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Receding Curves is a rather particular level, known wide and far for its rather particular collision. I'm currently testing things out ATM, but I'm very close to a viable strategy. Here's a testrun I made of the TAS strategy (826 rerecords):
https://youtu.be/_n96icynf0Y
This is currently .10 (6 frames) behind the human record, though I'm almonst sure to surpass the record with a bit of tweaking. The major improvement is finding a better frame to slow down at the start, as well as slightly better collision, which would push it beyond .50.
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Ammo management is very tough. Since the only way to recover ammo is with ammo packs, and there are a limited number of them on the map, you have to finish the game with a very limited number of ammo. I saw you missed one ammo pack at mission 3 (Baccus, after killing the gang members): that might be why you ran out.
As far as I know, enemies do have different health. With the handgun, you range from one to two shots. Other weapons deal different damage.
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Ah, alright. If you're doing a testrun unassisted, I'd say not to publish the runs in parts here, but rather encode and show the full finished testrun, as it is easier to follow in full. This way, reviewing certain parts of the game is also easier. Good luck!
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It's a little better, though there's still a long way to go.
Not getting a car and instead walking in the first part of the mission is the right call.
The movement is a little cleaner, although you're still not using jumping for big turns (at 0:31, most notably) and struggle a bit with small turns, opting to do stutter stepping a lot of the time. There are some situations where it isn't avoidable, but a lot of them can be done much better by simply redirecting your angle in a straight line in the corner you want to cut, then strafing for the rest of the trip. Here's an MSPaint example, using a simplified version of the walking part at the start of Mission 2:
Blue is walking, orange is jumping, green is strafing. The objective is the red circle, on top of a step in which you have to jump. Gray is the buildings and city you have to make your way across, although they are normally twice as wide. I mapped out the exact movement you've done.
See the problem? Your movement is fragmatic, unreliable, and most of the time looks more like an unassisted speedrun. This is because you walk. Now, compare to the second picture, to which I have even an encode of:
Link to video
I made this in about five minutes, although the start with redirecting yourself to strafe can definitely be improved by some frames. It also turns out to be almonst slower than your current strategy, because of bad camera angles: in future runs, you should be looking at the wall you're strafing against to reduce lag, not forward.
(In case you're wondering how I strafe back instantanely turning forwards after jumping, that's by facing Up at the very end of your jump, then immediatly strafing again as soon as you land: this does backwards strafing, saving around 2 gameplay frames compared to having to turn around manually via walking).
This is the very present advantage of strafing over walking. Use it.
It is also, in TASing practices, usually a good idea to start moving at the earliest possible frame, rather than waiting one full second. For skipping text, you don't have to wait 20 seconds to skip: just press A at the end of each screen. Saves 20 seconds for each.
The car movement is much harder to optimise: I'm leaving that up to you. You've tried to move in more straight lines, which is a good effort: but make them straighter. Savestates are there for that. I'm not blaming you, as this game is hard to optimise, again, but some of these mistakes are just laziness, not understanable oversights. I'd suggest redoing your test run at this point, to include basic techniques.
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InfamousKnight wrote:
About that shooting part, the strafing is easy, but not when your controls are on a keyboard. It felt so weird trying to get that right. My 'E' key is the R button, my 'F' key is the frame advance button, my 'Z' key is the B button. I have to press all four of those buttons to fire the gun(as well as the arrow on the other side of my keyboard)
Ah, of course. I also find myself often faced with the complete disability to remap my key bindings in any way.
Can you link your current movie here?
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Ok, I've played with the game around a bit now and can say:
Your movement is very bad. Optimising movement in this game is very confusing due to the left and right keys influencing movement in not exactly an intuitive ways, but there are some things you can do.
The first thing is sideways movement. Stutter stepping like you do doens't really help because it creates extra lag, and it's often better to just suck it and change your direction. However, the best way to do this is with jump: instead of slowly redirecting your speed, like with normal walking, you can instantanely redirect it with a frame perfect jump and turn. This saves about half a second on every turn, and is the best method for redirecting your angle. Jumping is also as fast as walking, discounting lzg frames.
When needing to g t the exit after getting the gun, just walk backwards instead of doing your fancy 360 no walk.
Movement with the gun is much easier, because strafing has the advantage of locked and instant sideways movement (hold R to strafe). It ends up also being faster than normal movement by a few frames, and is the king at sideways movement.
When in cars, move in straight lines. Again, doing stutter driving sabotages you quite a bit: suck it up and turn.
That's about all.
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https://youtu.be/UX8Ftm4qGuU
Tamir's Domain is the great example of a uninteresting level made much more interesting with unintended shortcuts and misalignement use to avoid grabbing ledges. Currently, this is 655 frames or around 11 seconds ahead in total over the previous run (which is pretty huge, for around 3 minutes of gameplay), though a bit of frames were lost in slower loading screens.
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Samsara wrote:
This actually synced perfectly.
That's great news. Doing a fresh install of 9.9 worked on my end, for reasons more obscure than the playtesting of this game. I'll be contunuing work on this movie, then.
