Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Thanks Tonski :)
If I was recording on Snes9x1.43 I am sure I could get a sub 40 realtime run. Unfortunately on Snes9x1.51 is is pretty much impossible :( The amount of lag that is added to door transitions is really insane. At the point of being 33 seconds ahead of my old run on the in-game timer, I am only 29 seconds ahead on the realtime frame count. That is a solid 4 seconds lost just from the added lag of door transitions, plus I am only about 1/3 of the way done with the run. It may easily be a 12 seconds total loss for the entire run, which would put the final smv time around 40:10 - 40:15
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
moozooh. He had access to my wip, which means he most likely did not advance to the next room until he at least tied (or beat) my times. I on the other hand had no other run to compare to. I think my current wip is very tightly optimized, and I don't see my new run being beaten by more than 2 seconds when it is finally complete.
btw, Snes9x 1.51 is a pile of crap. Not only are none of the save states recognized upon playback, I am experience serious desync issues now. Truly frustrating. I would have finished my run last week if the damn movie did not desync or if my saved states worked and I did not have to play it back from the very beginning every time I wanted to continue.
We're not obliged to use snes9x 1.51 are we? Maybe you should switch to 1.43 before it's too late, it could save you a lot of hassle. I'm not demanding you to, since that would mean starting over which would also be a pain in the ass, but imagine what the next 2/3 of the game could bode on 1.51 ...
wow, thats bad to hear hero :(!
iam recording for a while with 1.51(because i have to...) now.. and it never happend to screw up in any way :/
best wishes for your run to work at 100% and stuff
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
laughing_gas,
no, we aren't obligated to use 1.51, however I personally think the benefits outweigh the frustrations.
Benefits:
1. The image quality is perfect, and all graphical glitches are removed. The status bar no longer has the 1 pixel line of fuzz underneath it, and the phantoon death animation is now exactly like the console version.
2. The timing is now much more accurate and true to the snes console. The timing on 1.43 was too quick, and thus door animations went way faster than they were supposed to.
3. The sound quality is better, and it has toggleable sound channels as well.
In the end, it is worth all the headaches. It just requires more patience and time.
Hmmm, this are very bad news. :-(
And are you sure there is absolutely no way to produce a desyncless run without being forced to playback the movie over and over after every room to test it? Imagine whn you are at the end of it, I can't believe there is no way around it.
So nitsuja if you see that, please take a look at this problem.
Well this is not a fair comparison then. It's obvious and not hard at all to tie even a perfect optimized movie if you can compare to it every frame. Moozoohs WIPs automatically lose their impressiveness when a person realizes they are partly based on your own work, hero. Thats exactly the reason I keep my WIPs private. I think it's boring to copy things from each other, as we individuals can't show our own unique ideas that way. It sure is a good thing to improve the general SM standard especially when one of us has this unique moozooh-patience, but that way you spoil your uniqueness and hard work unnecessarily. For me it would be much more interesting to see what everybody of us can come up with by himself. Being forced to search for own strategies instead of copying them can also allow to find even more tricks that would be overlooked otherwise. Just my opinion.
Cpadolf:
Tieing JXQ already??
I can only say WOW! If you continue to improve in this style, you get a serious threat for all the top SM TASer very soon. ;-)
Keep it up!
Yes but then again I had help from his run, for every room I checked the framecount he had upon leaving each room and I refused to accept anything but that. And also if I found it impossible to keep up I checked what subpixel position he had when stopping at the door so I could try to get close to that myself. So I did not find all the optimal subpixel positions by myself which means I will most likely drop slightly in quality once the route difference begins.
EDIT: Does the elevators act differently depending on what frame you enter the elevator room? Because I was trying to tie with moozooh from landing-morphball which went fine until the elevator room where I could not enter at the frame moozoooh did, after a lot of trying different strategies I got suspicious and decided to redo the last room enter at the exact same subpixel position and mimic moozooh's input and it was still impossible to enter at his frame, very annoying.
Well, for the sake of comparison, I should say that I had most of the diagonal room already done before hero actually restarted his work on any% (and thus gave me access to the new WIP), and he knew it as well. That being said, he improved the end of my Torizo escape, but since I was already way past that, I didn't bother to return and fix it. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to refill in the diagonal room in any different way and still be comparably fast, I say that because I've tested many different ways (including getting the last missiles already in Brinstar) with my current one being the fastest — I have no idea how to improve it, since at least one missile refill has to be gotten there, and it costs at least 22-23 frames regardless of the particular enemy you're planning to get it from.
After that room, there was not a single new strategy up until red Brinstar — all the same moves as in the older runs, just most are better optimized. This is also true for my WIP, since the only new trick that was used was acceleration storing, which saved approximately… two frames in the entire WIP. :D
The only thing I hadn't thought of before I saw it was refilling on the last Rio in the Dachora room. I included it mainly because it looked cool, but if I won't be able to have a missile refill from it (since I'm losing about 20 frames waiting for a refill two rooms later), or will find a way to make that room faster it would be interfering with, I will exclude this trick from v2. I realize it was hero who's come up with this method, and it serves a good purpose for his route, but nearly none for mine — and if I won't be able to find a good purpose, it will detract uniqueness from either of our runs for no reason, which is something I would like to avoid.
