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Posted: 6/5/2013 1:12 PM
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Vykan12
Player (100)
Joined: 3/20/2008
Posts: 466
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Can't you get two-shot bows in the ice and fire dungeons? Or is the problem that Neo-Dhaos absorbs ice/fire elements?
The spreader bows you're thinking of are actually pretty weak compared to say, the elven bow. So even if they are effective against an enemy, they'll probably do roughly the same damage, if not less.
Regarding Klarth's Maxwell summon, while it's ordinarily very good I suspect it'll suffer from the same problem you mention regarding his Origin summon: if he's underlevelled then it may not do enough damage to compete.
Yeah I've ruled out using Klarth for the future.
In the second Dhaos fight, is it at all worthwhile enabling Fireball or Ice Needle on Arche? Why is she alive, anyway?
No. I kept her alive since I thought she would be useful since learning the indignation spell. I was wrong. None of this really matters because Cless is a powerhouse. I got him to kill Wolfang in a mere 19 seconds and Flamberk & Origin should be going down similarly fast. It's also a priority again to level up Cless because his focus more gives a larger attack bonus than flare bottles. So yeah, aside from using Arche in the aerial fight, Dhaos 1 and the 2SR battle, I have absolutely no use for other characters.
Posted: 6/7/2013 4:59 AM
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Vykan12
Player (100)
Joined: 3/20/2008
Posts: 466
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Test run complete! Link to video Link to video Testrun smv ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.26- The Future of Alvanista and the Grand World Tour ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It might be faster to re-stock on holy bottles in Freezekill (as opposed to Alvanista), but I’m too lazy to test something so insignificant right now. ---------------------------------------- 3.27- Freeze! Fenrir's Ice Cavern ---------------------------------------- Wolfang fight: frame 702996 I wasn’t sure what skills to use so I ran a quick test. Magma rift: 82 frames, ~3500-3600 damage Fury slash: 98 frames, ~4000-4300 damage Tiger teeth: 108-112 frames, ~1900 damage Magma rift is ~19.5% faster than fury slash but fury slash does ~14-19% more damage. I’d say magma rift is superior since it is divided into two hits and the first hit impacts relatively quickly. However, fury slash has more range and is more likely to swipe multiple enemies. I’m really surprised about tiger teeth since I always had the impression that the attack was lightning fast and easily quicker than magma rift. While tiger teeth definitely impacts early, I suppose the recovery time is quite large. As for the fight itself- Normally this boss is an absolute nightmare, but I manage to manipulate him into doing nothing the entire fight and make him look like a complete joke. Well, once again I run out of holy bottles. But this time I found something very interesting by accident. When I use the sorcerer’s ring on torches, the reRNG increments by 1. In fact, if you increase the counter past 255, it rolls to 0 and you can’t face any random encounters until you leave the room! Amusing, but the applications are very limited since the fastest you can fire the ring is once every 4 frames. -------------------------------------- 3.28- Burn! Odin's Fire Tower -------------------------------------- Random battle (Kary x2 & Jinn x2): frame 717939 I have to get into a random battle that includes a Kary in order to get a salamander ring drop. The ring gets transformed into a nymph ring using a rune bottle, and this allows me to navigate the lava areas of the dungeon without getting hurt. After that I walk through the dungeon since I am tired of running out of holy bottles. Forced battles (Kary x2, Druid & Djinn): frames 724763, 726553, 728204, 729885 My main strategy here is to land as many multi-hitting fury hits as possible, which is a challenge to set up. Flambelk fight: frame 731828 As it turns out the best strategy is to… cheese fury blade. Not terribly