Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
marzojr wrote:
WST wrote:
According to marzojr, the big screw consists of 2 small ones,
I don't recall saying that; which screw you are talking about?
At least a year ago, I was asking you how to perform the trick which happens in Aglar’s Sonic 2 TAS at frame ~3590. I was trying to do that with Amy (which, I beleive now, is actually useless for her). Anyway, I just posted my observation about that trick. If you want, I can provide 2 gmvs explaining my words, but I doubt it’s any kind of useful.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
I really, really hate optimizing the trajectory on such kind of terrain pattern:
Something like this is present in Sonic 1 — in Green Hill Zone 1, right after the tube. However, I do need to optimize it in a Sonic 2 hack (Amy in Sonic 2). I need to perform a jump with as high horizontal speed as possible. I try 2 possibilities — marked blue and orange. The one marked orange looks easy at first, but… It’s so easy to hit the slope in front of you and stuck… I made a lot of attempts, but failed to gain a speed that I would like.
Another possibility is the one marked blue. Based on Aglar’s «run up a slope» trick, it almost works. Why «almost»? Because beside giving me a great horizontal speed, it also gives me great vertical boost, which is absolutely not what I need in my situation.
I’m just letting you know, I’m not asking for help…
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
Link to video
Had nothing to do, decided to make a testrun of Sonic 2 CPZ1 and CNZ2 using recently discovered tricks.
Both are improveable, especially the boss fight — it’s just a testrun.
Sonic runs become so boring unless they are glitchless :(
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Quite a nifty test run, WST. Is there any sort of lua or anything to keep track of Sonic's speed and positioning? I might want to mess with this game someday.
Quite a nifty test run, WST. Is there any sort of lua or anything to keep track of Sonic's speed and positioning? I might want to mess with this game someday.
Here is the "TAS pack" for this game. I need to update the emulators to more recent SVN. Or maybe make aa BizHawk version if the script, assuming I can ever get it to work on Linux.
Edit: if yiu need help with any of the tricks and glitches, feel free to ask; I am the walking encyclopedia for Sonic games.
Sonic runs become so boring unless they are glitchless :(
I would love to watch a zipless run of Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, just like the Sonic 1 publication here in TASVideos! They'd be the best in my opinion :)
For Sonic 2, this is quite doable; for S3&K, they are quite an undertaking -- and I am speaking from experience here, even a run with zips in S3&K is an awful lot of work.
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
GoddessMaria15 wrote:
Would a zipless run be well received and a good goal choice for Sonic 2/2K?
Sure. As I mentioned, Sonic runs with heavy usage of level-wraps are boring. It looked cool in nitsuja’s epoch, when he first shown that trick, but now it’s annoying to see levels beaten that way. A good glitchless run will certainly receive very positive feedback.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
I wouldn't mind for a glitchless run, but for myself, I'm not really into glitchless TASes or something like that. Although its easier to do TASes without glitches than TASes with them.
Who told you that, can you please tell me?
That guy certainly never TASed Sonic.
QFT.
Quoted For Truth, not Quantum Field Theory
Indeed, the major reason why I only did one run without one glitch (level wrapping) is the sheer difficulty of making a glitchless run; no level wrapping already meant a huge amount of work, removing zips would make things vastly harder, and the thought of removing other glitches makes me give up a run I wasn't even really thinking of doing :-p
I have finally gotten around to doing this and personally, I feel partially pleased with this, but also partially unsure about it. What do you guys think of this...?
Encode:
Link to videoUser movie #17898360884919717
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
It’s a good run for the first time, and I am really happy to see a girl in our community of Sonic players, but there is certainly something that can be improved.
To explain my thoughts, I let myself use a convenient system of symbols to represent the input, which I often do while discussing the tricks with feeuzz and Qwerty. I hope it’s understandable.
Let’s start from the game boot process.
