Corruption TASing

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-22 04:17:15 pm

2015-10-22 04:14:19 pm

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

The Dolphin rev made for the Metroid Prime TAS has considerably accurate loads in this game as well (pretty much all games actually), so there's not much stopping TASes of this game from a "do we have the software to do it?" standpoint. I don't really have any serious plans to do much with this game. I don't even want to do a LOTAS unless the route gets a lot more interesting, but I guess this thread would be a good place for exactly that to happen.

At the moment I'm looking into ways to squeeze MBI into the run, since it's fairly interesting and entertaining. Sadly, you lose MBI dying after the Nova Beam wallcrawl, so having it in late-game would require a backtrack to wherever the fastest place to activate it is. Right now it's looking like that would be Spire. A bit of timing would need to be done to really know if that's worth doing.

I'm also interested in how much time it really takes to skip Grapple Swing and how much time it takes to collect. Obviously for non-TAS, skipping it would be an ludicrous proposal, but I'm not convinced it would be too slow tool assisted. It's also very possible that fall respawn skip is doable without boost in a TAS, which I believe would mean some rooms could be done inbounds (I'd have to look at a map, I'm still on good at remembering Elysia's layout).

Finally, a Screw Attack skip has some potential. I'm likely forgetting/not aware of some important use for Screw Attack, but to my knowledge it's not really needed anywhere aside from just getting up a couple vertical rooms which could relatively quickly be wallcrawled up. And any use for SA strats on bosses can be done faster with MBI.

Here's some MBI stuff:

This one would be useful for getting MBI either at the end of the run (assuming it actually saves time post-Nova) or on the way to Seeker Missiles (especially if Screw Attack skip becomes a thing)

This one just demonstrates MBI on final bosses and how quickly the Phaaze wallcrawl can be done.

Thread title:

The Dolphin rev made for the Metroid Prime TAS has considerably accurate loads in this game as well (pretty much all games actually), so there's not much stopping TASes of this game from a "do we have the software to do it?" standpoint. I don't really have any serious plans to do much with this game. I don't even want to do a LOTAS unless the route gets a lot more interesting, but I guess this thread would be a good place for exactly that to happen.

At the moment I'm looking into ways to squeeze MBI into the run, since it's fairly interesting and entertaining. Sadly, you lose MBI dying after the Nova Beam wallcrawl, so having it in late-game would require a backtrack to wherever the fastest place to activate it is. Right now it's looking like that would be Spire. A bit of timing would need to be done to really know if that's worth doing.

I'm also interested in how much time it really takes to skip Grapple Swing and how much time it takes to collect. Obviously for non-TAS, skipping it would be an ludicrous proposal, but I'm not convinced it would be too slow tool assisted. It's also very possible that fall respawn skip is doable without boost in a TAS, which I believe would mean some rooms could be done inbounds (I'd have to look at a map, I'm still on good at remembering Elysia's layout).

Finally, a Screw Attack skip has some potential. I'm likely forgetting/not aware of some important use for Screw Attack, but to my knowledge it's not really needed anywhere aside from just getting up a couple vertical rooms which could relatively quickly be wallcrawled up. And any use for SA strats on bosses can be done faster with MBI.

Here's some MBI stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYCGhwMqkks
This one would be useful for getting MBI either at the end of the run (assuming it actually saves time post-Nova) or on the way to Seeker Missiles (especially if Screw Attack skip becomes a thing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HLk0g7YvGo
This one just demonstrates MBI on final bosses and how quickly the Phaaze wallcrawl can be done.

Aruki

Edit history:

Aruki: 2015-10-22 05:12:04 pm

2015-10-22 05:05:45 pm

I can pretty much guarantee you there's no chance in hell that skipping Grapple Swing will be even remotely close to faster. You have to go to cliffside Bryyo anyway to get the map and the detour to Grapple Swing is nothing compared to the amount of time you would need to spend aether jumping and very slowly walking across the skywalk all over the place in Elysia.