exciting, but at least now Cless knows soul wave, my favorite tech in the game. Well it seems walking the entire dungeon was foolish because I only used 4 holy bottles. Clearly I should’ve walked Fenrir Cave and ran Odin’s Tower. -------------------------------------- 3.29- Spirit of Creation, Origin -------------------------------------- Figuring out this bossfight was a little trickier than Wolfang and Flambelk because neither fury slash nor magma rift even hit Origin. I ran some more damage tests since I wasn’t sure which tech would prove the optimal choice. Note that DPS = damage per second and that a flare bottle was used for each tech. Tiger teeth: 109 frames, 2316 damage - 1275 DPS Lightning bolt: 213 frames, 4229 damage - 1191 DPS Gale shield: 356 frames, 8368 damage - 1410 DPS I’m surprised lightning bolt comes out that fast, even though it has the lowest DPS. Clearly tiger teeth + gale shield is the way to go. Origin fight: frame 745744 Another one bites the… gale shield. But seriously, the rewards after this fight are insane: You get the eternal sword, the soul stealer bow, the origin summon, and the teleport, soul strike and soul forge techs. To top it all off, Cless finally learns focus more after hitting lv 50. -------------------------------------- 3.30- Before Taking on Dhaos -------------------------------------- Can anyone say cutscenes? ------------------------------------- 3.31- The Final Confrontation ------------------------------------- Dark Eye fight: frame 784383 Dark eye is immune to the first hit of magma rift, as well as soul wave, so I only had to compare fury slash and teleport. Fury slash: 98 frames, 3825 damage - 2342 DPS Teleport: 205 frames, 4578 damage - 1340 DPS Well that confirms it: fury slash is overpowered. So I found an excellent strategy for consistently killing off my characters. Re-position everyone in front of Cless at the beginning of the fight, and have Cless use fury slashes from the back row until he triggers a boss attack that kills everyone else. Sometimes I have to use magma rift because fury slash will be blocked no matter how many frames I wait for the RNG to advance. Hanzo fights: frames 789657, 791860, 793904, 796056 I timed Focus More since these fights are so short I was questioning whether it was even worth using compared to a flare bottle. It comes out to 127 frames, which is about the length of an extra fury slash/magma rift, so it’s probably worthwhile. Sometimes I have to use the flare bottle anyway to alter the RNG. Seal Eye fight: frame 804926 The polearm and eternal sword do about the same damage to him but the poleax has a much higher crit rate, hence the weapon switch. Hardest fight of the run so far. Hitting both Seal Eyes with Fury Hit simultaneously is a real pain since they tend to block so often, and most of the time the Seal Eye closest to Cless will kill him instantly after attacking. That’s why almost every attack resulted in a dizzy; it was necessary. I finished the dungeon with 4 holy bottles remaining, so some running could’ve been done. Dhaos 3 fight: frame 822806 Time for some more damage testing. Note that Focus More was used before each tech. Fury slash: 6700-6903 Magma rift: 4158 Soul wave: 0 Gale shield: ~450 / hit Teleport: ~5000-6000 Soul edge: ~4800 I hate to say it, but fury slash always comes out on top. Dhaos starts the fight in a state where he sits still until you attack him but will always block your first attack. Thus, Cless’ opening jump attack only serves to advance him. After that the fight is disappointingly easy. Neo-Dhaos fight: frame 826281 As for Neo-Dhaos, he can optimally be beaten using 4 Chrono Glasses, but I only had 3: I missed one in the cave dungeon very early in the game and used another in the 2SR fight. Nonetheless, I still managed to defeat him in 7 gale shields without Cless facing a single attack! And that concludes the test run. I’ll add some overall run comments shortly when I feel up to it. For now I’ll say I’m amazed that I achieved a time of 3 hours and 50 minutes, never in a million years would I have believed the game could be beaten this fast. Nor did I expect Cless to surpass level 50 on forced battles alone.
