Topic by Exonym

Posted: 7/22/2012 7:42 AM

Post subject: Radical Rex

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Exonym

Editor, Experienced player (883)

Joined: 7/20/2011
Posts: 345

Found this platformer the other day, and some sections might make the game fun to watch. There are however, other sections that are tedious and not much fun to watch. The main character moves pretty slow unless on a skateboard, so staying on it for as long as possible is crucial. I want to say this first: I won't be doing a full run of this game at the moment, as I'm working on something else. But if anyone wants to pick up this game I'll be glad to support you. I'll start off sharing what I know; x speed: 7E0525 x subsp: 7E0524 yspeed: 7E0527 ysubsp: 7E0526 xpos: 7E051D ypos: 7E0521 Sometimes using firebreath right before landing reaches the max walking speed. Jumping slows you down, so doing minimal jumps/falls will cut down on frames. Using firebreath sometimes can change an enemy's actions. I used it on that dragon head monster to cause him not to shoot early and I could jump over it. My test is unoptimal in most cases, and at the end of the test run I run into a random fireball with the skateboard. If there is some way to time it so that the fireball is out of the way, I'm pretty sure you could jump up onto the slope above. I didn't complete the first level because of the above mentioned problem, but anyway here's the little test (I used Snes9X v1.52 rr svn184 because I'm still learning lsnes at the moment. Because of this, microstorage won't accept the VBM so I'm using another file service.) http://www.4shared.com/file/hFxDrwqm/Exxonym_radrex.html?

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 7/25/2012 9:03 PM

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Omnigamer

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Joined: 2/16/2012
Posts: 282

Hello, good to see somebody looking into this game on the TAS side of things. I did a real-time speedrun of this game (currently in the submission queue at SDA), and I still have my notes from when I was researching the game. My route was reasonable barring any tricky skips, but I don't imagine the TAS will be much different without finding any clipping or superjump bugs. Below are some boss values:

Damage:

Sethron 1: 1/4 does 1, 1/2 does 2-3, 3/4 fire does 4 per hit, full does 8, 76 HP
Pterosaur: 75 HP, full flame does 20
Zombie Ankly: 65, kick does 1, bones do 3-12 with full flame; probably same as number of frames connecting with skull
Super Tumor: 72 HP, full flame does 5-6, 3/4 does 2-3, 1/2 does 1-2. Full roar does 18 dmg.
Hell Hive: 65 HP, full does 3-4 per hit, on second volley roar can hit all and do 21 total damage, and kills top left
Last boss has 64 HP, full flame does 5, roar does 8

Boss/Lifebar HP stored in 7E1EED, current value shown in 7E1EE6
7E1E4A - The level of fire. 2 = 1 powerup, 4 = 2 powerups, 6 = 3 powerups, 8 = full

Note that their may be an alternate HP location, as I'm pretty sure those values only refer to the life bar that appears on-screen. It seems silly to program it with the flame doing different amounts of damage on every enemy/boss, so I imagine there are some other addresses being used here and there. A useful trick for stages 3 and 8 is a boosted jump coming out of the tubes. In order to perform it, you need to land prior to entering (being in the air will result in a tumble motion when you come out) and then just before leaving the tube you have a 2 frame window to jump. This allows you to keep your momentum throughout the jump, and allows for a couple of fast sections.

Posted: 7/26/2012 4:59 PM

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Exonym

Editor, Experienced player (883)

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I watched the first stage of your run and I can't believe I didn't see that shortcut of jumping off the skateboard early onto that spring plant LOL. I did say the test was unoptimal but that was a bit retarded. Anyway, you said you played it on easy, what exactly does the diffculty change in this game? I never got around to really checking. I would assume it just makes enemies have less hp? Edit: Apparently hard mode creates more enemies than easy mode.