For Screw Attack IIRC the main problem is skipping it requires you to do a lot of wallcrawling in east Elysia. In particular, after you get Grapple Swing, there's no way back across to Turbine Chamber without SA so you need to fly back to Landing Site A and wallcrawl into East Elysia and go all the way back again, which is a huge timesink. I think that's the main issue with it. It might lock you out of some SW entrances as well; Skyway Access for instance would probably be useful in a TAS because I imagine wallcrawling the skyway sequence is faster than doing it inbounds, but not having Screw Attack rules out that strat.

edit: I suppose if you skip Screw Attack then there's no need for the Bryyo map, but even then I'd be really really surprised to see Grapple Swing skip be even close to faster. A lot of the stuff required for Grapple Swing skip is inherently slow and there's a limit to how much TAS will be able to speed it up. The wallcrawl around Transit Hub is a good example.

I can pretty much guarantee you there's no chance in hell that skipping Grapple Swing will be even remotely close to faster. You have to go to cliffside Bryyo anyway to get the map and the detour to Grapple Swing is nothing compared to the amount of time you would need to spend aether jumping and very slowly walking across the skywalk all over the place in Elysia.

For Screw Attack IIRC the main problem is skipping it requires you to do a lot of wallcrawling in east Elysia. In particular, after you get Grapple Swing, there's no way back across to Turbine Chamber without SA so you need to fly back to Landing Site A and wallcrawl into East Elysia and go all the way back again, which is a huge timesink. I think that's the main issue with it. It might lock you out of some SW entrances as well; Skyway Access for instance would probably be useful in a TAS because I imagine wallcrawling the skyway sequence is faster than doing it inbounds, but not having Screw Attack rules out that strat.

edit: I suppose if you skip Screw Attack then there's no need for the Bryyo map, but even then I'd be really really surprised to see Grapple Swing skip be even close to faster. A lot of the stuff required for Grapple Swing skip is inherently slow and there's a limit to how much TAS will be able to speed it up. The wallcrawl around Transit Hub is a good example.

Hazel

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-22 05:39:18 pm

Hazel: 2015-10-22 05:36:28 pm

2015-10-22 05:35:53 pm

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

I did find a way to do Skyway Access without Screw Attack actually. You can SSJ onto a little square shaped thing above the morph ball tunnel area, and then jump into this little tunnel that one of the Crawltanks comes from, then boost SSJ out and over the wall from there.

Is there a possibility of touching the dock between Transit Hub and Zipline Station Bravo (coming from either direction)? I tried messing around with it and it seems the docks in those rooms might not be programmed to load the ones closest to you. This likely wouldn't mean anything for the wallcrawl to boost, since you'd likely take a path through Hoverplat Docking Site, but it might speed up getting to Ghor.

Aruki

2015-10-22 05:45:31 pm

From the looks of it, no, the docks there can't load unless you touch the trigger to activate the shortcut.

MLSTRM

2015-10-22 05:57:58 pm

Quote from Parax:

there's no way back across to Turbine Chamber without SA

If it's an any% TAS you would never need to even visit Turbine Chamber since you would only enter East Elysia to go and get Seekers, since you could to the Ship Grapple skip wallcrawl? The only thing I can think of right now that would be annoying with that would be getting to the upper part of concourse without SA, but the rest is easily doable.

Aruki

2015-10-22 06:03:17 pm

Doesn't Ship Grapple skip require floating for like 3 hours? TAS isn't gonna be able to do much to speed that up.

MLSTRM

2015-10-22 06:04:49 pm

Quote from Parax:

Doesn't Ship Grapple skip require floating for like 3 hours? TAS isn't gonna be able to do much to speed that up.

No, Spire's box is present so you can aether jump up that, an optimised TAS could do it in like 5 minutes or less.

Aruki

2015-10-22 06:05:18 pm

oh, then yeah in that case Ship Grapple skip is probably the way to go in a TAS.

MLSTRM

Edit history:

MLSTRM: 2015-10-22 06:19:20 pm

2015-10-22 06:06:40 pm

Even in RTA if we had a good setup it would be viable most likely. For 100% you need to do it in just under 7 minutes for it to be faster, Any% can probably get away with doing it slower since you don't have to get ship grapple eventually. Problem for now is we don't really have a good setup and since position is annoying to see on emulator, creating a good setup is going to take a while.

EDIT: on the subject of skipping Screw Attack, the largest blocks I can think of right now is getting a good fight with Gandryda (not too bad really), and getting Out of bounds for Nova Beam in Quarry (not sure how necessary SA is there).

