After more than 20 years, here it comes.
Link to video
Official Description:
This is a Tool Assisted Speedrun of Full Tilt Pinball Space Cadet, done by running a Virtual Machine of Linux, then running a Windows 3.1 emulator inside of that Virtual Machine and using LibTAS as a TASing application. The goal of this TAS is to achieve the in-game rank of "Fleet Admiral", noted by lighting up the entire series of orange dots near the center of the machine. This is done by completing several missions in quick succession, all having different objectives.
There's an incredibly high amount of "randomness" in this game due to how the ball's trajectory is manipulatable by both the flippers and the mouse position on the screen. I use this to my advantage by brute-forcing a good outcome in scenarios like Attack Bumper hits and selecting missions.
The oddest thing is that the Windows XP version always requires you to complete three missions to go up one rank, but the Full Tilt version varies for reasons I don't understand. Going from Rank 1 to Rank 2 requires the completion of three missions (Or two of the "Secret" missions), but going from Rank 2 to Rank 3 only required the completion of one, and Rank 6 to Rank 7 requires 2.
Regardless, this is what I came up with. There's still probably some improvements that can be done with stuff like ball trajectory manipulation in some areas, but I still think this is a solid attempt for the first ever TAS of this game.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Link to video
Now that the decomp project has made it possible to port this game to damn near anything, it's going to be a lot more accessible to TASing and speedrunning too. Exciting times!
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6444
Location: The land down under.
What about porting the open source version to linux and seeing if that works with libTAS? Make it easier on everyone.
Similar to the examples above which use the project, but instead of Wii, well Linux.
Also Full Tilt! Pinball has 3 tables to go through.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
I built the reverse engineered version on Linux and it appears to work.
Warning/reminder if anyone tries to TAS this, the function keys do stuff but get captured by libTAS so you might forget. F2 seems to start the game a bit faster.
Link to video
Needs redoing and fixing audio but this is a decent improvement.
I don't actually know if multiball is faster. Also, there's a glitch on 3DPB version that progresses the launch mission multiple times at once.
Link to video
I partially replicated this in PCem but I don't know why it happens, and I'm unsure if it's possible in the decomp version, or why it doesn't work in the original Full Tilt version.
Experimenting with the "hidden test" debug mode. Pressing Y afterwards displays the FPS in the title bar.
Windows 95 version runs at about 15,000 FPS.
Windows NT version about 7,500 FPS.
Windows XP version, 120 FPS. This was when Raymond Chen put the limiter in, clearly.
The decomp version has options for both "updates per second" and "frames per second" and the choice to uncap updates per second. For me it maxes out around 350 FPS/UPS on lowest resolution though. In practice there's not much to do with this info, but it's helpful to note the different versions can behave quite differently.
Hidden test also works in Full Tilt, but you need to use Tab instead of Space.
The FPS limiter on the XP version is controlled an 8ms Sleep call:
https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/Release_1.0/SpaceCadetPinball/winmain.cpp#L274
Checked with Ghidra that the same code is in the XP executable.
I think a TAS of the 3D Pinball version of the decomp should use v2.0.1 or earlier, since v2.1 changed the collision system to Full Tilt version. There's a typo in 2.0.1 with "Commendation" though.
