It's an honor! I clearly remember the day I got the first upwarp in the practice room, it was pretty surreal to have discovered something huge. I looked at your run and it was well played! I think it can go as low as 56-57.
I'll let you know what I think is RTA viable: it's just about everything. Back in my days I used to practice RTA too and I skipped the entire practice room and fight against drill sergeant by upwarping with the statue, I had a consistent camera/positioning setup to make it into loading around 75-80% of the time, charging and turning forward in blind darkness. I'll let you in on a little secret, if you go into first person view and look down you can see the stage below and use that as a reference for your setups.
There is also an input glitch you can use to move during the test boxes at the beginning of the tutorial platforming course, I believe you hold triangle or start and it'll let you move.
The Snuff oob kill is pretty easy, I remember there was a consistent setup in how you walk through the room and approach the corner so that Snuff gives you a guaranteed upwarp. Doing the elevator requires skillful movement. Also do not trash talk the the tank controls, everybody does this and it hurts your potential. You have to look at it as a methodical style of movement that requires precisely timed turning, charging, and sidestepping in alternation. I could precisely skirt along the edge with the perfect angle and get elevator easily every time.
I had a good laugh in that one room during the 2nd dungeon with two monsters and you're supposed to upwarp but it just never does. I remember that room perfectly well, I had devised a movement setup for this as well just like Snuff so the mob always come at the perfect angle to get a consistent upwarp. In fact most of the rooms in the game where you have to upwarp you should always be thinking about your movement prior to lead the monsters in at the best angle.
Where I always got destroyed is well the final dungeon. The arrow shooting section and unending rooms with difficult upwarps and annoying enemies ended all my runs. I like your idea of changing the route early in Snuff to grab the key to skip a room later, that's a good idea. All the key types in this game are reused across dungeons so we should definitely consider every option. In the training room in the beginning which I skip, you can actually get infinite cherry keys I believe, but you had to skip a section with some insane wall platforming. There are a couple more rooms in Snuff that I'm able to easily skip by upwarp, I believe you could save a green apple key it was. Also in the first dungeon the cannonball room, I can't remember what it was but the cycles are always the same and IIRC there's a consistent input timing trick you can do to make it go perfect every time, just like the flames at the start of Snuff.
I recommend continuing to run the game if you like it. It's a rewarding run for sure, there are a lot of tiny details to optimize and I'm certain new glitches waiting to be found. A couple years after all these finds I went into it and randomly I was playing around in the first world.. you know the entrance to the first dungeon, there is a dark mountain/island area with a lighthouse you gotta enter. I was bumping into the scenery and found a way to upwarp on top of the lighthouse by just running in side of it. I wouldn't be surprised if we were only still scratching the tip of the iceberg, potentially there are mindblowingly precise damage boost angle that let you clip into perfectly flat walls or upwarp with small enemies.
I'm afraid this looks more like a segmented run than a TAS. The movement is poorly optimized, and half of the rooms you did we can completely skip with wall clips and upwarps. None of the tricks we discovered have been used! Personally I haven't abandoned this project, it's just on the backburner and probably won't get done until much later in my life. But if someone is ever serious about TASing it, get in contact with me and I will let you know my current route.
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.
If you've ever played with cheat engines when you were younger to cheat in games, it's the same thing really. You look for one initial value, play the game a bit, then refine your search.
To find your lives for example, you'd do an initial search with the number of lives you currently have, lose/gain a life, redo a search with your new number of lives, and so on and so forth until you've nailed it down to one single address. For things you don't quite have an exact value of like your speed for example, you need to do some assumptions.
For example, it makes sense to assume that your angular velocity must be set to 0 when you're immobile, so you'd do an initial search of zero while standing, then you could start walking forward and since you don't know the exact value of that angular velocity, you'd filter for values that have raised instead of an exact value. Then, you could go back to standing and search for decreased values, etc. Eventually, you'd end up with the angular velocity (if it's stored in the RAM that is, it's possible that the game never needs it)
I skipped over the different ways that those values may be stored (bytes, 2-bytes, 4-bytes, endianness (the PSX uses little endian) and signed/unsigned values) and again you have to make assumptions here and understand a bit how all of this works. It's all big words for pretty simple concepts, all things considered. I recommend this guide for more information http://tasvideos.org/MemorySearch.html
edit: but to address you post, I doubt you'll find anything useful for RTA using ram watches. It's useful mostly just for optimizing things during a TAS and also perhaps understanding a little better how certain things in the game might work. Usually, just experimenting and toying around is good enough to find good RTA viable tricks.
