antd, is there a reason you keep creating secondary accounts to upload encodes? Multiple accounts are not allowed.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Thanks for the encode. :)
I have one question for Lil_Gecko, I see you decided not to get the Moonstone from Queen Brahne after getting control of Steiner. It's only a few steps off and would teach Beast Killer and Shell. I guess you figured they wouldn't save enough time (not sure if there are any major beast type bosses early on in the game, but Shell would conceivably help against the Black Waltzes).
It's kind of unfortunate that the sound encoding is so bad. Hopefully that will be fixed at some point in the future. It's also too bad that it takes time to get rid of the here icon, which I personally find intensely annoying. In fact when I first played the game, before I even lit the candle I went into the menu to see if I could turn off that icon. I suppose most people don't care that much about it, but if enough people did it might be worth spending the few extra frames to turn it off while you're in the menu anyway.
Well, remember it's just a test for now and very far from an optimized run.
As I'm understanding more and more about lua and how the rng works I'll have to restart from the beginning.
For exemple, delaying the press on "New Game" by 14 frames instead of 3 is saving around 100 frames on the first fight (so around 90 total) and it's still not perfect.
About the moonstone, it is slower to take it than to just use luck manipulation on the Black Waltzes and beast killer is provided with the Leather Wrist stolen in the evil forest but since there's a long time before I can obtain shell elsewhere, it will probably save time in the long run so I think I'll go ahead and take it. Thanks for that.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Lil_Gecko wrote:
For exemple, delaying the press on "New Game" by 14 frames instead of 3 is saving around 100 frames on the first fight (so around 90 total) and it's still not perfect.
Pretty sure I mentioned this before but this really reminds me of when I was testing FF3j.
Every single fight had to be redone at least a couple of times because there was no way to manipulate the progress of the fight except by waiting an arbitrary number of frames before entering the battle. Fortunately I could simply test the battles at turbo speed, but it was still extremely tedious. If some variation could cause you to beat the enemy one move quicker, that might save as much as, say, 120 frames, which means an optimal search includes 119 battles. :/
Joined: 5/30/2009
Posts: 135
Location: Top of the pops
At the point where Quina is mandatory, Zidane will already have Lucky Seven, and from disc 3 onwards crits should be doing close to 9999 anyway. It'd be interesting to see if Burmecia/Cleyra could be done faster without Limit Glove in a TAS as well.
While I'm at it, Quina should be able to do at least 758 damage to the Earth Guardian, so that it can be taken out on Zidane's second turn.
While this isn't nearly as TAS friendly as FFVIII, I'm looking forward to progress. Do you need help route planning after the world map? I feel bad giving up after an hour of test running...
Well as for now I'm stuck at the first battle, with days and days of testing.
I found a few days ago that pressing X, or X+circle or L1+L2+R1 and so on with all kind of key combinations on certain frames before and after the Squaresoft logo at the beginning also change the list of random numbers.
You might think it's easy and just look at the random table after trying a combination but every combination has an influence on the number of lag frame during the intro. So when you try a combination you have to watch the entire intro to know what the ATB will be. To add to the difficulty, having the ATB set properly (meaning one character act right away while the ATB of Cinna is fuller than Baku's one) isn't enough as you need Cinna to be able to steal the Mage Masher without too much delay (I'd say one move of the pointer at most).
Yesterday I've written a lua that try different key combination, goes to the battle and print the ATB, I've started it before going out and when I came back, I found out that psxjin had crashed and I couldn't see any of the results. Does anybody know a way to save the results somewhere after every try so I can still have the results even if it crashes ?
Also, even if I'm not sure it's gonna be soon that I'll be back to the World Map, route planning after that will be really appreciated.
EDIT : Nevermind, after countless tries, I finally got the ABSOLUTE perfect first battle (saved 134 frames over the testrun). I also removed the HERE icon. The other fights being WAY easier to manipulate, I should be back to the world map within a week.
Does anybody know a way to save the results somewhere after every try so I can still have the results even if it crashes ?
Can Lua write/read to files? If so, create a text document and save any info you need.
Not sure how that would work with crashing but i don't really see why it wouldn't work.
Great job finding the perfect battle btw!
Sorry for not posting in awhile (college work started piling up) but nice work. The desyncs mysteriously stopped and nothing strange seems to be happening.
I think skipping the Moonstone might be a good thing. I only see it helpful against Black Waltz 2 and Black Waltz 3 (second fight) which could be manipulated.
Lua can read/write to files.
local SomeVariable = io.open(FileLocation,"a")
SomeVariablewrite(StringToWrite)
SomeVariable can of course be anything. You should use "a" for open type because you want to add to the end of the file (or create if it doesn't exist yet). Using "w" will clear the file everytime (which means you will have to move the log elsewhere before restarting the script) and "r" only reads data from the file (you can't write).
If nobody has done it yet, I'm going to take a look at how the RNG affects initializing battle data (ATE, etc.). Maybe I can come up with something interesting.
Sorry for not posting in awhile (college work started piling up) but nice work. The desyncs mysteriously stopped and nothing strange seems to be happening.
I think skipping the Moonstone might be a good thing. I only see it helpful against Black Waltz 2 and Black Waltz 3 (second fight) which could be manipulated.
Lua can read/write to files.
local SomeVariable = io.open(FileLocation,"a")
SomeVariable:write(StringToWrite)
SomeVariable can of course be anything. You should use "a" for open type because you want to add to the end of the file (or create if it doesn't exist yet). Using "w" will clear the file everytime (which means you will have to move the log elsewhere before restarting the script) and "r" only reads data from the file (you can't write).