Alyosha wrote:
Hi xy2_ , out of curiosity, why does that extra lag frame de-sync the movie so badly? Is it RNG , or is it just throwing off the rest of the inputs since there is so much lag in the game?
Just a single frame of lag offsets, first and foremost, the lag in the rest of the movie. This game is extremely laggy (runs at an average of 18 FPS and goes as low as 8, even in menus; the Gameloft and Ubisoft intro are actually loading screens in disguise. Just in the current WIP, there's 13k lag frames for a 18k frame long movie!). This is a huge problem, but wouldn't be so bad if it didn't actually add more non-lag frames, as staying in a menu for one more frame will make the game lag differently during loading screens. This offsets RNG, and the run is unsyncable.
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To continue on the name and birthday screens: these are crucial to continue, because the time it will take to draw these will directly influence the x100 seed (due to it being dependant, again, on the firmware system time) We can't effectively know the seed without these.
Here are the specs for these:
Any drawing will be able to be converted without any limitations to the desired answer. The main advantage here is that the pen used is 2x2 instead of 4x4, giving much more artistic liberty.
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Unfortunately, the TAS has died, again, 5 levels in. A rogue lag frame has taken a leave of absence out of all places in the title screen, and to be fair, I still don't have any explaination for it.. it suddently decided to not be there. Because of this huge difference of one lag frame, the entire movie desyncs yet again.
This happened last time for the old TAS (which, even after changing emulation settings mid-run, desynced 177k frames in due to a rogue lag frame) and using a newer versions of DeSmuME simply isn't an option, due to having even less sync reliability. As such, I'll be ceasing work indefinitely on this TAS. If anyone wants to check syncability, or has any ideas on how to make this work, feel free to post here, but my work here is done until this issue is resolved. I'm, unfortunately, not gambling months of work on an unreliable game.
This is irrelevant due to my install suddently not working. A fresh install of 0.9.9 works fine, while my old install doens't work.
Here's the movie file.
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https://youtu.be/KcZgKvWYAzI
I won't be showing off all levels from the v2, mostly because there's no point to: but in the meantime, enjoy Alep Plains v2! Surprisingly, this game keeps on giving: with bettter jumping management, better jump timer management, misaligement use, and a brand new out of bounds, the run is currently 161 frames! ahead by the end of this level. Considering these are the very first and simpler levels of the game, this difference will only get bigger..
At this point, I'd just say this game was a trainwreck on purpose to satify TASers.. In an ideal world, this will be finished before the end of the year. The technical quality has improved a lot from my initial start, and even though redoing the run was an unfortunate incident, I don't have any regrets :)
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https://youtu.be/jIgcwDVFtCU
Port is the last level of the game! Featuring invisible boats!
You might be wondering why this isn't on the workbench; this is for two main reasons. The most important is that I'm not happy with the state of the run: it is rather sloppy as is. After reviewing its quality thouroughly, it looks to me as a testrun rather as a polished run, even with the 70k+ rerecords it holds. The other reason is that, to my detriment.. the run doens't sync, due to me awkwardly changing sync settings mid-run.
As such, I'll be redoing this run entierely from scratch. From my new experience gained, this will take less than a month (with half that time spent on Tyre Sewer :( )
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Link to videoRerecords: 1275
Frame count: 584
.. Wow. This is one of the biggest improvents from IL to TAS in the entire run, and will probably stay so. Road to Nowhere is officially one of my favorite levels.
I have no explaination why this strat works, it just does.
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Now begins the fun levels.. Road to Nowhere has so much potential and is so complex I could write a book about it. 51.86 is the SMB1 TAS world record, and considering how broken collision is in Touch&Roll and the fact that T&R is about 30% faster, I'm aiming ultimately to beat or be around this time; that's when I'll be satisfied with this level.
The current world record is 35.55 on this level. I've tested some collisions for an hour or so and here's what I've got so far, with 689 rerecords. The bounces are unoptimal, they can be manipulated a lot better, and everything else is massively unoptimised, but it should give you a good idea of what I'm aiming for. (In case you haven't noticed, this beats current WR by 6 seconds.)
https://youtu.be/jd8pnPiiH7o
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https://youtu.be/9rASt9RtXTgRerecords: 1582
Frame count: 295
Infinity is Entwined but harder. Thankfully, the collision is still bad. This took a shitton of time to find the collision that zipped Aiai forwards on the very specific frame, but it was worth it.
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This TAS is currently on a very tight lifeline.. arandomgameTASer started this movie on 0.9.11 and converted it to 0.9.9 for the first level, which brings its problem: the loading screen is 2 frames slower. Considering this is Altaïr's Chronicles; this brings a huge desync to the entire movie.
I'll try to salvage it with some syncing and give a synced movie here, but if this is unrecoverable, I'll be sad to say that the best contender for DS TAS of 20XX is dead. This doens't mean the fight will be given up: a new version will be made, with the many improvements I've learned over the making of this movie.
Name screen
Amount: 1
Pen size: 2x2
Dimensions: 177x60 pixels
Birthday screen
Amount: 3
Pen size: 2x2
Dimensions: 141x148 pixels
