Yeah, I noticed that right away from Roland's video and feel silly for not having tried to do that myself :S
By the way, the PWASE remains active as long as the torch effect is active (I mean, you don't need to use a torch every time you want to use the glitch).
Good to know, although it will be tricky to get a new enemy to land on the same square if my units are advancing.
I don't know if it's faster but you can buy a torch on serafew (I think you can't do it in the chapter but you can do it in the map after beating C5). Maybe you can kill Novala faster.
If you can get a torch for C6, you can kill Novala on turn 2 player phase and it should save considerable time.
I noticed an increase of lag frames when a unit grays out in a PWASE. I don't know if you noticed that too.
Perhaps the added lag is what allows the glitch to occur?
So for C11, I'm thinking on turn 1 you execute the glitch, move all inconveniently located enemies (eg/ bottom-right corner, top-right corner) towards Seth/Vanessa, using as many rescues as possible so that the glitch can be used again on turn 2 with as many drops. This would cut the amount of enemies moved on turn 2 as much as half. Alternatively, you could move as many 1-range units as possible towards Dozla. There's a lot of possibility. I'll give it a serious look when I'm up to it.
By the way, the PWASE remains active as long as the torch effect is active (I mean, you don't need to use a torch every time you want to use the glitch).
Good to know, although it will be tricky to get a new enemy to land on the same square if my units are advancing.
What about the same enemy? You use a bait (cleric/monk) and another unit so you can kill the enemy when it becomes useless (for the TAS not for performing the glitch)
I noticed an increase of lag frames when a unit grays out in a PWASE. I don't know if you noticed that too.
Perhaps the added lag is what allows the glitch to occur?
That's the point!! If there's another unknown way to perform the glitch is knowing how to induce this lag when an enemy/green unit greys out.
To perform the trick, you need two things. An enemy that can attack your unit, and a unit who cannot counterattack. To activate the glitch, you must end your turn, allow the enemy unit to attack your ally, then AFTER the HP bars vanish, but BEFORE the foe greys out, hard or soft reset your game.
The bit about counterattacking is inaccurate. All that matters is that the targeted enemy gets greyed out on the PWASE, which means you can hit the enemy without killing it. The stated timing is also inaccurate since you can get the glitch to work even slightly after the enemy’s greyed out.
That's correct but I'd like to add that it is not necessary for the foe to attack you, it just have to end it's turn on that tile. (you probably knew this, but just to be sure...).
Link to video
Vbm links:
Chapter 6 (1498 frames saved, ~25 seconds)
Chapter 11 (3382 frames saved, ~56 seconds)
Chapter 19 (2251 frames saved, ~38 seconds)
The time saved was better than I expected, about 2 minutes minus the time taken to purchase the torch staff. I’m also happy that I saved a turn in C6 and 3 turns in C11, which would cut my total turncount down to 89.
There are some slight drawbacks to these new chapter approaches. While Seth & Vanessa conserve weapon uses from increased critting, they also kill fewer enemies, especially in C11 where Dozla eats up so many kills. This affects their exp gain and weapon rank (eg/ it takes longer for Vanessa to hit S-rank and get that nice 5% crit boost). Then again, I have more control over Vanessa’s level-ups in C11, which would increase her stats a bit.
Edit: I added C19 since I found the 2 turn could be improved using the torch glitch. I also had a look at the phantom ship (Eph route C11), but there's really nothing you can do to prevent the bazillion enemy reinforcements that show up on turn 2 player phase. I didn't bother to make a video for that since the chapter would be incredibly boring to watch; basically an incredibly long turn 2 enemy phase of enemies suiciding into Seth and Duessel.
I'd only update the run if the control enemy glitch could be used in every chapter of the game and make sub 1 hour realistic. With the new FOW strats, there's still roughly 7 minutes that need to be saved, although I have a nagging feeling that it is possible to control enemies in every chapter, it's just a matter of finding some new PWASE or looking into the extra "gray out" lag critcaluser was talking about.
Just theorycrafting, here's how the control enemy glitch could save time. Bolded what I consider noteworthy chapters:
Prologue: Not really worthwhile.
C1: Take the boss off the throne, Eirika doesn't get attacked.
C2: Wouldn’t save any time.
C3: Boss off throne, nothing significant.
C4: Would have to be used on turn 1, no point since the map is cleanly 2 turned.
