Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
PJ wrote:
I'm sure you already know this, but there are several ways to get through the spike ball section on the far right. If you damage boost off a skeleton guy, the balls will not crush you during your invincibility frames. The damage boost even refreshes your dash, so you can cover a lot of ground. You can also dash straight through the spike balls if you dash immediately before they crush you. I don't know what the frame window is, but it should be easy enough to test. I know it is consistent though, because I used to do it pretty frequently in our practice sessions.
Keep up the great work, t0ast! This is looking amazing!
I knew about using the skeletons to quickly damage boost through the spike balls, but not about dashing through them. I'm guessing the hop at the start prevents the collision? Regardless, will definitely try to put that to use, so thanks for the tip and encouragement as always :-)
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
I'm not sure if it is the hop that does it or if it is a thing like "two objects try to simultaneously occupy the same space and the game doesn't know how to handle it". At the very least, it is reproducible so the mechanics don't really bother me. :P
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
Made it to the spiky balls and tested dashing through/over them successfully. It does appear to be during the hop where collision is avoided. The timing is relatively flexible (basically the entirety of the time a character is off the ground), but manipulating the spiky balls to not spawn in the same path while recovering, while possible, is still an unknown to me. At a glance, I'm guessing it's driven off of some combination of the frame counter and screen position coordinates, but I'm not really sure at this point. I'll definitely be spending some time here trying to figure it out because getting through without taking damage would be amazing (but not required since I can still spend 2-3 hearts if needed).
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
Here's up to the sage:
Link to video.BK2 File (Bizhawk 1.7.2)
At the start is the before-mentioned health grab for Pocky, while Rocky cleans up enemies to reduce the upcoming double dash lag. The fire breathing blue head things require 16 hits to kill, so the moderate amount of lag required to dash through them pales in comparison. The hand enemies are cleaned up on the way to set up the next dash as well, because the lag reduction makes it faster overall.
Further experimentation in the spiky ball area still has me thinking it's a combination of a timer and screen position, but I still have yet to work out the specifics. That said, the possibilities for manipulation aren't as numerous in practice as I was expecting, so I went ahead and completed the area.
The main things limiting route choices here are the restrictive nature of solo dashes, the skeletons, and health restrictions (to keep upcoming double dashes).
The dashes are problematic because they're required to avoid the spiky balls when there are no safe areas nearby, but commit you to a lengthy distance and recovery time. Because of that, the next ball can quickly become difficult, if not impossible to avoid. Dashing diagonally instead of upward helps at times, but is far from a magic bullet for manipulation or spiky ball avoidance.
The skeletons were almost as big of a pain as the spiky balls. They target one character at a time and will occasionally switch. They will attack in the direction of the character as soon as they line up horizontally, regardless of which path they may be on. If you happen to be adjacent to one targeting you, it's nearly impossible to avoid taking damage. Once you combine all of that with their positions, you're basically guaranteed to take damage from them at least once, barring an impractical amount of path shuffling and waiting.
As for health, I needed to eventually get Rocky on the left, otherwise the skeletons were going to eat away most of his health. He actually didn't wind up needing more health from the chest, but the brief invulnerability it grants provided the only viable pacing I could find to safely get past the last few balls. Since Pocky had health to spare, she took all of the skeleton damage and used it for damage boosting.
Once out of the spiky ball area, it is possible to double dash through the next blue head fire breathing thing, but it travels too far, activates the spiky balls, and becomes prohibitively laggy while waiting for the sage.
Finally, in case you didn't notice it in the spiky ball area, Pocky shrugged off what should have been hits from two of the balls @ 0:20 and 0:24. No idea why at this time, but I'll try to look into it.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Awesome! Yea this is an incredibly tricky section to optimize but I really like your solution! Your notes are really entertaining for me to read, too. Haha. I hope you include them all in your submission comments. :D
Great work as always!
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
Now with all of the crazy work, holidays, and vacationing out of the way, I can get back to this. Here's Stage 5 completed. The new stuff starts around 1:45.
Link to videoBK2 File (Bizhawk 1.7.2)
Right away there's another tricky area in terms of optimization. You have to wait for the sage to drop the bomb, but the question is where. Running straight through to the next set of spiky balls moves you further in the level faster, but brings about a ton of lag due to the balls, spark enemies, and sage all crowding the screen. Keeping away from the spiky balls saves some lag, but puts you at a positional disadvantage and delays the last spark which still needs to die before proceeding (again, because lag). The best compromise I could find was to kill the two sparks on the other side of the wall ASAP and then stage Pocky in a place to pick up a bomb and kill the last spark quickly while Rocky started to venture into the spiky balls.
