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nitsuja wrote:
upthorn wrote:
nitsuja wrote:
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
1) They let me see the path I took to get to my current position. That's especially helpful when I load a savestate and wonder what I did to get there.
3) I can watch other savestates making their paths at the current time while I make mine (trying to go faster than them). I could do that with just a hitbox, but I like seeing more information.
4) The white line turns bright red if I dip slightly below maximum speed (used to only do that on the ground but I fixed that and the hitboxes as you can see in the new image), and it turns green if I ever exceed the maximum speed by even a little (speed here is calculated using the actual distance moved in X divided by the delta time in frames), so there's no way I can accidentally miss either of those things happening even if I don't notice it on the frame it happens.
I could tell they seemed to be a trail, but didn't consider any of these benefits at all. That's a lot more useful than my initial assessment.
nitsuja wrote:
5) Who doesn't like bouncy curves?
Uh... straight women?
nitsuja wrote:
One more note, you might notice I turned off the lag counter, that's because it's completely useless in this game the way it's implemented now. Popful Mail frequently skips updating the input for a frame, but it practically never actually lags.
Yeah I was actually thinking the other day about a simple check that might be able to eliminate most such false positives, although it is founded on a couple of major assumptions which might not be true for all games. (like that input is polled during the vertical interrupt, and the vertical interrupt is masked when it doesn't expect to be polling)
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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nitsuja wrote:
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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I've managed to get a basic watch list together. (right-click, save as, rename to match your rom)
it's probably not got everything you need, but based on the results it looks like all of your important player-related values are stored in the same area of RAM, so that should help you narrow down searches tremendously. (just search by address no less than FFAC00 and you'll be at the start of the player-related RAM addresses).
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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If it were actually a NES game wrapped in a customized emulator, there'd be some hope of a TAS soon. But if that were the case, I'm sure someone would have extracted the ROM long ago.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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mmbossman wrote:
Goldeneye begs to differ, as does it's much improved sequel-in-spirit, Perfect Dark.
Yeah... I've played them both and they aren't good counterexamples. The only console FPS I've ever played that comes anywhere close to having good controls is Metroid Prime (well, and it's sequel, obviously), and the only reason it manages to accomplish this without the use of a mouse is because it has target-locking so you don't have to spend 5 minutes fiddling with an finicky thumbstick any time you want to aim at anything. Again, this problem also plagues FPS games on pretty much any laptop ever, unless you've got a USB mouse plugged into it.
It's not a subjective statement that mouse (and the wii pointer) provide much greater flexibility for pointing purposes than the analog thumbsticks of any console controller that has been created to date.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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nitsuja wrote:
EDIT: I found what the trick is. All of the preferences have to be set to their default values. Changing anything like "Super Sonic Music" or "Camera Style" or "Boss Time Text" will make Knuckles drastically slower. Now that I've deleted my SRAM and refrained from changing any preferences, it's easy to get times like 9:19 in GHZ2. (Normally I would disable the boss text to make the bosses appear faster, but due to this bug that can't be done when using Knuckles.)
Oh crap, I forgot about that bug. It's embarassing that we couldn't get such a simple bug fixed for the final release, but so it goes, I guess.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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nitsuja wrote:
Also, I doubt the validity of the video that Aitamen posted above, because Knuckles seems to retain full speed when he starts gliding whereas he's supposed to always slow down (to 1024). Well, I hope I'm proven wrong because it would be pretty cool if Knuckles can really do that.
The character abilities have been edited for megamix. Knuckles is supposed to be able to retain speed when starting a glide.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Zurreco wrote:
There are other things running afoul in the community, and I think those would be better suited for addressing. I'm looking at you, anyone who registered in the last 24 months.
While I (think I) sort of understand what you're getting at here, I think you're mistaken on the time period. For instance, xipo, Nitsujrehtona, and klmz joined within the past 24 months, and some of the people who I'm pretty sure you're specifically thinking of joined a few months before that cut off.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Actually I think the TAS of "make everyone in the world love you" would be deceptively simple if you just use luck manipulation so that the moment you're born, everybody has the exact right brain chemistry to love you.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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andymac wrote:
Both Xkeeper and upthorn are overestimating games.
