Nah, I'm going to leave this as a test run. First I'll analyze how much time I can save by having each of the other three weapons, and I'll also look out for things I could have done better (I think I saw a way to reduce the lag on the flying platform area, for instance). Then I'll do the same for the other three regular levels. And once the final version of VisualBoyAdvance has been released and approved, I'll use it to do the full game run.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Now here's a preview for IceMan! http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/iceman.zip
Still using no weapons because I want to test the levels without them first to see where the weapons are most needed.
It should be pretty self-explanatory, except that I delay shooting Ice Man because for some reason he stays invincible for a little while--he flashes, but his health doesn't go down.
Anyway, this ought to be the last run I make using the last VisualBoyAdvance, because a new one is out! http://free.angeltowns.com/btr/VBA_ReRecord_Alpha4.rar This one is said to have no more unexplained desyncs.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Sorry I tried to post that link earlier, but the forum didn't seem to want me to do it.
Improvemensts / Bug Fixes:
- Fixed desync problem which was caused by the way savestates were handled
Cool, it works very reliably now. I just made a movie of pocket bomberman's "jump" mode real quick:
http://www.filespace.org/nitsuja/pockbombjump.zip
(Pocket Bomberman (U) [C][!].gbc)
(the movie is 11896 bytes -> 2973 frames -> only 49.55 seconds?)
Judging by the fact that it stayed perfectly in sync no matter how rampantly I loaded save states and used frame advance, it looks like all known desync problems have been fixed, and record from restart is also properly done.
I did notice that the (already mentioned) minor problem still happens where saving a state causes any movie that's playing to restart from frame 1 while the game's still going. And also this mysterious bug I can't reproduce but occasionally happens where loading a state when paused sometimes presses some buttons for you on the next frame depending on what you did beforehand (some combination of load/save/frame advance I think) but that's also really minor since it doesn't cause desyncs or anything and loading the state again fixes it. Really, it seems like the only major things missing now are header info and frame counter.
Ah, I see. The Pocket Bomberman movie was made in Game Boy Color mode with the border on. I had to try a whole bunch of those settings before I got it to work. There should be a notice in the movie file that tells the emulator which Game Boy mode to use before playing the movie. Oh, and Pocket Bomberman STILL freezes in the normal game!
Also, I think I saw a flaw in my IceMan movie. :( There were a couple of ledges where I probably could have jumped down to kill the Scworms slightly faster. Oh well, that's just something to keep in mind for the next movie.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
I'm not sure I understand... I just used the defaults, opened it from the Open (any type of) Rom menu, and I don't think I saw any border...
This is a bug in the game itself. If you press left+right while Bomberman is in the air, the game is programmed to freeze.
If you mean the extra-input-after-load bug... Actually I'm not convinced it's a bug, since whenever I try to get it to happen I fail, so maybe I was just pressing the wrong keys without noticing or something.
No, if I don't turn the border on before loading the game, or if the border is turned off when Bomberman gets to the boss, he jumps into the boss instead of bombing it. But thanks for explaining the bug.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
That's really weird, I can't get it to desync on playback even if I try (and I've been trying every combination of settings I can think of). I made the movie when it was set to GBA mode with the border off, btw. Could you give more detail on what you're doing to play the movie when it desyncs like this, like an example of what's checked in your Options->Gameboy menu, and do you do anything extra before playing it, like pausing/playing it a bit/etc.? Does your border have swords on it or is it pure black? For me, the game loads faster than normal on movie playback (which I think means it's playing from a reset and not a hard power-on restart), so even when Border is on, it skips the loading of the SGB border completely and the real border doesn't show up.
Anyway, maybe you've found another desync bug that's being caused by some some combination of settings... or maybe you just have a different ROM, so here's my info on those things:
ROM info: CRC = 9b, Checksum = 41cb
My settings:
Frame skip: 0, and No Throttle.
Video: 3x size, Direct3D
Emulator: Synchronize on
Sound: On, old synchronization off (Hey! playing a movie forces the sound to 22khz, that's annoying...)
Gameboy: only Automatic and Real Colors are checked atm.
Filter: Normal
Okay, this is really, REALLY weird, because apparently I was wrong, and the settings have nothing to do with it. I can try the movie over and over again with the same old settings you had, and sometimes it'll desync, but sometimes it won't. It's as if there's a 50/50 chance of a desync. Usually it alternates between working and not working (jumping into the boss, that is). Maybe it has something to do with what screen is loaded when I replay the movie, but at this point I doubt it.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
How fast is your computer? Maybe if the computer is too slow there's a chance the game will load at a different speed or skip a frame or something. I doubt that's it, either, but I can't think what else could be causing it. (I wonder, if you pause the game, choose to play the movie, then hold down the frame advance button to watch it, will it always do the same thing then?) (edit: or maybe we're missing some settings still that don't seem important but actually are. Maybe we should post our vba.ini files to make sure none are being missed.)
I'll give him a call sometime and see how progress is going it seems you guys are pretty eager...
I want to make some speed runs. The last few times ive seen him he says its much better now (the emulator, and throttle etc) I'll have to get it off him..
well, cya guys..
- Volkov
Well, I tried closing some programs and setting the scaler to 1x1, but I still saw the Pocket Bomberman movie desync sometimes and work other times. So... Sorry, I'm out of ideas for that right now.
In addition, I'm still getting desyncs while making my MegaMan movies, though playback of them is more consistent now, even when I use frame advance. Here's the movie I made of CutMan: http://www.geocities.com/ryan_ferneau/cutman.zip
I think I'm getting better at this. In my opinion, the CutMan movie might possibly be good enough to continue from for the final movie, if I decide to start with CutMan--which I probably will, thanks to some trends I've seen.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
In case anyone is interested, I made a trial run of Metroid Fusion with the alpha 1 version of the emulator. It is far from perfect, but I learned quite a few tricks while making the movie.
http://www.kraftfam.org/~david/Fusion.zip
Finishing time: 0:43
Items collected: 1%
Joined: 5/17/2004
Posts: 106
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
O.o - you've shortened the equivalent speedrun by 1/3rd in just a trial attempt? That's ... unbad. Very unbad.
Off to watch!
Edit: Ah, but Metroid games are pretty when run and even Fusion is no exception. Proper job!
I don't know much about the specifics of running this one, but things looked smooth. Maybe not long-days-of-sweat, frame- and pixel perfect smooth, but still smooth. The only glaring issue was wasting a few seconds of vulnerability on some boss or other (#2 or #3, I think) due to the need to dodge for a bit, but I'm assuming that can be ironed out in a final version. Also, most impressively, you're capable of standing still! I was beginning to fear I'd never again see a run on this site that doesn't look like it's played by a hyperactive nine-year-old :)
I'd hope the rerecorded run would be more than 1/3 faster, because the 1% speedrun is single-segment and the runner went out of his way to avoid enemies, go slow, and just not die after he beat Nightmare.
You'd be far better off comparing the rerecorded run to the segmented any% run instead, despite the inequalities between them...
Are you talking about the jumping plant? I probably could've unloaded a whole lot of missiles into the thing, but because of the way the boss works it wouldn't have been any faster. The only way I could possibly improve that boss(apart from optimizing the Core-X fight) is to manipulate luck so that it wastes only 3 jumps instead of 4.