Pocky uses item invincibility out of convenience rather than necessity this time since these spiky balls don't present nearly as much of a challenge. No manipulation is needed this time since safe areas are never more than a single diagonal dash away.
As with the previous one, it is possible (albeit very difficult) to double dash cleanly through the fire-spitting blockade and the twisting path, but it's way too laggy. The fire-spitter and spark are simply on screen too long. It wound up being faster to kill them both and proceed into the next area normally. Hand enemies are killed again to make productive use of time while Rocky catches up and minimize lag on the next double dash.
That double dash again follows the RTA because it's really good and the area it bypasses is really terrible. There's enough going on there that you're basically stuck with another mountain of lag no matter what you do. It's also at this point you can see that the Mandolin Lady's speedrunning game is not quite as strong as we once thought it was while Pocky and Rocky pass her by. I found this to be way more funny than it probably really is after just getting done crunching through so many iterations in this section. Any contribution to lag she might have is negligible because the game is already at its limit (every other frame lag) and waiting the 30-ish frames it takes for her to despawn is slower overall.
On the approach to the boss, I walked the last bit of distance instead of dashing to enable the sprite delay glitch. I figure the entertainment is worth the ~10 frame cost. If I had dashed, the glitch would not be possible due to the characters being stuck in dash recovery before and after the boss loading pause.
The vampire/bat boss is a big fat liar, claiming he has 32767 HP, but in reality, the total is closer to 2048. How his HP works is that once you deal more than 512 damage, he transitions to Phase 2 (bat form), which has 1536 HP. Unfortunately the transition to the "real" HP number isn't always immediate if he's in the middle of doing something, which is nearly all the time. Any extra damage dealt beyond the initial 512 or during that delay time will not carry over into Phase 2.
In spite of that possible delay and the boss's slightly smaller size limiting bomb effectiveness, at least one bomb is still needed here. The boss is ridiculously mobile and even likes to fly around off-screen at times. Phase 2 is equally awful because the boss will form a sizable rotating shield of individual bat enemies that get in the way of dealing damage to him. I was going in to this battle expecting to need two bombs, but got away with just one. This was accomplished by positioning and timing Rocky's bomb to catch the boss between actions so to not waste any damage ticks during the phase transition. This left the boss with only 536 HP, which turns out is just barely low enough that it can be taken out with normal shots before the boss finishes its transformation animation and starts building its shield. Considering how narrow the timing is at both points here, I don't think it'd be a viable RTA strat.
Having the additional bomb for Stage 6 will definitely work out in my favor. I just need to figure out how I'm actually going to use it. I'll tweak the bomb planning sheet once I figure it out, but I'm fairly certain at this point I'll be using it on the final boss to skip fighting the statues and do a little damage to him early.
Unfortunately the extra hearts left in reserve for each character extend the bonus time slightly (16 frames per 1/2 heart), but since I couldn't find a practical or entertaining way to lose more health, I decided to let it go. Arbitrary damage would have cost about as much time and would likely diminish entertainment.
PJ wrote:
Your notes are really entertaining for me to read, too. Haha. I hope you include them all in your submission comments. :D
Yes, they'll be there for the most part. I'm planning on at least concisely covering all of the noteworthy technical points, difficulties, tricks, lag management points, etc.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
And that's a wrap:
Link to videoUpdated .BK2 file (BizHawk 1.7.2)
Alternatively, I have a temp encode of the whole run which can be found here
Unfortunately it turned out that the start of Stage 6 wasn't quite the DOUBLE DASH ALL THE THINGS wonderland that it is for RTAers. With one exception, double dashing causes just enough lag to make it slower than solo dashing and selective killing by an annoyingly small margin. Suffice it to say this increased the difficulty of getting through there by a bit.
The enemy needing the most attention when it came to manipulation were the large beasts. If the character it's targeting is too far off from the middle of the screen, it will leap to the left or right to block them. The only time it won't do this is while it's preparing to shoot its large fireballs.
As with the Stage 5 boss, I waste about 10 frames walking instead of dashing up to the armor miniboss. Its sprite delay glitch turned out to be the best in the game, though tragically short-lived since there is no dialog to wait through. It will likely be a suggested screenshot in the submission.
Strategy is basically the same as RTA. Use a bomb to take out as much of its 2560 HP as possible and then abuse its collision-free torso to quickly and safely deal out the rest of the damage. The best bomb I could get dealt 2000 damage, which took its health low enough that it didn't even have enough time to shoot its laggy lightning.
