Well, I was thinking more in the sense of somewhere people will find it if they're looking for such a map. I have it uploaded and a link but anyone who wants to see it will just have to find me I guess...
Hit an unpleasant roadblock in the TAS just now too. It appears that you can't manipulate the green bug enemies in the random encounter in the swamp to drop two hearts at once. I know that other enemies in the game in the same basic drop category (2 drops, pink jade) will frequently drop two hearts but I've been killing them for hours now and it hasn't happened once. I guess every enemy has their own loot table? Either way, that one thing could end up costing me a lot of time...
What will make things even more annoying for the rest of the run is I've just noticed you can't influence your drop with controller input while you're still in a sword technique animation, and given that almost all combat from here on is sword techniques that's going to be painful. My entire strategy this time is relying on some very specific enemy drops.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xuaxnkdaxp5fiha/54539_FINISHEDWORLDMAPHALF%203200.png
Here's a version of your map that fits under gamefaq's 400kb limit.
Steps:
1) Load in Paint.net
2) Resize to 3200x3200
3) Save as a png with 8-bit colour depth and 0 dithering
4) Run it through optipng which losslessly compresses PNGs
It's possible that some other program/method will compress it even further.
Here's an optimized version of the 6145x6145 file that cuts file size from 4.12 MB to 1.05 MB. I used ScriptPNG to index to 8-bit color depth and recompress.
http://i.imgur.com/OtZNSMv.png
Hey, sorry for the delay but I wanted to thank you guys for the input. The map is on vgmaps.com now. Unfortunately 1MB is still too big but that's some impressive compression, I may be able to use it later. Thanks again!
Fun thing I learned today: If you open the menu while you're walking down out of a town to the world map, it will skip the perspective-change and you'll emerge facing the entrance you came out of. Don't think that'll be very useful since it takes about 200 frames to open the menu, but you never know. Walking backwards around the world map is faster sometimes.
16 23 minutes in and I've already saved two and a half minutes 3:45. I sincerely hope it will glitch properly when I'm done...
EDIT: Scratch that it came in useful immediately. If you need to access the menu anyway I think that's the best time to do it
Joined: 12/8/2012
Posts: 706
Location: Missouri, USA
Just wanted to pop in and say that you're doing some fantastic work on this. Love the motivation!
Keep at it!
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Will opening the menu during the transitions screw with the credits warp? I seem to recall not being able to get it when I menued on a different screen. I really hope I am misremembering.
Nice time savings though! This is more along the lines of the time I'd expect from a TAS. :D
"Screw with" is relative here, since almost anything and everything you do will affect the bug. In the case of the pause screen, the current screen position and some other things are stored when you pause, so if your last pause was in a scrolling room, then yes the memory values will change and the warp will be "different". Doing pauses here and there will not break the glitch though.
I never opened the menu on the world map on any previous warping run. I'm presuming it probably writes to some different addresses that wouldn't be there if you only open it inside, but generally speaking this run is going to be so different I'm not relying on anything I think I know about the glitch. Essentially I'm just getting to that room as fast as possible, where I will brute force it and pray.
When I was playing around with the unused room numbers and such a while ago, I noticed that I'd get warped to the ending somewhat frequently after a bunch of glitching around. I'm working on the assumption that any given unpredictable glitch in this game has some chance of arriving at the ending, meaning odds are good that I'll be able to manipulate at least one working ending by tweaking just Ortah, or even just the final fight. If nothing else I should check if the RNG address $A5 appears in the glitch, because that alone would give you more possibilities than I could test in a year...
I could be wrong and hit a dead end but at least I'll have a much faster and more entertaining run to show for it, and maybe we'll finally have enough data to pin down a cause. If I get desperate I'll probably just put out an open call for help testing the ending and give anyone who gets it to work 50% credit for the run or something.
