Yeah, I just got done with greenwood and stopped recording at the beginning of southerna. Here's what I have so far:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/421/sblazer.smv
It's a first rough run, I'm mostly determining the route, the experience gain (specifically manipulating the level gains for a free full heal) and the gem/magic usage.
It's already clocking 30 minutes at the beginning of the 3rd world... I estimate 3-4 minutes could be cut via monster pattern manipulation (haven't figured that out yet) and magic usage and frame perfection, but it'll still be one long TAS.
Did you check if it'd be faster to die in the dungeon of the first world when you need to get to Leo's house? It'd be pretty simple to take damage so that when you need to die, you'll only have one hit left.
Also, it'd be good to spend some serious time looking for bugs or unexpected interactions. In a movie this long, the ability to zip, go through a wall or even just walk faster could save minutes. If/when you do this, frame advance is very much your friend.
Did you check if it'd be faster to die in the dungeon of the first world when you need to get to Leo's house? It'd be pretty simple to take damage so that when you need to die, you'll only have one hit left.
Dying to go spin the mill's wheel and dying after getting leo's brush would faster, but dying means losing all gems unless a strange bottle is equipped. It's possible this isn't a big deal this early in the game, but it's hard to tell right now.
Also, it'd be good to spend some serious time looking for bugs or unexpected interactions. In a movie this long, the ability to zip, go through a wall or even just walk faster could save minutes. If/when you do this, frame advance is very much your friend.
I tried messing around a bit. Unlike LttP, Left + right does nothing miraculous. The game simply ignores the left press and moves the character to the right. Normal walking and crab walking are identical speed-wise. Only thing I haven't checked if it crab walking around a corner is faster than turning. Other than that I have no idea what could be abused except monster pathing/gem dropping (haven't figured that out yet), there aren't many moves in this game. Any suggestions?
Hmm... If you wanna be super serious you could check if there is a movement pattern of some sort. Like if you stop moving for one frame and then hit the forward button again. See if it gives you a slower or faster result perhaps? Think it was one of the SMB games that could go on faster by doing this at certein points.
Other than that, I'm clueless right now. I will check the WIP soon though and give input on it.
Sea world done, and it added 20 minutes to the total. So much backtracking in that one. I should've saved the strange bottle instead of using it in the fire temple. It would've saved a lot more time to die instead of walking back from Rockbird. I could have used the fairy gem to warp back to town but it's fairly out of the way, and clearing the 2 monster lairs + talking to the gem basically takes just as long, though it would've given me some extra experience... hmm.
I grabbed the ever so useful power bracelet as well as the critical sword but I can't swing it yet. Poking the boss with it didn't deal more damage than poking him with the sword of life (2 bars per hit w/ bracelet). I skipped the magic flair; while it's not too out of the way (3 extra monster lairs but the mermaid who gives it is close to a dolphin I need to talk to) and is probably the strongest spell when charged up beside phoenix, its range is absolute crap. The soul of the magician needs to be almost on top of the monster to hurt it, whereas with light arrows you can easily hit multiple monsters across the screen and landing double hits with it is a lot easier than with fireball.
I hope just poking the metal and spirit killing swords will be enough to hurt the monsters they need to hurt otherwise the soul blade won't be my only problem. I also hope skipping the ice armor won't come back to haunt me in Dr. Leo's lab.
One thing that comes to mind is that the less you use gems, the more you can use death as a shortcut. You'd want to time it carefully. If it turns out you need a bunch of gems late in the game but that you could also save a lot of time by dying instead of backtracking, you could use the Strange Bottle then.
In short:
1) Die often and minimize gem use.
2) Use the Strange Bottle to save time dying when gems are important.
This is still not a final run right?
If it's just a test you got plenty of time to do changes before submitting right. So it's good to come up with these ideas now. :)
Keep it up!
That's exactly one of the things I'm trying to determine, IdeaMagnate. :) I find an experimental run to be extremely useful for that, when I watch it I can spot mistakes and things I could better do differently a lot more easily than when I'm playing.
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
I sure hope you finish this Kaz. I don't remember much of the game in detail but I have played it through a couple of times when I was younger and I remember it as one really great game. Keep up the good work!
