That was a pretty good TAS, you might want to submit it for vault publication.
The movie starts from a savestate, not from power-on. Thus, it violates the rules, since it doesn't require installation.
I never planed to release this "TAS" in anyway, I just wanted to give all the real TAS guys here an overview of all that stuff that got discovered and an basic Idea of the current route.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Oh my God, that's a lot faster than I was expecting. Incredible work.
I'm still definitely planning on running this later on down the road (as said in the signature) and this will be a major help for me! It's already got me thinking about what a fully optimized TAS would time out to be... Under three hours, maybe?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Oh my God, that's a lot faster than I was expecting. Incredible work.
I'm still definitely planning on running this later on down the road (as said in the signature) and this will be a major help for me! It's already got me thinking about what a fully optimized TAS would time out to be... Under three hours, maybe?
I hope it can be under 3 hours :) Also here's a summary of all the things that can be improved in this TAS:
Chapter 1
• Tower 1: Boss fight can be improved by at least 3 sec, also make sure to get the lvl up at the door
• Tower 3: Manipulate the Cadet fight so you dont have to wait that long (I'm dumb at manipulating stuff..)
• Tower 4: Jumping on the rope may be faster, just try it
• Tower 5: Shadow Keeper can be improved, make sure to get lvl up inside him to get free hits
Chapter 2
• RaTree: Crit the flower twice that gives you the swimmers (Crits can be manipulated with attacking the air randomly).
Parasite fight is just a pain to TAS, probably up to 3-5 minutes can be saved here
• GreCliff: Faster movement strats in general. Grinding the boss like the TTas does, gives you about 3k exp/min. In a real TAS I would not grind the Borfs at all and just kill the bird all the time and that will save a huge chunk of time.
• Zue: I killed every enemy that was in my path because I'm lazy at routing, time can be saved with better enemy routing. Swimming diagnol seem faster, maybe that needs some testing.
• Eklamata: Get the slide boost (Room before goats). Destroy as many crystals as possible in the Yeti form to reduce lag and unnecessary waiting at the end. The Cadet can be hit multiple times with just one projectile if he moves correctly. Make sure to get 1 crit on the last form of Dark Morph to get the quick kill.
Chapter 3
• Louran: Maybe some better movement can save time. Get as much money as possible after you talked with turbo and hes walking to the house. That way we can skip 1 or 2 300 GEM chests
• Sylvain Castle: Try to get opal #4 with corner jumping. Once you got the STR pot you go the right way not left (3 secs saved). In the TAS I equiped the spear which is dumb, make sure to have the Light Rod equiped to gain extra EXP on the way.
• Ghost fight on ship: Slow as hell, can be improved.
• Wood collecting: You want every enemy to drop as much gold as possible so you can skip another money chest (Again, I'm to dumb to manipulate stuff)
• China: One of the biggest time losses in the TAS because I'm smart... The right way to do it is you go in the INN and talk with the girl next to Fyda. After that you talk to the guy in the LEFT building, then RIGHT, the left again and finaly talk with Fyda.
• Berugas Lab: General movement and enemy kills can be improved here.
• MoonStones: Maybe there a faster way to grab them.
Chapter 4
• Air Ship: Killing less enemys will help
• Dark Gaia: Needs more crits.
General stuff
• Menu optimization: I tried to be as less as possible in the menu. It can still be improved.
• Running boots: I'm sure theres still plenty of room to use them more often
• Movement: Can be improved by alot
Well that's it for the moment. I hope this is helping you guys.
Thanks for reading
Lemon
PS: As soon as new stuff gets discovered I will post in this thread
I finally finished watching this. Nice work! It generally felt pretty tight even for a test run, and it's impressive how quickly you managed to tear through everything.
I do have one comment on the running shoes -- it seems like sometimes you'd use them to go e.g. down and then right, when it seems to me it'd be faster to just run normally on a diagonal. The running shoes make straight-line distances fast, of course, but I'm almost certain they're slower if you need to travel diagonally more than some minimum distance.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I do have one comment on the running shoes -- it seems like sometimes you'd use them to go e.g. down and then right, when it seems to me it'd be faster to just run normally on a diagonal. The running shoes make straight-line distances fast, of course, but I'm almost certain they're slower if you need to travel diagonally more than some minimum distance.
That could well be what marks the difference between it being a test run and a real run. The rerecord count is rather low for a run of this length, which mostly indicates that it's not as tight as it probably could be.
Overall, my opinion is that it wasn't too bad, especially for a test.
