Maidens of the Kaleidoscope

~Hakurei Shrine~ => Help Me, Eirin! => Topic started by: iVAwalys on February 23, 2016, 01:04:09 PM

Title: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: iVAwalys on February 23, 2016, 01:04:09 PM
Touhou speedruns. So far, something I've never seen. (excluding 1. these (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4z2HEjF-as) 2. two (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TGRj4zFCqA) videos) I think it should become a thing.

While some might argue that a Touhou speedrun is impossible and dumb, because the game's pacing is fully linear (you can't just skip things), but what about defeating enemies and clearing boss patterns as quickly as possible?
I think it would be really interesting to see how fast you can 1cc, for example, EoSD.
What do you think?
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Boomer on February 23, 2016, 01:16:27 PM
I think that it would be pretty interesting.  If we were to be going by what I assume your idea is, the easiest one would probably be playing as MarisaB in MoF.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on February 23, 2016, 03:10:29 PM
it would basically just be bombspam though
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Monarda on February 23, 2016, 04:04:34 PM
I actually would be inclined to do this, since i naturally try to finish bosses ASAP and i don't play for score, maybe i could try doing something like that after, you know, becoming a proper Touhou player.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Sakurei on February 23, 2016, 04:13:19 PM
Just do a TD score run. It's basically the same in that game.

As for the photo games: Yeah, it's possible to speedrun them but no one (aside from LET) has taken that very seriously as a run. I don't think most players here could achieve a great time without massive time investment either.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Nameschonvergeben on February 23, 2016, 04:20:02 PM
Please no!
Speedruns of shmups are super dumb, because 90 percent are autoscroller and the rest is trying to get lucky on attacks to get a quickkill (ask someone that scores MoF how fun of an idea it is to try to speedkill attacks)

For the photogames it is technically possible but it's still kinda lame in my opinion, because rather than being an extra challenge most of the time killing everything as quickly as possible doesn't even require mastery or basic undestanding of the game. If you want to master a game and add an extra layer of challenge you should really just score
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: iVAwalys on February 23, 2016, 04:53:50 PM
it would basically just be bombspam though

Well, in the newer generations, perhaps...
Second generation bombs are pretty weak though.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on February 23, 2016, 06:43:46 PM
Bombs in general have a higher DPS than just shooting in every game, and when they are weaker it would have to be a character-specific gimmick that disables shooting (or has literally no damage benefit but costs Power). You'd have to cherry-pick to find bombs that end up with lower DPS. You say second-generation, but MoF bombs are crazy good, SA's are all strictly better besides MarisaC, UFO just has MarisaB that sucks, and TD is trance and bombs galore.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Raikaria on February 23, 2016, 07:32:13 PM
Seems pointless.

Stages have fixed time; so it's only boss battles. Boss battles have 2 types:

Boss dosen't move; there's a fixes time per shottype [Assuming the enemy's shots are not random]
Boss does move; it comes down to RNG

No-one wants a speedrun that is mostly autoscroller and then is decided by boss movement RNG.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: iVAwalys on February 23, 2016, 07:48:08 PM
Bombs in general have a higher DPS than just shooting in every game, and when they are weaker it would have to be a character-specific gimmick that disables shooting (or has literally no damage benefit but costs Power). You'd have to cherry-pick to find bombs that end up with lower DPS. You say second-generation, but MoF bombs are crazy good, SA's are all strictly better besides MarisaC, UFO just has MarisaB that sucks, and TD is trance and bombs galore.

What I meant by "second generation" is the second generation of Touhou as a whole, not the second generation of the Windows era. (PC-98 era is the first generation.)
EoSD, PCB and IN all have very weak bombs, aside from some exceptions, but you're mostly right.

Come to think of it now, Touhou speedruns are not that good of an idea as it seemed.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: dosboot on February 24, 2016, 03:05:55 AM
I think for standard Touhou games the next best thing you can get to speedruns is a type of challenge that incorporates failure (deaths, basically) as an unavoidable element.  Something that you can't just grind out tons of runs to minimize or eliminate.  I say this because otherwise your personal best feels too much like your normal-play best (or if you are crazy consistent at getting 1ccs, your normal play with more risky things added).

One idea is that you could race Touhou and have it be very interesting even though a speedrun with the same parameters wouldn't.  Say each player starts stage practice and tries to get a perfect Lunatic clear for the chosen stage.  The first player to succeed wins the race.  You would scale the challenge goal downward from "perfect Lunatic" to fit the capabilities of the players.  You want something that is very unlikely to happen on the first try, but easy enough so that half of the players will complete it in 30-90 minutes of attempts.

