Tails missed a floating ring at frame 43780, be careful with this situations
If the desyncs continue cause problems we have 3 options.
1. Waiting for a little of luck from MGZ don't desynchs
2. I will redo all zones again (I do not really have much free time to do this again)
3. Continue with the normal movie and we can note as "possible improvements" that AIZ2 can collect certain Knuckles rings in the submission text. for who want to work in a "improvement" in the future
Personally I opt more for the option 3 if you do not have luck sync all zones
I'm still very confused on how only Tails desynced there in the first place. What could've possibly thrown him off there?
Let's just take our time with this. We don't want to make this situation worse.
1) Let's just see what happens with this.
2) I want to avoid this option at all costs. Maybe if we're near the end of a level or the gmv we should do this.
3) A good last resort option. Let's wait on this though because I'm not done yet.
I haven't been having too much difficulty with this so far and who knows. Maybe the future levels will be considerably more sync friendly.
You're a coder right? Maybe provide Bizhawk with all the tools that are available only on Gens, an emulator that is not preferred but still perfectly acceptable here, for Sonic runners and I am sure they would be thrilled to do so.
You can't really TAS Sonic at the level that these guys are doing these days without these tools.
I'm not really sure that, especially when very new people to the forums are posting incredible finds, suggesting they should update to the newest emulator because it exists, (and will eventually, inevitability, be the only accepted emulator I admit) when, right now, it means they'll have way fewer resources to TAS Sonic... and could potentially kill their interest in the game.
I understand that encouraging people to move on to more accurate and up to date emulation is important... but doing so in such a dismissive way at a bunch of enthusiastic newbies who are making progress in a game not seen like Marzo joined us; feels counter productive.
I dunno; my suggestion at the start of this post that you code them up some tools is some BS, but I feel the suggestion they should just get on Bizhawk at this point is some BS too.
Anyway! As for the the issue at hand, unless you come up with a fix with out tearing your hair out; I'd go with '3'. There has been a lot 'progress' for lack of a better word, with the run at this point to throw it all away at this point. Give it 5 years and some new thing will have come up. You can fix then with a full re do!
Part of what's stalling the conversion of the Sonic TAS tools from Gens to BizHawk is, to my understanding at least, that some of their tools are specially built into the fork of Gens that they use. It's definitely not as simple as porting lua scripts between emulators (itself not trivial because pickles)
The movie desyncs for some extra lag frames for the game's RNG events
The problem with gens is outdated and no body is interested to updated it, We need Sonic TAS tools for perfect frame tricks and management of the characters.
I don't know about scripting and I dont interested to learn, I don't have time for that, but if someone one day decide port Sonic hud and Solidity display to BizHawk is welcome.
Not to mention that Solidity display modifies gens.exe specifically for only 1 game, we have 4 gens.exe with Solidity +Camhack display for Sonic 1, 2, 3 and CD.
These tools are indispensable for TASing genesis/CD Sonic games
While this is true, that is not the real reason; most of that stuff could be done in Lua script (probably all of it).
The real reason is that I am on Linux. BizHawk does not have a decent Linux version (last time I checked, it had neither Lua support nor a Genesis core), and the Window version does not run on Linux with Mono or Wine.
5. Stop spreading bullshit. The game desynched due to lag differences, and this would have happened regardless of emulator — even more so in BizHawk, because Gens tends to lag less than real hardware/better emulators.
kaan55 wrote:
Hydrocity 2 might take me a while to sync. I'm having some difficulty with it atm.
You know I'm surprised that the lag from the large group of rings in act 1 didn't cause any desyncs.
EDIT: Well I've run into a unique issue. When I stop input splicing the game registers a button press with C the next frame which causes Sonic and Tails to do an unwanted jump. I hope TASeditor can help me get around this problem.
This is a side effect of the jump predictor script: it emulates 2 frames ahead pressing the C button, then reloads the frame. This is usually overwritten when you are recording a movie. When resynching, this can cause issues after finishing a player's track and going to redo the other player.
A suggestion is to save at the last frame, disable the script, load the state, advance one frame, reload, then go back to TASing on realtor frames and reenable the script.
4. Use an emulator that isn't abandoned and actually functions correctly.
Well do you have any suggestions? All I'm getting from this is "Gens sucks, use another emulator" which isn't very helpful.
Personally I find Gens to be generally better than Bizhawk for these Sonic games. Although I haven't used Bizhawk in months so I don't know if its genesis emulator got any recent patches.
As for my progress on getting the movie to sync. I've gotten a little bit further. I still don't know what caused Tails to desync there to begin with but I am steadily making progress.
See that hand? I might be able to get the rest of the level to sync with that. From what I can tell those hands puts you in a fixed position. Tails got to that particular one before Sonic did. So I'm gonna get Tails there on the same exact frame as the original movie and then see what happens.
Well do you have any suggestions? All I'm getting from this is "Gens sucks, use another emulator" which isn't very helpful.
While it is true that Gens Is not the best emulator, kindly ignore natt in this; he has no clue what he is talking about, the issue is not the emulator.
This is a side effect of the jump predictor script: it emulates 2 frames ahead pressing the C button, then reloads the frame. This is usually overwritten when you are recording a movie. When resynching, this can cause issues after finishing a player's track and going to redo the other player.
