I've never TASed a DS game before. This is my first time TASing on DeSmuME, so the quality of the run may be a little sloppy.
For a first attempt, it was really quite solid. it's only .17 seconds slower (ingame timer) than my run that I never finished before our goals diverge (you get a bad on bandage, I heal goo+cool bandaged).
If I do complete this run, I'll make it an any% on Hard difficulty aiming for fastest time, disregarding rank. So far I only have Operation 1-1 to show; I complete it in 9.11 seconds, with a final timer of 4:50.89.
As always, I am of the opinion that such is a bad goal from an entertainment perspective, for a few reasons:
1) "ignoring rank" is the correct choice, because tasing actually makes certain missions basically impossible to XS because you're too good, and can't meet the sub criteria.
2) "fastest time" has the explicit implication that the entire run will be done using the healing touch which, iirc, lasts for 1800 frames (could easily be wrong, it's been 7 years since I last touched it), which is pretty much enough for any mission in the game to be completed with.
3) "fastest time" also shows how bad of a doctor you are by getting all those 'good' and 'bad' ranks.
My personal goal was always "all cool, no healing touch". This, for example, wouldn't be anywhere near as cool if it was done with the healing touch active from the very start.
Regardless of what you go for, keep it up I guess.
For a first attempt, it was really quite solid. it's only .17 seconds slower (ingame timer) than my run that I never finished before our goals diverge (you get a bad on bandage, I heal goo+cool bandaged).
Thanks. I've already redone operation 1-1 and got 8.92 seconds on it. Would you mind sharing your WIP if you still have it? I'm still not 100% certain on how to optimise certain stuff, especially the scalpel dotted lines.
There are still some basic optimisation techniques that I'm not sure are truly optimal. For instance suturing, I hold 3 frames on the first point then 1 frame each on the next 3 points. It seems kinda slow to me but I haven't found a faster way to do it. And the injections - my god, I wanna stay away from them as much as possible. I have absolutely no idea how to fill a syringe to max optimally, I feel that it's 2 frames per tick of the syringe, but sometimes I can only do 3 frames.
As always, I am of the opinion that such is a bad goal from an entertainment perspective, for a few reasons:
1) "ignoring rank" is the correct choice, because tasing actually makes certain missions basically impossible to XS because you're too good, and can't meet the sub criteria.
2) "fastest time" has the explicit implication that the entire run will be done using the healing touch which, iirc, lasts for 1800 frames (could easily be wrong, it's been 7 years since I last touched it), which is pretty much enough for any mission in the game to be completed with.
3) "fastest time" also shows how bad of a doctor you are by getting all those 'good' and 'bad' ranks.
My personal goal was always "all cool, no healing touch". This, for example, wouldn't be anywhere near as cool if it was done with the healing touch active from the very start.
Regardless of what you go for, keep it up I guess.
I will be prioritising fastest overall run time, over in-game time, for a similar reason you stated - fastest in-game time would basically mean Healing Touch everywhere to slow down the timer and that seems kinda stupid to me. Depending on the other operations' criteria, I may add on a rule to not use the HT unless necessary.
I also don't mind the "good" and "bad", since iirc they only appear at the very beginning and the end of the operation? (the initial incision and the bandage?). Of course, I try to get "cools" over "good" and "bad" where it can be done without wasting time (like extracting the bone fragments in 1-1).
Anyway, I'll be posting more WIPs when I can (already solved my SRAM issue), so I'm looking forward to more suggestions and criticisms from everyone :D
Memory wrote:
Also there is a trauma center discord I can dm you the details if you like.
Managed to look it up. Thanks!
Edit: Managed to improve it a bit more after discovering that you can use the forceps to grab stuff from the tray (bones, membranes etc) earlier.
Edit 2: Apparently RNG is a thing in this game too, it seems that it's possible to manipulate tumours into not producing blood pools after lasering them...
Would you mind sharing your WIP if you still have it? I'm still not 100% certain on how to optimise certain stuff, especially the scalpel dotted lines.
