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whole tas would have to be redone past the first 7 minutes, so not something that can be done too quickly. Would be up to chatter if they would want to do it themselves, or let someone else have a go at it.
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EZGames69 wrote:
tutelarfiber7 wrote:
Would actually need 4 files in Neutral cause you can reopen the game to save some time when choosing the FIGHT option at the end of the flowey fight.
Would need 6 files for pacifist, counting everything from neutral. One more for reopening the game after entering the door after the flowey fight so you can complete the pacifist part. One last time at the end of the Asriel fight to save some walking before the ending cutscene.
Ah, that’s right.
But with the limited tools, it’s more reasonable that just two movie files could be used, and just ignore skipping cutscenes by closing the game, since the time saved isnt that much. All that would need to happen is with the 2nd movie file, run the game with the game files flag set to the Flowey fight, and just TAS the game from that point.
Still pretty messy, but much easier and more reasonable to do.
If we are still referring to a pacifist TAS, it would still need 3 minimum. Because we have flowey forcibly crashing the game, and then you have to close and reload the game to continue the true pacifist route after flowey.
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Would actually need 4 files in Neutral cause you can reopen the game to save some time when choosing the FIGHT option at the end of the flowey fight.
Would need 6 files for pacifist, counting everything from neutral. One more for reopening the game after entering the door after the flowey fight so you can complete the pacifist part. One last time at the end of the Asriel fight to save some walking before the ending cutscene.
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I didn't know it manipulated position, that's actually useful to know. Also i didn't know fast text didn't obsolete here. Thank you both for the information. I guess I'll just focus on making the one I have faster rather than going to Mother 2.
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The SRAM glitch allows for a faster use of the "check area glitch." SRAM uses it to write memory to ""to be continued", while the debug menu tas uses the check area glitch to get to the debug menu. But for a shorter answer, they do not go out of bounds.
Also, I'm not sure if SRAM glitch can be done on the USA cart. The speedrun.com community actually separates USA and JP runs for nostalgic reasons, but there is no reason to split them cause the main difference for the run being only text speed. I eventually want to do a Mother 2 TAS to obsolete this one, but this was a nice intro for me for TASing.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "more common." The single segment branches on speedrun.com that remove any glitches are "Glitchless" which is too subjective, and "No OoB" which wouldn't work cause that's not all that's avoided. I also assume what you mean by "basic glitch" and "game breaking" is a minor and major glitch respectively? If so, both these glitches I avoided should be considered game breaking and major.
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I guess the best way is either give the branch with mine something like "No Wall Clips" or give pirohiko's branch something like "Wall Clips". Can't really think of better names to describe both glitches.
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Thinking about it, a more appropriate branch term for pirohiko's TAS would be "Walks Through Walls" or "Wall Clips" or something of the sort focusing on going through walls. Because you can walk through walls and not be out of bounds, but you can't be out of bounds and not walk through walls. Seeing how I avoided both in mine, this made more sense.
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the other main one is walking through walls. Which the way pirohiko's TAS does it, still results in him being out of bounds. There are ways to walk through walls in bounds though which are avoided in mine. That is the only other glitch.
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
Improvements over Halamantariel and Nitordon's (H&N) TAS</h3><div class="deeper"> First off, they made an unintended glitchless TAS with a side goal of no deaths, since there were no known glitches at the time of their submission for this game. They only learned about some glitches about a year later after they submitted and suggested them as improvements. This is hoping to make glitchless as it's own category for EarthBound TASing, and to give H&N more credit for what they had and knew at the time. In total this saved about 16 minutes over H&N's TAS.
Stuttering through event triggers
Stuttering past enemies
Not getting the bike
Spawns disabled abuse
Teleportation for faster movement in most places
Better item and inventory management
No fights with random encounters
Overall faster fights in general
Better use of exit mouse
I cleaned up the quote cause i guess the format is different from the submission. Deathwarps was the only thing not directly mentioned in the list as an improvement.
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I guess we will see when we get to that point. The only difference between mine and 567, is that 567 purposely avoided dying at any point. That may be the only argument for a branch later on. Besides that, the time 567 was published had no knowledge of any glitches in the game. I appreciate all your knowledge and help.
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So how I understand how EarthBound is set up on tasvideos at the moment. There is an "SRAM Glitch" branch which obsoletes the two "Check Area Glitch" runs. These are justifiably obsoleted cause the use of SRAM gets to the function of the check area glitch, just faster.
I also believe the one with an unlabeled branch, piro's 1:10:XX, is separated as well which obsoleted Halamantariel and Nitrodon's 3:26:XX TAS. I don't think this is rightly obsoleted cause of how the runs were completed.
I'm not sure of the whole process of TASes being accepted and published. I do think that piro's 1:10:XX should be separated completely on another branch, even if my TAS doesn't go through.
I do feel out of place being new and suggesting things like this lol. If there was a branch though, piro's TAS should definetly have a "Out of Bounds" identifier, or something similar. This would give H&N's TAS, and/or possibly mine the unlabeled branch to cause less confusion of the "glitchless" label. This all depends again on people wanting more branches, which seems like less is better.
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Mothrayas wrote:
It's really great to see a new run of this game without major skipping glitches. I've always found it a shame that Halamantariel and Nitrodon's movie was obsoleted by the stair glitch OoB run at the time, leaving no active movie on the site that didn't skip at least two-thirds of the whole game. Not having such a movie active on this site was a bit of an injustice to the game, really.