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 7/26/2012 8:35 PM

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Omnigamer

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Joined: 2/16/2012
Posts: 282

To my knowledge, the different difficulties affect several things: -Enemy HP -Your HP (or enemy damages) -Number of checkpoints (less for higher difficulties) -More enemies The main reason I did it on Easy is that Normal and Hard both spawn enemies in terrible locations for proceeding quickly, namely the Pterosaurs. It wouldn't be as much of an issue in a TAS since you can more reliably kill them/dodge their projectiles, but the amount of things that need to be dodged from level-to-level increases substantially with other difficulties. Toss that with the fact that you are not able to one-shot most enemies, and Easy was the most practical difficulty to do the run with since I could damage boost through most of them.

Posted: 7/27/2012 12:40 AM

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Exonym

Editor, Experienced player (883)

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Omnigamer wrote:

The main reason I did it on Easy is that Normal and Hard both spawn enemies in terrible locations for proceeding quickly, namely the Pterosaurs.

Wow this game is ridiculously hard to play on hard. I keep dying trying to play through it normally. You are right, the pterosaurs are the most annoying enemies in the game. I try to kill some early to prevent mishaps later, but sometimes it doesn't seem possible. I redid the first level and incorporated tricks I saw in your run (jumping from the ramp to that spring plant for instance. I also found that if your max walking speed is slightly slower than normal, you can sometimes release the direction for 1 frame and resume and you will be at max speed. I have concluded that the fireballs ALWAYS appear in the same position on screen no matter when you arrive at the location. This makes that jump to the slope above where I ended my last test impossible. Anyway, here's the first level, I rerecorded a little more times than I wanted to for a test cause I was trying to find a big skip. Unfortunately some gaps were barely out of range or otherwise unreachable. Still using Snes9x v1.52 svn184 because I already had the RAM values worked out. http://www.mediafire.com/?6f4ca8atqlvmiu7

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 7/28/2012 9:53 PM

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Exonym

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I saved 66 more frames on the first level. These improvements came from: - Grabbing the fire powerup, so it's now a fire projectile. This makes killing enemies easier so I don't have to use damage to run through them. - faster transition from skateboard to spring plant. - faster landing speeds (the running speed is pretty unreliable when landing from a jump..) - avoided the armadillo thing's spikes later in the stage. Jumping slightly earlier prevented him from shooting his thorns, which would slow me down below. He was in a worse position than last time however, so I couldn't simply jump over him this time. Possible improvements: - Skipping getting the second fireball powerup, and just dropping off that ledge at ~2870. - I haven't tested how many shots it takes to kill the final dragon blocking the exit. With the second fireball powerup it might be faster to just kill him instead of jumping over him. Of course if it's possible, then the above improvement is discarded. - When getting on the final skateboard, going left and eventually up over that ramp where the fireballs are in the way "might" be possible. I spent a good time trying, and really don't think it is. The fireballs are always in the way. The improvements shouldn't be too hard to experiment with, as they are all at the end of the level. Anyway: http://www.mediafire.com/?bbf7jlujamshcc9

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 7/29/2012 3:35 AM

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Omnigamer

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Joined: 2/16/2012
Posts: 282

Looking good so far; don't have too much to add. It will be important to remember that the projectile flame acts as both fire and a kick for later levels, as it can make getting through bones and some other parts much quicker. It also doesn't do as much damage against some bosses and enemies though, so be careful. Also be aware that during the boss stages, you probably will be forced to go out of your way to get the flame upgrades to save time. As a rule of thumb the damage you do to bosses doubles with each powerup, starting at the second or third. The only stage where I found that you can gain time by skipping a powerup was Stage 8, where it saves ~1000 frames on average (probably much more with some actual experimentation). One final thing that I didn't spend much time investigating is the vines in stages 2 and 9. I aim for the best setup to a full swing, but I didn't check which jumps you could make with swings that were less than full.

