Obviously, I'm new, and I've wanted to do a TAS for a while. A couple of questions though:
1. Most importantly, what game should I do? I'm thinking Golden Sun, but you guys say the RNG is hard to manipulate. If not, I'll most likely hope to do a gba game, and/or an RPG that has a easy to manipulate RNG that hasn't been done before.
2. Where's the best place to learn HOW to TAS? I think that there might be a good from-scratch FAQ somewhere around here, but I'm not sure where to find it.
3. What programming languages will I need/Where can I learn to work with Hex? I know Java, but I'm not sure that it can make programs that seek for hex patterns in games.
Thanks in advance for reading this, and mods, I'm sorry if this is in the wrong forum, but I didn't see an introduction forum, so here I am.
1. Most importantly, what game should I do? I'm thinking Golden Sun, but you guys say the RNG is hard to manipulate. If not, I'll most likely hope to do a gba game, and/or an RPG that has a easy to manipulate RNG that hasn't been done before.
The Golden Sun RNG is extremely rigid from what I've read. Every action has some set consequence. I personally would like to see a TAS, though much of it would be story. (It takes at least 45 minutes to get out of Vale.) Any contribution to such a run would be a good one. You may just want to start with a test run, get the hang of rerecording and perhaps find a couple tricks, route suggestions, and recommended leveling. The final product would need to be well routed and well optimized, but tests can contribute knowledge and motivate others to contribute as well.
You may want to try to frame optimize periodic segments for practice, but any complete optimization in a test run is just tedious. Here's a non-TAS run being working on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHaFG32B3nwZero100 wrote:
2. Where's the best place to learn HOW to TAS? I think that there might be a good from-scratch FAQ somewhere around here, but I'm not sure where to find it.
Here's the emulator.
http://code.google.com/p/vba-rerecording/
VBA 21.zip if you're on Windows.
We can't tell you where to get Roms at TASVideos, don't ask.
I do a lot of real time testing and then frame optimize later.
Start by recording a movie.
F1-F10 are your savestates.
In Read Only mode, you can view the video you are making and make relevant savestates.
When not in Read Only mode, you can alter your movie. Loading any savestate in "Recording" mode whether the savestate was created in Read Only mode or not will continue recording your progress from that savestate.
When switching between modes "Stop Movie" as a precaution.
Use frame advance, real time, pausing, and reloading to do testing and execution. (A finished TAS should be almost entirely done in frame advance, though walking in Golden Sun can be done in Real Time.)
If you make some progress feel free to upload in one of the existing Golden Sun threads. (Always use existing game threads if they exist.)
Zero100 wrote:
3. What programming languages will I need/Where can I learn to work with Hex? I know Java, but I'm not sure that it can make programs that seek for hex patterns in games.
You don't really need programming to make a good TAS. Programming offers helpful tools to make your life easier, and sometimes test exhaustive possibilities.
Look into memory watch to find variables to determine what fight is upcoming, and perhaps read damage formulas. I know the Golden Sun RNG has a lot of documentation, go check out GameFAQs.
Check out my post in this thread for a little bit on memory watch: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8169
As you may or may not know, modifying addresses can be good to test possibilities, but is not allowed in a finished product. (The movie will not synchronize for others if addresses were directly modified in the recording.) It is always good to view relevant addresses. Examples may include finding a value to determine what the next battle will be, finding values to determine miss values and critical hit values, a value to determine when the next battle will occur. These values are somewhat difficult to find, because you need to accurately project their behavior.
If you want to get a little more in depth, check out Lua.
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6539
EDIT: Any game with a difficult RNG isn't exactly friendly for a new user to start out with. I recommend playing around with games you enjoy to contribute some knowledge and progress. You can probably contribute useful knowledge and tricks to Golden Sun, but I doubt you can produce a sufficiently optimized publishable TAS for Golden Sun at this point in your career. So mess around with it for a while and see what you can come up with, or feel free to pick a more friendly game to start out with.
Everything is calculated between frames, it's like this for most systems:
render frame, update internal state
make calculations based on current state and input
render frame, update internal state
make calculations...
Pressing comma and period will display the input and the current frame, I probably should've mentioned that.
It seems autofire functions as so:
Frame Advance, Set autofire, Frame advance ....is the same as
Frame Advance, A, Frame advance, A, Frame advance.
Frame advance = "no input + Frame advance"
A = "A + Frame advance"
Autohold seems to function the same. Neither skips a frame, and begins input on the current frame.
There isn't really a "before and after frame X". It's more, the button is held during frame 200 or during frame 201
It isn't recommended to use autofire in a TAS, because you often lose one frame where you could have pressed the button but didn't happen to. It's great for testing though.
Everything is calculated between frames, it's like this for most systems:
render frame, update internal state
make calculations based on current state and input
render frame, update internal state
make calculations...
Not strictly true, as the Chrono Trigger save-corruption recently pointed, but for most purposes, yes.
Hi guys, I'm back. I finished school a while ago, so here I am to pick this up again. I'm gonna start looking through stuff and I'll post the input file here in a bit.
