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Yeah, wow, all sandworms dead in less than 5 seconds, with regular arrows. I wonder what other enemies that tactic works that well on... you'll probably need to manipulate a bunch of arrow drops at some point, since you're down to only 5 now.
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What do you mean by "cannot load"? Does it give an error message or crash or something? The only other possibility that occurs to me is that it's just not letting you choose JMA files from the ROM dialog, which could be because the ROM dialog was changed slightly by the MinGW patch, although I don't see any indication of such an oversight in that code.
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The diff between v6 and v7 is up. It's at
http://nvdata.pilif.ch/snes9x-imp-v6v7.diff.zip
Only thing missing from that should be the new icon file, and that I updated my version of zLib.
BoltR wrote:
Then is it only me that cannot load JMA files with your improvement?
Is this new to just this version? (I doubt it... it's probably safe to assume Nach's JMA update didn't break JMA support.) I haven't changed any of the JMA or ROM-loading code myself, and I'm compiling with JMA_SUPPORT defined, so I'm not sure what could be causing it to not work.
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BoltR wrote:
nitsuja, do you think you could add JMA support? I beleive Nach gave you a patch to do so on the previous page.
I already put JMA support back in a while ago. And I'm also already using Nach's new JMA code in this version. (I knew I was forgetting to mention something!)
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I just put up another new version (v7), see page 1 of this thread. It's mostly a bug fixing and code/GUI cleaning up release. (As I was putting together patches, I realized some things were a lot easier to fix than to justify leaving in.)
Newest change(s) in this version:
* Fixed the problem with input fields staying green when deselected.
* Added another page to the hotkeys dialog filled with more hotkeys, so now almost no keys are hardcoded anymore.
* Added proper key conflict detection, including between game buttons and hotkeys.
* Added more info to input config text message, repositioned some dialog elements, removed controller toggle-mode checkbox, moved turbo/toggle keys around to make more sense (you may have to reassign them if you have them set from an older version).
* Fixed a bug (mine) that prevented Pocky & Rocky from working (don't worry; it didn't seem to affect any other games).
* Fixed a bug (not mine) with the & symbol in the "recent roms" menu and author info display.
* Made the Snes9x icon high-resolution so it doesn't look quite as ugly. (Just what everyone needed, right?)
* Made drop-down boxes that make no sense to type into un-editable.
* Added an accelerator shortcut to access the hotkeys menu, put "maintain aspect ratio" and "use video memory" in the Window menu, removed fake accelerators.
* Fixed problem with Escape not exiting the Display dialog box.
Edit:
DeHackEd: which unix code is broken? It'd help to know what needs to be done to fix it. I'm a little confused which version you're talking about if you don't have the code for this one yet. (I'll put up a diff soon...)
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Nice speedrun. I suppose now TSA is working on outdoing it?
(I'm now sure that this time attack should easily be less than 90 minutes, considering that about 100 minutes time was achieved even with human error, bad luck, and without using restart sequences or glitches. By the way Omni, the overworld path to get the book of Mudora is 1.5 seconds faster than yours...)
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Basically everything you've done so far seems very optimized to me (I tried going through a few rooms in different ways and was almost always either slower by a few frames or exactly the same speed), but I also wouldn't be too surprised if this enables you to shave off a few more frames from what you've done so far. It should definitely help for the rest of the run, in any case.
Oh, and keep in mind that each save state contains the entire movie in it up to that point, so you're allowed to load states that are along different branches in time (i.e. out-of-order) and each one will restore the part of the movie that got to that point. So you can make a save state of each way to do something, then load the one with the lowest frame count and keep going.
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When you cross over the elevator platform right after getting the morph ball, what you do is 4-5 frames slower than running across it normally.
(edit: Uh, I wasn't intending to kill the thread or anything, I was just pointing it out in case you wanted to know. The rest of it looks great to me.)
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Some comments:
After around frame 9000, if you stop further up the stairs you can get through the door 1 frame faster (as you do later around frame 9600). Probably not worth fixing since it might screw up the randomness you rely on for a larger speed gain, but it (stopping too close/far from doors) is something to look out for elsewhere.
When you stand still on the right side of the room (and some other times), I realize you're going to edit that out of your AVI, but couldn't you do something more entertaining than standing there at times like that? You only have to end up in the same spot for editing purposes, it's not necessary to remain motionless the whole time.
Really great work overall.
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It's an awesome choice of a game, but it looks like this run can be a lot better. Health management, upward movement, and boss strategies especially look the most improveable. (I did notice a good amount of attention to detail, just not always enough of it in places it was needed.)
