What is the correlation between Tone and hits required to kill various enemies/bosses? Anyone with savestate editing knowledge who can perform this study?
Hiryuu at rpgclassics.com has set a hit count for each enemy with a base tone value of 30. The enemies fought in the movie are Bargan (the robot), Belzar, and Ligar. Their hit counts are 102, 897, and 1364 respectively. So, if Rygar were to fight Ligar with a tone of 30, he would take 1364 hits to defeat. Basically, if you take each hit count, multiply it by 30, divide it by Rygar's current tone, and round it up, that should be the number of hits it takes (if his stats are correct - I imagine he had to improvise a bit with Ligar).
So:
Bargan - 3060/Rygar's Tone
Belzar - 26910/Rygar's Tone
Ligar - 40920/Rygar's Tone
should be the number of hits each enemy takes.
Walker Boh wrote:
I just checked Rygar at gamefaqs. It appears that I have discovered a totally NEW glitch!!! Woohoo ;)
The flying glitch they talk about appear to be something else and my glitch should be "air walk" or something.
True, I had never even noticed this before - but there are quite a few glitches still that haven't been discovered. In Sagila's cave, it is possible to enemy-less fly around and walk on top of walls by bouncing on top of the Wyrms (flying, horned birds) at different places. Also, you can get most enemies on the screen, double back just a tad to get them off, and return to dispatch them (this is huge in the cave) - very reminiscent of Ninja Gaiden and other games of the time. Can't wait to see the air-walk glitch in action, however - it is tough to pull off, even on an emulator.
EDIT: Well, that certainly puts a new spin on the game. It is pretty incredible. Now there is officially nowhere you can't get to in the game before you're supposed to. While playing around with it, I discovered something: Crawl over a cliff using the "Air-Walk" technique and throw your grappling hook. This will make you fall into the cliff, but instead of dying, you will emerge at the top of the screen and continue to fall. This can get you to higher platforms:
Something I thought I'd never see.
You really have opened up an entirely new game here, Walker. One thing you might want to try in your next run is go straight to the Tower of Garba (with the snails and the Pegasus Flute) immediately to get up your experience, then go to Lapis for the warp. With the experience the enemies give you in the tower, you might not need to waste so much time on the robots in Lapis. Just a thought. And thanks - the walkthrough will be updated tonight.
I haven't either yet, but the possibility for warps is there. You're probably right about the tower, as your tone wouldn't be higher than 30 when you got there and they would take 327 hits, not to mention it being way out of the way. But they do reward 111 tone points as opposed to the robot's 18.
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Edit: I was about to ask whether to use death-as-shortcut or not in the full run of this game, but I hadn't tested some new stuff out so ignore this post. Sorry =/
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
Necro bumping!
So I'm into Rygar all of a sudden and got a suggestion on IRC that maybe it's time to re-define the "warpless"-run into an "all items"-run (In case someone would like to yell at me on IRC for this idea, find me in #tasvideos on freenode or drop a PM to Cardboard on the previously mentioned server (PM is probably the safest way (Parenthesis))) .
After all the "warpless"-run is already abusing more or less every glitch in the game with the exception of "warping", but it is using the floating glitch, and not to mention the way Deathpigor is handled in the Tower Of Garba etc.
Soooo... would this create an uproar if I aimed for "all items/all bosses", and other than that, had no restrictions on how to get there, and obsoleted the current "full" run?
(My opinion on this: Rygar is a fun game to glitch, but I also like the "warpless" run as it is now, but maybe it's time to break up with the past route and realize that all bosses in the game can be slain much faster, and much more fucked up. However if the majority of the viewers wants me to not glitch, and stick to the old route, then I suppose... that that's what I'll do)
End of not-making-sense-post.
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
So I'm playing around with this title now, in the interest of updating Walker Boh's warpless run.
It's early days yet, but it seems that the game could actually be finished faster in real time by using the US version. My calculations show there's not many frames saved by jumping over rivers as opposed to using the pulley. The biggest savings is the first jump Walker takes before the player has the pulley (~600 frames or so). The total savings I would say is very unlikely to exceed, say, 1800 frames.