Another idea would be something like the opposite of a speedrun: a marathon run / survival run.  Give yourself 1 credit (or maybe "X lives" would work better) and try to play through the series for as long as possible.  You start with the first Touhou game you own.  If you clear it, you move on to the next one and keep going.  Once you run out of lives you record your time.  Longer times are better runs. 

It is up to you whether you want to allow deliberate timeouts.  (There's probably a good deal of strategy with picking the best timeouts, but just like regular speedruns individual players often decide not to do certain skips or glitches to have more fun with their personal routes.)
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Nolegs the Cat on February 24, 2016, 05:13:09 AM
One idea is that you could race Touhou and have it be very interesting even though a speedrun with the same parameters wouldn't.  Say each player starts stage practice and tries to get a perfect Lunatic clear for the chosen stage.  The first player to succeed wins the race.  You would scale the challenge goal downward from "perfect Lunatic" to fit the capabilities of the players.  You want something that is very unlikely to happen on the first try, but easy enough so that half of the players will complete it in 30-90 minutes of attempts.

Touhou races are definitely a thing. Quite fun to watch IMO.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: ARF on February 24, 2016, 05:27:58 AM
Speedruns of the main games can be fun, but it is more about optimizing shooting and having nice bomb strategies/timings. It's particularly neat when you need to shotgun a lot, or when your shot requires some technique (think Malicecannon in IN, or SakuyaA/ReimuA in DDC). I have done runs of various games myself, but here are some really nice runs by real superplayers!

LET's Double Spoiler RTA in 31:32 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94mx7Cuko6A) Aya 100% and Hatate 100% along with similar runs of StB on his youtube channel. These are pretty much as good as it gets for 2hu speedrunning, I think.
SA lunatic in 17:59.12 (http://score.royalflare.net/th11/replay11/th11_ud0b16.rpy)
MoF lunatic in 14:34 with 1.82b score (http://score.royalflare.net/th10/replay10/th10_ud008b.rpy)
EoSD NMNB extra speedrun in ~7:29 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPPqSsSZP8g)
ISC 100% in 37:53 (http://www.twitch.tv/seihon/v/33870798) Something not done in this run: you can do a glitch which allows for early hammer (after the 1-1 tutorial scene) but idk if that's allowed or even faster if some other items would require leveling anyways...
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Mеа on February 24, 2016, 10:09:11 AM
TD Youmu is probably about the closest you can probably get in the main windows games without it being boring. Maybe even limit yourself to 1 power, no bomb, no trance.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: CrystalCreation on February 24, 2016, 12:32:03 PM
An Uwabami Breakers speedrun might be interesting since killing enemies faster in that game does actually shorten the duration of the stage. Additionally you have the chopsticks as a means to attack, giving you more strategy options.

As for bosses you cold experiment if it's faster to bomb, keep your shot power or attempt some fancy chopstick shenanigans.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Sen on February 26, 2016, 04:22:25 PM
I remember when UFO first came out, if your score got to 2billion, the game immediately crashed. Someone here suggested world records should be determined by whoever gets to 2b the fastest :V
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Cream Soda on February 28, 2016, 04:48:34 PM
There has been talk of bringing STG to the GDQ marathons, which isn't a huge leap considering that they've expanded from pure speedrunning into puzzle and rhythm games as well. Could the STG scene be revived after 20 years?
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Monarda on February 28, 2016, 04:53:15 PM
There has been talk of bringing STG to the GDQ marathons
Really ? I saw the TAS for Ikaruga and i was really impressed, seeing a real person beat one live would be pretty awesome IMO.
And would that mean one person here might go run a game in a GDQ ? If so it would be even better.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Cream Soda on February 28, 2016, 04:59:00 PM
It actually boggles my mind that they would try to introduce STG to a wide audience with Ikaruga, and a TAS of it no less. You can't get much more exact and binary than an Ikaruga TAS; there is no depth in routing or execution, just 100% perfect timings and having all the best puzzle solutions. TAS scoreplays have no business at group demonstrations in my opinion because they are pure theory, and STG is built around execution. What they should be showing off are some of the more impressive Cave or Touhou replays, or even a masterful first loop of one of the classics. I think the issue is that there are simply not enough STG people involved and not enough knowledge or expertise between those people. The person at GDQ who was most interested in featuring STG has since retired from the organization, I believe.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on February 29, 2016, 05:05:39 AM
Personally I find that talk of putting in games that aren't actually speedrun-focused has been going a bit overboard ever since TGM was hugely successful. When people start suggesting to include STGs and RTGs as exhibitions it starts to potentially take spots from people that have worked hard on their runs in a marathon that's already so incredibly cutthroat in selection as it is. It's one thing to want to introduce people to the games/genre and use a large marathon as a platform, but when you start taking spots from people relevant to speedrunning who really deserve it, out of a desire to fill a showcase variety quota or something, I don't think that's acceptable. It's more hijacking the marathon's popularity for your own gain than anything.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Karisa on March 01, 2016, 11:57:25 PM
I was actually asked by some speedrunners once, after the success of the TGM demonstration, whether a Touhou scoring demonstration could be arranged. I don't see it being feasible-- aside from having to find players willing to go to the event, I'm not sure it's possible to have anything close to "marathon-safe strats" for Touhou.