I do not know if you were going to optimize the menu selection or not, but at this time it can be improved. First of all, you could use the second controller to perform selection faster. Instead of pressing [<][][<] you could use [<][<][<]. The other possibility for improvement is ability to press Start together with the D-pad button (for example: [vS] instead of [v][S]). However, you noticed that A and C buttons in the sound test can be pressed together with the D-pad keys — good.
Now about the game itself.
The fundamental basics of this game’s physics were discovered and explained by SprintGod ages ago. He was probably the first person who made really well optimized runs of Sonic the Hedgehog (and it doesn’t matter that nitsuja beaten him by 10 seconds — it all comes from nitsuja’s much better tools and knowledge about the game inner side, allowing him to abuse glitches that SprintGod was not aware of). And some of the very important, I would say, “key” theses are:
— The fastest way to start is spindash
— Spindash can give you speed from 2048 to 3072, depending on number of revs. Full spindash consists of 6 revs: [v][vA][vB][vC][v][vA][vB][vC]. After releasing, Sonic is rolling.
— 2 most common states of Sonic’s move are running and rolling. When Sonic is running on flat ground, his speed does not change. However, when he is rolling, he decelerates.
— Slowing down from rolling can be avoided by turning into running state. But it may cost some horizontal speed sometimes. The most common way of switching from rolling to running state is jumping to hit ceiling or an object above. There are some other common ways — the best is to see existing runs.
— When you jump from rolling state, you have no horizontal control (the D-pad is useless). When you jump from running state, you have full horizontal control.
— To perform a spin dash, you need to brake. In Sonic 3 (&S3&K), you need to bring the ground speed below 256 to be able to charge a spin dash. In Sonic 2, you need to be completely still. This is one of the most terrible facts about Sonic 2: the braking, one of the most important maneurs of any Sonic TAS, requires very high skill by itself. And it’s not a joke — so far, Aglar is alone who always uses the “right” way to brake in this game. Fortunately, there is an alternative, more algorithmic, way of braking on flat ground (and on objects), which will always cost you exactly 2 frames everytime you charge a spindash, but gives guaranteed result quickly. The algorithm is below:
1. Bring your speed below 128 by pressing [<] as many frames as needed
2. Press [<>]
3. Charge your spindash using this wonderful sequence: [v<][vA][vB][vC][v][vA][vB][vC]
This is what most Sonic TASers use for their just-for-fun runs.
— There are also faster ways to stop than braking. The fastest way to stop is to hit an object or terrain (quoting marzojr, the boss of Sonic TAS). For example, when you are in running state, hitting a monitor will stop you immediately, allowing to charge spindash much quicker than if you braked.
— On sloped ground (with positive slope angle) rolling is faster than running. However, if your ground speed is very high, and the horizontal speed (calculated as the projection of the speed vector to the horizontal axis) is expected to be more than 4096, it will NOT be more than 4096, but at the same time, your ground speed may still be growing. Sometimes it is useful, for example, when the terrain makes Sonic often switch from moving horizontally to moving vertically — vertical speed is not affected by this anomaly.
— Jumping is the most important way of taking boost in this game: jumping off slopes gives you great acceleration. Every point of the ground has it’s own value of slope angle — and when you are jumping, your horizontal and vertical speeds are calculated from the last two values of the slope angle. The speed is mostly affected by the angle change, while the direction — mostly by the angle value on the frame before you pressed the jump button. This may be a bit hard to understand, but… SprintGod explained it simple:
SprintGod wrote:
Jumping at the exact point that a downward slope begins gives you a slight speed boost without having much effect on the jump height.
But… Well, this all was general theory, which you can certainly read yourself in the knowledge base. I wrote this post mostly for those who never read wiki. Now let’s return to your run…
When TASing, you definitely should be using marzojr’s Lua HUD. It displays a plenty of useful information about the game and it’s much more comfortable to use than RAM watch. Using the Lua HUD, you will see that you are loosing the speed after your very first jump. This is because you released the jump button too early and started to decelerate before hitting the ceiling. If you hit the ceiling a bit harder (:-D), your speed will not go down. Also, you jumped 1 frame later than possible. It probably didn’t affect your result, because the difference in speed is only 6 subpixels per frame, but… It’s nice to be faster even if it doesn’t save time, isn’t it?
