Heh, that's even better ^^
I'm guessing you were ram-monitoring the Maple counter and the Gasha counters while you were doing this? I found the gasha counters by accident trying to pinpoint the Maple counter a few moments ago.
Also those two monsters you kill at the Maku Sapling battle don't count towards the counters. Disregard that, I'm and idiot.
EDIT: Now I remember what I came here to say: Double Shovels was funny as hell.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Pokota wrote:
You need to have at least two tiles of walkable space at both the entry point and the exit point, otherwise you'll just fall into a pit. The reason is that you're switching back and forth between tiles as you pitwalk, which makes the game try to pull you into the other pit. If there's an obstruction to where there's a pit of width 1 you can't fool the game into trying to pull you into the other pit because there is no other pit.
I see. Thanks for explaining that. Reviewing the dungeon that takes the key pitwalk out of the question. I guess the already existing bridge for the other pit counts as an obtrusion and not ground while pitwalking?
In the Gasha seed room? The bridge isn't an obstruction so much as a bridge, and moving diagonal (which is required for pitwalking) is slightly slower than moving orthogonal. Since the bridge is there, may as well use it.
Plus we needed the Gasha seed for... something? The ring was grabbed but not identified, so I'm guessing it manipulated the Yoll Graveyard tree into giving the Expert's Ring.
It may be slightly faster to pitwalk in the gasha seed room, I just haven't tried it.
We need to get 2 rings, because the first ring you get is always bad. You can't get a tier 4 ring from your first gasha tree.
I figured manipulating something else played into it, I just wasn't sure if it was luck-manipulating something else or if it had something specific to do with the rings. Pitwalking in the Gasha Seed room will depend on if the bridge is placed right where it needs to be when you first get to the ledge.
Incidentally (as I can't run Bizhawk on my laptop due to rendering shenanigans), what was the ring from Past Lynna?
I figured manipulating something else played into it, I just wasn't sure if it was luck-manipulating something else or if it had something specific to do with the rings. Pitwalking in the Gasha Seed room will depend on if the bridge is placed right where it needs to be when you first get to the ledge.
Incidentally (as I can't run Bizhawk on my laptop due to rendering shenanigans), what was the ring from Past Lynna?
idk, probably something useless like the octo ring.
Here's a WIP up to the start of d1. I'm not doing d1 yet since I need to plan my kills, but feedback would be nice, so I'm sharing it now. Technically, yoll graveyard isn't "final", as I'll probably edit in some slashes to get the RNG I want in the dungeon.
I managed to get 2 big blue rupees before unequipping the shovel, one of which was spent right away. I still need 1 more. Unfortunately maku path isn't quite as optimal as it could have been, but I think it's worth it, since I'll probably save an equip later on.
Btw, the d1 miniboss will be great for farming kills, as it looks like it will be necessary to an extent.
Oh, and I'd recommend changing the palette settings so it doesn't look washed out from being in GBA mode.
This looks really good for a first attempt. However, there's some minor issues. Triggering the custcene where Impa examines the stone from below like it is done here is 6 frames faster than your method.
You can also manipulate your subpixels to save a few frames here and there. For example, when you push the stone, you can hold up for a little longer, which gives you a better subpixel state for walking up.
There's also corner-boosting where you can move into an NPC at a specific pixel and you get pushed one pixel to the side. You do this at some places but not everywhere you could.
Now this is obviously really minor stuff so it is up to you if you want to go through the tedious work to get this run super-optimised but if you want to, you can compare parts of your run with my WIP to see where you lose frames. I think the only outright mistake in it (apart from the routing) is when I walk back to the stairs after getting the Graveyard Key. I only tried falling into the right hole but taking the left one makes the camera move less so that's pretty smart.
About the enemy kills: From what I remember it is possible to get 6 kills on the Miniboss without losing any time and 9 by losing ~20 frames. You really shouldn't have to farm more than that if you concentrate on killing a lot of enemies along the way (like the crow just before D1).
About the rupees: I'd say you need two more big blue rupees after the first one. You should be able to get one while retrieving Ricky's gloves. Now if I were you, I'd skip the second one you got and instead get one at the time portal just before D3. There's no guarantee that you'll get one there but I think you should be able to juggle soft and hard resets on Crescent Island to make it work.
This looks really good for a first attempt. However, there's some minor issues. Triggering the custcene where Impa examines the stone from below like it is done here is 6 frames faster than your method.
