Topic by FriiedPorkchop

Posted: 9/6/2015 4:32 AM

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FriiedPorkchop

Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 6

Thank you. I'm pretty sure I used the mGBA core for that TAS since that seemed to be the only core I could use for recording movies. I will definitely post a bug report in the BizHawk forums though. Also, I did try the RAM search option but it seemed easier to find the values I was looking for using Cheat Engine. Perhaps I'll experiment a bit more with it and see If it ends up being a better choice.

Posted: 9/21/2015 1:27 AM

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FriiedPorkchop

Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 6

WIP up until Visitor's Courtyard: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/25648152377346256 I decided to use the VBA-Next core instead of mGBA for this TAS. It seems like it might be a bit laggier than mGBA but I don't seem to have to worry about any desyncs, so that makes this process a whole lot easier. I won't go as in depth with my optimizations as I did for my last post but there are a few tricks/glitches I feel I have to explain: Damage Boosting: Getting hit by an enemy gives you a little boost in speed, if you enter toboggan mode before hitting the ground you can preserve that speed for an extended period of time by jumping. I use this extensively in the tutorial and Artic Pen, as well as once at the end of Visitor's Courtyard Falling using toboggan: If I start falling during the grounded detobogganing animation (L>L on the ground), I start falling faster than I normally would be able to. How fast I fall is based on how far away from the ledge I start tobogganing. This trick also allows me to jump in midair and slide along the top of water, allowing me to make jumps that are normally impossible. Bounce Boost: If you press L within a small window of bouncing of a bounce pad, you get a small boost in height at the end of your bounce. I use this in Artic Pen-2 to skip the second bounce pad. OoB Trick: If you toboggan while jumping into a ceiling, the game will revert you back into normal mode automatically (presumably to prevent clipping into the ceiling). There is a small window in which you can do this off the top of a toboggan tunnel ceiling, allowing you to walk through toboggan tunnels in normal mode and also clipping you oob. You have to have some forward momentum in order to clip oob. I use this in Artic Pen-3 to skip a huge section of the level and also in general to save time when going through toboggan tunnels. I don't use this in Toboggan Courses because for some reason, this trick doesn't seem to work with ice physics. General Routing: Because damage boosts save time in this game and I only have a limited amount of health, its in my best interest to pick up medals along the way to increase my health. In this TAS, I try to pick up every medal that doesn't waste anytime to pick up. keep in mind that collecting every medal in a level gives you an extra text box at the end of the level, wasting a few frames. I should get my first health upgrade in the middle of Zebra Pen (the next level), just before it will be neccesary Levels: Mr.Chew: straight forward fight; I have to wait for his recoil animation to end before I can hit him again. In phase 2 he has less knockback, so I switch to grounded attacks. Training: because I don't have toboggan yet, this level is pretty straight forward. damage boosts/first-frame jumping on water to save time. Holding back for a couple frames after bouncing on the bounce pad keeps me from hitting the wall and losing all my speed. Overworld: using toboggan mode allows you to enter levels a little earlier. Toboggan Courses (Green Circle): heavy use of toboggan mode here to preserve as much speed as possible. continually entering and reentering toboggan mode preserves my speed up the ice slope. Autofire L produces the same effect, but since the window is so large I decided to mess around with it a bit more. Giraffe Pen: mostly the same as my test tas with a few more minor optimizations Artic Pen: In this level I have to destroy 5 fans in each section. The wind the fans produce pushes me in the direction it's facing, this can either help me save time or lose time depending on how the cycles turn out. The fans can only be destroyed by the incredibly slow grounded attack, thankfully I am able to use the momentum from the fan to skip the attack's cooldown animation in a few spots. Artic Pen-1: All of the fan cycles worked out well and the walrus damage boost at the end is magical (took me a long time to get that to work) Artic Pen-2: The second fan cycle didn't work out so well so I have to jump over the windbox here to save the most time. The toboggan in the middle of the section is much more precise than it looks and it's very easy to lose all of your speed before hitting the bottom. The fact that this toboggan worked out the way it did is practically a miracle. Artic Pen-3: Showing of the OoB Trick for the first time, this skips a good half of this section by itself. Minigame: Probably the worst part of this game; you have to sit through this bad DDR clone everytime you enter Visitor's Courtyard. You don't have to do anything to beat it but I do the minigame anyway for the medals. I enter one incorrect input to get 9/10 medals and skip the "you got all the medals" text at the end of the minigame. This part looks sloppy, I'll probably redo it later. Visitor's Courtyard: In this level, I have to collect 20 shovels along with getting to the end. This level is also the introduction to stealth in this game, which unfortunately is very time consuming. I am able to jump over and knock out a couple of the NPCs, but for the rest of the time, you can enjoy me being a generally upstanding citizen while I wait for the NPCs to move. I will probably upload the next WIP once I get through Bird Cages. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Posted: 9/22/2015 2:05 AM

