Tired of always helping Sonic get by, Tails has finally decided it is his turn to break the game. This run goes where no other runs have gone before and uses a disassembly of the game in order to squeeze the most of every trick.
Emulator used: Gens 11b + S3KCamhack + SolidityViewer + (partial)HitboxDisplay + LUA HUD for Genesis Sonic games
Commentary with HDL and Marzo (sadly, lacking video due to technical issues)

Game objectives

  • Ignores delays caused by bonus effects
  • Aims for fastest (primarily in-game) time
  • Takes Damage to save time
  • Abuses death
  • Abuses programming errors
  • Counts time spent dying
  • Manipulates luck

Comments

New tricks

"Stair" clip

When a character is on-air, not moving upwards (i.e., vertical speed is zero or it is downwards), and his vertical speed speed is at least equal to his horizontal speed (in magnitude), he may fall through otherwise-solid ground. If the pixel portion of the vertical velocity plus 8 is greater than the distance both of the character's bottom collision anchors are inside the floor, then no collision with the floor is registered and the character can fall through. This is explicitly used in HCZ1 to enter the wall, and at LZR (both acts) to clip through the stairs. It is implicitly used to speed up entering the ground in LBZ1 and in MHZ1.
I believe this extra check was added to let you fall through a higher ledge when jumping to it from below if you did not go high enough to reach it.

Camera locking

In general, bosses wait for the camera to lock before they do anything. In all such bosses, the camera position was manipulated to make it lock as soon as possible.

General Comments

This run was made with constant reference to the disassembly available at Sonic Retro. This disassembly was used to determine the exact positions where the camera locks, how bosses and badniks behave, how several glitches work, and so forth. All this information is being collected and revised, and will be released in the future.

In-Game Time Table

ActTime[1]
Angel Island 10:40::48
Angel Island 21:15::32
Hydrocity 10:20::47
Hydrocity 20:24::35
Marble Garden 10:35::30
Marble Garden 20:31::08
Carnival Night 10:36::20
Carnival Night 20:31::31
IceCap 10:48::44
IceCap 20:00::42
Launch Base 10:33::17
Launch Base 21:06::35
Mushroom Hill 10:34::20
Mushroom Hill 20:47::30
Flying Battery 11:01::14
Flying Battery 21:06::31
Sandopolis 11:09::43
Sandopolis 21:11::33
Lava Reef 10:51::50
Lava Reef 20:21::55
Hidden Palace0:26::44
Sky Sanctuary0:53::28
Death Egg 11:04::51
Death Egg 21:44::31
Total18:49::29

Time lost to deaths

ActTime[1]
Hydrocity 20:05::19
Death Egg 20:04::31
[1] The value after the final colon pair indicates the in-game frame counter, and is restricted to the 0-59 range. It is updated every frame (except during lag frames), and increments the in-game second when resetting to zero.

Level-by-Levels comments

Here we mostly only mention what's not obviously clear when watching the run, each other situation pretty much speaks for itself or has been used in earlier TASes of this game.

Angel Island 2

By jumping at the right spot by the entrance to the tunnels, you don't slow down and thus save a considerable amount of time. With Tails, taking the upper route was the faster option.

Hydrocity 1

Here we abused a variation of the stair clip, which in this case was much harder to execute as the object that stops the horizontal movement resides quite far from the edge of the terrain. A small bit of time was lost to setup the quick death at the start of the next act.

Marble Garden 1

Tails can't sink far enough when jumping from the rolling state and therefore can't enter the yellow spring like Sonic, and thus a slightly longer route was necessary. There was luck manipulation at the end of the level: we caused a few extra signpost sparkles to be created to manipulate the MGZ2 boss pattern.