C5: Could avoid a lot of combat on turns 1 and 2, although the turn count is unaffected.
C5x: A lot of time could be saved moving the enemies in the 1 space corridor out of the way, also avoid a lot of combat on the last turn.
C6: Used already.
C7: Would save a turn, ease up the manipulation (archers don’t have to attack) and would even allow Vanessa to gain more exp since she could crit the boss on turn 2 player phase.
C8: Enemy phase heavy chapter, would be worthwhile on almost every turn.
C9: Would save an enormous amount of time since I could direct the pirates towards my units instead of away and at least manage a 4 turn like in the normal mode run. At least 7493 frames (~2 mins) could be saved.
C10: About 36 secs can be saved just by ending turn 1 enemy phase prematurely. Then another ~58 secs can be saved by doing the same thing on turn 2.
C11: Used already.
C12: Doesn’t seem like much time could be saved since the spiders can only move 1 space per turn in the mountains. Lowering the turn count at all would cut down on a ton of reinforcements. Hopefully Tana can ORKO the spiders with a double crit, if not she could always be power levelled somewhere else (probably C9).
C13: Can’t save time on the 1-turn.
C14: Disarming enemies and moving them out of the way would save so much time. Could even recruit Rennac if you wanted to.
C15: A turn can definitely be saved (6 less reinforcements), possibly even 2 (another 2 less reinforcements). I would probably have to make Tana help Saleh with the troubadour kills.
C16: Same idea as C14. About 40 secs could be saved just by ending the second to last turn prematurely.
C17: Could cut down on a lot of enemy movement on turn 1.
C18: There would be surprisingly little benefit to using the control enemy glitch here.
C19: 1 turned already.
C20: Cutting out enemy phase would save ~90 secs.
Final: Cutting out enemy phase would save ~20 secs.
Tallying that up gives about 6 mins saved plus probably an extra 6+ mins for intangibles (the stuff I didn’t time estimate for). Thus, if widespread application of the control enemy glitch is possible, sub 1 hour could be achieved in theory. An insane amount of work would be needed to optimize the run properly, at least 100k re-records easily.
I’m going to spend a few hours trying to find new ways to control enemies and will stream my attempts on twitch.
Spent a good 2 hours looking for new PWASE, the only leads I could find are desert forts and desert bones in C15, as they generate the correct amount of lag but don't allow the control enemy glitch as far as I can tell. I did make some useful findings, though, mainly that there are usually 24-25 frames of lag between the exp counter vanishing and the enemy greying out, and PWASE adds 4 extra frames of lag. I put my raw data in quotes below:
Go by first frame exp bar vanishes until first frame of greying out
Torch
29 frames (+4) (confirmed)
Snag also causes 4 frames of lag
No Torch
25 frames (confirmed)
Torch PWASE causes 4 frames of lag. Reset window is definitely larger than that though (test that now)
(at least 10 frame window)
---
C1
27 frames (confirmed)
C3
24 frames (confirmed)
C5
24 frames (confirmed)
C5x
24 frames (100% consistent)
(25 frames in certain chapters, 29 for PWASE)
PWASE CHECKS
PWASE
Desert fort (+4, doesn’t work?)
Desert bone (+4, same as above)
Non-PWASE
(Throne) floor
(Throne) pillar
(Throne) door
Plain
Bridge
Ballista
Forest
House
Mountain
Peak
Sea
Vendor
Outdoor stairs
Road
Desert
(Desert) ruins
(Desert) lake
Chest (unopened)
Chest (opened)
Untested
River
Cliff
Gate
(Throne) stairs
Fence
Village
Barrel
Gunnels
Armory
Chest (opened and unopened)
Only got the snag PWASE to work in a FOW map (narube river creature campaign)
To make any further findings, I need someone to help me isolate the memory addresses related to this glitch so that I can control enemies on non-PWASE. It's stated in the gamefaqs guide that you can control enemies even on non-PWASE but that the window of opportunity is dramatically smaller, sometimes a fraction of a frame. Obviously trying to guess those frames would take forever and likely prove a waste of time, hence why those addresses are so important.
Link to videoLink to video
These are the new real-time WRs for both routes. Notice that Ephraim route is 3 minutes faster, although in theory it should be roughly 4 minutes.
I don't want to get into the specifics unless anyone is curious, but being able to 3 turn the Phantom Ship using the torch glitch makes C11 Eph about 1 minute faster than its Eir route counterpart, which is what ultimately makes Eph route decisively faster.
