has anyone ever found a time attack or speed run or super play to
Megaman X5
Megaman X6
Megaman Zero etc etc...
or quite possible a text file explaining the story through all these games? ;)
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I did a quick TAS of the intro stage. I was going to go further, but I'm not sure how to manipulate the destruction of the space colony. You can see it on Youtube or download the movie file.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
First, congratulations! I am really really excited about this. I honestly have no intention of stealing your glory or turn peoples attention away from your wip but if we could just change our policy and accept mz's working emulator, I will TAS right away (alongside Super Castlevania 4, that one is still my highest priority with King Phil) Mega Man X4, Mega Man X5 and Mega Man X6.
No worries, the glory is all yours. :) I posted this in the hope that one of the Mega Man TAS experts would get interested in working with mz's emulator.
The main issue with my version of PCSX (besides not meeting most of the requirements) is that there's no sync-robust open source sound plugin, which would make impossible to encode high quality AVIs with proper A/V sync. I don't know if some of the coders here could find a way to record audio from any plugin, even if it isn't open source...
What I wouldn't mind, is to have a new forum for PS games or PS emulators, to try to get more attention/help from coders and TASers. We'll probably have pSX with re-recording support someday anyway.
It looks really good for something that long made within a day! I never really liked MMX5, and having one of the shortest PS speedruns on SDA doesn't help either, but it looks like a full TAS of it would look amazing.
I hope you don't mind if I upload your movie to my YouTube channel, as I'd like to have as many TASes there as possible to get more people interested.
to be honest, if you didn't say it was TASed, i would've thought it was played unassisted. skipping Alia's dialogue was unoptomized, for one thing.
but i doubt this would have been the final product. i can only assume that this was done to prove such a run can be made, which is good news.
@mz:
VBAR can keep the emulation speed accurate at the cost of inaccurate sound pitch, and vice versa. I guess you can use some similar mechanism to keep A/V synchronized. You may need to write a customed sound plugin (maybe a customed video plugin as well) for this, though.
@AngerFist:
Then will you make another multi-game movie?
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days
<adelikat> no doubt
<adelikat> klmz, they still do
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
First, I am extremely excited and eager to TAS all of them individually. Because this is obviously a new platform for us TASers and that motivates me a lot. It motivates me so much that Im "bolding" the a lot part twice now! :) I could definitely picture myself doing a dualrun of Mega Man X4 and Mega Man x5. Thats the only multiform I havent done as I've already covered a sextuple and quadruple run. I need Cremator and Satoryus knowledge to get started, once mz's emulator gets more attention and assistance.
You are fast. :P
It sure looks a lot better this time. I doubt anyone could think it's unassisted now, even if you compare it to the movies in SDA.
Do you plan to keep going further this time? :) I'd love to see more.
Thanks for adding input display, it made a huge difference. I'd continue, but I can't get the colony to blow up.
EDIT: I restarted from the beginning and improved the movie by several seconds. I was hoping that I'd be able to blow up the colony, but it still didn't work. Youtube and movie file.
better nip these in the bud.
you used an air dash in the part with the collapsing ceiling. i'd suggest to avoid air dashing as much as possible, because after the dash, forward progression slows down a lot.
don't jump through boss doors. the WARNING does not show up until you are touching the floor. it's better to be on the floor, or as close as possible in the case of stages like Spiral Pegacion, to avoid wait time. this applies to X6 as well, but oddly not to X4.
and are you sure the way you fight Sigma is best? if he spits out all those blue balls (ha!), his mouth is always open. there's no wait for him to open up like when he uses the green balls.
Since no one knows what determines when the colony blows up, I suggest that you use savestates and create a situation where the colony blows up about 30%-70% of the time, and determine at what point the decision is made.
A note on the intro stage: Don't climb the ladders. You waste almost 2 seconds by using the ladders instead of wall jumping your way through it.
As for the colony: It shouldn't be too hard to figure out by first giving it some classic, manual input to get colony destroyed and slowly backtrack your way, changing from human input to frame perfect. When the colony no longer blows up, you've found at least one spot. It's a bit of a chore that way, though, but could a bot handle it, perhaps?
