In a TAS, if you are in a place where it is completely dark and you cannot see anything, how can you TAS that part of the game perfectly like all the other parts?
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In a TAS, if you are in a place where it is completely dark and you cannot see anything, how can you TAS that part of the game perfectly like all the other parts?
There are lots of possible strategies, for example
1) Turn the lights on, TAS it with the lights on, copy the input, paste it into your real TAS. (Works only if the game is deterministic there)
2) If the darkness is due to a layer change or palette change, many emulators let you easily change what layers/palettes are being used without needing to know how to code or assembly.
3) If it's not, you can still write a camhack or otherwise write a script/edit the ROM so that the area is bright. (Sonic games have a similar problem - you can go so fast the camera is not showing where Sonic is at all. The solution is to write a camhack, that tells the emulator to draw the screen around Sonic even thought the in-game camera is somewhere else, such that the ROM is unchanged and the input made in the camhack syncs in normal non-camhack playback)
4) If 1) 2) and 3) aren't possible, you can STILL use memory watch to find X and Y position of your character, try 1) to see what the route through the area is ROUGHLY like, and do trial and error until you can get something similar to what you do in 1)
You could also use a Lua script to draw hitboxes for the player, enemies, and terrain. This requires a lot of digging around in memory, though (even more than option 4 of Patashu's post).
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