Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
Zurreco wrote:
people will simply mooch off of them without giving any real feedback ("Great job" and "Keep up the good work" are terrible examples of feedback).
Awwww... but don't responses like that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? No? Not even a little bit? Well ok... anyway, keep up the great work! ;)
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
Thanks guys! I used your inspiring feedback to make 10 seconds of improvements!
e: I guess if you want something to work from, I'll say that the finished product should be less than 2 hours in length. I did a sloppy test run (durr) using 75% speed and lax savestates to get a rough finish time of 2:19. However, I've already shaved a minute or two off of that at the end of 1-2.
A few questions:
- Do you know if you need to finish the training course for 100%?
- Are you using Down+A dashing instead of regular running? (It's about 20 frames faster for long distances)
- What drilling technique are you using for long sets of walls?
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!)
My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
Training is unecessary.
I use dash/dash cancels for movement. There are lots of *-cancels in this game. There are some bananasly odd situations where dashing is not faster! :o
For destroying anything with the drill, drilling is dash cancelled on the first possible frame after the wall erodes. Other than that broad statement, each encounter is handled uniquely. It's a toss up between shifting, cumulative damage, and outright speed. Before each jump/wall/enemy/etc, I figure out all possible actions and test them all. The only portion I'm not confident in at the momement is the forced minion battle halfway through 1-2, so I'm reworking from there.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
Pekopon wrote:
I know that by now you have probably dropped this
Nope. School, personal life, and a few other things have taken priority over all of my speedruns.
Feel free to work on the game, though. There are no dibbs around here, and nothing but good can come from competition.
e: Both tricks are pretty rad. I'll hex them in on a later date.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Are you working on a run or not, Pekopon?
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Oh gosh no. Drill Dozer would be a really hard game to run. I'm sticking to easier games since I wouldn't have the patience to plan out harder games. I'm just posting tricks in case other people want to run this game.
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
But you just posted like 9 amazing tricks/shortcuts/techniques in less than a few days. I say go for it (if not for the fact you're already working on something. Tackle this next then is what I really say.)
Well I'm not even half way through Kirby's Dream Land 3 yet, and I've just today started on Looney Tunes. I'm already pretty far in that though. It's a very short game. I did find a trick in the Speedy Gonzalies stage that saved TONS of time.
But that's off track. While I am pleased with the tricks I've found, I think that Drill Dozer is too advanced for me. The game sort of expects you to buy all the energy tanks. (health boosters) Not buying them makes it a real challenge to stay alive. With the very small amount of health I'd have at the Missile stage, It would be impossible to plan out what to get hit by, and what to avoid.
So yeah. Drill Dozer isn't for me, but I might try to find more tricks sometime, but that's all I'll do. I've seen this in other threads. People discovering tricks, but don't do the run. Then other people say they should, since they are finding them. While a person may find some neat tricks, it's only a very small section of the game. Even if one discovers tricks, it doesn't really mean that the person finding them is really good at the game. That one part will be a bit easier, but the rest of the game is still as hard as ever.
I'm very bad at expressing myself, so that may have been a bit confusing. Basically what I'm saying is that just cause I'm finding tricks, doesn't necessarily mean I'm any good at the game. Just observant.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
Pekopon wrote:
While I am pleased with the tricks I've found, I think that Drill Dozer is too advanced for me.
I'm very bad at expressing myself, so that may have been a bit confusing. Basically what I'm saying is that just cause I'm finding tricks, doesn't necessarily mean I'm any good at the game. Just observant.
You've expressed yourself fairly well, actually. While I understand that Drill Dozer is a very intimidating game, it's not as hard to work with as you seem to think. It just requires a lot of time and thought to work around each situation, since the tiniest changes make huge impacts on each screen.
Either way, your tricks are going to already save a lot of time. I've gone ahead and uploaded the truncated WIP as of yet (I recently removed about 5 minutes from the end to fix a few things that hex couldn't manage). It once again needs more work, so now I can go back and fix a few more things with your tricks! Luckily, hexing with Drill Dozer isn't so bad. The only problem is that I prefer to use minimal input, so hexing precision has to be exact. Oh well.
Expect me to say more on this probably in January. As I've said before, my Diablo 2 speedrun has priority over this, and I'm aiming to finish that before the end of the year. Feel free to keep pumping out time savers, though.
This isn't exactly a trick, but it's just me experimenting in a certain room in kuru ruins. It could probably be done faster, but this was just an experiment.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/536054906/fast%20room%2042308%20-%20Drill%20Dozer%20%28U%29.vbm
I do still occasionally search for tricks in this game, just not very often anymore. I know for sure that it's possible to kill the crab guy in the Museum vault in two rounds, but I've only ever gotten it to work twice the whole time I've owned the game. This isn't related to this video, but just so people know.
As I mentioned before, I have no plans to run this game. It would require a lot of planning, and I'm no good at that. Since I would only have one (maaaybe two) health tanks, it would be very hard to plan out where to get hit to save time, particularly in the missile level. If I'm just annoying people by posting things without running the game, I'm sorry. I'm just helping the one who does eventually decide to make a run for this game. (whoever that may end up being) I'll probably keep hunting for tricks though.
I'm still a rookie, so a big game like Drill Dozer is ambitious. Granted Dream Land 3 and Lady Sia were ambitious, And I would have finished Dream Land 3 if not for desync issues. But when I started redoing my Lady Sia run since it was getting poor ratings in the votes, I was able to improve just the first world by 1461 frames, showing how sloppy it was. If the beginning was that bad, imagine how the later stuff must have been when I was getting tired of the project. Granted I've only played that game a few times though.
I currently working on something else anyways. It's a short GB game by HAL called "Trax"
HA! I finally discovered how I killed the mecha crab in 2-2 in two shots! If you just drill like crazy, killing this guy takes 3 shots minimum. However, on your first hit, after you shift into third gear, jam your drill in reverse right before he pulls his head up. This will cause a massave amount of extra damage, making it possible to kill him in the next hit. The amount of damage he takes seems to involve where you drill him, and when you shift your gear. It might be possible to knock him out in one shot since you can come SO CLOSE to doing it. But to find the exact right frame work could take a long time, even if it is possible. Here's the video. You might want to watch it with input display on.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/464303895/Copy%20of%20crab%20fight2308%20-%20Drill%20Dozer%20%28U%29.vbm
Maybe this tactic could work on other enemies too?
I don't think it would be possible to collect enough chips to get everything without going through levels more than once. As it is, nobody really has any interest in making a run. Lots of people want one, but nobody is willing to make one. I've been posting lots of tricks in the Drill Dozer thread though, and if you want to see a sample of a TAS, you can check out this video on my youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZrcXlDq3Mw
This was done as something for my brother, to get through this room without getting hurt. It's not much, but it's one of the few Drill Dozer TASes. (Another user had a WIP, but I don't remember his name.)
Oh, and at least with the rom I use, the game crashes after the credits, so it's impossible to go back to the menu without a soft reset.
Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1941
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden
I recently played through this game, was suggested to TAS it, so I gave it a shot. I have no idea if someone (Zurreco) is still working on it though, but yeah.
I have only done the first room so far, but it is 195 frames faster than the WIP Zurreco posted earlier.
VBM