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That's from this thread (which has info about an FTP site you can use) :
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1815
although DeHackEd's is more specially designed for this sort of thing.
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qbproger wrote:
it seems audio is out of sync with video in the avi.
I think the emulator itself screws up on the sound timing for certain scenes, specifically in the intro after the princess gets captured and mario comes out. Some other games do this too, and there's no way to avoid it at the moment. But most of the game's sound is timed correctly.
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I think I know why you might have had trouble getting 59.85: I tried for the fastest time and could only get 59.84 no matter what frame I started going left, but then I realized I was forgetting to hold down the run button; once I did that I managed to get 59.85. It's not a randomness thing or anything else, I didn't know what I was talking about before, either you're not holding run or you're not starting from as many pixels to the right as you could be without falling off the edge. If it's the former, I'm not saying you're actually forgetting to run, but maybe you have the buttons set up wrong so the button you think is the run button is not really the run button. (Oh, and does your edit mean you ended up getting 59.86? First of all, how? And second of all, maybe that .01 saved is the reason you can't get a certain exact time after the next room.)
(btw, this is another reason to use the custom improved snes9x: you can tell it to hold down the run button for you to avoid having to hold it all the time, and if you press "," it will start showing you which buttons you have held down)
And, I agree that at some point, you should post the smv of just the intro & escape (you're not starting from a saved game, right?), if you don't do anything super-secret during that time, since it's always possible that someone here will find a way to improve upon part of it.
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Wow, I would've suggested starting over as being way easier, but for some reason I thought you were too strongly against it.
michael flatley wrote:
I probably won't resort to the WIP because an official release is easier to come by. I don't want an smv only compatible with a certain WIP.
I think some different things are being confused here.
There is a Snes9x 1.43 Final official release, which I suggest you do not use because it seems to always have occasional desync problems. It's no fun to have to re-do something just because the emulator messed up.
There is a Snes9x 1.43 WIP official release. While better as far as desync goes, it is an older release and this is not what OgreSlayeR was talking about.
There is a custom build of Snes9x in the thread OgreSlayeR linked to, which I suggest you DO use because of the extra features, which include hotkey customization and better graphics (depending on what you set) when playing, among other things. It's fully backwards-compatible with the above versions (whichever one you want) and if you don't believe me you can always try playing back your movie with an official version and you'll see that it plays back exactly the same. SMVs made with this version have already been published at this site. It's not "hard to come by" and even if it was, it isn't needed to play back what you make with it. And if your Snes9x movie is already underway (which it is), you can continue making the rest of it with this version without having to start over again. But it's your choice, of course.
As for the slower escape time, I think Omni's suggestion makes the most sense. It might be the case that you're actually faster than before even though this causes the countdown timer to seem to indicate that you're slower. Then again that might not be the case, you are still getting used to using a different emulator after all.
(edit: just to clarify, when you say "currently timing at 59.84 instead of 58.85" do you mean the 59.84 is what you got on ZSNES while 58.85 is what you get now? Because 59.84 is faster than 58.85 if you mean it the other way around.)
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Wow, you sure showed those werewolves, plus that was a pretty funny bug with their skeletons. It's amazing how much stronger you're able to make the characters seem than they normally would be. I guess the Tropicalo fight just looks so improveable in comparison to the other fights (but I'll take your word for it if you're sure it isn't improveable).
Also, I hope you're able to do some cool stuff with the 3-playerness of the game. Like controlling them separately in battles, taking turns killing monsters with criticals while the other characters run by, etc.
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Zer0 wrote:
Uhm yes, about the fight with Tropicalo. I really can't hit him earlier, and I always tested if I could hit him more times without diving in immediatly the next time he appears, but that only worked one time, all the other tmes he dived in immediatly.
A quick comment on this: Keep in mind that sometimes hitting as soon as possible can be slower overall because of randomness in enemy AI and/or other frame-dependent calculations. It's not necessarily the case here, but when something only happens once it's often possible to get it to happen again.
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Nach wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
it would help if you could tell me which things you want in separate patches
I'll have to go over the change log and discuss it with the other devs first.
OK, in the meantime I'll try putting some patches together (I suppose I can resort to using something resembling common sense for deciding what to keep separate).
Fabianx wrote:
Why do you need to change the savestate format to just display the number of played frames since reset?
_I_ would just add another counter for that ...
That would work until you load a save state, then how are you supposed to know how much to decrease the frame counter by unless the number of elapsed frames is stored in the save state?
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michael flatley wrote:
It will be entertaining and will require more than a few viewings to catch everything. Anyway, I'm really baffled at all the negative feedback I'm getting even before the release.
