Is anyone else interested in seeing a TAS of Popful Mail? Here are my conclusions so far:
There's a lot of room for high-precision optimization of the movement.
Taking damage rarely saves time, because every 1 HP you lose costs 1 frame later.
Buying 2 weapons like the speedrun does is unavoidable. But in a TAS it will save a lot more time to buy the Boomerang instead of the Electro Cane, since you would never have to wait for it to recharge, and you wouldn't have to switch characters every time to use it, and it can also hit some bosses when they normally can't be hit.
Getting the 3100 gold (edit: oops, I think I meant 4100 since the fire breath costs 3000, not 2000) to buy the weapons will take a little planning. The speedrun gets most of it by selling gold bullions and other items, but in a TAS it's probably fastest to collect the money by killing certain enemies along the way. I don't know how long it's best to wait before collecting the gold, though. Probably starting in the Wind Cave or Hot Springs.
Some "impossible" shortcut jumps can be made by switching characters to combine their strengths. The running speed of Mail plus the jump power of Tatt plus the flying power of Gaw makes for a really big jump.
yeah Nitsuja, we trust your taste in games and your TAS skills to produce yet another mind-blazing run.
it looks like a regular platform game, hope it allows some speed abuse.
will check on the speedrun later.
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
it looks like a regular platform game, hope it allows some speed abuse.
It'll never be super-zipping-fast or anything (although the ice level will be crazy because the max speed skyrockets there) but the character is very responsive and it's a nice platformer RPG that isn't completely trivial to optimize.
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'd rather see the Sega CD version overall, but I'd be happy watching any version of the game done, really. Neat little title you never hear too much of.
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superjupi wrote:
I'd rather see the Sega CD version
I think there are no other versions than the Sega CD one, which is the one that nitsuja is talking about. (There is a SNES version, but it seems to be a different game.)
I suppose the forum name is a bit misleading and should be updated, because all the Sega 32X and Sega CD games are talked about here.
Could have sworn there was a Genesis version similar to SNES... probably misremembering again. But yes, there are at least four versions of it floating around.
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
1) They let me see the path I took to get to my current position. That's especially helpful when I load a savestate and wonder what I did to get there.
2) They draw at the corners of the hitbox so I can see how close I came to any surfaces and keep a better sense of the character's size.
3) I can watch other savestates making their paths at the current time while I make mine (trying to go faster than them). I could do that with just a hitbox, but I like seeing more information.
4) The white line turns bright red if I dip slightly below maximum speed (used to only do that on the ground but I fixed that and the hitboxes as you can see in the new image), and it turns green if I ever exceed the maximum speed by even a little (speed here is calculated using the actual distance moved in X divided by the delta time in frames), so there's no way I can accidentally miss either of those things happening even if I don't notice it on the frame it happens.
5) Who doesn't like bouncy curves?
One more note, you might notice I turned off the lag counter, that's because it's completely useless in this game the way it's implemented now. Popful Mail frequently skips updating the input for a frame, but it practically never actually lags.
It's also fun making tools for games like this:
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
I'm more interested in learning what the bouncy curves that appear to be trailing the main character are for...
1) They let me see the path I took to get to my current position. That's especially helpful when I load a savestate and wonder what I did to get there.
3) I can watch other savestates making their paths at the current time while I make mine (trying to go faster than them). I could do that with just a hitbox, but I like seeing more information.
4) The white line turns bright red if I dip slightly below maximum speed (used to only do that on the ground but I fixed that and the hitboxes as you can see in the new image), and it turns green if I ever exceed the maximum speed by even a little (speed here is calculated using the actual distance moved in X divided by the delta time in frames), so there's no way I can accidentally miss either of those things happening even if I don't notice it on the frame it happens.
I could tell they seemed to be a trail, but didn't consider any of these benefits at all. That's a lot more useful than my initial assessment.
nitsuja wrote:
5) Who doesn't like bouncy curves?
Uh... straight women?
nitsuja wrote:
One more note, you might notice I turned off the lag counter, that's because it's completely useless in this game the way it's implemented now. Popful Mail frequently skips updating the input for a frame, but it practically never actually lags.
Yeah I was actually thinking the other day about a simple check that might be able to eliminate most such false positives, although it is founded on a couple of major assumptions which might not be true for all games. (like that input is polled during the vertical interrupt, and the vertical interrupt is masked when it doesn't expect to be polling)
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Cute game. Not very kind, though. The controls are kinda loose (it's very easy to jump into enemies), and your sight radius isn't so great easier (it's very easy to jump into enemies). Halfway-decent voice acting, though, which is a nice surprise. And I like how Slick's ears wiggle when he's feeling smug.
I'm not so certain that killing enemies for money is going to be the best way to get all of your cash (some of it sure, but not all of it). I say this because I don't think I've seen an enemy give more than 80G yet, and it takes a decent amount of time to kill an enemy and then wait for the cash to drop. I'm assuming here that you can simply walk/jump past most of the enemies in the game. Naturally, if you do need to farm it's best to find an area with several enemies that you can kill simultaneously. Parallelism for the win, hey?
Right now I'm stuck on the giant/dragon guy in the second area (the one that alternates between sleepy and berserk). Stupid falling rocks...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Popful Mail was originally for the PC-88 and PC-98 and then ported to the PC Engine-CD. There was also a SNES version which was much different from the original versions and the Sega CD version.
And to think I didn't know about this game until I saw this thread. XD
Wikipedia's no good for serious, scholarly work, but most of the information on it that I'm able to check on has been accurate, which inclines me to trust the stuff that I can't check on.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)(Here I can see at a glance that the bee takes 3 hits to kill with my current weapon, will do 25 damage if it hits me with my current armor, and will drop 75 gold if I kill it.)
