User Files for F-Zero: Maximum Velocity

just to avoid losing the file

TAS through Pawn 4

2 tracks done now.

Finished first go through of this track. I'll probably look into redoing it from the beginning later but I'm happy with this for now.

First lap 23"46, second lap 20"57. Main reason I'm uploading this is because of insane +56km/h bump I got towards the end of the second lap. I'll continue to work on it but progress is good.

Best opener I've managed so far. Tweaked the final couple curves from the last WIP.

Something interesting happened at the end of this lap. The Rival Radar indicated that the game has no problems with spawning a CPU car on top of another CPU car! One rocketed forward to my position, and I got a relatively soft bump from it.

Yes, one of my problems is trying to figure out how to get 600 km/h bumps. As such, I'm too slow. I'm one frame behind WR opener. What did they do and how can I match that? I'm uploading this primarily because of an interesting event at the end of the lap, not because of my poor driving skills.

Improvement of "08 on the first lap.

Most inputs are the same as the "63 until just before the section with the conveyor belts. I came up with a new strategy to get a 594km/h bump without much setup. From then on the inputs are mine I believe I can improve this further, but I'm happy to have finally gotten a significant improvement.

Uses a lot of FatRatKnight's inputs. The only real improvement I found on the beginning of the lap was on the opening bump. I made some more changes to the end in order to still pull off the same strategy with that minor change and ended up with 23"63.

I'm looking into alternative bumps on the conveyor section that could get stronger bumps. We'll see how that turns out.

Changes to the script are mostly just internal. Consolidating some functions so the ones that are functionally identical between rotating and static have only one copy of the function, rather than two. Stuff is rearranged, and now things are changed for better maintenance. The visual output of this change should be non-existent.

However, that wasn't the only change. I did other small changes, such as properly detecting whether a machine exists, and whether a race has started. Recording mode is dormant if not racing, instead of constantly trying to write to its tracker, and when dormant, is indicated by less saturation in the red REC. Small, but I did refine a false positive out of my detection.

Uploading largely because I'd like an online backup, but having it publicly available wouldn't hurt. Haven't had any other ideas that immediately come to mind as useful to implement now.

Another small change. Looked at machine stats until I could identify the hysteresis flag. Speed is highlighted in red when you can't accelerate due to hysteresis (but releasing the accelerator will add coasting friction on top of maintenance friction).

Knowing speed limit would require knowing what machine you selected. Understandably, I felt finding the related flag would be less work than having the script find what you picked out.

Increased the number of decimal values displayed. Not really any significant changes otherwise. As much as my habits are for me, I should realize I'm not everyone.

Also, I experienced some pretty fast crashes with BizHawk 2.0, on three different tries, with this script up. Curious.

I just can't keep away from TASing this lap, can I? 23"65, down from 24"21, a good 0"56 removed. Mid-23s as predicted by our RTA speedrunners. Take my advice, taking advice from people who knows things can often show good results. Still not sure if I'm in a good position for the curve ahead, but at least I made sure not to sacrifice speed after the second speed arrow.

I was having trouble slowing down, but then I realized the perfect slowdown. Those things that slow you down on either side simply affect your position, and have no effect on your momentum or velocity. Therefore, I find these things to be a nice boon in this case. Could I have taken a bump earlier? Possibly, but this one extra bump has already shown nice results. I've also ended up taking other paths on the end of this lap, curious how many frames are left to find here. Wonder how much more this bump can push us.

Was interesting to see my script indicating I was past the 20 frame range I set of where my ghost was.

A bunch of changes here. The script will record to a file in text format. This is because the way BizHawk is set up, it is impossible to maintain lua variables, such as the position history, when merely switching from one movie to another. A persistent file might be useful for other reasons, so it's probably good I made one to begin with. Note the list of frames in file isn't necessarily sorted in order.

Also, I'm now displaying ghost trails. In the past and the future. The ghost Xes will also show everyone, not just the player, and will be darkened if it is identical to the immediate current position. This is probably a better way to indicate changes in CPU position than the confusing list I was displaying before. As for the trails, they look pretty, though sometimes I ended up confused on whose trail went to what.

I hope this is a fun script to use. Oh, and useful, of course.

Once again, I'm doing something right. Opener lap done in 24"21. Unassisted WR opener is 24"39.

Though, whether I drove nicely for the next curve ahead is another question. If not, it just means we shouldn't expect it to remain 24"21. There may still be a few mistakes in there, though. I just TASed a part and don't really want that to go to waste.

Starting bumps got me to 450-ish, and the one just before the jump got to 593. I've seen 600, but wasn't able to replicate that in this run. The other times the CPU appeared all did not look convenient to take more bumps, and TASing this still didn't give me ideas on how to script up predictions.

This script now records positions and whether things exist. After playing parts of the run, rewind and do different things. The script will state whether things existed or not, and if they did, whether they changed position from the last time it got to that frame. The script will dumbly record into its memory every time you go back over a part, so if you just rerun the new input again, it will claim everything is present or absent exactly as they were.

The purpose, mainly, is so we can more easily tell if the CPU did something different when doing random crud.

Oh, and I changed the order of the player ghost functions. It'll record your new position after displaying what it has. Previously, it recorded, then displayed the recording, which will always coincide with the player's immediate position. At least this way, if you leave the ghost recorder on, that you can see the immediate local changes you're making, though it really isn't smart. Thanks to core resets killing lua variables, and one being triggered every time you play a new movie, cross-movie checks with this type of ghost stuff are impossible without file IO.

I do need a better frame detection (it doesn't like start of races). I also need a better way to detect whether a thing exists.

SRAM uses Type 5 controls. I make no claim that this is the best opener, I'm fooling around trying to figure things out.