You can also manipulate your subpixels to save a few frames here and there. For example, when you push the stone, you can hold up for a little longer, which gives you a better subpixel state for walking up.
There's also corner-boosting where you can move into an NPC at a specific pixel and you get pushed one pixel to the side. You do this at some places but not everywhere you could.
Now this is obviously really minor stuff so it is up to you if you want to go through the tedious work to get this run super-optimised but if you want to, you can compare parts of your run with my WIP to see where you lose frames. I think the only outright mistake in it (apart from the routing) is when I walk back to the stairs after getting the Graveyard Key. I only tried falling into the right hole but taking the left one makes the camera move less so that's pretty smart.
About the enemy kills: From what I remember it is possible to get 6 kills on the Miniboss without losing any time and 9 by losing ~20 frames. You really shouldn't have to farm more than that if you concentrate on killing a lot of enemies along the way (like the crow just before D1).
About the rupees: I'd say you need two more big blue rupees after the first one. You should be able to get one while retrieving Ricky's gloves. Now if I were you, I'd skip the second one you got and instead get one at the time portal just before D3. There's no guarantee that you'll get one there but I think you should be able to juggle soft and hard resets on Crescent Island to make it work.
I should've watched your WIP earlier, bizhawk 1.4 is just really slow on my laptop.
Well, come to think of it, there's another disadvantage to getting that 2nd rupee, which is that I can't equip my satchel during the transition from leaving the maku tree screen. It saves half a second because of the way palette transitions work. I see you didn't do that in your old WIP, it's like nobody knows about that trick :/
Alright well, I think tokay will be a pain, but I'll cut out that 2nd rupee. I'll try to incorporate those optimizations also.
That's pretty much what my test run did, correct? Aside from the whimsical ring. It's not likely to be worth it. We'd have to bump into maple, and add a second trip to the ring shop, just so we can... 3 cycle the d2 miniboss? idk what else you'd use it for.
Edit: technically I guess we could buy it from the advance shop. It could save time with the d6 bosses, which would require a separate trip than if it were used in dungeon 2. Still not sure if it's worth it.
44. 3 Mystery Seeds from the Tree in Rolling Ridge
That's not necessary because the Seed Satchel that you get on Crescent Island always has Mystery Seeds in it.
Drenn wrote:
That's pretty much what my test run did, correct? Aside from the whimsical ring. It's not likely to be worth it. We'd have to bump into maple, and add a second trip to the ring shop, just so we can... 3 cycle the d2 miniboss? idk what else you'd use it for.
Edit: technically I guess we could buy it from the advance shop. It could save time with the d6 bosses, which would require a separate trip than if it were used in dungeon 2. Still not sure if it's worth it.
You can 3-cycle the D2 miniboss without using a ring by using a bomb on the last cycle. Using the Whimsical Ring you can 1-cycle him by getting two crits in a row. So if you don't lose too much time luck manipulating, you should about break even. However, it's really hard to guess how much time it would save on the later bosses because it all depends on how many crits you can get.
That's not necessary because the Seed Satchel that you get on Crescent Island always has Mystery Seeds in it.
Except that we're not actually getting the Fertile Soil and Lynna Village is too out of the way, so we have no other way to get back to Eastern Rolling Ridge. Why are we getting those particular seeds? I know we're spending 10 to get the Feather back, and we need 3 more to do the Nayru fight... do we really need to reserve more than 7 seeds for text warping?
So, here's something interesting. I managed to recreate the Veran Warp glitch in the japanese version of Ages, in real time, using a weaker form of sockfolder's arbitrary code setup. It's kinda ridiculous for RTA, though. Here's the highlight.
I don't know how to call the credits directly, and I might not have been able to anyway, since I could only run a very small amount of code. Veran Warp was just a matter of overwriting 2 bytes. In any case, I'm going to stick with the US version, since I don't want to run the risk of having a full minute of staring at the map screen in the TAS...
I have a new WIP up to the start of dungeon 2. I hope I didn't make too many mistakes :P don't be afraid to criticize though.
Like I said I redid it from scratch, unfortunately I didn't save as much time as I'd hoped (22 frames entering d1), but I'll take it. I managed to kill 29 enemies between planting the 2nd seed and finishing d1, and that number went up to 35 by the time I entered d2. That leaves 5 enemies to kill in dungeon 2, easy.
I opted to not get the whimsical ring. If I was doing all the dungeons I'd probably get either that or the power ring L2 from the advance shop. As it is, it would have to save some time in D6 to be really worth it, which I'm not confident that it will (because of the extra trip to the ring shop).