This savings, it seems to me, would be dwarfed by the realtime savings of NTSC emulation (i.e. the game running 16.7% faster).
Can anyone correct me if I'm wrong on this? Otherwise, my temptation would be to do my improvement using the US ROM.
>This savings, it seems to me, would be dwarfed by the realtime savings of NTSC emulation (i.e. the game running 16.7% faster).
Just because the game shows more frames per second doesn't mean it's faster. The speed of the character/enemies is sometimes adjusted so that they run the same speed in meters/second on both systems.
I'm not completely sure which it is for Rygar, but a quick test showed that
1) NTSC and PAL Rygars walk at the approximate same speed
2) NTSC Rygar climbs a lot faster
3) PAL Rygar is less affected by gravity when he jumps and lands later.
You can always TAS the first stage in both games and see which is faster (in seconds, not frames).
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
NTSC Rygar can and will kill bosses faster due to landing faster between jumps and enemies being invulnerable "less amount of seconds".
Also the greatest river skip is probably after beating Dorago's Palace.
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Cardboard wrote:
NTSC Rygar can and will kill bosses faster due to landing faster between jumps and enemies being invulnerable "less amount of seconds".
Also the greatest river skip is probably after beating Dorago's Palace.
You can't jump over that river, unless you mean suicide as an option?
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
Walker Boh wrote:
Cardboard wrote:
NTSC Rygar can and will kill bosses faster due to landing faster between jumps and enemies being invulnerable "less amount of seconds".
Also the greatest river skip is probably after beating Dorago's Palace.
You can't jump over that river, unless you mean suicide as an option?
Not that river, but like... 2 screens to the right of Dorago's Palace. There's a pretty large gain from being able to pass the river there I think.
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
Truncated wrote:
Just because the game shows more frames per second doesn't mean it's faster. The speed of the character/enemies is sometimes adjusted so that they run the same speed in meters/second on both systems.
I'm not completely sure which it is for Rygar, but a quick test showed that
1) NTSC and PAL Rygars walk at the approximate same speed
2) NTSC Rygar climbs a lot faster
3) PAL Rygar is less affected by gravity when he jumps and lands later.
You can always TAS the first stage in both games and see which is faster (in seconds, not frames).
Thanks, that makes sense. In looking at this issue for both runs, it seems...
1. PAL's major advantage is in Garloz; jumping the river saves a good chunk of time, but just as big is the ability to take shortcuts by walking on the grass. The route taken in Walker's glitched run (shortcut to the grappler, and then going east after getting the grappler) is not replicatable (by me) in NTSC. All told, this made my NTSC TAS to Lapis ~25s slower, and that's using suicide as a shortcut.
2. Both the boss invincibility and faster climbing save time in NTSC. My preliminary calculations are that it would save about 20-30s in the glitched run starting from Lapis, making NTSC vs PAL probably very close timewise. For reference, robot invulnerability period is 20 frames, Ligar's is 30 frames; realtime savings per swing is thus 0.067s for robots, 0.1s for Ligar.
3. Walker's unglitched route seems like it would be somewhat faster in NTSC (more bosses, more climbing), but that's just a guess based on examining the glitched route. And again, suicide might be required.
I guess my conclusion from all this rambling is that PAL seems to have more, cool glitches, even if it's somewhat of a wash timewise. If I were to try to make improvements to one or both runs, would anyone care which one is used? Would throwing in some death abuse be viewed negatively?
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
BTW, not sure if anyone's ever used the air walk for this before, but you can "walk" off the sides of several levels at the bottom using it. Not useful, of course...
http://tom.seufert.googlepages.com/airwalkunderneath.fcm
(uses US ROM)
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
I still claim that PAL should be used.
1. Jumping over rivers is possible here but not in NTSC
2. The game is easier in NTSC version because you can level up more.
Cool, thanks for pointing these out to me, I hadn't seen either, and didn't realize the game was beatable w/o the grapple weapon.