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CoolKirby

Editor, Experienced player (609)

Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4012

Yes! I've been waiting to see progress on this game. Good work, but would the turbo tobogganing glitch speed up the toboggan courses? Also, is there any way to manipulate the people in Visitor's Courtyard to look away the whole time (so you don't have to stop and "smile and wave"?

Posted: 9/22/2015 6:27 AM

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FriiedPorkchop

Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 6

Thank you. I guess I didn't manage to explain this very well. Basically, what I do in Toboggan Courses to preserve my speed up the ice slope is the same thing as turboing L. When you enter/exit tobbogan mode, your speed becomes frozen until the end of the animation, but you can cancel the enter animation with the exit animation and vice versa, therefore allowing to chain animations together and preserve your speed. Now you can do this on the first frame possible, which would be using autofire/turbo, but the window for pressing L is actually much larger than that. So instead, I decided to mess around with it a little bit more and do something a little more creative. In short no, turboing would not save time here. To explain your second question, the positions of the NPCs are unfortunatly based on cycles. I could potentially wait for the NPCs to walk along their path and eventually turn around, but they move so slowly that this would waste much more time than it would save. Otherwise, the NPCs I stop at aren't skippable.

Posted: 10/17/2015 5:13 PM

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FriiedPorkchop

Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 6

WIP up to the end of Hippo Pen: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/26239430614974492 IRL things have started to catch up to me and that has meant that progress on the TAS has slowed down by a fair amount. I was hoping to have Bird Cages done by now but im still happy with the progress I've made so far. So here's the next three levels of the game: Zebra Pen, Children's Zoo, and Hippo Pen. before Zebra: I use a cool trick here where I input a jump 1 frame after inputting B to talk to a sign and get a second and third jump. Because of how rare signs end up being this ends up being the only place it saves time. Zebra: Gliding slows you down as you use it, so for this level I want to avoid gliding as much as possible. I'm still suprised I was able to skip gliding on a couple of these jumps. Children's Zoo: Straight forward level where you get to play as Marty. This level is actually supposed to be a stealth level but you can just jump over all the NPCs heads Hippo Pen: where swimming gets introduced. As is obvious, constantly attacking is the fastest form of movement in the water (It's actually slightly faster than regular walking speed). In the ending, you get a little taste of Bird Cages. I also tried my hand at encoding again and have uploaded an encode of the TAS so far, hopefully the quality is a little bit better although I can't do much about the drop from 60 fps to 30 fps. Link to video As always, Any comments or feedback is much appreciated.

Posted: 10/23/2015 7:28 AM

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CoolKirby

Editor, Experienced player (609)

Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4012

Looks good! That jumping backwards in some areas is to reduce lag, right? That was sometimes the only way to reduce it in the first Madagascar game, and this one appears to use a modified version of the same game engine.

Posted: 3/3/2020 8:58 PM
(Edited: 1/29/2024 5:30 PM)

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RetroEdit

Any

Editor, Reviewer, Player (166)

Joined: 8/8/2019
Posts: 131

I recently remembered this game again, and I'm interested in TASing it. I'm particularly interested in routing out a 100% run, because the optimal route isn't entirely clear. Because you have to enter most early levels twice to take out the police men for that mission, comparisons will have to be made to determine whether collecting all the medals on the first time or second time around is faster (still, this is irrelevant for most levels, because some of the medals are usually ability-locked and could only be accessed in the second playthrough anyway). More broadly, routing the order of the medals will be interesting. I recently did a blind 100% playthrough and finished in a highly suboptimal 3 hours. I wonder how fast a TAS could go, since there are no recorded speedruns on SRC at least. This video finishes in just under 2 hours, but it's probably not anywhere close to optimal (I haven't watched it through). As for any%, an SRC board was made since 2015 and several runners have brought the time down. The current world record is 37m 32s, set more than two years ago. Edit: As of January 2024, there's a 100% completion time of 1:25:13 posted on the board.