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nfq wrote:
Two new places to use walljumps on level 3:
Walljump 5
Worked like a charm, saved me around 4.5 seconds.
nfq wrote:
Walljump 6: From the palm tree you can jump to the top of that stone thing and fall through it instead of pushing the button and waiting for it to go down.
I believe you did this manuever in your run, and I plan on duplicating it, unless you are referring to something else. SEE EDIT
nfq wrote:
I think it would be better to do level 5 before 4 so you can do a death warp on level 4 (saves a few seconds). If you do the death warp, you have to collect enough life forces on your way through the game (so that you can use the death warps on level 6).
Completing level 5 first would leave me without the use of the grenade launcher to use on the Mantis, and I'm pretty sure this would be bad. I know which death warp you're talking about (actually thought of it the first time I saw your run, and wondered why you hadn't taken advantage of it). I'm hoping the savepoint in the catacombs can be sidestepped in the same way the savepoint in level 3 right before the second key can be done. If so, it would save around 40 seconds at least I believe. If not, it would still save around 5 to 10. I'm not worried about collecting enough lifeforces, because there are two abundant sources I could utilize, the first one being the purple ones right before the deathwarp on level 4 (where all the swinging sandbags are), and the second is the ring of 4 purple lifeforces immediately before you get the 2nd (I think) key on level 6. Both would provide enough for an additional life as long as I collect close to as many as you did.
Right now I'm on level 3, about ready to make my jump on that large, lowering stone pillar that leads to the warp to the second key. Because of that wall jump, I'm around 7 to 8 seconds ahead and have replenished my tek arrows (I forgot there was a quiver of them in the little hut on the opposite end of the path to the 2nd key in the level.) I hope this all makes sense, and more importantly, that it all works like I imagine it to.
EDIT: Thanks to a new and improved technique with the lowering pillar I was able to regain any time I had lost getting the Tek arrows, plus some. With the 3rd level's second key stored away safely, I am currently 535 frames ahead (almost 9 seconds). Things are looking good :)
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evilchen wrote:
well nice wip , i just finished watching it.. does the 4 sec improvement come from better movement or a new trick/shortcut?
A lot of A, a little of B. The only new trick I've found was on the wall leading to the second key, everything else has come from frame by frame optimized motions.
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Let's see, I think I started this a week ago? Here's the first level done, and entrance to level 3 made, in 4:38, which is 252 frames or over 4 seconds faster than nfq's movie.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/3199/Start%20Level%203%20%28-252%29.m64
PS. Thanks to all who voted for my GBA Silent Scope movie! I only joined this forum about one month ago and I'm proud to say I have an accepted run already:)
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Yes, I'm using the 1.2 version of the ROM, so it's not unexpected that Mupen is having problems w/ you trying to use the 1.0 one. As much fun as getting the Chronosceptor would be, many of the pieces are way out of the way, and you certainly don't need it to finish off the Campaigner. I'm planning on taking primarily the same route that nfq took because it is clearly very fast and, I believe, nearly optimal. I'll be using some of the hints he gave me (on the first page of this topic), along with my own self discovered time savers, to hopefully pull this run under 37 minutes. However if anyone can figure out a way for me to access level 8 without collecting all the keys I could make a sub 10 minute run probably :) *sigh* I can only hope...
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Almost to the sixth key, will post a WIP when I'm done with the level and on to level 3. As for the Tek Arrows, if I find out that the respawning will be too hard to manipulate, there are a quiver of them behind the energy gunner on the left right before the backpack is picked up in Level 3. I figure it will take at most 2 seconds, and it allows me to use them as much as I want up to that point. I'll just wait to see how hard the respawns are to get, and restart to get the quiver if I need to. Not as optimal as possible, perhaps, but I'd rather think forwards than backwards.
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nfq wrote:
it might be a bad idea to use tek arrows except 5 for the purlin because then they will spawn on longhunter.
did you know that a normal arrow can do critical hits in which case it's stronger than a tek arrow?! i once killed a raptor with one arrow on hard! those sergeant soldiers also die with one shot, but it doesn't work as well on all enemies, like purlins!
I was having a hard time getting a single shotgun hit to kill the soldier in the area with the lava, so I just decided to go with the tek arrows, and if I have to fight with them spawning at the longhunter, so be it I guess. They're at least better to have spawn than pistol ammo, and (I think) as powerful as explosive shells, with just a slight firing delay (although you have to be very close to your target for them to connect, which I will be for most of the longhunter fight).
I did know about the arrows, and as you show with the knife on the high priests on level four, it's just as effective. I once played through the game using the knife as much as possible so I could save up as many of the critical hit tokens that soldiers drop (they raise your overall hitpoint level), so that when I was done, if I had picked up a full health it would have filled me up to 200 instead of 100 (I think that was the maximum it went, it may have been 225).