Marble Garden 2

There is a glitch that affects the boss fight: when the character is in a certain range of positions, the game will trigger the screen shaking and rising terrain. The problem is that going over the top of the screen when far enough to the right will trigger this. The main issue is that this creates a lot of terrain that make it impossible to break through the roof of the boss' arena. For this reason, the glitch is triggered early, so that this additional terrain has moved up enough to let Tails go in. There is a bonus to this glitch: while on air, Tails is dragged up by 3 pixels every 8 frames, meaning he can deliver 7 hits while above the screen.

Carnival Night 1

Wheel glitch happens because of the wheel's very large "hitbox", which encompasses the monitors, coupled with a bug in the code that short-circuits the case when the character is standing on an object. We could not jump for the boss fight or we would lose wheel glitch (which we want to keep for the next act), so the fight had to go a little slower than it could otherwise be done.

Carnival Night 2

Jumping off the barrel does not end wheel glitch. Wheel glitch is used along with a bug in the game's collision checking to enter the wall; after that, comes an ultra-rare vertical zip. We then used the glitched gravity to fall horizontally all the way to the boss.

IceCap

When only having one character, the slope glitch can still be activated by standing on the very right part of the moving ice-block as you hit the wall. Running though the act is faster then rolling as your speed won't be capped when you reach 16/pixels frame.

Launch Base 1

Here we abused the spike crusher to quickly perform a level wrap.

Launch Base 2

This was the most resilient level by far -- we simply found no way to break it with Tails. Due to a stroke of luck, we did not have to luck-manipulate the flamethrowers out of the way. At the first boss we flew over an invisible wall in order to start damaging the boss earlier.

Mushroom Hill 1

The boss' flames were on the way, so they were manipulated away at the start of the level with pauses.

Mushroom Hill 2

The upper route is the fastest, so we took the upper route. Tails is the only character other than Hyper Sonic that can gain enough speed to jump all the way to the bottom route at the end without help.

Flying Battery 1

A zip exist in the early part of the act, but that proved to be ~10 frames slower than the method that is used here instead. However zips became useful after the outdoor area to get to boss much faster.

Flying Battery 2

As the boss in the previous act is defeated, standing on the edges of the capsule will give you the slope glitch, which is used here to speed up the act considerably. The rising terrain at the end is triggered by camera position, not character position. Also, once triggered, there is nothing that can be done to speed up their rise. Once the terrain stops rising, it is replaced by a platform object which allows jumping through.

Sandopolis 1

Jump out of the sand, up the sand fall, fly to the platform above, hit the ceiling to zip left to a level wrap, wait for the boss to get close to the quick sand, hit it once - done. Luck manipulation at the end of the level: we caused a few extra signpost sparkles to be created to manipulate the starting positions of the SOZ2 ghosts.

Sandopolis 2

The ghost manipulation before the start of the act made it possible to play the whole act with the lights out. A number of glitches were used throughout the act including screen wrap, falling through the floor, the stair clip and spin dashing through a sprite off screen.

Lava Reef 1

Here we entered Knuckles starting area to perform a level wrap using the spike crusher. The hand boss was manipulated to be in the exact spot we want it to be by adding pauses at the start of the level.

Lava Reef 2

Level wrapped through most the act and then used the stair clip to pass the objects blocking the pipe.

Sky Sanctuary

The boss can move in different patterns and needs to be manipulated at the start of the act.

Death Egg 1

In the beginning we abused the extending stairs to perform a small zip.

Death Egg 2

Used another stair to enter the wall and work our way to a level wrap.

Other comments

Thanks goes to Nitsuja and Upthorn for their Sonic runs; to Orkal for his glitch videos; to HHS for his explanation of the Angel Island/Hydrocity transition glitches; to mike89 for his blooper videos; to HDL for hosting the TAS, and for his general awesomeness at this game; to the folks at SonicRetro involved in the making of the S3&K disassembly.
The Launch Base 1 crusher trick was found by DMTM with Hyper Tails; DMTM also discovered the Death Egg 1 zip.
S3KGlitches found out the Lava Reef 1 level wrap with Knuckles; we soon put it to use with Tails.
gamble5688 found out the DEZ2 level wrap, and he discovered that the LBZ1 platforms pulls you through walls.

turska: Judging.

turska: Great audience response. Accepting for publication to Moons as a new branch.