One other difference in timing I've noticed is that the frame counts for door & screen transitions are equal in both versions, meaning NTSC door is about 0.33s faster, and screen change is about 0.4s faster.
As to Walker's comment, I'm still familiarizing myself with the game, but I assume you're referring to the higher tone limit for NTSC? I just don't know how to evaluate the effect that would have on the "difficulty", since you need to spend time racking up the extra tone, and 1024 is quite a bit anyways relative to most enemies.
I guess my personal tendency would still be to prefer the "fastest at all costs" approach. I mean, jumping the river is cool, but I also find it cool jumping around the ends of the river in NTSC. And faster fighting is, IMO, always to the good.
Thanks for all your input, BTW, the existing Rygar runs rock and this game is a lot of fun to TAS compared to Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu!
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
I dunno if "higher max level in NTSC" is such a good argument.
Does the current run reach max level any time, and also in PAL, does the STR quit increasing as well, or just the HP?
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
The full PAL run essentially maxes out a little more than halfway through, if memory serves.
Fun fact for anyone trying this game in the future: Speed is higher while flying through the air. How much higher? Well, in PAL, running speed is 1 5/16 pixels per frame. While airborne, the programmers thought it vital that speed be 1 3/8 pixels per frame...all of 4% faster...
Wow.
Still not worth it to jump all the time due to the 3 frames forward progress lost initiating a jump, but it is faster to jump and then bounce on a monster than just to run.
Oh yeah, the above applies only to side scrolling mode; overhead the speed is the same jumping/running.
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
I made an NTSC improvement of the "glitched" run that came out a little under 5:40. I'm in the process of applying the same strategies to a PAL run. Given the specifics of how I power up in my run, I believe the PAL run will end up 5-10s faster, but it'll take a few days to get it together. I'll submit whichever is faster.
As for the full run, well from what I've done so far it's a very route-specific question, so I'll have to bang together a route before I could make an educated guess which ROM would be faster. Fortunately, given the route and the experience of making the glitched run, I'll hopefully be able to predict times for each version rather than actually making each separately.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Lord Tom wrote:
Still not worth it to jump all the time due to the 3 frames forward progress lost initiating a jump, but it is faster to jump and then bounce on a monster than just to run.
I'm probably sending you on a wild goose chase with this one, but I swear more than once I've jumped without having that annoying little pause.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Lord Tom wrote:
The full PAL run essentially maxes out a little more than halfway through, if memory serves.
Fun fact for anyone trying this game in the future: Speed is higher while flying through the air. How much higher? Well, in PAL, running speed is 1 5/16 pixels per frame. While airborne, the programmers thought it vital that speed be 1 3/8 pixels per frame...all of 4% faster...
Wow.
Still not worth it to jump all the time due to the 3 frames forward progress lost initiating a jump, but it is faster to jump and then bounce on a monster than just to run.
Oh yeah, the above applies only to side scrolling mode; overhead the speed is the same jumping/running.
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Lord Tom wrote:
Still not worth it to jump all the time due to the 3 frames forward progress lost initiating a jump, but it is faster to jump and then bounce on a monster than just to run.
I'm probably sending you on a wild goose chase with this one, but I swear more than once I've jumped without having that annoying little pause.
Ha, I won't look too hard, I think it would be pretty annoying if Rygar leapt through all the side scroller stages. Occasional bouncage is ok, though...;)
You may be thinking of the mechanics in the overhead stages, though; pressing left/right while airborne allows you to string jumps together with less (or zero?) delay.
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
Yeah, so route design is done for the full route. I found a new glitch whic h allows some big shortcuts in Sagila's lair and Garba, and a huge timesaver elsewhere using a previously known glitch.
Provided reasonable item drops, this should come together fairly quickly, and I'm hoping to chop 3-4 minutes off.
Joined: 5/25/2007
Posts: 399
Location: New England
Whew. This (no warp glitch) run is essentially complete, only issue is the Ligar fight is a tad slower than Walker's run so I'll have to see if I can improve. Should be in over the weekend...lots of new glitchin' on display!
