Fortranm
He/Him
Editor, Experienced player (878)
Joined: 10/19/2013
Posts: 1121
http://www.speedrun.com/undertale#True_Pacifist_Ending1 "Start with a 0-reset fresh game. Complete the True Pacifist route (note this requires achieving a Neutral ending at least once during the run). " Apparently you can do a pacifist run without starting from a save, but it faces the same issue as a neutral run does in a TAS. Right now the RTA WR for genocide route is only about 4 minutes slower than that of a neutral route. With the precision of a TAS, genocide route could possibly be a little faster than neutral route, I guess.
Joined: 8/3/2008
Posts: 157
Location: The Land Down Under
Hello everyone! I've been keeping an eye on the Undertale speedrunning scene and a whole bunch of new glitches were discovered very recently! Most importantly, using the item 'Punch Card' with perfect precision allows for dialogue/cutscene skips, OOB tricks, and even mild wrong warping. With this discovery, a pure neutral run will be much faster than a genocide, and it should be easy to complete the game in under an hour. We still don't know how many time saving wrong warps are possible. In the best case scenario, this would make for an extremely cool tas where Frisk is ignoring everyone left right and center while teleporting all over the place It's a shame that we still lack the software to do it, because it's all there conceptually.
jhztfs
He/Him
Player (68)
Joined: 7/11/2016
Posts: 6
Location: Seoul
It seems Undertale is still not TASable right now due to technical difficulties, but Toby Fox allowed speedrunning it showing speedruns on GDQs, etc. a week ago. That would include TASes. TASVideos where he didn't want it on.
Spikestuff
They/Them
Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2642)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6438
Location: The land down under.
jhztfs wrote:
Toby Fox allowed speedrunning it a week ago. That would include TASes.
No one gave a crap. Since speedruns were already coming out on first week. He was laid back with speedrunning (as well as sprite ripping) since v1.001 (February).
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
Active player (378)
Joined: 6/5/2006
Posts: 188
Location: Malmö, Sweden
He wasn't against speedruns, he was against having it on big marathons to avoid spoiling incidental viewers.
Even the best player is limited by the speed of his fingers, or his mind's ability to control them. But what happens when speed is not a factor, when theory becomes reality?
jhztfs
He/Him
Player (68)
Joined: 7/11/2016
Posts: 6
Location: Seoul
It was a mistake on my wording, sorry.
Ianwubby
He/Him
Joined: 7/19/2016
Posts: 3
Location: Texas
Is hourglass really the only program that can TAS PC games? Because it's the only one I've heard of, and it not working with Undertale is disappointing. Unless you want to use a really slow speedhack on Cheat Engine, but if you mess up there or get bad RNG, you still either have to live with it or start over.
Invariel
He/Him
Editor, Site Developer, Player (171)
Joined: 8/11/2011
Posts: 539
Location: Toronto, Ontario
As I understand it, if you're trying to run Undertale through Steam, Steam and Hourglass don't play nicely together. If you can get Undertale to run without Steam being in the way, you might be able to work something out with Hourglass.
I am still the wizard that did it. "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata <scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
Joined: 12/31/2009
Posts: 174
Invariel wrote:
As I understand it, if you're trying to run Undertale through Steam, Steam and Hourglass don't play nicely together. If you can get Undertale to run without Steam being in the way, you might be able to work something out with Hourglass.
The Steam version is just the game executable wrapped in a Steam api executable. You can extract the game executable and run it directly to avoid interference from Steam. EDIT: Never mind, they seemed to have changed it since I last checked.
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2238)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Ianwubby wrote:
Is hourglass really the only program that can TAS PC games? Because it's the only one I've heard of, and it not working with Undertale is disappointing.
You have to understand how complicated Hourglass is as a program and how much it has to do to even get a small library of games to work. If you (or anyone else) want to TAS Undertale ASAP, the best thing you can do is find programmers with tons of Windows knowledge and direct them to help out with Hourglass Resurrection.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Fortranm
He/Him
Editor, Experienced player (878)
Joined: 10/19/2013
Posts: 1121
There are official DRM-free builds.
Ianwubby
He/Him
Joined: 7/19/2016
Posts: 3
Location: Texas
I more meant disappointing as in I'll sit there and be slightly sad, NOT as in I'm disappointed in the people who made hourglass; Of course it's not going to work with every game, especially since the program is fairly old. I wish I knew how to code or something so I could help with Hourglass Resurrection, but as it stands, all I can do is sit and wait patiently.