While I'm not sure about the "glitchless" label (stutter-step sequence breaking can quite arguably be counted as a glitch), the general limitations chosen for this movie make sense and are consistent enough. Besides that, this is a great run, and I think it should be published. Yes vote.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and i agree that a non-glitch category should have been displayed without being obsoleted.
I do feel my limitations were pretty basic for glitchless standards. Usually communities debate if glitchless should be either "game mechanics working as intended" versus "viability in a normal playthrough of the game." I do find the second argument moving away from speedrunning and focusing more on the causal or nostalgic aspect of the game. Glitchless by itself is arbitrary and subjective though and it's hard for people to agree on anything. Once again I'm glad you enjoyed it and I'm hoping to make an improvement on it in the near future.
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scrimpeh wrote:
I haven't watched the full run yet, but I had a quick question:
Why use an exit mouse after Lilliput Steps? Can't you deathwarp back to Twoson instead with Paula and save the exit mouse for another dungeon?
I timed that walking back through Peaceful Rest Valley and skipping the deathwarp and save in Twoson, followed by not having to revive Paula, and having to walk out of Belch's Base, is roughly 3 seconds faster.
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JSmith wrote:
How much time would it have cost to use different one-letter names for each party member?
The direct cost would be frames as long as they were one character each still. The indirect cost is the amount of frames off whatever seed we would have been on in for the whole TAS. Meaning a relative frame adjustment of the name could have changed the time of the whole TAS by +/- a minute or so. I was going for frame optimization initially but seeing how the seed is so dependent on every little thing, i could have done different one character names with little or no consequences.
I do plan on improving this TAS one day because it is still very reasonable to gain a lot of time back with my suggested improvements. It would be easy to make more interesting name combinations then.
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Halamantariel wrote:
While I have not been active in TASing in many years, I still monitor new submissions. When I saw this one, I had to come out of hiding!
This is an easy Yes vote from me! It's very nice to see a new glitchless TAS of Earthbound after so many years.
Here's a list of my highlights for this run:
The Frankystein Mark II fight Guts save to protect Ness from mortal damage even though he only has 2 HP
Putting Master Belch to sleep to avoid nausea
The many death warps
Diamondizing Jeff to give Ness all the XP
Also, why the heck were there no enemy spawns at all in the Milky Well!?
Teleporting from the Monotoly Helipad
Teleporting around instead of walking
Stutter-walking is so OP in the Pyramid!
The Runaway Five music still playing when going back to Fourside
And some other comments:
In Dungeon Man, you lost an opportunity to gain 6 more frames over Nitrodon and I's run! At the ATM, you could have pressed right to go to the extreme left when entering $10000. We had listed it under "Possible Improvements" in the Author's comments on our run. Unacceptable! /s
I also noticed that when Poo is a ghost (right before Pyramid), at the end of a failed teleport, there are a few frames where Ness, Paula and Jeff all appear as ghosts before going back to normal. Interesting visual glitch!
It is not possible to go to the extreme left of the ATM by pressing right. I didn't try personally on that one ATM, but ATMs in general don't have that wrap around with the cursor.
I did in fact watch your and Nitrodon's TAS and noted on all the improvements to be made. This TAS definetly couldn't have been as fast as it was without some of your guys comments.
EarthBound has various visual glitches involving teleports. I've seen sprites change on screen at the end of teleports, or in area where a teleport is done. Just another weird thing about the game.
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Zowayix wrote:
Meh vote for naming everyone "A" and the vague category description. There has to be a stronger, more objective definition of "glitchless" right?
Glitchless defintions tends to be pretty subjective in each community and there tend to be debates on what really is an expolitable game mechanic, and what is an exploitable glitch. My definition of glitchless attempted to be broad to have the least amount of debate.
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GJTASer2018 wrote:
tutelarfiber7 wrote:
Recently LylatR managed to tie the TAS time meaning that the TAS can no longer be faster than RTA runners unless some more tech is found.
If the submission isn't faster than an RTA run, then why bother submitting it here? Voting No for bad game choice.
It's not that it's slower, it's that recently LylatR TIED the TAS time. That is the only reason it can't be faster than RTA runners unless some new tech is found. It would be like saying the Dragster TAS is bad because it's no longer faster than RTA runners due to people achieving the same time.
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andypanther wrote:
After watching this TAS and taking a look at the leaderboard, I have two questions:
Is this even distinguishable from RTA runs? The time on the leaderboard looks suspiciously close to the TAS time and there is the usual timing difference that makes the TAS time longer by default.
Does this TAS actually complete the game? The ending comes off as some sort of "bad ending" and there seems to be a "good ending" for scoring at least 5000 points.
As for entertainment, I voted "no". The gameplay is minimal and the only "superhuman" thing demonstrated is the wiggling, which gets old very quickly. Movement like this should only be done occasionally and never throughout entire levels, that's just bad practice (unless of course, such movement actually saves time).
The timing that is displayed here is the length of the whole movie and not the actual timing of the TAS. With the speedrun.com leaderboard rules and timing, the TAS came out to be a 3:25.744.
This was made mostly for curiousity purposes to see what the fastest possible time is. All inputs are bufferable and there is no wild tech that saves anymore time RTA so wiggling back and forth was reasonably the only thing a TAS could do that a human couldn't. I agree it gets old quickly but i thought it was more justifiable in a 3.5 minute run. Recently LylatR managed to tie the TAS time meaning that the TAS can no longer be faster than RTA runners unless some more tech is found.
This TAS is for the "Any% Super Model" category, which does complete a bad ending of the game, but is still an ending and fastest way to complete the game.