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Derakon wrote:
How much validation does Sonic Center do? I could easily see people lying about the times they get just so they can be at the top of the list. Alternatively, if the people at the top are known to be good speedrunners of other Sonic games (where the runs can be more easily validated than on the DS), that lends their times more credibility.
SkyLights is known to be credible.
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Comicalflop wrote:
Rather than slowing down before the ring to make it spin less, you may want to make the run go for fastest in-game time, which some other sonic TASes do.
This. And I believe that all published Sonic TASes do this
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Sonikkustar wrote:
EDIT: Turns out, the speed calculation is faster in the PAL version making the PAL version from 189 to 320 frames faster!
Remember that PAL is 50 frames per second, where NTSC is 60, so depending on how long the speed calculation takes in NTSC, that "189 to 320 frames faster" may actually mean "exactly the same speed".
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inichi wrote:
お心遣いありがとうございます。upthornさんが日本語がお上手なことは、妖怪道中記の動画でupthornさんの字幕の素晴らしい出来を拝見した時から知っていました。おぼつかない英語で恐縮ですが、英語の勉強も兼ねているので、できるだけ英語で書いていきたいと思います。もし誤りや曖昧な表現等がありましたら、指摘してくだされば大変嬉しく思います。
Thank you for the offer. I'm afraid that my English is not so good, but this is also a chance of improving my English skills. So I think I'll try to write it in English as much as I could. I'd highly appreciate if you could point out a mistake or an ambiguous expression in the submission text. Also, I have known you are really good at Japanese since I watched the Youkai Douchuuki movie with your subtitle. It was awesome.
返事が遅れてすみません。PMが出なかった時から、inichiさんはこれを英語の勉強きかっけと思う気がありました。お望むならば、僕は過ちを改めるためもっと深く今までの説明をよむことが出来ます。
妖怪道中記についてほめてありがとうございます。でも、英語が僕の母国語で妖怪道中記派かんたんな日本語を使ったから、私はじしょを使うときにどうって事なくなりました。もちろん、関西弁は除けましたが…
Sorry for the late reply. When no PM came, I started to wonder if you might be thinking of this as a chance to study English more. If you wish, I can look more carefully at the explanation you have written up until now, to check it for errors.
Thank you for the praise regarding Youkai Douchuuki. But because English is my native language, and Youkai Douchuuki used simple Japanese, it wasn't a problem once I used a dictionary. Except for the Kansai dialect, of course...
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Sonikkustar wrote:
EDIT: I've been told that there was only a PAL version. Ill have to start all over!
There were no region lockouts between European master systems and US ones. So that PAL cart could (and would) play fine on a US master system, where it would run at 60FPS instead of 50.
Additionally, the Game Gear version was released in the US, and I do not know of any version differences between the SMS and Game Gear versions except for display resolution.
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This run is very impressive, and much more entertaining than Hero of the Day's run. I'm in favor of obsoletion in this case, because I don't think a non-glitched TAS of Chrono Trigger really has much to offer compared to a person playing the game in real time.
Additionally
Inichi wrote:
the submission text is still incomplete. I think this is a bad thing. However, considering these facts:
Most part of the run is totally new stuff. So it would take a long time to cover them all, even in Japanese, my native language.
This is a long-term project; I started making the run in August 2007.
Chrono Trigger is a very popular RPG, and not a few people have been interested in how the run is going.
I thought it would be better to submit the run as fast as I could than to write up full texts and submit it. I will upload the rest of the submission texts little by little.
inichiさん、PMで日本語で説明すれば、僕は英語まで訳すには助けてあげられます…たぶん。
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Professori wrote:
I have VisualBoyAdvance (The program the moviemaker used)
Having VisualBoyAdvance is not enough, you have to have the specific version of VisualBoyAdvance that was modified for TAS purposes. You can find it linked earlier in this thread.
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SonicX3 wrote:
add2: and what are those tracer tools? what can be done with them?
The tracer tools produce a log of each command executed by the game while "Trace" is checked, and include all reads/writes to memory in that log while "Hook RAM" is checked.
The contents of every CPU register are also included after each instruction.
It's somewhat advanced, but if you familiarize yourself with 68K Assembly, it allows for unprecedented understanding of the internal mechanics of the game. For instance, this is how you could find the "random" number generation process.
