This is a new Rockman TAS, mostly an update to the previous version though.
Changes:
Cutman battle improved by 4 frames. Thanks to Vatchern!
Wily1-Wily4 (excluding Wily4 refights) improved by about 16 frames.
One more refill in Wily2. Costs 20 frames. Wins a couple of seconds in Wily4.
Bombman refight glitched, death. Resulting lots of gain. Other refights skipped totally. Thanks to Arne the Adjective and FinalFighter! (Thanks to Arne again for reminding me about FinalFighter's refined technique to this.)
New attribute: Uses death to save time.
90% of the last battle was played by BisqBot. I created a new algorithm core in the bot that simulated literally what a human would do in such situation; only saving lots of work. (Previous versions of BisqBot have always used random input combinations.)
AngerFist's contribution to this movie comes from his part
in the previous version. He played the Gutsman fight and
the Bombman fight (the first), and he prevailed at luck
manipulation in Cutman stage, and helped optimize
a couple of rooms.
Ps: The rerecord count is arbitrary. At some point, it was going to say 6268371 -- somehow the value was accidentally copied from BisqBot's progress file. So I edited it manually.
Ah, indeed. BisqBot did play some parts of this movie. Specifically, the 14-frame improvement in Wily1 is thanks to BisqBot, and the Bombman refight escape technique was perfected by BisqBot. And of course, he manipulated the refills in Wily2 and beat CWU-01P. And, played 90% of Wily4 battle.
As for Bombman refight escape... I disassembled Bombman's AI entirely. That way, I knew exactly how to make it throw a bomb and how to make it jump a certain height of jump.
Edit: Submission file replaced! (15:52 --> 15:49)
Edit 2: Submission file replaced again! (15:49 --> 15:48)
Edit 3: Round numbers are nice. 56900 frames is the length now, making it 1289 frames (21.5 seconds) faster than the published movie.
Ps: This is a bigame movie. It completes on both Rockman (J) and Mega Man (U).
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I know it is off topic, but I'd like to say I really like the luck manipulation in bisqwit's megaman movie. Each version has more and more optimized energy refill drops. I love seeing 3 energy refils fall down so quickly.
That's sort of what my post was getting at: if people are feeling dissatisfied with broken runs, maybe they can play a "takes no sloppy damage" and "no zipping" run. The goals are listed with each published movie because they vary between movies, which I consider a good thing. People should feel free to try different sorts of runs and state the goals, and we can see if the support exists for them.
Although I'm generally just here for the speed, I've found the recent MKII and KI runs pretty refreshing and enjoyable.
4:45 AM, apologies in advance for typos and redundancy.
Besides being a completely wrong name for a category ("sloppy damage" means that the damage is uninentional or unnecessary, which is hardly the case in any run) it's also very difficult to define: What is considered "sloppy-looking" and what isn't? If in my opinion some damage is not "sloppy-looking" but in your opinion it is, who is right?
Goal strategies should be clear and unambiguous. "Takes no damage" is very unambiguous and easy to check. "Looks good" isn't.
I'm doubtful about the real value of such a version of the rockman run. Forbidding one glitch abuse while allowing countless others seems a bit artificial. Note that this is a bit different from a "no warps" run in that zipping doesn't really skip entire levels. The "no warps" category is good because you get to see the whole game.
Of course one could argue that "no zipping" is the same: You get to see the whole game, but this is much more debatable. In many cases the "zipping" doesn't actually skip any screen nor actually deviates considerably from the intended route. A good example is the very first zipping in the rockman run: I see absolutely no problem with it. It looks cool.
The first category name was made intentionally ambiguous to gently poke fun.
The second one was serious. If people are upset that speed-enhancing techniques are used to achieve the fastest time, that's the middle ground; defining what techniques you will or won't use. Technically it's already done with existing movies in the case of "takes no damage". It doesn't have an ambiguity problem.
I see no value in it either by the way, but it seems like others may.
I have always wondered if "takes no damage" means "it's not necessary to take any damage in this game to complete it as fast as possible, and this run consequently takes no damage anywhere", or if it means "the game could be completed faster by taking damage, but this runs does not, and thus is a bit slower than the fastest possible". I have mostly assumed it is the former.
One problem I can see with several of dubious categories (such as "no zipping", "takes no damage" (when taking damage is faster), "does not abuse programming errors", etc) is that the amount of videos to be published with all the combinations of these categories would be rather large.
Perhaps someone would want a rockman video where there's no zipping, but taking damage is ok? Or perhaps no damage and no zipping, but other bug abusing is ok? How about a run with no bug abuse at all, with or without taking damage? The amount of possibilities start rapidly growing quite large (exponentially with the number of such categories, actually).
So, which combination of categories would please most people? Some people might want to see a "does not abuses bugs" run, while others might just want to see a "no zipping" run, while others might not mind taking damage while others might want a no-damage run. If we come up with even more such categories, the amount of possibilities explodes.
It would be prohibitive and useless to publish all possible kinds of movies for the same game. Currently only about 2-3 movies are published for certain games, and the differences are often quite extreme (such as the ones caused by "no warps"). If the difference between two movies is subtle (such as "takes no damage", which would perhaps make a difference of just a few seconds) then it starts rapidly becoming pointless to publish both movies.
>I have mostly assumed it is the former.
It has been both. It is the former especially in cases where taking damage would save very little time, or needs to be taken in very few places.