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Table of contents

Introduction

I SWEAR I AM DONE NOW.
Ok, in my previous movies there were people both here and in youtube asking for a max friction movie. I guess they thought I wouldn't pay attention, but I just cannot escape a challenge. Also squeeze the last drop of juice from my bespoke bot.
So. Max friction. It's a different challenge because many more strikes are necessary to score all balls and each one of them becomes more fine-grained.
Since the exploration space is much larger in this case, I had to adopt some additional heuristics to make it work. The most important of them being: use only the most powerful shot (and just in case allow for one or two lighter ones).
See #9499: eien86's NES Lunar Pool in 22:53.62 for a detailed explanation of the TASing process for this game.

Software + Hardware

Rom Information

  • Name: Lunar Ball
  • ROM: Lunar Ball (J) [!].nes
  • SHA1: AA5C574A4743991A3523DFD78A39D782BEDE262A
  • MD5: 26F1B77980A216767EA63C41397476E5

Emulator

  • EmuHawk 2.10 (Core: QuickerNES)

Routing Bot

  • Bot: LunarBot
  • Routing Core: QuickerNES
  • Platform:
    • 2 x AMD Epyc 7763 (128 cores, 256 threads) + 512Gb RAM
    • Exploration Rate: ~16k shots/s

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Posted: 3 days ago
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TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15964
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #9591: eien86's NES Lunar Pool "maximum friction" in 30:47.47
Posted: 3 days ago
Quote
Dimon12321
He/Him
Editor, Reviewer, Experienced player (603)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1268
Location: Romania
NES TAS of 2024
How to make a TAS look like a regular speedrun xD Also, it's cool to see more "invisible hole" glitches. Stage 39 is my favourite! Yes vote
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Posted: 3 days ago
Quote
jeff_town
Joined: 7/7/2017
Posts: 32
how can you be done? aren't there about 253 more friction values to TAS? what if one of them turns out to somehow yield a faster overall game compared to all the others? I mean, we've got 3 data points: no friction (31:58), default friction (22:53), and this (30:47). Both 0 and 255 are slower than the default, so maybe the time distribution is parabola-shaped, but no matter the exact distribution it seems unlikely the default friction is also the minimum time friction.
Posted: 3 days ago
Quote
Challenger
He/Him
Skilled player (1760)
Joined: 2/23/2016
Posts: 1087
Sega TASer of 2017 TASer of 2017 NES TAS of 2017
This category is very impressive than I expected: more deaths in some levels and more hole glitches. Excellent job as always! Yes vote.
My homepage --Currently not much motived for TASing as before...-- But I'm still working.
Posted: 2 days ago
Quote
FractalFusion
Editor, Expert player (2126)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3298
Glitchy TAS of 2013 Gameboy TAS of 2013 PSX TASer of 2010
Sorry, eien86. The Arkanoid TAS raised the bar so high that 5 Lunar Pool TASes are boring in comparison.
Posted: 1 day ago
Quote
eien86
He/Him
Judge, Expert player (3027)
Joined: 3/21/2021
Posts: 305
Location: Switzerland
NES TASer of 2023 PC TASer of 2023 NES TAS of 2023 PC TASer of 2021
Thanks all for your comments!
jeff_town wrote:
how can you be done? aren't there about 253 more friction values to TAS?
Oh heeeeell no ;)
FractalFusion wrote:
Sorry, eien86. The Arkanoid TAS raised the bar so high that 5 Lunar Pool TASes are boring in comparison.
Fair enough! Glad you liked the Arkanoid one ;)
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