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Oh here’s that testrun. Link to video Actually I was gonna suggest for you to do it anyways. I haven’t spotted as many improvements as I would like so you’ll probably improve it more. Tell you what. Why don’t you do DEZ1 and make another gmv to tas DDZ. When I get back I’ll do DEZ2 and paste in DDZ.
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Thank you to give me the link, don't worry about DDZ I need to do it in our gmv anyway, because I need to use pause buffering to manipulate the rng of the rockets in the first phase of the boss, I'm sure that will be desynch instantly.
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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Well whatever you want to do with DDZ is up to you. That was merely a suggestion. As for DEZ1. You can get rid of the lightning shield like I did in the testrun because the insta-shield is better for the start of Act 2. Also I might be able to save some ingame time in Act 2 if we forgo the death transition skip.
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Here is DEZ 1, 11 seconds faster than the testrun, enjoy. http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1915972246/Evil_3D-TheYogWog-kaan55-S3K-ST-ringattack.gmv Link to video
kaan55 wrote:
Also I might be able to save some ingame time in Act 2 if we forgo the death transition skip.
Oops! Well, you can remove the death transition if you want =P
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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Wow that's impressive. I knew you'd be able to improve it better than I would've.
Evil_3D wrote:
Oops! Well, you can remove the death transition if you want =P
Don't worry about it. I only told you not to do it to save yourself the trouble. Plus what I'm thinking about doing isn't gaurenteed to work so it might be good that you did it anyways. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. When Sonic got sent up top I was gonna manipulate Tails to spawn there which would allow him to gain control sooner than Sonic.
JXQ
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This level must have been a pain to route-plan. It doesn't seem to flow very well because of the amount of different places you need to go for rings that don't connect in a graceful way. Some questions!
  • At 0:31 you send Tails up to get the rings above so you don't later have to go on that route, at the delay of waiting for him to respawn so you can get the 20 rings in the impossible wall. But later on, at 1:22, you take the lower route to get the 5x4 grid of rings at 1:26. What if you took the upper route instead with Tails, getting the 6 rings up top, and then sending Tails down below to get those 20 rings while Sonic got the 3, 5, and 3 ring boxes? Would that delay be shorter than the current delay at 0:31 waiting for Tails to respawn?
  • At 1:20, the gravity thing pushes you up pretty high. If you jumped straight up first and fell more into its effect, would that counteract its upward push enough to let you hit the ground faster?
  • At 1:46, the pinball section, I'm surprised this wasn't faster. It seems like Tails could hit the 4th switch sooner. What's he doing between 1:50 and 1:52, does he not interact with the bumpers off screen? What if you sent Tails below to collect that set of rings while Sonic activated the switches on the right side, could this speed things up? Or is collecting those rings without the electric shield much slower?
  • Why do you lose the shield at 2:12?
Edit: I found the answer to the last question just a few posts ago:
kaan55 wrote:
You can get rid of the lightning shield like I did in the testrun because the insta-shield is better for the start of Act 2.
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
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I have a probably more basic question! What's happening at in game 5 seconds, where you're seemingly building up speed Sonic CD peel out style but with a much higher speed cap on the lazer bridge? I don't recall seeing it in any other runs, just this latest video and kaans wip of it.
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Paused wrote:
I have a probably more basic question! What's happening at in game 5 seconds, where you're seemingly building up speed Sonic CD peel out style but with a much higher speed cap on the lazer bridge? I don't recall seeing it in any other runs, just this latest video and kaans wip of it.
That's only a visual effect of the booster, I keep 4096 sp/f holding [v] in spindash state until the bridge dissapear.
JXQ wrote:
Some questions!
  • At 0:31 you send Tails up to get the rings above so you don't later have to go on that route, at the delay of waiting for him to respawn so you can get the 20 rings in the impossible wall. But later on, at 1:22, you take the lower route to get the 5x4 grid of rings at 1:26. What if you took the upper route instead with Tails, getting the 6 rings up top, and then sending Tails down below to get those 20 rings while Sonic got the 3, 5, and 3 ring boxes? Would that delay be shorter than the current delay at 0:31 waiting for Tails to respawn?
At 1:24 I need Tails to open the door because is closed from the other side, I Chose this path because the lazer bridge above the rings group is activated until 1:26. Given the circumstances of the bridge time it is faster to go down with both 2 characters, also because the lightning shield doesn't interact with the last ring of the bottom right, so Tails need to grab him.
JXQ wrote:
[*]At 1:20, the gravity thing pushes you up pretty high. If you jumped straight up first and fell more into its effect, would that counteract its upward push enough to let you hit the ground faster?
Seeing that Tails is essential for the trick at 2:15, I don't lost time here because he is flying and the gravity machine stops him and can reach the ground faster, I keep it in moving at the first frame avaidable (for the circumtanses) always, Sonic is secondary here.
JXQ wrote:
[*]At 1:46, the pinball section, I'm surprised this wasn't faster. It seems like Tails could hit the 4th switch sooner. What's he doing between 1:50 and 1:52, does he not interact with the bumpers off screen? What if you sent Tails below to collect that set of rings while Sonic activated the switches on the right side, could this speed things up? Or is collecting those rings without the electric shield much slower?