A suggestion is to save at the last frame, disable the script, load the state, advance one frame, reload, then go back to TASing on realtor frames and reenable the script.
That is interesting. Is that the same reason why Gens presses literally all the buttons when I go past the last frame of a disabled track?
In any case I just used the TASeditor to turn that frame into a blank frame.
marzojr wrote:
While it is true that Gens Is not the best emulator, kindly ignore natt in this; he has no clue what he is talking about, the issue is not the emulator.
I will. I have better things to do than to waste my time with him.
That is interesting. Is that the same reason why Gens presses literally all the buttons when I go past the last frame of a disabled track?
No that one is because of how buttons work on the Genesis and how GMVs work. Specifically, buttons in the Genesis are active low, meaning 0 = button pressed, 1 = button not pressed. GMV stores buttons like that on the movie format.
When reading buttons post the end of a player track (that is, when there are no more buttons to read), Gens feeds in zeroes, which means all buttons pressed. I guess this could be fixed easily.
I will. I have better things to do than to waste my time with him.
Please note that I said to ignore him [I]on this specific issue[/I]; he is usually well informed otherwise, and blindly ignoring him is bad.
I checked the lag frames in the next zones and this not look bad at all.
MGZ1: 1
MGZ2: 4
CNZ1: 0
CNZ2: 7
ICZ1: 4
ICZ2: 1
Seing that Hydrocity is the most lagged zone no wonder is out of sync
Most of the lag frames are from doors , platform and ice cubes breaked (this is normal). with a little of luck the movie don't desync anymore. I hope
Personally I'm curious about marzo thinks about this movie since is the most experienced genesis TASer here :3
I have been looking occasionally, but not too deeply; since I moved recently to France, there is a lot of stuff I have to worry about before I can go back to TASing stuff, or to paying close attention to Sonic TASes in as much detail as I used to.
Yeah that doesn't look terrible. Maybe those zones will be easier to sync after all.
As for my progress in hydrocity. I got about 20 seconds further. Unfortunately Tails ended up desyncing in a really bad spot. We might have to redo the rest of the Hydrocity 2 (or at least part of it) if we want to keep going.
I will. I have better things to do than to waste my time with him.
Please note that I said to ignore him [I]on this specific issue[/I]; he is usually well informed otherwise, and blindly ignoring him is bad.[/quote]
Oh my bad. I can't think as clearly as I normally can when I'm up so late. I really need to fix my sleep schedule :p
For what is worth, desynchs and resynching are things you have to get used to in high level TASing of the game when you do input slices (but it is not nearly as bad as S1). I strongly recommend not going past a certain zones until you are sure you are done with previous zones; notably, Marble Garden bosses, Carnival Night balloons, IceCap, Mushroom Hill 1 boss, Lava Reef 1 boss, Sky Sanctuary boss, Death Egg 1 & 2 bosses all tend to desynch due to differences in lag, randomness (usually due to differences in the v-int run counter due to different pseudo-randomness frame rules), or both. There are some other sources of desynchs, but these account for the vast majority of cases in S3&K.
Once you know all the factors involved, resynching is usually easy, but time consuming; and the further along in the game you are, the worse it becomes to resynch small changes early in the run. In the end, you will likely end up preferring to add some strategic pauses to manipulate these factors, rather than resynch for the umpteenth time...
Joined: 10/6/2011
Posts: 1697
Location: RU · ID · AM
I’m deadly tired from those people always reminding us of BizHawk. BizHawk does not have Sonic TAS tools of any kind, moreover, it’s not usable at all, because at least me&marzojr use Linux. Do what you want, feel free to proclaim Gens outdated and stop accepting gmvs, it will not make us switch to software which is absolutely useless in it’s current state.
Also a Linux user, btw.
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 :)
Thanks for the tips marzo, we hope not to have to do this again, I prefer to do the zones in the correct order to avoid these problems, the project is up to ICZ2 actually
and here is Kaan AIZ 2
Link to video
I really wish I had the knowledge of the game I do now 2 months ago. Well at least we won't have to go through this again. The rest of the rings in AIZ2 are impossible to grab because of the death boundary.
Yeah we're probably gonna have to redo at least some of the Hydrocity 2. Tails' speed and position is way off for me to be able to sync it. Sonic's inputs will still work fine up until a certain point. To be more specific he gets desynced at a spot where he's expecting a Tails carry.
I mean do you want to try to finish Hydrocity 2 to see what happens with the other zones?
Minor thing kaan, but just if you are unaware, dehacked made a site specifically for uploading TAS movie files here. Your link works just fine of course; just letting you know.
You're a coder right? Maybe provide Bizhawk with all the tools that are available only on Gens, an emulator that is not preferred but still perfectly acceptable here, for Sonic runners and I am sure they would be thrilled to do so.
I don't think so. Bizhawk is literally bristling with tools, plus the lua extensibility, plus the C# extensibility (that requires recompiling, but it's way easier than building Gens and IToolForm has a lot of stuff built in). Plus the fact that the core has zero savestate determinism issues.
If the efforts of the Bizhawk team have been insufficient thus far, then there's nothing else I can do. You can lead an ass to water, but you can't make it drink.