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I'm going to delurk a bit again after noticing that my Golden Axe movie got the new "Heavy Luck Manipulation" tag.
Things in that movie that feature luck manipulation:
* Some extremely crude trial-and-error luck manipulation in most (but not all) of the bonus stages.
* One thief in the Stage 7.
And that's it on the luck manipulation front. Seriously. (Heck, other than the thieves, I'm 99% convinced that Golden Axe doesn't call the random number generator.)
Oh, and whatever happened to the promising Golden Axe stage 1 video? Use that as a base, find somebody that actually understands luck manipulation (instead of more or less faking it like I did) to optimize the bonus stages and steal my GA star. Please!
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eternaljwh wrote:
Isn't GA2 4-player in its arcade incarnation?
GA2 Arcade and GA2 Genesis are two entirely different games--different stages, different characters, different animals to ride, different magic system, etc. Both involve quasi-medieval adventures to kill a huge dude with an axe, animals of some sort to ride and bonus stages that involve getting items via violence to mooks, but the similarities end about there.
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I agree with the decision to go with 2 players in GA2. One trick that may be useful is for 2 player combos--e.g., 1 player does slash-slash while player 2 is already in midair for the fatal downslash.
If you use the two humans, it's possible to get them to "kiss" during downtime.
Don't know if "magic throws" work in GA2/GA3 (jumping downslash, turn the frame after hitting to knock the enemy forwards) but that might be worth checking out, too.
As for GA1, I've mentioned this before, but somehow pausing-unpausing just before a bonus round starts changes the RNG rolls. Pausing and unpausing at different frames has different results and multiple pause/unpauses can change the RNG even further. Why that works, I don't know.
Another thing that may or may not be useful is that a bonus round can be shorter if you enter it with one or zero pots. Since the thieves add the stolen pots to their inventories, it takes fewer hits to get rid of a thief that hasn't stolen extra pots. After review, I believe I should have NOT taken any pots in stage 3 bonus or stage 4.
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Mukki wrote:
Golden Axe
I have a massive amount of respect for Trazz's run. If anyone has any ideas for improvement please raise them because I hope to make a very good job of this run.
Looks like I didn't get all the frames, eh? Keep finding a few surplus frames here and there and the awesome should take care of itself.
I've chosen to make this a single player run. A two-player run would be considerably faster, but because there are no more enemies or challenges it would essentially be a two player run of a single player game. I don't believe this would be as entertaining from a TAS perspective, but I'm very interested to hear other people's opinions.
I briefly experimented with a GA I two player run and came to the conclusion that combination was a very, very poor candidate for entertainment quickly. Tyris already is quite capable of slicing through everything and has to dash around quickly to keep the kills coming. Two characters with TAS-granted-powers would make most of the interesting screens solvable with pure brute force.
I've been out of the TAS scene for some time and will likely be so for quite some time. Good luck finding more excess frames!
(P.S.--Shadow Dancer is also improvable but, eh, don't have the time for a full run!)
Edit: Watched the mkv file. Nice work so far! I blathered on about various stuff in my multiple posts about my multiple versions of the run--hopefully you can glean some useful information there.
Luck manipulation should only be a major issue during the bonus stages but luck manipulation WILL be THE major issue in those bonus stages! A breakthrough in manipulating the RNG for those stages should be a guaranteed source of saved frames.
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That was _funny_ and by funny I mean totally sweet.
1) Samhain-Grim is a mammal.
2) He fights video game characters all the time.
3) He kills video game characters and the game flips out.
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4matsy wrote:
Space Invaders at the "invisible enemies firing fast wavy shots, moving shields, and big player sprites" setting. :p
And two players at once, too. I don't think this setting is even possible at real-time speeds.
Missle Command might also be interesting if the game uses the "start from the yellow wave + smart bombs" variation--I'm not sure it's even possible to complete some of those waves unscathed even in a TAS.
Fishing Derby might be interesting if someone could find a way to win with a shutout. (read: find a way to prevent the CPU from catching anything. Might not be possible.)
Asteroids? Three words. Nonstop thrusting demo. Okay, it sounds dirty but it would be insane to see the ship racing around at maximum speed and not going splat. This might require extensive hyperspace or shields to work.
If somebody wants to make Atari 2600 speed runs, I wouldn't worry about not getting at least a few interesting speedruns. After all, there's been some great videos from unlikely sources before. (Dark Castle? King's Bounty!? And who would have predicted that an Excitebike video would be insanely good?)
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Myria wrote:
Let's say you were a developer of a game and you wanted to make it difficult to make a TAS of the game. How would you do it?