Finally there's the fight with Black Mantle. Since its sprite delay isn't nearly as amusing and Pocky and Rocky have a ton of health that would slow down the bonus time, I use the shield to lose nearly all of it in sync with the music.
Black Mantle has 4096 HP and his shield-generating statues have 640. The first bomb takes out the shields and deals 1200 points of damage to Black Mantle. This was definitely more than I was expecting. Once he becomes vulnerable again, overlapping Rocky and Pocky's last bombs yields 3000 damage in total and immediately ends the fight and the game.
Since the official timing of these videos appears to be taken from power on to last required input, I ended the movie file immediately at the last bomb input. If for some reason this is less desirable than extending the time with some minor entertainment during bonus downtime, then it can be easily added. I could also forego jumping into the shield repeatedly if it's not well received since it technically wouldn't make the last input occur any earlier or later.
One last quick note for RTAers: the timing and positioning to get a 1200 damage first bomb on Black Mantle is loose enough that an RTA should be able to easily replicate it or come very close. It's basically dead-center and about 6 frames worth of downward movement from the point where you'd take damage from the shield (a tiny bit further than that is okay as well). The other two bombs require way more precision in placement and timing, so I unfortunately can't make any good recommendations in that regard.
And now for the end result:
Frames: 67321
Time: 18:40.18
Rerecords: 59565
If there are any objections or questions, now's the time, because I'm going to start working on finalizing my submission text, doing one final check for any low-hanging fruit, and then submit it sometime within the next few days. After that, my plan is to take a break and then come back to this game fresh, chasing further improvements on every stage and adjusting anything that might not be up to snuff with those reviewing the submission.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Great finish, t0ast! I had a feeling that the double dashes were a bit too laggy on that stage, so it is really neat to see your alternate strat! Really great work as always. ^_^ These boss fights are incredible.
This TAS is really impressive! Your lag manipulation is really strong, and the choices of double dashes were perfect. This is not an easy game to optimize. :P
Very nice! Congrats on finding nearly perfect RNG and putting down a solid run with it. I'll update the submission text accordingly (though the time difference will be a little greater due to the difference in TAS/RTA timing standards).
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
i start my timing on start and end on mantra kill SDA uses on character control, but i feel like thats wrong since already at the start you manipulate the intro to give you a sage otherwise its a reset
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
Akisto wrote:
i start my timing on start and end on mantra kill SDA uses on character control, but i feel like thats wrong since already at the start you manipulate the intro to give you a sage otherwise its a reset
True, it's definitely not a fair comparison, but it's the closest in terms of time that I could find. Without this site having an accepted TAS that I could compare mine to, I chose to mention RTAs because they're the only other good examples of speedrunning this game has available at this time. This was done mostly to give people who might be unfamiliar with this game a basic idea of how fast it can normally be played.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Damn... after almost 9 years someone finally did it! Thank you T0ast. :-D
To think I was 21 and probably drunk as hell when I originally made this thread.
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
Hey, just wanted to stop in and mention that I'm back to working on this. Kinda hype to be able to do this with TAStudio now since it wasn't fully up and running until I was most of the way done with the original run.
Goals at the moment are as follows. Feel free to provide any suggestions.
GENERAL
-- Try to clean up unnecessary inputs.
STAGE 1
-- Take a quick look at the super-laggy area near the sage to see if improvements are possible.
-- In the boss intro, sync the melee attacks with the music better. Also clean up Pocky's movements since they were a little sloppy getting her in to position.
STAGE 2
-- Redo the whole stage from the first screen transition onwards. It's an unfortunate necessity due to the sheer amount of entropy present in this level.
-- Try to kill first tengu pair earlier in hopes of drastically cutting down lag on the first cyclops.
-- Damage boost through bamboo seedlings if it's faster than double dashing or better facilitates killing the tengu.
-- Implement the improvements found earlier for the area between the first cyclops and bamboo miniboss. Should shed approximately 200 frames.
STAGE 3
-- See if first double dash can be improved.
-- See if manipulating the boss into doing his other attack might be less laggy (not sure why I didn't check this earlier...)
-- No plans beyond that, I really like where the other parts this stage are at the moment. At best, I may very slightly tweak some of the inputs in the canyon. Here's hoping they don't desync.
STAGE 4
-- Maybe fool around with the lag bridge a little more. Not sure I can make it any better than it currently is, but it's worth a shot.