Posted: 7/31/2012 1:32 AM

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Exonym

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The tricks I listed before for the first level don't work. Or at least; I can't find any way to make them save time. I went ahead to the second level and got through most of that. It most likely isn't going to be the final version, there are many places to optimize landing speed by a small amount.. Anyway, I have concerns about the game regarding TASvideos standards of acceptance. The run so far isn't going to look significantly different from your (Omnigamer's) real time speedrun. There will obviously be precision movement regarding jumps and movement speeds, but I haven't been able to find any major skips or glitches yet (I found a possible skip somewhere, I'm still investigating; read below for details). Here's another problem: the game is somewhat slow paced in the non-skateboarding sections. Even though there are lots of tricks and optimizations to save frames regarding movement speed, they are not very apparent to even someone who HAS happened to play the game (not many). I haven't watched your full run (I watched about half so far to get an idea of what the game will be like), but the game seems to get pretty repetitive after a while. I need some opinions regarding acceptability of the game here at TASvideos. Without any glitches and somewhat slow gameplay through a lot of it, I have my doubts. The site also is pretty strict regarding game choice. Now, about that little trick I (may) have found. It occurs right at the end of my movie. This is what I know so far: when you swing at full speed, letting go at the right frame (only 1 frame window as far as I know) will get you the angle needed to stand on the side of those trees. There is a small window where you have the walking animation where you can perform a jump. Now at this angle, it's not high enough to get over the tree in this instance. In fact, I'm not sure if the programmers have already prepared for the situation and went ahead and blocked the whole area above the tree. I can't jump high enough to find out. I will surely be trying all kinds of angles and combinations to get this to work, as it's my only hope of looking like an actual TAS with superhuman capabilities. Here's the file anyway: http://www.mediafire.com/?xyr9r4e22bodvxo

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 7/31/2012 2:31 AM

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Omnigamer

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Joined: 2/16/2012
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I had doubts about it being a good TAS project as well, since it mainly comes down to the route rather than special movement techniques or other glitches. You could put it in the same category as Toki, which has very limited movement options but was accepted due to the humorous abuse of poor hitboxes. That was a very old submission though, so standards have probably changed.

Posted: 11/21/2014 12:48 PM

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Exonym

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Joined: 7/20/2011
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I see that you're going to be running this game at AGDQ next year, Omnigamer? I was going to test the game more, because I've been thinking about it and stage 3 and 8 would be interesting with all the bounciness. If you want whenever I get some free time I could take a look into it again and see if I can find anything worth noting for an RTA, though I think your SDA run had most of the game staked out pretty well. Also I enjoyed watching the run, so I'll look forward to seeing it at AGDQ if you're going :).

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 11/21/2014 3:22 PM

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Omnigamer

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Hey Exxonym, yeah I will be running the game at AGDQ. I actually worked on re-learning the first half of the game last night and found a few time-savers in the process. It amounts to about 3-4 seconds overall, but any improvement is improvement. If you want to investigate things further, by all means. The game is too silly not to have one or two crippling oversights.

Posted: 11/22/2014 2:01 AM

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Exonym

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Awesome! The main thing that will be worth investigating from a TAS perspective is seeing how much time each powerup costs to collect, and how much time it takes to kill the boss without it. Of course this would only really be practical for a TAS because it will have frame precise movements. What I would look for in terms of realtime runs would be some sort of clip or tricky skip. Some skips might be dangerous though because of those one hit kill spikes. I'm working on SSW right now, so it'll be after I finish that and if I have time during DTC5.

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 11/22/2014 4:54 PM

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Omnigamer

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Posts: 282

To be honest, the difference in time between collecting and not collecting powerups is not so small that you'll need to do stringent frame analysis. For whatever reason they made damage specific to the enemy being hit, and collecting powerups changes the amount in unpredictable ways. I will need to check my notes, but for example on the Pterodactyl boss he takes something like 1, 2, 5, 10, or 42 damage depending on your flame powerups. That's a lot of extra hits to get the equivalent damage between even level 4 and level 5 flame. This compounds with the bosses that have invulnerability between cycles. Pterodactyl is the most pronounced difference, but the only boss I worked out to be faster without getting full powerups is the Tumor boss in Stage 8, and that was mainly because all of the other flame powerups are way too far out of the way. But yeah, it won't be a difference in number of frames, I expect it to be on the order of seconds at least.