Indeed, Tails don't interact with some bumpers until Sonic let's load these on the screen, at 1:50-1:52 Tails activated the last switch of the right top, Using the lightning is the fastest way to collect the rings in this room, and I also have to manipulate and grab them fast because the abrupt movements of the camera can disappear from the orbit of the shield.
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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Hey guys. Quite an odd question for you all so I'm not sure what can be achieved. As you guys might know, through a series of inputs it is possible to get the game to a point where it's inputs become volatile to the games data and can allow you to corrupt the main system's memory data (More usefully, the range in particular that handles recording of "what players" are active, etc). Through messing around with your inputs you can get the value stored at 0xFFFF0A to become a non-expected value (0 - 3 is the intended range) and a value of 128 becomes a "Blue Knuckles". This is mostly just a goof-around project but I have gotten my inputs (admittedly lifting inputs from aglar and marzojr's runs, as they are amazingly optimized for the early areas of the game) to a point where it puts the game into this state but I cannot seem to get the game to "crash" successfully and write to that area of the memory, bit of a out-there question but I don't suppose anyone has suggestions or inputs on how I can achieve this? The input file so far. Note: This input requires making a save and takes up the first slot (going from a clean SRAM) [Edit] p.s this is recorded in BizHawk, as I need to be able to do a console reset [/Edit]
A whisper in the wind~~
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Post music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Y3PKkkePk Hey, congratulations Evil_3D! You turned out to be a great TASer. This was your project, even if I submitted a few rough prototypes a long time ago. And you too, Kaan55, what an incredible ally to Evil_3D you turned out to be! I only regret not getting to know you two better, and maybe not helping out more but alas, I'm past my prime, and you two are better than I ever was. You know, after I published my Knuckles run 4 years ago, I thought that someday somebody might emerge who would do a Sonic & Tails run just like this. I couldn't have asked for a better couple of guys to do it. I honestly don't believe this run will ever be obsoleted - certainly not by a couple of new-comers, anyway! Please do comment on any one of my YT videos (so I get the notification) before you publish this. I'm watching the thread and progress as usual, but I'd just so hate to miss the opportunity to cast my vote and voice my appreciation. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, other than you two obviously, this TAS means so much to me. Thank you both so much for all your incredible effort all these months. Good luck once again going forward, what little bit there finally is left to go! I'll see you guys at the finish line! Congratulations!!! Oh, and Kaan... if by any chance you somehow find a way to collect even just 1 more ring in AIZ any time soon, please kindly keep it to yourself :p
Knuckles does, what Sonican't.
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There's a crash in AIZ2 which looks rather curious. It's definitely known that getting pushed back by the tunnel just before the boss causes graphical glitches. But I couldn't find any mentions that if you enter a special stage or die after that and then try to go to the boss the game will crash. This seems to be caused because something overwrites horizontal and vertical interrupt handlers with more or less random garbage (at memory addresses 0xFFFFF0-0xFFFFFF). Having even minor variations in input may cause different garbage to be written. gmv reproducing the crash http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/49065907235942714
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TheYogWog wrote:
Post music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Y3PKkkePk Hey, congratulations Evil_3D! You turned out to be a great TASer. This was your project, even if I submitted a few rough prototypes a long time ago. And you too, Kaan55, what an incredible ally to Evil_3D you turned out to be! I only regret not getting to know you two better, and maybe not helping out more but alas, I'm past my prime, and you two are better than I ever was. You know, after I published my Knuckles run 4 years ago, I thought that someday somebody might emerge who would do a Sonic & Tails run just like this. I couldn't have asked for a better couple of guys to do it. I honestly don't believe this run will ever be obsoleted - certainly not by a couple of new-comers, anyway! Please do comment on any one of my YT videos (so I get the notification) before you publish this. I'm watching the thread and progress as usual, but I'd just so hate to miss the opportunity to cast my vote and voice my appreciation. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, other than you two obviously, this TAS means so much to me. Thank you both so much for all your incredible effort all these months. Good luck once again going forward, what little bit there finally is left to go! I'll see you guys at the finish line! Congratulations!!! Oh, and Kaan... if by any chance you somehow find a way to collect even just 1 more ring in AIZ any time soon, please kindly keep it to yourself :p
Beautiful words Yog, thank you for this. I will definitely let you know when I upload this movie here, don't worry about it, this is also one of the biggest projects of my life and it means a lot to me (working almost 2 years on it), it really is satisfying to do this. In a last attempt to optimize the movie a little more, I decided with kaan to redo MGZ and CNZ, this will be the last revision of the first zones so we hope to finish at the end of the month or at least the end of September.
