(Link to video)
EZGames69: 2017 was when I started this project. It was my very first speedgame, and also the first game I ever tried TASing. Now 5 years later, I am finally able to get this TAS finished and not have to deal with sync issues as well as impossible tricks anymore.
As a quick aside, this game seems to have terrible performance when playing back in BizHawk. I’m not sure why this is the case but you may get an average of 35-45 fps.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 2.7 (also syncs on 2.8)
    • Uses GLideN64 video plugin (also syncs on Glide64mk2 for older graphics cards - change SyncSettings.json's VideoPlugin to 2)
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Genre: Platform

EZGames69's comments

I'm never that good at writing submission texts, and honestly I don't think there's much to write. But I'll do what I can to get to the point.

CoolKirby's comments

I hadn't seen this game before, but on watching EZ's original run I found I really liked the game and the run. Especially I think the N64 version has a lot of charm with its unique and colorful shading and graphics tricks, and near lack of loading times. The Poohsticks level of the run did look improvable though, and since EZ offered to resync the rest of the run if it was improved, I improved it. I also added a subtitle track that points out tricks as they happen, and added these comments to the BK2, under Comments. Overall working on this was pretty fun, but I might be as burnt out on this game as EZ is now.

Stage by stage comments

Before we actually start the first level, we already do a glitch, dubbed “Ninja Skip” because it was found by NinjaCocktail. Normally after completing a level, the main map screen creates a brick bridge that leads to the next stage. Tigger does not move to the next level until this happens, which usually takes about 3-4 seconds. By repeatedly pressing the up button as we bounce to the first stage, the game thinks Tigger is moving to the stage after it. If we do the same trick as we exit level 1 and go back to the main hub, we instantly start moving to the next stage. This disables the rest of the bridge building animations and saves about 24 seconds in total.

Stage 1

Tigger has the option of bouncing for his forward movement. This is the main movement we want to use as not only is it faster, but as you can see, we get a little bit of height in our bounce to clear any small enough obstacles such as the tree root.
There are two types of jumps, a standing jump and a moving jump. Standing jumps can be useful if you need to gain height quickly, but it has a slower horizontal speed.
Whenever we bounce near ledges, we press the duck button to gain a bit of extra distance forward. This also allows us to make jumps that are harder to reach, such as the leaf platform cycle in this stage as well as the next stage.

Stage 2

This stage has a trick that caused me to put off TASing this game for a long time. Near the end there is a tricky jump you have to do off a leaf platform to grab a hold of a ledge at the top. It's very specific and was such a pain to deal with back then.
The number of honey pots needed for Owl at the end is shown in the HUD. It's 65, which is 5 pots more than Stage 1.

Stage 3

Simon Says but with Rabbit. Always in the same order, no way to speed it up. This stage gives us a flapping ability after we complete it.

Stage 4

Windy city. We don't want to be in the gusts of wind that long as it's slower in horizontal movement, but it's very useful for clearing large cliffs.

Stage 5

We make a detour to collect some honey pots in one of the secret underground caves. Later, after talking to Piglet, we walk left and then right to charge up some forward bounces, then use them to get across some tilting platforms. This is faster than the intended way of crossing them with standing bounces.

Stage 6

You need to get your stick to the end first in four rounds. This game has some unforgiving RNG. There's no easy way to manipulate it in a favorable result. Basically, each round doesn't end until all sticks have made it to the end, meaning we need to make sure Pooh's stick also gets dropped as soon as possible. On top of that, invisible lag and hard-to-predict physics act on the sticks so you might lose time by e.g. dropping a frame earlier. If anyone finds a faster RNG seed for this stage, I'll be willing to redo the run from here.
Round 4 is the only place we use a trick to reduce 2 frames of lag by pausing and unpausing rapidly. The sticks jump forward after the pause to make up for lost in-game (gameplay) time so only the lag frames are affected. Sometimes it leads to time loss instead of gain though, so it really needs more testing, and probably a better emulation core.
This stage gives us the super jump afterwards.

Stage 7

Now that we have the super jump, this is where the game's pace picks up. It's the fastest movement in the game, and can be used for some funny stuff.
We can use the super jump to skip some cutscenes, such as Owl telling you how to use the super jump and Pooh asking for his umbrella. We can't skip Owl's end cutscene though due to an absence of lag.
Super-jumping in a forward direction is done by turning around for a frame, then turning back around and performing the jump. We also cancel the usual animation by pressing any directional button with the super jump.

Stage 8

Sliding into Owl's intro cutscene looks like a glitch, but is actually just part of the cinematic.
We do our second and final damage boost here. Health carries between levels, which limited the amount of boosting we could do. There are no health pickups in this game; only dying would reset our health, but it would be too slow to be useful.
At the end of this stage, there is another cutscene skip we can perform with Owl. I (EZGames69) originally thought you could only perform this trick on console because emulator doesn't produce enough lag for it to work. However I discovered if we do a pause manip, the game lags just enough to skip the cutscene trigger. The level is already considered complete anyways so the cutscene is not required.

