Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
Done with level 5 and the boss. Thanks Spikestuff for the tip about sliding on edges. Level 5 has some nice straight ones where the extra speed really adds up.
Link to videoBizHawk movie file
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
It doesn't actually lose any time to do that, since the dance still finishes on the same frame compared to staying put on the ground. Certain actions do delay the dance but that wasn't one of them.
Okay, it was just to be sure. By the way, you should start the next encodes after Ripper Roo, since it's not really relevant to show the same levels again and again.
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
So... with zip-glitching now a thing in Crash games, things just got complicated.
First, a testrun I threw together:
Link to video
This is already about 20 seconds faster than the any% I was working on.
The practical stuff: 100+ speed is possible with a long enough setup, but if you get too far ahead of the camera Crash will fall through the ground because hitboxes aren't loaded yet. So it's only necessary to increase speed until Crash is moving slightly faster than the camera can keep up. The main challenge when TASing will be optimizing exactly how much time to spend charging up at the start to make the camera move at that max speed. Overall this will save a lot of time in every level.
Now, the big question is how to handle this from a branching / goals perspective. The glitch pretty much destroys normal Crash gameplay so a TAS using it will look very different from the one I was working on. Do we use the glitch or forgo it?
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6435
Location: The land down under.
Just as a little point out. Thanks to zip-glitching we're allowed to propose not using this glitch like how Super Mario 64 decided not to use BLJ for the 70 stars (120 when).
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
That was a really nice WIP. Balancing the speed build up will be insanely hard. I've TASed the first level of Crash 3 3 times now. You'll probably want to watch a byte for how far through the level the screen has scrolled. 0x065D70 (4 byte) is really useful in Crash 3. It's how far the screen has scrolled through the level, but it works perfectly if the level changes direction too. Crash 2 very likely has a similar address. It would probably help to write a lua script that calculates the amount that the byte changes per frame. Like a screen scrolling speed. I've found that roughly 5x walking speed is a good amount to build up to. You can build up speed on the bonus platforms without jumping in Crash 3 so I thought you'd be able to do it in snow go. But it's possible that it's different in Crash 2.
So like Ripper Roo, it doesn't save any time to start the victory dance on Komodo Joe's head ? Anyway good job so far, warp room 3 will be interesting.
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
That's right, the game is pretty forgiving about what you do at the end of the boss fight. For this boss, starting the victory dance really high in the air loses one frame but everything else starts on the same frame.
Joined: 5/23/2006
Posts: 361
Location: Washington, United States
New WIP, covering levels 20, 19, and 18 (going through the warp room backwards is the better mask route in this case).
Link to videoBizHawk movie file
In level 18 I also experimented with taking the normal route instead of the "death" route. There are a couple of minor skips I found that make the normal route more competitive in a TAS. Unfortunately it was 22 frames slower so I couldn't include it in the run, but here's what it looks like (new route starts around 00:35):
Link to video