If nobody has done it yet, I'm going to take a look at how the RNG affects initializing battle data (ATE, etc.). Maybe I can come up with something interesting.
Ah thanks for the lua thing, it's gonna be really helpful.
About the Moonstone, I'm starting rethinking about it. I'll have to time it.
As the Trance Bar is filled when it reaches 255 and it's increasing by [Spirit-[RN*7]] Mod Spirit everytime you get hit (RN is the 6th byte of the RNG), the minimum number of hits before you can Trance with 24 Spirit is 12. So with enough luck manipulation, Zidane will be able to Trance right at the start of Black Waltz 2.
As for the RNG affecting initializing battle:
The Full ATB of characters or ennemies is determined by : (60-Speed)*160
Starting ATB : 2 differents RNG. The first one for Ennemie's ATB a few frame after the black screen. The second one for your characters ATB some hundreds frame later.
On each one the first 4 bytes are used. 1st byte = ennemy 1, 2nd byte = ennemy 2 and so on...
Then using thoses RN the starting ATB is calculated by : [RN*257] Mod Full ATB
Now as the Speed only influences the length of the ATB bar and not how fast it fills (which is 14 per frame at full speed with normal status), there's some interesting stuff that can be done and way easier to calculate.
For exemple in the second fight, King Leo, Zenero and Benero have an ATB length of 6560 while Zidane and Blank have 5920. So if we can have Zidane or Blank attacking first and then a second character get is ATB filled while one of the ennemy's ATB is still under 630, we can skip his turn using the ATB on Wait trick.
For exemple I had this configuration :
Benero = 96 and Zidane =5654 , Blank = 5564
Zidane attacks first, Blank stop the ATBs (Benero is now at 452), Zidane gets his second turn before Benero. Unfortunately this configuration makes King Leo use Poly and wastes too much time but I'll keep searching.
EDIT : Yep, the Moonstone will be skipped.
Some (very little) news.
The "Escape" trick (Pressing R1+L1 after selecting a target to skip the characters animation) I just saw on DarkKobold's run of FF8 is also working here. So some more frames saved in the first fight.
No luck with the skipping one turn of the ennemies on the King Leo fight. Out of the 600 next positions of the RNG, only 3 works for that and they all involve fake magic use so they take more time than having the 3 ennemies using physical attacks.
Anyway, back to gaining control of Steiner 260 frames ahead of the test run.
Awesome stuff. That's a helluva lot of optimisation in not many minutes of game time - this run is gonna look fantastic! :)
PS, I've just lent my brother this so he can play it on his PS3 - It's only a matter of time before I'm spending more time at his house than in mine!
Some changes compared to the video.
- First fight against Steiner. The fight end when Steiner has lost 169 hp. Now Zidane max damage is 92, Cinna 32 and Blank 46 so a total of 170. In order to make Cinna deal 32 damage we need : [3rd byte of the RNG] mod 3 = 1 AND [4th byte of the RNG] mod Strength = 7. It took a bit of time to have the RNG in the proper position but even with that defeating him with only 3 hits is faster, so this was changed.
- After the Plant Brain, Zidane will now be revived in order to make it to level 2 and gain 26 more hp well needed for Black Waltz 1.
At the moment I just defeated Black Waltz 1 and Sealion with a Trance Bar at 242/255, so only one hit away. Meaning Black Waltz 2 is gonna be ended in only 2 little rounds :)
I can't believe how much progress you're making, considering all the revisits you've had to do as new breakthroughs arise. I figured we wouldn't see an FF PSX TAS done properly for a good five years, but with FF8 and FF9 now getting such great love it may yet happen within my twenties...
Keep it coming. There are many silent watchers like myself who may not say much but love every minute of what you do, like voyeurs or peeping toms. (And doesn't that analogy put your mind at ease?)
Currently shopping in Dali.
And this is the part that needs accurate route planning. What's needed to be buy ?
I guess I'll stop the TASing part here and just progress normally now to see what would be faster or not in the future but every help is more than welcome. Buying a new Mage Masher to synthetise an "Ogre" for Zidane seems pretty much mandatory but what about the "Yellow Scarf" that I see everybody getting ?
On a side note, remember that in order to make critical hits we must have a Spirit at 24 and above EXCEPT 12,13,14 and 15 which works too.
One good thing is that the RNG is frozen during Menu so even if I don't buy something that I'll need or buy stuff that I don't need after all I'll be able to hexedit it without too much difficulty but I'd rather have it right on the first place.
Joined: 5/30/2009
Posts: 135
Location: Top of the pops
The Yellow Scarf can teach Zidane Bird Killer, which may be important if you want to try taking on Gizamaluke without Quina. An extra Feather Hat for Dagger might be useful as well, because I'm not sure you're given a chance to nick Marcus' before the Black Waltz 3 re-fight. Otherwise, it depends on what abilities you want to have, or what elements you want to boost/block later on in the game.
Would Gamble Defence be useful at all in a TAS? While I was checking up on item abilities I ran into this:
==============
Gamble Defence
==============
The characters Defence stat changes randomly when attacked between 0 and
Defence * 2.
You could completely lock out physical attacks by manipulating that, but I'm not sure if there are that many to worry about (or that you wouldn't just be able to use Distract).