Posted: 6/7/2013 7:00 AM
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Vykan12
Player (100)
Joined: 3/20/2008
Posts: 466
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Here’s the overall run comments I promised. --- Although bossfights are the most entertaining part of the run, optimizing them would actually save the least amount of time compared to other mistakes in my test run. This is due to the fact that bossfights generally last between 15 seconds to a minute and most of my fights are reasonably optimized from about Demitel or Jahmir onwards. So what would save the most time? It all boils down to holy bottle management. When I run out of holy bottles and am forced to run from random encounters, huge swaths of time are lost. Similarly, when I walk through parts of a dungeon and end up with a surplus of holy bottles, I could save a ton of time by running said sections. Aside from that, I made a couple errors navigating menus before I understood their frame rules properly (eg/ scrolling basically always takes 4 frames) and I never checked if clipping corners saved time, so that could add up significantly over time. Funds are a complete non-issue. The only time you even need to make a detour for money is getting the elixir at the harbor northeast of the Mystical Forest, which sells for 10,000 g. After that point very early on in the game, bosses just drown you in money and the only things you generally need to buy are holy bottles, flare bottles and new weapons. In fact, in a broader sense, item management is generally a non-issue. For instance, I beat the game without ever changing Cless’ armor. Giving him a perfect set of defensive gear would only halve the damage he takes in the endgame and Cless only takes damage when it involves cancelling an attack recovery, which is reasonably rare. Even orange gels are barely used and the only accessories that matter are the jet boots, sorceror’s ring (for puzzles), battle rune and mystical rune. As for weapons, most of what you need can be bought in stores or are acquired as part of the plot (eg/ eternal sword). There’s not a single case where getting a ?weapon drop from a random encounter proves worthwhile. What else? The only spell worth buying is thunder blade for the aerial battle. None of the techs get mastered so combos like mecha blade are pointless. The only character that ever gets used is Cless, with the exception of Chester early on and Arche in the aerial fight, against Dhaos and 2SR. There’s never a case where I have to grind for levels because boss fights are so fast that the time saved from learning a technique early would probably be lost on the first random encounter. It should come as no surprise that most of the treasures I acquired proved to be unnecessary. Charm bottles, iron boots, items with high re-sale value (eg/ talisman) The combat in the game isn’t as easily manipulated as I’d have liked. Most of the manipulation goes towards having bosses not block your attacks, and making the bosses as idle as possible since their attacks generally kill Cless instantly. That leaves little room to manipulate crits and dizzies. Moreover, from brute force testing, the RNG just doesn’t advance quickly enough for it to be possible to string 10+ crits in a row. I’m also disappointed by how overpowered fury slash and magma rift are, as I feel it kind of ruined the entertainment value of the last third of the game. Even tiger blade was abused in the midgame and there’s a sense that the fights are too repetitive. I was especially sad that I would never get to use soul wave or teleport because fury slash was just so dominant in terms of damage output. A lot of my intuitions about tech speed were wrong. For instance, tiger teeth is significantly slower than I expected while lightning bolt is significantly faster. For a real run it’s very important to test the damage per second of each tech. There’s a lot of subtleties to the combat system I learned as I went along. For instance, a tech can be used a few frames before a regular slash on any attack recovery. Another trick is repeatedly slashing when Cless’ position largely overlaps an enemy’s, which commonly happens when spamming a tech in a corner trap. What will happen is that Cless slashes and hits the enemy, but gets stunned and recovers more quickly than the normal recovery on a slash attack. Another little trick is that using a flare bottle can alter the enemy’s pattern slightly. I haven’t bothered to look into that more closely but I took advantage of it in a few places. --- All things considered, I don’t think I’ll make a submittable TAS for this game. The main reason is that 90% of the run consists of optimizing running and holy bottle management, which is tedious and not something viewers would really notice and appreciate unless they actively looked for it. Skipping text is also pretty tiring, even with a simple turbo script that mashes A and B on alternate frames. The other main consideration is that the testrun is actually very optimized, especially towards the end, but not quite good enough for submission mainly because of my earlygame sloppiness, holy bottle mismanagement and predictable planning mistakes (mainly acquiring a lot of unnecessary treasure). A fully optimized run would look almost exactly the same, so it just doesn’t seem worth it. TASing the game has also made me painfully aware of the game’s combat limitations, particularly being limited to 2 short-range techs and long-range techs. You can’t change techs mid-battle, the targeting system is awful, spells interrupt the flow of the game completely, random encounters are far too frequent, and so on. Not that I regret making the run; some of the fights are just awesome. But honestly I don’t want to touch this game for the rest of my life. Someone actually recommended that I look at the PSX re-make of the game, as well as Tales of Destiny. I haven’t even played either game, but from what I’ve seen PSX ToP has revamped graphics and, more importantly, fixes a lot of the combat issues I discussed above. P.S. Just for the hell of it, should I submit the testrun for vault publication? Also, if anyone wants to make a youtube encode of the run, by all means go for it.