Active player (458)
Joined: 11/12/2010
Posts: 183
Location: Sweden
I tried out the demo version of the game ... and I could play it in the Hourglass Resurrection interim build just fine. More or less. Didn't have to do any magic or voodoo rituals to make it run on my old XP laptop. Frame advance and save states worked without any problem, unless you count having each save state keeping track of quite a lot of memory. According to the task manager, Hourglass climbed up to ~500 MB of memory usage, and that only using one save state, which also happens to be 50% of the total memory of my (quite old) laptop. Apart from that, I still managed to play (without really trying) until the end of the demo with using save states 77 times. When I tried to play back my run, however, the RNG was different and the run couldn't continue since the battles ended differently. I only tried to play it back twice with different RNG both times, which means I haven't really experimented yet to see whether there's a reliable way to get the RNG to sync as well. As I said, I've only tried the demo version of the game so I don't know whether the full game works or not.
"An artist who can’t take constructive critique on their work is only hurting themselves and their potential. Conversely, and artist that can’t communicate a critique in a constructive way isn’t helping anybody."
Editor, Active player (297)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth
I don't know if it has been mentioned already, but just so you know, we have reached the point in time where it is OK to post an Undertale TAS on TASVideos.
Joined: 10/14/2007
Posts: 9
Location: La Plata, Argentina
I revive the topic for a small point of view. I think that the best way to speedrun this is doing both ways at once. Singularly, they'll be mostly boring, and this might be a way to not make two sleep-inducing movies, but a single fun one. Now, I'm aware that this is crazy difficult, both because of getting both instances to run, syncing the controllers, and the run itself. But the vastly superior run should be worth it. Have fun.
Jenetrix
She/Her
Joined: 8/16/2017
Posts: 10
Well since the game is I guess 'open' according to Bisqwit, ill un-lurk and chime in. Assuming the game can be ran well enough inside of Hourglass enough to sync properly, Why not just do 3 individual runs of the 3 different endings? End the first with the setup for the second, and second for the third. (Neu-->T.P.-->Gen) Of course this would require 'save anchoring' which is normally a no no, but would be better for presentation instead of 1 longer input file for 2/3 or 3/3 endings. (I say this as I'm doing research on the subject. Kinda looking for an excuse to mess around with Hourglass & Undertale)
Pokota
He/Him
Joined: 2/5/2014
Posts: 779
Well, yes but not for those reasons. TP (and only TP) requires the presence of some ending, so that's the only one that has to be done from what is basically dirty SRAM (and NG+ situations like the TP route usually get exemptions anyway so long as the SRAM state can be validated, which is what the Neutral run would do anyway). Neutral and Gen can both be done from clean start, so there's no reason for Gen to start from dirty SRAM in the first place and anyhow there's no material changes wrought about in Gen by TP (the material changes are the other way around anyway as the TP ending changes if there's a Gen completion in your SRAM)
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Jenetrix
She/Her
Joined: 8/16/2017
Posts: 10
Pokota wrote:
Well, yes but not for those reasons. TP (and only TP) requires the presence of some ending, so that's the only one that has to be done from what is basically dirty SRAM (and NG+ situations like the TP route usually get exemptions anyway so long as the SRAM state can be validated, which is what the Neutral run would do anyway). Neutral and Gen can both be done from clean start, so there's no reason for Gen to start from dirty SRAM in the first place and anyhow there's no material changes wrought about in Gen by TP (the material changes are the other way around anyway as the TP ending changes if there's a Gen completion in your SRAM)
Then I had he T.P./Gen thing backwards. That would be less of a problem then. My only real other question is though, Would the differences in Neu/Gen be considered enough to get their own branches, or the same one?
Player (26)
Joined: 8/29/2011
Posts: 1206
Location: Amsterdam
Jenetrix wrote:
My only real other question is though, Would the differences in Neu/Gen be considered enough to get their own branches, or the same one?
Let's face it, people want to see that sans battle. Anyway there's a number of different boss fights in the Gen run so it strikes me as a separate branch.
XkyRauh
He/Him
Joined: 6/9/2005
Posts: 171
Location: Southern California
The two branches would almost assuredly have to be different runs, seeing as you have to invest a great deal of extra time racking up the kills for Genocide. Yes, people want to see the Sans fight done TAS-style, but you have to admit the Pacifist route done quick will still be fun to watch. :)
Pokota
He/Him
Joined: 2/5/2014
Posts: 779
XkyRauh wrote:
The two branches would almost assuredly have to be different runs, seeing as you have to invest a great deal of extra time racking up the kills for Genocide. Yes, people want to see the Sans fight done TAS-style, but you have to admit the Pacifist route done quick will still be fun to watch. :)
If the savings from shorter Papyrus and Pacified Dummy and from not having to navigate Hotland outweigh the time spent exterminating through Waterfall and fighting Undyne the Undying, it might be worth aborting a Gen run at Mettaton for Neutral.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Jenetrix
She/Her
Joined: 8/16/2017
Posts: 10
Its a start... Still no input tho...
