Small update :
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLE599019F4A28066D
Black Waltz 2 is annoying to set right because of 3 things :
- Zidane must be hit first and trance.
- Zidane and Steiner must make the lowest damage possible with attack and fire sword so they deal 512 damage. At 515 and above BW2 counter with Fira and we want to avoid that.
- Zidane should make a critical hit > 518 so it finishes BW2 right away. And the odds of that are 1/64.
In the video the 2 first points are done with pretty much no delay, but the third one is achieve with a 600 frame delay so I'm still trying to improve that.
Haven't had too much time to work on it those past months, but now that I got a little bit of it I thought I might as well keep you posted.
Some minor changes were made.
- Stage fight against Steiner. Killing yourself is slower than attacking Steiner but it allows to get past the sentences of the Knight of Pluto, so overall it saves some hundred frames. So that was change.
- Have been able to get faster than the smoke in the Ice Cavern so I saved time by not taking the detour.
And a big huge major improvment :)
Complete different strategy against Black Waltz 1 and Sealion.
Since Trance is in fact not needed for BW2, I used the Plant Spiders from the Evil Forrest, to fill my trance gauge up to around 200 and then completely destroyed BW1 and his friend :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h87u0inGtEU
Overall around 5600 frames were saved.
The boss fight was good, but the preparation for it was kinda boring, I just hope its not like that for all boss fight.
(Sorry havent watched any other encode of the run, and barely remember anything about the game, so this is not an informed post)
Keep up the good work, will watch the submission for sure.
The boss fight was good, but the preparation for it was kinda boring, I just hope its not like that for all boss fight.
(Sorry havent watched any other encode of the run, and barely remember anything about the game, so this is not an informed post)
Keep up the good work, will watch the submission for sure.
I understand how boring it looks like unfortunately a one minute save is way too much to sacrifice it for entertainment purpose imo.
However, it's the only time in all the game where I'll have to do something like that afaik, so don't worry ;)
I enjoyed watching you build up Zidane's trance. Luck is involved in how much your trance bar fills (unless you are using High Tide) so have you manipulated luck to minimize the amount of hits Zidane needs to take? I could tell some manipulation was done but not enough to figure out if you were maximize filling the trance bar.
Good to see an update. I wasn't sure if you gave up or not and the last thing I wanted to do was bug you about it.
I read somewhere that This game can be played, in battles with two players. Would this make combat move faster? is it even worth testing?
I don't think so. It basically splits control over the characters between the players but still only one action menu is up at a time. If your controller isn't in charge of the character that the action menu is for, your input is ignored (from what I can tell). I'm not sure what the point of it is besides letting up to 3 others control their favorite characters in battle because there are no known advantages.
It doesn't take any frames to activate (you pass by it when changing other options) but having to deal with a second (or third/fourth) controller might be more trouble than it is worth because the defaults spread the characters evenly between the controllers. Probably better to take a look as an improvement on the next run.
I enjoyed watching you build up Zidane's trance. Luck is involved in how much your trance bar fills (unless you are using High Tide) so have you manipulated luck to minimize the amount of hits Zidane needs to take? I could tell some manipulation was done but not enough to figure out if you were maximize filling the trance bar.
Good to see an update. I wasn't sure if you gave up or not and the last thing I wanted to do was bug you about it.
Well, there's actually many things going on here.
First of all I needed 3 Plant Spiders to avoid unwanted delay between their turns.
As they are 3, if Zidane was alone, it would take him 3 turns to finish the fight + I needed someone to block the ennemies'ATB while mine was refilling after using a potion. So I needed Vivi alive during the fight.
So as Vivi is alive, in addition to manipulate how much the trance gauge will fill I had to manipulate the attack so Zidane will be the target and not Vivi.
Now regarding the manipulation itself. There's a frame rule for the Plant Spider attacks, so they attack at one specific frame each time (every 100 frames about).
In addition, when one of them fills his ATB while it's not his turn to make a move, it move the RNG forward.
So basically, if the first Plant Spider launch his attack while the 2 others have their ATB full, the RNG has moved 3 times (in addition of its usual move of course). But using the ATB on wait trick, we can block the second and/or third ATB while the first one is full so the RNG moves only 1 or 2.
And because of the frame rule, we can also put the ATB on wait so the first spider miss its specific frame and use the one 100ish after with an other RNG.
To synthetise we can have up to 3 differents RNG every 100ish frame, and everytime you use one, you have up to 3 differents RNG every 100ish frame for the next attack and so on.
The way I manipulated it ended up with an average increase of 16 every hit while I would have need 18 to save one turn which I don't think is possible without wasting more time than it would save.
It probably couldn't be seen like that but there's around 6 hours of testing in this battle alone ;)
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
I know it's a bit late for this suggestion, but you can actually keep some of the dialog a little more intact, specifically the bits where a character moves after speaking. In these cases, delaying by exiting the text box later will not cause you to lose time, and faster readers might catch some of the text. This might seem a bit silly at first, since you can't do this with all of the text, but it might make some of the longer dialog segments that much more bearable.
I read somewhere that This game can be played, in battles with two players. Would this make combat move faster? is it even worth testing?
Yeah exactly what Zanoab said. The only thing you can do is set a specific controller for every character in battle and when it's up to this character the input from other controller are ignored so you cannot even manipulate anything. Plus even if it was doing something you would have to go back to the menu to set it everytime a new character join the party .
