Tool Assisted... Practice?

[meronpan]

Lately I've been getting a bit frustrated trying to 1cc eosd with other characters.  I knew that I was abusing the heck out of master spark for my first 1cc and needed to practice actually capturing spell cards to make some progress... however it's been a bit frustrating having to play through entire stages just to get a single shot at a particular spell card.  I'd love to just be able to just use some program to save state right before a boss and practice the hell out of just the boss... tools like that out there?  If so any recommendations?

...or do i just have to suck it up and grind all my practicing out like a true masochist? ^^;;

[Drake]

Haven't gotten far enough to save get a program to savestate, unfortunately.

Grind it oooout.

[Zengar Zombolt]

...or do i just have to suck it up and grind all my practicing out like a true masochist? ^^;;

Like a true MAN, you mean.
If anybody does Tool Assisted runs here, it's surely for the lulz.

[Zengeku]

That would actually be a good idea but your training will come off as more effective. Still, a program to make save-states would be awesome. That would prevent me from just going "screw this, let's go play Splinter Cell" when i'm trying to capture something.

But.... wouldn't that make it very easy to do insane stuff? Like a perfect No-Miss, No-Bombs run of a Touhou game on Lunatic?

[meronpan]

thanks for the info everyone.

@zengeku - yeah if one wanted to cheat one's way to a perfect game like that it'd definitely make such a feat possible.  personally i don't see the fun in it (though i wouldn't mind watching a replay for kicks) cuz i'm just trying to get better in a more efficient manner...

/begin rant
playing through all of stage 3 just to practice hong's final spell card is just a huge time sink. prolly worse is patchy... i get impatient getting up to her for practice, inevitably get sloppy and will have some incredibly stupid death before even getting to her... which makes me frustrated... and do worse than usual on her, totally nullifying any practice time i get -_-

i guess the annoying part is that, yeah, true, i can perfect my play on the regular part of the stage - but once i'm getting up to the boss without deaths/bombs, it doesn't directly help me achieve my goal of a 1cc!  at this point the practice has added an extra hardness that has nothing to do with skill, it's just time.
/end rant

ah well, guess i just need to suck less and get better faster. 

[swamp147]

Heh, for now, you could practice and perfect your stage run (and make it look super cool). The big problem I had with IN was that I ended up being REALLY good at capturing spellcards, but sucking in the stage and the boss's regular attacks. If you're just practicing a stage and die early, don't quit and restart the practice run - play through the stage even if you have one less life.

[mark2000]

I say go for it if you can. EoSD's Practice Mode is a load of crap anyway.

[Zengeku]

thanks for the info everyone.

@zengeku - yeah if one wanted to cheat one's way to a perfect game like that it'd definitely make such a feat possible.  personally i don't see the fun in it (though i wouldn't mind watching a replay for kicks) cuz i'm just trying to get better in a more efficient manner...

/begin rant
playing through all of stage 3 just to practice hong's final spell card is just a huge time sink. prolly worse is patchy... i get impatient getting up to her for practice, inevitably get sloppy and will have some incredibly stupid death before even getting to her... which makes me frustrated... and do worse than usual on her, totally nullifying any practice time i get -_-

i guess the annoying part is that, yeah, true, i can perfect my play on the regular part of the stage - but once i'm getting up to the boss without deaths/bombs, it doesn't directly help me achieve my goal of a 1cc!  at this point the practice has added an extra hardness that has nothing to do with skill, it's just time.
/end rant

ah well, guess i just need to suck less and get better faster.

Practicing a spellcard using stage practice is an excellent way to learn the stage. You will also be able to brush a little up on the other spellcards. Take me for example, yesterday i wanted to cap VoWG Lunatic (which i suceeded at) and in the meantime i got more consistent and familiar with her other spellcards.

But remember. If you are playing EoSD and practicing spells there, you'd want to capture all the spells in the stage to get the rank as high as possible. That will make your training more effective. Hongs final card can vary very much depending on your rank.

[zaelie]

You could try a program like at www.autohotkey.com. Admittedly I haven't used it myself, just did a quick google.. There was a program I used a long time ago to record keyboard macros but I can't remember the name for the life of me.

The idea would be to start recording keyboard input at the main menu then start the stage. Press escape at the desired point in the stage, then stop the recording. Whenever you want to use it just replay the input file from the main menu again. The downside is it will take realtime to play it back (and it may desync if you drop frames.. so bring a good PC), the upside is you can continue from where you want to.

It's a crude savestate but probably the best you'll get short of reverse engineering the game.

Though I'd suggest just sucking it up and practicing the old fashioned way. It's less complicated lol.

----

Edit: Argh sorry, scratch that. Shortly after posting the random variations in touhou bullets dawned on me :/

[Drake]

Lol, if you use an unrandomizer that could actually work.

[zaelie]

Hehe. Yeah you could set the seed to a static value.. not sure what ZUN is using for his randomizer though. Maybe there's something stock inside the DirectX library? But that's beyond my reversing ability. If you know how, be my guest 

[meronpan]

i guess ranting a bit has strengthened my resolve... nothing left to do but practice practice practice ^^;  interesting idea with the keystorke capture but that seems like a pretty thorny path ^^;

that said, i have become extremely interested in touhou danmakufu!!  i'm gonna try manually scripting out (rough approximations of) some of the spell cards i'm having trouble with, should be fun ^^  or if my programming skills fail me i'm sure i could find/code up some practice patterns to better hone my abilities

was looking for a repository of eosd spell card scripts but no luck so far... i'll have to poke around the rika's garage forum and the danmakufu wikis...

[zky]

Bumping because I do want to know how ZUN gets his random values.

I'm curious as to see how he manages to save the random bullet data for entire replays so easily.

[zaelie]

I'm torn between a straight up rand, and Mersenne Twister.

Since Zun is somewhat lazy and drunk, srand/rand would be the easiest choice. But then again the Mersenne Twister was created by Japanese people, so he could have Jap Pride towards it, and it's quite arguably more pseudo-random than rand() is, AND it's quite popular in game dev.

As I said in my last post though, there could be something stock in the DirectX lib. No idea what algorithm it would employ though. I've only used OpenGL for rendering.

In terms of how he saves random data in files, it would just be a simple seed value (likely an unsigned 32bit int). If you supply the same seed to any randomisation algorithm, it will reproduce the same results every time.

For example that's how Elite generated its universe. A fixed seed is fed into a static universe generation algorithm. The more you know.. hehe.

[Drake]

Given that he can call the same seemingly random numbers in each replay, it would be safe to assume that he uses some sort of pseudo-random number generator. I would agree with a Mersenne and wouldn't be surprised if it was what he uses.

[zaelie]

Has anyone broken the replay format? I'm pretty new on the scene so I dunno.

Most of the data would be movement anyway. Run length encoded at best, personal compression at worst. I guess important data would be at the top of the file and checksummed at the top/end. So it could be cracked with patience, tedium and saving very short replays.

Regardless, I think his seed value would be the system time. That's the only logical way. However if he uses compression that will be a bitch.

Do the guys who do english patches frequent this board? They seem to know how zun compresses at least dat files.