Post by Miles

Posted: 9/21/2014 3:58 AM

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itsPersonnal

He/Him

Player (230)

Joined: 1/20/2012
Posts: 540

I did a little testing it turns out that the "wallcrawl from Tallon to Ice Beam" is a lot slower than I expected. You need to aether jump up FCS twice in order to load the room, and transition to the room. The only way I can imagine that could avoid doing this, is to scale the room (which is incredibly difficult since there are very, very few invisible ledges around the room) and then infinite boost from around the area with the door to the Underwater Frigate, up to the Ice Beam door at the top of the room, passing through the load trigger on the way up. I can say with 99% certainty that this would be possible, the trajectory of the infinite boost looks very perceive, but not impossible. Needless to say though, this will never ever happen.

Completed: 2010-Current | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Individual Level TASes 2014 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 1:05:03.23 2014 | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Hero Story (w/ THC98) in 25:11.87 2016 | Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37 (In-Game Time) 2018 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:42.350 2020 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 0:39:20.10 2022 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:25.567 Currently working on: SA2:B DARK STORY

Posted: 9/21/2014 4:05 AM

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solarplex

Active player (477)

Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928

itsPersonnal wrote:

I did a little testing..

Well when we get to that section, the Four or five of us will simultaneously test this area!

Posted: 9/21/2014 4:19 AM

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itsPersonnal

He/Him

Player (230)

Joined: 1/20/2012
Posts: 540

You guys do not know what you're getting yourselves into.

Completed: 2010-Current | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Individual Level TASes 2014 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 1:05:03.23 2014 | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Hero Story (w/ THC98) in 25:11.87 2016 | Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37 (In-Game Time) 2018 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:42.350 2020 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 0:39:20.10 2022 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:25.567 Currently working on: SA2:B DARK STORY

Posted: 9/21/2014 4:53 AM

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exileut

Joined: 2/15/2009
Posts: 329

itsPersonnal wrote:

You guys do not know what you're getting yourselves into.

Dolphin's TAS tools/syncing are worse than I would like, but so were Super Mario 64 and OoT's when those first came out.

Working on: Legend of Legaia, Vagrant Story

Posted: 9/21/2014 4:54 AM

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RachelB

She/Her

Player (129)

Joined: 12/3/2011
Posts: 1579

Dolphin hasn't desynced on gc games in years.

Posted: 9/21/2014 4:58 AM

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itsPersonnal

He/Him

Player (230)

Joined: 1/20/2012
Posts: 540

The Sonic Adventure 2 TAS is being made on a version of Dolphin from 2012, and we have yet to see a desync 16 minutes in...?

Completed: 2010-Current | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Individual Level TASes 2014 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 1:05:03.23 2014 | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Hero Story (w/ THC98) in 25:11.87 2016 | Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37 (In-Game Time) 2018 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:42.350 2020 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 0:39:20.10 2022 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:25.567 Currently working on: SA2:B DARK STORY

Posted: 9/21/2014 5:01 AM

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solarplex

Active player (477)

Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928

Technically there are some games on gamecube where dolphin desyncs, which was the teason for our four-man agent under fire TAS was halted due to cutscenes or something desyncing with us randomly on playbacks. Im unfamiliar with prime so im just here to do work when the guys and gals need me.

Posted: 10/6/2014 1:31 AM

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solarplex

Active player (477)

Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928

A little update for my boys working in this tas team: Between shots theres 7 frames, so input display shows: A, (blank 7 frames), A There is probably a ram watch somewhere but I can't find it lol.. Second frame count I did was for Charge Beam: which is 62 Frames of holding A between you can release. Thirdly, Here are the cheat tables I created. it has X,Y,Z position, Health and Metroid in Ball-Bomb charges. Really basic so far but hopefully we can get more detailed.. http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=03718861238390783956

Posted: 10/6/2014 10:56 AM

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got4n

Experienced player (589)

Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 1417
Location: France

Thanks Solar, just to know, what Dolphin version we use?

Current: Rayman 3 maybe? idk xD Paused: N64 Rayman 2 (with Funnyhair) GBA SMA 4 : E Reader (With TehSeven) TASVideos is like a quicksand, you get in, but you cannot quit the sand

Posted: 10/6/2014 2:04 PM

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solarplex

Active player (477)

Joined: 2/1/2014
Posts: 928

got4n wrote:

Thanks Solar, just to know, what Dolphin version we use?

