Hi! I've tried using Flapp (http://charcoalstyles.com/Flapp/) to convert Flash games to Windows stand-alone .exe, but I couldn't get it to work on Hourglass, probably because I'm using Windows 7 x64. Maybe someone with Windows XP installed could test that and see if it works?
Edit: Hmmm actually, it seems that Flapp only embeds the swf on the "stand alone" window, so I guess it's unlikely it'll work even on Windows XP...
For anyone who's interested, Yume Nikki works, though some slight tweaking was necessary (audio problems). It's not exactly the most exciting game in the universe, unfortunately.
Just wanted to thank Nitsuja for making this kick-ass program.
For anyone who's interested, Yume Nikki works, though some slight tweaking was necessary (audio problems). It's not exactly the most exciting game in the universe, unfortunately.
Just wanted to thank Nitsuja for making this kick-ass program.
if it were submitted I'd vote yes, except there are some things you do which don't seem to make sense… sometimes when going back to the doors room to activate the speed glitch again, you use the bike, other times you don't, also I remember the glitch was faster to activate and didn't require the snow thingy but maybe I'm wrong…
does this mean RPG Maker games can be TAS'd? O_o
if it were submitted I'd vote yes, except there are some things you do which don't seem to make sense… sometimes when going back to the doors room to activate the speed glitch again, you use the bike, other times you don't, also I remember the glitch was faster to activate and didn't require the snow thingy but maybe I'm wrong…
does this mean RPG Maker games can be TAS'd? O_o
Because of the time it takes to go through the menu and activate the effect, using the bike to go back to the desk only saves 2 or 3 frames the first couple times; for the last two times, the Bicycle option had moved so far down the menu that it wouldn't have saved any time (as far as I could tell).
The only two ways I know of activating the speed glitch are the drop-the-bike version, which I use the first time, and the snowman version, which I use thereafter. The second one is roughly three seconds faster. Since the whole process takes about 23 seconds anyway, if there's a faster method I'd sure love to hear about it :)
As far as TASing other RPG Maker games, I assume they would run into the same problems, at least with the current version of Hourglass: it doesn't seem to like MP3s, and it glitches up with any audio that fades in gradually. Notice that in certain sections (title screen, mural world, candle world, etc.) the music seems to start up abruptly; that's because I had to change the fade-in time on those areas to zero, or the music wouldn't play. Otherwise, I can't think of any reason why other RPG Maker games wouldn't work (though YN is the only one I personally know of).
Thanks for the reply!
Joined: 10/17/2005
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Location: Seattle, WA
Idea: since you have to go through the menu for every item to drop it in the main hall anyway, it might save you some frames to just drop them off every time you to use the hand head, since you're already walking at normal speed anyway.
For extra frame saving, manipulate the 'walk away from the egg' direction to be towards the door every time.
Only problem I can think of is if the eggs get in your way after putting them down. They all have set spots in the main room that they respawn on. Demon gets in the way of the walk back to the bedroom door, so it's better to not drop or to get very late in the run, which I believe you already did. The rest I believe stay largely out of your path.
The rest of the run is of really good quality, if the audio issue can be dealt with or possibly even tolerated for the matter of submission, I could see this being liked and published! Good job.
--Any more discussion probably should go into another thread now that I notice.
None of the Multimedia Fusion / Multimedia Fusion 2 games I've tested seem to work in Hourglass. (They just crash.) They do run in kkapture, however. It might be worth checking kkapture's source code to see how Fabien Giesen does whatever he does: http://www.farb-rausch.de/~fg/kkapture/
I don't know if it's directly analogous, but I'd imagine the goals and methods of kkapture and Hourglass are very similar, since they both wrap programs and trick them into running at arbitrary frame rates.
None of the Multimedia Fusion / Multimedia Fusion 2 games I've tested seem to work in Hourglass. (They just crash.) They do run in kkapture, however.
I think I had opposite results on my system (works in Hourglass, crashes in kkapture), and several other people have said MMF games work for them in Hourglass. What OS are you on and which games are you trying? If I can't reproduce the problem I might ask for your log file of the crash.
Pointless Boy wrote:
I'm aware of that code, and I even have a link to that same page on the project home page of Hourglass. There are a few things I've been planning to borrow from kkapture (but haven't yet), but there's not as much overlap as you'd think.
Pointless Boy wrote:
I don't know if it's directly analogous, but I'd imagine the goals and methods of kkapture and Hourglass are very similar, since they both wrap programs and trick them into running at arbitrary frame rates.
They're very similar, but also different at a pretty fundamental level. Some of the biggest differences are:
kkapture doesn't care about determinism. To make things deterministic in Hourglass requires reimplementing very many things that kkapture doesn't need to worry about, and this is pretty much the biggest source of incompatibility.
kkapture tricks the program into running at a fixed framerate. Hourglass doesn't quite do this. It enforces a maximum framerate but allows the game to choose its framerate and then detects it. So it's easy to end up with unnaturally-fast AVIs when using kkapture, but not Hourglass.
I'm wondering if this is a common issue. I'm trying to TAS a game but a lot of times, when I load state, the game crashes. As far as I can tell to get Read + Write working you have to load state. Sometimes it just works (thats only happened twice) and sometimes it works, but when I hit frame advance once, it crashes. Other times, it works but emulation breaks, as in sounds play but the visuals never change (only once). Sometimes, load stating just breaks all together too(only 3 times). The game Nezumiman. Its fairly unknown so I just thought it wasn't on the list because no one knew about it. It seemed to run fine but I just want to make sure. I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I was told to post it here =\
Edit: Currently running on Windows 7 Ultimate; no Service Pack; 64-Bit
The issue you're probably getting is that some video drivers (usually ones made for Windows 7 or Vista) conflict with the way Hourglass currently does savestates. Look at this post/thread for some workarounds you can try.
