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Spider-Waffle wrote:
Had an idea for a new zipping technique, I don't think I've seen it before
I've tried this technique many times, and I'm not quite sure why I always end up not doing it. Instead of rejecting or congratulating you on that, I'll point out a few facts: - Constructing a beam takes some time. - There's a limitation of 5 active beams at once. - At the first point, the ceiling can be reached with 3 beams, not 2. But I really haven't yet analyzed this technique deeply enough. I only can say that I've never had success with it, and I can't remember why.
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Spider-Waffle wrote:
I was thinking of doing something similar at end of the bombman's level after passing through that second wall, could you use the jump in a wall and be temporarily lower technique to pull this off?
Answer: (FCM) Almost, but not quite. The beam goes 1 pixel too low. It doesn't allow any fancy techniques except suicide by jumping.
Post subject: Bombman level end techniques (beam variable)
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Here are three different techniques at the end of the Bombman level. Image 0 - FCM - 0 magnet beams - 1037 frames Image 1 - FCM - 4 magnet beams - 953 frames PLUS some distance to Bombman - Weapon switch added, length is 1000 frames. Image 2 - FCM - 5 magnet beams (1 in pit) - 963 frames PLUS some distance to Bombman - Weapon switch added, length is 1010 frames. The animations are synchronized from their beginnings, making it easy to see the difference in their length. (The script created for creating this mosaic animation can be found here.) Using 1 beam in the pit (instead of 0 or 2) is a mistake - it merely slows down falling, which is why it's slowest. 2 is fastest. I estimate it would have been about 943 frames long (990 after weapon switch compensation). However, I think the total gain of this technique is too small to justify the big number of beams used. The gain is approximately equivalent to the gain of a 3 block wide zipping. EDIT: I also tested the 1-beam way, former "S" route. It would be 997 frames (1044 after weapons switch compensation). It's the slowest of all, because the zipping is so minimal and it prevents doing weapon switching in the tunnel while dropping (the beam is still active).
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Hey, wonderfull gifs, this has to be the prettiest timeattack topic ever! Off by one pixel :\ I don't supose you can use the jump at a different walking animation frame technique to change this, or chain together the temporarily lower technique, that is, through some combination of jumping become temporarily lower then temporarily lower from the already temporarily lower posistion?
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
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Spider-Waffle wrote:
I don't supose you can use the jump at a different walking animation frame technique to change this, or chain together the temporarily lower technique, that is, through some combination of jumping become temporarily lower then temporarily lower from the already temporarily lower posistion?
The "temporarily lower" technique is already used there. You can see Rockman jumping in the right edge of that wall. The nature of that technique is on/off, which means it can't be chained. I also tried all the different frames of walking animation, and it wasn't any help. Ps: May I request you change that Iceman image in some way. It badly breaks this page, being so wide.
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lol, yea, I was thinking the same thing. ;\
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
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New Bombman level plan. https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/bombmanmap2.png These choices were made: - A instead of B (B is almost nothing) - R=1 (number of recharges) - E instead of F (no zipping) - D instead of C (in Elecman level it was a surprisingly big gain) As concluded in previous posts, the end of the level (after the 1up room) will not feature any special tricks. Doing two separate recharges is a bad idea, because it takes a lot of time. If I can somehow manage to do two recharges with just one switch2 (which I think is unlikely), I'll change the plan: I'll either do F (+2 beams, 3 excess) or the 4-beam ending (1 excess), depending on which works out faster.
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Is it somehow possible to zip through the wall at the first ladder you are supposed to climb upwards? That would be awesome since the boss room is on the other side of the wall. It can't be abused with the ladder somehow? If maybe one were to climb off the ladder after the screen has scrolled upwards and then press up+down to zip to the right? But on the other hand I have no time attack knowledge of Mega Man 1 ;) The things I know is what I briefly have been picking up from this thread and from watching your currently published run. Or maybe to put up a beam under the platforms that holds the ladder upwards? And now I'm starting to guessing wildly so I might just be quite.
/Walker Boh
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Walker Boh wrote:
Is it somehow possible to zip through the wall at the first ladder you are supposed to climb upwards? That would be awesome since the boss room is on the other side of the wall.
No, it's not possible. The level does not really have a 2-D layout. The only relation between rooms is "next", "previous". Going through the right side of the room will take you to the next room (and only partially - you can't really progress there). For ease of visualizing (and to keep the image in sane size), I did not make the map 1-D.
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Aha. Maybe I was confused from the picture. It's nice though.
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The boss room isn't actually there. It's just configured that way to save space, and I believe that there isn't actually a 2D grid for Mega Man 1, so even if two rooms appear to be next to each other, they aren't unless it's normal to go between those rooms. Too bad, since it would obviously be really cool to just jump to the boss. Edit: Doh, I'm too slow, it seems. =P
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There's one particular thing that fascinates me in this game. In the end of my Iceman battle, you can see that there appear extra Rockman characters for a few frames. I don't know the exact cause of it, but I think it's a buffer overflow glitch of some kind. There's one particularly interesting item in the game: item number 0x43. It's a teleportation item. The item can be found only in the last level, Wily 4. Each teleport contains one of those items, and they are invisible. If the item is activated in some other level, weird things can happen such as teleportation forward in the level. I'd like to find a way to trick the game into cloning such item. Of course, there's also item number 0x44, which is the level-end trigger... Other items of curiousness include 0x2F, which invokes a level-specific behavior (found in Gutsman level (lifts) and in Wily3 (water tunnel)), 0xFF (water tunnel along many more functions), 0x4A (random powerup) and 0x3B (boss activator)...
