Curious if anyone has done much digging in this game. Was messing around a bit in the RAM search today and manage to find jetpack speed and fuel, but can't find the actual trigger for acquiring the jetpack. There are things I want to do with this knowledge (mostly want to see if I can carry it into different stages somehow). Unfortunately my RAM watch didn't save correctly so I have to dig for it again.
Either way, I know very little about TAS type stuff, so more curious if anyone with experience is willing to deep dive a bit.
No doubt. I'm mostly looking at ways to see if you can carry the jetpack in Blasto from episode 1 to episode 2 and trying to learn to read the values for that to see if it's even possible. But that's a bit off topic.
But yeah, once I find my hard drive and hook it back up I plan to go digging again. Definitely some cool new stuff you found. Would really be cool to see if we can skip revisits, if possible and if it's even useful.
Are there infinite continues? I didn't even think about this aspect, especially since when we were tampering with things it was in emu and we basically had god mode on, lol.
One thing I meant to ask is how you managed to find and isolate certain values in that huge list of shit. Everytime I look at them they just look like gibberish to me :/. I'm asking too because I'd like to be able to look at other games like this (specifically Blasto) to see if I can figure some other things out, but I have no idea what I'm doing lol.
So, I've been in quite a hiatus, and I apologize. The last year has been quite a year to say the least and I'm still trying to find my headspace. But I do very much intend on getting back into things and especially back into KA. I ordered a physical copy of the game and soon as I find my old hard drive, I'll be putting in emu work again and getting used to controls and whatnot. I see Oxy has still be doing some work on the resource page and youtube, and that's fucking awesome. Hopefully we can put our heads together again and take this game down.
Good stuff Oxy. I'll be sure to check that stuff out when I get there. Also, I've been kinda sick, so too today off to kinda relax. I'll get back on the grind tomorrow for sure and see if we can find anything else.
Good stuff. I love the instant boss kills. That shit is so funny.
I don't think it would be too difficult to set up the pressure plate into a quick death, especially with the hammer guys that hang around.
Welp. I hate dungeon 3. Nothing looks or seems reasonable in terms of skips. Upside is it is relatively short and easy. The crypt puzzle is annoying though. Take so long to move those things around to the right spots.
I think I figured out the strat against Snuff. If you haven't read the earlier posts in this thread, then you probably learned the hard way that skipping snuff entirely is not viable because it will cause a required loading zone to vanish completely out of existence a room or two later. (thanks psygnosis!) As such, I decided to search for a new trick. Here is what I came up with just now
https://youtu.be/Gq3U4Ld909I
Not too hard to do RTA as long as you practice it enough. It's actually possible to drop down into the small space behind the door and manipulate Snuff into killing himself from there, meaning that you don't have to take a death and you get to save a couple seconds, but it is much harder and comes down to rng a lot more I think.
note that my game was a bit glitched in this recording, (weird polygons, etc.) but the trick should work regardless. I think this might have happened because of how I was trying to exploit the game using the start menu glitch (fall down into the void, wait a bit and press start just before the transition. You will respawn with the start menu still showing while being able to move around)
Oh man, I must have completely missed that post. That's amazing and hilarious though. Good to know.
Also, I feel with all the damage boosting we do, we need to figure out viable heart/1up and possibly coin patterns because continues in this game start you at the beginning of a dungeon...and that sucks hard.
So good news...most of dungeon 2 can be skipped through various corner and damage boosts.
Bad news...it may come with consequences...
I made my way through the dungeon skipping anything and everything possible, including the boss. After skipping the boss, all the triggers saying you "killed" him are affected. ie: dialogue triggers. However, the last cottage when you talk to the little girl about your achievements there is a door, like so http://puu.sh/muK3y/befe20d301.png
It's the only exit. Problem is, there is not loading zone. You walk through the door and just fall into the abyss and die. This also causes a soft lock because you can't go back the way you came and there is no where else to go. I've tried jumping as far as I can out into the blackness and everything. There is nothing.
With this image you can see I'm standing where the load zone SHOULD be, but isn't: http://puu.sh/muKue/4e0f606bbd.png
Going to redo the boss fight and see if that actually makes things work or not.
EDIT:
So the boss drops the Knife and Fork as an item upon death that is required to trigger the last load point. So rip skipping the boss fight. That's really unfortunate, and I'm not sure there is a way to dupe the item somehow without fighting.
