Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
I'll look into these as soon as I can...
Nightcom: You have to uncheck "read-only" either in the movie play dialog or from the menu after you start playing it, then either load a save state like normal or choose "continue recording from here" from the menu.
Fortune: At least Windows 98 is required, no way around it that I know of.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
The movie directory is automatically set to be whatever directory you last (or maybe first) recorded a new movie into. At least that's what it used to do, and I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. In the meantime, you can change "movieRecordDir" in the vba.ini file to customize the default movie play/create directory.
I agree the read-only checkbox staying that way would be better, I can do that. Same for alternate save state modes. And I'll see about displaying messages while paused - there are several subtle problems with doing that, but I should be able to work around them.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Hmm, I think that for some reason MinGW does not support anonymous unions... One workaround is to simply put all of the items in the struct so it takes up more memory but at least compiles (I thought I put this in from the other patch but maybe it got erased during one of the merges). The rest of the errors are probably caused the render code being confused after including auxmath.h.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
quietkane wrote:
I think Megaman X2's star should be given to this movie when/if it gets published.
Well I think any movie that the author isn't reasonably sure is perfect shouldn't get a star...
Mlandry wrote:
but the ladder trick works in MMX2 so this one is closer to perfection than X2
I don't really agree, especially since MMX2 doesn't have that many ladders that must be climbed up compared to MMX3.
But, uh, thanks for the compliments.
McBAIN wrote:
I don't understand why the creator does not jump at the end of it's dash.
Not only will it increase the length of the dash, but when you touch the ground, you can instantly start dashing again. (iirc)
Right now, most of the times you keep on dashing on the ground. You can clearly see the movement pauses for a very brief moment, and you lose various frames due to this in your entire movie. It'll prolly only be a few seconds at most, but still...
Jumping also causes a 1 frame complete stop, and when you touch the ground you have to walk for 1 frame before you can dash. In places like the hallway before a boss, jumping actually slows you down by 1 or 2 frames (especially if you hit the ceiling which costs 2 extra frames), and besides that it's often the exact same speed. But you're right that in some places (such as longer rooms without lots of height changes and with no obstacles overhead, which admittedly are not rare), since a jump lasts longer than a dash it still leads to less total pauses, so some number of frames (but certainly not a few seconds worth) would be gained by jumping in more places, and maybe it looks better even when it doesn't save any time.
(EDIT: I did a test of X's first part of the intro area and found that the very first thing done, dash-dash, is faster than anything else possible, and that about 3 frames are lost over that area by jump-dashing more often. And watching the MMX video, it loses usually 2.5 frames or sometimes only 0.5 frames in every small pre-boss/transition room by dash-jumping instead of dash-dashing.)
McBAIN wrote:
Also, i don't understand why you get hit by some bosses. For instance, the drill boss. He's charged up and heads towards a wall. There's no stopping him, but still you jump up on him and get damaged.
If this was for entertaining purposes, well, it didn't work for me.
It saved 39 frames each time, that's why I did it. He was invincible-charging up to head at the other wall; jumping on him tricks him into charging into the wall he's already at, which causes him to become vulnerable to damage earlier than normal. (Avoiding the damage would not have saved any more time and wasn't possible without the air dash. (EDIT: perhaps it might be possible after all, let's see...)) Manipulating him to not go into that charge at all (or at least less) would be even faster, but I haven't yet been able to get him to do anything else but invincibility-charge every other time as his low-health behaviour.
McBAIN wrote:
Another thing, the boss fights weren't really entertaining. Take a look at the X1 run and see how much the player moves around the boss even if he has to wait for the boss to stop flickering.
Right now it's like, "shoot, evade attack, wait for the boss to get vulnerable again, repeat".
I suppose you're right... I think Blizzard Buffalo is the most boring one, I'd like to try beating him just as fast without exploiting his AI stupidity. Some of the bosses use attacks that normally require a lot of moving around to avoid, so in those cases I purposely moved very little to make it look like dodging their attacks was easy for me, but yes, more dancing around them when waiting would probably look better.
(edited for extra info in the above)
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
All right, submitted it...
I couldn't find any way to prevent Vile from blinking there. The ray splasher had a delay before it would fire a shot that high, and the spinning blade would either take too long to arc up to him or require getting too close to avoid his bullets.
The Doppler 1 miniboss seems to be weakest to ice, 2 ice shards and a single buster shot is enough to kill it. But after the battle, X walks slowly across the rest of the room to Zero, so I took damage to get on the other side to skip almost all of the walking.
The beam saber cancel by switching weapons usually doesn't make a difference, since I'm only waiting for the beam saber to charge up again, and I can keep charging the next one even while I'm in the middle of swinging it just by continuing to hold the button. I only cancelled it in the fight against Tunnel Rhino so I could jump away from his attack in time.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
TheAxeMan wrote:
I hadn't thought that this game had hi-jumps off of enemies (hitting A after stomping an enemy, like in Mario 3 and Mario World) .... does anyone know anything about this?