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.
Awesome to hear. I've been playing around on and off with this game for a few months now and actually started streaming some RTA runs in the last couple of days. I've been trying to figure out so hard how to optimize lives seeing how damage/death abuse heavy a run of this game is going to be with all these tricks but I recently realized something that might seem obvious in retrospect, but if you ever enter a dungeon low on lives, just kill yourself until you game over and you'll respawn at the beginning with your lives refilled to 5. I somehow had the wrong assumption that you would go back to your last save if you game over but no, you just respawn at the start of the dungeon. I usually enter the 4th dungeon with 1 or 2 lives so a quick reset to 5 right at the beginning there is definitely good for RTA.
Speaking of the 4th dungeon, a good route needs to be figured out for the two rooms filled with all these piece of shit archer rats because they can very easily fuck up your run. I did a run yesterday that went fairly average, decided not to reset anyway because I wanted to finish a run for once, but I got wrecked at that part.. I don't know whose idea it was to put inertia on the first person mode but it's ridiculous, it definitely takes practice to aim
This is so against the spirit of tasing and is a shame to everyone who works on tases.
Spikestuff wrote:
Like myself (2 player), mozkf (1 player) and TheRedhotbr (1 player) did?
Ah yes, those are the ones I had in mind
Spikestuff wrote:
How's 1 player going for you anyways?
Didn't work on it further, I don't think that kind of AI manipulation is for me. I prefer games where I can mostly focus on optimizing movements, route etc.
that's hilarious. Crash Bash is in dire need of a good tas but at the same time it's such a beast to take apart, with all the different movement mechanics we have to study and the AI manipulation everywhere...
And some of these minigames come down to P=NP a bit I think, I mean how do you optimize polar panic levels for example? I'm thinking the FASTEST way would be to manipulate all the AIs to jump off the stage right as it starts but is that even possible? You could maybe manipulate one to jump right off but how do you synchronize them all so that they all do it? So many difficult questions.
I guess the next option would be to play perfectly but how do you define perfection in a game like that? Some minigames like crash ball we are in fact able to define perfection (someone had already TASed it in fact) as a sequential list of things to do but for some other mini-games, (like polar panic) that's really difficult.
edit: I noticed your attempt at polar panic and remembered we are doing 2 players so that does open up some possibilities
I've been playing around on and off trying to find some new tricks. I noticed that the loading zone for the locked door in the second world is actually really really close to the outside of the building so I've been trying to maybe touch it ever so slightly through the walls and activate it from outside.
I decided to try the most random thing ever and didn't actually think it would work but pushing myself against the door together with the dog (which I pushed all the way to the door prior to) actually lets me clip very easily through the door
https://gfycat.com/NegligibleDirectChimneyswift
Sadly, the loading zone is not active at that point when the door is closed. Quite weird. This could be useful for other things tho, just an interesting mechanic to keep in mind when looking for skips and stuff
In the training rooms at the beginning, I found a way to clip into the movable block. You place it such at it is overlapping the sliding door while it's down and pull it as close as you can to the switch. You can pull it closer than you normally could by taking advantage of the glitched corner of this block which can clip inside walls. Then, you activate the switch to slide the door back up and reactivate it again to pull it down. As it's coming down, you rapidly run under it and you'll be pushed inside the block. You cannot move out of it by walking in any way, and you can pull/push the block into any direction from inside. (kingsley moves along with it) Finally, you can jump to upwarp on top of the block. If you position the block next to a wall and jump forward, you can upwarp on top of walls. As is what seems to be standard with this game, the room is littered with walls that extend to 10,000 units high with a few low walls sprinkled all over. I don't think this whole thing has any use considering the time it takes to setup it and whatnot but it's a fun trick to keep in mind.
edit: found some new oddities
I've been playing around with the green portal that takes you to the room with Reggie but I think this will probably apply to all green portals like this
1. If you do the glitch to walk around while in first person, look all the way down towards the floor and enter a green portal, there is a very high chance that the game will just freeze forever. The more towards the floor you are looking, the higher the chances.