I think someone already made a TAS of that game in Hourglass (which you can see here) so the game is probably supported, but it looks like they might not have used the built-in AVI export so I'd want to verify that that works too before adding it to the list.
EDIT:
Nuy wrote:
As far as I can tell to get Read + Write working you have to load state.
Technically you can use "File > Resume Recording from Now" (and "File > Watch From Beginning") to create a TAS with re-records but without ever loading any savestates. But that would get tedious really fast...
Joined: 6/25/2007
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
nitsuja wrote:
EDIT:
Nuy wrote:
As far as I can tell to get Read + Write working you have to load state.
Technically you can use "File > Resume Recording from Now" (and "File > Watch From Beginning") to create a TAS with re-records but without ever loading any savestates. But that would get tedious really fast...
That wouldn't be tedious if you could mark a frame (with a keybind) to replay and rerecord back to at maximum speed, at which point, the execution is paused and you may continue watching (and rerecording) any further input from the previous input and take control at any time (also with a keybind). This is how Worms Armageddon TASing is done without state-saving, and it's definitely not tedious considering how fast unthrottled playback and redubbing is.
Technically you can use "File > Resume Recording from Now" (and "File > Watch From Beginning") to create a TAS with re-records but without ever loading any savestates. But that would get tedious really fast...
That wouldn't be tedious if you could mark a frame (with a keybind) to replay and rerecord back to at maximum speed, at which point, the execution is paused and you may continue watching (and rerecording) any further input from the previous input and take control at any time (also with a keybind). This is how Worms Armageddon TASing is done without state-saving, and it's definitely not tedious considering how fast unthrottled playback and redubbing is.
I second this. Or at least an option to automatically pause when a specific frame is reached, would be awesome.
That wouldn't be tedious if you could mark a frame (with a keybind) to replay and rerecord back to at maximum speed, at which point, the execution is paused and you may continue watching (and rerecording) any further input from the previous input and take control at any time (also with a keybind).
That's... almost exactly what it already does if you start replaying the movie and then load a savestate that's in the future. But that's not going to work well on Windows 7 or Vista until this mystery is solved. And I would still call it unnecessarily tedious for that to be the intended re-recording flow... some games aren't efficient enough to run at 1000s of FPS in fast-forward mode, and that's still a significant wait every time as you get into a moderately long TAS. I should just fix the savestates instead, which I think I already know how to do (in this case, the problem is that certain drivers spawn "un-savestateable" threads for DirectDraw, and the solution is to run it in another process so that it isn't part of the savestates).
So, if I try to run different games with Hourglass to see which ones work or not, do I post the working ones here then?
"An artist who can’t take constructive critique on their work is only hurting themselves and their potential.
Conversely, and artist that can’t communicate a critique in a constructive way isn’t helping anybody."
Rockman2Neta has some issues with Hourglass. Aside from the save state system still not working (And by not working, I usually mean either failing to redraw the screen, although there have been other issues), there is another graphical issue:
Shredded Mega Man! Anyway, frame advance works surprisingly smoothly, though the program froze once. Here's a log.
For some reason in Nezumiman after beating a boss, the emulation(or whatever you wanna call it) slows down a LOT. You have to hold frame advance for 15-20 minutes to get past the Weapon Get screen. Other than that I dont see any errors in running this game with Hourglass.
The emulator has a bug, which leads to a tas I can't finish. I want to do a Mario Forever "warpless" TAS. But when I completed a World, and arrived at "World X Completed". It can't skip to next world though I press any key. So I can only do the warped run if I wanna do it. So I want hourglass emulator charactors can repair this bug so that I can do Mario Forever "warpless" run. The game you can download here: http://www.robosoft.softendo.com/Super_Bros_3_Mario_Forever_v44.exe
Hi! I tried running this game in hourglass, and it worked! But how exactly do I record audio? Right now, even with "Capture Audio Only" selected, it doesn't record it.
If it helps, my settings for the game is:
Multithreading Mode -> Allow(normal thread creation)
Multimedia Timer Mode -> Asynchronous (run timers in seperate threads)
Message Sync Mode -> Asynchronous (any timeouts)
Wait Sync Mode -> Asynchronous (unchecked waits)
DLL Loading -> Allow loading any custom/installed DLLs
Frames per Second: 60
System Time: 0
In the game, Warning Forever, some addresses seem to change values everytime I reopen the game. For example, the address 00467320, which decides the location of the boss's hp address, is different each time the game and/or the movie is played. Strangly, this doesn't seem to cause desync (yet).
Is this supposed to happen?
In the game, Warning Forever, some addresses seem to change values everytime I reopen the game. For example, the address 00467320, which decides the location of the boss's hp address, is different each time the game and/or the movie is played. Strangly, this doesn't seem to cause desync (yet).
Is this supposed to happen?
It sounds like you've found the pointer to the HP address. This is normal behavior. I don't know the details of how Hourglass handles memory, but I expect that nitsuja and the other coders accounted for dynamic memory allocation when creating it, so you shouldn't get any desynchs. If you want to learn more about pointers, I think the help file for MHS has a good description.
Joined: 10/27/2004
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Is there a setting somewhere that would prevent the game from writing anything to the hard drive? I've encountered at least one game that would require the movie maker to delete a file every time after playback to ensure synchronization. You can see how that would get tedious.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Shredded Mega Man! Anyway, frame advance works surprisingly smoothly, though the program froze once. Here's a log.
