Post subject: The start of a "Blue" period
Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
Seeing as how this site has a good reputation of making the best speedruns ever, I'd figure I'd try to throw my own hat into the ring. But in order to do a run, I had to find my first victim, erm, game. So then, I decided upon: Neo-Geo Blue's Journey Sure the game looks colorful, but it is hard as hell IMO. I once wasted my quarters in an arcade trying to get Blue to jump across that stupid river only to find that I needed a boat. Fortunately I didn't need one when I did my demo run, which I present to you here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JTBiz5anQY The reason why the arcade version was so badly praised was that the player is given two hearts, instead of 3 like the console version, which meant that if he took 2 hits, the player dies, and he has to start from where he perished. I would have re-recorded when I took damage at the slope just outside of the boss arena, but I didn't, and then I hit the Change Size button instead of Jump, so that was also a costly mistake. Hopefully this all might change once I get the final production rolling. The site suggested I use Final Burn Alpha with blip's patch applied to it, and I'm surprised that the game worked then, because before I applied blip's patch, the emulator would complain that a file in bjourney.zip (022-m1.bin) was 64 KiB too small, and then the game won't load. When I'm to do the movie, I had to plan ahead so I made sure to enable Free Play to avoid any extra steps that can disrupt the starting process. The game region that I can read off the DIP switch settings was on Europe / Asia, so should I set this to North America if needed? Or will it crash FBA?
Joined: 1/14/2005
Posts: 216
I haven't been keeping up, so I could be very wrong, but from what I heard, FBA isn't supported because it doesn't record from reset. This is why you don't see any FBA TAS's here, but there have been some at speedruns.net like the Shadow over Mystara vids. I'm sure if it was so easy, someone would have done it already, but it would be really nice if someone modified FBA to be allowable on this site. I know personally that many of my favorite TAS's would be of arcade games if this was allowed. If you like this game, you should play and submit a score. ;) Edit: I just watched your link and well, you might as well hear this from me since I'm nice, instead of all the sharks. Do you know what this site is about? Do you know what frame advance is? If I stumbled upon this on youtube, I would think it was gameplay footage, not a unassisted speedrun, let alone a TAS. Are you recording yourself refamiliarizing yourself with this game? Really sorry if you say this but I missed it. I suggest you read through all the FAQs.
"I think happiness is just being able to loaf without stress." http://speeddemosarchive.com/
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Joined: 8/4/2005
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I've talked to Bisqwit on topic of FBA recently, but the conversation was quite inconclusive. Basically, unless my info is outdated, FBA is being worked on in order to add the missing rerecording features and improve functionality. The coder who has taken the task is pcc, the guy who added rerecording to Dega. However, there is a somewhat important problem. Apparently, FBA hasn't been frozen in development. It follows MAME's progress and continually adds support for new games or improves the existing. If you visit the official site you can see that the development goes at a steady pace. So the problem is: which version of FBA to take as a base for adding rerecording features? This is something Bisqwit didn't decide upon. The options: 1. Old version, the one available via the emulator resource page at the main site. No support for newer games, probably some other things, and who knows what else. 2. Current version from Barry Harris's site. 3. Some future version (which?). 4. Some other version (which and why?).
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
Of course, the only obstacle in submitting a Neo-Geo game TAS is what the filename it's going to be since it's going to be multiple files in a single ZIP file.
Former player
Joined: 8/12/2004
Posts: 651
Location: Alberta, Canada
What was the reasons FBA was being used over MAME again?
Experienced player (590)
Joined: 1/11/2007
Posts: 103
moozooh wrote:
I've talked to Bisqwit on topic of FBA recently, but the conversation was quite inconclusive. Basically, unless my info is outdated, FBA is being worked on in order to add the missing rerecording features and improve functionality. The coder who has taken the task is pcc, the guy who added rerecording to Dega. However, there is a somewhat important problem. Apparently, FBA hasn't been frozen in development. It follows MAME's progress and continually adds support for new games or improves the existing. If you visit the official site you can see that the development goes at a steady pace. So the problem is: which version of FBA to take as a base for adding rerecording features? This is something Bisqwit didn't decide upon. The options: 1. Old version, the one available via the emulator resource page at the main site. No support for newer games, probably some other things, and who knows what else. 2. Current version from Barry Harris's site. 3. Some future version (which?). 4. Some other version (which and why?).