I think you have to jump pretty high, then release A a while before landing on the enemy (after you're near the top of a jump arc, I think) and then press and hold it again a little bit before hitting the enemy. I'm not completely sure about this, but it seems to me that you bounce higher the longer you've been holding the button before hitting the enemy, not counting the button press that initially started the jump.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Phil wrote:
When recording AVI, I noticed that when frameskip was set to 2, it records the AVI at 60 FPS with duplicated frames. Normally, at frameskip 2, it should record at 20 FPS without duplicated frames.
OK, to do that I'd have to make the frameskip not changeable while an AVI is being recorded, but that's not unreasonable.
Phil wrote:
Edit: I have just noticed there was a 9b release. What's the diff between 9 and 9b?
9b has clearer labels for the options in the movie recording dialog, that's all (there wasn't even any source code changed).
Phil wrote:
I would like to use Ctrl for frame advance but I can't. Is it possible to add support for it?
Well, it's possible, but it would be quite difficult (requiring completely re-implementing the key customization system).
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Updated the WIP, it's now through the whole game in 39:51 (about 3 minutes and 45 seconds faster than the published movie). But there are some small mistakes, I think they can't add up to more than 1 or 2 seconds but they're probably enough that it should wait for another version or massive hex-editing of this one to fix them before it's submittable.
Oh, and I verified that the trick to skip climbing ladders works in MMX2 and in MMX, so it can be used to improve the runs of both of those games. There seems to always be a 4-pixel range in the center you have to be in to continue moving upward through a ladder top - it's not quite as strict as I thought before, although X's sprite is offset considerably from where the game thinks its center is so it's hard to tell if you're in the right spot just by looking at it.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mikwuyma wrote:
I think you fired an extraneous shot during your battle with Bit.
That (firing 2 shots at once) was necessary to hit him as soon as possible when he was moving away. The first shot fired triggered the second one to hit him (that weapon has some weird logic determining when it hits). Maybe could've been avoided by manipulating the fight differently starting from a few hits before that, but it's not as if ammo was any concern there.
mikwuyma wrote:
In Neon Tiger's stage after the boss door (the empty one, not the worm one) you fall down a ladder. Would it be any faster to dash jump off the right wall at any point while falling down?
No, it's 10 frames slower if done at the top of the ladder and about 18 frames slower if done from the wall on the right.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
So you just made From Reset not an option anymore? That seems kinda mean.
Oh wait, it only seems to be disabled for the old Game Boys. Game Boy Advance still has the option. What's up with that?
I couldn't get from-SRAM recording to work at all for GB games, so I disabled it until I can figure it out. There is still from-snapshot and from-power-on for them, at least.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
And how is it helpful to take out the word "SRAM"? I think it would be better to change "From Start" to "From Power-On".
I don't understand. I changed it to say the following:
Record Options:
* From start (power-on)
* From reset (SRAM)
* From now (snapshot)
And the word "SRAM" was not even there before in the first place to take out. (EDIT: actually it was in the movie play dialog but I didn't change that part of it.)
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mikwuyma wrote:
I realized I worded that really badly. What I meant to say was manipulate Tunnel Rhino to shoot his triple drill missiles (not yours) to prevent him from performing an invincible dash.
Oh, no I probably just read it wrong. I've never seen him shoot his drill missiles, maybe that requires going easier on him the first few rounds? Anyway, you're probably right about skipping that manipulation, he actually did 3 invincible dashes without it when I was testing, but with frame-perfect shots he shouldn't quite have time to get the 3rd one in.
mikwuyma wrote:
What do you mean by dashing off the wall? Do you mean an air dash?
I meant wall-jumping while holding the dash button pushes you too far from the wall to be able to move back into the center of the ladder before hitting the top. You have to do a normal wall-jump that starts from pretty far below the top of the ladder in order to make it. (It might be possible with a lot of practice to do this no-climb maneuver when playing normally. At least on some ladders, a wall-jump from the right height will put you exactly in the middle at the right time with no additional sideways maneuvering required.)
mikwuyma wrote:
Is taking the bottom in the beginning of Crush Crawfish's stage any faster? I'm sure it isn't slower, but I'm just curious.
There were enough enemies to cause lag on the top route so the bottom was a little bit faster.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mikwuyma wrote:
How does that Mac killing bug work when you're using Zero?
Jumping causes the Z-saber animation to stop for a few frames, so if you keep doing tiny hops it'll stay out and keep doing damage from one swing of it. It's not too hard to do in a normal speedrun, but I think it doesn't actually save any time since a single buster shot would've also finished him off. (It sort-of works for X but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to stay in damaging form for him.)
mikwuyma wrote:
How do you climb up ladders without grabbing them? Does this work in X2?
