Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player
(908)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
Thank you to everyone who submitted a run. I've zipped up all of the submissions and placed them here:
http://acbit.net/static/BabyMosesCompetitionSubmissions.zip
I'll be watching all of the submissions and compiling statistics and I'll make another post shortly.
Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player
(908)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
All contestants completed the game objective of releasing Baby Moses into the river and all competitors made a good-faith effort to complete their TAS'es in under two hours in the spirit of the honor-system time limit. Out of the competitors, Eszik, Scepheo, and Tompa opted to use BizHawk, while Spikestuff, TheAxeMan, MESHUGGAH, TASEditor, and Truncated used FCEUX. The rerecord times seem to indicate that some TAS'ers opted to use completely different strategies, but I'll allow the authors to comment on their own strategies. The results are:
Tompa: 2997 rerecords, 01:59.20
Truncated: 91 rerecords, 01:59.67
TASEditor: 7084 rerecords, 01:59.82
MESHUGGAH: 3717 rerecords, 01:59.92
Scepheo: 645 rerecords, 02:00.13
Eszik: 1183 rerecords, 02:00.17
TheAxeMan: 180 rerecords, 02:00.40
Spikestuff: 2724 rerecords, 02:02.97
Solarplex created an awesome four-player comparison video of the top four entries and another one for the next four:
Link to video[/video]
Link to video
Congratulations, Tompa!
Now that this competition is over, please feel free to post comments and feedback in this thread, as well as suggestions for future games we might consider doing this with. You are welcome to send me PM's if you want to keep the game choice secret, but please note that I will not likely have time to organize another competition myself until after AGDQ 2015 preparations are complete. Thanks again to everyone who supported this concept and for making this extremely entertaining.
Nice to see you got it to sync even though I used 1.3 :D So I think I lost quite a bit of time at the beginning of the second level. On my first attempt I could get the "animation skip" but then after 50 min I realized you could run... So I restarted the whole thing and couldn't get the trick for some reason x)
If I had enough time I would have spent more time optimizing the baby grab in the last level but well, I'm really happy with what I did for my first full TAS :p
I problably made mistakes, sorry for my bad English, I'm French :v
Woohoo most rerecords :O
I'm the only one who used a trick in the beginning of each stage to accelerate faster, it saves 9 frames according to Tompa. I made two mistakes. I bumbed into a wall in the first level (I'm stupid) and I used double Start press after each level instead of pressing A.
Converting my input file (one I didn't use for this competition (1:59.22)) into bk2 ends up with a desync (both NesHawk and QuickNes). I also tried to run Tompa's inputs in NesHawk mode, also a desync.
Look's like QuickNes has the fastest loading time (462), then FCEUX (464), then NesHawk (468), timed on the first black screen after the bible text.
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
I'm not sure how I got so few rerecords but probably due to my rewinding lua script. Anyway, it turns out I am bad at TASing quickly and/or rusty on platforming. The quad encode makes me look even slower though; you can see from the framecount that it isn't matched up with the others.
Everything pretty much turns on picking up the baby and mostly on the levels where you need to jump up to a platform for him. The main trick is picking him up just before falling off the ledge to keep moving forward. In the last level this is tough to do without falling in the river. Another note is that even on a flat pickup, picking up on certain frames gets a slightly faster animation for some reason.
I messed around trying to find movement tweaks but all I found was that if you press left+right in the air you turn left but don't lose time. I showed that off just in case anyone was counting style points. But Tompa's hopping trick is much cooler and saved time.
I'm the only one who used a trick in the beginning of each stage to accelerate faster, it saves 9 frames according to Tompa.
How does it work? The best way I found to begin a level was to keep holding Right+B during the text boxes between each stages (or the bible text)‚ speed started to increase earlier if I did that (x speed is actually the only RAM address I bothered searching xD)
I problably made mistakes, sorry for my bad English, I'm French :v
I'm the only one who used a trick in the beginning of each stage to accelerate faster, it saves 9 frames according to Tompa.
How does it work? The best way I found to begin a level was to keep holding Right+B during the text boxes between each stages (or the bible text)‚ speed started to increase earlier if I did that (x speed is actually the only RAM address I bothered searching xD)
Look at my inputs, I didn't even used the most optimal in the competition.
I think it's weird to see how much I am behind Eszik on the penultimate level, then suddenly manage to finish before him. There's some weird stuff going on in this game.
Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1943
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden
Nice video, Mes! First time I'm seeing the TAS editor in action basically =P.
I only used: Frame Advance and Save States. No other tools. I planned on using the ram watch, but I felt like I didn't need it, so it was skipped. After TASing for awhile, I looked the Genesis version TAS as a comparision. Wasn't mostly that helpful, but it inspired me to try hard to grab Moses quickly in the final level.
This was a fun project to work on. I'm looking forward to more of these in the future!
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
So, Tompa, going to submit your run?
Or do you guys want to work together and make a better run?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Thats what i forgot to do this morning. I had a HD encode of Tompa's run to post. Ill do it when im home in a few hours, i think it would be awesome to see an optimized run between all the tas competitors submissions
Here's Tompa's Run in 2048x1920, i just did 8x size lol..
https://www.dropbox.com/s/djlquxfu0db4fqv/Bible%20Adventures%20-%20Tompa%20-%20TAS.mp4?dl=0
I'm the only one who used a trick in the beginning of each stage to accelerate faster, it saves 9 frames according to Tompa.
I'm not surprised that this is possible, the physics are pretty quirky. For example, I noticed that when trying to change direction in the air, it is faster to let go of the run button.
Tompa wrote:
I only used: Frame Advance and Save States. No other tools. I planned on using the ram watch, but I felt like I didn't need it, so it was skipped. After TASing for awhile, I looked the Genesis version TAS as a comparision. Wasn't mostly that helpful, but it inspired me to try hard to grab Moses quickly in the final level.
I did mostly the same thing. I don't have a good explanation for why my rerecord count is so low and yours so high. I didn't restart my movie file or anything. Does Bizhawk calculate rerecords in a very different way than FCEUX? I don't think I used as few as 90, but I guess it's possible...
Almost all of my time was spent experimenting with how to pick up the baby optimally. I managed to get into the water in the final level like Tompa, but couldn't find a way to stay alive even with constant jumping, so I gave up and used a worse pickup strat. With about 5 minutes left I noticed that the last level sometimes starts to fade out earlier if you let go of the run/forward buttons, but by then it was to late to change the earlier stages.
I did mostly the same thing. I don't have a good explanation for why my rerecord count is so low and yours so high. I didn't restart my movie file or anything. Does Bizhawk calculate rerecords in a very different way than FCEUX? I don't think I used as few as 90, but I guess it's possible...
