As far as i can remember from just watching your WIP, in wily one at the long long spike room with flying guys. At the end on it, you use Magnet beam and walk across it and jump up. Couldn't you have zipped on the wall then jumped?
You have the right frame of mind, but I would have already done this, if I could somehow place the magnet beam at the right position.
The supporting beam I'm jumping from is just about to disappear, and it's not high enough to position the beam in one jump.
So far I haven't had luck in this.
In fact in my latest movie I lose 3-4 frames because the second lift refuses to elevate at all...
Food wrote:
Does it help reduce lag if you blast the Fleas with your Thunder Beam while you're taking out the blocks, or is it really better to have the blocks onscreen as little as possible?
When the blocks are blasted, they break into pieces, which are again new objects.
I admit I haven't tested this thoroughly, but I believe this is the fastest way...
New WIP available. No timing estimate, I gave up with the timings. Well, it's at least 100 frames faster than the previous WIP.
It needs some work with Wily3 entrance though.
I hate that boss. It's really hard to do optimally.
You need to predict where the enemy will appear, and act accordingly. And the action actually affects what will happen -
So if you throw the rock to left, the enemy will appear from up, and if you throw it to right, it will appear from left... is what may happen.
And the bounding boxes of the rocks are really vague. They can sometimes pass through the enemy (that's why there's a few frames delay in the first Cutman fight)
So to do the Wily3 fight optimally is really difficult.
[transcribed from IRC]
Are you going to refill the Fire Storm, or will you just use the pause trick the rest of the time?
I'm not sure how many shots will be needed, but in the Wily battles the pause trick will definitely be used.
Edit: Right, I have four shots left. I need two or three for Wily, which leaves 1 or 2 for Bombman. So, Bombman needs to be paused too.
Bombman might need to be paused anyway, because he tends to jump a lot, and I'd like to keep Rockman in the teleporter so he can exit quickly.
New things I like the most in this movie:
- The slalom between enemies and bonus drops in the beginning of Wily2
- The new strategy of Cutman refight. I solved two problems at once: 1) I believe it's now optimal, 2) it's much more versatile and impressive than before.
And of course, that the sloppiness in two screens before the Clone robot was fixed.
How do you like the fight against the rock statue? (Err, Yellow devil)
As a consequence of the change in Wily1, I also have now the 1 extra beam I was hoping for. This movie is going to finish wonderfully.
However, I still fear that the Iceman stage could be played differently with great success...
Okay, there will be a slightly longer detour, it seems :)
BisqBot got me 81 frames off the Bombman luck manipulation scene.
It may cause that the Cutman stage be needed to play again.
But that result still has a couple of weapon switches. I'll try to get it even quicker.
[img_left]http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/unlucky.png[/img_left]
Lucky? Not quite...
This is an example of a case where BisqBot doesn't
understand that it's not a good situation.
EDIT: 168 frames faster now.
That is great though. Out of all the luck manipulation you had to do, the Bombman stage looked much more delayed to me than the others did. Probably cuz it was done by some human. Hehe
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
Heh!
You should leave bisqbot crunching games for a couple of months and see how fast it will complete a game! :D
Of course you would need to tweak it alot for it to understand all things that could be done. :)
What is the reason for switching to the fire weapon during luck manipulation sequences? In this case I understand that the cannon takes a few shots, but doesn't the switch take longer? And I remember you switching even when shooting the small blue jumping robots somewhere else.
Does the shield affect randomization in some way (number of sprites on screen)?
What is the reason for switching to the fire weapon during luck manipulation sequences?
The F weapon is sometimes more lucky than the P weapon. The reason they are different is because the number of sprites in them are different.
P is one 8x8 sprite, whereas F has four 8x8 sprites flying plus another four 8x8 sprites circulating Rockman.
The number of these 8x8 sprites affects luck.
However, in this newest update BisqBot's luck was P-based.
Today's status, with timings compared to yesterday's timings:
- Bombman stage improved by 179 frames (+180 in stage, +3 in tunnel, -4 in boss)
- Copypasted everything back, desync at Cutman stage. Therefore, replayed.
- Cutman stage improved by 22 frames (+12 in luck manipulation, +10 in tunnel)
- Copypasted everything back, desync at Wily1.
That's a pity. Wily1 is the most laboursome of all the Wily stages, especially the beginning of it. So that's where I'm now. All the Wily stages (well, at least Wily1 - perhaps I can copypaste Wily2 and Wily3 back) need to be redone.
So why do these desyncs happen?
Rockman 1 is generally speaking very copypastefriendly. I can copypaste entire stages between different movies, and it always works.
Except when it lags.
Lag is caused by the NES program requiring up too many CPU instructions to process in a single frame. Even though the game resets the frame counter in the beginning of each stage (resetting the luck), it can't reset the cycle counter of the CPU.
So when there's a scene that sometimes lags and sometimes doesn't, chances are that it will desync when copypasted.
You went back and tried to improve the luck manipulation in Bomb Man's stage before I could ask about it. Awesome.
For the record, the reason I don't really comment is because I don't have anything to add. Being a huge fan of the Megaman series, I'm always anticipating the completion of new movies.
I tried the Spider-Waffle's idea that has been bothering me for a long time.
Here's the first test result...
