I found this TAS of MPH when searching for a speedrun on youtube. I've watched it and shows off some impressive tricks. This is a great basis on where to start a TAS. It is using the Spanish ROM of the game though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEiWcaCuH6U&feature=related
I'm beginning to look into this game for TASing and have already found a number of helpful addresses. I'm also relatively familiar with developments made in the game over the past year in the RTA community.
However, there was a out of bounds trick found a long time ago that would save a significant amount of time that would allow you to collect the volt driver early. Problem is that this currently leads into a dead end.
The trick is here:
Link to video
I've managed this a few times myself, but the problem is that there is currently no way back out.
The game has a number of places you can get out of bounds through damaging yourself with charged missiles, but no oob has been found within the center area yet.
The game has a checkpoint system, but as far as I can tell, there are no checkpoints you can activate in that room after getting volt driver.
I'll work on tasing this regardless of whether the skip was found, but this would occur relatively early in the run, so if it gets found, I'd rather it be sooner than later.
There are a number of out of bounds tricks in console Metroid Prime Hunters runs, but no sort of inter-room out of bounds travel.
This will not be the case in TAS:
Link to video
The clip at the beginning was known by console runners for a while now but I wasn't quite expecting to get it how I did since I wasn't using frame advance for that.
Room collision in hunters is largely one sided, so it's easy to reenter the boundaries of the room. However because there is very little ledge in the hallway in between the two bigger rooms, this means you need to carefully balance on the outside of the room to do this, making it very much tas only.
I did not spend any time optimizing this, this is mostly a proof of concept of what a TAS could do in this game.
So this is far from the most optimal way of doing this but I have volt driver early:
Link to video
Thanks to parax for finding the original oob method, amhite for pointing out the missile push worked, and Dann for the setup for the missile push. Everything once I got out of bounds was my work.
So what happens once I get out of bounds is that I grab volt driver from below and land kind of on a ledge. If you have seen my previous balancing videos you know the deal. I made sure to regain my jump before going over to this big chunk of ground beside a ramp leading up to a door. From there I can safely bomb jump back to the outer ring.
This is far from the most optimal way of doing this, but I'm glad that I have shown that you can do it at all.
This saves at least a minute.
Did I say a minute? I should have said 4 minutes. The fact that you can make a lot of progress towards CA2 during the CA1 escape, completely avoiding the typical CA1 escape route helps a lot.
So it seems when you go really really far out of bounds you hit triggers:
Link to videoLink to video
idk if I could take advantage of this, they all seem really far.
So I'm going to do a rough draft TAS first and then do a second full TAS that is better optimized. I feel that doing this will help me get a better picture of how things fit together.
Rough draft TAS WIP1:
Link to video
I will spend a bit more time better optimizing sections and smoothing out some camera turns on the second TAS.
About the pauses: LuckyStarKid (JP TASer) tweeted out that rooms load faster when paused and I confirmed this. This saves time basically every time the game needs to load something.
The game runs at 30FPS and there are two methods of boosting: one is controlled by the r-button, and it takes 15 frames to fully charge. It's usually worth the full 15 frames. The other is controlled by the touch screen. With TAS I can do these boosts in two frames, however you cannot perform another until the game detects you have "slowed down" or something. Therefore I cannot just repeatedly spam them to go fast, and I need to use r-boosts too.
I'll probably post WIPs through the end of the first Celestial Archives visit. After that I'll work on the rough draft and post it all at once when it's done.
Last WIP I'm uploading of the rough draft:
Link to video
Completes the Celestial Archives 1 escape (while simultaneously making progress in Celestial Archives 2)
This game seems to respond pretty well to sequence breaks! That's typically an encouraging sign for the making of a TAS.
It'd probably be better if I had more of an idea of what the game's intended sequence is, though.
The game has had a somewhat active speedrunning community and they found a good number of breaks over the years so it was well known that the game handles sequence breaks very well. I'm working closely with them to make sure the TAS is of proper quality. They've already suggested a number of things I can improve on my rough draft that I will incorporate into my final draft. A runner/glitch hunter named Dann has been especially helpful, he discovered a good number of tricks in the last two years that were used in real time runs. He has been a great source of ideas for TAS as well and has been generally helpful all around. Once I wanted a new clip so I could do a cool TAS trick that is coming up later and he found one in like 15 minutes, he's great.