Posted: 11/23/2014 4:07 AM

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Exonym

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Wow, that's a big increase in damage. In that case you're probably right. I never played up to any of the bosses, so I didn't think about the invincibility time between hits. Maybe it's still possible to skip 1 powerup on the bosses that don't increase quite as much as the pterodactyl? I guess I'd have to get to that point to really see, but your notes say that full flame on hell hive for example does 3-4 damage per hit. It's tough to know for sure, but I guess doubling your damage would decrease the time spent on the boss quite a bit.

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 12/2/2014 6:25 AM

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Omnigamer

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A couple of new finds: -Boneyard boss can be completely skipped. For whatever reason, one frame of his animation does not have the invisible wall. During that time you can get a pixel inside of it, and then the next damage boost will push you the rest of the way through. A pretty big timesaver, and removes probably the biggest point of RNG in the run. -A newer strat against the Tumor boss helps tremendously. Turns out you can hit both sides of him at the same time with full or 3/4 flame. I need to time out what the actual differences are, but it may be enough to justify getting another flame and full roar. At least in my testing it takes the time to finish him down from about a minute to ~20 seconds if done well. Again, the detours will need to be timed out, but it's a start. -A couple other minor route modifications throughout. Basically a few more shortcuts and a couple of uses for the "tube jumping" technique I described earlier.

Posted: 12/2/2014 12:21 PM

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Exonym

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Skipping that boss sounds awesome. It also sounds like it would be difficult to do in real time? I haven't had much time to work on it, almost done with redoing the first level though and I'm finding at some points it's hard to get the max movement speed. Sometimes it will be 1 - 244 pixels isntead of 2 - 0. And breathing fire before landing doesn't change that in some locations for whatever reason. Getting the highest pixel count possible to 2 is what I've settled on for some locations, but I feel like it should be max. You can let go a few frames and then resume your direction to get it, but that's not effective on small platforms because there isn't enough distance to cover that loss. Also I'm curious what the new route changes are, nothing changed for level 1 I assume?

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 12/2/2014 2:53 PM

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Omnigamer

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Nothing changed in Level 1. The setup for the boss skip is actually pretty easy in real-time; you just walk at him, kick, and then keep walking. After I figured it out, I was able to do it every time after. It requires three damage boosts though, and an optimal method should be able to do it in 2. I'm also working on a hitbox viewer for the game. Their data structures are fairly straightforward, although the actual hitbox calculations and flags are a bit wonky. I'll work on it a bit more. Also as a note, Rex's speed address is 2 bytes and changes by stage. I've included in my script something that displays his speed beneath him so it should be easy to track. I'll release the script after I've squashed a few more bugs.

Posted: 12/3/2014 11:46 AM

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Exonym

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A hitbox viewer sounds pretty useful, considering some of their boxes are kinda hard to figure out. I've finished level 1 and actually improved it by 55 frames over my old attempt. I think 30 of those are from using Bizhawk for whatever reason. Improvement comes from staying on the skateboard longer before ditching it when running into that dinosaur at frame ~3025. Doing this puts that Pterodactyl in an annoying position though, so I lose a little bit from avoiding him dropping rocks. He also causes lag if you jump too early to the next ledge. Tested max speed in some areas, and the subspeed is always in multiples of 8 pixels, out of a total of 256 for every 1 speed. So if I can't get 1+256/256 (which is just 2), the next best is 1+248/256. Doing this doesn't actually lose time as long as the distance to the next jump is short. Haven't found any glitches yet, but I did find this:

Letting go of the skateboard right before hitting a wall gives you a frame of being on solid ground, in which you can jump. Not sure if it's useful anywhere though, but something to keep in mind. Not sure why the animation is so large embedded. Here's level 1 http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/19173940827354274

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 12/4/2014 4:32 AM

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Omnigamer

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Very interesting on the above. Can it only be done on colliding with something, or is it possible any time when losing the board? For example, could you launch the board mid-jump and then jump again after? I made a YouTube compilation of my improvements so far: Link to video It doesn't take into account a route change in stage 8 to get the last flame powerup, but I believe it still gains time over that.

Posted: 12/4/2014 1:35 PM

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KusogeMan

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go for a vault movie,fear nothing!

TAS i'm interested: megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched fighting games with speed goals in general

Posted: 12/5/2014 12:49 AM

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Exonym

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grassini wrote:

go for a vault movie,fear nothing!

Honestly if I submit the game I know it's probably just vault material, but I find some vault runs entertaining.

Omnigamer wrote:

Can it only be done on colliding with something, or is it possible any time when losing the board?

Only when colliding with a solid object like a wall. It seems you need a higher speed than your normal xspeed, such as a skateboard or those vines from stage 2. By the way, those are some nice improvements, I like the boneyard boss skip especially.

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 12/8/2014 3:44 AM

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Exonym

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Finished stage 2, and improved my old WIP in a few areas. When dropping down onto the swinging vine at 4930, it's actually faster to jump to the ledge and then fall than drop from the vine because doing so prevents the animation when you fall too far. Instead of taking damage at the frog at 6880, if you turn around for a few frames while jumping over him it causes him to move to the left instead of the right. The rest of the level is new to me so it might be improvable somewhere, but I'll share my notes anyway. The jump at ~7680 or so might be possibly done in real time, but it would be pretty difficult, it's like a 3 frame window. Jumping on the spiked ledges shortly after it however are basically impossible because you have to be very precise to land on the ledges, and any small mistake causes instant death. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/19277615103292616

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.

Posted: 12/8/2014 5:09 AM

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solarplex

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Exonym wrote:

http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/19277615103292616

Link to video

Posted: 12/9/2014 6:53 PM

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Omnigamer

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Wow, looking really impressive! I'll have to give some of those a go when I get back to practicing. I'm curious if some of there are some similar ways to abuse the momentum in stage 9, although the stage layout is a lot different. I can't think of places in other stages where the spike ledge-jumping would apply, but I'll keep my eyes open for that too.

Posted: 12/10/2014 4:00 AM

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Exonym

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So I found something out that makes this game a little more complicated to TAS. Jumping cycles through your speed at 1+240/256, 1+224/256, 1+208/256, 1+192/256, 1+240/256... etc By pressing A when your speed is at the highest (1+240/256), you maintain that speed one more frame. This lowers your deceleration rate when falling or anywhere your speed drops off gradually. In this case you can stop every increment of your speed, so that it ends up being 1+240/256, 1+240/256, 1+224/256, 1+224/256, ... etc Now this only saves a matter of pixels, but it's something that will need to be considered and unfortunately means I need to restart the run. It also means that I'll be breathing fire at almost every jump now, so it will look like I'm attacking nothing, and I am. Also found that jumping when exiting a log in stage 2 allows you to turn around a bit faster. Currently about halfway through stage 1 and saved 6 more frames so far. I'll just post when both the levels are redone. Edit: Abusing momentum such as in stage 2 is actually kinda hard, you have to have the right pixels for Rex to even notice the next slope, which is why I turned around for a few frames in my WIP. Sometimes he just likes to fly off the top of the slope and not gain any speed from going down it. Edit2 Just thought I'd throw this useless information in. Keeping your momentum really high from those logs and running into the bottom of the tree puts me into the floor for 1 frame, but can't do anything with it.

Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.