2. If you enter the portal, exit out the game real quick then start a new game, kingsley will appear as if he was coming out of a green portal in the room with adelina at the start. Doesn't seem to affect anything but it's good to keep in mind just in case
If I keep pushing the game and testing every little details, it shouldn't be too long before I start finding some really serious glitches in the game. At least, that's what I'm hoping. (e.g. causing loading zone to warp to incorrect areas, this kind of stuff)
I've been playing around lately, trying to figure out stuff and I came across this
https://gfycat.com/ElatedHarmlessAracari
Didn't do much in the end but it's still cool. Also interesting that you can activate that switch more than once. I wonder if it's the same for other ones also?
I started the TAS over from the start, improving on the old wip that got to the library (so not even into the first dungeon) and so far I got to the room of the tutorial with the block you gotta push onto the pressure plate. Entering that room, I am overall 71 frames faster than the old one so that's certainly good news. This is partly due to the fact that I now force Kingsley to immediately run all the time by double tapping the forward stick, which can be done lightning fast in TAS. (thanks connor for that one)
The next couple bits are gonna take a bit longer because I want to test an alternate route for for that room.
Here is the progress on the old TAS, as a sample of what to expect https://youtu.be/cF98xGd4j-g
now that I rewatch it, that upwarp was so insanely good that I I don't even think my new TAS is even as fast as that. I'll have to time it during my next session.
You can use the userfiles storage. Log in to the main page, and then almost at the very bottom there's a link saying "Upload a WIP...".
It accepts RAM Watches and Lua scripts as well as movie files.
Just letting you guys know that I have updated the dedicated resource page for this game http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/PSX/KingsleysAdventure.html
it contains almost everything that is known up until now and I suggest reading it (especially you saintconnor since you are going to be playing around in this game)
Finished the game and here's everything I found after 3rd dungeon (which is.. not a lot, unfortunately!)
Arrow room skip https://youtu.be/p_7ZMkfOPng
This chest is close to the wall enough that you can clip into the wall and just upwarp there, nothing super difficult. Playing in this room a bit, I wondered if I could maybe shoot the target from way back, on top of the panel that opens up after, but here's what I found out: I believe that the game unloads/stop updating everything that is not rendered. So shooting the arrow from there to the target actually did nothing. So I went to the furthest place I could find where it was still loaded and hit it, then tried going back to the panel quickly, but I realized that it didn't do anything. When I walked back closer to the target, then it enabled the short cutscene and the panel went up. Zooming in with R1 also will make stuff render/update from further away also. May be good to keep in mind for certain things later
I also found a frame perfect exploit by accident that has no use for now but basically, there is a single frame before the cutscene starts where you can shoot an arrow and it will come out from the point of view of the camera during the cutscene, and I think the angle it shoots off at depends on your view before the cutscene. I actually did that on accident the first time and was amazed when I realized afterward that there is only a single frame window. Could perhaps be useful for something? Highly doubtful but still
Next up is a skip for the room I call the "bullshit room" https://youtu.be/4MZ9-xU2VCg Almost like the dev put that acute corner there on purpose
Banana key skip https://youtu.be/BI50rrM20Tg uses 90 degree corner + a tall enemy. Pretty standard stuff
A skip for the room just before the prison room https://youtu.be/MN3jAl_Xe0U I actually had no idea how to complete this room legitimately. There was no place I could go? Anyway, I got crafty and shot 7 arrows at that crush monster (the category of monsters that crushs you) which is the max you can do before he dies, then pushed him the rest of the way to the wall, and used him to clip and upwarp.
To finish off, a quick upwarp using an acute corner to shave off a few seconds of dialogs and running https://youtu.be/-YGQ53GzE2k What is cool about this is that the last prison cell has an easter egg. It's basically a refrigerator npc that, according to one of the developers in an interview, supposedly contained a celery and a carrot, but nobody was able to interact with it and therefore nobody was ever able to confirm this. This upwarp however changes everything!
