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Samsara wrote:
One week left for submissions! Someone please remind me next Monday* that I am in fact still doing this!
*so that i can correctly close the contest on tuesday, of course
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If the other teams want to post their lua scripts, ram watches, or notes here it may be useful in eeking out more frames. We already learned about some possible timesave from different RNG manipulation from team Magic Staff.
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There is a ~29 frame timesave on the intro stage to the Ty 2 TAS. By ending your boost closer to fluffy she doesn't trun around. This makes it so her missile launcher doesn't have to rotate at all before she shoots you. You can also hit her sooner depending on where the boost ends.
I had overlooked this because you start the fight much later, don't make up the time difference until over halfway through the fight, and I didn't realize the benefit of her not facing you until it happened to me in an RTA run.
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Awesome TAS, Ballaam! Glad to see you finally submitting some of your work for publication. You get a resounding yes from me.
P.S. If the PAL region does end up getting this run rejected, I hope you are willing to jump through the additional hoops and put in the extra work needed to present this TAS on a slightly suboptimal version that provides no additional entertainment value. Would be a travesty if this TAS is never showed off because of something silly like that.
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I think this is a great example of what a TAS should be and there seems to be something there for everyone.
For Non-TASers the franchise is well known, the length is about right for someone who's not super committed, it's fast and varied enough, there is good playaround (like in the train autoscroller) that keepnit from getting stale.
For people new to TASing the gameplay is overall fairly simple but provides a good example of the type of movement to maintain speed. It has good examples and write-ups of glitches (clips, zips, level/screen wraps, etc) that are common in other games.
For veteran TASers the thorough writeup with backstory, timelines, glitch explanations, and memory addresses really ties the whole thing together.
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Thanks for making those feos.
Would the 1st movie be for official timing (power on to last input), and then 2nd one for rendering video?
If so, I agree that's probably the best course action for this game.
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The8bitbeast wrote:
Even though I did probably less than 5% of the actual inputs I still learnt a lot of interesting stuff and hopefully what I contributed with glitch hunting, routing and minor optimisation helped push this sub 15.
I really appreciated you agreeing to work on this project with me, as there were a few points I almost threw in the towel (*looks at croc escort level*). Your contributions definitely helped push the time down to sub15! Excited to working with you again in the future :)
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Just sat down and manage to get it actually figured out the lion village glitch. There are 2 ways to despawn the enemies that count towards the objective:
1) kill it and let it's animation play out
2) kill it and then get it off screen
If both of these despawns occur on exactly the same frame, both will count down the objective and the single enemy will count as double
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GJTASer2018 wrote:
Does anyone know why this glitch happens?
Not up to this point.
GJTASer2018 wrote:
And if not, would how you managed to reproduce it help figure out why it does happen?
Of course it helps cause now I have access to the system memory while the bug occurs. I can do as much testing and bedugging needed to find the actual cause.
From the button file I captured, it appears an enemy spawning the same frame another enemy despawns is what is causing it.
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It's been a while since I've posted an update here. I'm still chugging away at this TAS. With so many glitches opening up new movement and routing options this game has ended up being a bigger project than I expect. Here are a couple new things since last time:
Text Skipping: pausing the same frame text is about to pop-up just completely skips the text.
Infinite boosting: Figured out how to reliably transfer in and out of this state. Similar to boosteranging, but capable of gaining speed even while airborn. Also avoids ground damage sources.
Lion Village Glitch: tonight I finally got an input file where this glitch occurs. In RTA runs, you would occasionally have one enemy death on this level count as 2. Could in theory cut the time for this level in half.
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I'm getting close to 50% done with this TAS, and am still finding things. This last week I found 2 new glitches, and something applicable for RTA runs.
1) Swim in air: Taking damage while enter water can cause you to be in a swim state, but be above the water and swim in the air. Needs to take damage or enter water to cancel. Would love to include, but will probably not be fast enough.
2) While doing an RTA run, I managed to get a kill on an enemy to count as 2 kills for the objective. Not sure what caused it, but hopefully will figure it out/replicate it soon.
RTA Viable thing) landing with infrarang rang throw keeps the the glide bit set indefinitely until you jump/land again. Makes superjump extremely easy/RTA viable.
I also finished creating maps for the game. Found here.
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I mentioned this on the IRC a while ago and was asked to put it here but forgot. When working with TAStudio and the current mgba core. The game(? emulator? Core? Idk) tends to enter a state where load times are shortened and the bios will not boot when going back to frame 0.
I have witnessed this with many games (ty2, hi hi puffy ami Yumi, banjo pilot, and klonoa).
Closing and reopening TAStudio tends to fix it. And I have yet to witness this state when running the movie without TAStudio open.
Not sure if it's an issue with TAStudio, mGBA, or just some bad compatibility between the 2.
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Here's the latest WIP on this game for anyone curious. Any feedback is appreciated!!!
Link to video
I realized you could do 1 up press in the pause menu to exit level instead of 2 downs, which saved 2 frames every pause exit, so the last week or 2 have just been resyncing what I had.
As you may notice I'm having big issues with RNG. Overworld 1 (where I just sit there for a second in the jeep) has always been a problem, my boss fight (Patchy the dino robot) is 20 frame slower than before the resync. Luckily i managed to save 35 in Boonie Come Home (lvl 3) during the resync so I'm still positive on time save leaving the boss, but then the enemy RNG on the overworld right after is REALLY bad (where this WIP stops).
To effect RNG I've tried additional inputs throughout the prior level that didn't actually effect the gameplay, entering the level a few frames later, but I'm can't seem to get any real change in the RNG :/ If you have any ideas what else to try let me know.