Now because of this, I believe that it's now possible to TAS Sacred Stones in under an hour, which warrants an updated TAS. To get sub hour requires saving 8 mins 51 secs, 4 of which are already accounted for through the route change. The other 4 would come from starting the run from a savestate (probably just use the published TAS as a verification movie), as this allows units to move twice as fast when holding A. I can easily see this shaving more than 4 minutes, and combining this with better strats & optimization, I should realistically be able to meet my goal.
So, a couple basic questions:
1) Is anyone bothered by using a savestate to increase unit movement speed? It won't affect the RNG at all since the RNG seed is always 8,56,21 after a reset.
2) Should Eirika and Ephraim route be separate categories, or just go with whichever happens to be fastest?
3) Is there any actual interest in seeing this improvement or should I not even bother? I know these FE runs tend to have very niche audiences and all.
At any rate, if I do work on this, progress will be very gradual since I'm pretty busy these days. I certainly won't be concocting a run in ~1 month like I did with my last Sacred Stones TAS (the currently published one). Probably more like a few months to a year or so.
I think starting from SRAM to get the faster unit movement will cause the run to be rejected. It's sad that you won't be able to get sub-hour because of it, but that's the way it is.
Are there any major known improvements in chapters 1-8, or will you be able to cannibalize those from the existing run?
e: I'm also curious to see how Cormag ends up--is he better enough than Vanessa that he's worth using over her despite not being able to triangle attack Fomortiis? Or is he basically going to be just a better Tana, filling in when you need an extra flier?
I think starting from SRAM to get the faster unit movement will cause the run to be rejected. It's sad that you won't be able to get sub-hour because of it, but that's the way it is.
You're allowed to start from a memory card state in SotN to get a faster time - why not in FE too? As long as you have a verification movie to prove your SRAM state is reachable.
I think starting from SRAM to get the faster unit movement will cause the run to be rejected. It's sad that you won't be able to get sub-hour because of it, but that's the way it is.
But what would be the reasoning behind it? Originally I was bothered by the idea of using SRAM since I thought it would change the beginning RNG seed and therefore make the run impossible to reproduce without using the exact same SRAM. But this isn't the case, as stated in my previous post. Any SRAM that's cleared the game will yield the same starting RNG, so it's easy to reproduce a run like this from many possible SRAM states. Not only that, there's two published TASes for the game (yours and mine) that could easily be used as verification movies, which automatically rules out any possibility of cheating.
Are there any major known improvements in chapters 1-8, or will you be able to cannibalize those from the existing run?
Well, one definite improvement is moving the cursor without holding B on movement that normally causes the camera to scroll back to the character before moving. It's not too significant; if I had to guess it would save like a minute over the whole run.
e: I'm also curious to see how Cormag ends up--is he better enough than Vanessa that he's worth using over her despite not being able to triangle attack Fomortiis?
Actually I forgot about that. In chapters 1-8 you don't need Vanessa to fight at all, which actually saves time since you don't have to invest 28 levels into her over the course of the run (1 -> 20 then 1 -> 10) since Cormag can instantly be converted to a godly unit in the phantom ship.
In the RTA run I basically have Cormag solo the phantom ship and feed him 6 manipulated level-ups, which is easy considering you control the enemies halfway through turn 2. At level 15/1 his stats were comparable to Seth, aside from lackluster luck and res, which really don't matter in a TAS. I could even manage with fewer levels since pierce crits truly are broken. The only issue I had with him was getting javelin hits to land against multiple fighters in C15, but that's trivial to manipulate in a TAS.
All to say, he easily replaces Vanessa on Ephraim route, and does so without having to suffer through a period of earlygame suckage.
It's unfortunate that the ending will be so much less cool, then (and we'll have to watch Fomortiis' slow as hell attack animation).
The Purge Sage in chapter 16 is also in a much weirder location in Ephraim route, so we unfortunately won't have access to that either.
It's unfortunate that the ending will be so much less cool, then (and we'll have to watch Fomortiis' slow as hell attack animation).
Actually it will still be pretty cool since the fastest way to kill him will probably be to have Cormag land a double pierce crit with a killer lance.
The Purge Sage in chapter 16 is also in a much weirder location in Ephraim route, so we unfortunately won't have access to that either.