Another idea: make nice with the dev team and have the rerecording features put in the official builds. Then every future version will have them. Would save future dev-hours, and even better, raise TASvideos profile. The join-forces approach might be possible with FBA. Not with MAME, as they are hostile to TASing, or anything else beyond the reverential sipping of VVSOP, feature-bare emulation. Ideally, dev teams would go to TASvideos to add rerecording to emulators, not the other way around. Achieving this requires a combination of aggressive friendliness and site self-promotion. (Provided the emu dev is cooperative.) I'd also enjoy seeing, e.g., the gens improvements put back into the official gens.
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Joined: 8/4/2005
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Dammit wrote:
Another idea: make nice with the dev team and have the rerecording features put in the official builds. Then every future version will have them. Would save future dev-hours, and even better, raise TASvideos profile.
There is still a problem, though, in that using different versions of the emulator might make movies desync, and keeping track of them is not only hard, but plain infeasible. We've had a lot of trouble putting together 3-4 consecutive FCEU and SNES9x versions floating around, now think about something that gets updated, like, every month. Clearly, a version of choice must be frozen and used for a long period, preferrably not less than half a year, to make keeping track of different versions easier. That said, having TAS tools built-in at that point would be nice, although it would still be possible to live without it, as it's not as much of a problem by itself since the actions that need to be taken in that case are at least clear.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Man, I never would have considered it a BAD thing that the emulator was still being worked on.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
It's not bad obviously, it's just inconvenient for movie production.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
After an entire week of poking around with the movie file, I finally got out one version put out on YouTube right now: NG Blue's Journey in 16:30.13 In-game Sound version Part 1 - 9'14" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m53tmSqo3I8 Part 2 - 8'33" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9h53pe-0LA Total Run Time: 17'47" In this version I wrote in some in-video comments describing the situations as they happen. Such as what kind of problems to expect that would cause lag, or otherwise...
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Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
Hmm, this is odd. It should be a speedrun, yet you remained normal size for about 80% of the time, while small Blue is like 1.5 times faster and jumps much higher. You don't need to kill many enemies or collect much stuff on your way, anyway, since most items are completely useless for a TAS, except those increasing speed. Also, why did you take damage in some boss fights?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
Yeah, I was going for a perfect no-damage run, but one of Fire Maniac's fire snakes burnt me, but instead of messing with the save state and moving away from it, I did an about-face, took the damage, and landed just one step away from Fire Maniac. Then I walked a few steps back and continued my beatdown. By the way, about Blue's killing rampage, if Blue doesn't get a highscore in this game Princess Fa might not marry him at the end of the game. Some of the fruit that gets nabbed along the way are just for bonus points so those add to his final score at the end.
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Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
Still, if you were going for lowest completion time, you could have done without the sidequests/best endings. Otherwise, you should find what are the exact prerequisites for the best ending, and ignore everything else (but to be honest, running as small Blue is so much faster and more entertaining). Also, if you take damage where you didn't plan to, you must load a state and redo it. Otherwise, the movie would be rejected in no time due to inconsistency and/or sloppiness, had you submitted it. If using small Blue wherever possible, I'd estimate a publishable quality any% TAS (with whatever bad ending) to end at around 10-11 minutes tops.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Is it just me, or does Blue stop for a frame every time he lands after a jump?
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
I just want to give you props, guidmorrow, because adding those "subtitles" for the clueless ones [read: me] made this movie infinitely more interesting. I watched one of your earlier WIPs and was bored to death, but I actually sat through the whole run! Good idea, man!
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.