Posted: 10/2/2015 2:17 AM
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Yagamoth
Joined: 4/1/2010
Posts: 90
So, reviving an old thread to add some information just in case someone might be interested in picking up a TAS for this awesome game in the future. I'm currently picking up this game as a speedrun and I'm in the progress of creating a reasonable route for a single segment run. Thanks to the information here in this thread posted I've figured out a few extensions to the Stepcounter stuff, I've found an interesting (but probably pointless) glitch from the youtube to make your main character an unkillable zombie and I've also found something new but probably also useless, that you can run away from boss battles. Stepcounter & Stepcounter extensions As it was already mentioned here, certain actions increase the stepcounter, which can be useful to push it past 255. Surprisingly, almost anything that requires you to push the "action" button will increase the counter by 1, even if it doesn't do anything. Pressing "action" on switches that don't react anymore because they are pressed, reading signs from the side, breaking down walls, stepping on switches, etc. How does that help? If you use a Holy Bottle just before such an action, you will guarantee a overflowed stepcounter, resulting in absolutely no encounter in that room anymore, and the next room will start at 255 steps. Even before you have Holy Bottles it can be useful, plus it can extend the longevity of individual bottles, giving more availability to run in dungeons and reach inherently 0-step rooms. Mini-Tutorial I made for potential realtime speedrunners https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LVq6idRvOw In this example I 'read' a sign from the sign, avoiding the textbox and increasing the counter as fast as I can mash the A-button. (I assume a TAS could increase the stepcounter by 30 times per second). Later on in that dungeon I spam A in front of a statue to extend the Holy Bottle I received from the golem to last until I reach the 0-stepcounter room (Timing it so I avoid both, a probable encounter before and a certain encounter after picking up the red gem) and then also entering the main hall with just a little Holy Bottle left, which will set the stepcounter to 255, regardless whether it'll run out 2 steps in. Avoiding overworld encounters On the overworld you can avoid encounters by walking into terrain that pushes you to a side, just as the stepcounter would reach 0. It's as simple as that. In the realtime speedrun I'll try to route some points where I'll use a Holy Bottle in a specific place and take a very specific route, but a TAS would be able to take complete advantage of unbottled areas and probably completely avoid having to use Holy Bottles on the overworld. From what I can tell, unfortunately it doesn't work in dungeons. Running from boss battles If you equip the +50% flee-speed accessory you can run from boss battles. It takes around ~1.5 minutes and is susceptible to being interrupted. What happens after differs from boss to boss. Example for running from Gnome where I discovered this in my casual playthrough: http://www.twitch.tv/yagamoth/v/17566310 I tried it on many other boss encounters, with varying results. Usually I was just able to roam in the bossroom a little, rarely ever able to do much. Sometimes potentially skip/ignore a boss encounter, but it seems to be never really worth it, as it takes quite the setup to survive and a long time to run away compared to just beating the bosses. In general the triggers to enter boss battles are not deactivated until the bosses are beaten. So if you try to walk through them, the bossfight simply starts a 2nd time. Funnily enough, it usually spawns a multitude of the character and boss sprites.. You could potentially overload and crash the game doing this. Although at some point it seems to simply stop loading sprites. The most promising boss-flee was on the Midgard-Fields battle, where you fight a dragon at the end. He is pretty easy to run away from in terms of setting it up, and - most importantly - you can actually enter Dhaos' castle early and even defeat him. In theory you'd skip the scene in the castle where you'd lose Gungnir and have the airbattle. The problem however is twofold: 1) You don't get Indignation, which is a ridiculously effective spell against Dhaos and Thor enemies. May not be as much of a problem for a TAS. But... 2) The "can't leave town" trigger in Midgard and the "battlefield" event on the fields are never cleared unless you beat the boss and play out the events. Since you have to cross the fields to get to the unicorn forest, you won't be able to reach there.. At least I haven't figured out how outside of simply going to kill the