It is possible that StB/DS/ISC might get into a GDQ marathon at some point, though, since the single-scene games are more speedrunnable than the standard games. I think I have no name (http://www.twitch.tv/ihavenonamesda) was considering submitting Double Spoiler in the past? Not sure if it was rejected or if he just wasn't able to go.

(Oh, and TGM is Tetris: The Grand Master, for anyone who doesn't know. It's a set of extremely difficult Tetris arcade games, where as far as I can tell, every 100 levels (level increases simply by placing pieces, not just by clearing lines) can be a significant accomplishment, and speed is already the secondary goal beyond surviving.)
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on March 02, 2016, 02:20:49 AM
IHNN was scheduled for AGDQ14 and couldn't make it last minute, apparently.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Picochilla on March 09, 2016, 04:24:29 PM
Speedruns of the main games can be fun, but it is more about optimizing shooting and having nice bomb strategies/timings. It's particularly neat when you need to shotgun a lot, or when your shot requires some technique (think Malicecannon in IN, or SakuyaA/ReimuA in DDC). I have done runs of various games myself, but here are some really nice runs by real superplayers!

LET's Double Spoiler RTA in 31:32 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94mx7Cuko6A) Aya 100% and Hatate 100% along with similar runs of StB on his youtube channel. These are pretty much as good as it gets for 2hu speedrunning, I think.
SA lunatic in 17:59.12 (http://score.royalflare.net/th11/replay11/th11_ud0b16.rpy)
MoF lunatic in 14:34 with 1.82b score (http://score.royalflare.net/th10/replay10/th10_ud008b.rpy)
EoSD NMNB extra speedrun in ~7:29 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPPqSsSZP8g)
ISC 100% in 37:53 (http://www.twitch.tv/seihon/v/33870798) Something not done in this run: you can do a glitch which allows for early hammer (after the 1-1 tutorial scene) but idk if that's allowed or even faster if some other items would require leveling anyways...

Still funny how many people forgetting my PoFV Speedruns on Lunatic (  9:39 with Medicine (no miss) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT3tQfFHbi0) /  9:59 with Aya (no miss) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4VydnV_Sf0) )

Probaly because nobody is intrested to challangeing a hardcore rng-game
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: friend on March 09, 2016, 08:23:52 PM
Those are not speedruns. You are just playing the game for a 1cc and calling it a speedrun for some reason.

https://www.twitch.tv/chumlumstg/v/53405364

Here, 55 seconds faster than yours, going by the AI timer
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Picochilla on March 09, 2016, 09:27:01 PM
Those are not speedruns. You are just playing the game for a 1cc and calling it a speedrun for some reason.

what are u for a weird guy? just creating an acc for that and make a stupid post for that?

Just because it is not the "fastest" time doesnt mean u need to shitpost about that.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Sakurei on March 09, 2016, 10:29:49 PM
His account was registered in 2015 still. So he didn't make a new account just to post that.

Furthermore I have to agree. Your times are just about average and what I would expect for both Medicine and Aya barring the Eiki fights where you get lucky. So yes, those are not speedruns. Those are 1ccs with a timer. Completely different thing.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: ElaineSpencer on March 13, 2016, 08:20:17 AM
Main game runs are silly (I occasionally do IN runs, which optimally is pretty much bombspam/malice cannon). It's basically just throwing a timer in front of an RTA and calling it a run, since it's mostly autoscroll.