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Ah, I was simply going by the reader on the bottom of Mupen that says 30 fps when I'm running the game at 100% speed. I know that video and input both have different rates at which they run, so you're probably right.
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Well I've made some progress in the past two days, and I'm currently around 135 frames ahead, but I'm having particular problems at the first ladder after the explosive shells. I'm heading on a loooong plane ride to the west coast today, so as long as my laptop battery gives me a decent amount of power, I'll hopefully have a WIP with me proudly holding the 3rd key when I land.
Oh, and after playing around with it, nfq is right, it is an easy game to TAS. However it becomes much harder when you try to either match or beat a previous benchmark for each small section (ie from checkpoint to warp, or shotgun to top of the two ladders). I got the 3rd key yesterday afternoon but realized I'd lost nearly 100 frames in the process so that I was only ahead by 50. And since I'm a damn perfectionist, I decided to just plug along nice and slow
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Looking good, especially liked the rockets being fired at you while you're opening up the machine gun chest. Something small that probably isn't worth much thought (but it just occured to me) was the bridge at the end of the first area. You run all the way around to cross it. Why not just cut the corner with a jump? Or is Juno's jump not much at gaining distance?
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nfq wrote:
mmbossman wrote:
I have no idea how nfq made it so fast,
because it's easier to play with a controller.
That's the biggest understatement I've heard in a long time. I'm expecting a, *cough* slightly larger rerecord count than you got (and by slightly, I mean exponentially).
Wow that's some nice pixelation, it looks almost like I'm playing on an SNES;)
I have an updated .m64 that's 47 frames ahead, but I'll probably have to redo most of it, since the more I think about skipping the pistol, the more I think it would be very worth it :( At least I got that damn first jump out of the way, I have no idea how nfq made it so fast, I tried nearly 200 rerecords and didn't get anything close (I ended up writing down the exact keypresses and just using those, which I hate since it feels like plagarism lol... but oh well)
EDIT:
Here is (I hope) my final WIP for the first two keys. Even though I keep getting better times, I'm ready to move on. BTW, this one is a 61 frame improvement.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/3128/2nd%20Key%20%28-61%29.m64
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nfq wrote:
I noticed that you climbed the first wall slower than I did.
Went back and fixed it, I now collect the first key a measly 3 frames off your run
nfq wrote:
The auto-shotgun wall can be climbed faster than in my run.
I sure wish I knew why I was having so many problems getting max height on my jumps to walls, it's been the most frustrating thing about this run so far
nfq wrote:
EDIT: oh, and there's a reason i skip the pistol. if you're gonna use my strategy you shouldn't take it because then pistol ammo will appear on the longhunter fight which lowers the probability for explosive shells to appear.
Actually, as long as I don't have any ammo missing for it then the game won't try to give me more at a ammo respawn point; it only spawns ammo missing from your inventory. However that backpack you grab right before longhunter would probably mess that all up... how easy it is to manipulate luck into what the ammo respawn areas drop? It looks like all you would need is 3 boxes of explosive rounds, so if that's the case I can probably manipulate that easily enough, however it may be worth it to go back and skip the pistol. I'm just getting really tired of the first minute of this game. (But my most recent attempt is 47 frames faster than yours, thanks mostly to the wall glitch, everything else is very similar)
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Ok, I found a useful glitch, except I can't for the life of me replicate it. On the climbing wall right before the second level key I was somehow able to skip Turok's climbing animation all together, which saved a considerable amount of time. If I could figure out how to replicate it more often it would come in very handy, but I have yet to succeed (I'm trying on the very next climbing wall, where the indispensable auto-shotgun is). I hope this isn't just a one time fluke...
See it here (using v1.2 ROM)
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/3123/2nd%20key%20%2821%20frames%20ahead%29.m64
I know I haven't gotten very far, but I'm just now getting to feel like the TAS input is second nature, plus I'm taking my time trying to match nfq's speeds as closely as possible (which are optimized up to this point, as far as I'm concerned). Hopefully progress will be much faster from here.
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Kitsune wrote:
I hope this Run will be better than the SDA run, and will avoid running SIDEWAYS, I found that rather boring.
Unfortunately, strafing while running is the fastest movement that Turok has, so I think it has to be in there (although running straight would make things sooo much easier to do). However I won't pull a Goldeneye and stare at textures for the whole game just to decrease lag, I think nfq did a good job at avoiding this also and let the viewer see as much of the game as possible as he flew through it, so here's hoping I can replicate/improve that aspect.
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Desynchs for me with about .5 seconds left in the level, so it doesn't quite get cleared. I think this is a known Mupen problem (cutting off the last few frames of input), but I don't know the specifics. Otherwise, looked very good (glad you got the key crate blown earlier) and all the headshots were fun
Oh, and glN64 doesn't work at all for me (it just produces a black screen), but jabo 1.6 is picking up the slack nicely.
