Topic by Sonikkustar

Posted: 12/16/2010 11:56 PM

Post subject: Alcahest

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Sonikkustar

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Joined: 9/7/2007
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Location: U.S.

Think Crystalis but on the SNES, and you get this game! Its all in japanese though, so there might be some difficulty. Is there any interest? There's no way in hell im doing it since snes9x is turning into a mess of different builds. Heres what the game looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvYfbywIHBI (Note: This is translated)

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Posted: 12/20/2010 3:42 AM

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Limne

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Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 153

Wow, I just picked this game up; it's really pretty awesome: Kind of like Brain Lord but a little better in some ways and a little worse in others. It has so much going for it: The music and sound design are laugh-out-loud funny for how closely they mirror Kirby's Super Star and the story's delightfully schlocky (It's about demons trying to revive an evil God who's been sealed away and a legendary adventurer's quest to defeat him using the four elemental powers! Oh! There's even a flying high-tech castle full of robots!) The gameplay's pretty good (damned generic for a dungeon crawling action adventure though) and I especially appreciate the ability to attack in eight directions... The use of magic and secondary characters is also fairly interesting. This game probably has good potential for a TAS. A TASer could run constantly and I think the route planning would be straightforward enough not to get to boring. There are a lot of enemies too which leads me to hope there's potential for some interesting action, especially because you can be blasting stuff with three characters at once. Also, it's a damn hard game, especially some of the boss fights, but with the right strategy they actually go down surprisingly fast. Ya, hopefully someone picks this up.

Posted: 6/4/2014 11:35 AM

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Odongdong

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Joined: 9/14/2011
Posts: 349

I decided to take this up as the game's concept intrigued me. Every speedrun relevant informations are welcome as I couldn't find much of them on the internet. Correct me if I'm wrong here: - On my knowledge, difficulty setting on the option menu only affects the number of continues. Therefore I'm going to follow the default setting (Normal). - The game's basically straightforward, except that there're collectable items that increase maximum of VI (health) and MP point. Since there're few places where damage boost is desirable and lots of way to get healed, getting VI upgrade looks unnecessary. However, MP upgrade may be good as some boss fights can be beaten faster by using skills. I'll come back after making some progress. It wouldn't be too soon as I'm occupied with other works now.

Posted: 6/4/2014 2:08 PM

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Warepire

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This should be interesting, good luck Odongdong!

Posted: 6/4/2014 2:22 PM

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Omnigamer

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Joined: 2/16/2012
Posts: 282

PJ found a glitch some time ago that causes treasures to shift locations when activated. I did some digging and found the affected memory locations to test it, however we didn't have a full understanding of it by the end. In particular the goal was to move some of the critical items (magnet boots, IIRC) to a different location on the map, but we couldn't find a way to achieve this. I will check my notes when I get home, but you can activate it simply by triggering the robot helper's special. While the special is active, some of the mapping mechanics will break and enemies/chests will be out of place.

Posted: 6/4/2014 5:57 PM

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PJ

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I'm really excited to see that somebody is interested in working on this! I absolutely love this game, and was planning on doing some more routing for an RTA after SGDQ. Like Omnigamer said, I found a weird chest displacement glitch in the Sky Fortress or whatever it's called (the chapter with the magnet boots). I was able to relocate several chests using the robot helper's special attack, but unfortunately none of them were key item chests. I don't remember the details of the glitch either, but I'm sure it's in Omni's notes. :P It will be difficult to route pickups. I think MP would almost always be worth it just because it speeds up bosses so tremendously. HP upgrades aren't necessary at all I don't think. Not only are there plenty of health refills as you mentioned, but you can just run through most enemies. If you're holding the attack button while dashing, you will autoattack an enemy if you run straight into them. On several occasions, I was able to just constantly autoattack and push right through the enemy without taking damage (most obvious on the plant enemies in chapter 2 sewers). I didn't quite figure out how that works, but I'm certain it can be abused in a TAS. You can also skip a lot of story items. In chapter 1, you don't need anything except gas mask. You can skip torch, hammer, and ice boots. If there is a way to cancel the air sword's charge attack (the skyfall attack) you can skip even more items, but I haven't found a way to do so yet. Anyways, I'll be following the progress on this closely. Good luck! Edit: I forgot to mention that the difficulty does change the chest contents. Some chests don't exist, and the contents of other chests are just changed. IIRC, there is a lot less red medicine in the hardest difficulty (might not be any red medicine); it is mostly replaced by the blue medicine. The key item chests are in the same locations though, so it shouldn't matter much for a TAS. Should probably do highest difficulty just out of principle.