Player (19)
Joined: 5/22/2012
Posts: 26
Pokota wrote:
Well, yes but not for those reasons. TP (and only TP) requires the presence of some ending, so that's the only one that has to be done from what is basically dirty SRAM (and NG+ situations like the TP route usually get exemptions anyway so long as the SRAM state can be validated, which is what the Neutral run would do anyway).
Well, TP can be done from one save- you'd do the neutral ending while meeting all TP requirements, and then load a save made during the run after Flowey to go do the TP exclusive stuff and reach Asriel. So it wouldn't need a full neutral playthrough and then a full pacifist playthrough.
Jenetrix wrote:
My only real other question is though, Would the differences in Neu/Gen be considered enough to get their own branches, or the same one?
And the answer to this is a resounding yes, due to the punch card glitch. Basically, stuff breaks when you trigger something with the punch card active, and unlike all other items, you can move for 1 frame after triggering it from the menu. Since it can't be obtained on a Genocide run and it can be used to walk around during cutscenes and be warped to the wrong place on a new screen, the fastest neutral route has very little Genocide overlap and instead a lot of overlap with pacifist. The neutral/pacifist difference is that neutral defeats the forced Vulkin for level 4 to speed up Asgore (pacifist can't) and pacifist does the Papyrus date while passing through Snowdin (neutral obviously wouldn't) and has the true lab/Asriel at the end. So my take is that pacifist and genocide would be the only branches necessary, as the pacifist run would contain everything that the neutral run would contain, and the genocide run hits everything else.
Jenetrix
She/Her
Joined: 8/16/2017
Posts: 10
So I've been playing with this for a bit and I had some ideas to get around the no-input issue for Undertale when running under Hourglass. 1) XInput to DirectInput DLL Wrapper. 2) Decompile/Recompile the game with DirectInput Support. 3) Rebind the 'Gamepad' in the game to keyboard commands. Each of these kinda has a different problem though: All of the existing XInput to DirectInput wrappers I've tried don't support remapping to keyboard, only to a DirectInput controller. De-Compiling and Re-Compiling the game with DirectInput instead of XInput may be considered too heavily modifying the game/engine for the site's liking, although this would be (in theory) the much easier option. (This is how people got the game running on Linux before the official linux port of the game) I honestly don't know if Hourglass (Or even Resurrection) even support grabbing buttons from a gamepad. (Which considering that it doesn't support mouse input this is probably likely.) It might be possible to use Hourglass in conjunction with another program (Like Autohotkey) and record input that way to get around this though.
Pokota
He/Him
Joined: 2/5/2014
Posts: 779
I have no name wrote:
Pokota wrote:
Well, yes but not for those reasons. TP (and only TP) requires the presence of some ending, so that's the only one that has to be done from what is basically dirty SRAM (and NG+ situations like the TP route usually get exemptions anyway so long as the SRAM state can be validated, which is what the Neutral run would do anyway).
Well, TP can be done from one save- you'd do the neutral ending while meeting all TP requirements, and then load a save made during the run after Flowey to go do the TP exclusive stuff and reach Asriel. So it wouldn't need a full neutral playthrough and then a full pacifist playthrough.
Jenetrix wrote:
My only real other question is though, Would the differences in Neu/Gen be considered enough to get their own branches, or the same one?
And the answer to this is a resounding yes, due to the punch card glitch. Basically, stuff breaks when you trigger something with the punch card active, and unlike all other items, you can move for 1 frame after triggering it from the menu. Since it can't be obtained on a Genocide run and it can be used to walk around during cutscenes and be warped to the wrong place on a new screen, the fastest neutral route has very little Genocide overlap and instead a lot of overlap with pacifist. The neutral/pacifist difference is that neutral defeats the forced Vulkin for level 4 to speed up Asgore (pacifist can't) and pacifist does the Papyrus date while passing through Snowdin (neutral obviously wouldn't) and has the true lab/Asriel at the end. So my take is that pacifist and genocide would be the only branches necessary, as the pacifist run would contain everything that the neutral run would contain, and the genocide run hits everything else.
To clarify, you can't go onto Pacifist if you've killed anything as Undyne refuses to have anything to do with you at that point. So, either TP can be done from one save OR neutral defeats the forced vulkin for level 4 to speed up Asgore. That's the only difference between TP and Neutral. Is that correct?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?