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Why is two refils with only two switches unlikely? Couldn't you grab them from consecutive cannons? Also I think you could do F with only 1 extra beam if you used the technique I brought up with the iceman jpeg.
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
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Spider-Waffle wrote:
Why is two refils with only two switches unlikely?
Because the cannons are far from each others (I recall they activate on proximity) and because the big weapon powerups are rare (tedious to manipulate the randomness). Perhaps it's possible to take one from cannon and other from sinewave-flying bomb, but without testing it's impossible to say whether it really works. > Also I think you could do F with only 1 extra beam if you used the technique I brought up with the iceman jpeg. The underlying beam can only be 256 pixels wide. And it must end just before the next floor starts (in order to be able to jump on the next beam). This means that it must begin very late. Add there the time needed to construct the actual F-zipping beam -- the F-zipping would be very short. (Note that the F-zip must end just before the hole in the floor.) Edit: You mean like this? It seems to work nicely enough. Saves 1 beam.
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yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking, except it'd be really nice if you could place the first 16block MB such that you could place the other 2 with only 1 jump, maybe adjust the placement of the very first MB. Maybe you could get a large and a small powerup and then do F.
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
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Spider-Waffle wrote:
nice if you could place the first 16block MB such that you could place the other 2 with only 1 jump, maybe adjust the placement of the very first MB.
Of the 9 possible positions where the first beam can be put without having to jump twice, I tried last two. The last didn't allow proper placement at all and the one that worked, only allowed proper positioning if the placement jump is done immediately after landing. I didn't test more positions... Edit: Oh, there's the thing that - The beam has to reach far enough (to be able to jump on the second zipping beam) - The higher the beam is, the less far it needs to reach (because a jump reaches longer). So I placed it as high as possible. If I place it lower, I have to delay the release and as result, the first zip would be shorter. But be sure I'll try to optimize it when I play the part for the actual movie.
Post subject: Animation fun
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For fun, I've been trying to create a version of the above-shown animation where the magnet beams are contiguous instead of flashing. Among many algorithms I tried, here's the most promising so far: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/rm1bombdemo2b.gif Now, who can guess how exactly the algorithm works? Hint: The animation generator has no access to the emulator's knowledge of sprites. It operates only on images. Hint 2: Except for the background (array of most commonly appeared pixels during the movie clip), the animation generator has no knowledge of future. Can someone suggest a better algorithm?
adelikat
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This algorithm looks really promising for future runs. Perhaps you can compile this into some sort of program to make available for time-attackers. It look extremely helpful for comparing various routes.
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adelikat wrote:
This algorithm looks really promising for future runs. Perhaps you can compile this into some sort of program to make available for time-attackers. It look extremely helpful for comparing various routes.
To avoid confusion, the algorithm I referred in my last post was about the GIF linked in the same post, not the different-routes-side-by-side image that adelikat seems to talk about...
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Whenever a pixel changes, it's given a set number of frames to live, and when it expires, it's changed to the original image's equalent pixel. If it is changed again before it expires, the "frames to live" is reset. Seems to work like that to me...
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Blublu wrote:
Whenever a pixel changes, it's given a set number of frames to live, and when it expires, it's changed to the original image's equalent pixel. If it is changed again before it expires, the "frames to live" is reset. Seems to work like that to me...
Your theory doesn't work: When a magnet beam part disappears from the image, it also counts as a "change", and your algorithm would keep the change - the sky - visible for the set number of frames, instead of the beam.
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Actually, if it worked like I said, Mega Man would be permanently embedded at the beginning, so I have no idea.
Post subject: Re: Animation fun
Hoe
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Bisqwit wrote:
For fun, I've been trying to create a version of the above-shown animation where the magnet beams are contiguous instead of flashing. Among many algorithms I tried, here's the most promising so far: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/rm1bombdemo2b.gif Now, who can guess how exactly the algorithm works? Hint: The animation generator has no access to the emulator's knowledge of sprites. It operates only on images. Hint 2: Except for the background (array of most commonly appeared pixels during the movie clip), the animation generator has no knowledge of future. Can someone suggest a better algorithm?
One thing that would be intresting is taking several animations, taking differntials of the animations against the base version, putting the additional ones into a differnt portion of the gif color palette, and then combining them. It apears that you're just OR'ing the last X frames together. You may want to only OR if it's a specific color. You'll get the 'motion blur' effect on megaman, and potentialy other things, but it will at least be far from every thing.
Post subject: Re: Animation fun
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Hoe wrote:
It apears that you're just OR'ing the last X frames together.
Nope, that would create overimposed colours (and generally hide black pixels). My algorithm doesn't invent any new colours. (Ok, the GIF was reduced to 8 colours for better compressability so that's not entirely true, but it's not the point.)
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It seems to me that you just delay the action if a pixel is supposed to go back to the background colour.
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