Posted: 6/21/2014 9:49 AM

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Odongdong

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Joined: 9/14/2011
Posts: 349

So I skimmed the game on pro difficulty. Apparently, the gameplay differs by difficulty - not only the items, but the bosses' behavior too. For instance, there were two lizardmans in first mid-boss fight on normal, but there are four on pro. Thankfully, as far as I know, damages taken from any enemies don't change, so there's still enough room for damage boosting. Unfortunately, I also found a bug on Bizhawk when running this game. It doesn't affect the game itself but I'm afraid it might mess the movie up later. So till this is fixed, I think the project is on hold.

Posted: 6/24/2014 7:07 PM

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agwawaf

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Joined: 12/20/2009
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I wanted to TAS this, however I'm busy (in real or to TAS other games lol) now. I'm looking forward to watching your result! Good luck! Oops, you stopped this project, I'm really sad. ;(

Posted: 6/24/2014 7:36 PM

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TheAngryPanda

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Odongdong wrote:

So I skimmed the game on pro difficulty. Apparently, the gameplay differs by difficulty - not only the items, but the bosses' behavior too. For instance, there were two lizardmans in first mid-boss fight on normal, but there are four on pro. Thankfully, as far as I know, damages taken from any enemies don't change, so there's still enough room for damage boosting. Unfortunately, I also found a bug on Bizhawk when running this game. It doesn't affect the game itself but I'm afraid it might mess the movie up later. So till this is fixed, I think the project is on hold.

What exactly is messing up? I'm curious because I also thought about looking into this game for TAS'ing.

My Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/theangrypanda1 Mostly SoE TAS and casual playthroughs.

Posted: 6/25/2014 3:34 AM

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Odongdong

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Joined: 9/14/2011
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Bizhawk counts every frame as lag frame in version 1.7.0. Didn't check with version 1.7.1 yet. Edit: Same thing occurs in 1.7.1. Fun fact: In version 1.6.1, it doesn't count any of lag frame. I'll post the RAM addresses I found when I'm back.

Posted: 6/26/2014 1:04 AM

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Odongdong

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7E1856: HP (Max) 7E1858: HP 7E185C: MP 7E1860: SP 7E1864: Sword charging counter; increases by 2 per frame, max at 127 7E1AB4(2 byte): Aura Blade counter 7E1997: Current Partner 7E1C12(2 byte): Earth Gurdian Shield counter All other RAM addresses that isn't marked is 1 byte. On second thought, I may try it on lsnes this time. I'm not used to its interface, though. But first, I should test further on this robot helper glitch and air sword skip possibility PJ & Omnigamer mentioned. It'll be a big time saver if it works.

Posted: 7/15/2014 11:52 AM

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Warepire

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Scepheo wrote:

Don't use the performance core for movie recording/playback (it's what causes the lag counter to stay red). Try using the compatibility or accuracy cores. If you're very lucky, your movie might even sync.

From this topic: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14612 Perhaps this is what is causing the problem for you.

Posted: 7/18/2014 3:46 AM

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Odongdong

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Joined: 9/14/2011
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Warepire wrote:

Scepheo wrote:
Don't use the performance core for movie recording/playback (it's what causes the lag counter to stay red). Try using the compatibility or accuracy cores. If you're very lucky, your movie might even sync.
From this topic: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14612 Perhaps this is what is causing the problem for you.

I tried this on Bizhawk 1.7.1. Performance core counts every frame as lag as I said and Compatibility core doesn't count any lags, so it didn't solve the issue unfortunately. To be honest, I suddenly felt to move to other games when waiting Bizhawk to fix this. Other than that, I've been working on another SNES game, which had positive progress so far. So I hope I can be back when I finished it.

Posted: 7/18/2014 8:27 AM

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Warepire

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Does Snes9x detect the lag in this game? If not it might be like Kirby's Adventure on NES where the game deals with lag such that it's not visible to the emulator (console) If this is the case, you should find some kind of flag getting changed in RAM during a transition into a lagframe and then change again during a transition into a normal frame.

Posted: 7/18/2014 7:39 PM

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PJ

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I decided to actually make a video of the chapter 5 chest glitch. I figure it's much easier to see that way. I just recorded a bunch of footage from SNES9x and then slapped it together. Nothing fancy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-WzTLkRejc Copied from youtube description: "This is just a real quick demonstration of the chest glitch in action. I don't know exactly how it works, but you can "move" certain chests to other locations within the room. The first three clips show three simple examples of moving the "aura blade" chest in the upper right corner of the room. The last clip just shows another example in a different room. That chest cannot be collected because once you move it off camera it disappears. All of these have one thing in common: using the robot helper's (Magna) special attack and then quickly moving. I have no idea exactly how it functions, but I have been unsuccessful in getting this to "move" a key item chest. If we can move the magnet boots in the first room, we can skip essentially this entire chapter."