Stage 9

Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Possible improvements

  • Better RNG for Poohsticks. We did our best, but as with any RNG level, going slower to go faster or saving a frame somewhere could lead to a big breakthrough. Better emulation could also help the lag and unpredictable currents/physics, maybe on the Ares64 core (though this run does not sync on it).
  • A way to lag Level 7's ending Owl cutscene, though it's not known how this would be done yet.

arkiandruski: Claiming for judging.
arkiandruski: Setting to delayed as requested by the author
arkiandruski: Setting back to new.

arkiandruski: Claiming for judging.
arkiandruski: Replacing the file with an improvement
arkiandruski: Looks good. Accepting to Standard.
EZGames69: This is an unusual move from me, but this submission has been sitting on the workbench and we were planning on waiting for the next BizHawk release so we can encode with AngryLion (since this submission syncs on it). However that release wont be for another few months, and other publishers had issues with the current video plugins this movie used, so I’ll be taking this one. Processing…

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7310: EZGames69 & CoolKirby's N64 Tigger's Honey Hunt in 25:51.38
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I was hoping when you added that mood avatar of a guy holding a honey pot that you'd TAS a Pooh game eventually. I hadn't seen this one before, but it's a beautiful game with nice scenery and 3D models for these beloved characters. I enjoyed all the movement, landing precisely on that log at 20:40, and the cutscene skips. Voted Yes! Is it possible you could've entertained more in Level 3 by changing up the timing, like waiting as late as possible to do the movements or otherwise playing around? Just a small thing, I wouldn't redo it unless you find other improvements you need to implement. By the way, the text glitches in the encode seem to be fixed by running GLideN64 at 640x480 (or bigger should work too).
EZGames69
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Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2701
Location: Michigan
CoolKirby wrote:
I was hoping when you added that mood avatar of a guy holding a honey pot that you'd TAS a Pooh game eventually.
This game is actually why my avatar is the way it is. I used to run this game RTA and I commissioned an artist to have me holding a honey pot. Of course I haven’t ran the game in years because I moved to TASing (which this game was the whole reason why I got into TASing myself).
“CoolKirby” wrote:
Is it possible you could've entertained more in Level 3 by changing up the timing, like waiting as late as possible to do the movements or otherwise playing around? Just a small thing, I wouldn't redo it unless you find other improvements you need to implement.
I probably could have, but I was so tired of having to redo this game a bunch of times (and with the game not running at full speed on my computer) that I just gave up and did it asap.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
EZGames69
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Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2701
Location: Michigan
CoolKirby wrote:
By the way, the text glitches in the encode seem to be fixed by running GLideN64 at 640x480 (or bigger should work too).
Forgot to respond to this. My encode was done with a 720p dump, then upscaled to 1080p in post. Not sure if something else broke when dumping.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
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Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4012
I saved 199 frames (3.317 seconds) from Stage 6 - Pooh Sticks. (Encode here.) It's always possible more frames could be saved by better manipulation and invisible lag reduction, but it's a trial-and-error affair. You not only have to get Pooh to throw earlier, but get both sticks to hit enough floating boosts to make it to the end as soon as possible, in each round. And each round affects the next. Sometimes if you throw a frame or a pixel off, it doesn't move as fast. Maybe invisible lag costs it a frame of movement. Round 1: I used similar input as EZGames, though it's a little cleaner. 2 frames saved between when Tigger starts cheering and the start of the next round. Not sure why. Round 2: Slightly different positioning of both sticks allows me to hold onto the frames I've saved. Still 2fr ahead. Round 3: Very different strat. Pooh still takes a while to throw but this is the fastest I could get him to. 52fr ahead. Round 4: Somehow those previous rounds led up to a very fast Round 4. I throw on the first frame without aiming, then Pooh takes only 9 additional frames to throw. The majority of the improvement is here, along with a pause and unpause that shuffles lag frames enough to save 2 more frames. I tried this on Rounds 1-3 too but it always changed Pooh's AI for the worse. I also had a 5 frames faster Round 2 (with a pause/unpause) and a completely separate 7 frames faster Round 3, but I couldn't find throws in later rounds to hold on to those frame savings. I also changed the core from Interpreter to Pure Interpreter in case it improved accuracy. It didn't appear to affect sync. But speaking of which...
EZGames69 wrote:
If anyone finds a faster RNG seed for this stage, I'll be willing to redo the run from here.
I'm going to take you up on this, because I was unable to resync any of Stage 7 due to lack of knowledge about how the rest of the game works. I mentioned before how much I like this run, so I hope it goes well for you and you're able to carry those frames to the end. I also added myself as a coauthor, if you don't mind. If you do, you can remove it when you resync the rest of the stages.
EZGames69
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CoolKirby wrote:
EZGames69 wrote:
If anyone finds a faster RNG seed for this stage, I'll be willing to redo the run from here.
I'm going to take you up on this, because I was unable to resync any of Stage 7 due to lack of knowledge about how the rest of the game works. I mentioned before how much I like this run, so I hope it goes well for you and you're able to carry those frames to the end. I also added myself as a coauthor, if you don't mind. If you do, you can remove it when you resync the rest of the stages.
That’s completely fine by me. It’s going to be awhile however before I can get to resyncing this, so I’d like to request this submission to be set to delayed until then.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
EZGames69
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Joined: 5/29/2017
Posts: 2701
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Alright here it is: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637819705826416536 I managed to save a bit more time in this one too, because I discovered by pressing B before doing a super jump, you can slide a little bit of distance during the time you're waiting for the jump to happen.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
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Good job EZ! Arkiandruski, please don't replace the file yet - we're going to add some BizHawk subtitles as text commentary.
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Editor, Experienced player (607)
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Okay, we're ready. Please replace the file with this one, with subtitle commentary to enhance the viewing experience in BizHawk and on YouTube. I tailored it to a general audience, especially Pooh fans, but it should answer all the questions any viewer may have on watching the run. I also replaced the temp encode in the submission with one of the improvement. By the way, I never entered Read+Write mode while making the subtitles, yet the Mupen64Plus core still desynced at the end of level 2 once. Tigger stood around instead of going up to Owl. I fixed it by restarting BizHawk, but I've never seen that before. I guess that core is infamous for desyncs, but I wasn't even recording.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4654] N64 Tigger's Honey Hunt by EZGames69 & CoolKirby in 25:51.38