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nitsuja wrote:
I found this really boring to watch with the exception of a few bits close to the end. But, having played the game, I find it hard to believe that could be the game's fault. (And, the low re-record count suggests something.) So I hope this movie gets repeatedly obsoleted with more and more interesting movies. Maybe that was part of the point of it being submitted, anyway.
That's interesting, because, having played the game, I have difficulty seeing an optimized TAS looking too much more entertaining than this.
Well, maybe if it avoids warps...
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Warp wrote:
Stacking two 4:3 images horizontally rather than vertically will indeed not enlarge either image when viewed fullscreen on a 4:3 monitor. The reason is simple: Two 4:3 images stacked inside a 4:3 area will take exactly half of the area, no matter how you rearrange them (assuming you don't overlap them).
I believe the issue here is working around a maximum vertical resolution that exists on sites like youtube, where stacking the screens side-by-side will allow each screen to have a higher resolution, but may still result in the movie looking worse overall..
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superjupi wrote:
I consider this the most boring of all Mario platformers to watch someone play, even when played well.
I have to second this. I came into watching with an open mind, but yech, if this is the best that can be done, NSMB may simply not be worth publishing, ever.
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DarkKobold wrote:
You bring up the 16 star Mario Run. The goal of that run, when it was made, was not to get 16 stars. It was meant to beat the game as fast as possible, which at the time, meant collecting 16 stars. Thus, it is in the same category as the 1 and 0 star runs. I can guarentee, if the authors of the 16 star runs could have done it in 15, they would NOT have gone for the 16th star for entertainment over speed purposes.
And that is exactly Xkeeper's complaint.
DarkKobold wrote:
There is a run that technically trades speed for the entertainment of star collection; the 120 star run. Why not just watch that if you want to see star collection?
Why can't there be middle ground between 90 seconds of skipping everything and 90 minutes of doing everything over and over 8 times?
DarkKobold wrote:
And yes, while the 100% runs also aim for speed and perfection, the videos wouldn't be TASes if they didn't aim for something above human capabilities.
The complaint isn't that the runs aim to be fast, it's that they do it to the exclusion of all other concerns.
DarkKobold wrote:
Also, your .7% number is due to mmbossman not pointing out EVERY SINGLE entertainment run, like family feud, the megaman dual and quad run, any 100% run on this site, and ones I'm sure I'm forgetting.
Quadrun was a massive disappointment precisely because it was optimized to the point that it doesn't even look like the games are using the same input. Which means that to watch it you effectively have to concentrate equally on all four screens at the same time, because Megaman isn't going to be doing the same thing on any two of them.
Dualrun worked because both megamans were generally doing the same thing at any given time. When you remove that, the run becomes a pointless cacophony.
The problem with Xkeeper's arguement is his decision to focus solely on arguing against speed. Speed itself isn't the problem, nor is it the only problematic goal. The problem is that people are focusing on the goal checklist and never considering anything else.
All that matters is whether it consistently and efficiently achieves the goals the other sets forth, and whether the game is popular.
It doesn't matter if having to sit through the whole movie without the aid of a fast-forward device would put a caffeinated child into a coma, as long as it consistently achieves its checklist of non-arbitrary goals.
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FuzZerd wrote:
sorry I didn't realize you needed to be logged in to download from their. I uploaded it to rapidshare.
http://rapidshare.com/files/222245459/PHANTASY_STAR_2.gmv.html
I'm tempted to restart this run now that I thought of item duping the dynamites but it would take a lot of time and work and I don't think anybody cares about it.
DeHackEd's Microstorage is the best TAS wip hosting available, since it was designed specifically for that purpose and displays useful file information like frames and rerecords.
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The game is great and the run is clearly perfect beyond any shadow of a doubt, but it still goes on way too long to stay interesting the entire time.
5/5
So Alden, 6 hour rampage, 1000 hour desert bus... is Blue Sphere next?
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Ahem.
upthorn wrote:
It sounds like what happened is you played past the end of the movie and then forgot you weren't recording. You should really be using Gens 10, it has safeguards against that kind of thing.
Although at this point you should definitely be using gens 11a, because it is superior to 9.5 and 10 in practically every way.
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nitsuja wrote:
It's to be expected, really. If a game handles characters generically enough, then your character is just another "thing" in the world, and of course you can't expect to find every thing in the world at the same memory address, because there's more than one of them. If you're lucky, it'll be at the same place every time anyway simply because the player object gets loaded first and gets assigned to the same slot in memory, but there's nothing stopping a game from putting the player in a random slot every level instead.