Currently I used 4.0-3518

Posted: 10/12/2014 9:22 AM

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got4n

Experienced player (589)

Joined: 2/5/2011
Posts: 1417
Location: France

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=01998066320631311214 Cheat Table for the version we're using for TAS, only updated pointers. 4.0-3599

Current: Rayman 3 maybe? idk xD Paused: N64 Rayman 2 (with Funnyhair) GBA SMA 4 : E Reader (With TehSeven) TASVideos is like a quicksand, you get in, but you cannot quit the sand

Posted: 10/12/2014 8:55 PM

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Miles

Joined: 11/21/2006
Posts: 94

Here's some addresses I've found in the past. Doesn't include stuff like health/your inventory/etc., as those are in different locations every time you start the game and I have no clue how to use pointers or whatever to find them. https://www.dropbox.com/s/0tq7bdi5rce0emu/Prime.CT?dl=0

Posted: 10/12/2014 9:38 PM

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RachelB

She/Her

Player (129)

Joined: 12/3/2011
Posts: 1579

Miles wrote:

Here's some addresses I've found in the past. Doesn't include stuff like health/your inventory/etc., as those are in different locations every time you start the game and I have no clue how to use pointers or whatever to find them. https://www.dropbox.com/s/0tq7bdi5rce0emu/Prime.CT?dl=0

Easy way to find pointers is to find the address once, save state, then do whatever to make the address change, then find it again, and save state again. From there, search for 4 byte value > 0x80000000, load the other save state, then filter by changed by the difference between the two addresses.

Posted: 10/14/2014 8:47 PM

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Memory

She/Her

Site Admin, Skilled player (1556)

Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1766
Location: Dumpster

People have been breaking Metroid Prime since the year it came out ( http://www.metroid2002.com/sequence_breaking_topics_tbj_V1.0.php ). That is 12 years. People who either run metroid prime, and even those who just follow the game closely would like to see a tas represent these 12 years of knowledge, rather than see a group of people try to cram some of that knowledge into a far shorter amount of time. I highly recommend that if you don't already, start lurking the metroid2002 forums, start watching runs of the game on twitch ( http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Metroid%20Prime ), youtube and sda (all categories, don't just watch any%), learn all the terminology, take part in the metroid prime community, etc. Heck, it would be best if at least one of you started RUNNING the game. Try to get around a 1:10 in any% on console (if you run the game, you'll realize the differences between console and emulator). In addition, do 21%. Don't try speedrunning 21% or tasing it, just do it (with slow down if you must) to get a better understanding of the game. If you do all this, the end result will be way better than if you had not. If you do not put the time and effort into learning about the game, the people who are in the prime community will look down on your TAS. Half a year of playing around with the game does not sound enough to do the game justice. Your posts are not very hope inspiring to me. I have a feeling that you will end up with a worse time than the expected time of miles's segmented run that is currently on hold. I don't run the game, I've just lurked in the prime community for a while. I've learned quite a bit about the game just by lurking and watching runs. Also nobody brought up ghetto dashes, which is dashing into the edge of a platform to get a slight boost in height at the to make it onto the platform. They are too precise to implement in most console runs. Its done in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TaDibu4tg

[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours

[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero

Posted: 10/14/2014 10:55 PM

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Samsara

She/They

Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2239)

Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California

Lovely! Another piece of fanatical support to add onto the pile! This kind of excellent motivation keeps the team going!

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 Bluesky

warmCabin wrote:

You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.

Posted: 10/14/2014 11:16 PM

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Samsara

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Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2239)

Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California

Miles wrote:

If you have nothing to do but complain about warranted criticism then please go away.

If you have nothing to do but rehash the same "warranted criticism" in every post then please go away. What warrants your """"criticism"""", anyway? What warrants multiple posts that amount to nothing more than "please research the game"? What does it add to the discussion? What is there to discuss, even? There hasn't even been any work put into the movie and there's already so much negativity being thrown about. You're telling a group of people known to research the hell out of the games they TAS to... research the hell out of a game they're TASing. Is that really necessary? Is it necessary to have multiple people say it in separate posts? What is that supposed to accomplish aside from being extremely demotivating and setting an unnecessarily high quality standard for a run that, shockingly, is going to beat all existing records by default? You know what would be helpful? Actually talking about the physics and mechanics and glitches, explaining things in a way that's easy to understand for the group, and leaving all the bullshit "this isn't going to be entertaining" and "I don't have high hopes for this" comments out. This is a game you're supposed to love and cherish, you should be excited that the run is coming. If you're going to pull that elitism routine, then at least wait until a WIP comes out so you actually have something to criticize.