One last skip I forgot to record. The dark night of aphasia, (4th dungeon world) you can skip the first room. There are acute corners all over the place but none of them let you reach the loading point because there is a ditch in the wall in-between. So what I did is push the movable box against the slanted corners at the far end of the room, and basically created my own acute corners. From there, I think you can figure out what comes next.
A small bit of information that's nice to know is that there is quite a delay before you take the damage when walking on the green goop in 4th dungeon. (the water-like substance of that dungeon)
Oh, and in the world right before the final boss fight, if you jump down into the lava, it'll put you next to the boss entrance which skips a bit of walking. (also, notice how that jump behaves, try it a couple times, you'll see why I'm saying that. I'm gonna have to study that one. It basically pulls you straight down halfway thru the jump which is REALLY weird)
Unfortunately, no boss skips/quick deaths were found after Clarence, which kind of sucks. It is sort of possible with Reggie (4th boss) because you can get on top of the walls and get the door down, like with Snuff, but reggie doesn't really care and moves all over the place. Many annoying rooms in the 4th dungeon could not be skipped either. It's still worthwhile to search in those rooms however, maybe I could have missed some interesting details.
After this, I'm gonna take a break with this game for a few days to think of some ideas and brainstorm a bit with what we have and what we know. All the obvious skips are there on the t able and now we'll have to think way out of the box I think.
Beein researching the third dungeon for a bit
Finally found a way to skip the entire third dungeon. This doesn't stop the softlock from happening after but at least it's possible so there's that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cspZ92dCXS4
Found a way to perform an upwarp and and quickly activate the pressure plate and release the cage around the purple plant/ingredient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpT9i1xWEiw The other room with the green plant should be before this one so that we would have low HP after it and could suicide quickly after activating the pressure plate. Might be hard/impossible to string all of this together in RTA, but it's a cool route for TAS. To get the upwarp, you have to run into the coffee and stop moving right when you're inbtween it and the wall, (which is a bit hard to get in RTA because it happens suddenly and quickly) then sidestep towards the wall and jump at the same time. You need to be angled a certain way for it to work, refer to the video.
Finally, clarence strat, pretty similar to snuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxdUu_d1DYY It's possible to get a quicker kill by jumping into the void and having clarence follow you into it. For this boss you don't have to wait for the talking to finish, unlike snuff. So it can be setup such that clarence dies in the void as the sceen is transitioning away from your death. It's quicker and also respawns you in the middle of the room, close to the loading zone. Might be a bit harder to do RTA so I showed the simple and consistent method in this video.
Okay, well I guess I learned my lesson. Never fuck around with the menu glitch I listed above. I think my entire rom of Kingsley got corrupted. When I start the game (no save or anything, clean start) some of the VRAM is corrupted already, and it freezes all over the place. In fact, I just let it on the start menu for a bit and the game crashed during the demo
Saint Connor wrote:
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.
Dungeon 3 is pretty boring yea
edit: I guess I forgot to mention a small detail about the pineapple key door skip. When I toyed with it yesterday, trying to find a solution for the grape key, I did notice something: when the spiders were deployed, if you can somehow get a spider on top of that door, the mobile tall monster will spawn on the ground below, but on the wrong side. I'm not sure if the spider's positioning on that door could somehow affect the side the tall monster will spawn on but this is a potential trick for TAS. Also to get spiders on top of walls is actually quite an easy trick and happens all the time during casual play: (in fact, not only with spiders, as you may have noticed in your highlight, the tall monster that randomly just died) their movement speed is so high when they lunge at you that they can easily upwarp all over the place, and they will always keep doing their lunge when you are on an opposite wall. Monsters can perform unassisted upwarps relatively easily, and on straight walls even.
yes, hearts and stuff will have to be routed indeed
found a way to corrupt the vram using an acute corner to perform an upwarp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP8_1Ciah5E&feature=youtu.be
serves no purpose but I thought I might as well show. (did you know Kingsley's dead body can sidestep as well!?)
If you jump straight into the portal and skip little girl, you will hardlock(screen remains black)
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)
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.
Because I've been screwing around with the forward upwarp since its discovery, I can actually get it a lot more consistently than I previously thought. I just run up to 90 degree corners with a mob on my trail and generally get the upwarp on the first hit, or the second sometimes. It can spiral out of control pretty quickly tho if you start missing it so the backflip way is indeed a bit more safe but does waste 2-3 seconds since you have to setup it then possibly end up in a subpar angle in relation to where you want to go after getting upwarped.
