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Posted: 3/21/2017 4:35 AM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
One thing I do recommend trying sometimes is missing the Impact Zone entirely. In casual play, I would use a right-handed Neil (and let Height go up to maximum) with Risky clubs, aim a bit off to the right, then time the impact late. The loss from completely missing the Impact Zone is curiously small, enough that switching to Super POW and hitting normally isn't really much better. But then, we're using Ella, whose Height goes down with levels, and timing the impact late will practically bury our ball. Something to experiment with, perhaps. If it turns out we need the options provided by a passable Impact & Control, we can likely go back to the last level-up and change our stats around. This is a TAS, and we can go back to change things we don't like. In any case, we have 4096 possible aiming directions. The Impact timing doesn't change to another one of the other 4095, but further tweaks the direction, compounding the possibilities. We also have the 25 positions for low/high and fade/draw to our shots, and the 5 possible spins. We have the power to our shot, club selection, the spot our ball landed in, and the RNG involving weather and our shot power randomization. Overall, a lot of possibilities. We just need to find the right ones.
Posted: 3/21/2017 2:10 PM
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JCBoorgo
He/Him
Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Indeed. We'll have to around around the right mix of possibilities to optimize each hole as much as possible. I think I should have done each hole one by one, optimized to its fullest, instead of going section per section. That's my mistake, but since we're TASing we can do what we want and go back. I think that doing some collab stuff will work better than trying to work on our own. Even if we don't have much time, at least putting some work in common will certainly help our cause. What do you think?
Posted: 3/22/2017 8:49 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Collaborating does sound good. I may know a lot of things, both in TASing (I have a few published runs here), and in this game from my casual play-throughs, but it's always helpful to have another point of view. It's definitely a good motivator when you come back and see some things were done, and having ideas to give someone and have them look it over directly can be fun. I am still in the Dream Team Contest, which will go on for another month (I really should be putting more time into it again). Once that's over, I should have more time I can put here. The main reason I already did stuff here is to have a change of pace to deal with recent life stresses that came up. Oh, and I also did the front 9 holes of Palms already. My TASing methods involved trying to find something that works with a really low 1W shot, then taking the first thing that worked. There may be other sorts of things that will work, and it's likely there may be faster things than what I did. Once you have a movie from someone else, you can get some understanding of techniques they used, and have a comparison point when trying to improve things yourself. It should feel pretty good that, even if it looks unbeatable, you experiment a bit and get something better.
Posted: 3/22/2017 10:08 PM
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Since school won't be over soon, I guess it's alright that you don't have that much time for now, as I don't have much time either. We'll see in the future what we can do. And yeah, since this is my first serious TAS (I did a Mario Bros. warpless before to learn how to use BizHawk), I really could use a hand (or two or seventeen).
Posted: 4/20/2017 8:03 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Well, I had spare time. Here's an Ella run that completes the Mushroom tourney. I figured having a test run should help.
Posted: 5/12/2017 2:50 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Seems that soft resets weren't available due to a bug in emulation. We should wait for the fix before producing the final run, as the GBA BIOS takes a bit to wait through on hard resets. I haven't forgotten this game, don't worry. I've started Neil until Hole 11 of Marion to get a nice comparison against Ella. Stopped there because Neil apparently can't hole out in as few strokes as Ella can on that hole, and haven't wanted to continue from other things in life happening.
Posted: 5/12/2017 3:10 PM
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JCBoorgo
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Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Don't worry, I didn't forget this game either. I will probably have more spare time when college ends in late-May, but yeah I'll be working on it here and there!
Posted: 11/4/2017 9:10 PM
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JCBoorgo
He/Him
Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
Small FYI here, I've kinda abandonned. I've started working on Toadstool Tour, because the skillpoints thing and the fact that the paths / strategies could diverge a lot from there because of different "builds" kinda discouraged me. It's still in my computer, I may come back to do it at a later point, but for the time being I'll focus on Toadstool, as it is a more straightforward and less overwhelming game to TAS, in my opinion. It's gonna be under the same conditions (no giving up, reaching the "ending" which the speedrunning community has defined for Any% as clearing the 6 courses from a fresh file), but it's on the Gamecube and the player has more control and freedom for shots. So yeah, that's pretty much all there is to know for now.
Posted: 11/4/2017 9:56 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Personally, I don't see what's complicated with the choice of level up stats. Really, the only one that I think matters is Drive, as TAS can deal with any control necessary to make up for the loss. Drive means the ball has a faster initial velocity with each shot. Everything else, character selection, left/right handed, whether to fetch Super POW, those things do need to be tested. And the control isn't fine-grained, so it's a hunt for checking if this shot setup works, and if not, try this next one, and so forth. If we do choose to not restrict ourselves from "Give up", we do get a difference of experience depending on our end score, which affects our Drive, and therefore how quickly we can take later courses. Without that restriction, things get a lot more complicated, as maybe saving ourselves the minute of flight time through Marion is lost in 40 seconds to Palms, another 30 at Dunes, 35 over here in Links, and... Really, no Give Ups is the logical start to begin from anyway to get a base line of comparison, and to get an idea which holes are the most costly. Anyway, hope to see progress over on Toadstool Tour. I don't have any particular TASing plans at the moment, so maybe I'll fit this one back in my schedule.