I guess the next step would be finding some boss manipulation to give the most favorable pattern.
We can indeed move the immobile mob with attacks or just running into it but there is indeed no viable corner for that, and only 2 of which would even be acceptable anyway since they have to be next to the 10,000 units walls so we can get on top of those. I actually wonder if damage boosting straight into a wall without any corner could be a thing? Might be a TAS only trick but that would certainly reiterate things a lot considering we'd no longer be restricted to corners, we could just upwarp where the hell we want, so long as there are nice perpendicular walls.
I tried messing with just straight up against a wall, but I think the reason a corner works is because it restricts your side to side movement. So instead of an attack against a wall pushing you to one side or the other, it just pushes you back, allowing for the boost to happen.
That's the best explanation I got anyways. If you can manage to do it without a corner, I feel like it would be a TAS only thing and would be really hard to setup RTA.
this is interesting because it seems to be a bit more reliable than the ways I've been doing it so far and lets you take less damage. Do you actually get the upwarp on the first try always doing it that way? Or does it normally take a few tries? My way going directly forward usually works after 4-5 tries, sometime less, but you do take damage in the process which is sort of sub-ideal for RTA
Yeah, I can get it pretty consistently. I'm just timing the backflip with the enemy attack and it just pops me out. Once you get a feel for the attack timing its actually really easy. Fenns, the guy that introduced me to the game at AGDQ picked it up pretty quickly too after I showed it to him. Also it's quite a bit safer because you can block the damage with your shield until you get your timing to do the flip.
By the way, here's my updated ram watch which has some extra stuff like health which you can freeze https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1BJqPPfhZhdSWduMVhCaUtOVUk/view?usp=sharing
It's actually pretty slow for the emulator to update the ram watch fields every frame so here's a trick I found out: in the ram watch window, go into Options and then enable "Display Watches On Screen", and then minimize the ram watch window. This will make it so that watches are drawn directly onto the screen by the emulator's renderer which is very fast. Minimizing the ram watch window on the other hand makes it so that it doesn't get updated. You should see a slight improvement in fps from this trick. I told one of the Bizhawk dev about this a while back and I think he said it was on the list of things to fix/optimize.
Thanks for the updated RAM watch. I was trying to do a search for things like health values and stuff and was ready to pull my hair out trying to figure shit out and search through the massive list of values, haha.
As for the "display on screen" mechanic...it works in terms of reducing the frame drops, but its such a cluttered mess. I got rid of the unnecessary columns but it still shows all the details on screen regardless so it overlaps and remains cluttered and unreadable. So if you have a fix for that, it would be much appreciated. Otherwise I'll just use the window to make any adjustments like freezing values and just minimize it. I do most of my findings by feeling the game out anyways, this would just be a nice assist.
oxysoft wrote:
2. I finally got the pineapple key skip after reviewing your highlight on twitch https://youtu.be/iGBXg9kzrC0
However, the joy was short-lived: I realized that it's not actually possible to skip the grape key afterward unless you don't do the pineapple key skip. This is not such a huge problem since the grape key is quick to get anyway. What I'm more concerned about is this: is the grape key we need in the third dungeon actually the same item in memory? Because if so, it could potentially be faster to skip the first grape key wall, keep the key and use it later in the third dungeon.
The reason you can't skip the grape key in the second dungeon if you skip the pineapple key is pretty interesting. In that room with the grape key door, 2 tall mobs spawn, one of which is IMMOBILE. The mobile one spawns in the middle of the pineapple key door. See where I'm going? Since this door is skipped, the mob spawns on top of it and actually falls down to its death... The immobile mob spawns near a few walls but not close to any good corners.
As if that wasn't enough, that room has pretty much no 90 degree corners, they're all pretty obtuse corners. The only 90 degree corner I could find is the one behind the statue, and while you can reach that corner by fitting yourself behind the statue, you couldn't push the mob in there with you.
Later, I will cheat my position to go past that door regardless and test if it is indeed the same grape key item used in the third dungeon. If it isn't, then all of this we can safely ignore and just use it in the second dungeon as we are supposed to. It might not even save time anyway to keep that grape key for third dungeon
This is fantastic. Thats a good chunk of early dungeon 2 that can be knocked out by that skip alone. After some messing around and getting a feel of how deep in the wall I need to be to maintain a sidestep, it's pretty easy to setup and execute.