MMORPG. No save states, no server source code, lots of other people running around, lots of items, did I mention no save states, people pestering you with questions like "How I mine for fish?"...
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AjAX wrote:
Cool, thats what i was doing anyway by hoping that you can go back in time by any other way.
Alright guys.
Thanks again! :P
Nope. No rewinding. Use lots of save states--outside of replaying the movie, they're the only way you can "go back in time".
Also, slow motion isn't completely useless--just useless almost all of the time. There may be a point in your movie where running in a straight line is all you have to do for a second or two. Slow motion can be used in that situation. Another case can happen in-between levels if the game has screens that don't respond to button presses at all. If the game isn't listening to the buttons then there's nothing to optimize. Be sure to create a save state in the middle of that slow-motion section, though--you'll want to optimize what comes after that section using frame advance.
If this doesn't make any sense, or if there's any situation that involves anything more complicated than simply holding a button or three down and not letting go, or if there's ever any doubt, always use frame advance.
Personally, I used a playstation style pad when creating my two one-player TAS runs for Genesis games. Since I did runs of 3 button games, I had four free shoulder pad buttons. I assigned one of them to do frame advance, one for pausing and one for activating slow motion. That way I could do a lot of the work without having to touch the keyboard--I could do frame-by-frame work and, on rare occasion, switch into slow-motion (e.g., there's some parts of Golden Axe where all you have to do is walk/run to the right for a bit). Of course, I ended up using the keyboard frequently anyways to save and load save states but that's okay. I'm just not willing to buy a 25+ button controller.
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Voted meh after seeing the run via Google Videos.
Pros: Beats a(n in)famous game quickly.
Cons: Lousy music. Stupid bossfight. Long bossfight. Lousy music during long, stupid bossfight.
I guess it's okay to publish this with a "Music from Hell" warning label.
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xoinx wrote:
moozooh wrote:
How about making 3-4 screenshots that can be switched manually on the individual movie page ("more movies/history of this entry/similar movies" style)? Shot #1 will load by default (on both the individual page and the list), the buttons won't take too much space, everyone's happy.
Seconded... though updating every run on the site would be tedious. Or would this only apply to new publications?
Who says that all of the movies need a slideshow? If a person really likes a movie, they can make a slideshow or animated .gif or three for that movie's page. If most movies never get more than one static screenshot, that's perfectly fine. (Heck, even that one screenshot isn't strictly necessary--people can download the .avi files and watch the whole thing without.)
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Ouzo wrote:
I've been thinking for a while that instead of just a screenshot for movie entries we could put 3-6 screenshots together in a slideshow or maybe use a section of the movie for an animated gif (like in the Mega Man Tricks section). What do you think?
That might work nicely for an individual movie's page. That's an awful lot of bandwidth for some of the larger collections (e.g., all NES or all Genesis movie pages), though.
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NesVideoAgent wrote:
<hr/><b>This movie has been published.</b><br/>The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie.<hr/>See <a href="http://tasvideos.org/709M.html">http://tasvideos.org/709M.html</a><hr/>
It's been awhile but it's finally published. Very cool screen shot, too--I've only too published movies but you guys have given me outstanding screen shots both times.
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Haven't tried to create a TAS in a while so I thought I'd try a fairly simple 2 player run--Rolling Thunder 2.
Here's a WIP containing level 1:
http://storeandserve.com/download/558933/Rolling_Thunder_2_%28U%29_%5Bc%5D%5B%21%5D.gmv.html
While it certainly doesn't look like it, this is actually a no damage run so far. There's a whole lot of "that attack does no damage" abuse though...
Notes so far:
* Contact with a non-attacking enemy does zero hp of damage but does knock the player back and grant temporary invincibility. That invinciblity can then be abused to safely absorb bullets, etc.
* Absorbed bullets knock the player backwards. If the player faces leftwards, absorbed bullets knock the player rightwards.
* An invincible player can also shield a non-invincible player by absorbing bullets.
* It takes a few frames for a player to draw his or her gun. Once drawn, bullets can be fired on every other frame until the player moves again.
* The goal of level 1 appears to be to reach the end with no enemies in sight. Simply reaching the end of the level will not complete the level if enemeis are still alive.
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mark wrote:
i feel so ashamed that i cant spell properly when im english -.- o well ill just have to hope no one scolds me >.<
Don't think of this request as a scolding but you should work on your grammer.
When you are walking about town, people can see how you dress and how well you take care of your personal hygiene. If you haven't changed your clothes, brushed your teeth, combed your hair nor taken a bath for three days, people are going to notice how sloppy you are and will tend to react negatively.