At first I did it by accident and I thought it was because I had ice-sliding physics applied to me at the time, but later I realized what it really is: The game doesn't stop your upward movement if you're exactly in the middle of the ladder. Horizontally it has to be pixel-perfect or very nearly so (and so won't work when dashing off the wall). I don't know about MMX2 but it's likely programmed similarly.
mikwuyma wrote:
Wouldn't you lose a frame for every ground dash you're doing after another because you have to let go of the button for a frame? Or am I completely missing something?
Jumping also loses a frame (X pauses in place for 1 frame every jump) so it doesn't make much difference. When the ceiling is low, jumping actually loses (a really tiny amount of) time compared to going directly from dash to dash, and the same goes for if the floor is icy.
mikwuyma wrote:
Is there a reason why you didn't ground dash on the first conveyor belt? It was going in the same direction you were going.
The game seems ignore adding the conveyor belt speed when dashing. If there's a conveyor belt going the right direction and then a drop I have to go down, it's significantly faster to dash-jump over most of the conveyor belt in order to be moving down faster for the drop.
mikwuyma wrote:
Could you please explain your tunnel rhino fight? I was really confused why you got hit when he did the invincible charge. Also, there was a point when you let him go for about a second without blinking. Furthermore, I'm almost positive you can reduce the invincible charges down to one. I'm sorry but the only advice I can give you is to get him to shoot those triple drill missiles, which seem to prevent him from invincible charging.
Don't I get the drill missiles after this fight? Letting him go for a short time that once was to manipulate him to not invincibility charge that time, but nothing I tried after that point in the battle worked to prevent more charges (and I tried some pretty crazy things). However, I found that jumping on him to make him charge into the wall he's already at causes his charge invincibility to wear off a lot faster, that's the reason for taking the damage.
mikwuyma wrote:
That Crush Crawfish fight was insane. How did you damage him so quickly?
I found that after he's hit, if you stand next to him, jump, and fire very soon after jumping, he'll get hit for 7 damage instead of 5, and that there is just barely enough time to do this twice in a row between each regular hit, leading to a damage pattern of 3,7,7,3,7,7... instead of 3,5,3,5...
mikwuyma wrote:
I don't really understand why you used the buster on Neon Tiger as your first attack when you had to delay anyways. Could you explain why?
The weapon he's weak to causes him to flash invincible for 100 frames. With the buster it's only 60 frames. Staying with the buster would be slower because it takes 90 frames to charge it and he blocks on the ground, but the 40 frames gained from hitting him after only 60 frames of invincibility was enough to make up for however many frames he was blocking for (some of which would have been lost anyway due to lower weapon speed/range than the buster). Switching back and forth between the two would probably be faster, but unfortunately the game imposes a large time delay for switching back to the buster most of the time.
mikwuyma wrote:
How did using the drills against those red bots work? That was a cool glitch.
Anything that gets a drill in it won't do any collision detection with X for some number of frames (15 or so) which was enough to dash right through them after firing.
I'll have to rewatch the run to understand the rest of your comments (so I'll reply to those sometime later).
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Because it caused so much confusion, I've made a small update to the re-recording VBA (now 9b) just to change the recording dialog to be more clear.
Zurreco wrote:
Why is there even a record from reset? Is that just for people who want to record casually and dont want their stuff erased?
Well, if for instance someone wants to record a movie of Metroid Zero Mission on Hard mode (or a Julius run of AoS), I think that would require starting out with SRAM. Normally it couldn't be accepted here but maybe something could be worked out (such as verifying that an existing published run creates the same SRAM data that it continues from).
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
The only difference is that "from start" movies don't contain SRAM, which could theoretically allow cheating, or at least skipping introductory parts of the game which would make runs hard to compare. All existing SNES submissions are from reset with SRAM and we just have to trust that they don't actually use it. I thought it would be better for it to be an option to have none at all so it's not even a possibility that a run could rely on previously saved data. There is further explanation at the rules page under "The movie must begin from console power-on".
It shouldn't be necessary for you to start over. If you're really not relying on the save data, it should work to hex edit it away. (Actually, it should be as simple as changing byte 0x014 to 0.) Anyway, I think in this case it's not a huge deal since you start a new game in the movie and there don't seem to be any other existing save slots so the SRAM saved in the movie is most likely empty and unused by the game. But avoid starting any new movies from reset if they're intended for submission.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Yes vote, although of course I found the no-glitch (less-glitched?) run more entertaining.
But, one note about the submission: it was recorded from reset with SRAM. Obviously it starts from a new game, but for future submissions (uh, after what you're currently working on I guess) you should start recording from power on ("from start", which is the default) instead of "from reset".
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Some other people had the iNES mapper problem, I think it was just from a bad ROM.
