Posted: 3/1/2010 2:50 AM
Post subject: How to find a glitch
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wicked
Joined: 1/22/2008
Posts: 319
Location: Brasil
Well i see in lots of tases publiches there using glitches. i would like to learn how can i find thoses gliches in a game?
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Posted: 3/1/2010 3:24 AM
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funnyhair
Player (118)
Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny
It depends on the game really. Several games have little to no glitches, and others are incredibly glitchy. As for finding them, the best I can say is watch videos on you tube, where people post glitches they have found. Also, just try stuff. That's how most glitches are found in the first place. Also try the pages area for certain games. Hope this helps!
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Posted: 3/1/2010 3:25 AM
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sgrunt
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There's no real structured way to find glitches. The best advice I can offer is to try everything - some glitches are only possible/useful at the TAS level, and finding those tends to be a function of experience both with the game and with TASing in general. Also, look around in the game's community to see if anything usable has been found.
Posted: 3/1/2010 3:35 AM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
There are a few standard things you can try that may reveal glitches, depending on genre: * Try pressing multiple directional inputs at the same time -- especially, opposed directional inputs like left and right, or up and down. Many games don't expect this kind of input. * Get to know how collision detection works in your game. What happens if an object just barely clips the corner of some terrain? Which way does it get pushed? What happens if you collide with multiple terrain tiles at the same time? What happens if you change your hitbox so it doesn't fit into your current space? I'm sure other people can think of more "general-purpose" suggestions. These things won't find every glitch in every game, but they might help you get started.
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Posted: 3/1/2010 3:37 AM
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adelikat
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I would say it is about careful observation and dumb luck. The dumb luck is where you stumble on some odd behavior. Careful observation allows you to determine WHY it happened, what other situations it could happen, natural consequences of it, and how it can be used to save time. For example, when making my Batman Begins TAS, I noticed that when you threw a bat star in the air there was a frame where Batman went into standing motion. At first it just seemed like an odd sprite animation flaw but then it occurred to me that the game probably thinks he is on the ground for that frame. I tried jumping on that frame and sure enough he jumped! Cool double jumping. But then it occurred to me I could throw a bat star during that 2nd jump which means I could jump again, and then again, etc. Infinite jumping. Now there is a LOT of uses for that! However, it didn't stop there. I tried this out to get to crazy places in the game to see what happens. If you go over a ceiling you will fall inside it. The game treats walls as open on top. Once you are in, it is if there is not all at all. This led to even more shortcuts. The moral of the story is to have try lots of things and use careful observation and creativity to find what can be done with your discoveries. Also many tricks are common on many games, pages such as Common tricks can be quite helpful.
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Posted: 3/1/2010 3:41 AM
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Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4045
One way to find glitches would be to experiment with things that are often poorly done in other games; for instance, you can zip in similar ways in both mega man 1 and 2, so if a new mega man game came out (10!) you might try and reproduce zipping in the same way.
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Posted: 3/1/2010 4:09 PM
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adelikat
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TASer of 2010 NES TASer of 2010 DS TASer of 2010 Arcade TAS of 2010 NES TASer of 2008 NES TAS of 2008 Funny TAS of 2008 TASer of 2007 NES TASer of 2007 Funny TAS of 2007
Common tricks wouldn't just be about similar games. Platforms themselves have common exploits. For instance, in Glover I searched hard for getting inside walls as a shortcut because I knew the N64 is notoriously bad at keeping players out of walls. Another example is that the NES is notoroius for L+R or U+D side effects.
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Posted: 3/1/2010 4:58 PM
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Mitjitsu
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When a games being tested for bugs/glitches there is usually 3 forms of testing that takes place. 1. Acceptable - Nearly all of them will have been discovered in the beta stages, but very rarely all of them. A lot of glitches are discovered by dumb luck when acceptable forms of testing takes place. 2. Boundary - TASers will often uncover them. Stressing seams, clipping corners etc. 3. Extreme - Crazy, inconcievable and highly imaginitive stuff.
Posted: 9/7/2010 6:42 PM
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janus
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Joined: 9/1/2008
Posts: 900
unless you created the game, glitches are found by chance. When doing BOF 2 TAS, I found out that, following certain condition, Nina could walk through one rock in the sky cave.
Posted: 9/7/2010 8:18 PM
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Warp
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Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
janus wrote:
unless you created the game, glitches are found by chance.
If by "chance" you mean that you stumble across the glitch while playing or TASing the game regularly, that's not always the case. Often people will deliberately try to glitch the game by trying several things. For example if they notice that certain parts of the level "push" the character to one side a bit (to avoid letting them go into the wall), one could try finding locations where this could be abused (eg. by making the game push the character out of the screen, which could have all kinds of funny consequences, eg. because the collision detection stops working when the character wraps around the screen). (Years ago I found a glitch in Jekyll&Hyde precisely by doing that. When there's a higher platform in some levels, if you jump onto the corner of the platform, not enough to get onto the platform, but enough to touch it, it will push you backwards a bit. If scroll the screen so that you leave a gap between the edge of the platform and the left edge of the screen which is just right, and you do a jump just in the right way, you can make the playable character zip through the floor, go out of the lower edge of the screen and wrap around at the upper right corner. I found this glitch by deliberately trying to find it.)