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Getting past title screens is boring and it's possible for a game to have many title screens where one only has to push one button once on the right frame to continue. Unlike other parts of a speedrun, getting a single button press within a few second timespan is not going to run into a scenario where the bot needs to test 600^8 or more possible inputs to optimize a 10 second scenario.
Here's an idea of how an recording emulator might be able to automate many typical title screens/level name screens/"push button to continue screen".
The emulator could have a "pixelbot function". Once activated, the menubot could ask you to pick an estimated time, a particular button, a particular pixel on the screen. (E.g., the user says that the current screen should change within 5 seconds, you press the start button to get the screen to change and then clicks on a pixel that will change when the title screen changes.) The emulator then automatically tries to press the specified button at different times (it would probably be much faster if the emulator didn't try to render these attempts) and then automaticaly records the attempt that caused the targetted pixel to change the fastest.
If spamming the button on alternate frames is acceptable--and I think it usually is for most games, then program should get a usable result almost instantly. It would only have to make two attempts for those cases: one for even frames, one for odd frames. Such a feature might be able eliminate a fair amount of tedium in a speed run for a game that requires you to press a button at the beginning of each level.
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moozooh wrote:
Obviously, this is a great improvement timewise, but a pure sword-run isn't very pleasant to hear, cause using different animals is a matter of variety, and not using them somehow lowers it quite considerably. When speedrunning GA III with Panther back in 90's, I used pretty much the same move (R, L, R, attack+jump) almost all the time, and it really helped me not to get hit and deliver 100% accuracy at the same time. Still, if I TAS'd this game, I'd most probably didn't use it at all just for the sake of entertainment.
But well, I say that without looking at the result, so would you mind sharing a WIP? I sure seem sceptical, your work may be much funnier than I think it is now.
I'd argue the opposite. Animals are boring and take variety out.
Combos? Gone. Jumping attacks? Gone. Your most powerful attacks? Gone. Number of times you have to knock the same enemy down before it actually dies? Increased.
I tossed the WIP onto one of those free fileserver things. Don't know if it will be up there a month from now, don't care that much either. This should do for now:
[URL=http://storeandserve.com/download/189466/GA_1.ZIP.html]GA_1.ZIP[/URL]
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moozooh wrote:
Yeah, this new run ought to be at least as fun as the present one (especially during the waiting sequences). However, 7+ seconds for just the first level is already cool. :)
How does 24 seconds 48 frames of saved time by the time the level 3 boss dies sound?
However, I've had to forsake using all of the animals in stages 1-3. As far as time attacking goes, they're all massive downgrades. You lose your most powerful attack, you lose the ability to combo and you're stuck with two moderately powerful attacks that always knock foes over so you have to wait for them to get back up. The sword is a much better weapon.
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deathout wrote:
Trazz wrote:
Wow--you've made one post and it's just for me? That's almost better than a vote!
Oh yeah! I was working on a shadow dancer run based on Neofix 01 version movie... Then FODA show me you perfect(or near perfection) movie and I had to coment and congratulate you :)
Big difference between trying to beat ~14:05 and 12:52:47, no?
If you're still intested in Shadow Dancer, good luck on your run. I tried to leave behind as few opportunties for improvement as possible but I might have missed a dozen frames here or there without knowing about it. I only have vague ideas on how the second and last boss move, so there might be luck manipulation opportunites there.
I might think differently later, but for now, the 12:52:47 run is my last attempt at figuring out this game.
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Neofix wrote:
in english:
1- Yes it is possible to hit 2 enemies at the same time in the level 1. But for that is necessary positions-them joined, what is going to lose a long time.
Not true. I can't get the first two enemies to stand close enough together to hit both at once. However, if you defeat the first two enemies and then move up+right and then down+right, it's possible to hit the next two enemies at the same time. This saves over two seconds.
There's a lot of great ideas in this movie but there's still lots of room for improvement. I'm working on a run--my current draft covers level 1 and I've already found 7 seconds and 11 frames worth of improvements and I might be able to elminate another frame or two in the boss fight sequence.
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IdeaMagnate wrote:
Was it a desync or did you take a bunch of damage on the Statue of Liberty stage on purpose? Other than that, I found this more entertaining than the previous versions and will be glad to give this a yes too. I especially like how you end input before the game is really over.
As FODA said, there's no player damage in the game. Every character that has more than one hitpoint is an enemy ninja or a boss. The dog can take damage (he yelps and then transforms into a puppy) but that would be cruel.