The only places where purge are used are the gorgon eggs chapter (no big deal) and the final chapter, which I guess actually matters since you need to kill the bonewalker in front of Lyon to get that crucial 2 turn. There is, however, a way I could do that using Syrene and Cormag since Syrene has enough movement to kill the bonewalker at 1 range from a decent turn 2 vantage point.
---
So I did a quick test to form an educated guess as to how much time will be saved holding A. In a nutshell, normal movement costs 4 frames/square whereas movement holding A only costs 2. Thus, the time saved per chapter is equal to the amount of movement in said chapter.
I took C2 and C15 as samples (short chapter and long chapter, respectively), and extrapolated that C2 has exactly 56 frames of movement, whereas C15 has roughly 220. As a crude guess, if half the chapters in the game are short and half are long, this totals to 56(10) + 220(10) = 2760 frames saved, roughly a minute.
This is actually kind of disappointing because I was expecting more time to be saved. Then again, maybe C15 was a poor test chapter since it's beaten in 3 turns. Regardless, I'm kind of wondering if it's even worth whatever controversy starting from SRAM will cause if the savings are so minimal. Then again, holding A does make the run at least appear to be much faster paced, even if it doesn't affect what eats up the bulk of the time in such runs, which is the animation time for actually killing enemies and the idle time between their movements.
Link to videoWIP (up to Chapter 5)
Somehow I’ve already managed to save over a minute! A more detailed breakdown below:
Prologue: 2666-2609 = 57 frames (0.95 secs)
For some reason the cutscenes skipped faster from SRAM, otherwise the only difference was holding A on character movement.
Chapter 1: 5818-5245 = 573 frames (9.55 secs)
I found a more efficient way to burn RNs with Seth and delayed his level-up to the next chapter (which is actually why I lose time there, relatively speaking).
Chapter 2: 10626-10229 = 397 frames (6.6 secs)
I rescue Ross & Garcia as soon as possible in order to eliminate the “Other Phase” and plan out my movement to reduce the amount of enemy attacks I face (ie more player phase attacks, less enemy phase ones).
Chapter 3: 17124-15095 = 2029 frames (33.8 secs)
Huge strategic overhaul here. I rescue-drop Seth besides the wall so he can kill both nearby ranged attackers. The remaining turns I use a pacifist approach, only killing the boss and avoiding combat with the thief altogether. You’ll notice Seth’s level-up is a lot more tame than usual as well; he only gains hp and skill.
Chapter 4: 25894-22534 = 3360 frames (56 secs)
I land more crits on turn 1 player phase (reduces combat) and have Seth deal with the eastern mogalls instead of Artur (reduces manipulation).
Chapter 5: 30209-26261 = 3948 frames (65.8 secs)
I found a clever way to ninja the chapter with Seth such that the only enemy he'd actually attack is the boss. This actually postpones his level-up so that will result in lost time in C6.
In general you’ll see I’ve been much more thorough testing out alternate strategies and optimizing RN burns & trades, which is why my re-record count is already over 6000. I really want to hit that sub hour benchmark, although it’s starting to look more and more realistic the further I get.
===
Some miscellaneous observations:
Setting text speed -> max saves time in the armory since some of the text prompts are skipped automatically. However, for some reason you can’t skip boss portraits and some cutscenes must be skipped later when this feature is toggled. Due to this, the chapter 3 armory’s actually faster to do the regular way, although this may not be the case for the torch purchase in chapter 6.
Base stat Eirika can OHKO Murray. This is why I allow her to get a no strength level-up in C2.
Made this Melkaen Coast TAS for fun using BizHawk to test it. This map is not seen in any TAS, so yeah. To effectively TAS on BizHawk it is required to move the Lua Scripts to be compatible with it, and that would require time to re-study it.
Link to video
Updated Vykan's WIP with new strats/more efficient RN burning/cutscene skipping
Link to video
This is about 15 seconds faster than the WIP posted previously.
I'm planning on using the ECG (enemy control glitch) quite frequently throughout this run, and it turns out that the (J) version has a (significantly) quicker soft reset than the (U) version, so I'm thinking about switching over to that ROM. Does anyone have opinions about that?
I'm planning on using the ECG (enemy control glitch) quite frequently throughout this run, and it turns out that the (J) version has a (significantly) quicker soft reset than the (U) version, so I'm thinking about switching over to that ROM. Does anyone have opinions about that?