Eh, why not. I will give the following advice towards using it, however: don't watch it past the last operation you've completed until you've gave a solid shot at it yourself, so not as to have a preconception that the methods I've used are the fastest that something can be done (three operations in particular come to mind, one being the last I did).
There are still some basic optimisation techniques that I'm not sure are truly optimal.
This is what actually stalled my run, though I wont explain what it was. All that really needs to be said about it is that it would've involved an extremely large amount of trial and error to optimize, and I wasn't willing to both overlook it just to proceed further, nor redo it over and over again until it was as optimal as I could get it.
And the injections - my god, I wanna stay away from them as much as possible. I have absolutely no idea how to fill a syringe to max optimally, I feel that it's 2 frames per tick of the syringe, but sometimes I can only do 3 frames.
Here is an old as hell ram watch list for it, but I couldn't tell you what half of them are for at this point. In the trauma center games things get real weird when it comes to low values on tools/health/etc, and become oddly inaccurate, and I could never be bothered to find out why.
I will be prioritising fastest overall run time, over in-game time, for a similar reason you stated - fastest in-game time would basically mean Healing Touch everywhere to slow down the timer and that seems kinda stupid to me. Depending on the other operations' criteria, I may add on a rule to not use the HT unless necessary.
For operations that don't require any usage of healing at all (ie. early ones), the healing touch is most likely to be slower be a mere fraction as far as realtime goes, but if you have to heal with a syringe at any point in the operation, the time it takes to use the healing touch at the start of the operation instead is far likely to be shorter.
I also don't mind the "good" and "bad", since iirc they only appear at the very beginning and the end of the operation? (the initial incision and the bandage?). Of course, I try to get "cools" over "good" and "bad" where it can be done without wasting time (like extracting the bone fragments in 1-1).
It's a personal preference thing really. I just imagine it as you've got this superhuman doctor working on people, and then he goes and fucks up your initial incisions/post op wound closure. Just feels like a real sloppy copout to me, but eh, as I said personal preference.
Anyway, I'll be posting more WIPs when I can (already solved my SRAM issue), so I'm looking forward to more suggestions and criticisms from everyone :D
If you're also posting movie files that would be nice.
There's also at least one extremely subtle non-operation relevant timesaver you may or may not use or even notice being used in my run past operation 3(?), which is enabling skip mode after an operation to be able to bring the menu up faster.
Hey Atma thanks a lot for being so forthcoming with help! Really appreciate all your insights. I'll look through your movie the next time I'm free to TAS.
At the time of typing this I've already completed the whole of Chapter 1.... only to learn new menu optimisation techniques (mainly text skip and bringing up the start menu) which practically forced me to restart a whole chunk of the TAS. Hex editing in the new inputs doesn't work for me as certain random factors ended up desyncing the operation itself.
I'll just treat everything I've done so far as a warm-up to the actual run I'll be doing. No idea if I can ever complete it (it's like, 40-50 levels in total?) but... I'll try! And I'll post a few movie files too.
I used to work on this game with comicalflop several years ago, and then he got too busy with real life and somewhat disappeared, so I decided to work on it solo. Started over, improved on pretty much every level so far (only worked on the first five or six operations) and my hard drive recently died, taking with it my entire progress.
I just redownloaded DeSmuME on this new drive, and I'm going to restart from scratch very soon (most likely this week). I may post some work in progress videos in here, and might stream some of the work on my Twitch channel (FozzyRTA).
I have spent too many years not working on this, and it's a project I've been wanting to get done for a long time and now I have motivation again. Hopefully that motivation stays until I can finish it and isn't killed by Deftera :^)
Hi.
As a speedrunner of this game I noticed the locations of each patient when trying to find the correct antigens ("Race for the Cure") is random. I've been trying to reverse engineer that selection process, but it's turned out to be quite difficult, namely because I'm not sure how to debug and dump the code that writes into certain bits of ram.
Can someone help me with some of the debugging tools? How can I dump disassembly code of the rom? I'll send shortly a savestate with a ram watch file.
Thanks in advance. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k5b233akcroe0co/AAC2t8p3lbNV6MVSv2DyBX31a?dl=0