Post subject: Crystal Beans From Dungeon Explorer
Player (34)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
I've been looking into this game the last couple days and figured out some interesting things as to how the game behaves or handles things so far. The game only accepts inputs for movement every 4 frames. The first frame you gain control entering a new room is seemingly random but (so far) is within 11-15 frames after the lag frames, might have something to do with how much it has to load when fading in a screen. Attacking with your ranged attack will make the character stop moving when done on a frame where it accepts an input for movement but won't interrupt it when done on either of the 3 other frames, so there is no penalty for attacking except eventually creating lag. It is pretty common for the game to lag enough to increase the number of frames it takes to accept another input of movement, however killing enemies and monster spawner generally leads to avoiding that lag. When I reached the boss of dungeon #2 I ran into an issue though. From running this game in RTA I know that he has 2 different patterns that he can give you: - He moves very slowly towards you - He rushes towards you Since you can only have 2 projectiles at the same time on screen having him rush towards you is the preferred pattern as it will make you hit him faster and thus increase the rate of your shooting earlier. The issue I had was him giving me the slow pattern. So I decided to just try to change the RNG by killing more enemies, getting hit, and all kinds of stuff that doesn't waste any frames in previous rooms. Nothing changed his pattern. So after that I decided to just wait outside of his room for different amounts of frames and just kill enemies in the meanwhile but nothing I did over the course of several hundreds of frames changed his pattern (I didn't check every single frame but rather every 20th). Finally after exactly 440 frames he gave me the preferred pattern and he would keep giving me that pattern throughout the next 120 frames entering his room. Trying to figure out if I can find an Address that potentially shows RNG on my own with RAM Search I stumbled upon 000422. When it's value reached 25 on the first frame of the fade-in of the boss room it would give me the preferred pattern and it would last until a couple frames before the boss starts moving before changing the value to 26 would take over to the slow pattern again. I am still not entirely convinced if that Address is actually RNG but at least it seems to be accurate for that boss. The value itself is pretty weird. Regardless of what I do it only advances every 256th frame. There are a couple restrictions to it though as following: -Lag frames generally don't count towards the 256 frames -When a screen fades out the first lag frame counts towards the 256 frames -When entering an area from the overworld there is a single frame between the lag frames when loading where the first lag frame after that also counts towards the 256 frames -When a screen fades in the 2nd non lag frame will be the first to count towards the 256 frames - For the 2 boss rooms I've tested this so far it was 18 frames on the first and 4 frames on the second boss additionally after the lag frames that didn't count towards the 256 frames So as I said the issue is that I arrive at the boss room when the value is still 23 and I'd need to wait 440 frames (which is probably longer than the fight itself even with the slow pattern) for it to be at 25 when entering the boss room on the fade-in. Since I'm not entirely convinced that this Address actually represents RNG for this game I might try to look further into it before moving on but eventually someone from here can help me out. I'd rather not continue with the slow pattern but if I can't get anything to work I might have to. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43467098245451509 If you remove the Up input on frame 8560 and replace it with an Up input on frame 9000-9120 you will get the preferred pattern.
Player (34)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
Bizhawk just has all the issues emulating this game properly apparently. When I first started this project I noticed that whenever a textbox is on screen the window would automatically become like 4 times the size of what it was previously and would become small again after that textbox is cleared. I could easily ignore that when making a TAS. Now in the 4th dungeon when you go through the first teleport though the loading wont trigger until several seconds later and even then the loading itself will take several seconds longer than usual too. I've played through the game several times manually on Bizhawk just to see that it happens every single time, so I decided to just put this TAS on hold for now. Don't feel like dedicating time to it when stuff like that happens and can potentially happen again further into the game. Will upload my current progress though I made with the TAS. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/43665985766904067
Joined: 4/1/2010
Posts: 90
A similar thing happens to me on Secret of Mana on BizHawk - but only on one monitor specifically, not on the other one, I'm not sure what that exactly is about. But older BizHawk versions seem to work fine
Player (34)
Joined: 10/9/2016
Posts: 40
I completely forgot about this thread here. Well anyway i finished the TAS. Link to video Movie File: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/51371380468117142 A commentated version with more insight on strats I used will follow soonish. Overall I'm pretty happy that I was able to make this TAS sub 30 minutes. Commentary: Link to video