I wanted to play around with TruePNG and used the world map as a test sample. I generated 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4 bit indexed palettes for full resolution (6145x6145) and quarter resolution (3073x3073). No dithering was used because it increased file size while offering no advantages over increased color space. EDIT: I meant to downscale with nearest neighbor but used bicubic instead. Also, the 256 color options were dithered, so I am adding non-dithered options.
full resolution256 color dithered, 1.05 MB (previously linked)
256 color non-dithered, 789 KB
128 color, 706 KB
64 color, 632 KB
32 color, 558 KB
16 color, 470 KB
quarter resolution nearest neighbor256 color dithered, 339 KB
256 color non-dithered, 290 KB
128 color, 264 KB
64 color, 232 KB
32 color, 213 KB
16 color, 197 KB
quarter resolution bicubic256 color dithered, 399 KB
256 color non-dithered, 378 KB
128 color, 329 KB
64 color, 291 KB
32 color, 258 KB
16 color, 212 KB
Again, really good compression. I tried some messing around with TruePNG myself on the slightly-updated version of the map I sent to vgmaps and got very close but slightly less nice results, probably because I used MSPaint to do the resizing (I tried gimp too but it didn't seem to do any better). I find it interesting that the dithering seems to preserve one small specific purple spot in the bottom left corner, where all the other versions it's basically gray. I don't really know what dithering is supposed to do but I guess it's that.
In my opinion the 256-colour-quarter-resolution-bicubic-dithered option seems to look the best and keep the scenery markers reasonably legible while staying within the size I'd need.
Also - I reached the end of my new TAS! I have spent a couple days now testing various tweaks in the last few rooms trying to get a successful ending but no luck. What disturbs me is how I keep seeing certain patterns recurring even after the most extensive changes I can make in the final rooms. Strictly speaking I don't think I've seen the exact same glitch twice, but almost every single attempt I've hit a mostly orange-and-white checkerboard pattern for several of the torch-flicker values, which I don't remember seeing hardly at all in previous runs. I've managed to get a series of glitched events vaguely similar to the working warp a couple times but it always ends in a crash so far.
I've tried searching traces of the moment after the final input for addresses we've focused on before like 7EBB46, the where-you-last-walked-up-a-screen-in-town address, but I haven't found it. I'm thinking I may have changed something vital to the early progression of the glitch but as always, there's a hundred things it could be. I keep trying to look at a trace of it myself but I keep getting lost...
I'll keep testing but I'm not sure whether I should just post up what I have as a WIP or what. I don't really want to spoil it all for the actual submission but I can't know how much longer it'll be until I get it to work.
In the meantime here's a savestate if anyone wants to have a look at the glitch after the new TAS.
Two more:
Same as what's posted on vgmaps but ~100 KB smaller.
396 KB quarter resolution 256 color dithered version of the above, this time downscaled with fant rather than bicubic. At extreme zoom, fant handles the small boxes more gracefully than bicubic. It also makes for a slightly smaller file size.
I used Paint.NET for downsizing, but GIMP should be competitive. GIMP also has good support for color indexing.
As for dithering, it's used to fake increased color bandwidth through a method called error diffusion. The algorithm effectively injects digital noise into the image, and the end result is it tricks our eyes into thinking there are more colors than actually present. However, being that random data is being inserted, dithering harms compression and is rarely useful under 256 colors compared to increasing actual color bandwidth, assuming that the original image uses 256 or more colors.
TruePNG (and probably most other quantizers) sacrifices the purple region because it is one of the least prevalent colors. Other regions of the map also drop out as the color bandwidth decreases. Keep in mind that any scaling method other than nearest neighbor increases color bandwidth via smoothing.
Here's a 24 color dithered version of the full size image. As you can see, there isn't enough color bandwidth to represent objects in the southwest purple region and objects have been replaced by a speckle pattern, otherwise known as dithering. Despite the lack of color bandwidth, dithering drives file size to a hefty 788 KB, the same size as 256 color non-dithered, which is far more appealing looking.
That map is absolutely beautiful for 396kb, I really didn't think that was possible. Thank you very much for all the help and explanation! I really appreciate it!
Okay, tried a new approach to investigating the glitch. I want to know what exactly calls up the ending cutscene. The obvious method is trying to compare several massive traces including how the ending is naturally supposed to occur to find out where they start to line up, but that sounds like a pain. So I tried some romhacking instead.
I located the RNG-calculating subroutine I looked at before at "80e3bc", which is 0065bc in the (headered LoRom) ROM. It starts off by setting the DB register, which is great since most spots I'd want to jump to require it to be set correctly. I tried inserting a Jump-Absolute-Long (5c) right after that to various key spots I found in my traces right before and while the ending begins, but unfortunately I've had no luck yet triggering the ending. I came pretty close though - I managed to get the exploding noise from the beginning of it to play in a loop.