The bumps on that level are used to shove ninjas around, cancel their attacks and showing off. People said that just killing the ninja wasn't very interesting. Even worse, there's nothing you can do to speed up the level. To make things more interesting, I don't use normal tactics on that level and try to see how many silly situations I can get Shinobi into before the ride is over.
Three bumps run into a ninja that has already left the platform. In two of those three, I've walked Shinobi completely off of the platform and he's completely helpless. In both cases, the suicidal gold ninjas bump Shinobi back onto the platform and the game continues.
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deathout wrote:
Yes!!!(oops... i can´t vote =/)
I really enjoyed the movie, specially The Statue of Liberty elevator and The Final Battle :)
Great job for a great classic!!
Wow--you've made one post and it's just for me? That's almost better than a vote!
By the way, getting voting privledges isn't that hard. Just make 20 or so (20? 25? It's not a huge number.) posts and don't do anything obnoxious (including spamming just to get the needed posts).
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FODA wrote:
just watched this, i found it very funny how you played around with the generic ninjas, like they were nothing at all :) good job.
feel sorry for the lag though, but yes vote.
Thanks for the complement. I'm not worried about the lag. A human player isn't supposed to successfully run away from so many ninja, particularly in level 5's Room 4 and Room 5. (It does make finding the right frame for a jump hard in those two rooms, though--the game is so busy drawing ninja that it doesn't manage to "listen" to the controller during all of the frames.)
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
What would a major glitch do?
Hopefully something interesting? Major glitches (e.g., the way you can turn an ordinary boss fight in Rygar into the final boss fight), by their nature, aren't very predictable until you've discovered them.
It might be interesting if the WarioWare game could be confused to the point that it let you skip many levels or if something equally weird happened. Otherwise, I don't see the point of trying to TAS this game.
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KDR_11k wrote:
Wario Ware has very little to optimize, the minigames have fixed length no matter what you do. Only the boss fights can vary in length and even those are often very straightforward.
Kinda like speedrunning Gradius or R-Type.
At least in Gradius or R-Type the player has the option of moving up/down/left/right at almost any time. As you already know, a huge part of WarioWare is just waiting for the right moment to press a button.
I haven't watched the movie, but I did play the original game thoroughly. Barring a major glitch, most of a WarioWare speedrun should be as pointless as a speedrun of Dance Dance Revolution.
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KDR_11k wrote:
And hell, it makes for a more interesting finale than just seeing him throw another two shuriken.
I think so, too, especially considering that one must face at least five waves of ninja and there's only three patterns. I decided to have fun with the rerun of pattern #2 and I'm a bit surprised that I was able to find a way to stay alive through the whole pattern without using the attack button, even if I had to use bumps to get past the vertical wall of forward-flipping ninjas.
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Highness wrote:
Another yes from me!
Nice played.
Allthough. Ain't it quicker to throw two shurikens instead of the ninja magic?
You must be referring to the end, no? That's the only time I use ninja magic.
The stars are faster, movie wise, but the magic is much faster, input wise. Once I release the magic button, the game is a guaranteed win and I can stop the recording.
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Truncated wrote:
Oops, this went under my radar. Watching and voting now instead.
At 2:58 somewhere (i paused too late), could you have walked further ahead before switching sides, so that you landed on the wooden box instead of the ground? (I's a shorter jump so it should take less time.)
Well, I could. I'd have to bump into a ninja on the way to the box and then I'd land on a knifeman on the other side of the fence...
It's noticably faster to jump early, avoid the two ninjas and kill the knifemen cleanly instead of playing human bumper cars on the shorter route. :)
Truncated wrote:
I really liked how you played the Statue of Liberty level.
That level was something that more or less just fell together. I started by goofing around with the first pair of blue ninjas (I play chicken with the second ninja's swords) and after a few more waves, I noticed that, while I hadn't been completely pacifistic, it was possible just to kick a ninja off the level instead of having to fight them conventionally.
Truncated wrote:
At 7:28 something (again..) it looked like you had to pause in mid-air to grab the prisoner. Could you just jump earlier?
If I jump earlier, the green cyclops will still be on the platform when I land. Since Shinobi is completely incapable of attacking downwards and the green cyclops monsters are deadly to the touch, jumping any earlier means that Shinobi will die.
Or maybe he wouldn't die--I think Shinobi can activate Ninja Magic mid jump and become invincible as he lands but Ninja Magic would waste multiple seconds.
In any case, the jump is already as early as possible. Jumping even a frame earlier has very bad consequences.