A side note is that this run syncs on Tenchi Souzou (J), which isn't a bad dump, compared to the Tenchi Souzou (J) [h1C] that it was recorded on, so I don't know what the underlying differences are.
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Atma wrote:
A side note is that this run syncs on Tenchi Souzou (J), which isn't a bad dump, compared to the Tenchi Souzou (J) [h1C] that it was recorded on, so I don't know what the underlying differences are.
If I remember correctly h1C means the header was hacked. Probably to make the game run with crappy emulators.
Interesting video! I really liked the part where you repeatedly killed the Grecliff boss; that should help close the experience gap between the Parasite leveling session and Louran.
However! I'm not convinced that the second part of your run is optimal :p. I think there are at least two better alternatives to using the 3PartRod against the Security Robot: either the NeoFang or the EnbuPike (possibly with a lower level).
Maybe I should try making a run similar to yours, since I have never actually tried these strategies in practice...
Interesting video! I really liked the part where you repeatedly killed the Grecliff boss; that should help close the experience gap between the Parasite leveling session and Louran.
However! I'm not convinced that the second part of your run is optimal :p. I think there are at least two better alternatives to using the 3PartRod against the Security Robot: either the NeoFang or the EnbuPike (possibly with a lower level).
Maybe I should try making a run similar to yours, since I have never actually tried these strategies in practice...
I would love to see a run from a real TAS guy :) also you can abuse that bird grind boss until you are like lvl 20 or more
How exactly does this work? I've been trying for ~4 hours or so to manage this trick with frame by frame input and I'm clearly missing something. If anyone could explain it in basically a step-by-step manner that would be awesome.
So far this is what I've determined you do from the video:
run up a bit
run diagonal left 1 or 2 units of distance from the old guy
run past him slightly
turn left (or right? or does it matter? can't tell from video)
turn that direction again (now facing downwards)
talk to old guy
wait for optional dialogue choice
jump when making the choice (or whatever frame it is possible on)
The results I've gotten so far:
Jumped straight up most of the time
Jumped in place occasionally
Jumped left/right rarely (these made me think I was on the right track)
Never gotten him to jump downward like in the video, which makes me think I'm missing a specific piece of the puzzle but I'm out of ideas so far.
Any help with this would be great as I'm hoping to at least get this TAS started so I have something to work on alongside the Secret of Evermore TAS I'm working on.
Also, Gunty, are you still working on that lua script with all the information on it? If so, do you plan to release it at some point? That script is just amazing, awesome work.
Thanks in advance all.
First make sure you're running up, next to the Elder
Press left or right for one frame
Press down for two frames
Then press right to face the Elder
On the next frame, press A to talk to him
When given the dialogue choice, press B
So why does this work?
First: when you're jumping, the jump is made in Ark's current movement direction.
Second: when you turn, you will continue moving towards your current direction for 1 frame (there is an exception when you turn from left to up/down, but I consider that a bug).
If you combine these two, it allows you to jump in a certain direction, while facing another. The whole dialogue with the elder just comes in-between.
TheAngryPanda wrote:
Also, Gunty, are you still working on that lua script with all the information on it? If so, do you plan to release it at some point? That script is just amazing, awesome work.
Not actively, but I've been asked by other people to share it, so I will try and clean it up a bit before sharing it. Any particular one you're interested in?
Anything you're willing to share honestly. It's all helpful. The most interest I have in it though is the exp efficiency and collision scripts. If you ever got the HP per enemy (and hitbox?) script(s?) working those would be quite nice to have as well.
Lemon and I have been planning to work on this together for quite some time and we plan to test everything down to the frames so anything at all helps honestly. I even plan to make backups to test the separate routes for maximum speed.
Anywho, thank you for the quick response Gunty, I'll go back to working on the TAS asap.
EDIT: Got it working Gunty, thanks a ton. Now we can move along with the rest of it once Lemon has some free time again.
require "terranigma_collision_map"
require "terranigma_exp_timer"
require "terranigma_dmg_graph"
currentInput = {}
previousInput = {}
while true do
previousInput = currentInput
currentInput = joypad.read(1)
if currentInput["L"] and not previousInput["L"] then
exp_timer.toggle()
end
emu.frameadvance()
end
Wow Gunty, thanks a lot for those awesome scripts, time to play around a bit! ;)
So there are actually intervals, where u do more and less damage, is that right? o.0
Everything works fine, just tested it, great work and thanks for sharing!