StB/DS/ISC are a little more speedrun friendly, with the lack of autoscroll, though I've yet to attempt either.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: ojisama on April 04, 2016, 01:46:29 AM
The good Touhou games to run :
- Touhou 1 : no autoscroller, pure skill
- Touhou 3 : I don't know if there is a way to manipulate the deaths, but anyway, no autoscroller.
- The fighting Touhou Story Modes
- Touhou 9 : same reason as Touhou 3
- Touhou 9.5, 12.5, 14.3 : no autoscroller, only skill.
- Touhou 10 : Basically, a run with MarisaB, you can do both the story run or the extra run, I play in normal difficulty. The goal is to defeat the mid-bosses and bosses as fast as you can abusing the "3 power" of marisa. you have to have between 4.00 and 4.95 power before a boss, just bomb at the beginning and just stay at 3 power after that.
(my pb on this one is 14:35 in normal difficulty and the WR is 14:14)
- Touhou 13 :
play with youmu as she is the fastest one to kill bosses, and you can use the trance mode on this one, which is basically a free bomb.
and I haven't included yet all the touhou fangames, like megamari.

the touhou autoscrollers speedruns seem pointless, but seriously, I know plenty of games that have plenty of things like that, and everyone is still happy to see a run.
good examples are the final fantasy speedruns, especially the PS1 ones where 1/3 of the runs are just cutscenes, so absolutely 0 gameplay.
and even when there is no cutscenes, final fantasy speedruns generally consists of skipping protagonists dialogs as fast as you can.
while in touhou, there is still gameplay in autoscrollers, and you can still die, and that's more interesting to dodge bullets than just reading text blocs.
mario 3 has some autoscroller stages, sonic 1 game gear has autoscroller stages, star wing and lilat wars are autoscrolls, pok?mon snap is an autoscroller, but all those games are still runned by speedrunners.
if you say "well, a run of touhou 10 consists if 90% of autoscroller and 10% bosses.", that's not entirely true, because the original game generally have around 12-13 minuts of stages and like 15 minuts of bosses.
so, if the 15 minuts became 2 minuts because of speedrun strats, that's because of speedrun strats.
even with MarisaB, if you don't use speedrun strategies, you will never go under 15 minuts in MoF.
and people seem to forget that you can gain time at the mid-bosses in MoF.
I was able recently to have a time of 14:35 and I needed to train for hours before doing such a time.
the hardest part of MoF speedrun is Momiji, If you are not at the right position, at the right time with 4+ power, you are losing precious time. but there are enemies and bullets everywhere when she appears, which is a huge problem.
+ you have to stay unfocus while fighting the bosses, so dodging patterns is way more difficulty, especially against some aya's patterns.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on April 04, 2016, 04:20:35 AM
Those aren't really comparable though. Pokemon Snap is probably the closest, but even that speedrun isn't structured as an autoscroller by nature. The main point of Snap is completion given the limited time available, and making sure not to miss anything and have to go back (in which case the run is basically over). Even then, the Booster and being able to immediately exit a level are important methods of time saving, that further puts pressure on not missing anything. Optimization on that game is by frames at this point.

Similarly, you mention skipping dialogue in games, but that has nothing to do with the core of the runs. None of the other examples of autoscrollers you mention are an integral part to the games, and they're rightfully looked down upon by speedrunners for existing at all.

Meanwhile, "you can still die in the autoscroller" is bad for two reasons. Firstly, dying in Touhou doesn't slow down the run in any way besides losing Power in some games, which makes it even less punishable than other autoscrollers. Secondly, the reason autoscrollers are disliked in the first place is that there's no way to make it faster. Any runners not failing an autoscroller will necessarily have the same times. Meanwhile, making an autoscroller slower (by dying) is one of the single worst ways you could possibly model a speedrun. If Double Spoiler had no speedkill strats and every scene was a set length, that would be a terrible speedrun. You want top-level optimization to be "do it the best you can", not "don't fail".

Lastly, being able to gain time by speedkilling midbosses is still not too big of a deal for the same reason Touhou bosses altogether aren't a big deal for speedrunning: you can just bomb them. And even then, in literally all of these midboss cases, the stage will not go below a particular duration, i.e. there is a cap on how much you could go faster. These periods are just filled by bonus enemies until a specific time has passed and the stage continues.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: nyttyn on April 04, 2016, 12:20:11 PM
On the flipside, what can be speedrun, 'official' touhou games wise? Pretty much just, as prior mentioned, StB, DS, and ISC - arguably ISC probably has the highest potential out of all 3, due to the item system giving you a potential for both risky and "safe" strats (unlike the other two where it's pretty binary, but they could still be interesting!) for single segment.

Shoot the Bullet (http://speeddemosarchive.com/TouhouShootTheBullet.html) and Double Spoiler (http://speeddemosarchive.com/TouhouDoubleSpoiler.html) both have SDA precedence for being accepted as speed games, at least.