Yeah, go for it. As for the WIP, I liked it, keep it going.
Thanks guys. A couple of things I noticed after a quick experiment with the JP version:
You do save a lot of time with the soft reset, roughly 5-6 seconds each time (and this includes loading the game at the very beginning). However, I noticed that the enemy stats in the JP version are slightly higher across the board, and this slight increase is just barely enough to make a lot of strats that are possible on the (U) version no longer viable. I still think there will be a net time save with the (J) version, but I'm likely going to have to reroute a large portion of the early game.
I'm also not going to be able to use the previous runs for SRAM, although that can easily be fixed by using the run as its own verification in a second pass.
But while I'm starting from scratch again, perhaps the run should be ported to BizHawk? For more accurate emulation (although this will definitely cause some major time loss)?
Thanks guys. A couple of things I noticed after a quick experiment with the JP version:
You do save a lot of time with the soft reset, roughly 5-6 seconds each time (and this includes loading the game at the very beginning). However, I noticed that the enemy stats in the JP version are slightly higher across the board, and this slight increase is just barely enough to make a lot of strats that are possible on the (U) version no longer viable. I still think there will be a net time save with the (J) version, but I'm likely going to have to reroute a large portion of the early game.
I'm also not going to be able to use the previous runs for SRAM, although that can easily be fixed by using the run as its own verification in a second pass.
But while I'm starting from scratch again, perhaps the run should be ported to BizHawk? For more accurate emulation (although this will definitely cause some major time loss)?
In my opinion you should go with BizHawk, but that would also mean moving all the Lua Scripts (assuming you are using them) from VBA to BizHawk. And generally, the (U) version is easier when being ported from (J). And also, the RNG seed is different (at least, in FE7) in both (U) and (J), so take that in consideration.
The RNG seed is the same as far as I can tell, but the problem is that the strats no longer work due to inflated enemy stats. So I have to change a lot of them regardless.
I don't think it will be too hard to move stuff to BizHawk, but I haven't tried lua stuff with it before so not really sure what I'm going into lol.
The RNG Seed should be exactly the same between US and JP. But yeah there are some weird differences. As ruadath said, the enemy stats are generally higher for JP, but you also have x3 weapon effectiveness (it's x2 in US). Other differences include Caellach moving in JP (he's stationary in US and stays on a fort), and eirika Ch16 sage NOT dropping a purge tome in JP (he does in US).
Self reminder: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=360698#360698
WIP of Ephraim route up to chapter 5, seems optimized upon video inspection, willing to proceed to completion with this. Maximum 1 chapter per day to ensure gradual progression, sustainable.
@ruadath: Why did you not upload your input file?
I can get you the input file. The reason I had not uploaded it immediately was that I intended to convert it to mGBA (the above is VBA).
Also we need to consider whether or not we want to move to JP version. If we use the ECG, its almost certainly worth it to switch, but it means that we will have to redo a lot of the early game strats (like the monster chapter), since enemy stats are higher... unless we drop the difficulty to JP normal (instead of hard)?
I don't want to get into the specifics unless anyone is curious, but being able to 3 turn the Phantom Ship using the torch glitch makes C11 Eph about 1 minute faster than its Eir route counterpart, which is what ultimately makes Eph route decisively faster.
Now because of this, I believe that it's now possible to TAS Sacred Stones in under an hour, which warrants an updated TAS. To get sub hour requires saving 8 mins 51 secs, 4 of which are already accounted for through the route change. The other 4 would come from starting the run from a savestate (probably just use the published TAS as a verification movie), as this allows units to move twice as fast when holding A. I can easily see this shaving more than 4 minutes, and combining this with better strats & optimization, I should realistically be able to meet my goal.
So, a couple basic questions:
1) Is anyone bothered by using a savestate to increase unit movement speed? It won't affect the RNG at all since the RNG seed is always 8,56,21 after a reset.
2) Should Eirika and Ephraim route be separate categories, or just go with whichever happens to be fastest?
3) Is there any actual interest in seeing this improvement or should I not even bother? I know these FE runs tend to have very niche audiences and all.
At any rate, if I do work on this, progress will be very gradual since I'm pretty busy these days. I certainly won't be concocting a run in ~1 month like I did with my last Sacred Stones TAS (the currently published one). Probably more like a few months to a year or so.