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
This is a pretty nice demo run, hope you are able to finish. Don't worry about finding every trick, just finishing the game at the pace you are going now will be a major accomplishment. Hey, now I know what it looks like to go through the darkness without the soul. :)
The min level for each sword is kinda annoying, but workable. I agree that critical sword is probably a worthwhile pickup. Ice armor would take so long to get that I don't think it's worth it. It hardly phased you in Greenwood and there isn't as much fire in Leo's lab.
It's hard to say how important it is to keep a lot of gems around, which is a very good reason to make a demo run. For sure there will need to be a lot at the end to take on DeathToll, but even then you can pick some up during the battle.
Also, I think you can just poke the metal/spirit enemies with the right sword to kill them. This is good because otherwise you won't be able to kill the walls to levelup at the end. Of course you still need to be able to swing the Soul sword to use Phoenix, so it's necessary to get that high to finish the game.
It'd be silly not to pick up the critical sword. I walk on the tile right next to the chest, and the chance to land a critical hit seems pretty high and perhaps even manipulable. Too bad it doesn't work on bosses. The lucky blade isn't a big detour either (~3-4 seconds) and it's a worthwhile grab considering how monsters' defense goes up but their HP remains mostly the same so double shots of light arrows still slaughter them. I think the lucky blade's chance of getting better gems still works on magic kills, too.
The problem with the fire floors in Dr. Leo's lab is that they deal 4 damage instead of the fire temple's 1, but they're fairly small stretches and there aren't too many of them so it's workable. I'll probably need a medical herb though.
And yeah I just tested it, poking works on metal/spirit enemies so it's all good. Poking the moving walls in the final area with the soul blade 1 shot-kills them and they're worth 4000 exp a pop, so getting to level 24 just before Deathtoll will be a breeze.
Updated test run, world 4 done.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/452/sblazer.smv
Figuring out what monsters lairs to seal was annoying in world 4 because I not only had to free the necessary NPCs, but also free superfluous NPCs that would "dig" my way to them.
I grabbed the magic armor, I only had to clear 1 quick spawning monster lair to make its chest appear. I also made a slight detour to get the lucky blade. I skipped the rotator magic (it's terrible) and a strange bottle since I hadn't used the one I got in world 3 yet, but it too is only a small detour to get.
I used magic a lot in this world because it's a significant time saver. Those wizards teleport around if I get too close to them and it's a huge waste of time. They start spinning for 2 seconds, disappear for 3-5 seconds, spin again for 2 seconds and only after all that can I finally damage them. Doesn't happen if I waste them from afar with magic. The annoying rotating bats are much faster/convenient to kill with magic, too.
Total time is now 1:05. I wanted the complete run to be at most 1:30 but that won't be happening. Perhaps a planned, frame perfect run can be 1:30 or less.
All done. Total time is 1:44. Lowering that to 1:30 might prove to be on the impossible side but it can definitely be improved by a few minutes.
World 5 was surprisingly short, 12 minutes total, but I took a ton of damage due to the sheer amount of hazard it contains. Dr. Leo defies death every day he works in his lab. On a positive note, no living creature's soul needed to be released, just doors, stairs and city models.
World 6's ghost fights were o-so-annoying. These guys are already painful in a regular game, having to poke-kill them is just a chore. Thankfully only 3 ghost monster lairs needed to be sealed. Also, I needed to free the 2 guards with Dr. Leo to make the cutscene with the queen occur. I also needed to free the frontdoor castle guard to spawn the castle otherwise the king's soul just sits there floating complaining it can't be released yet. Funny how the queen in world 3 didn't have that problem. That last one alone added 5 more monster lairs to the total.
I'm satisfied with how the boss fights in world 5 and 6 went. The fights themselves aren't perfect but I think the strategies used are. They die fast, fast enough to surprise people who played this before, particularly the airship fight. Deathtoll was neither interesting nor fast, unfortunately.
For some reason I can't upload the last movie to dehacked's microstorage even though the file is 736K.
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
I certainly don't want to derail this topic, but seeing as this is one of the few runs I ever pushed for someone to do...and seeing as I'd like to give input on how things are going...I have to ask:
anyone know how I can fix SNES9x so that it doesn't freeze within 10 seconds of starting this movie? This isn't the only movie it has happened, with, but it is the only one that it happens every time to. I've given the game upwards of 15 minutes warmup, I've tried messing with sound and video settings, nothing is working. I have the most up-to-date version (or at least I think I do) of the emulator, and the proper ROM (or at least it has the right checksum). The sound seems to hiccup and get stuck like a broken record in an infinite loop, and then the emulator freezes up. Every once in a long while it'll unstick itself and the movie will continue fine, but most of the time I have to kill the program and start over again. I'm kinda frustrated that it isn't working because I really want to see the WIPs. Hopefully someone can help me, if not, I'll have to wait for a finished AVI to make comments.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
anyone know how I can fix SNES9x so that it doesn't freeze within 10 seconds of starting this movie?
