Post subject: Finding Glitches.
Joined: 5/13/2013
Posts: 180
How do most of you guys go about finding glitches in games you TAS? It's really hard for me and I don't fully know how to do it exactly. In a practice TAS of Pokemon Blue I actually managed to set up an SRAM corruption but couldn't get past arranging Pokemon in my party. It's not just Pokemon that I have trouble glitching; any game is a challenge for finding Glitches in and I don't even know if it's possible in some areas. Could anyone offer some tips?
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https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/1ve6xy/how_do_you_find_glitches/ Has several very excellent answers, give it a read through.
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Sometimes (if not most of the time) glitches are found by accident; either through casual gameplay or via the course of testing normal mechanics/parameters for a game. Once a glitch is discovered, then it must be determined whether or not that glitch is useful, or can be made useful. One glitch that occurs in multiple games results from pressing both U & D or R & L together. Doing these inputs together isn't commonly possible with most hardware (gamepads/joysticks) but the game code itself will still try and process it if they are done together. This can sometimes allow for unusual/glitched results. Just play around and see if things happen that you don't think the game's developers intended. If you find something that looks odd....congrats you've found a glitch! Now try and make it useful.
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Well, I think that answering to this question is pretty complex, so I'll probably write another post when I get more ideas... The point is that most glitches are discovered by chance. So the more you play a game, the more chances are that you randomly stumble into one. You can also specifically look for glitches, but it requires a lot of creativity. For example, you could try put the game into a very unlikely circumstance. For example, some glitches are caused by having two different events happening at the same moment, like having both the player and the boss dying in the same frame or hitting yourself while you're transitioning from a room to another. Another thing to try is to do specific movements with pixel-precise positioning. Another is trying to spam the same actions or events until the game memory floods or an address overflows. Some glitches are discovered while TASing, because the fact itself of trying to put a game to its limits can often cause exotic phenomena. To put it simply: mess with the game, molest it until it freaks out. Remember, always record a movie while you search for glitches, because most times it's not easy to figure out what actually caused it, so having a recorded movie gives you the chance to look at it again closer, or even show it to people we could collaborate by looking at it with a different approach. By the way, the first Pokémon series are by far the most researched ones in the world, so it's really unlikely to discover new glitches for them. Also, you mentioned a very hard glitch that requires advanced knowledge of that game. In any case, if you want to learn more about glitching in Pokémon games, you should visit this site: https://glitchcity.info/
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http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19723 Mostly recommending MUGG's post.
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Post subject: Re: Finding Glitches.
Joined: 10/18/2011
Posts: 64
YushiroGowa wrote:
How do most of you guys go about finding glitches
Mostly by playing the game and saying "huh, that's weird". You can find a starting point for "that's weird"s by thinking about game logic. Nearly everything is playtested by itself, so what weird interactions happen when you get two or more unrelated actions happening at the same time? Can you interrupt an action in a unique way? If you logically assume that some in-game counter would be modified by two different functions, can you fire off those functions in an unexpected manner? Demon's Souls for example, one of the dupes involves cancelling out of a prompt in an unexpected way so that it doesn't clear its variables, then when you go to put an item into storage, you store negative one of the item (and negative one is really just the highest possible positive number) Sitting down at a game and thinking "what can I break" covers way too much space, but if you're playing and see something weird happen, you need to think "how can this weirdness break the game"? Disney Infinity has an infinite jump. You press the jump button and immediately block, which gives you the height of the jump, but in the block animation. You release the block, and before you enter the fall animation, you jump/block again for more height. Find a weirdness. Understand what causes the weirdness. Apply the weirdness.