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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Thank you for those beautiful words. This was a fun and satisfying project to work on and I couldn't have asked for a better partner than Evil_3D. YogWog you contributed all you could to this project. Don't forget that you're the one who introduced the concept of this run. Don't worry about AIZ2. I've confirmed it's absolutely impossible to get any more rings unless we somehow get rid of the death boundary. Besides do you know how many precise tricks I had to do in that last iteration? I'd have to be out of my mind to even consider redoing it again lol. Since I've taken a vacation I'm kinda hype about redoing MGZ and CNZ. Evil is doing both Act 1's and I'm doing both Act 2's.
JXQ
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kaan55 wrote:
I'm kinda hype about redoing MGZ and CNZ
SAME
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
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You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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So with the help of an old lua script I got from the sonic speedrun discord server I was able to figure out what the signpost monitors in Knuckles' Angel Island Act 2 boss area are. Here's a screenshot. Now my main concern comes with that ring monitor. It's pretty much impossible to get but it's still a part of the base game just like any other ring monitor, so I was wondering if it should be included in the ring attack submission text.
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kaan55 wrote:
Since there are no normal ways to break that monitor I think it should not be taken in the current rings counter, but we could comment as a curious fact in the submission text. Perhaps in early versions of S3 they had planned that both bosses drop a signpost (or maybe they has planned 3 ACTs with Knuckles?), but it's see that this idea was changed and they left residues of this in AIZ2, since in other levels there are no monitors like these. This is just a theory.
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
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This is a new MHZ2 boss strat, moving Tails to hit robotnik off-screens save some time in the auto scrolling section, and with some slot manipulation with dust particles you can let spawn the capsule buttom inside the boss fight, I don't have the tech details, but I think marzo can explaint the process better and get a more optimized fight http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1579670720/marzojr%2Caglar-s3k-newgame.gmv (use newgame+ savestate) Link to video
You can see more TASes on my youtube channel
marzojr
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Evil_3D wrote:
This is a new MHZ2 boss strat, moving Tails to hit robotnik off-screens save some time in the auto scrolling section, and with some slot manipulation with dust particles you can let spawn the capsule buttom inside the boss fight, I don't have the tech details, but I think marzo can explaint the process better and get a more optimized fight
Nice work. I will look over the video and the disassembly over the weekend and see what comes out.
Marzo Junior
WST
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Crazy as hell… With this game you never know what will be discovered tomorrow.
S3&A [Amy amy%] improvement (with Evil_3D & kaan55) — currently in SPZ2 my TAS channel · If I ever come into your dream, I’ll be riding an eggship :)
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WST wrote:
Crazy as hell… With this game you never know what will be discovered tomorrow.
It'll be some way to squeeze an extra ring out of Angel island so they have to re TAS that stage for the four hundredth and sixty third time. But seriously, great find.
marzojr
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Here is how the glitch works: when you enter the boss arena, 7 objects are created and their RAM addresses are stored (as words) starting on $FFFFA808. So $FFFFA808, $FFFFA80A, $FFFFA80C, etc. The first two objects are the wood bars that hold the spikes; the other five are the spikes. They are moved by the background deformation routine for MGZ2 when the boss arena is activated. Now, the list is set only when the objects are created. If the object is destroyed, it will still be on the list. The deformation routine does not check if the object has been destroyed, and will happily move the deleted object around, or any other object that happens to be allocated on the same slot. These objects are freed some time after defeating Eggman. This happens when word @ $FFFFEEC6 is set to nonzero, which sets byte @ $FFFFEED3 to zero, after which the objects delete themselves. But this is mostly irrelevant. As far as I can tell, all of this is essentially on a timer. The only relevant actions is when to enter the arena, how to manipulate the slot used by the capsule, and how fast to break the capsule; everything else depends only on how fast you kill the boss. So add RAM watches for the 7 words starting at $FFFFA808 (in hex). For each of those values, prepend 'FFFF' and add a RAM watch for the hex longword at the resulting location. You want any of these to be $8672A, the code pointer for the capsule, when it spawns. Since everything is essentially on a timer, the only thing that I could really do to improve it is make Tails break the capsule faster; here is a video with the capsule being destroyed on the first frame possible. As it turns out, by manipulating when I entered the arena, I needed only to hold right with Sonic to manipulate the capsule to a favorable slot. So: same in-game time, tiny real time gains, compared to Evil_3D's version.
Marzo Junior
Post subject: New MGZ2 wip
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Thanks for the explanation marzo, it will be helpful when we have to incorporate it into future runs. ------ And here is the new MGZ2, saved 46 seconds compared to the old run made by kaan, this guy really surpassed himself in this level. GMV Savestate Link to video
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Jeez, in a level that ends in only 3.37, 46 seconds is a hell of an improvement. So what you two re re re doing next?
XkyRauh
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Alright, I'm gonna ask a completely newbie/ignorant question: A lot of times, when watching these incredible TASed levels, Sonic will halt in front of an obstacle, seemingly spin-dash one direction, stop on a dime, and spin-dash back the way he came. The screen with hiccup and jerk in one direction, and then whip back, and Sonic will have passed through the obstacle. I get that, in essence, the screen scrolling the obstacle past a certain point allows for Sonic to move through the obstacle, but I'd like some clarification on what exactly the inputs are. What exactly are you doing? :)