First, try this: run "snes9x.exe -restore" at the command line (from the same directory as your snes9x, of course). That may not fix it, but I'm curious as to whether it does. If it does work, that means one of your emulator settings was bad somehow.
If that didn't fix it, then here's something more likely to work: When you go to play the movie, in the playback dialog, turn off "Sync sound with CPU". You'll have to turn that off every time you play the movie, though, if that's what fixes it. (Unless Kaz turns off that option the next time the movie is updated so that it will automatically be off for you.) A few games actually need that setting on to stay in sync, but that's very rare so you're probably safe with turning it off.
Since it still won't upload on dehacked's site I put the final movie on rapidshare. Here it is:
http://rapidshare.de/files/8938654/sblazer.smv.html
And it's weird that it freezes for Hamm, I have no trouble playing it back with the default movie settings.
It looks good. Obviously it's rough around the edges, but the main strategy is there. One thing I wondered about is whether gem drops are manipulable. Small, medium and large gems seem to be dropped at about a 5:1:1 ratio (in the castle, at least), so if you can influence the rng you could get whatever you needed.
If you could manipulate gem drops, the gem loss from dying would be a non-issue. Additionally, you could save more time because you wouldn't need to bother with getting and equipping the Strange Bottles.
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
nitsuja wrote:
Hamm wrote:
anyone know how I can fix SNES9x so that it doesn't freeze within 10 seconds of starting this movie?
First, try this: run "snes9x.exe -restore" at the command line (from the same directory as your snes9x, of course). That may not fix it, but I'm curious as to whether it does. If it does work, that means one of your emulator settings was bad somehow.
If that didn't fix it, then here's something more likely to work: When you go to play the movie, in the playback dialog, turn off "Sync sound with CPU". You'll have to turn that off every time you play the movie, though, if that's what fixes it. (Unless Kaz turns off that option the next time the movie is updated so that it will automatically be off for you.) A few games actually need that setting on to stay in sync, but that's very rare so you're probably safe with turning it off.
I'm on my laptop and I had the same problem. I ran the restore and it didn't fix it, but disabling the sync sound with CPU worked. I'm actually in class and can't watch the whole thing, but I saw far more of the video than I have seen thusfar. I think that did the trick, so I'll attempt the same thing at home and see if it works. Thanks alot.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
Well, it worked fine for me, and I must say that was pretty neat. You've certainly covered quite a few of the angles for this game. As you said, the lab and airship fights are great, I definitely wasn't expecting that. The trick with the teleporting wizards is also very cool. It does seem like the magic and gem usage can be played with quite a bit to optimize things. Early on, it didn't seem like you ever had too many gems, so more deaths shouldn't be a big problem. In the last few levels the magic is great, so death is probably tougher to handle. On the last level, it looks like you could have killed some more enemies as you battle through, which would cut down on the ending buildup.
Also, you ended the input after killing Deathtoll, but there are a couple spots in the ending which need input.
Here are some pointers after having watched up to Leo's lab.
Use more magic.
Use magic more efficent.
If you can use more magic and hit random enemies that you don't really need to kill you will still gain exp faster.
Take damage more efficent.
Combine magic and sword to kill enemies even faster.
Remember that some enemies doesn't spawn until you have killed off the first one. There for it's even more important to kill these enemies as quickly as possible.
Don't spend time taking gems from chests. Only a waste of time. You can probably manipulate gems faster the regular way anyways. I'm thinking of the snowy mountain currently where you bring up a couple of chests.
After getting the mushroom shoes you head down the basement at the top of the mountain. Right where that slippry ice sort of thing is (the one that forces you back down). I think it's better to move straight up on it if you just walk a bit further to the right first. I think this is where you kill your first set of enemies after getting the shoes. If you don't know what place I mean that is. :)
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
I've had prep for finals and the actual finals this week, so I've not had a chance to watch the entire movie yet. I did notice a few areas that didn't seem optimal, but I'll have to watch again to get a good feel for it.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
