Hi, I've been recently trying to help the RTA community for this game, and I've been having a horrible time getting PSXjin to not flicker and do other horrible things...
However, my main reason for coming here is I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to glitch-hunting.. I've recently improved the Tower of Babel Outer Wall skip (before it was thought you had to jump to enact the warp, turns out you can simply run which saves a handful of frames not setting up a previous thought-to-be precise jump) but it still has no consistent setup. There seems to be sub-pixels involved and we've tried just about everything we can in real time to use objects to align ourselves on the correct "set" of sub-pixels, but alas nothing around seems to give the proper alignment.
So if anyone with playstation TAS experience could point me in the correct direction for creating a RAMWatch so I could see my X, Y, and Z coordinates for Fei/Weltall/Whoever is the first character, I'd really appreciate it.
I'm pretty sure I can figure out my problems with the graphics and what-not, that's not a serious issue anyway as I have the game looking and sounding great on ePSXe, so why not PSXjin? I've also looked at the TASVideos tutorial, but it didn't really seem to help me since I don't understand/am not educated enough to know when I'm looking for 1byte/2byte/4byte values, what the difference even is, or what signed/unsigned means, and pretty much everything I'm looking at when I open the RAMSearch.
This game must have many more warps/zips/whatever you'd like to call it, it's just that as far as I'm aware the person who found almost all of the current platforming tricks/skips isn't even a speedrunner/TASer and is also Japanese, so unless LiveUG (the main Japanese RTA runner for this game) acts as a translator/mediator or even knows where to contact said person, we really have no way of knowing how they were even discovered.
LiveUG suspects more similar warps could be found in Goliath Factory, Shevat Emergency Shaft, and Krelian's Lab due to the similar nature in how some of the platforms are vertically layered, and I do too. I'd gladly do the actual hunting and testing, I just am really at a loss on how to start.
Furthermore I'd like to look into different types of glitches. Something like getting the Yggdrasil onto water before the game flags it to be able to do so. This would skip a giant portion, as you would go directly from Bart's Hideout to the Thames, presumably where Fei and Elly get scooped up off the barge, or between the two Haishao fights. That would skip roughly 1/4 of disc 1. O_O! For J version, this would be huge mainly because there is some type of item duplication glitch which would solve all the money issues skipping this big of section of the game and you would immediately be able to purchase the Thames' gear tune-ups. Less so for the English version, because this glitch doesn't exist, so it would probably make for a LOT of burning up Hob-gobs with Elly's fire-elemental ether in Blackmoon Forest and probably collecting every last damn thing on the Thames just to pay for the upgrades, supposing the glitch even exists, it can be doable in RTA, and doesn't crash the game.
Other things I'd like to improve are some of the rather precise jumps that also require sub-pixel alignment, but are much smaller time-savers. I believe a simple RAMWatch to show one exactly where I am to create setups to guaruntee sub-pixels would drastically reduce the current clunky "blind" platforming strats.
If anyone is interested in what's already been discovered, I can share the RTA notes, as well as some videos of the currently used tricks and interesting platforming in the RTA. For now I'll leave the thread with the fact that the speedrun is roughly 15 1/2 hours on Japanese, and roughly 18 1/2 on English. The Japanese runner prefers to run Glitchless because of the item duplication glitch, and says that this particular glitch devalues the run because there are no major sequence breaks to go along with it, so he also chooses to not do the warps and text skipping. The English runners, however, do use the platforming-based glitches/tricks, but I'm not too familiar with who uses what for tricks and text skips. To also add, there are quite a few text skips, but for a speedrun that is essentially the fastest way to read the story, the runners seem to have been on the fence about actually including them in their runs.
This is where I'd like to come in, and provide 2 separate categories.. hopefully by breaking this game there will be a much shorter glitched category, and those strong-willed enthusiasts can still run a glitchless "story run". The game is so huge and its funding was cut so early in development that I can't imagine larger sequence breaks aren't there. The only current sequence break is being able to skip visiting the Thames to talk to the Captain (sad, I know) before going to Zeboim.
Anyway, that's about all I can type for now.. I'd just like to reiterate that ANY and ALL help would be greatly appreciated, I absolutely love this game and wish to reduce it's length in a speedrun so more would play it on a timer.
Thanks all :>