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 Bluesky

warmCabin wrote:

You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.

Posted: 10/14/2014 11:35 PM

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ais523

Editor, Player (44)

Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1029

From what I see, the situation is this. Most games don't have communities as active and knowledge about the game as Metroid Prime does. If I take a random low-quality platformers and hand it to an experienced TASer to TAS, they'll do what looks like a pretty good job of it to pretty much anyone, because the deep knowledge of the game just isn't there, and the TASer will probably know more about it than anyone else and the end of the experience. In the case of Metroid Prime, that quick approach to making TASes wouldn't work. It'd produce something that'd be impressive to a casual player, and contain lots of tricks they didn't know. But there's a huge community behind Metroid Prime who have been analysing it for years, and know many things that a TASer couldn't possibly discover in just, say, a few months. So the only way to get enough information to complete a Metroid Prime TAS in a reasonable amount of time is to use all the existing resources, both online, and by asking people who are aware of the game. This means that posts like TheMG2's are very useful; it could have been worded a little less harshly, but the actual content ("this is probably the best way to become more knowledgeable about the game") is probably good advice that's worth taking. What a TASing team for a game that's been analysed in this depth needs is advice about specifically what steps would help get at the analysis. There's also the added issue, that although the emulator has been made, as I understand it, accurate enough that it can gain a reasonably good approximation of what routes would be possible on console, it's also, as I understand it, different enough from any particular user's console that comparing times wouldn't be useful (and that fixing this would be too technically difficult). This means that although a TAS will be a decent approximation of what a console can do, it'll be hard for realtime runners to judge how good any particular room is under TAS conditions, and the run will look less authentic than perhaps we'd like. This may well mean that a TAS is doomed to be somewhat far off optimal, because the years of experience Metroid Prime on console may be impossible to apply directly. In a sense, this is a sad situation; it's a case where pretty much any TAS that could be made over the course of less than five years or so will be likely to be quite noticeably improvable. But in another way, it's a pretty encouraging situation; the TAS will still likely be very good compared to those of other games. The problem is not that it'll be bad in an absolute sense. The problem is that, unlike Random Platformer #129826, there'll be a lot of people who'll know how much better it could be.

Posted: 10/15/2014 12:03 AM

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Samsara

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Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2239)

Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California

ais523 wrote:

This means that posts like TheMG2's are very useful; it could have been worded a little less harshly, but the actual content ("this is probably the best way to become more knowledgeable about the game") is probably good advice that's worth taking.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I could have worded my comments less harshly as well, admittedly, and I apologize for that. Some of the posting just really doesn't sit right with me. Advice is definitely fine, encouraged even! Criticism is okay too, though as I said before, there's nothing to criticize right now so it's really out of place to start trying to correct things that haven't even happened yet. Explicitly telling people you don't have high hopes for the run, though? I feel like that's crossing the line. To me, it's a step short of telling someone they suck. Maybe it's just me, but if I were trying to learn a new game and a bunch of highly-respected people in the community told me it was nearly impossible to understand without years of experience and that they weren't expecting anything good out of me, I wouldn't want to learn that game at all anymore. Hell, I'd probably stop speedrunning altogether. The psychological impact can be astounding on certain people. Like I said, it'd be much more helpful to be active influences on the run instead of just telling everyone to look things up themselves. As the "people who know most about the game", they'll be researching you know anyway, you might as well elaborate on it in a way they'll understand. Have a little faith in the team, help them when they ask. Hell, set up a Skype chat or an IRC room or something so you can all discuss things in real time. Anything would be better than what I've been seeing. That's all I'm going to say. Leaving this thread for good now.

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 Bluesky

warmCabin wrote:

You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.

