Posted: 10/21/2016 11:50 PM
Post subject: [WIP] Trauma Center Second Opinion
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Thurler
He/Him
Joined: 10/21/2016
Posts: 3
Location: Brazil
Hello there, I'm new to the TASVideos forums, so sorry if this is out of place somehow. This topic is something I'd like to use to receive feedback on a project I'm working on for Trauma Center Second Opinion on the Wii. The goal is to complete TCSO as fast as possible while achieving an XS rank on every operation. This includes the X episodes with both doctors. There is currently a single SDA run by szsk that is several years old, available here. Since speedrunning the game is tiresome enough as is, I imagine most runners don't like the idea of doing a near perfect run of it for 2.5 hours, myself included. I'll go ahead and link below a Youtube playlist with my current progress, I've finished every Chapter 1 operation, and would love some feedback on how the game is being played, if there are any obvious improvements to gameplay or video quality that could be made, or any overall advice so that, if I come to the conclusion that a fresh start is needed to make a great run for submission here, I won't lose much progress by starting over.
The Playlist Here's a sample, it's the TAS for 1-6: Link to video
I'm using dolphin's latest release that is available on their main page, should be whatever 5.0 they're distributing as of this post's creation time. I did some research on recommended settings for emulation while TASing, so I'll just post here the settings I found to be relevant to change, if there's anything off please tell me so that I can correct it for the future of this project. :p
    Disable Dual Core Disable Idle Skipping Emulator Engine: JIT Recompiler DSP Emulator Engine: LLE Interpreter Video Backend: OpenGL Resolution: Native
I'm encoding and dumping frames and audio with the default Dolphin settings, it gives me an AVI and WAV file for video and audio (not really sure which codec it's using behind that). I'll link below a .dtm file for operations 1-1 through 1-3 if anyone wants to bother looking at the binary file for other settings I may have missed. Or if you want to try playing it on your own emulator, that's fine too!
The DTM file
Not entirely sure what else to say, I could go on and on about game mechanics but it'd just be a long, exhaustive post. If any of you have any questions or suggestions, please share, and thanks in advance!
Posted: 10/22/2016 12:29 AM
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Memory
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Site Admin, Skilled player (1552)
Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1765
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GBA TASer of 2020 GBA TAS of 2020 GBA TASer of 2019 Exotic platforms TAS of 2018
I was entertained
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Posted: 10/22/2016 1:51 AM
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Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4043
I don't know anything about optimizing this game, but I've thought for a long time that tasvideos deserves to have some trauma center speedruns on it, and Second Opinion all XS sounds like a great way to start off! EDIT: Spikestuff reminded me to look on nicovideo for TASes of this game. I found a few. (One I didn't link - it's a single mission done suboptimally.) Make sure that you beat them all (when you get to those respective missions). Link to video Link to video Also, I found some New Blood TASes: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm19777666 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm18525162 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26686413 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26727437 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26751238 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26771628 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26806629 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26809911 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26839769 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26876737 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26876791 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26909706 http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26909837
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 10/22/2016 3:09 AM
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Thurler
He/Him
Joined: 10/21/2016
Posts: 3
Location: Brazil
Oh, right, I completely forgot to look for videos at Nico Nico, thanks for sharing those. It seems there's a couple things I could learn from them and add to my run, specially those regarding the gel. I can also point out quite a few unoptimized segments at those runs, so I guess I'll study them and re-do the segments I've already done to further optimize them. Guess I really should have tested the gel frame data better... Ah well. For some more information on what I mean:
    *Bandaging with the gel isn't always necessary, specially on the XS operations since you can easily grind your chain and COOLs, and from what I've seen those videos do it every time to get an extra COOL at bandaging. Sometimes it IS mandatory, though, like 1-1 or Z-1, since it's one of the only ways to earn COOLs. *That said, when bandaging is required, the japanese player did it way faster than I did, by rubbing it all over the incision rather than by spamming it at specific points. It wasn't the case when I tested it, but I could have tested it wrong since I was still getting used to TASing with Wiimote TAS input. *For suturing, you only need to cross the laceration / incision 3 times to have it count as a COOL if you angle it properly, and from what I've seen the videos at niconico use 4, effectively slowing them down by 2 frames for every stitching they do. Since you do this all the time in the game, it can pile up quickly. There are, however, cuts that need 4 crossings to get a COOL, which is usually the case for big lacerations. *The only other major difference I can see between what I did and what the jap player does is faster menuing - you can turbo A to skip the results screen in just a couple frames. Then again, the player probably knew that and just wanted to show off the score, but it's always nice to point out if you're not TASing ILs. :p
One more point to make about this game, Japanese is a bit faster due to text speed, as usual with games that are heavy on text. Would it make sense to then TAS the Japanese version for the extra few seconds it saves, at the cost of not understanding everything that's on screen? Imo, half of the fun is having Angie scream Doctor every 10 seconds every operation, but that's just me. I also don't know exactly how many frames Japanese text saves over English. EDIT: Since you brought up New Blood, there's a complete XS TAS of it on Youtube.