Generally speaking though I can't get it to stay on track with the working warp endings I've achieved naturally, there's a lot of opportunities for it to derail if an address isn't set right. I think I just haven't gone far enough back yet to where it begins. Generally speaking I've been trying the spots I see with the highest stack pointer in hopes of getting to the main... thing.
Anyways. I'll post more if I have any luck with that. In the meantime, I'm also looking into address 7E9BA9, mentioned back on page 1 of this thread. In the original working warp with the intact ending, it gets updated repeatedly in time with all the glitched cutscene events before the ending appears, less so in my new broken versions. I'm holding out a faint hope that the ending is a relatively simple branch option inside one of these cutscene-event things, and that if you reach it that way it will be set up correctly - though the idea that I got to the credits twice more by totally different means seems hard to believe...
I dunno. I still want to understand it all, even if there's very little chance that knowledge will help me provoke an ending deliberately.
Found something fun: there's a sound effect that goes with revealing the path to Ortah. I don't know if anyone else knew about it, but you can only hear it when you play the horn facing toward the quicksand cave, within 5 or 6 increments of due west, otherwise the long horn song covers it up. You can listen here:
Link to video
Other news,
-Edited my game end glitch submission a while back to note that I lost 300 frames to bad world map movement on the very first trip from Rysis to Hujia; essentially I overshot the warp star and could also have stayed facing east the whole time to go even faster.
-Tested Super Drakkhen (J) a bit and can confirm the Ortah glitch does happen. Just for fun tested the cutscene after the Sektra boss with the 7F present and it glitches out in the same way as at Ortah. Also looked at the normally inaccessible rooms I found before and they're all the same in the japanese version.
-I made two tiny mistakes on my map earlier. Tile $9F, where the badsel dead-end cave is, is overlaid entirely with water. The water isn't rendered in badsel region but it is on the desert side of the wall, so it comes in straight west at the top of that tile until it hits the wall, leaving the southeast corner of the desert out in the water. Tile $52 just east of that one was drawn by Excel with the water over top of the dark wall, and I didn't notice until now. Will update the uploaded copies soon.
-Working on 100% run! There's a lot to consider. The Arsenal and Storehouse are complicated. It seems geographically slightly faster to hit the Arsenal on the way to Galys Pass, but the Hauza can make Piercia much faster. Arsenal first also lets you enter the storehouse at level 2, speeding up the first room, but visiting the Arsenal after the storehouse eliminates the wasted time fighting the lizard knight at level 1 again. The real obnoxious part is the potion room. If you skip collecting the potion you save over 1000 frames, but you're down a free potion. You're also a lower level for Piercia so that fight takes maybe 400-500 frames longer - so you can still save 500 frames this way, IF money is not going to be a problem later which I don't know yet if it is.
Other than that the only real optimization problem is still the 100 kills. I've tested around and I'm pretty sure the 3 swamp bugs is the only world map encounter with 3 enemies you can get, at least before Mt. Badsel. I could fight encounters of 2 scorpions each getting the horn though the fights would be much slower, might save a bit of time. The worst part will be manipulating the clouds to appear along the way.
Finally got the map up on GameFAQs if anyone wants to have a look. I think it came out pretty well all things considered. Could not possibly have done it without TruePNG, and the extensive labelling was mandatory.
Also had some fun with the world map to tie up one last loose end. I'd previously seen some objects rendered that aren't in the game normally, so I tested it more thoroughly with a ROM hack to replace several tiles with a grid of all the scenery objects, and had a walk through it in each region. Unfortunately a lot of them cause the game to crash and most of the remainder seem to be repeats of the same images, but there's more than just a couple that have unique graphics.
Here's a few screenshots of what the unused objects look like:
http://www.pictureshack.us/images/51543_BadselStuff.pnghttp://www.pictureshack.us/images/59549_SnowfieldRocks.pnghttp://www.pictureshack.us/images/33165_Skullsmaybe.png
And for fun, this is the view in the second, unused Underworld region code ($06):
http://www.pictureshack.us/images/22471_UnderworldTwo.png
I so want to believe that last one isn't just a creepy coincidence, and that they actually planned to have you face down an army of yourself in the underworld...
Anyways, the only one of these unused objects that seems to have any scaling with distance is the small plants in the badsel region, as you can see in that screenshot.