Posted: 10/15/2014 12:33 AM

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kirbymastah

Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 84

Except, you know, instead of trying to do the research first, they've already tried to start the TAS itself without full proper research despite saying they'll spend > 6 months researching. I'm fine with people starting a TAS, even if they don't know anything about the game to start with, as long as they take it seriously, and I will help wherever I can. However, they evidently are diving in without doing what was advised by basically every prime runner (which is to do some serious research and play-around before starting the TAS itself), and this will only turn out to be a really sub-par TAS if this continues (and no, people aren't looking for a perfect TAS, that's ridiculous). This isn't a game where you can just start immediately and figure things out as you go. And to be honest there are things the TAS team has said that are just flat out wrong about the game/physics. Can you blame themg2 (and other runners/knowledgeable people) for not having high hopes because of this attitude?

Posted: 10/15/2014 12:55 AM

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itsPersonnal

He/Him

Player (230)

Joined: 1/20/2012
Posts: 540

I feel like the general attitude towards anyone wanting to TAS this game is "you don't understand what you're getting yourself into". I for one, am probably the most qualified person here to be saying that, having worked with TASing this game first hand. It's disheartening to see people who clearly are new to the game, trying to take on such a ridiculous task. I'd have little faith in Miles being able to optimize a TAS of this game, even if he is easily the most knowledgeable person about Metroid Prime, period. Why on earth would I have expectations for a group of people who have yet to show me they have any idea what they're doing? I can't expect much more from them than maybe moving around the same pace as my 2012 WIP, which wasn't even scratching the surface of what a true TAS is capable of. Metroid Prime is a complicated game, it is far and above the most complicated game I've ever worked with, and being an experienced SM64, SA2B, SADX, SCWii and SMS TASer, that is saying something. I'm being true and honest, along with the other members of the community. Right now, they're in over their heads.

Completed: 2010-Current | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Individual Level TASes 2014 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 1:05:03.23 2014 | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Hero Story (w/ THC98) in 25:11.87 2016 | Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37 (In-Game Time) 2018 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:42.350 2020 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 0:39:20.10 2022 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:25.567 Currently working on: SA2:B DARK STORY

Posted: 10/15/2014 1:01 AM

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kirbymastah

Joined: 7/6/2012
Posts: 84

Thing is, everyone has to start somewhere. While I agree that it's hard to have much hope, it's also not very encouraging to keep saying that to people who are new to the game. Again, I'd be fine with the team working on this game if they put in the time and effort into researching this beforehand but (from what I've seen, read, and heard) they haven't really taken that seriously. Feel free to prove me wrong though.

Posted: 10/15/2014 1:03 AM

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itsPersonnal

He/Him

Player (230)

Joined: 1/20/2012
Posts: 540

I left the "Right now" in there for a reason. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Completed: 2010-Current | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Individual Level TASes 2014 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 1:05:03.23 2014 | Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Hero Story (w/ THC98) in 25:11.87 2016 | Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37 (In-Game Time) 2018 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:42.350 2020 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Any% in 0:39:20.10 2022 | Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom - Cheat% in 1:25.567 Currently working on: SA2:B DARK STORY

Posted: 10/15/2014 2:42 AM

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EEssentia

Joined: 4/13/2009
Posts: 431

Everything must start from something. You can't expect a fully-optimized TAS of a complicated game out of the bat. So what if it will be inferior? Great runs are made iteratively. If a semi-optimized run was done first, the TASers would learn a lot of things, such as how the game works, how the emulator works, quirks, etc. That would translate into experience that the TASers could then use to improve the TAS in subsequent runs and even help them to better understand how the techniques are done and how to properly implement them in the TAS. Then comes the stage of improving the product even more. A super-optimized speedrun of Metroid Prime did not come in one night. It has come this far after years of iterating improving of old runs. Give the TASers a chance. If they post a WIP, be supportive and help point out things that could be done better. Don't discourage them from not trying at all because then we will NEVER see a TAS. All speedruns begin with a practice run. Is a practice TAS really so bad?

Posted: 10/15/2014 3:13 AM

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sonicpacker

Active player (426)

Joined: 9/21/2009
Posts: 1047
Location: California

EEssentia wrote:

Is a practice TAS really so bad?

If the goal is publication. Which is the point the MP community is trying to make. They don't want a suboptimal, what should be [by definition] "perfect" run representing their longtime findings to people outside their community.

https://personalitygrowth.com/entp-myths-stereotypes-misconceptions-cliches-and-tropes-that-are-inaccurate/

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