First of all, this is the first any% run of Wipeout, so I made some assumptions on what "Any%" means. My previous TAS accepted on tasvideos was a "Qirex%" category on the Rapier original tracks, with the fastest but stiffest ship to show off how a TAS can control it.
This run is about getting to the end credits, i.e. in Rapier Class and after the Firestar track. Usually Rapier and Firestar are unlocked after finishing the game and this can be saved on a save card. In order to save time with the save card, I use two different passwords on the title screen to unlock both the Rapier Class and Firestar. The fastest run is obtained with Auricom ships, with a top speed inferior to the Qirex ships but overall faster on the tracks.
Wipeout TAS revolves around both optimal trajectories and RNG manipulation. There is a constant balance between getting the best trajectory, or de-optimize the trajectory to get the Turbo power-up. Turbo has the ability to accelerate instantaneously your ship (with a delay of 2 frames), and somehow more importantly to stop the current trajectory and accelerate toward the direction pointed by your ship with little remaining inertia.
The RNG is based on a random list of thousands of power-ups generated at startup of the game, and remains unchanged during the game. Every frame (the game runs at half the 59.9Hz frequency) the pointer to this list increases and loops when reaching the end. When the ship goes over a power-up pad, the current pointer position designs the power-up and then the behavior is as follows :
- When a power-up is armed but not yet fired, the pointer stops increasing. This allows strategies where the timing of fire of a weapon allows the future selection of the Turbo.
- For mines, even when they are fired the pointer is still frozen. So if a Mine is not directly just before a Turbo in pointer list, this is a missed opportunity to get a Turbo. This is why this run almost never fires mines.
Finally, the last way to get a turbo is by planning the course of the ship with occasional breaks, collision with the enemies of even bump into a wall. Bumping into a wall is an almost total halt of the ship but proved to be the fastest strategy at several occasions, in particular in hard turns where bumping and firing a Turbo can be faster.
These optimizations make it impossible to reproduce twice the same run over successive laps on a track. This is why the 3 laps can in fact be considered as one long track, and there can up to 1 second of difference between the fastest and slowest lap of a race.
Many other strategies are involved as well, for instance:
- Collisions with enemies can accelerate your ship under certain circonstances.
- Even if major shortcuts are not currently know, the boundaries of the tracks have a specific 3D shape that allow optimisations and the ship seems to fly through obstacles.
- Management of the rebounds, with Turbo released at specific times and sometimes under the track.
- Fine adjustment of left/right airbrakes and up/down control.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
I'm going to do it...venturing out into the Playstation. :)
nymx: Ok...I think I have finally absorbed enough understanding that I can finally pass judgement with some good notes, for any future submissions to follow. (Let's hope that I don't botch this.)
Ok...first let's describe what is going on here. This game, played from absolute zero, will progress through un-lockable content at the completion of specific classifications. From the start, you have the normal class...which is called "Venom". When beaten, it opens up a new class called "Rapier". This basically, is a progression of difficulty. Completing this class will open up a new track called "Firestar"...which is what this run contains. Now...if the game had no other options to unlock these classes, we would require a verification movie to play all the way through to open up this new content; however, this game key presses at specific points to get around this. For this submission, Napoleon does just that...which would be the equivalent of an SRAM starting point. This seems to be an acceptable act, since we see similar in other publications (IE [4336] SNES Q*bert 3 "X-Bert" by nymx in 15:24.69, where key presses are done without any prompting to open up an extra and harder mode for playing). Additionally, this situation kinda resembles #7362: nymx's SNES F-Zero in 39:30.36, where the game was played on the hardest difficulty (achieved by an SRAM Starting point, but wasn't accessible to a passcode or "hidden prompt" controller presses).
I don't see a problem here with this method, since the author is trying to present all the game has to offer, with the hardest level of difficulty. Cross analyzing it with speed-runs, I do see super human playing occurring...even though we don't have a so called "any%" run to compare against. Great job on this run, and sorry for the delay. We just needed to know more about it, so that we can work out how future submissions will be judged.
Accepting!
despoa: Processing...