Truncated wrote:
The bonus levels and final boss are sort of repetitive no matter what you do. I think four frames is an easy trade-off for making them a little more interesting. Keeping all the ninjas alive for the final jutsu was also cool.
Well, I don't keep all of them alive. I get at least one of them to commit suicide by going too far off screen...
It was fun to leave a ninja alive at the end of wave four and finish the game by killing off that ninja, almost all the ninja from wave five and the boss with a single button.
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blob2 wrote:
I can't seem to watch any .avi speed runs that have the h264 encoding. I have Quicktime 7.0.4, which should have that built-in, but it won't play the videos. How do I fix this?
I have the same problem on my Mac. I use VLC (there's a link on the codec problem page) for playing the .avi files from this site--I can get it to open the h264 files and I'm still using OS X 10.3.9.
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My final update in this thread:
I finished the movie a few days ago--it's been on the workbench for a bit.
For anyone who wanted to see the next movie but hasn't yet--or for anyone who somehow happens to run across this obsolete thread weeks/months/a year or two from now--the thread for the improved version of this movie is at http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3510
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hero of the day wrote:
I just found a way to bankrupt the cpu within 9 seconds (the entire movie is only 9 seconds), but it involves a controversial method. If you press Start and select at the same time, an option appears on the board which says "which player am I talking to" if you select the computer players name, you can control thier actions while in the select menu. At this point you can trade all thier cash to player1 and since you are also player1 you can accept the transaction. Afterwards the computer is left with $0 and he must land on a space which costs money, only then will he go bankrupt. Should this method be allowed in a run, or is it considered cheating?
I wouldn't worry about whether or not it was cheating when the previous movie loads every dice roll and stacks the deck of cards.
However, the trade-all-the-money away plan certainly lacks style. I like watching TAS movies because they show complete dominance over the game, not because they reveal a hidden "win the game instantly" button.
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J-Rauwd wrote:
so i've got but just one more question. all other videos i've been watching that are not tool-assisted were actually performed in real time, correct? because ive got a bunch of those type of videos and i just wanna make sure.
Yes, those videos are done in real time--well, most of the time. Someone who is less than honest could play a game in slow motion, record it at normal speed and falsely claim that they played the game in real time.
This sort of dishonesty has caused a fair amount of controversy in the past and it's one of the reason this site has disclaimers stating that all movies are tool assisted and a clear definition of what a tool assisted gameplay movie is. It also causes problems for people like Twin Galaxies who have to take precautions to make sure that people aren't using tool enhanced movies to win no-tools-allowed gameplay contests.
I think TASes are like stage magic. We (Okay, I've only submitted one game so far but I have made a submission!) cannot duplicate the actions in our TAS movies no more than a stage magician can actually saw a lady in half. However, the honest TAS maker and the honest magician are not frauds--both tell people that they are using tricks to entertain and neither hides the fact that they do not have mystical, superhuman powers.
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Bisqwit wrote:
****) Of course, you could eliminate combinations which don't seem to affect the game in the long run at all. This would reduce the amount required by the calculations by some (big) factor, but still not far enough to be practical.
If you could prove that the game was only listening to one button and that the player's input only matters during 50 or less frames, you'd have search space of 2^50. Larger search spaces than 2^50 have been computed using brute force techniques.
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Boss 4 complete. One bonus stage, five themed rooms (e.g., a room with nothing but gunmen) and one boss to go.
Current time- 8:19:05 which is 3 seconds, 7 frames faster than the previous pace. Right now I'm on pace to finish in just under 12 minutes, 57 seconds.
I do not know of any ways to save frames in a bonus stage. Recent experience suggests that I have a good chance of saving a few frames in the theme rooms. The biggest remaining challenge right now is determining if the last boss can be manipulated into moving more quickly as the last boss's armour controls the pace of that fight.
Notes:
* The biggest part about time attacking boss four happens before the boss moves a pixel. As far as I can tell, once the boss starts to move, nothing can change where the boss will stop. I don't understand it fully, but by pressing buttons before the round starts and using trial and error, you can influence where the boss stops.
The most favorable stopping location that I know of is on the left side and fairly close to the bridge. During the previous run, the boss was set up to stop there. During this run, the boss defaulted to a location that was several pixels higher. This caused a large amount of fustration--at first, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't attack the boss as quickly this time. I then had to use trial and error to figure out how to do the necessary luck manipulations. However, once the boss stops in a favorable spot, it doesn't take that much TAS skill to kill it before it can move again.