If you've used cheat engine in the past, finding interesting values is pretty straightforward. It's just a bunch of tests back to back to narrow down until you get only one/a few.
I'm not sure what you mean by "cluttered mess" but that's what it looks like for me
I personally think that looks nice, with the values on the side
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.
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.
ah right, I guess I just kind of implied it but didn't state exactly why. There are high bounding boxes surrounding the door (those that shoot to the sky, which I suggest we refer to as "10,000 units BBs" since these always shoot up to y=10,000) and the only section you could get through is a small part above the grape key door where the BB is normal but you can't quite reach from either sides of the wall. (I am quite sure that it is impossible to reach it but maybe, just maybe, with a combination of frame perfect jumps and sidestepping in the air. I'll have to try it)
Btw, do you think you'll be playing around with Kingsley anytime soon? We could use definitely use some more people for glitch hunting!
I spent 2-3 hours just screwing around and hunting for anything interesting
here is what I found
1. You can get OoB in Sea Town https://youtu.be/81kEDWZEUWU
I couldn't find a purpose for this after spending a lot of time there but it is pretty cool nonetheless. I was able to hardlock the game from there though which is pretty funny: https://youtu.be/qIKHADkfSLo2. 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 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
Saint Connor wrote:
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.
I found this wonky corner as well when I was researching this dungeon and had the same reactions as you did in that highlight. It looked promising and all, but never really yielded anything. I still get the strong sensation that there is something to do with this corner and it's puzzling me a lot.
Other than that, the corner you went to try out at the end of that highlight (in front of the wonky acute one) is the one I was able to use along with the spiders to skip pineapple key, if you want to try experimenting with that and your backflip trick. Note that up until now, this clip has been extremely elusive and only occured twice in like 60+ minutes of testing
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.
On a side note, it's good to see some new people getting interested in breaking this game. Until now, it's been mainly me and 2-3 other guys on the SDA thread but I have a pretty good feeling that we're only scratching the surface on how terribly broken this game truly is
edit: lol, press and hold start then exit out the menu using another button. What a weird game
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.
If you read some older posts in this thread, you should see that a grape key skip has already been ruled out. Two factors lead me to this conclusion:
1. The wall adjacent to the books we use to upwarp extend to 10,000 units high. If we maneuver a bit on top of this bounding box and reach the corner where the next wall meets with it, we quickly realize that this next wall we would need to step on to finally get to the warp zone is a regular wall which unfortunately does not extend to 10,000 units and therefore means that we cannot safely get down without dying. It is also not possible to jump across the entire room into the warp zone
2. Even if we were to somehow reach the warp zone, the game will softlock when attempting to come out because the grape key door is still up.
Ideas:
1. When I manually moved myself into the warp zone by manipulating the game's memory, I don't think I tried to stand on TOP of the grape key door. Here's my idea: Walls/things that can slide down and up act stangely in this game. In one of the tutorial area, you walk on top of a pressure plate which causes a door to temporarily go down. By staying on top of the door and carefully sidestepping a bit, you can get it to go back up while still being on top of that door. If you move back "deeper" into the door, the game will detect that you are standing on it again and it will fall back down. I would be curious as to what would happen with a key door, and if something interesting does happen, if we can somehow trick the game into keeping the door down. This is all assuming we can find a way to get on top of that door in the first place.
2. Maybe try playing further into the game. (finishing the first dungeon, interacting with npcs, anything...) perhaps advancing the story could trigger the door to go down?
Finally, two unrelated ideas:
1. A simple lua script should be written that can be enabled at will. This script would increment Kingsley's angle every frame (which is in range [0,4200] if I am not mistaken) and set his speed to 32, which is running speed. From there, we position kingsley in front of corners and enable the script. This would simulate the act of running into a corner at full speed from every possible angles, and could help in finding magic angles that will let us perform unassisted corner clips. (which has been impossible up until this point without sharp angles) From there, we could abuse them in a TAS environment by carefully manipulating our angles into these magic numbers. These should be tested with sidesteps as well.
