NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried Castlevania - Bloodlines (U) [!].gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.
Hay, dude.
Voting Abstained as I haven't watched it.
EDIT: OK. I voted 8.8/8.6 for all the awesomeness and perfection.
<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
I finished watching the other movie feeling sad because it was so short. Then I came back to the forums and saw this one, what a pleasant surprise!
I really loved both movies. They have everything I could expect from a good TAS: great boss fights, entertaining auto-scroller levels, unexpected glitches and, of course, one of the best games ever made behind.
This was one of the most awaited runs by me, and you surely exceeded all of my expectations. Amazing job, thank you so much for making these movies.
I gave both submissions a 10/9.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
Thanks (kl)mz for watching and voting!
Sir VG, what I can tell you is this: for some reason, the axe crash starts the AI script for the armor bosses to retreat. They will continue to do this until some other action causes them to do something else. For example, as seen in 5-6, where we attack him with the spear so he stops retreating. If left alone, he will retreat until he is so far off the screen that the game decides that something went wrong and removes him.
You can do this against the subboss in 5-6 too, and he does get removed (you get points), but the exit does not open this way.
Hope that clears it up somewhat. Honestly we don't know for sure what happens and why.
So I wasn't the only one who wanted a piece of this TAS.
Some surprising findings here: Wobbling to reduce lag, delayed step hopping, canceling the fall recovery and of course the zipping.
Really good work with the subweapon and lag management.
Incidentally, Bloodlines is the map of the month for 10/'08 over at vgmaps.
Watched Nineko's encode. Thanks Nineko.
9.5/9.5 like the other movie, see that one's post, though I'll copy the question here since it applies to both movies, with added notes for Spear-
Nice dancing after offing Medusaform.
Spear Guy Eric AlucardLeCarde looks like a girl in his ending pose, if not the walking away.
eternaljwh wrote:
My main quibble/question is whether use of axes on Golem (first and refights) would help- its mainly vertical motion (and less lagginess for Spear guy especially) would seem to be good for damaging all those segments. Does the not-always 10 damage cripple this option too much? Is it a matter of fire rate/not being able to melee him as much?
It'd likely save a large number of crystals (and therefore possibly four or more jumps to get crystals/axe/special subweapon, and certainly mentioned Elizabeth time from greater axe and crystals remaining allowing more axes and crash)
4+4+5+6+4 = 23 elizabeth hits needed, you have 15 you already axe
Just given the figures you've got, it could save up to 132 (jumps:40+24 crystals used, 2 axe pickups? not sure here) + 45 (Liz 2)+4(axecrash liz 1) = 181 frames, given naive assumption of 1 fewer jump (saving always 2 frames rather than given 1-2) per crystal you don't need to pick up later- this is merely the upper bound of what you could save, since you grab some in autoscrollers.
reviewing the golem fight, it looks like each segment takes 10 hits from explosions before dying, this would mean ideally you'd only need 8 hits from axes (4 refight)- and with an ideal arc, you'd hit all the segments with one throw each- but again, from what you said, it sounds like an axe won't do 5 damage to all the segments even if it hits all of them.
that would revise savings to be up to 169 nonlag frames from the change, subtracting off the 12 more used crystals on axe throws.
Thoughts?
If I remember correctly, Axes hit only 5 against the Golem so it'd be half damage. The boss has 50 HP (first fight), according to RAM watch and would end up being 13 Axes since you have to take the boss down below 0 HP.
You also have to make sure the Axes don't cross through any of the body before it meets the head or else it'll hit under 5.
So, you'd have to stand a little away, jump to nearly a peak height, chuck the Axe and wait for the Axe to leave the screen (I'm not even sure if that's possible from the start because of how tall the Golem is. You'd have to break him down first). As the Axe is descending, it attacks the Body causing lag. We also have to worry about the Golem walking forward and whether or not he'll smack the wall to cause cave-ins. I'm thinking of the second fight in this regard because the first one has that sinking water we have to wait for.