Posted: 7/18/2014 8:29 PM

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Derakon

Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960

Interesting. Maybe the projectiles from Magna's attack are turning into the chests when they go offscreen? Something like they get partially garbage-collected and the "next" object in whatever appropriate data structure overwrites their properties...except for their position, hence why the chests teleport. That could explain why the chests disappear when they go offscreen, too -- the corrupted objects are getting correctly garbage-collected. This is total shot-in-the-dark supposition, mind you. But you might try seeing if changing what other objects are around has an effect. Stuff like killing enemies, luring enemies into the area, creating auras with your sword, simply having the sword swinging, etc. Additionally, if there's other interactive objects (like switches, say) in this game, they might also be potential teleportation targets. It's been ages since I played it so I can't remember.

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Posted: 7/19/2014 12:10 AM

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PJ

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I spent a long time with this and was only able to get chests to teleport. Didn't matter what enemies were around, didn't matter if I dashed vs stood on one of the arrow tiles, what sword I had, etc etc. Also, the chests would only appear on a few tiles. Like, no matter what actions I took, how long I delayed, etc, the teleported chest would always be on one of a few specific tiles. This seems to indicate that the location of Magna's projectiles aren't impacting it. I think it's more critical that he is using the attack at all rather than any specifics of the attack. The other neat this is that if you collect the chest that would normally be teleported, then a different one will be teleported. It's a really bizarre thing. I still wasn't able to teleport any key item chests, but it has potential. I didn't have any luck teleporting any other objects. You only have Magna for such a short period of time that your options are very limited. There are only like 3-4 rooms in the entire game that are large enough while you have Magna. :/

Posted: 7/19/2014 12:23 AM

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Derakon

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Hm, okay, alternate hypothesis: there's a list of active objects somewhere in memory, which includes Magna's projectiles. This list is of fixed size; thus, if you generate too many projectiles, it overflows. Chest location data is in a queue of some kind after this list, and some aspect of cleaning up after Magna's projectiles (possibly setting their positions to fixed values?) causes the chests to be teleported. If this is the case, the main requirement should be generating enough projectile spam. What I'd recommend doing is looking at memory to see where the projectiles' X/Y locations are and what happens when they get cleaned up. Then see what parts of memory get updated when you collect a chest. That should give you some idea of how the two are interacting.

Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.

Posted: 7/19/2014 5:06 AM

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Omnigamer

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I figured out the trigger for the glitch before; it has nothing to do with the projectiles. You can test a lot of things by forcing 7E1B9C to 01, which triggers the bug. If I remember right, that address is used as the frame counter until enemies can move again during the robo super. I don't remember all the details, but it essentially breaks the mapper and fills some locations with the chests. I think that all chests on a map are in a vector, and this only grabs a specific index of that vector. I don't have notes from before, but I do have a few disassemblies I can share as well as some of my candid analysis from ~6 months ago.

Posted: 7/20/2014 11:31 AM

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Odongdong

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Warepire: No luck, Snes9x also doesn't count the lag. Omnigamer: Thanks for the guide. I'm gonna look into this robo glitch things.

Posted: 7/20/2014 1:21 PM

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Warepire

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Odongdong wrote:

Warepire: No luck, Snes9x also doesn't count the lag.

Try to look in RAM for a value that changes state when the game lags. Or a counter that increases every lag frame. ~~If you tell me which version of the game you use~~, I can try to search too. (I'm stupid, there is only one version)

Posted: 7/20/2014 4:52 PM

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Warepire

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After some testing I cannot detect any lag in this game. Could you explain where it lags? Maybe give a save-state?

Posted: 7/21/2014 1:05 AM

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Odongdong

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That's the same problem I have, as every emulator somehow has this issue I can't tell where the lag is. I don't know if this is game's nature or not. You know what, I assume this is negligible, as I didn't find any other oddity while I skimmed the whole game on Bizhawk. Inability not to detect lags won't bother TASing a lot anyway. So it's likely I resume when I submit the one on working.

Posted: 7/21/2014 9:07 AM

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Warepire

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I meant that I cannot find any invisible lag, in a range of ~500 frames tested, the game accepted and acted on input on all of them. I was in the first area, before entering the cave.

Posted: 7/21/2014 10:38 AM

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Scepheo

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A frame is marked as a lag frame at the start of the frame, then unmarked whenever the game polls for input (although this INPUT_NOTIFY message is never sent to the client by the performance core, the other core works fine). If no frame is ever marked as a lag frame, that means the game is polling for input all the time, so no frame is actually a lag frame. I find it hard to imagine a way in which this system could yield false negatives, honestly.