Nice job on the map!
As for the optimization of the world map battles, I don't think there will ever be a great way to do it. Just have to bite the bullet and try to get all 100 fights during your world map travels without having to add any extra steps, I suppose.
You want to finish the 100 fights by the time you get to the second temple right? Since I don't believe you go up there anymore after that.
I don't know how extensively you can manipulate the fights you want without sacrificing time on world map movement, but the 2x scorpion fights may be worth it if you can get a few of them while still following optimal world map movement, assuming you can't get 33 swarm bug fights following perfect movement (+1 random small fight).
I don't know how viable this would be, but you could do a few battles during your first visit to the swamp to knock a few out of the way and gain some levels. It would probably require at least a potion. I don't know if it would help you save any decent amount of time in the following few areas at all though as you already destroy the dungeons and bosses pretty fast. I'm guessing this would be a bad idea but just throwing it out there.
Or maybe do a few easier fights in the snowfield/firefield/low level areas during your travels there even if it's only 2 enemies. That way you may not have to sacrifice as much time on your world map movement to get the clouds to spawn as you want, and for the viewers it would split up the grinding.
Like I said though, I don't think there's any absolutely amazing way to do it. You still need to kill 100 enemies at the end of the day.
So I did the math on everything before Galys Pass. It is definitely slower to get the Hauza before the Storehouse:
SEGMENT DISTANCE FRAMES
RYSIS->WARP A 271.5 863
WARP A->HUJIA 769 1352
HUJIA->STOREHOUSE 603.7 1710
STOREHOUSE->HUJIA 603.7 1686
HUJIA->ARSENAL 810.0 1941
ARSENAL->HUJIA 810.0 1965
ARSENAL->GALYS 580.3 1616
HUJIA->GALYS 915.1 2033
WARP A->ARSENAL 1118.9 1878
ARSENAL->STOREHOUSE 1146.8 2297
*Frame counts based on my best time, most can probably be improved slightly
"Distance" units are just pixels on my map...
OPTION A DISTANCE FRAMES
RYSIS
WARP A 271.5 863
ARSENAL 1118 1878
HUJIA 810.0 1965
STOREHOUSE 603.7 1710
HUJIA 603.7 1686
GALYS 915.1 2033
TOTAL 4323 10135
OPTION B
RYSIS
WARP A 271.5 863
HUJIA 769 1352
ARSENAL 810.0 1941
STOREHOUSE 1146 2297
HUJIA 603.7 1686
GALYS 915.1 2033
TOTAL 4516 10172
OPTION C
RYSIS
WARP A 271.5 863
HUJIA 769 1352
STOREHOUSE 603.7 1710
HUJIA 603.7 1686
ARSENAL 810.0 1941
GALYS 580.3 1616
TOTAL 3638 9168
SAVE: 967 Route: (10135 - 9168)
SAVE: 126 Arsenal Fights Faster
LOSE: -44 Storehouse First Fight at Lvl 1
LOSE: -35 Storehouse Last Room Before Piercia at Lvl 3
LOSE: -240 Piercia fight without Hauza (3 more hits)
SAVE: 150ish No menu for switch to Hauza
TOTAL 924 FRAMES saved by getting Hauza after the Storehouse
The only part I haven't accounted for yet is the possibility of skipping the potion in the storehouse. Need to finish planning the rest of the route to see if I'll need it. I think you're probably better off just buying an extra.
I still haven't really decided much more on the 100 fights yet. If I could encounter fights with two enemies that could be killed almost instantly, that could be slightly faster than four sword techniques against three swamp bugs. What that means though is most of the losses will be in walking out of the way to hit the encounters, so getting them along the way will probably be essential.
My current plan is to hit 9 encounters of 3 immediately after the wet cavern, which should be possible to do spending just one potion. The huge xp boost this gives would save a bunch of time from the fire cave through to Ortah. I could probably get at least four just on the way, but there'd be some wandering around... I don't think I can avoid a bit of wandering no matter how I go about it.
I'm at a loss for a way to calculate an optimal strategy. Unfortunately there's no real way to hit a high enough level to do any damage to the swamp bugs at all until the last 5 encounters or so. I still haven't looked much at the impact the exp will have on the last half of the run, but it might be worth the longer fights just to keep pace with the later enemies.
