Posted: 5/23/2023 3:15 AM
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BikerBones
Joined: 5/23/2023
Posts: 1
Location: Michigan
I'm making a 100% TAS of SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini bottom, and trying to recreate a trick only two other people (who are both also inactive on social media) in the community have ever successfully pulled off. Documentation is limited, and blindly attempting it using my best educated guess as to how it works isn't getting me anywhere, so I'd like to make a brute force script in the fork of Dolphin that supports Lua scripting. However, I know nothing about coding, and when I've tried to learn, I've always made very little progress. So, I'm looking for someone who would be willing to write one for me. It would need to be capable of feeding inputs into Dolphin, loading a save state to retry if it fails (this would be check by checking the in game golden spatula counter every X number of frames, if it hasn't increased, reload), reading position, momentum, and stick angle data, and making slight adjustments to the position and stick angle on every consecutive reload. If it could also make note of which sequences of inputs, stick angle, etc resulted in the spatula being successfully collected, that would be helpful, so that I could just leave it running while I'm asleep or something, and check it in the morning. I know this is a tall order, but I'm at my wit's end here. This is a last ditch effort, before just ripping the footage from one of the other two TASes that have done it.
Posted: 5/23/2023 7:59 PM
(Edited: 5/23/2023 8:01 PM)
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Dimon12321
He/Him
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (596)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1219
Location: Romania
Hello, BikerBones! Welcome to TASVideos. Such a script would be a documentation itself. I'm not aware of someone actually releasing a single script for a GC/Wii game for reference or demonstration. Maybe I missed it, who knows. IIRC, there's at least one submission where Dolphin 5.0 LUA (mentioned in the submission text) was used, so you may give it a try to find it and contact its author. There must be a reason why he/she used that fork. The recent publication of Dragon Warrior 4 for NES provides a library of how a NES game can be brute-forced. I don't Lua at all, but as I understand, there is a core script of how to do basic actions and movements and a lot of scripts for mesh buttons for battles/movement for each game walkthrough chunk (a set of screens of a chapter) until the game is complete. It can be used for reference of what should be done after all useful RAM addresses are found. The only problem is, it was written for Bizhawk emulator, so it might have a different RAM address basis and who knows what else.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.