Arguably all of the fighters could be speedrun as well - but Urban Legend in Limbo, in my opinion, probably has the highest potential due to a structured storyline that provides a tangible "end point" (Reimu's true scenario). Also arguably the only one of the fighters with enough modern interest to attract more than one or two niche runners - which is the current problem with the primary 3 candidates for a touhou speedrun.

Of course the interest issue is also there for the first three and is arguably the biggest obstacle to any serious speedrun community attempt. Someone would have to start up a grassroots community for speedrunning any one (or two or all three) of those games. It could be done! But someone would have to go out of their way to set it up, and probably be okay with the very real possibility there's not enough interest.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: ojisama on April 12, 2016, 04:56:21 PM
Quote
there is a cap on how much you could go faster.
like any speedruns actually ?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that going under 4:56 for Mario Bros 1 is impossible, at least as long as they don't find some new glitch for this game.
but people still run the game.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Drake on April 12, 2016, 07:30:40 PM
You keep trying to use other speedgames as comparison but they're never even close. SMB1 has a minimal time because there is no known way to execute any better than current frame-perfect inputs.

I'm beginning to think you don't really understand speedrunning. The fact that you would compare TAS-level optimization to autoscrollers is honestly baffling.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Monarda on April 12, 2016, 08:24:58 PM
This is still going ?
I thought we already had reached the conclusion:
"The Autoscrollers can only be cleared faster by doing the bosses quicker, making potential quite low, the Fighting games have a speedrun potential, other games such as some from PC-98, StB and DS also have possibilities."
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Karisa on April 13, 2016, 05:28:07 PM
other games such as some from PC-98, StB and DS also have possibilities."
"Some" from PC-98? Pretty sure it's just HRtP. PoDD would just be luck as far as I know? (Well HRtP would also be luck with bombs hitting maximal tiles, but still one of the most speedrunable in the series after the spell-based/fighting games.)

Also don't forget ISC.

The standard games are pretty much just a routing exercise, not much potential for optimization.

Hmm, LoLK Pointdevice might be another option since the stages are no longer fixed-length. I've seen it casually raced on Twitch occasionally (only by players who are very inconsistent at that difficulty though). An optimal speedrun would never have to use the checkpoints, though.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Maple on May 12, 2016, 06:57:39 PM
Yes, i'm necroing a thread just short of a month of inactivity, but i wanted to share a finding.

【TAS】東方輝針城 Lunatic 咲夜A NN Speedrun 17:38.27 (http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm26412367)
Double Dealing Character speedrun.

Video is from June 2015. By using SakuyaA, it's possible to speedkill bosses, often before their spell card bonuses start to go down. No bombs used at all. Note, though, that the player wasn't 100% focused on speed, on the midbosses he took his time for the nonspells. It could be made shorter by ~1 minute.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Mero on May 13, 2016, 04:34:37 AM
Note, though, that the player wasn't 100% focused on speed, on the midbosses he took his time for the nonspells. It could be made shorter by ~1 minute.
Stages have a fixed length, and when you kill a midboss too fast there are filler waves to make up for that time and so the stage keeps its pace, He most likely speedkilled Cirno to have more power for the boss, and he speedkilled Seija in Stage 6 because the stage ends when she dies.
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Karisa on May 22, 2016, 07:05:11 AM
It depends on the stage, whether the stage spawns additional post-midboss enemies on a global timer, or the same wave regardless of time. They're usually pretty common-- DDC has those additional enemies in every stage (including Extra, unusually) except stage 6. (IN is an exception, not including any post-midboss enemies.)

You can usually tell by whether the second half of the stage always remains synced to the music, even if you don't know the exact counts of enemy waves.

Hmm, I think I'll try to list (https://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php/topic,19568.0.html) the stages that have these post-midboss enemies...
Title: Re: Touhou Speedruns?
Post by: Hakkai on May 26, 2016, 11:07:14 AM
We did a race on Touhou 15 : LoLK when it came out.
Since it was a special run to end a full Touhou Marathon stream, we split into two team (one really good player ~ can 1cc most of the game in lunatic and 3 okay-ish player ~ can 1cc some game on normal).
It was our first playthrough so we went in point device mode, lunatic for the 1-man team, normal for the 3-man team, we switched player at every life lost and it was pretty tight until Clownpiece.
It was something really fun, but i'm not sure that it could still be feasible since that most of the players now know the boss patterns. (well, it's still doable, but the fun part was trying to find out how boss patterns worked, now it would be only skills but it's not a bad thing either)

Doing a pure speedrun wouldn't even be pleasant to watch since you probably won't be using most of the game mechanics except bombs (no crazy graze milking points and stuff).
Instead of a speedrun, a pacific run would be more interesting i think.