Hello!
Long time fan of the games and after hanging out in the monkey ball scene for a while, I've started doing TASes. My current project is SMB2 NTSC expert mode. I've got some help from Jcool and Diddy (some top RTA runners of the game) and we are making great progress now, getting several stages finished every day :). Majority of Monkey Ball community is also supporting us by giving ideas about strats and optimization and making sure everything looks as optimized as possible.
This is our latest WIP (we are way past that alreardy tho)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpJ8PELqOIQ
I am also planning picking up SMB1 expert TAS with Barhunga and SMB2 PAL story mode TAS some day.
Isn't doing a retry right when the level start faster than waiting the level to start? I've seen it done in the AGDQ race, so I'm wondering about it...
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
I am by no means a fan, expert or player of this game but your wip looked really cool and optimized. Though I am curious if you could address THC98's question :) Cheers!
Joined: 6/21/2004
Posts: 247
Location: New Hampshire
Great WIP! Have you found any movement methods that provide speed boosts etc. (given that Amusement Vision's engines seem to reward turning in odd ways)? I spent an afternoon noodling around with SMB1 and trying e.g. alternating left/right every frame, but I'm not well versed with the research process and I never got anything promising. :1
In SMB2, main boosting techniques are frame boosting and wall boosting, you can see me do them in the beginning of nearly every level. Getting low bumps also gives some nice speed so I aim to get those as much as possible. In air, adjusting the analog stick as little as possible makes you fall faster (you can see that in Free Fall). Most of these works pretty similar way in SMB1, it just doesn't have wall boosting due to lack of separate starting platforms. :)
I'll give you this, probably the last WIP video of the project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUP_rKGaGwU
If you wonder what's going on at the E25 Sieve, getting hit while going as high reverse speed as possible at the precisely correct spot is needed to achieve the fastest possible time in it.
Holy hell, I knew that the Super Monkey Ball games would make good TASes, but I hadn't quite realized how good. This is awesome! I look forward to seeing it on the workbench. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I was thinking what about the Expert Extra stages, but there seems to be only 10 of those...
Oh, and then there apparently are master levels as well (10 of those).
Very nice WIP, congrats!
I was wondering, in stages 12 and 22 for example, it seems you don't go inside the gate, but simply knock one pillar. There is also the same thing in SMB1 (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzZs3159AUI). Do you know how does it work ?
I'm currently working on SMB1 and made a couple of stages, but some are really hard :(
When you are going at high enough speeds, there is a chance you can just clip though the pole and break the tape. This is way more common in SMB2. In fact, that Nahoc's E6 TAS did originally go to the goal the normal way but his replay desynced so it looks like it hits the pole.
Oh by the way, we picked up SMB1 Expert with Barhunga yesterday and finished some stages: E1 28.35, E2 26.43, E5 28.06, E6 55.73.
My Expert times so far are:
E1 28.30 (didn't manage not to hop)
E2 26.45
E5 28.05
E6 54.98 (I basically gave up on this stage)
E7 51.00
E8 27.00
E9 55.60
Thanks :) Your recording desyncs on E6 for me, tho. I also tried to hex edit your E2 to our recording and it got 26.43 instead (in your recording it did get .45). In addition to that it also desynced our E6. o_o
We might go with the .43, we worked pretty hard to get the E6 time and don't want to redo it from scratch. Also can't get .45 even with your inputs, this is just weird. :/
Another thought is the in-game replay. Save the different replays from the game itself and compare the two. Even better if you know how the game stores replays.
... It's a thought... Wouldn't hurt to see what the game itself picks up rather than what we feed it.
I use 4.0.2 as does Barhunga and other SMB2 TASers.
I think the game might have some really minor calculation differences if you enter a stage on different frame, explaining why your recording gets .45 and ours gets .43 with exactly the same inputs. (it looks exactly the same but the goal tape just breaks in the original one frame earlier)
Another thought is the in-game replay. Save the different replays from the game itself and compare the two. Even better if you know how the game stores replays.
... It's a thought... Wouldn't hurt to see what the game itself picks up rather than what we feed it.
Okay, so I just saved replay of the .45 and .43 done with exactly same inputs. It turns out that in .43 the goal tape stretches for one extra frame instead of breaking, even if the monkey is in the exactly same position...
Also I noticed when playing keylie's recording, dolphin said that the game's checksum doesn't match. What is this supposed to mean?