Oh and Pokota, if you kindly decide to encode this one, please use the GBA palettes :P
Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1942
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden
The first thing I noticed was that you could have killed the gels slightly faster in the Maku Road. A few possible damage boosts, such as after the first key in D1.
There is a faster way of lightning the torches to get the Bracelets, as seen here in SL's old WIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXtWUfPixw&feature=player_detailpage#t=129. I believe it saves like 2-3 frames or so. Or maybe you didn't do it because of RNG stuff? I noticed that was the reason you didn't slash before entering the Maku Road.
Except for those, it looks pretty nice!
The first thing I noticed was that you could have killed the gels slightly faster in the Maku Road. A few possible damage boosts, such as after the first key in D1.
There is a faster way of lightning the torches to get the Bracelets, as seen here in SL's old WIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXtWUfPixw&feature=player_detailpage#t=129. I believe it saves like 2-3 frames or so. Or maybe you didn't do it because of RNG stuff? I noticed that was the reason you didn't slash before entering the Maku Road.
Except for those, it looks pretty nice!
I'd watched swordless's TAS, but somehow I couldn't figure out how that would be faster. Turns out I wasn't standing close enough to the torch. Ah well... maybe I could splice it in, but that hasn't gone so well for me in the past.
How is it that I could've killed the gels faster?
Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1942
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden
Here is one of two methods for the gels, both ending up in the same frame count (2 frames faster): http://www.mediafire.com/download/bk62isfq4iqi50b/Ages+WIP+2.bk2
The other method is to walk up diagonal further, to have the bottom gel jump higher up, and then walk diagonally down to kill them all in one slash.
Nice job implementing the subpixel manipulation. In some places you can also move diagonally into a wall to save time later on, like after unequipping the shovel or when you regain control when you search for the fairies. Right after that there's a part where you have to change back and forth between two screens. In that case you can make it so on every screen you move diagonally for only 3 frames and move one pixel vertically every frame.
You can get corner boosts when moving diagonally into NPCs. I don't know if you knew that, some of the boosts look a bit odd but not sure if it lost time.
As Tompa said, damage boosts are always nice especially while you're killing stuff. Not getting a damage boost off the guay the first time looks a bit ugly. He was going the wrong way for that but I guess you could have manipulated him into moving down?
35 kills is almost too many. In D2 you have to kill 3 enemies, you're pretty much guaranteed to kill 3 Stalfos with one bomb and there's a lot of Keese and Ropes along the way. So maybe you could cut out some slower kills like the Like-Like. Although I guess that helped manipulating the Goron Dancing since the pattern you got was indeed really nice.
In Maku Road you shouldn't have moved diagonally before pushing the last block.
In D1 when you push that thing that changes colours it moves faster when you are at the middle of it when you start pushing.
When a key drops from the ceiling I believe it spawns relative to the camera position so it drops faster when the camera is lower on the screen. I don't think you had enough time to do it here with the manipulation you got. Just a thing to keep in mind for the future.
After the miniboss you can kill the 3rd Stalfos with an Ember Seed while slashing the sword. That's faster and you also get a 5 rupee drop.
The boss fight is slower than in this WIP: User movie #12996165641066198
You can pick up the Essence a little faster by walking on the side and moving towards the middle when you're close to it. That way it reaches you faster in the cutscene. It is really weird that you can only pick it up every 4th frame in this emulator version. Might have something to do with the new frame timing.
After getting the Pegasus Seeds it's faster to go down rather than right.
Anyway, while we're at it, I've done some routing for the rest of the game:
In order for the Whimsical Ring to be worth it, it would have to save more than 1000 frames from D4 onwards. I'm not sure if that is possible. Here's an example for the boss fight in D6: User movie #16540268996119658
The jump before Cheval's grave can be made without a bomb boost with really good subpixels.
Visiting the Ember Seed tree before or after Rafton costs only 150 frames so it's worth it for the later warp.
In the Tokey shop getting the Power Bracelet first saves an equip which should be more than the feather saves in the meantime.
There's a different route for D3 that theonly0 came up with: After destroying the second crystal you get the key where you have to kill the two Moldorms. Then you enter the Miniboss fight from the wrong side. After that you step in the warp, get the Seed Shooter and destroy the remaining crystals. Then you deathwarp, get the Bosskey and finish the dungeon. According to my timing this was 132 frames faster than the RTA route.