My guess is it's related to the frame when the second set of the cutscene (ie. failure/destrution cutscene) is loaded.
Also, is it truly faster to wait the first car to pull its... thing, whatever it is... back instead of getting damaged in a way that doesn't slow you down much; there are many ways to do that, fastest way probably being dashing under the roller and getting damaged while facing left to minimize the recovery animation and to get through the car quickly.
The fastest way to complete the game is probably to use Zero in a low% manner (unless you're doing it per internal clock instead of real time), because you can kill everything and every one really fast (even in the last level) with Zero. The non-assisted runs aren't doing that because it'd be too hard to get everything done correctly while having the bosses cooperating to ensure a fast completion, but that is not a problem if you have tools to aid you. I don't think having Black Zero to be faster either, because it takes quite some time to get the armor, and the 25% (or so) increase in damage and more health probably won't make up for the time you spend getting it (again, applies only if you are aiming for real time record, not the ingame timer. It's a bit complicated like that).
So... is the tool emulator available for the public somewhere? I've always wanted to try TASing these games, if only to check new strategies & other possibilities. I don't check TASVideos frequently, sorry if it's on some new hot topic around here I simply didn't notice.
Edit: Oh, you have a PSX sub-forum nowadays. When did that get there? :P
Personally, I'd rather see these (x4/5/6) done on the jp versions, if only because of the slightly different names, and not so sissy sounding VA's.
There isn't exactly much of a story for these games anyway (something happened! In the end, sigma was behind it. Again.), so I don't see it as being that bad of an alternative.
On the topic of the actual run, the third one is certainly a massive improvement over the first, but as mentioned, there still looked to be minor room for improvement in it. Keep it up though :)
I figured out at what point whether the Enigma (and supposedly the shuttle) destroys the colony or not is decided. This is not a substitute for luck-manipulation.
To set it up, I quickly played through and beat Grizzly and Firefly, two of the four bosses with Enigma Parts*, then reduced the hours remaining to 7 (since there is a theory floating around that less hours means higher rate of success). I made various savestates and determined:
- The RNG does not change at all outside of the stages (including subscreen menus where you can change your weapon). That means that the only way to alter (and hence, luck-manipulate) the RNG is to do it in the stages, and before the stage ends.
- The RNG is altered by things like waiting, and (relative to waiting) jumping, during a stage.
- The success rate for the Enigma for two parts and 6 hours remaining was around 1/5. Same for 1 hour remaining. Though it is still possible that it is harder to do with, say, 13 hours remaining.
- I believe the RNG is global due to the following comment I found on YouTube:
In regards to a speedrun, do not reset, reload, retry immediately after every failed attempt to destroy the colony, because it is guaranteed to fail again. You should enter a stage before trying again.
*)By the way, when testing this, I decided not to get more Enigma parts because the Kraken and Whale stages are a pain to play. Speaking of Kraken, the level design at the beginning is horrible. I never thought I would see a level where you could die before the word "Ready" disappears from your screen. That's a good thing, though, if you want to kill yourself off for a quick save after blowing the colony (this means you, Cremator :D).
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
I'm hoping I'm understanding all this talk of blowing up the colony is related to getting to the last level as quickly as possible. Personally, I'd rather see this get treated as any other Megaman game, i.e. all bosses are beaten before tackling the final area.
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.
Don't know if the PC version works differently, but I've done that in the way you're describing to be impossible. I used the F9 soft reset, though.
*)By the way, when testing this, I decided not to get more Enigma parts because the Kraken and Whale stages are a pain to play. Speaking of Kraken, the level design at the beginning is horrible. I never thought I would see a level where you could die before the word "Ready" disappears from your screen. That's a good thing, though, if you want to kill yourself off for a quick save after blowing the colony (this means you, Cremator :D).
I'm quite sure I tried that, and it was slower. I assume the game starts the counting on Kraken differently than in Grizzly's stage. It's been a while but since I thought Kraken to be faster and then scrapped it, it must've been slower.
I also think the starting animation lasts too long for it to be worthwile for a TAS to use it (which you would do if you're going for 100%, unless you can pull off a massive rank leveling before doing the normal levels or somehow get a different ruling for this site, which I doubt somewhat).