It jumps to 408 km/h when the clock is visibly 0'03"43, and to 446 at 0'03"45 on the next frame. I'm not entirely certain what's going on. It looks like a double hit to me, although Power only drops once.

The Wind Walker CPU in Training hasn't had any obvious speed boost from me hitting the wall or anything, so I fooled around and tried to snake to reduce my true speed forward after a rocket start, but without hitting the wall. If things are different in Grand Prix, I will take a look there.

The list of five numbers in my current script show, after messing about, that the Wind Walker CPU reaches the same lap segment after the same number of frames, after a few random actions on my part.

This "good hit" was apparently frame perfect to get. One too many or one too few frames of my leftward strafing did not get anywhere close to the 446. I may want to study the collision radius for a bit and see what I come up with. Is this the effect we want, or am I looking somewhere else?

You know, since I have a nifty radar display, I figured it wouldn't hurt to record player positions. Also, added one more number right below the durability and lap progress numbers. All the fanciness of height and vertical velocity, and it really boils down to one number: How much longer until you land. Mind, I only report the longest possible time left, when holding down the whole time.

As I haven't figured out code for detecting user input while paused (I will refuse a solution requiring an active loop), you need to hold the key and advance a frame to toggle record mode. For now, I have it keyed to M, but of course change it as needed.

Well, I pick different numbers for that list of five numbers on the right side of the radars. Now it specifies that lap segment thing, so you can tell if something suddenly appeared ahead. It also changes the colors used for the background of those numbers in case it's a mine.

Other thoughts include calculating jump time, but that's for later.

Contains a very minor fix that prevents rocket start values from displaying alongside speed values.

Fixed F-Zero MV SRAM verification movie. Unlocks Queen + Master on all tracks, Jet Vermilion and changes a key control setting.

Complicating my script some. I hope my organization works out.

Left side, static display:

Right side, rotating display:

Didn't want to work out rotating grid lines. At least, not yet. I've aligned the grid lines with what I suspect to be how the game tiles things.

And it has a few other things, I suppose. Some stats on the right are seen, some basic thing with machine data or something.

Facing and momentum compass on the lower left.
Rival radar on the lower right.
Various RAM Watch alternatives and minor calculations in various places on the screen.

This is a start. Not sure how helpful the visuals are, but the visuals should hopefully give a decent idea. I use hexadecimal in a lot of places, considering how many important things are apparently nicely divisible by 256, but if those aren't liked, look through the various string.format scattered about and change that X to a d. Or ask me to do that for you and re-upload, I suppose.

I have a soft spot for hexadecimal. Easier for me to remember 0000, 4000, 8000, and C000 for the compass points rather than 0, 16384, 32768, and 49152. So clean.

Anyway, hopefully this script is a nice enough starting point. Some things from an older VBA script was used.

Before I forget, the rival radar has a minor glitch. Namely, I restrict the viewing area to a square, and then rotate it. Whoops, the rotation spins my square around. I really should rotate, then trim to within the square...

Second exhibit. Apparently, I was making a visual compass or something. My guess for the numbers are about as good as yours, and I sure hope yours is any good, since I believe they relate to speed, position, facing, and momentum. The numbers on the bottom right may have something related to boosts, I'm pretty sure their purpose will be obvious when you try to boost.

The compass would be much better with some margin off to the side, or on a separate canvas, which VBA doesn't have. Any plans to port this to an emulator with such capability should look to adjust the display for that feature.

Emulator: VBA-RR v24m svn480

Unassisted fast lap for Pawn 1, Bianca City - Stretch Circuit: 19"28

I'm doing something wrong, as I'm 0.20 seconds slower. Either that, or the Master level Rival in Training gives enough of an advantage over Expert level Grand Prix. But I'd like to say it's my error.

I know, this is meant to be a verification movie. But it's no good if I don't hone my knowledge over the game. So make the verification good at something, or try to.

Splits: 36"33 34"11 23"64 40"15 19"48

Emulator: VBA-RR v24m svn480

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7OeNApAntY

I don't know... Either I'm playing this game horribly wrong, or I'm doing it incredibly right. The game was telling me to turn back most of the time. I got a time of 36"35 for my first lap before blowing up in a tragic explosion, while still in first place in Expert.

To convince you to look, this is a hilarious 36"35 to watch (my opinion). I don't believe I was driving in any fashion a sane player would do.

Seems to work fine (though this was made in v24 and probably won't work in v23.6). I'm curious about thoughts of any experts who've been messing with multiple versions of VBA.

Go into name entry. Run script. Mess around in there. Tells you what password for any name you input as you're messing around.

I left a few notes in the code, if you need them.

Emulator: VBA-RR v23.6 svn480 (How is VBA-M v24, anyway?)

The only thing I do is give myself an odd name to change the unlock password, set up the options as usual, then unlock Jet Vermilion with password and select it for Pawn Expert.

I expect someone to beat this time by a few frames sometime in the future. There's only 20 trillion names to check.

Oh, and watch as I manage to input the 8th character of the name before the 7th character to speed up the name entry. That should cause some worry for any distance algorithms to take into account that trick.

Emulator: VBA-RR v23.6 svn480

I don't actually know if these two laps with the Fire Ball in Bianca City - Stretch Circuit (28"18 and 23"67 in the first Pawn track) is any good for TAS. I haven't found any ridiculous speed tricks, though.

I did mess with the in-game controls (to type 6) so that up triggers the boost instead of L+R. L and R buttons do a pretty good job at making you go a bit faster, especially if you're holding one opposite of where you're turning. Freezing this helpful boost for a few frames waiting for the boost to trigger is one way to slow you down, so I shift controls to the less-used up.