Indeed, I found the same thing happening in Chaotix - the player characters were dynamically loaded into a linked list of objects at the start of every level.
[quote="nitsuja"I had a similar problem recently with a Sega CD game (Popful Mail), where the game code itself got replaced with a slightly different version of the code per level, and the data I wanted to read (hitbox dimensions) was mixed in with that code that was shifting around.[/quote]
Virtually every SegaCD game is going to do this. Because of the way the addon works, each level has to be a complete self-contained program that no more than 256KB in size. And while working within that limitation, it's much easier to include the common routines and data at the same basic positions in the source code than to include them at the same offsets assembled binary.
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The run is a joy to watch once it is past the first dungeon, though towards the end there are a few places where it looked like the path through a room wasn't necessarily the fastest...
Is it faster to wobble over all those pits than to use that one cane to make a moving platform? At first I thought it was so that there'd be more magic guage remaining to use the fire rod, but at least once, more than half the guage was left when you did the save-restart.
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I, like Ferret, took a little liberty on the album name rule, because "Has Of Being Happy" and "One Has Of Being Happy" make significantly less sense as album titles.
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nitsuja wrote:
deltaphc wrote:
from Lua, Gens doesn't allow you to load a state without redrawing the screen. So if I were to load a state afterwards, it'd just bring me back to where I started (if I'm understanding it correctly).
Loading an anonymous savestate does not redraw the screen. (If this is not true for you, then it's a bug that I have never seen happen, and I could use an example to reproduce it.) Furthermore, loading non-anomyous savestates can also be forced to not redraw the screen by using speedmode("maximum").
deltaphc's script here is actually the precise example that caused me to make that issue report...
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mz wrote:
upthorn wrote:
because it isn't in line with the site's goal of unmodified output.
Bisqwit has said many times that he would prefer to have AVI videos with the NTSC filter on them; but we still don't have any emulator capable of doing that, I believe.
Err, I meant that dumping AVIs after they've been NTSC filter would require moving the AVI dumping call to _after_ the filter is applied, thus allowing AVIs to be dumped in 2xsai, hq2x, etc. I was not referring to the NTSC filter specifically.
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Neither S1 nor S3K have a "dirty" screen flag, so what the camhack does there is make a savestate, set the camera values to one screen above/left of the target position, then invisibly emulate the number of frames required to scroll down/right onto the target (advancing the camera position by 16 pixels each frame), emulate one frame visibly, then load that savestate without redrawing the screen.
As for S3K's specialized method of getting tile addresses, it's fairly simple once you understand it. There's a table of 16-bit pointers to the start of each row, starting at FF8008, and alternating foreground and background.
So, to get a specific foreground tile
Take its row number (Y/128), multiplied by 4 (so really just take Y/32)
Read the short pointer at 0xFF8008 + that number
Sign extend the short pointer (>= 0x8000 -> >= 0xFFFF8000, <= 7FFF -> <= 0x00007FFF)
Add its column number (X/128) to the pointer
or, in lua change the beginning of work_tiles to
function get_tileS1S2(X, Y)
return addr_levellayout + ((Y * level_rowlength) * 2) + X
end
function get_tileS3SK(X, Y)
local rowpoint, tilenum
Y = AND(Y*4,memory.readword(0xFFEEAE)) --optional, for correct behavior when outside normal level height bounds
rowpoint = memory.readword(addr_levellayout + Y + 8)
if rowpoint > 0x7FFF then
rowpoint = OR(rowpoint,0xFF0000)
end
tilenum = rowpoint + X
return tilenum
end
function work_tiles(xcamera, ycamera)
local xtile1, ytile1, tilepos, tilenum, x1, y1, x2, y2, get_tile
if game == "s3sk" then
get_tile = get_tileS3SK
else
get_tile = get_tileS1S2
end
xtile1 = math.floor((xcamera + xmouse) / level_tilesize)
ytile1 = math.floor((ycamera + ymouse) / level_tilesize)
tilepos = get_tile(xtile1,ytile1)
tilenum = memory.readbyte(tilepos)
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
I, like Ferret, took a little liberty on the album name rule, because "Has Of Being Happy" and "One Has Of Being Happy" make significantly less sense as album titles.