As far as the "why" for skipping the grape key gate, I'm not sure I had the same interactions as you. One of the enemies did die because he spawns where the pineapple gate is, but since you skip it, the gate is still up, so he spawns on top of it and falls to his death when he tries to walk into the room. As for the other one, he's not entirely immobile. He won't make attempts to chase you (which is good) but can still be attacked and moved that way. Other than that, everything functions normally. The main reason we can't get past the grape key gate is that section appears to be surrounded by the very high walls that we encounter every now and then. I tried air strafing around the walls and everything I can think of, but no luck getting around. Damage boost might be possible (and I think this is what you were talking about), but there doesn't seem to be a viable position to do so.
Warepire wrote:
That's some nice skip of the pineapple key, I do however wonder why you just cannot run on the wall past the grape key door? Maybe you explained it and I just can't understand.
See above. In short the walls around the green warp point are super tall and there is no viable way to get around them or over/on them.
So I made a couple quick highlights.
First is to show how backflipping can boost OoB (bonus of silly enemy death): http://www.twitch.tv/saintconnor/v/35185283
Second is me working with a corner early in dungeon 2 (grape key room) that could maybe skip the pineapple door? Hard to say http://www.twitch.tv/saintconnor/v/35186509
I feel like the platform is too short to allow for a proper OoB boost onto the wall and spiders are too unreliable because their attack animation has no start up for a visual cue. Might be worth looking into still.
So I visited that corner between the large books and the wall in the Library (grape key room) and managed to get on top of the map. If you run into the acute angled wall, its pretty easy to work your way into the corner. From there I give some slight taps left while running forward until I can safely maintain the corner glitch using side step instead then keep turning until my back is against the wall. From there I do a quick backflip and immediately release the sidestep and it puts me above the map on a high scale wall.
From there is the hard part however. From a TAS standpoint it may be quite easy to work around the map to the loading point, but RTA may be much more difficult. Haven't tried making a running leap to see if I can actually jump across the room or not, will test that later.
Oh, quick question, which emulator are you using? I'm assuming ePSXe as that tends to be what a lot of people seem to play on I've noticed, but didn't know if there was a prefered.
Hmm...that's interesting. Then maybe speed isn't the factor that's actually causing clips. Fenns can verify that I was clipping consistently using the backflip method so it definitely works, the why is really the question.
I know some games during jump animations (including backflips) factor in distance to the next point. So maybe in the case of the backflip the game is saying "ok, you should land at this point" and the damage boost is pushing beyond that basically pushing Kingsley into the wall and boosting him upwards. Which would explain why it may not have a Y velocity and treats it more as if it is a dash or blink. If that makes sense...
Posted in the SDA thread, but figured I'd just post it here as well:
Hey there! I recently had the pleasure of meeting Fenns at AGDQ this year who introduced me to this game and I'm definitely interested in running it. It has a very similar feel to Blasto to me, so it's well within my comfort zone. During the short time I messed with it, I did find some OOB tricks on my own using damage boots from enemies. Fenns linked me here and the thread on TAS videos and I can see you guys have found similar OOB methods in slightly different ways.
Upon reading up a bit, especially on the TASVids page, I noticed something about getting these clips relying on the relative speed of Kingsley during the clip being 32 (his running speed) and during an enemy attack it resets his speed to 0 on the first frame then down to his normal walk speed at 20.
Now when I found the OOB clips on my own, I was using the method of back-flipping during an enemy attack and was getting much success for taller enemies (not so much for the likes of spiders). With this in mind, I have a feeling that the back-flip may have a speed similar to running in a short moment in addition to getting a proper jump height during an attack that allows for getting the clips successfully. I don't have the resources such as a ROM or things used by TASers, so I'm just making that assumption based on the info I'm reading from you guys.
Speaking of, I found a ROM and plan to dive into the game very soon and will get an actual physical copy relatively soon. In the meantime, if you guys have any resources I could use to help further route this game, feel free to share (ie. I noticed during some testing on the TASVids thread, damage not being taken allowing for constant attempts at clipping). I'm not hugely familiar with emulation due to preferring actual copies of the games I play, so any help in those terms would be great.
Until then, I'm looking forward to breaking this game further :D