Greetings
So I also made some kind of test TAS, to experiment with the route planning in the second half of the game. This movie tried the EnbuPike path, where some leveling parts have been replaced by collecting the EnbuPike instead. The movie is split up in 3 parts because I had to edit in the EnbuPike since I was too lazy to ressurect Mu and play all the way up to Sylvain castle:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1657121529/enbupike_part1.smvhttp://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/138841961/enbupike_part2.smvhttp://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/232821868/enbupike_part3.smv
Note that the EnbuPike is edited in the inventory between parts 1 & 2. Collecting the EnbuPike properly would add another ~4300 frames to the movie length.
Comparing the total movie lengths isn't very insightful due to the different levels of optimization, so here is a more detailed comparison of the movie differences:
EnbuPike vs 3PartRod
The ressurection of Mu: +2350 frames
The movie starts at Sylvain Castle at level 19 (18808 exp) compared to level 20 (21559 exp). This means that the current movie collects 2751 less exp in Louran. Counting an exp collecting rate of 25 exp/sec: -6500 frames
The lower level in Sylvain castle results in longer fights against the skeletons (80f), first Soul Knight (500f) and the second Soul Knight (150f): +730 frames
Clearing the Gumin forest requires an additional weapon switch (130f) and killing the monsters takes an additional hit (35f x10): +480 frames
Fish boss takes 5 more hits: +1000 frames
Collecting the EnbuPike before GLC: +4300 frames
Skipping the experience collecting in GLC: -9150 frames
2 fewer hits required against the GLC boss: -310 frames
Not collecting the 3PartRod: -3600 frames
7 more hits required against the Security Robot: +250 frames
Extra experience collecting in the sewers: +9700 frames
Total: -750 frames
Conclusion: I think this strategy is at least 12.5 seconds faster.
Level 27 vs level 28 against Dark Gaia
Getting to level 28 requires 4805 more experience. This takes about 4000 frames in the sewers, with an additional 500 frames for the levelup animation. Comparing the second phase of the Dark Gaia fight, my version takes about 4570 more frames, meaning that a total of 70 frames is lost.
However, considering my horrible/non-existing luck manipulation, I estimate that an optimized Dark Gaia fight at level 27 can save up to 30 seconds.
Other notes
Death-warping from Eklemata to Freedom after Beruga's Lab saves about 10 seconds.
Getting the 1700 gems in Africa on the way to Yunkou is a fast gem source (120 gems/sec).
A lot of fast experience (7036 exp) can be gained on the way from the sewers to the final boss, so getting to 40000 exp against the purple robot balls in the sewers should be enough.
Now I wonder how the strategy of skipping both EnbuPike and the 3PartRod plays out. I may do a similair comparison of it in a while.
That's a surprisingly narrow difference between getting the EnbuPike and skipping it. It's nice that it works out to be worthwhile though, since it shows off more of the game instead of having more grinding. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Here's the the second part of the game (until right after hitting the 40000 exp mark in the sewers), using the NeoFang route:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/499690207/neofang.smv
Some numbers in the comparison are different from before, since somewhat different strategies were used
NeoFang vs. EnbuPike
Not ressurecting of Mu: -2350 frames
Extra Louran grinding (2914 exp) +7000 frames
Sylvain castle fights against the skeletons (-80f), first Soul Knight (-500f) and the second Soul Knight (-150f): -730 frames
Gumin forest weapon switch (-130f) and killing (-100f): -230 frames
Mermaid tower killing: +600 frames
Fish boss takes fewer hits: -1000 frames
Not collecting the EnbuPike before GLC: -4300 frames
GLC grinding: +8650 frames
Two more hits required against the GLC boss: +310 frames
Two weapon switches before the Security Robot: +410 frames
12 more hits required against the Security Robot: +500 frames
One more weapon switch after the Security Robot: +150 frames
Shorter sewers grind: -9700 frames
Total: -690 frames
Conclusion: this route seems to be 11.5 seconds faster than the EnbuPike route. However, this method does somewhat less damage after the sewers grind than the EnbuPike route. This means that some more time may be lost when killing enemies along the way in the final part of the sewers.
Sacrificing a second by getting the GeoStaff is probably worth it to deal more damage in Beruga's Lab and in the Neotokio sewers...
So... it got discovered that there is a new TAS for this game
http://www.nicovideo.jp/mylist/33549313
The time is 3:22 after the credits are done and it has a lot of interesting stuff in it
There's not much there: you have to trigger a levelup on the overworld and they haven't managed to do that without using cheats. Still would make for some interesting potential skips if a non-cheating way to trigger it is found, since Ark can apparently walk on water.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