Link to video
Posted: 10/22/2016 3:49 AM
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Atma
Former player
Joined: 9/1/2005
Posts: 803
"Bad", the sign of a subpar doctor. I have the personal opinion that a tas of a trauma center game should be one that doesn't use healing touch outside of mandatory instances, and gets "cool" at every instance possible (getting XS not mandatory simply because you have to artifically prolong a number of operations to meet the XS requirements). Using the healing touch on every operation after you acquire it trivialises the entire TAS, and while getting "Bad" is obviously faster, to me personally it just seems slopping for something that's supposed to be above and beyond. As far as the actual operation is concerned, it looks fairly what I'd expect (having seen it done before on the DS version), though putting the required ultrasounds in the same spot repeatedly is kind of lame. Finally, version wise I think playing it on the english version is fine. You can get some funny results with skip enabled, such as "Doctor, wait!" "No." in UTK2 on DS. Keep up the good work, I guess.
Posted: 10/22/2016 7:53 AM
Post subject: Re: [WIP] Trauma Center Second Opinion
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JosJuice
She/They
Editor, Emulator Coder
Joined: 7/3/2010
Posts: 193
Location: Sweden
Thurler wrote:
I'm using dolphin's latest release that is available on their main page, should be whatever 5.0 they're distributing as of this post's creation time. I did some research on recommended settings for emulation while TASing, so I'll just post here the settings I found to be relevant to change, if there's anything off please tell me so that I can correct it for the future of this project. :p
    Disable Dual Core Disable Idle Skipping Emulator Engine: JIT Recompiler DSP Emulator Engine: LLE Interpreter Video Backend: OpenGL Resolution: Native
I'd recommend switching away from LLE interpreter if you can, because it's a lot slower for no real benefit. Keeping it probably won't lead to any problems other than lowered performance, though.
Posted: 10/22/2016 12:43 PM
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Thurler
He/Him
Joined: 10/21/2016
Posts: 3
Location: Brazil
Thanks everyone for the comments / suggestions. I'll go back and restart my progress after spending the night analyzing other videos and frame data on dolphin, hopefully I can save some more frames in the operations now. I'll keep that Youtube playlist updated with the best times for each operation, and I'll try to make a post here every time I finish a major section of the game for some more feedback, so you don't have to go check out the playlist every time.
Atma wrote:
"Bad", the sign of a subpar doctor.
I had my doubts about that, too, since getting a Bad on incision / bandaging really only saves a couple frames. The thing is, it does save frames, and for a run which goal is to beat the game as fast as possible, saving 10-15 frames per operation that doesn't require avoiding BADs can pile up into full seconds quickly. Then again, the run will be about 2 hours long, so a couple seconds won't make much difference, maybe.
JosJuice wrote:
I'd recommend switching away from LLE interpreter if you can, because it's a lot slower for no real benefit. Keeping it probably won't lead to any problems other than lowered performance, though.
I'm using LLE interpreter since it should be the one with highest quality, and since I record it frame by frame sound is pretty much irrelevant for me, I even play with sound off entirely. The idea is to get the best result when dumping audio and video, but if the difference is small enough to not be noticed I could switch to the recompiler / HLE, thanks for pointing it out.