Hazel

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-22 06:26:03 pm

2015-10-22 06:25:46 pm

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

Quote from MLSTRM:

EDIT: on the subject of skipping Screw Attack, the largest blocks I can think of right now is getting a good fight with Gandryda (not too bad really), and getting Out of bounds for Nova Beam in Quarry (not sure how necessary SA is there).

Screw Attack isn't needed in either place. MBI should oneshot Gandryda and

First video shows how to get on the peg without SA, second shows how to get into the SW without SA.

kirbymastah

Edit history:

kirbymastah: 2015-10-23 01:34:07 am

kirbymastah: 2015-10-23 01:29:36 am

2015-10-23 01:27:36 am

For the au last phase it doesn't seem like it'd be fasteready to wait for it to spin on the ground then mbi it. Pretty sure I've had faster fights with other attack patterns by just shooting it with in charge shots then a missile before it turns

Still hilarious to see it die instantly though

Edit: there's a pattern where the au fires a charged shot then is stunned for a while. I'm pretty confident that tas can 1 cycle that boss with that pattern (or the pattern where you actually stun it when it lowers it's antennae belly thingy)

JosJuice

Edit history:

JosJuice: 2015-10-23 03:56:54 am

2015-10-23 03:46:08 am

Dolphin dev

Quote from itsPersonnal:

The Dolphin rev made for the Metroid Prime TAS has considerably accurate loads in this game as well (pretty much all games actually)

You mean 4.0-4222? The improvements back then didn't apply to Wii games, so MP3's loads shouldn't be accurate at all in that version. Later, 4.0-4898 essentially brought the Wii disc speed accuracy from non-existent to acceptable, but it still has a fairly large problem; it ignores that Wii discs have partitions. PR 1900 is supposed to improve that, but it's kinda stuck without any progress right now. If the loads are accurate for you, then I'm happy to hear that, but I don't really understand why they are.

EDIT: You should be careful with 4.0-4898 and later, though. 4.0-4898 introduced a problem that apparently can make the emulated CPU lag while loading rooms in MP3. It was fixed in 4.0-5531, but that's after 4.0-5400, the last build that didn't have the new problematic hotkey system. Normally I would simply recommend using the newest development version, but that's hard to do until the frame advance hotkey is fixed.

[quote="itsPersonnal"]The Dolphin rev made for the Metroid Prime TAS has considerably accurate loads in this game as well (pretty much all games actually)[/quote]

You mean 4.0-4222? The improvements back then didn't apply to Wii games, so MP3's loads shouldn't be accurate at all in that version. Later, 4.0-4898 essentially brought the Wii disc speed accuracy from non-existent to acceptable, but it still has a fairly large problem; it ignores that Wii discs have partitions. PR 1900 is supposed to improve that, but it's kinda stuck without any progress right now. If the loads are accurate for you, then I'm happy to hear that, but I don't really understand why they are.

EDIT: You should be careful with 4.0-4898 and later, though. 4.0-4898 introduced a problem that apparently can make the emulated CPU lag while loading rooms in MP3. It was fixed in 4.0-5531, but that's after 4.0-5400, the last build that didn't have the new problematic hotkey system. Normally I would simply recommend using the newest development version, but that's hard to do until the frame advance hotkey is fixed.

Hazel

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-23 06:19:40 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 06:19:06 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 05:34:45 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 05:25:31 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 04:09:36 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 04:04:44 am

2015-10-23 04:00:25 am

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

Quote from kirbymastah:

For the au last phase it doesn't seem like it'd be fasteready to wait for it to spin on the ground then mbi it. Pretty sure I've had faster fights with other attack patterns by just shooting it with in charge shots then a missile before it turns

Still hilarious to see it die instantly though

Edit: there's a pattern where the au fires a charged shot then is stunned for a while. I'm pretty confident that tas can 1 cycle that boss with that pattern (or the pattern where you actually stun it when it lowers it's antennae belly thingy)

I'm pretty sure there's a pattern where it drops into that ground attack right as the fight starts, I swear I've seen that happen before. Also that video was made on a Veteran save file because I couldn't find a save file on the internet that was: on Normal, at Phaaze, and able to skip cutscenes. I tried fighting it "normally" and with TAS aiming, it's actually pretty easy to just walk under the AU and spam shots straight up, hitting it basically no matter what attack it's using, but since it was a Veteran file, I wanted to use MBI, even if I couldn't get the attack cycle I wanted.