fieldboss. Two flee examples: - In the pegasus airfight you simply start the next battle in the set - In the coliseum you just straight up lose Zombie glitch Very simple: If you get killed by an enemy and petrified at the same time, you can remove the petrification outside of combat and Cress(Cless) will be alive with 0 HP. He can not be killed at all and functions like a fully alive character, no downsides. (Petrification and Paralyzation still count as loss condition). One would think this would be useful of a non-TAS speedrun, but unfortunately currently I have found no application for it. None of the bosses after Demitel are threatening enough to be an issue with the availability of spamming spells with Arche and Klarth(Clause). Setting it up with a save + reset costs me about ~1min assuming I'm already in the area. Of course a TAS would be faster, but.... Problems with that are: - Any levelup on Cress will 'heal' you above 0 HP, removing the Zombie status (Even if you are already at 9999 HP through HP+ items). So generally it's only useful for one boss battle - There are many, many little healing cutscenes that remove your zombie status - Environmental damage like Odins tower will not work to set up Zombie (not sure if it kills if you are already a Zombie) - There are very few enemies that petrify Minor - Using an hourglass/Chronoglass to get behind NeoDhaos is super simple, and will completely crush him as he doesn't do anything to anyone behind him. - I managed to open the menu just before entering loading-triggers on the overworld, and save. When loading that savefile it would simply immediately load the zone after spawning briefly on the overworld. The way to do is is weird: You save BEFORE stepping on the tile and then simply stepping on the tile holding X. If you don't save before, it won't open the menu before loading the zone (no idea why that works). So... Most of all, thanks a ton to Vykan12 for your run comments and insightful commentary on your testrun. This gave me a lot of base to work with. It's unfortunate that the run doesn't "look" exciting enough to TAS it, but to me it's a ton of fun to route :)
Posted: 3/13/2017 3:45 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
I'm thinking of picking up this game within the next couple of months and am wondering what people's thoughts are on normal vs hard mode. I know that the site rules are generally to avoid such modes when it just involves buffing enemy HP, but the nico TAS does use Hard Mode. What do you guys think?
Posted: 3/13/2017 4:05 AM
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Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4045
ruadath wrote:
I'm thinking of picking up this game within the next couple of months and am wondering what people's thoughts are on normal vs hard mode. I know that the site rules are generally to avoid such modes when it just involves buffing enemy HP, but the nico TAS does use Hard Mode. What do you guys think?
If hard mode requires fundamentally more interesting strategies, rather than just 'do the same thing but for twice as long', it's worth considering.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 3/14/2017 3:44 AM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Well, look at Vykan's testrun. The bossfights mostly consist of pinning the boss in the corner and constantly interrupting them so they can't get any attacks off. The random encounters are a lot more interesting, since Cless on his own can't lock down more than one or two enemies at a time. If Hard mode makes it impossible to lock down bosses, makes randoms die more slowly (so they have more time to make the fights interesting), or anything like that, then it'd probably be worthwhile.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 3/14/2017 5:13 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Believe it or not, after doing some tests, I think Hard Mode is actually faster. Increasing difficulty doesn't increase enemy durability, it only appears to increase the damage they dish out (and maybe AI stuff, I don't know). Since you can avoid damage you don't want to take almost entirely, this doesn't really matter, and the extra damage is in fact a benefit since you can use it to kill off characters (EXP distribution) much more easily. In addition, the opening cutscene is also faster because the boss dishes out more damage in the first hit.
Posted: 3/16/2017 1:18 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Here is a test of the Forest, completed (return back to town) in 4:58 Link to video The boar fight is not completely optimized, and I believe that it might also be possible to save time by moving Cless forward in the formation. I'm hoping people can give some feedback/spot other mistakes after watching this.
