Three Pokémon games for the DS where you capture Pokémon by drawing circles around them.
I can only imagine the crazy rapidity loops can be completed on the touch screen...assuming it's now emulator-supported.
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
Three Pokémon games for the DS where you capture Pokémon by drawing circles around them.
I can only imagine the crazy rapidity loops can be completed on the touch screen...assuming it's now emulator-supported.
They work, but good luck optimizing everything + luck manipulation for the overworld pokemon. :P
I actually started route planning this game for a console run, but got fed up trying to optimize unlikely things as soon as the first mission. There are a lot of little time savers in the overworld. (The actual captures, of course, should be trivial to TAS, and also trivial to strategise; the strategy of "draw circles/triangles as fast as you can" is clearly the right one, and it seems unlikely that the time assists take to perform will save time in the actual captures. Even on Suicune. I have done no-assist runs of Suicune on console; on average, they take me around half an hour just for the one capture. A TAS would do it much faster, though.)
I am attempting a TAS of the 1st Pokemon Ranger, and am now starting to really work on it. I have completed the first mission and am currently 1 minute and 39 seconds ahead of the real time world record. There are a lot of text boxes. Capturing is a joke in a TAS though. Routeing is the only hard part so far, as there aren't many other people who run this game.
Here is a link to mission 1 on youtube if anyone is interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6obx3dkT-xU
You need to move using the touchscreen right at the start of the game, to get shorter dialogue (otherwise, you're told how to use the Touch Screen, which takes ages).
You should also use the Touch Screen to initiate dialogue; it works from a longer range.
(Btw, I'm unclear on whether playing as Solana or Lunick is faster. Lunick has less dialogue to sit through because of pronouns ("he" versus "she"); however, certain rarely-playing animations are shorter.)
EDIT: One really big issue: in mission 1, you can capture the second Chikorita and the Zigzagoon in the same battle (which is much faster than two battles). It needs a lot of luck, but a TAS should have perfect luck.
Do you refer to their heroic poses? Aren't those normally used during a fanfare? And doesn't the game not resume until the fanfare finishes playing?
Or did you mean a different animation?
Do you refer to their heroic poses? Aren't those normally used during a fanfare? And doesn't the game not resume until the fanfare finishes playing?
Or did you mean a different animation?
I was thinking of the heroic poses, yes. If there's a frame rule then anyway, though, I learned something today :-)
Has anyone found a way to manipulate spawns in the overworld? As far as i know the pokemon spawn after dialogue or when the screen changes. Then they spawn in a set area. Short of reloading til good patterns i'm not sure of how to optimize it.
Anyone know if its possible to write a LUA script that draws triangles frame by frame?
Yes. The basic approach would either be make 1 triangle then copy-paste the input multiple times, or make a loop in lua and specify 3 static points to make. Lua api is here: Post #425736
A quick example would be something like
while(true) do
stylus.set({x=127,y=95,touch=true})
emu.frameadvance()
stylus.set({x=127,y=0,touch=true})
emu.frameadvance()
stylus.set({x=0,y=95,touch=true})
emu.frameadvance()
end
A better method would be keeping track of the pokemon's positions and offsetting x/y based on that.
Thanks, i'm pretty bad with ram watch and lua. But from what i remember playing the game all most all pokemon start in the middle. It might be possible to brute force speed capture most of the early battles at least with just the right points. For the small ones at least.
Decided to give this a try, but, honestly, it's really not fun to TAS or watch back. The game just has too much text, even after the tutorials are done. Also, I'm really annoyed by the poor emulation of the game (mostly graphical but very blatant). I don't think I'll continue, but I'll post my WIP anyway: User movie #50568756314764533.
Even though I hadn't played this game in years, I kinda wish I went a bit further with just the TAS before deleting my 100% save file...
Joined: 3/2/2014
Posts: 71
Location: Colorado, USA
Hi everyone. Little late to the party, but wanted to let everyone know I'm working on a tas of Shadows of Almia right now. I'm about 45 minutes in, and it's been a blast. Looking at the past posts, I can say a lot of progress has been made in making this actually possible to tas. Having tastudio in bizhawk is a god send; I don't think it'd even be possible for me personally without it.
I tried TASing the original in desmume years back, but found the timing was horrible as triangles would drift. With the better timing of bizhawk, it's a simple one frame for one vertex. However, a member of the rta community let me know that stars are actually faster than triangles. I tested this out and found you can do 2 loops in 5 frames with stars versus 6 for triangles. Because of this, and because of how fast fights are, I doubt I'll even need to use Pachi much at all. If it turns out this is true, it's possible getting Starly is faster.
Second, getting suboptimal captures is preferred as that is less xp bonuses that pop up and less xp to scroll through. To do this, I just added a single blank frame during the capture so that I didn't get the one line bonus. From power on to Gastly, I saved a whopping 7 seconds compared to optimal captures. Also, when the xp ticks by, if you hold down A, if ticks by faster. 4 frames per tick without it, 2 with. It either has to be A or touching the screen, other buttons don't work (that I'm aware of, at least).
Third, I found a glitch when Kramu (I don't know his English name. The guy you meet during ranger day at the school) is teaching you about Poke assists. If you hold B when the game selects Blastoise, it will trigger instant text for 2 extra text boxes. No idea why, but it saves over a second.
Right now I'm almost 2 minutes ahead of the wr. A Japanese TASer did one on nico nico in 2016, but it's very unoptimal. Not sure if I'll be able to beat it, though, because the timing seems to be off. Perhaps the difference between desmume and bizhawk is large enough that it negates the benefits
No game is perfect, Everything can be broken. - Whoever was on the couch with dwangoAC and Weatherton at AGDQ 2014.