Posted: 11/5/2017 3:29 PM
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JCBoorgo
He/Him
Joined: 11/21/2016
Posts: 24
Location: Québec (QC), Canada
That may be the case indeed, but there are some frames to be saved if we can angle the ball without aiming at all. Having a wider "fork" to stop the shot marker in can help in skewing shots to our advantage, having more spin to stop the ball dead in its tracks whatever the power is can save another couple of frames, and we probably don't need max power to reach the cups in minimal amounts of shots. Anyway, that's how I felt, and maybe that playing with the game a bit more would convince me of the opposite, but for now I don't feel like fiddling around with this. As I've said, I may come back and do it one day, but not for now. Last note: I really appreciate that you're following here and on the Toadstool Tour TAS. It's an extra bit of motivation that I'll gladly accept.
Posted: 12/22/2018 4:08 AM
Post subject: Mario Golf - Advance Tour
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dzuh
They/Them
Joined: 12/22/2018
Posts: 4
Location: London
Hey guys, I'm really surprised there isn't TASes of the mario golf games. This is my first ever time TASing, but I've done the intro and holes 1-9 of the first cup using the RTA route. Only thing I differ on is choosing Neil over Ella, but i think that might be wrong. As I said, never done this before, so i'm clueless about optimising movement and maybe even adjusting the +/-% on shots, so help would be really nice! Menuing, Custom Clubs and Holes 1-9 ive been using BizHawk EmuHawk 2.3 and TAStudio on the regular NTSC version.
Posted: 12/22/2018 4:34 AM
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dzuh
They/Them
Joined: 12/22/2018
Posts: 4
Location: London
I've never TAS'd before and didn't know this game was being worked on, so I did a Neil run using the RTA route for the first 9 holes of Marion before being directed here! From what I can see Neil seems to be a no go; I assumed he'd be better just from having a better drive but does the increased height lose him that much time?
Posted: 12/23/2018 12:07 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
I believe Ella is superior due to Height. I do not know for certain if this is the case, but I've found low shots to be fast, and several years ago, I advised a speedrunner to use Ella with fairly major effect. Neil gets better Drive, but Height increases pretty badly after a few levels, and then that ball stays in the air too long. In any case, my Ella test run should give a pretty good idea what to expect. You can see I routinely try to keep my shots real low. As for how I do things... Getting the ball toward the hole was mostly me just trying some shots and hoping it got in. I will say that I had a script tell me the distance between ball and pin (I did not include height in the distance calculation, for reasons I hope don't need to be said). Finding out how close I was in the trajectory is really helpful in understanding how I should aim, and pretty vital for flag shots. I was never able to directly land the ball into the hole, only roll it in or flag shot it in. In fact, I have seen some pretty compelling evidence that it can't land directly in the hole, including the fact I've seen the ball bounce a few times on the top of the hole before being allowed to sink in. Affecting the +/- power randomness, or RNG manipulation, is done in a few ways: * Waiting a few more frames on the title screen * Watching confetti fall for another few frames after getting an Eagle or better * Waiting for birds to chirp in sunny conditions in some tourneys * Waiting a few frames in rainy conditions * Switch between viewing the Green and the rest of the course And it does affect the +/- power adjustment. It'll also affect the weather, calling in or banishing rain, as well as affect winds. The +1% power doesn't actually do anything, but -1% power can. When you get a maximum hit off the Tee, that's 100 power. +1% can't move that to 101, you just stay at 100. -1% would drop that to 99, though. With less than 100 power, the 1% rounds down to 0, and it basically doesn't matter. Higher percentages in rougher terrain definitely has an impact. These are things I can remember right away. I can collect my notes and try to get more information from my old attempts.
Posted: 12/24/2018 3:24 AM
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dzuh
They/Them
Joined: 12/22/2018
Posts: 4
Location: London
awesome! thank you so much, i'd really appreciate that. i'm really interested in getting into TASing, so looking through the Ella run was super cool. if the soft reset bug gets fixed, count me in for helping optimise n getting this published!
Posted: 12/24/2018 5:10 PM
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FatRatKnight
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Soft reset should be fixed already. It was a problem a year ago, and plenty of emulator development took place in that time. Latest BizHawk should work fine here. Some rudimentary script I had. Hopefully it makes it easier to figure out where you went wrong in that last shot. Probably needs to be prettier, but it was designed for myself to read. I remember being very close, but failing to get many of the later holes in fewer shots with Ella. Maybe Neil can get them with the better Drive. But this site is generally about speed records, and Neil's Height will probably slow us down. And if pure speed is the target, it actually makes some choices tricky. Sure, we can Give Up a few holes in early tourneys, but then we're a lower level. Which means less Drive and worse Height, and slows down later shots. It's not hard to figure out holes to Give Up in (ones that take longer), but whether to do so is trickier. Mushroom Tourney is the last one, so there's no question to Give Up for speed purposes. More routing decisions. POW is probably worth it. Super POW is probably not worth it. The test run has both clubs taken. There's also left-hand vs. right-hand, in case that is important. In any case, that soft reset bug is fixed, so nothing to worry about there, and we're good to run anytime.
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