Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Good idea Mitjitsu. But am I missing something here? We are aiming for fastest time and I seriously doubt that pausing that way is faster than walking without zipping.
Here's the same segment, with a small improvement and the pauses edited out.
Link to video
The music skips quite a bit with the pauses removed, and I actually think its more distracting than the pauses themselves.
I may be a lone ranger here, but I don't really have a problem with the excessive pausing. The concrete shot zip glitch's ONLY use, is to shave split seconds off the game timer. By the end of that segment alone, I saved 2-3 seconds off a run that doesn't zip.
After taking all the comments into consideration, I still stand by my suggestion for this game to aim for in-game time. It is, of course, unfortunate that Mega Man 9 lacks the quick-switching of Mega Man 10, as that would completely negate this issue. But this isn't a speed/entertainment tradeoff as Sonikkustar posted. It simply has a goal to minimize the count on the game timer using every tactic available, like these movies.
The fact is, a real-timed TAS will more than likely use the buster for this entire segment. In fact, it will probably stick to the buster for the majority of the game, only switching for boss fights, unreachable platforms and unavoidable enemies.
The final time will probably end up around the 20 minute mark -- slower than the current human record of 19:18.
On the other hand, a game-timed TAS will include an incredible amount of zipping and weapon juggling, obliterating the current record on the order of several minutes or so.
It might be better to play a pre-recorded track of the level and leave out the sound effects. Another solution would be to mute the BGM ingame (if an option exists), and then combine the pre-recorded BGM with the sound effects.
You could subtract the raw BGM track from the BGM+SFX track (subtracting is the same as 180° phase inversing one track and adding that to the other) to get a track of slightly distorted sound effects, then edit out the pauses, then add the BGM track to that.
This makes sense to me. Especially since it's 8-bit sound, I suspect that there would be virtually no distortion in the sound effects.
Also, I don't know how well Dolphin + LUA scripts work, but it would be cool to see an icon of the weapon above Mega Man's head much like MM10 each time he switches weapons.
I also kind of feel like that if you're cutting out what stops the in-game timer, then you have to cut off weapon refill animations too, although I'm very much fine if that was left in in the encode.
This speedrun is starting to have a lot of post-production
Just to keep people informed. My progress on this will become an EVEN SLOWER crawl since my youngest daughter arrived rather recently. I do apologize for this so I'm gonna be kinda cheeky and ask if you guys could use this topic as a centrailzed hub for research on known glitches and stuff for me, it would make it alot easier on myself. I still fully intend to complete this but I'm kinda asking for your help doing the research cause I don't have the time to do it anymore :)
Funny, I actually tried this yesterday. Unfortunately, I couldn't replicate it so I had nothing to post about it. It seems very situational and since Concrete Man's shots change depending on his and your relative positions, it might have to be exactly like its shown in the video to work.
I did get him to shoot his concrete shots at me at the beginning of the fight, though. And I could even get inside one after being frozen by another... but I wasn't able to zip through the floor.
On another note, this was done in time trial where supposedly you have no items so its a real mystery where the beat call came from. But it might only work in Time Trial because of that.
It looks like a great glitch... if you figure out how it works.
To me it looks it's a subroutine that's called for whenever Megaman escapes a boss fight screen somehow. I bet you something similiar would happen if you zipped past the left or right edge of the screen for any boss.
I think the way Megaman fell to the left, even though he was frozen, was affected by user input once he got stuck in the floor.
Also typically, after a boss dies, user input is disabled; however when the user did something unexpected, it looked like the game gave the user a chance to try to bring Megaman back to where he's supposed to be.
This might be nothing but as trident shots left the screen and the game removed those objects from RAM, Megaman got stuck in the floor. Something to look into.
The video could also be a fake for all I know. I hope what I wrote won't actually mislead anybody.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
The glitch is not something extraordinary. This is what I think happened:
1) Mega Man froze.
2) Fortunately for the zipping to occur, the boss fired a perfect concrete shot exactly where Mega Man was positioned.
3) Once Mega Man unfroze, the concrete shot was still there and Mega Man was more or less perfectly inside it, making him to zip.
4) Due to most probably good x- and y-pixel position, he managed to zip downwards.
that looks incredibly awesome, how I wish MM9 had the weapon switching MM10 has… I don't know if video editing out pauses is acceptable for TASVideos, but with the pauses in, I'm completely against zipping
hopefully someone'll find a way to zip a lot more with much less shots…
Well, I could have zipped through that segment using only the concrete shot, but there's a few problems. First, there can only be 3 concrete blocks on the screen at time. I go to the weapon menu to reset the blocks and zip again. Without that, I can't zip again until the screen clears the concrete block. Second, I'll very quickly run out of Concrete shots. The C. shot consumes the enemy and will never yield any drops. This means no refills. I switch to a different weapon to kill an enemy and force a refill to continue zipping. Without those two problems, I wouldn't have to pause at all after changing to C. shot.
What's up with people saying the pausing kills it?
Okay, true that there are plenty of them, but I like more a full video than an edited out video... Actually, I don't think there haven't been one game where people complained of the final product for trying to be faster?
For now, clearly, the TASers are aiming for fastest in-game time. I also prefer that this section is done before the real-time TAS of mm9... Assuming there will be a real-time completion TAS, just because people are randomly bashing the pausing on this particular game.
But I'd say this game doesn't deserve the bashing about the pausing =(. Maybe just wait for the other category to come, or like they say, do one yourself =).
I'm gonna have to pass the honour of this one up guys. I am ending simply rediculously busy. if diggiyo or some other experienced player could do this i'd love to watch it later. unfortunately theres no real point giving my input as it's not fully complete in getting to tornado man, but will provide it if it does help.
AngerFist and I will pick up the ball on this one. For now, we're still trying to settle the real-time versus game-time debacle. To add some more fuel to this debate, I made a run of that same segment pausing only once.
Link to video
This strategy is much faster for real-time than the heavy pausing in the teaser video. For in-game time, it's .7 seconds slower.
It still shaves almost 2 full seconds of the game clock. But despite that, since switching weapons takes almost 2 seconds, it is roughly the exact same speed as a buster only real-time run of the same segment.
Thoughts?
I'd admitably rather see real time over in-game time. The constant pausing for IGT runs sucks. Especially for how much you'll need if you really are aiming for it.
At least with Super Metroid, it wasn't "play for .5 seconds, pause, play for .5 seconds, pause..."
I think you have to choose between in-game time and real time. As I've said previously I think both categories have their merits and both are most likely publishable. You really can't categorize a run halfway in the middle. You won't please the entire audience in either extreme case though. I'd rather see an in-game time run personally, but you should do whichever you prefer.
Far more watchable to me, as the Ratio between Pausing and actual gameplay is far more on the Gameplay side. Since ultimately, every other run is judged by real time, with ingame time a secondary goal at best, I don't see why MM9 should get an exception. I assume you'll go for Concrete Man first to get access to his weapon sooner. What I think some planning will need to go into is wether to pause for recharging the weapon or not. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to a run