Quote from JosJuice:

If the loads are accurate for you, then I'm happy to hear that, but I don't really understand why they are.

They aren't absolutely perfect, but very close to, if not actually, accurate for most rooms. They're also consistent, which Metroid Prime wasn't for a while, I ran into desyncs on other revs with that game simply because a door would take slightly different amounts of time to open each time I played the movie.

-

Edit:

Quote from itsPersonnal:

I did find a way to do Skyway Access without Screw Attack actually. You can SSJ onto a little square shaped thing above the morph ball tunnel area, and then jump into this little tunnel that one of the Crawltanks comes from, then boost SSJ out and over the wall from there.

Here's a video.

I encountered another problem on my way over here, though. I'm not sure there's a way past the wall in Command Courtyard without Screw Attack or Grapple Voltage. That sort of limits routing options on Pirate Homeoworld.

-

Edit: it appears that there's a gap in at the top of the one-way-gate in the acid rain area of Lift Hub, Morph Ball is just small enough to squeeze though it. If you can 2BSJ instant morph through that, it would open up routing possibles a lot, both with or without Screw Attack. If you had MBI active, you wouldn't even take that much damage doing it this. And just from looking at the room, as long as you can instant morph, this should work. (I'll try TASing it next time I'm in the mood).

[quote="kirbymastah"]For the au last phase it doesn't seem like it'd be fasteready to wait for it to spin on the ground then mbi it. Pretty sure I've had faster fights with other attack patterns by just shooting it with in charge shots then a missile before it turns

Still hilarious to see it die instantly though

Edit: there's a pattern where the au fires a charged shot then is stunned for a while. I'm pretty confident that tas can 1 cycle that boss with that pattern (or the pattern where you actually stun it when it lowers it's antennae belly thingy)[/quote]
I'm pretty sure there's a pattern where it drops into that ground attack right as the fight starts, I swear I've seen that happen before. Also that video was made on a Veteran save file because I couldn't find a save file on the internet that was: on Normal, at Phaaze, and able to skip cutscenes. I tried fighting it "normally" and with TAS aiming, it's actually pretty easy to just walk under the AU and spam shots straight up, hitting it basically no matter what attack it's using, but since it was a Veteran file, I wanted to use MBI, even if I couldn't get the attack cycle I wanted.

[quote="JosJuice"] If the loads are accurate for you, then I'm happy to hear that, but I don't really understand why they are.[/quote]
They aren't absolutely perfect, but very close to, if not actually, accurate for most rooms. They're also consistent, which Metroid Prime wasn't for a while, I ran into desyncs on other revs with that game simply because a door would take slightly different amounts of time to open each time I played the movie.

-

Edit:
[quote="itsPersonnal"]I did find a way to do Skyway Access without Screw Attack actually. You can SSJ onto a little square shaped thing above the morph ball tunnel area, and then jump into this little tunnel that one of the Crawltanks comes from, then boost SSJ out and over the wall from there.[/quote]
Here's a video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRPyxq6_H9Y

I encountered another problem on my way over here, though. I'm not sure there's a way past the wall in Command Courtyard without Screw Attack or Grapple Voltage. That sort of limits routing options on Pirate Homeoworld.

-

Edit: it appears that there's a gap in at the top of the one-way-gate in the acid rain area of Lift Hub, Morph Ball is just small enough to squeeze though it. If you can 2BSJ instant morph through that, it would open up routing possibles a lot, both with or without Screw Attack. If you had MBI active, you wouldn't even take that much damage doing it this. And just from looking at the room, as long as you can instant morph, this should work. (I'll try TASing it next time I'm in the mood).
[img]http://puu.sh/kUw21.png[/img]

Aruki

2015-10-23 06:43:34 am

oooh that gap is pretty interesting. Weird no one noticed it before.

MLSTRM

2015-10-23 06:45:32 am

Quote from Parax:

oooh that gap is pretty interesting. Weird no one noticed it before.

Yeah solves quite a few problems as well, like how you could do Pirate Homeworld without Seekers, and since with this you can get to research without XRay, it means our only block is the leviathan code (I think?)