Electrospecter wrote:
I know it's a bit late for this suggestion, but you can actually keep some of the dialog a little more intact, specifically the bits where a character moves after speaking. In these cases, delaying by exiting the text box later will not cause you to lose time, and faster readers might catch some of the text. This might seem a bit silly at first, since you can't do this with all of the text, but it might make some of the longer dialog segments that much more bearable.
Problem is that in this game the luck manipulation is one a the hardest I've ever seen, so every single battle can take up to 5/6 hours of testing to make it optimized. So in order to preserve my sanity I've made a lua script that automatically skip dialog parts so I don't have to worry about it. If I had to find the text boxes that can stay a little bit longer and manually skip them on the last frame possible, I think I'd be bored pretty quickly. But if that could be hexeditable after the run is complete I might take a look at it but can't promise.
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
Lil_Gecko wrote:
Problem is that in this game the luck manipulation is one a the hardest I've ever seen, so every single battle can take up to 5/6 hours of testing to make it optimized. So in order to preserve my sanity I've made a lua script that automatically skip dialog parts so I don't have to worry about it. If I had to find the text boxes that can stay a little bit longer and manually skip them on the last frame possible, I think I'd be bored pretty quickly. But if that could be hexeditable after the run is complete I might take a look at it but can't promise.
That's totally forgivable then! Do whatever you have to do. Also, now that I think about it, don't the text boxes advance the RNG anyway? Or is exiting out of them faster no different from letting them linger a bit in terms of RNG?
That's totally forgivable then! Do whatever you have to do. Also, now that I think about it, don't the text boxes advance the RNG anyway? Or is exiting out of them faster no different from letting them linger a bit in terms of RNG?
Well outside of battles, the RNG is always moving as its own speed, and this speed can vary to veeeeeeeeeeeeery slow (pointer moves forward every 100 frames) to extremely fast (pointer moves forward 4 times every frame). This speed is only depending on the location you're in (and in rare occasion, running makes this speed a little bit faster than standing still).
Basically, I optimized everything : dialog skips, way of moving up to the next battle, to see what's the first RNG I could get, then look at the ones after to see which one would give me the best battle. So I rewind the movie to the previous location and stay a little longer in the one where the pointer is moving the fastest.
If it's a location where there is textboxes, then yeah I delay a little bit before closing it like during the stage fight against Steiner, but usually if you're allowed to move between battles it's gonna be fastest to run in circle than delaying textboxes.
Yeah I saw that a few days ago, along with a video that shows a trick to avoid getting hit by Puck at the beginning of Alexandria which made me start again to save those 400ish frames.
I've just watched the first 4 parts but unfortunately his WIP is vastly unoptimized.
- The textboxes are skipped too slowly (but maybe it's to allow people to read them so...)
- The battles could have been waaaaaaaaaaay faster. I'm already 600ish frames ahead just after the first battle. He attacked Baku instead of killing himself on the stage fight which also cost a bunch of frame. He let the Plant Brain attack which is completely out of question and a vast waste of time. From what I can see, he seems to do a little bit of luck manipulation to have nice enough battles, but not enough to have the best possible ones.
- Before the Plant Spiders fight he wait a few frames before exiting the ingame menu which unless I'm missing something is irrelevant since the RNG froze while in menu.
- At the beginning of the Ice Cavern he's waiting for the smoke to disappear when it's actually possible to pass by the right without touching it.
After the Black Waltz1 and Sealion fight he's already about 10k frames behind the WIP I'm currently on.
But still it'll be nice to see how he manage to do the next parts so that will help me planning.
On a completely unrelated subject, has anyone been able to work on that annoying background noise ? I would really appreciate if I could get rid of that.
Yeah I saw that a few days ago, along with a video that shows a trick to avoid getting hit by Puck at the beginning of Alexandria which made me start again to save those 400ish frames.
That's a very nice find. :)
edit: just curious, could you link to that video?
That's a very nice find. :)
edit: just curious, could you link to that video?
Sure ;)
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm15323462
Also I just noticed that he impressed 100 nobles but not Queen Brahne in the sword fight apprently so he just got 927 gils instead of 10 000. I'm even more interested in his future strategy so.
EDIT : for comparison, at the same point in the Evil Forest, just before the Plant Spiders fight.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
That's a great trick. I'm guessing you have to be frame precise? By the way, could you post your movie file? I'd love to make a WIP encode of your progress so far (and I see you have a 15 minute limit on your account).
That's a great trick. I'm guessing you have to be frame precise? By the way, could you post your movie file? I'd love to make a WIP encode of your progress so far (and I see you have a 15 minute limit on your account).
Yes it's frame precise.
Here's the movie so far and as I'm starting to be really annoyed with redoing the beginning all over again and again, that should be the final product for this part. Goes until the exit of the Ice Cavern.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DJLHX8WR
psxjin v2.0.2 svn0
Version : SLUS-01251
If you managed to solve some of the sound or/and graphical problems you'd be my hero :)
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Thanks, I just managed to get it to work. The ambient sounds are pretty badly emulated, all at 100% volume even though the volume should be much lower. Hopefully someone can fix that before you're done, just like the SPU was improved for FF8. :)