When you are writing on a bulletin board the only thing people can see are your words. If you write in a sloppy fashion people will assume bad things about you.
Also, if you do have a serious case of Tourette's syndrome, you have an even stronger reason to improve your ability to read and write. Having your life complicated by Tourette's Syndrome is bad enough--you do not need to further reduce your chances of getting a good job by being unable to read and write effectively.
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FractalFusion wrote:
I guess the statement is up to interpretation. Especially the word "garbage".
My interpretation was that a "garbage run" is a useless run, or a run which makes you think "I shouldn't have done this", or a run which you should delete from your computer without second thought.
My definition is, "Ouch, it hurts to watch this. I know this can be done more efficiently." For me at least, my first published Golden Axe run definitely falls in this category.
You could be right--garbage may be too strong of a word. On the other hand, I do want to use a strong word--I've learned the hard way that just because one thinks one has done a great run doesn't mean that run won't be greatly improved by redoing the whole thing from level 1. I want to imply that it's okay to take that first run, analyze it, find its weaknesses and make then make that first run completely and totally obsolete.
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FractalFusion wrote:
trazz wrote:
2) Your first run will be garbage.
That is a rather negative statement.
No, it is not a "rather negative statement"--as long as you don't take it out of context.
trazz wrote:
2) Your first run will be garbage. That's okay. Redo the entire game from the start and look for new stuff--you'll surprise yourself by finding new ways to save time.
Doing a TAS requires noticing a ton of details and it's very, very easy to miss several details on the first attempt.
I though my first Golden Axe submission was pretty good but it had several severe problems. I used a trick to get a jumping-downthrust to connect once in the submission and never even thought about using that trick elsewhere. I missed multiple attempts to hit two enemies with one strike. I used magic 4 times and 2 of those times caused an unnessary knockdown, prolonging the life of the stage boss (even though I used magic correctly against the last boss). In short, I missed multiple chances to save time on all of the first seven stages (The eigth and final stage is very, very short).
My first run of that game was error-filled garbage. (It got published anyways--sometimes major errors aren't obvious.) That's okay, though--when I redid the run, I found and corrected those errors.
It takes a lot of screw-ups to learn a craft well. You don't see first drafts for sale at your local bookstore. Every Olympic downhill skiier started their career by crashing on not-particularly-steep slopes. In the same way, it's possible to make mind-blowing TAS runs--but it often takes several not-even-close-to-optimal-attempts to get good enough to make those runs--and even the good runs have rerecording counts in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. It's not "rather negative" to point out that you *must* fail thousands of times before creating a good TAS.
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FeelTheMagic wrote:
Wow, thanks for the detailed response! It helped quite a bit actually :)
I still need to figure out a game I want to try my first TAS on, but it seems all the classics have been done. (Secret of Mana is one of my all time favs, but it's already a WIP and I think a shorter game would be better for my first)
I'll figure something out, thanks for your help :D
1) Yes, shorter games are better for a first run. It can take hours to plan even a minute of a TAS run.
2) Your first run will be garbage. That's okay. Redo the entire game from the start and look for new stuff--you'll surprise yourself by finding new ways to save time.
3) Always look for ways to influence the game--sometimes the strangest stuff changes how the game plays because the game is depending on you to help it create psuedo-random numbers. The only way to completely understand how the pseudo-random number generator works is to reverse engineer the game. If you can't do that (which won't be uncommon--you will need to learn the assembly language used by your console of choice to pull this off), you'll want to make very careful observations as you play.
In my published Golden Axe run, I actually pause the game briefly during the beginning of some of the bonus stages to get a favorable psuedo-random number. It's much faster to waste a few frames with the game paused and to get all of the thieves to appear close together than it is to start the bonus round immediately and waste many frames chasing the thieves all over the screen.
In my unpublished Shadow Dancer run, I discovered that randomly hitting the buttons during the introduction animation of the 4th boss stage actually changes which pattern that boss uses. There's only one pattern that allows one to kill the boss extremely quickly--all of the other patterns allow the boss to escape hitstun or otherwise waste time. It took me awhile to figure out that random button presses at the beginning of the stage actually affected the game (after all, you cannot move your character at all during this time) and then it took several wild guesses before I could find a button mashing sequence set up the exact psuedo-random number I wanted.
Oh, and don't think that everything is random, either. If an enemy is programmed to always appear at a specific part of a level and then always run directly and your character, luck-manipulation is not going to help. On the other hand, a RPG will have many scenarios in which parts are psuedo-random and parts aren't--e.g., the final boss will always appear in the final level but that boss' attacks will be pseudo-random. (But, then again, you might just find a glitch that lets you avoid the final boss and win the game even if you aren't supposed to be able to do that...)
