this can be improved, although I could be wrong. If you're not sure, you can always post in the other topic and see if people think it's worth submitting, and submit it a few days later if there aren't any objections.

Posted: 10/5/2005 10:58 PM

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nitsuja

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Baxter can't be hit with a special in the air (and it doesn't seem to be possible to manipulate him to stop flying sooner), but I could have used up another special on an enemy during that long period of waiting for Super Krang to get off the screen. Would have saved 15 frames, but my attempts to hex that in later failed pretty miserably, and since I'm ignoring huge score bonuses in some stages anyway it didn't seem too bad to leave it so I get a few extra points there.

Posted: 10/5/2005 10:51 PM

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nitsuja

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Too_Bored wrote:

how about having 2 different ppl play the same game it can work

2-player of this game would be fun, but I think it would be considerably slower so I'm not so sure anymore. Also, like FODA said, you don't need 2 different people to play a 2-player game - it's easier (in time attacks) with 1 person controlling both players.

FODA wrote:

hold this button for me please. ok let it go now

And I already have this part automated, no need for a person to be a button-holding helper...

Posted: 10/5/2005 10:45 PM

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nitsuja

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I did that too at some ends of areas when the tornado couldn't be used. It's really fast and can be made to last longer by jumping, but I found the tornado still moves faster. At least, the screen scrolls quite a few more pixels each frame with full speed tornado, enough so that it's faster overall, I think.

Posted: 10/5/2005 10:36 PM

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nitsuja

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Hmm, now I'm not so sure that I won't lose all the time gained in the upcoming boss fights compared to using the hammer. And switching abilities to try speeding them up will probably cost at least 111 frames on its own. (The tornado might not move faster than the wheel at full speed, but it doesn't require winding up backwards to get started or slamming into things to go upward, and it's better for clearing out lag, so it ends up effectively being faster except in certain areas that were designed for using the wheel in.)

Posted: 10/5/2005 3:37 PM

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nitsuja

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Looks like it is running at the same speed to me. I'm very surprised he was so lucky in the Judge Doom battle, he gets in about 70 consecutive punches which is extremely unlikely because Doom can decide to attack at any moment and punches do not interrupt his attacks. It's the same type of luck as never hitting a random enemy battle in Dragon Warrior. Besides that, it also looks like he would have ended up with a shorter time than you had he not checked the places that turned out to be empty. A long segment of the driving was while being chased, and he did also take that shortcut that I said was after the baseball and wasn't sure if it was faster than skipping the town before the baseball. Maybe you should try finding a better random item placement...

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