About this run:
It looks like you can kill the very first boss (pirate ship) faster by moving much closer to it (while firing) when the battle starts, and if necessary backing away between shots.
For the areas where you're overshooting the stairs (jumping up 2 and a half steps high, it looks like), wouldn't it be faster to instead jump up 1 step at a time?
Going down hills is definitely faster, does that mean going up hills is slower? I can't quite tell if you're flying up them or walking up them, but if walking it might be slower. (And it seems like going down hills with a character that has treads gives more of a speed boost than normal, but that probably really is an illusion.)
There are some (well, very few) places where there are lots of enemies onscreen but you leave them all alone, when it looks like it'd be faster to kill some. Even if they all create eggs, I think it's likely that eggs cause less lag than enemies. (When using the character that outruns his own shots, would it be faster to kill some more enemies by shooting backwards as you pass them by?)
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Zurreco wrote:
You are able to use the magic cap on the bird. When it dives in from either side, jumping to that side of the screen will give you enough slide time to stay on the platforms. This also lets you do a few full charge shots per egg drop, but you'll have to worry about dealing with bird minions and whatnot.
Hmm, OK, I'll look into this and resubmit if it turns out to be faster.
EDIT: BTW, I did look into this a while ago, and was unable to get that fight to be faster. Couldn't get in position to hit it and still charge up soon enough to hit the bird with a fully-charged blast every round, which made everything I tried slower overall, although maybe I missed some trick that would make it possible.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
He probably didn't watch it with the left+right option because he wasn't using the same emulator version. This is why I suggested not using left+right, unless... does it actually do anything in this game?
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mikwuyma wrote:
Well, it looks like this will be a good run. Hope to see more soon.
Well, uh, here is what I have, if you want to see it - so far it's through Volt Catfish's stage and about 80 seconds faster. (I've skipped the air dash.) I've already noticed some inconsistencies in the first stages but they're small enough and aren't slower than before so I'll probably keep going from here...
EDIT: Now past Gravity Beetle's stage, and 126 seconds faster than prower's v1 run so far. And if anyone has suggestions for further improvements, let me know, since I can probably hex them in (when I get around to that somewhat painful step of the process).
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mikwuyma wrote:
The biggest application of the air dash comes in Doppler stage 2 where you can use the air dash to skip most of the waiting on the platforms. This saves at least 20 seconds, if not more. This means you want the dash boots Nitsuja, they save more than 22 seconds, trust me.
Here is my response to that particular application (at least I think that's what you were talking about), it's only somewhat optimized since I was just fooling around to see if anything worked.
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Phil wrote:
I don't know what has happened with Snes9x but right now, with version 7, I can't record to AVI. When trying to record to AVI, Snes9x just crashes.
Works for me. Does it only happen when you record bigger than a certain size or replace a large existing movie or use a certain codec or anything else like that?
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
I know this thread is pretty ancient, but I watched prower's MMX3 run recently and it seems to be one of the most improvable published runs. So I had some questions:
Is prower still working on v2 of his run?
Can anyone convince me that getting the air dash is anything but a huge waste of time? (It takes 22 seconds to get it, and saves at most 3 seconds in Neon Tiger's stage and basically no time anywhere else that I can see.)
Assuming it isn't necessary to get the air dash, is there a better order to do the stages in or would prower's route still be solid in that case?
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
You're right about the enemies, actually it seems to waste a frame or two to get hit despite looking a lot faster. The tree boss can be manipulated at the very beginning by sucking air before its first attack (may be necessary to do it more than once). The cloud bosses have a non-random attack pattern, but I think the wait time before they go onto the next phase is somewhat random (may also apply to other bosses, not sure about in extra game mode, though). I'm pretty sure that shooting fireballs doesn't slow you down unless there were just enough enemies that it adds to the lag and it doesn't hit and kill an enemy. I was impressed by the Lololo battles. (And I didn't know it was possible to skip getting the Kirby's in the 4 pre-boss-rematch areas.)
Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1301)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Hmm... this is a nice run, but, I know it can be improved. If you jump onto an enemy to purposely take damage, it pushes you very quickly to the side, and as an added bonus it also kills the enemy and lets you walk through and kill other enemies (reducing lag), so all of the damage you take should go toward this, especially in areas that aren't over land or have lots of enemies. Also, I think your boss fights can be a lot faster by manipulating them more - their randomness is determined almost entirely by how many times you've pressed the B button to suck in air, so for instance you can inhale some air for no apparent reason during the battle with the tree boss to make it skip its gust-blowing attack and go straight to dropping enemies at you (EDIT: looks like you actually do this starting with the second tree battle, but it should also be done earlier.) And I think this game has some concept of acceleration, so jumping before edges when you need to go down should save a few frames.
(oh, one more thing: When you get the first fire powerup, why did you not roast all the enemies in front of you and instead let them slow the game down?)