It would be completely unheard of to move at 4000 units per frame. Generally, programmers don't need that degree of precision. unless you want to measure the radius of a virtual atom, your character's speed will rarely exceed 100...
In Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the early games for the Sega Genesis, positions have an 8-bit subpixel component. Speeds are 16-bit values in subpixels per frame.
Upshot: In the TAS, Sonic routinely exceeds speeds of 4000, and even 8000.
In Ecco the Dolphin -- perhaps the earliest game that your theory could apply to, positions have 10-bit subpixel components, which means that even one pixel per frame is a speed of more than 1000, and Ecco's speed will frequently exceed 8000 or even 10000 in normal play.
For Super Mario 64, the console's data registers are naturally 64-bits wide, and it'd actually require additional programming effort to avoid using the extra precision...
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Xkeeper wrote:
Games that run on newer hardware and utilize more bits for movement/position are very likely will have rounding errors that are much smaller. The gains from these would, by my guess, be far less than even 1%. If average movement speed is ~4000units/frame, your best change is going to be at best 1 or 2 units (no smaller unit), and that's assuming the game doesn't have higher precision in its movement.
In short: I believe this concept to be completely useless except in either strange circumstances or very badly programmed games.
This is basically what I was saying in my two posts on the first page.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Eratyx wrote:
Am I posting too often?
Not really, but if your post is the last one in the thread, it is often better to edit new content onto the end of the post, instead of making a second post in a row. Just uncheck "minor edit" and the IRC channel will still be notified.
You might benefit from using http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php for your WIPs. That way they're backed up permanently, and you can upload two files with the same name without the first one getting overwritten.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Perhaps some 3D platformers use the pythagorean method for calculating X and Z speed, but I imagine that in those, the calculation is camera relative, and additionally that any floating point rounding error is so small as to be negligible within the size of a single level.
But even in cases where all of the conditions for andymac's thesis are true, it's usually not going to be useful to take those diagonals. Because the added speed gained when travelling at angles to the straight line is only ever going to be added perpindicular to the direction of motion.
Let's take a hypothetical example where there's a game where your max speed is 6 pixels per frame, but it uses the pythagorean method to calculate your speed on two separate axes, given one total speed value.
Let us say that when going straight forward, you get 6 pixels per frame forward, but when going 3 degrees to the left of forward, you get 6 pixels per frame forward, and 1/3rd pixel per frame left due to rounding error.
If your goal is a straight line forward from the starting point, the result will be that you reach the goal in the same time period, but you'll be a few pixels further to the left when you collide with it. Which I suppose could be useful enough in arriving at point A in an optimal position to get quickly to point B, but would not be helpful at all if point A is the only point you need to visit.
Edit: Oh damn, four posts between me hitting reply and hitting submit.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Eratyx wrote:
Does anyone have any tips regarding more efficient cornering?
Try letting go of the d-pad on occasion, so you slow down. This issue was a huge problem for my Ecco TAS, where he goes so much faster, turns so much slower, and takes so much longer to slow down that the last two corners of the game took me half an hour to get right.
But yeah basically the only thing you can do to corner tighter is to slow down every once in a while. If you know exact speeds, distances, and acceleration/deceleration you can calculate what the best times will be to let go of the d-pad.
Incidentally I just watched the speedrun and I'm looking forward to this TAS. Perhaps it will fill the hole in my heart left when the Minish Cap TAS was abandoned.
Edit:
VVV: I thought I remembered you saying you'd basically given up on Minish Cap in IRC at some point. No offense was intended, I just meant it to be a humorous way of watching this gameplay is kind of similar to watching Minish Cap.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Well, for the mega man zipping one, any one frame from the animation would work, because the spark trail implies motion.
The zelda and Mario 64 ones could be a bit more difficult, though.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Eratyx wrote:
I see! So once I've created the splice file, I can reload from a save state and redo that segment, making it faster. As for desyncs, I know it's one of the nightmares of TASers. I doubt that this game will be subject to it due to (1) no lag frames except in very rare situations and (2) little randomness, only in enemy movement patterns. Supposing it still desynced, I could just make another input splice, correct?
The first thing to try on splice-related desyncs is to go to the frame you were at when you ended the splice, and add or remove an empty frame.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