You shouldn't be baffled, it's not strange that a lot of people at a site that has certain conventions (for a reason) will have the same opinion about those conventions not being followed, especially because you gave so little information initially that many probably assumed you were following them and then only later revealed otherwise. But, actually there hasn't been and really can't be any feedback (positive or negative) on the contents of your run itself, not until it's released. So I'm not sure what else you expected the response to be after making such a revelation, seeing as how you're keeping most of what you're actually doing secret and not giving much else to talk about (edit: uh, well you just posted something back on track while I was typing that).
Anyway I don't think we're trying to be overly negative about it. I'm sure it will be entertaining, and I'll try to watch it. The only real problem I see with doing what you're doing is that you will have no proof of the legitimacy of your video when it's done (by that I mean, not even proof that it's theoretically possible to do anything you did, even if it probably is), and also that people here most likely don't want a heavily edited AVI associated with this site because there are (or have been) so many misconceptions about the videos that are at the site already.
(edit: And we haven't been unwilling to help out. Most people including me probably just don't know enough about Super Metroid to be able to provide you with helpful info about it...)
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Yeah, but there were plans to make a 100% run of just The Great Cave Offensive. (Of course, then people would want a completely 100% run where you beat Dynablade with both secret levels opened, Milky Way Wishes with all the abilities obtained, and The Arena so that you get the Sound Test. Heh.)
MWW with all abilities obtained and at least most of them used is something I could see being entertaining. And I would still like to see a 100% Great Cave Offensive run because actually I've never found all the treasures and I don't think it'll take quite as long as people think without the getting-lost-all-the-time part that happens when playing it normally.
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Well, Zelda games make good time attacks, and Terranigma is a lot closer to Zelda than to, say, Dragon Warrior. (Actually Terranigma has better action potential than many games, with the real-time battles, very short invincibility periods, ability to run in 12 directions, and the variety of spear attacks.) Admittedly, Dragon Warrior and some other RPGs have tricky ways of getting through them fast which is probably the real reason people would want to see runs of them, but I'm still convinced this game also has some way of beating it faster than one would think possible.
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At the very end it looks like it's a tiny bit slower to not be exactly on top of the door when Wart dies. (But in this case I figured I would vote Yes first and ask questions later.)
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You haven't replied to my last post before this. I'm just saying this because we posted at almost the exact same time and the thread has since moved to a new page so I thought maybe you missed it.
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michael flatley wrote:
I don't need re-records if I'm just releasing an avi. ... Thanks for the input guys but avi it is...
Well then I guess there's no point in us yelling at you to do otherwise, but you should understand why the people at this site would want a non-AVI version also available. I think at some point one of us will want to make our own faster video (faster than Teri's current one, I mean) in our own way using these tricks, and you mentioned that you were willing to make short demo videos in a format of our choice, so could you please (when you're done with the avi) make a little .smv movie clip of each of the big tricks/glitches that nobody else has done/used before?
(BTW, isn't using ZSNES and relying solely on video editing to piece the frames together a hell of a lot more effort than necessary? And ZSNES picture quality isn't better unless you have your Snes9x settings wrong, except in some very few games ZSNES emulates better which Super Metroid is not among.)
Saturn wrote:
Sadly ZSNES has changed the movie recorder after version 1.01 because the older versions had very large movie files (about 5 MB per hour) and they wanted to compress them like snes9x so they changed the movie recorder, and this was (IMO) the biggest mistake they did so far since the the new movie recorder has so much sync errors (because of compression of the .zmv files)
Are you saying ZSNES originally recorded more than just the button input for each frame? Because regular compression does not change anything, just as zip compressing it afterwards doesn't change it, and Snes9x does not compress its movie data at all anyway.
(edited for clarification and fixing a typo)
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michael flatley wrote:
As for the avi being suspicious, are you serious? There are people hex-editing their runs here. What in the world could I be doing that even comes close to that?
This argument makes no sense. For one thing, hex editing isn't any less legitimate than using re-records, really it's just a very tedious way of re-recording parts of a movie. And videos can be edited to do things the game would not do, whereas game input cannot.
As for you releasing an edited AVI, I'm fine with that, but could you please also post somewhere the smv file (when you're done) so we can look at it? I for one don't have a good enough internet connection to be able to download the AVI, and I'm guessing some other people here are in the same situation. (EDIT: or maybe I misunderstand and you actually mean you are using ZSNES for no good reason despite the fact that it has no re-recording? It sounded to me like you just said you're not using ZSNES because you need re-records and frame advance.)