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/rockman-icetest.avi (3.7 MB, coded with lossless h264 + 11 kHz mp3)
Here you see some of the most horrid lag this game has to offer.
It reaches the middle of the top platform near the end 100 frames earlier than my WIP, but with the magnet beam completely exhausted as opposed to 6-7 remaining shots.
Edit: While making it, I noticed a mistake in my Iceman level playing... It saves 4 frames when fixed.
Edit 2: I tried also omitting the two first beams in order to use 7 beams with Spider-Waffle's way over the water pit. The method worked, but was 159 frames slower.
Things I thought of when viewing the work so far:
- I'm not imagining, in the laggy screen I asked about before where you jump+pause trough the red block enemies, you are standing still for 7-8 frames after leaving the ladder and before moving. Is this all because of lag? Usually you move directly after leaving the ladders.
- At Bombman, you hit him the last time while you and he are still in the air. This delays your jump for the end-level ball. Could you change the end of the fight to be standing and jump earlier, or do you already grab the item at max jumping height?
- At clone robot, he explodes a bit to the left of the screen. It seems the end level script doesn't start until all the fragments are off screen. Could you kill him more in the middle, and at the peak of his jump?
- Wily 1, at the passage with spikes in the ceiling and the ground, and moving plaforms: in the screen before you perform a vertical wraparound on the ladder. If you did it with the magnet beam instead to wrap around in the top/right area instead, you would end up in the wall above the spikes, giving you a free ride. (This sounds like something you would have thought of, so I'm guessing it doesn't work and you actually end up in the spikes.)
Wily 3 and the end of Wily 2 was madness. I have no idea what's going on with all the screen shifts. And I really like the 1up and enemy avoiding in Wily2. I hope you can keep that if you redo it, which it seems you are.
There was something more I though of but I seem to have forgotten it.
Thanks for the feedback and questions Truncated!
Again, I answer your questions.
> I'm not imagining, in the laggy screen I asked about before where you jump+pause trough the red block enemies, you are standing still for 7-8 frames after leaving the ladder and before moving. Is this all because of lag? Usually you move directly after leaving the ladders.
During the "delay" (which is the walking delay superimposed by lag), I'm holding right. The purpose of the delay is to move Rockman 1 pixel to the right so that when jumped, the next platform is reached instead of bumped into (the pause trick gobbles most of the horizontal motion during the jump).
It is faster than doing a tiny jump from the ladder without delay and then jump the big jump.
> At Bombman, you hit him the last time while you and he are still in the air. This delays your jump for the end-level ball. Could you change the end of the fight to be standing and jump earlier, or do you already grab the item at max jumping height?
It bears no significance, but in the redone fight (not published yet), I eliminated this little cosmetic error.
However, the new fight is 4 frames slower now... (why, I don't know)
> At clone robot, he explodes a bit to the left of the screen. It seems the end level script doesn't start until all the fragments are off screen. Could you kill him more in the middle, and at the peak of his jump?
Despite how it may look, the dying position of the clone has no effect to the level completion time (I tested it). Well, at least the horizontal position has no effect, that is.
> Wily 1, at the passage with spikes in the ceiling and the ground, and moving plaforms: in the screen before you perform a vertical wraparound on the ladder. If you did it with the magnet beam instead to wrap around in the top/right area instead, you would end up in the wall above the spikes, giving you a free ride. (This sounds like something you would have thought of, so I'm guessing it doesn't work and you actually end up in the spikes.)
Exactly. It's my biggest annoyance in this game. The game kills Rockman because his feet lie on top of the flat side of the spikes.
The only way I can imagine to get Rockman above the spikes is to climb him up the tiny hole in the left edge of the screen, but d'oh, it doesn't work either. It's a too little hole.
That was very cool finalfighter!
A question though. After those two bosses, would it be possible to jump up and zip in order to scrol down instead of climbing all the way down to the clone? Not sure if you understand what I mean. If not I will have to make print screens. :)
Same tricks can be used as before.
Note:
- There is no free refill at the end of the stage
- To zip horizontally, you need a solid ceiling (or a solid screen bottom, if you're at screen top). You can't zip over pits.
Finalfighter's trick requires 7 or 8 beams, and eliminates all the chances to refills for the rest of the stage.
Assuming my current path so far, I would have 3 or 4 remaining after exiting Elecman's room.
With the methods I use in my WIP, I need 6 in the rest of the level (no refills are available). I can manage with 3, but it's about 35 frames slower.
So in the beginning of Wily3, my beam would be completely empty. I need a refill in the beginning of that stage.
I also need 7 beams for Wily4 (I actually need 6, but I want 7).
In Wily3, I'm using 2 beams, so I'd need to refill from 0 to 9 beams in the beginning of Wily3.
This can only be accomplished using two big refills. Taking them requires at least 100 frames of time.
I was not talking about scrolling horizontally. I was talking about vertical. It's being used in other levels, such as Ice man I think. And it's used in finalfighters video as well (in the boss rooms). He climbs upwards and zips and ends up below (?) the boss room.
Ain't the floors before the clone solid enough?
This is absolutely wonderful.
I had no idea that the game would be playable after escaping the boss's room. Last time I tried, the game glitched so heavily that it wasn't even playable.
Finalfighter tells that it depends on the timing. So it needs experimentation, which I didn't previously do.