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nfq wrote:
mmbossman wrote:
Oh, and thanks for your permission to rerun this nfq,
You don't need to have anyones permission to run a game :P
Ok, permission was the wrong word... how about... your blessing:) I know competition is all well and good, but I try to avoid stealing other people's thunder.
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Zurreco, I changed around my controls a little bit, so now they are a little more intuitive for me to use. I've played around with multiple inputs, and I've found out that if I'm using down and left (or right) on both the c buttons and the analog stick, all four motions will register, and I'll still be able to use the frame advance button (the slash key above the enter button). However it seems that if I want to make some combination of the Up C button and the Up analog (and some other directional button), that's when I have problems. There are a variety of patterns I could try to duplicate, but it's not a huge deal, since I won't be using up on the analog stick too much. I'm going to assume that my keyboard just doesn't like to have some button combinations pressed at the same time, and hope that I don't come across a section of the game where I have to press 4 or 5 different buttons at once (which I doubt).
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I'm having some problems with the TAS input plugin. Basically the major problem is that when I try to hold both the up and right C buttons (W and S on my keyboard), the program won't let me frame advance. This problem doesn't occur when I'm trying to use the up and left C buttons at the same time, and I can even use the left and right C buttons while using frame advance. But not the up and right... any idea why this might occur?
Overall I'm getting a little used to the plugin, although it still has a pretty steep learning curve for me. I haven't had a lot of time to sit and play around with it, but I'll keep going, as long as someone can figure out why I can't strafe forward and right at the same time.
Oh, and thanks for your permission to rerun this nfq, and for the offer to help! I'm sure I'll need it in the future:)
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** After watching **
Ummm... yeah, holy crap. I have no idea why you didn't submit this, since I think it easily would have been accepted, but since you didn't I think I'll take a "stab" at it. I'm glad to see you used both the water skipping and wall jumping tricks, although now that people know they're out there my run won't be as impressive;) Still, unless you're still working on a revised run nfq, I think I'll start this project up today. Oh, and I think I'll use the TAS input plugin Mukki, I think I haven't liked it as much because I've never tried to do frame by frame with it, but I'm sure it is better.
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Thanks for the quick responses, and I'll definitely take it all in. I've actually had quite a lot of experience with frame advance during my GBA Silent Scope (which was almost entirely done using it), but I figured that for a lot of the stuff in the earlier levels (where there isn't as much activity and a lot more running), 30% would be appropriate, but I'll just see what feels best at the time.
And thanks for letting me know about nfq's run, I didn't manage to get through all the pages in the N64 wishlist to see if there were any other mention of the game. I'll definitely get in contact with him in the next couple days to see if he'd be willing to offer any help and advice.
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Having been inspired by watching some recent N64 games in progress, I've decided to try my hand at my first 64 speed run and I think this game would make a good first try. I played the hell out of this game when I was younger, and it's probably the game I know the most little glitches about. However I have a few questions, mainly:
First off, would anyone be interested in this game? The SDA run is an few seconds shy of being an hour and three minutes, and after watching the first two segments I feel pretty confident I could shave it to at least under an hour at the very least (I was thinking of 50-55 minutes as a target time), so it wouldn't be a marathon to watch the whole movie in one sitting.
Any knowledge of which Mupen plugins might work the best would really be helpful, I've played around with both the Jabo 1.6 and glN64 0.4.1, but don't really know which one would be better. Also, since I'll probably be doing most of this run at 30-50% speed (with random frame advances), I don't think I'll need to use the TAS input plugin, and was thinking of sticking to N-Rages Direct input 1.6 since I'm most familiar with it, but I'd welcome any recommendations.
Soo... any thoughts? I'm on 5 weeks of Christmas break, so I'll have bunch of time on my hands and I think this would be a great way of doing it:) I'll see what I can come up with in the next couple days for a WIP to show, but if you have any advice I'd love it, since I'm new the the N64 side of TASing.
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DK64_MASTER wrote:
Couldn't you just keep floyd shooting, constantly, using a macro? That might get annoying, and he might hit one of the tribals, but I'm sure it will help in some areas.
I think that not only would get annoying, but would look incredibly sloppy also. I agree w/ comicalflop on this one, from my memory of the game there are very few places where floyd would actually be a benefit to the run, since perfect reflexes and aim are going to be used, there will be ample time to get in all the necessary shots. And if Floyd use would only save a few seconds at best, and it's much more frustrating for the maker to incorporate him in, I think it's best to leave him out.
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Soooo much cleaner and better looking! The damage taken is obviously needed (from falling) and everything else looked great. And that's good news about the drones dying immediately with a proper head shot. Keep up the good work!