Hazel

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-23 07:27:18 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 07:06:26 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 07:04:55 am

Hazel: 2015-10-23 07:04:01 am

2015-10-23 06:56:51 am

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

Huh, you don't even need to morph. (Yes it's possible).

I accidentally saved over my playback state, so I couldn't encode the full movie. You can get the gist of it from this though. The farthest back savestate I had was right after the unmorph, you know, where the video starts. Rolled in the room and used a spring ball to set up a quick 2BSJ.

~~I imagine non-TAS can do a precise SSJ Screw Attack through this???~~ Scratch that, Screw Attacking is a lot harder than just a 2BSJ.

MLSTRM

2015-10-23 07:38:03 am

Well this opens up PH pretty nicely for even non-TAS runs. I guess we can now go and do Grapple Voltage first (or even right after XRay without enabling the map), and do it from the other end of research which should be a bit quicker (not sure how you'd get past the hyper missile barrier though, maybe crawl from Metroid creche?). I don't think we could do Nova second though since you need to reload the room for spider skip, and either way requires XRay or Nova (unless you can unload from Security Air Lock without turning the centre?), but it at least gives us some more options to explore.

Hazel

2015-10-23 07:42:44 am

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

Quote from MLSTRM:

Well this opens up PH pretty nicely for even non-TAS runs. I guess we can now go and do Grapple Voltage first (or even right after XRay without enabling the map), and do it from the other end of research which should be a bit quicker (not sure how you'd get past the hyper missile barrier though, maybe crawl from Metroid creche?

This is doable (I'd have to look into doing that SW without Screw Attack for a TAS, but I've done this exact wallcrawl before with Screw Attack).

Quote from MLSTRM:

I don't think we could do Nova second though since you need to reload the room for spider skip, and either way requires XRay or Nova (unless you can unload from Security Air Lock without turning the centre?)

This is also doable, since the door to Defense Access curves out to the side of the room, you can get closer to the other door by going in the corner opposite to where the Defense Access door is.

MLSTRM

2015-10-23 07:45:55 am

Oh it's a proximity one? I thought it might have been triggered by the morph ball thing. That makes it way nicer. You can entirely bypass the PH map and going through flux control with this then, since after getting nova you could go into command station, use the morph tunnel from the GV entrance to get to xray, then to straight back in again to lower the defences (or just bypass the second trip entirely and go straight for skyway access->wallcrawl demolition sequence. Shame we still need XRay to damage Omega ridley though >_> (He basically forces us to have all 3 items from PH I just realised.)

Aruki

2015-10-23 07:45:57 am

Does anything weird happen if you call the ship to the landing site in Research without activating it?

MLSTRM

2015-10-23 07:48:06 am

I would think it works fine since we already do this with Nova Beam in 100% and it all works out ok? (The landing site appears on the map but is inactive until you go to it though, so a slightly different situation I guess) Really it depends how a landing site is activated, which could cause a slight problem I guess but you could probably just return the way you came through Metroid creche if it's inactive.

Hazel

Edit history:

Hazel: 2015-10-23 07:54:28 am

2015-10-23 07:53:23 am

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

Land > Lift Hub Gate Skip > Grapple Voltage > Back to first area > Skyway Access shortcut > Reload Room > Defense Access SW > X-Ray > Defense Access SW > Nova

In case anyone isn't aware, you can Seeker the locks from out of bounds in the X-Ray room, the cutscene puts you inbounds and switches the map.

Draconif

2015-10-23 12:03:25 pm

You can open Creche Transit's Hyper Missile from Behind. No need to go out of bounds

MLSTRM

2015-10-23 12:43:29 pm

Hmm, you would probably want to do it all Out of bounds though since the acid rain and you wouldn't have Hazard Shield. That much time is going to be like at least 3 tanks if not more? Whereas iirc from OoB you can avoid the acid rain a bit more?

Aruki

Edit history:

Aruki: 2015-10-23 02:05:30 pm

2015-10-23 02:05:15 pm

Probably not really a problem more optimized and with use of Screw Attack/morph ball. Remember that you don't take acid rain damage in Screw Attack until you land. Of course, that doesn't help you if you skip Screw Attack...