2. When jumping out of bounds and dying in the void, kingsley acts very bizarrely and while it locks your movement, you are actually free to move with sidesteps. I suggest we try jumping into the void next to a warp zone then sidestep into it. Some interesting properties are bound to be manifested
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
I booted up the game in my emulator and decided to inspect the behaviors of backflips. A backflip sets Kingsley's speed to 20 which is unfortunately the same as walking speed. When getting attacked at the same time, your speed seems to be reset to 0 for a frame, the same as when on ground. Therefore, backflips shouldn't be relevant to us.
I didn't pay attention to see if backflips actually give you any Y velocity but I did notice that after getting attacked during a backflip, my Y velocity was reset to 0 until I touched the ground again. This may suggest that the backflip is actually only any animation and does not give you any height. I will go back soon to verify that. If you do actually gain height/Y velocity, then it might open some possibilities for glitches and mechanic abuse. (i.e getting attacked while backflipping off a ledge, etc. Stuff like this is worth studying the results)
edit: guess I should talk about the third dungeon as well. I am 99% sure we can't skip it. First, I spent about 3 hours trying to get on top of the slab with the exit passage but could not even get close to reaching this area. This area does have spiders I believe but could not upwarp anywhere using them. (We do know it is possible but extremely difficult, and the only times I was able to perform it was with wide angle walls, not 90 degree ones)
I was able to get on top of that scythe with a series of highly precise jumps, sideway movements and countless rerecords, hopeful that I could jump on the walls but you can't reach them anyway.
I then manually changed my position in the game's memory to get up the slab to see how it behaves with the game anyway, and it turns out that the game softlocks because the gate remains closed. We should therefore work towards perfecting a good route for this dungeon. In some posts before this one, I outlined how to perform an upwarp to get into the cage containing the green leaf and another way to upwarp back up after getting it. (which might be a bit sketchy for RTA, but definitely a good skip for TAS)
I get the feeling that it might be possible to "manipulate" the upwarp, so to speak, and end up on top of the cage rather than the 10,000 units high walls which would save a bit of time and make it viable for RTA!
The other 2 challenge rooms exhibit some interesting properties which I can't wait to play around with.
It's been a while since I worked on this but I found out that it might be possible to clip in 90 degree walls using small enemies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8HIJuHGNIA
Note that I froze both my health and speed value so that I was always moving at 32 units. (running speed) This means that results might be inaccurate but in essence, you would have to clip into the wall on the first hit you take by those spiders or else you will downgrade to walking speed which I am 99% sure will not let you perform this trick.
I will now continuously attempt this without freezing my speed
edit: so here's the deal, when you take a hit, your speed drops to 0 for a frame then it is downgraded to 20, which seems to happen before kingsley can clip into the wall. It might work for some magic angles with very very precise timing etc. but it might take a while to find out if it is. I have a gut feeling that if I keep trying though, it will eventually work
I haven't done too much lately since I'm knee-deep working on another project. (not tas related that is) The tas so far gets into the library and although it's pretty optimized, I can't help but feel that it's "choppy", for lack of a better word. Maybe it's a result of the weird controls in the game. I'm thinking of starting over though because I think some parts could be done.
I realized also after watching Not Worthy's video that the block pushing part is most likely faster if pushed from the other side rather than pulled inward towards the pressure pad. (The time it takes after to get through the door that is) I will re-tas it and see if it's true.
In any case, I'll try to record my progress and post the video soon.
Warepire wrote:
The SDA thread was just updated with some videos that contain some interesting stuff.
I personally think that looks nice, with the values on the side
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 then manually changed my position in the game's memory to get up the slab to see how it behaves with the game anyway, and it turns out that the game softlocks because the gate remains closed. We should therefore work towards perfecting a good route for this dungeon. In some posts before this one, I outlined how to perform an upwarp to get into the cage containing the green leaf and another way to upwarp back up after getting it. (which might be a bit sketchy for RTA, but definitely a good skip for TAS)
I get the feeling that it might be possible to "manipulate" the upwarp, so to speak, and end up on top of the cage rather than the 10,000 units high walls which would save a bit of time and make it viable for RTA!
The other 2 challenge rooms exhibit some interesting properties which I can't wait to play around with.