In D6 the key on the right side is faster to get because you can just savewarp (or deathwarp) instead of having to backtrack.
Name the specific palette you want and I will use it.
Currently testing for sync on the lastest BizHawk release.
"GBA" please :)
SBD wrote:
Nice job implementing the subpixel manipulation. In some places you can also move diagonally into a wall to save time later on, like after unequipping the shovel or when you regain control when you search for the fairies.
Since getting the pegasus seeds I've been more conscious of this, since subpixels affect all movement, you can actually overshoot the pixel you want sometimes.
Right after that there's a part where you have to change back and forth between two screens. In that case you can make it so on every screen you move diagonally for only 3 frames and move one pixel vertically every frame.
You can get corner boosts when moving diagonally into NPCs. I don't know if you knew that, some of the boosts look a bit odd but not sure if it lost time.
I've been doing corner boosts by walking directly into NPC's at the corner, it moves me 1 unit in both directions without affecting subpixels. I think I got a "double" boost on one of the workers that was moving towards me. Is it better to walk diagonally into them?
As Tompa said, damage boosts are always nice especially while you're killing stuff. Not getting a damage boost off the guay the first time looks a bit ugly. He was going the wrong way for that but I guess you could have manipulated him into moving down?
In the beginning I wasn't quite warmed up to the idea of damage boosts, I guess. By the time I thought of doing that for the crow, I would have had to rework the RNG at the start of the dungeon to make it work :(
35 kills is almost too many. In D2 you have to kill 3 enemies, you're pretty much guaranteed to kill 3 Stalfos with one bomb and there's a lot of Keese and Ropes along the way. So maybe you could cut out some slower kills like the Like-Like. Although I guess that helped manipulating the Goron Dancing since the pattern you got was indeed really nice.
I wasn't really interested in killing that like-like, but it did allow me to get that dance pattern, which was worth it. It was tricky because I had to manipulate the dance right after manipulating the like-like...
I somehow hadn't thought of killing the shrouded stalfos with a bomb. But, they don't count as kills if they fall into the holes. It doesn't seem realistic to get all 3.
In Maku Road you shouldn't have moved diagonally before pushing the last block.
I noticed that after rewatching it yesterday :(
In D1 when you push that thing that changes colours it moves faster when you are at the middle of it when you start pushing.
When a key drops from the ceiling I believe it spawns relative to the camera position so it drops faster when the camera is lower on the screen. I don't think you had enough time to do it here with the manipulation you got. Just a thing to keep in mind for the future.
After the miniboss you can kill the 3rd Stalfos with an Ember Seed while slashing the sword. That's faster and you also get a 5 rupee drop.
The boss fight is slower than in this WIP: User movie #12996165641066198
Hmm. I believe I lost a few frames because of the direction he moved in, but I noticed that you did 2 slashes and a spin attack, while I did slash spin-attack slash. I'm not sure if that matters, I didn't experiment with that.
You can pick up the Essence a little faster by walking on the side and moving towards the middle when you're close to it. That way it reaches you faster in the cutscene. It is really weird that you can only pick it up every 4th frame in this emulator version. Might have something to do with the new frame timing.
After getting the Pegasus Seeds it's faster to go down rather than right.
Good to know.
Anyway, while we're at it, I've done some routing for the rest of the game:
In order for the Whimsical Ring to be worth it, it would have to save more than 1000 frames from D4 onwards. I'm not sure if that is possible. Here's an example for the boss fight in D6: User movie #16540268996119658
The jump before Cheval's grave can be made without a bomb boost with really good subpixels.
Visiting the Ember Seed tree before or after Rafton costs only 150 frames so it's worth it for the later warp.
In the Tokey shop getting the Power Bracelet first saves an equip which should be more than the feather saves in the meantime.
There's a different route for D3 that theonly0 came up with: After destroying the second crystal you get the key where you have to kill the two Moldorms. Then you enter the Miniboss fight from the wrong side. After that you step in the warp, get the Seed Shooter and destroy the remaining crystals. Then you deathwarp, get the Bosskey and finish the dungeon. According to my timing this was 132 frames faster than the RTA route.
In D6 the key on the right side is faster to get because you can just savewarp (or deathwarp) instead of having to backtrack.
Thanks a lot for this :)
Looks like I have my work cut out for me :P
There is a location for a potential text-warp in Mermaid's Cave. It is in the room with the Scent Seed key. Using this text warp will take you across the chasm, saving 3 to 5 seconds.
Currently testing for sync on the lastest BizHawk release.