I do understand what you mean by that, since both hero and I did that in the past and were shown how unfruitful it can be even by each other. It can't really be called a mistake, it's absolutely normal to be trying to find a reference in an uncharted territory and follow it. It only makes sense to do everything on your own only after you already know what is required in order to achieve maximum effect. So this time, whether we had each other's WIPs or not, we actually searched for the new tricks and their applications and found them regardless (granted that most of them were completely generic and didn't require any kind of special knowledge). I also thought of more of them after releasing my own WIP (as it usually happens; I'll update the list with these ideas soon), and discussed some improvements with hero for his run as well. So all in all, the comparison was fair.
Yes, they accept input only once per two frames or so, and this is highly annoying. But I actually lost a frame twice in this manner on the first two elevators, didn't I?.. Well, I'll look into it later, I guess.
I see your point, mozooh. Thanks for the detailed post, and sorry if I understood it a bit wrong at first.
Can you define a bit more precise what the "end of the Torizo escape" is? I understand the walljump from the door to land on the main ground faster in the room with the many bats after Torizo. I don't have experience there so far, since I didn't do a TAS with the escape yet and therefore didn't bother to test/optimize this move, but as it looks I can't see this jump being improved by more than 1-2 frames.
I have no doubt it's the fastest way to refill, since it only requires you to slightly slow down one time to get the Missile. All other rooms would for sure require longer slowdowns.
This is actually a pretty obvious refill that is a must take in any run, even in yours. Since you have to wait for the bombs to break your way through, there is more than enough time to get this refill without any time loss. And you will save some frames in any case from skiping another refill for that later. In runs that aim for Phantoon first, only a Missile refill makes sense here. It's very well possible to manipulate one, as I did it in my old WIP just fine. When you have to sacrifice 20 frames to get a Missile refill later you should definitely get it during the bombing there.
One last question, how is your progress by now? Already reached Kraid? :-P
Cpadolf:
Yes, the elevator entering is based on luck. As moozooh said, they only accept input after every 2nd frame, so you were just unlucky in this case.
I completely forgot that I could land earlier (on the second frame after the transition) in the next room and run off the ledge with around 3 px/f overall speed. It saved 5 frames the way hero did it.
Well, I also have some other idea that might work for that particular room that might interfere with refilling depending on how I'll do it.
Another opportunity to refill is to slow down and lose 1-2 frames near the super missile pack and get a refill from the waver that I kill there.
Nope, the last thing I did was to start optimizing the 2nd room of Brinstar. I see numerous different ways to move through it, and have to test them all (saved 4 frames there compared to JXQ's run so far, but that's likely not the limit as I have only tested about half the opportunities).
No matter what you will do there, you will always have enough time to get the refill if you use a good strategy. Trust me, I analyzed this part as hell when passing it myself.
I'm pretty sure you can't get this refill in less than 10 frames of delay. Remember that you have to shoot it twice in order to kill, where the 2nd shot will come too late to make it throw the refill in time. When you start falling through the crumble block, you won't be able to reach the refill because the Waver is more to the right of it. And since he moves very slow, waiting to get it more to the left before killing wouldn't be worth as well. You definitely have missed something in the above statement.
I just played morphball-elevator and to my surprise gained a frame on moozooh in the room after the missiles. Since it was not in your list of improvements I thought it would be worth mentioning, and if you wish to look into it I'll upload the smv, I think the improvement is in the second jump in the room after the missiles.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/211037286/CpadolfTASv3WIP.smv
Indeed, I felt like I was losing a frame there but couldn't do anything about it. You rock, though, I didn't expect you to find improvements in my WIP this soon. :)
Nope going with the same route. Gonna try to avoid recharging at the pipe bugs in norfair though and maybe I'll use your new draygon strategy too.
Oh and did you manage to kill phantoon with the pattern where he quickly closes the eye or did you have to wait?
Hey guys, do you see that? He is a TAS newbie, rushing into the scene out of nowhere just recently, and...
he just pwned moozooh!!
I'm highly impressed about this early skill, Cpadolf.
Seems that my run finally gets a challenge from a serious fellow TASer.
I'm very interested to see how you will handle it. :-)
Good luck!
Not to imply anything but your post seems to refer to moozooh in a very offensive light. Might just be me though, and I'm sure you don't mean that at all, just saying you could word it better. :P
I don't think he was being very offensive, he said it like beating moozooh was something unbeliveable meaning he thinks moozooh is great.
Anyway don't expect to much, as I said the only reason to why I'm tieing with moozooh (and luckily improving a frame) is because I know how fast I must play, once I only have less optimized runs to compare to I won't be as good, probably.
Yeah, I meant it the positive way, since pwning moozooh is something very very special and really not that usual at all.
Cpadolf, the more you progress the more you will learn by yourself, so I'm sure once you got the hang of it, you will be able to match most of the existing times even without comparison. Just believe in yourself. :-)