Posted: 3/17/2017 3:50 AM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Why the name modifications? How much time do you think they'll save over the course of the run? I'm also curious about that pause near the end of the boar fight. Otherwise, looks good to me. Good luck!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 3/17/2017 4:45 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Name modifications save a ton of time since every time there is a dialogue, it takes at least one frame to display each character. Not sure exactly how much time it saves, but probably quite a bit since this is cutscene heavy JRPG. Pausing in battle can occasionally be used to manipulate enemy AI by controlling the order in which random numbers are used. For what it's worth, I saved roughly 1.3 seconds over that attempt in my current WIP by pushing Cless forward in the formation and having a slightly better boss fight. Things are going pretty well and I'm at the beginning of the sewer with roughly a 17-18 second lead over the JP TAS (the majority of the time save coming from having 2 less encounters than him)
Posted: 3/26/2017 4:55 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Link to video A ton of work has gone into optimizing and streamlining everything as much as possible for this first segment, so I hope you guys enjoy! Feel free to ask questions/leave comments and I'll try and answer to the best of my ability. For what it's worth, this is approximately 23 seconds quicker than the nico TAS, not withstanding the fact that I pick up extra lag frames due to Bizhawk vs snes9x emulation differences.
Posted: 4/6/2017 6:26 PM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Just so people know, I am indeed still working on this, and have finished routing through the first time warp. Before I continue, however, I would like to request some (disassembly) help investigating the left+right overworld movement glitch. I have already found one potential use for it, but in particular, I would like to understand why it works and whether or not it is possible to perform a similar glitch but move the character in another direction. Understanding why the range of the glitch is limited would be useful too.
Posted: 4/8/2017 2:28 AM
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amaurea
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
Before I continue, however, I would like to request some (disassembly) help investigating the left+right overworld movement glitch. I have already found one potential use for it, but in particular, I would like to understand why it works and whether or not it is possible to perform a similar glitch but move the character in another direction. Understanding why the range of the glitch is limited would be useful too.
I have had a quick look at this now. When you hold left+right you walk left, but the code that checks whether the tile you are moving into thinks you're moving right, so it looks at the tile to the right of you when determining if you should be allowed to move. This is why you get stuck if you keep holding left+right after walking left through the small lake, but can proceed normally if you let go of right. And it is why you can't keep walking far into the ocean. As soon as you have a water tile to your right you're stuck. I haven't found out why the game does this, and why it doesn't seem to work in the up+down direction yet.
Posted: 4/8/2017 2:52 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Thanks for the help! I'm guessing this means it's not possible to do the same trick but move to the right? Because that would allow for a pretty significant cutscene skip, saving ~4 minutes or so.
Posted: 4/8/2017 3:01 AM
(Edited: 4/8/2017 4:49 AM)
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amaurea
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
ruadath wrote:
Thanks for the help! I'm guessing this means it's not possible to do the same trick but move to the right? Because that would allow for a pretty significant cutscene skip, saving ~4 minutes or so.
I haven't interpreted all the relevant disassembly yet, but currently my hypothesis is that the movement direction code checks the buttons in order Up,Down,Left,Right, while the allowed terrain code checks the buttons in order Up,Down,Right,Left. I have confirmed the latter, but not the former yet. But it seems pretty likely. It explains why Up has highest priority, followed by left and finally right, and it explains why only left+right gives weird behavior, since things are checked consistently for up+down. Edit: I have confirmed this: The "find out which tile I'm moving into" code is at CA85F3. It basically does this (simplified) 
if(controller & up) next_tile = current_tile + map_width;
else if(controller & down) next_tile = current_tile - map_width;
else if(controller & right) next_tile = current_tile + 1;
else next_tile = current_tile - 1;
if(walkable(next_tile)) walk();
The "move the character on map" code is at CA86F3. It basically does this: 
if(controller & up) move_up();
else if(controller & down) move_down();
else if(controller & left) move_left();
else if(controller & right) move_right();
In the case of move_left and move_right, this is done by adding or subtracting what looks like the subtile speed (usually 2) to the subtile position, and then updating the tile position when this under/overflows. For moving up/down it's a bit less transparent. But the point is that the two functions handle the left and right (and only left and right) in different order.