Another obvious mistake is the final boss fight. Aglar did his best to make it frame-perfect — in other words, to not loose even a single frame. In your run, I clearly can see frames when the boss is not suffering from being hit.
And the last mistake is in the very end: you didn’t jump after the spin dash to hit the ceiling and thus switch into running state. Thus, rolling greatly decelerated you — and it seems to be the most significant time loss.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
In regards to the spin dash at the end, I tried to jump but it deemed to be slower...unless I've done completely wrong.
I did expect mistakes to be present during the preliminary testing. With the final boss fight, I have been trying to get the timing as much as I could. Sadly, most of them didn't work out as I thought. I was using the lua HUD script by marzojr from start to finish. That was how I was able to notice the speed drop when I went for the jump after spin dash at the end.
I didn't know that using Controller 2 also affected the menus. Something else that I have learned through this. Either way, thank you for the critique.
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
A couple fixes…
First, of course, nitsuja improved SprintGod by 10 minutes, not seconds.
Second, the speed in S3&K in order to be able to spindash should be below or equal 256 — in fact, it is very common to charge spindash with the speed exactly = 256
Third, Aglar’s final boss fight does not seem to be absolutely frame-perfect — which probably means that it cannot be done perfectly at all
How about TASing Sonic hacks instead of original games? Runs of the hacks are usually way less optimized, and there is a very wide area for improvements, finding shortcuts & so on. Also, as marzojr’s experience shows, TASes of Sonic hacks are quite acceptable on TASvideos if they are done well.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
How about TASing Sonic hacks instead of original games? Runs of the hacks are usually way less optimized, and there is a very wide area for improvements, finding shortcuts & so on. Also, as marzojr’s experience shows, TASes of Sonic hacks are quite acceptable on TASvideos if they are done well.
There's nothing wrong with TASing something already TASed for practice. It makes it even better to learn that way, since you know what it's 'meant' to look like right away ^^
In regards to the spin dash at the end, I tried to jump but it deemed to be slower...unless I've done completely wrong.
hmm.. just a little clarification, of what i think happened:
Sonic 2 is particular with jumping, even after a spindash, if you need to jump (and if your speed is higher than 1536), do NOT press [>] during the jump. If you press [>], you will indeed decelerate instantly 'til reaching 1536 subpix/frame.
Press "right" only if your speed is below or if you got speed shoes (for a certain speed also).
But don't forget to press right as soon as you reached back the ground ;-)
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1690
Location: RU · ID · AM
Not exactly correct. After the spindash, you are in rolling state. Jumping from rolling state gives you absense of horizontal control — but does not make you affected by the ASC.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2
my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Yeah, it's Sonic 1 that acts like that out of a rolling jump. The only time the speed cap kicks in in Sonic 2 is if you have air control (running or rolling off the edge of a platform, for instance).
As far as I understood jumping from a rolling state gave you 0 horizontal control and you didn't want to [>] until you hit a ceiling, then you could and your speed would be locked in.
Something like this is present in Sonic 1 — in Green Hill Zone 1, right after the tube. However, I do need to optimize it in a Sonic 2 hack (Amy in Sonic 2). I need to perform a jump with as high horizontal speed as possible. I try 2 possibilities — marked blue and orange. The one marked orange looks easy at first, but… It’s so easy to hit the slope in front of you and stuck… I made a lot of attempts, but failed to gain a speed that I would like.
Another possibility is the one marked blue. Based on Aglar’s «run up a slope» trick, it almost works. Why «almost»? Because beside giving me a great horizontal speed, it also gives me great vertical boost, which is absolutely not what I need in my situation.
I’m just letting you know, I’m not asking for help…
