Post subject: D/Generation
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
Hey. I noticed on the wishlist a few people mentioned D/Generation. I wanted to make a TAS for a while and I love this game, so I'm in the process of taking a stab at it. So far I've only done a WIP of the 1st floor. Unfortunately I had to do it over (for the 3rd time...) and lost the savestate so I can only give you a dump to use with playdump.exe. It's ~50mb so keep that in mind if you want to see it. http://www.mediafire.com/?cce60ac98or0ty0 If a veteran of the site watches the dump could you please tell me if I'm on the right track to an entertaining run or it's boring. Thanks. So, with that out of the way, let's discuss techniques! The main technique for saving frames is corner boosting. Now comes a shoddy diagram... |_ ^ Ok the caret is the direction the player is running, and hopefully the corner is obvious. What happens when you run into a corner like that is you get pushed to the left (along the horizontal plane of the corner) and get pushed back (along the vertical plane of the corner). You will always get pushed further along the horizontal plane than the vertical plane. Depending on the orientation of the corner it will be 3px across and 1px back, or 4px across and 2px back. Sometimes it seems beneficial to corner boost but it isn't. I will detail how to make a lua script to track the player's x/y position so you can find out how corner boosts are working in your favour but maybe in another post to keep this one on point. The next technique is going OOB. There is a certain wall prop the designers used in levels that allows you to get around a wall and into no man's land. However screen transitions work by a designer explicitly marking an edge of the screen to go to a certain room, so you can't get crazy game breaking glitches this way i.e going from floor 80 to floor 87 or whatever. You can see me using this glitch in the dump I posted. In the room I collect the laser I skip getting the key, because I can go OOB in the next room and get around the lock. Later on in my planned run I use this twice more. The last technique is about luck manipulation. If you've played this game before you know there's item boxes you can collect and they give you random items. Turns out it's really not that random. In fact the boxes only change their contents on DAYS. Not hours mins or seconds, and input has nothing to do with it... Anyway I will elaborate on routes and stuff in other posts if people are interested. I'll leave you with a map I made of the game. The pictures are just collages and you need to refer to the txt file for scene numbers, items, etc. http://www.mediafire.com/?6xot5gomky43iqu
Joined: 6/24/2007
Posts: 119
Hope to see this soon. Are you skipping any stages? Is it possible to manipulate more bombs from the pick ups?
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
I skip 82 completely because you get a bomb from talking to a man on 81, and since 82 has the exit on the same screen as where you start it's the poster child for a bomb skip. After that there are 3 item boxes on the fastest route possible. The first two boxes both have 8 items in their cycle before they repeat, and the third box has a cycle of 5 days. The first two boxes only have a bomb during one day of their cycle and they're not lined up, so you have to make a choice. You can either get a grenade and a bomb, or a bomb and a shield. Since the third box cycles every 5 days you can manipulate it to a bomb regardless of the other boxes. With these two bombs you can skip the majority of floor 87 and the first half of 88. I toyed around with grabbing another bomb on the last half of 88 rather than getting the final key to open the exit, but it was slower by several hundred frames because you have to wait for a bomb to detonate. I tried throwing grenades at it and shit but no dice. So the question of route comes down to whether you want a grenade or shield. Shield is the smart choice because when you activate a shield and run through laser barriers you pick them up and can deploy them later. They kill C/Gens just like a grenade and where I use the shield it saves a bunch of frames not waiting for barriers to move. Also you can grab 2 barriers which saves you grabbing a gren on 88, ~30 frames saved. With that said I haven't disassembled the game to find out the actual arrays that item boxes use. I just changed the date a bunch of times and observed, seeing if the patterns I jotted down coincided. They've coincided to my predictions but I certainly don't deny I could be wrong.
Joined: 6/24/2007
Posts: 119
any wip so far?
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
Not since the last one I posted. I've been kinda busy. I found a new time saver last month and then tried to code a prog to splice sections from an old replay to a new one, but that turned up dead because D/Gen has updates on odd frame numbers. I looked at some other DOS TAS's like Hocus Pocus and noticed that run had a solid 3 frames/sec update (from memory) which could facilitate splicing, but some other runs didn't have an even number of frames. I guess I should have picked an easier game for my first TAS but whatever, I'm still working on it. Since my free time isn't set in stone I can't say when the run will be done. I'm setting a personal goal for it to be before May though. I could release a half assed run and, realistically, no one would challenge it unless they loved D/Gen. But I want to make the best run that I physically can. Otherwise why bother making a TAS right?
Jungon
He/Him
Player (50)
Joined: 4/2/2009
Posts: 376
Location: Porto Alegre - Brazil
I'm having trouble finding this playdump.exe, where can I find it? I'm very interested in this run... +D
*Jungon*/*Johnnyz* smilie weirdo =P ^^ o.o @__@ +D
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
It's in the /streamtools directory of the JPC-RR archive.
Jungon
He/Him
Player (50)
Joined: 4/2/2009
Posts: 376
Location: Porto Alegre - Brazil
Ok, do we have a tutorial on that? I'm still a little lost .... +D
*Jungon*/*Johnnyz* smilie weirdo =P ^^ o.o @__@ +D
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
Well I certinaly botched my May goal! When it's done, etc. Jungon, download this: http://tastools.googlecode.com/files/jpcrr-streamtools-r11.2-win32-bin.zip Playdump is in there. Just drag the file I uploaded onto playdump.exe.
Joined: 6/24/2007
Posts: 119
how's the progress?
Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 9
It's been a while. Last year a lot of heavy things happened in real life and I completely forgot about this. I plan on resuming this run now when I have free time.
Joined: 6/24/2007
Posts: 119
how is the run going?