Posted: 4/8/2017 3:19 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Ah, ok that makes sense, since if you hold down multiple buttons, the direction you move in corresponds to the order you suggested above. Well, good to know! It's surprising how few glitches this game has compared to most JRPGS.
Posted: 4/11/2017 9:05 PM
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ruadath
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Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Link to video Completed through the recruitment of Klarthe (slightly further, enters the next town for shopping) in 28:15. Video is recorded again from the beginning because I made minor improvements from the start of the playthrough... so yeah. I think I'm a bit over 30 seconds ahead of the nico TAS now, although it's hard to compare because the videos are split into parts. Of course, it's actually more than this in terms of gameplay time, but BizHawk/snes9x lag differences.
Posted: 4/12/2017 2:37 AM
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amaurea
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
What is the pause at 6:22 in the video, by the statue? Luck manipulation? The movement speed at 10:17 is also weirdly slow. I guess it falls into the same category.
Posted: 4/12/2017 2:45 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
I'm mashing A on the sign for about about 20-30 frames or so. For some reason, the game increases your number of steps to an encounter whenever you interact with an object, even if you do so from a position where nothing actually happens (such as the side of the signpost). So by doing this, I raise my amount of steps for an encounter by 10-15, allowing me to pass through the area without any random encounters (the number is reset when transitioning back to the overworld). At 10:17, that's just the fact that there moving on stairs creates additional lag compared to moving on flat terrain, compounded with the fact that I ran a few steps just before going up the stairs in order to minimize lag on the stairs. RNG in the sewers is static, so taking longer doesn't help with luck manipulation in any form; the one exception to this is me waiting for ~8 frames in the save point to manipulate the upcoming encounter. You might also be noticing that I walk the stretch after that instead of running, due to the fact that you burn "steps until encounter" faster while running than while walking.
Posted: 4/13/2017 9:09 PM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Link to video
Posted: 4/15/2017 12:54 PM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
Link to video New stutter stepping trick!
Posted: 4/17/2017 1:49 AM
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ruadath
Active player (262)
Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
So after extensive discussion on IRC, and some testing with a physical console, it turns out that even putting aside RAM initialization issues, the game is not being emulated correctly. There are apparently some issues (among other things) with the sound effects in this game that bsnes cannot emulate properly, and therefore I will (most likely) be discontinuing this project. Even if I were to continue, new realizations from disassembly means that some relatively significant route improvements can be made... so yeah. Hopefully we will eventually have emulators that run this game (and by extension, Star Ocean) properly... until then... time to try out some other JRPGs! Actually, after talking it through with some people, I've come to the following conclusion. Even though the run is not accurate, the strats I've been developing and the mechanics I have been discovering have been of considerable benefit to the RTA community. For that reason, I think I might continue the run, although I will not sustain the same level of optimization that I had previously intended to carry out. In particular, I will not go back and redo the early parts of the run with the new RNG improvement techniques I found, and I will skip incorporating the stutter step in catacombs.
Posted: 4/17/2017 3:50 AM
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OmnipotentEntity
He/Him
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Joined: 9/11/2004
Posts: 2631
ruadath wrote:
So after extensive discussion on IRC, and some testing with a physical console, it turns out that even putting aside RAM initialization issues, the game is not being emulated correctly. There are apparently some issues (among other things) with the sound effects in this game that bsnes cannot emulate properly
I wasn't aware of this. Do you have a reference?
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Posted: 4/17/2017 11:46 PM
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ruadath
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Joined: 12/13/2016
Posts: 352
According to natt, the sound effects from the game are too hardcore for bsnes to handle properly, hence the extreme lag variation that occurs on certain cutscenes. However, I've now narrowed down the initial RNG generation and luck manipulation that was different on lsnes/snes9x and bizhawk to the values of exactly two uninitialized memory addresses. Since these manipulations are 100% reproducible on console, it seems to me that this information can be used to reverse engineer the values of these RAM addresses on console at power on (for a given SNES model).
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