With the Green Special sub-weapon and all its lag; it totally annihilates the Golem. The water isn't even finished lowering just to give you an idea how much faster it is than Axes.
I can clearly see this taking way longer than using the Green Special, in fact, I think we have a test movie of Spear Dude using Axes for that fight.
Refight too? That does bring you back more than enough crystals you need for timesaving vs Elizabeth- so it could overall be faster even if the Golem refight turns out up to a second or two slower.
It's the Golem and not the Explosion that's lagging the game? I'm...not sure I believe that, but okay.
If you tested axe v. golem, then I can think of no unmentioned improvements.
(13 axes? but 50+1intdiv5 = 11.)
Refight too? That does bring you back more than enough crystals you need for timesaving vs Elizabeth- so it could overall be faster even if the Golem refight turns out up to a second or two slower.
The refight would require 6 Axes but so much time is wasted while waiting for the Axes to leave the screen. Basically, more time is wasted than can be made up in Elizabeth 2. Truncated may have the numbers on this and I'll look through my WIPs to see what the outcome was but I remember Truncated being very sure about the Green Special sub-weapon.
eternaljwh wrote:
It's the Golem and not the Explosion that's lagging the game? I'm...not sure I believe that, but okay.
No, I said it was the Green Special sub-weapon...
VANDAL wrote:
With the Green Special sub-weapon and all its lag...
But I didn't make it clear. It's actually a combination of the two because of all the sprites on screen.
eternaljwh wrote:
(13 axes? but 50+1intdiv5 = 11.)
Yeah, I meant 11. I don't know what I was thinking...
>Nice dancing after offing Medusaform.
Mmm. :D
I'll try to answer to answer your questions about the axes.
First off, the time that can be saved against Elizabeth 2 by use of more axes is small: just 3 frames per hit, and maximum 8 hits. That's 24 frames.
Not picking up crystals does not save any time, because we (almost) only picked up the ones where we were forced to jump anyway. The only exception i can think of is a jump in 4-9, which gives 7 crystals.
For spear dude, the first inoptimized green stuff test we did was 230 frames faster than our optimized axe test. This convinced us that the axe was out of the question. The final version is 331 frames faster.
The reasons the axe is so much slower are many:
- The axe doesn't reach the head immediately. The body needs 5 hits before we can start doing actual damage.
- No new axe can be thrown until the last one exits the screen. The axe has a very high arc to hit the head. The rate of fire becomes very slow.
- Because the boss is destroyed later, he has time to attack. The rubble falling from the ceiling causes considerable lag. Possibly this can be manipulated away.
- Using the axe destroys fewer sections during the fight. These have to be destroyed while the boss is sinking, causing much lag.
It's possible that Death would be a bit faster with the axe instead of green, but not enough by a long shot.
For Whip guy the situation is the same, except for the first point, since we still need to whack the body. But after that it's only 3 hits with the whip, and no delay between hits. Also his Death fight is unaffected by the use of subweapon.
Hope that explains it for the refights. If you want I can elaborate on the first fight, but the situation is mostly the same.
No, thank you, the explanation is quite satisfactory- substituting axes just one of those things that occurred to the untrained viewer due to the vertical arc and fairly good damage. ;)
i downloaded the latest version of gens under tasvideos downloads today to watch these and i'm pretty sure i have the right ROM (it's (U) [!]) yet the spear dude run always seems to desync after the second boss fight; he always stands just a bit too far to the right of the red sphere to actually pick it up and you can see where things go from there
tried 41khz sound settings, allowed left+right input, both controllers are set to 6 button, what gives?
What's the ROM file name extension? Is it .gen, .smd or .bin (I'm sure there are other extensions. These are just the ones that I can think of)? Ours was .bin.
full filename is Castlevania - Bloodlines (U) [!].bin
to be as thorough as possible i'm playing the runs in this emulator (windows), the whip guy run played fine with this
also player 1 and player 2 are 6 buttons and set to pad, the other ones (1-B, 1-C, etc) are all 3 button