-- Probably going to leave the auto-scroller alone since it's in a really good place with the boss being one-shotted and the entertainment being lag-free.
STAGE 5
-- See if I can do a little better around the eye lasers section of the first area. Not quite sure what else might have improvement available.
STAGE 6
-- Will give a cursory glance to the first screen, but not expecting to find anything.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Joined: 7/14/2014
Posts: 57
Location: Kansas City, MO
So I've downed the first Cyclops again. The good news is that I've saved over 200 frames. The (not really) bad news is that I'm kind of torn on how I should go about doing it.
Here is the published run timestamped to match the segments below for reference.
Option 1 (208 frames faster):
Double dashes again, but does it better. 94 frames better, to be exact. This is mostly because I didn't think that first angle I hit here was possible originally. I still have to handle the Tengu in the middle of the Cyclops fight, but it turns out I can do that better as well. I figured out how to generally manipulate the Cyclops into walking a bit further before shooting fire and was also gifted with a less aggressive Tengu flight pattern. Those things, coupled with ignoring the Tengu to kill the Cyclops with as few lag frames as possible results in another 114 frames improved. Having the Tengu hang around after the Cyclops dies does not cause extra lag or hold up the screen from moving on, so there's basically no time penalty beyond their lag during the fight. They'll also disappear shortly after the screen transition if left alone.
Link to videoOption 2 (235 frames faster):
This trades double dashes for solo dashes in order to preemptively damage the Tengu. Their initial spawn and behavior still kept me from being able to kill them outright (at least without an absurdly long wait), so I do what damage I can while maintaining momentum towards Cyclops. This is 130 frames faster than the original as well. The first Tengu can be killed before the Cyclops starts spitting fire, so the whole fight is a bit less laggy. I thought things were going well at this point, but it turns out the game thinks the Cyclops will be too lonely with only one Tengu friend and will spawn 3 monkeys to replace the dead one. You just can't win here. Still, the fight goes 105 frames faster than the original, and having leftovers at the end is not big deal.
Link to video
Personally, I'm leaning slightly towards Option 1 but would be happy with either. I just like the tricky double dashes a bit more and think they might possibly be worth the ~30 frames / 0.5 sec difference. It also provides a more seamless route towards being able to zombie hover on the raft for further entertainment. Option 2, though not too big of an inconvenience would require me to do something like jump Pocky off the raft to get her to hover-ready health. Still, slower is slower, so I figured I'd try to solicit some feedback here in case my preferred option might not be as well received.
Current Project: Pocky & Rocky (SNES) improvements
Status: Stage 2 - fighting the octopus
Frames improved so far: 577
Strategy is basically the same as RTA. Use a bomb to take out as much of its 2560 HP as possible and then abuse its collision-free torso to quickly and safely deal out the rest of the damage. The best bomb I could get dealt 2000 damage, which took its health low enough that it didn't even have enough time to shoot its laggy lightning.
Finally there's the fight with Black Mantle. Since its sprite delay isn't nearly as amusing and Pocky and Rocky have a ton of health that would slow down the bonus time, I use the shield to lose nearly all of it in sync with the music.
Black Mantle has 4096 HP and his shield-generating statues have 640. The first bomb takes out the shields and deals 1200 points of damage to Black Mantle. This was definitely more than I was expecting. Once he becomes vulnerable again, overlapping Rocky and Pocky's last bombs yields 3000 damage in total and immediately ends the fight and the game.
Since the official timing of these videos appears to be taken from power on to last required input, I ended the movie file immediately at the last bomb input. If for some reason this is less desirable than extending the time with some minor entertainment during bonus downtime, then it can be easily added. I could also forego jumping into the shield repeatedly if it's not well received since it technically wouldn't make the last input occur any earlier or later.
One last quick note for RTAers: the timing and positioning to get a 1200 damage first bomb on Black Mantle is loose enough that an RTA should be able to easily replicate it or come very close. It's basically dead-center and about 6 frames worth of downward movement from the point where you'd take damage from the shield (a tiny bit further than that is okay as well). The other two bombs require way more precision in placement and timing, so I unfortunately can't make any good recommendations in that regard.
And now for the end result:
Frames: 67321
Time: 18:40.18
Rerecords: 59565
If there are any objections or questions, now's the time, because I'm going to start working on finalizing my submission text, doing one final check for any low-hanging fruit, and then submit it sometime within the next few days. After that, my plan is to take a break and then come back to this game fresh, chasing further improvements on every stage and adjusting anything that might not be up to snuff with those reviewing the submission.