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FeelTheMagic wrote:
For example, luck manipulation in RPGs I don't quite understand.
There is nothing random in a NES or a N64 or a Sega Genesis. Barring any saved games on a battery chip (and most of the time one is NOT allowed to start from such a game), the game will always be in a specific state when the power is turned on.
(State: everything in a video game is defined by numbers or true/false statements. E.g.
Super Mario starts off with three lives.
Mario starts on level 1-1.
It is FALSE that Mario is Super when the game starts.
etc., etc. All of these numbers and conditions combinded make up the state of the game.)
However, things would be a bit boring if everything happened the same way every time.
Let's make up a fake game: Absurdly Simplified Princess-Saving. ASP is a computer RPG game for the NES, featuring one teenaged hero who must fight foes and kill randomly encountered monsters until he defeats the evil dragon at the bottom of the local cave.
Now, to make things interesting, not all of the teenaged hero's attacks will hit. Since we're cheap, we'll make determine if the hero hits or not with a simple table.
Hit
Miss
Hit
Miss
Hit
Miss
Critical Hit!
Miss
Now, if we were just to choose these outcomes in order, things would be boring. The hero would always hit, then always miss, then always hit..etc. We want to be random--but we can't. There's nothing random inside a NES. As it mentions in the site's FAQ, computers are calculators, calculators do math and there's nothing random about 2+2. Therefore, the game has to use a trick: humans are kind of random, so let's use the human to pick the random numbers for us!
Now, it wouldn't be fair if we let the human pick the number directly (he'd always pick Critical Hit!, no?), so instead, we set up sort of an imaginary roulette wheel inside the game. If the human hits the attack button in the first 1/60th of a second, it's a hit. If the human hits the attack button in the second 2/60th of a second, it's a miss. Since humans do not have perfect reflexes, the human won't always hit the button during the same 1/60th of a second and therefore won't always get the same results. This makes our game look random. It isn't--it's psuedo-random. (Psuedo meaning false or "not really, it just kinda looks that way".)
(NES games, or at least Japanese/American ones, generally function on 1/60th of a second intervals because Japanese/American television sets draw a frame every 1/60th of a second. The image looks better when the game and the monitor are sychronized. Each period of 1/60th of a second is called a frame because that's the term that the television experts use.)
Now, let's look at what happens when you have an re-recording emulator. When you have the ability to slow the game down frame by frame and even "rewind time" with save states, the game isn't anywhere close to random. The user can get a critical hit every time--all the TAS maker has to do create a savestate before the battle starts and them press the attack button during the first possible frame. If that creates a Critical Hit, well, that's great! If not, the TAS-maker can reload the save-state and then wait one frame to see if waiting one frame creates the Critical Hit. If that doesn't work, the TAS-maker can reload, wait two frames...etc., etc. Eventually, the TAS-maker can find the exact frame needed to get a critical hit and therefore can make a movie that beats Absurdly Simplified Princess-Saving in which the hero always gets a Critical Hit when he attacks.
Things get a lot more complicated than this--many situations call for multiple random numbers before the game asks the human to press a button. E.g., if the monster survives the first attack, it gets a chance to attack the hero. In that case, the TAS-maker may have to find a wait time that allows the hero to get a good psuedo-random number and the enemy to get a bad psuedo-random number.
There's also random numbers everywhere in an RPG game. Therefore, you'll see a person who makes a TAS of an RPG game doing odd pauses here and there. They're trying to get the "roulette wheel" to land on a specific "random" encounter or they are trying to get the "random" encounters to not happen at all or they are trying to win the jackpot in the village lottery game or...
After all, when the game has to rely on the human to pick random numbers and the human is allowed to try things over and over again, the human can eventually make all of the "random" events go his way.
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Baxter wrote:
I'm getting the impression you submitted all these run to get the 1111th submission... but with that theory it wouldn't make sense that you submitted 2 (at this point) more movies. I can't say I watched this movie, but it's over 3 and a half minutes slower than FODA's submission.
At least check if there are faster movies out there before submitting something.
If he can quickly submit 223 more movies, he can have the 1337th submission, too...
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Ramzi wrote:
While the animation is very nice and easy to follow... the bottom row is still only two pieces. JXQ's solution let's the bottom row be nice different pieces.
No, the bottom row is comprised of the maximum number of pieces. The eight rows on the left can be made by eight "beanpole" pieces stacked like this:
||||||||
The next piece completes three lines, leaving only the bottommost box of the eight beanpoles intact as well as adding a ninth box from the dropped piece.