* I'd have to do some more study to prove exactly how it works but bunny hopping is definitely slightly faster than walking. I think that the way it works is that if you do a forward jump and do a second forward jump during the first possible frame, you move forward one additional pixel. This explaination may not be entirely correct but it's the most logical explaination I can make as to why I can save a frame by doing two consecutive jumps.
* It's possible to jump from the ground level in 1-2 and jump kick the 1up hidden in the second story platform in 1-2. I do this but, because the icon spawns behind a roly-poly guy, you have to know what to look for to notice that the icon appears.
* I also do a few jump-kicks that don't hit anything at all because I think jump kicks that miss are amusing. I consider it demonstrationg a minor bug--unless you've turned Shuriken mode off, Shinobi is supposed to throw ninja stars if you do a jump attack and there are no targets within kicking range.
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Luke wrote:
Great to see computer programs being used for luck manipulation :) Takes away the most annoying part of making a TAS.
Could this be the first speedrun known to be optimal?
Not quite--Acim only used a large random search to find a fast solution, not an exhaustive search specifically designed to find all possible solutions. Until someone finds a way to systematically account for all possible inputs, you can't prove that a speedrun is optimal.
A huge, randomized search that uses a specially built simulation is still _extremely_ impressive, though.
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Dromiceius wrote:
trazz wrote:
I fixed the elevator level--every last ninja on the level are is either lured off the elevator or kicked off the elevator. Look out below!
Booya! :)
Looking forward to the next version.
4-1 complete.
3 seconds, 45 frames ahead of previous pace.
Part of that's due to handling boss 3 differently--if you get too close, she backs up with buzzsaw hands guarding her face. While that gets her moving in the right direction, her walking speed is too slow. By making sure I never get close enough to provoke her into backstepping, I saved a few frames.
I also saved four frames in 4-1 by making one jump slightly earlier than before. This is just before the 2nd to the last hostage--by just _barely_ clearing the green crawling monster, I have slightly less hang time.
4-1 is a pain to speedrun--lots of enemies, several enemies are in inconvienent places, there's a few bottomless pits and the level design can easily make you waste frames in less-than-obvious ways. I had to make several attempts and restudy my previous video several times just to match the time in the previous video.
Only 4-2, boss 4, a bonus level, the five enemy theme rooms and the final boss to go.
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Dromiceius wrote:
I was disappointed by the elevator level. A full pacifist thing would probably have been cool.
Other than that... yes-worthy.
I fixed the elevator level--every last ninja on the level are is either lured off the elevator or kicked off the elevator. Look out below!
While I do use some jumpkicks, none of them are directly fatal--to my surprise, this is enough to collect the Peaceful Bonus.
(Level 3-2 was brought to you by Bob Barker, who reminds everyone, "Help control the ninja population. Have your ninja fall off a world famous monument.")
Current status: 3-2 overhauled
Current time: 6:00 minutes and 5 frames (3 seconds, 34 frames ahead of previous pace).
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Dromiceius wrote:
I was disappointed by the elevator level. A full pacifist thing would probably have been cool.
Other than that... yes-worthy.
I'm redoing the run--I've recompleted 1-1, 1-2 and Boss 1 and I've shaved off 68 frames so far.
* ~10 frames are saved by jump kicking a gunman instead of pausing to throw a crouching star.
* I figured out how to kill the first shield thrower in 1-2 without having to wait for him to throw the shield and this time my solution doesn't result in the TAS-ruining missing hostage glitch.
* I understand the earthquakes better and, by delaying a jump, I can ride the earthquake for a bit, saving a frame or two.
However, I don't think it's possible to do a full pacifist run of the elevator--once you get five or more red/blue ninjas on the screen, it's very difficult to bump any of them off the platform. Five red ninjas can easily form a completely unbumpable tower of spinning katana blades. (Sure, one ninja may be on the ground and vunerable, but you'll never get close enough to bump him because he's covered by three of his buddies doing midair spinning atttacks.)
If you want to take a few extra seconds, it possible to get the Peaceful Bonus on the elevator (no attacks other than Ninja Magic). I won't do that--at least not in this run--because I'm trying to break the 13 minute mark. Right now, I'm on pace to complete the game in less than 12 minutes, 59 seconds.
Edit:
Update: Redid 1-1 through the end of boss #2.
The frame count is currently 3:23:41 which is 2 seconds and 29 frames ahead of previous pace.
Current projected time at end of game: under 12 minutes, 58 seconds