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I have really enjoyed the swiftness of the Orange Blur. Want more! Also, I have selected a few screenshots out of tradition:
AzumaK wrote: I swear my 1 year old daughter's favorite TASVideo is your R4MI run :3 xxNKxx wrote: ok thanks handsome feos :D Help improving TASVideos!
Patashu
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I like screenshots 3 and 5 :)
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My vote is for #1, but I've always had a fondness for the more understated screenshots.
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#5, definitely. I love the screenshots that just make you ask "wtf is going on there" :D
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2!
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
BigBoct
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I like seeing Tails inside a monitor and his face pointed down, so I'd go for 3.
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1!
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
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I was going to say that, although completely badass, the Carnival Night Zone with the wheel glitch screenshot has been done to death. But then I checked and I guess I misremembered because none of the published Sonic 3 runs have it, even the one I was responsible for publishing. So my vote is for 2, 1 or 3 in that order.
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WST
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I certainly love #2. Spindashing on what? To where? For what? =D (obviously, as a TASer of this game, I know the answers, but the feelings of a casual player will be like that)
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Spikestuff
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I felt Like I've seen 2 too many times (altered different yes.) #1
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zwataketa
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Could someone please encode this on youtube?
I quit TASing.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2468] Genesis Sonic 3 & Knuckles "Tails" by Aglar & marzojr in 30:12.52
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Any plans for a "Modern" "Camhack" encode?
"The guy was fatally injured and wants to be covered by God's tears (rain) before he dies. God is too busy to bother because it wastes frames." Frames 16:26
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I'll reencode all of them since DMTM stole my logo, and the current 512kb camhack has wrong subtitles (timing was picked from Gens itself).
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Spikestuff
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feos wrote:
I'll reencode all of them since DMTM stole my logo, and the current 512kb camhack has wrong subtitles (timing was picked from Gens itself).
And this is why you make a wacky small logo not your actual logo. Because everyone will make their own HD one but not SD.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
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feos wrote:
I'll reencode all of them since DMTM stole my logo, and the current 512kb camhack has wrong subtitles (timing was picked from Gens itself).
Will the "Update" show up in the Recent List? Or will I have to just check in on the entryevery once in a while?
"The guy was fatally injured and wants to be covered by God's tears (rain) before he dies. God is too busy to bother because it wastes frames." Frames 16:26
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Dunno, but once I add them, I'll announce it here.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Okay, camhack downloadables are added, youtuber will follow shortly. Not sure if I really need to reencode regular ones...
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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feos wrote:
I'll reencode all of them since DMTM stole my logo, and the current 512kb camhack has wrong subtitles (timing was picked from Gens itself).
Subtitles? I don't see any Subs in the MKV.
"The guy was fatally injured and wants to be covered by God's tears (rain) before he dies. God is too busy to bother because it wastes frames." Frames 16:26
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He means the video tag, with the game name, time, author, and the TASVideos watermark.
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MarbleousDave
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Ponyfied Encode: Link to video
Guga
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PikachuMan wrote:
Ponyfied Encode: Link to video
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Spikestuff
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PikachuMan once again we do not require this.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
WST
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Spikestuff wrote:
PikachuMan once again we do not require this.
Who asked you? He made an encode for those who is interested. Don’t say «we», it’s your own personal opinion.
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Pokota
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But Spikestuff does raise a good point. What purpose does a ponified encode serve? I can understand a camhacked encode, or an encode that shows off all the lua tools that were visible during the making of the TAS, but a simple graphical replacement doesn't exactly add anything. Especially when the video is only in 240p and therefore is hard to see the graphical changes on. Plus it would probably be more in character for Dash to be replacing Knuckles in a Knuckles run, as Knuckles' X speed increases the longer he flies
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