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Messages - Plexa

#121
Golden Sun / Re: Tret OOB Weirdness
23, January, 2015, 12:58:59 AM
Ah yes, the 4000/C000 thing is definitely Isaac's direction. Looks like if you're approaching a transition screen the game records Isaac's direction when transitioning to maintain that after the transition. Although, some transitions fix Isaac's direction (e.g. world map doors) and that data gets overwritten.

Looks like other highlighted areas are related to the position of the camera. I tested it in a dungeon (because sometimes world map/dungeons behave differently) and got the camera to lock somewhere else. I'm guessing that near transition zones like doors there is an area around them which takes control of the camera as you move through the area, as opposed to locking the camera on Isaac. That way you can control the camera movement as Isaac goes through a door (which is slightly irregular).

I bet that camera lock in tret is to do with the number of breakable leaves in the dungeon.
#122
I'm somewhat ashamed that after posting I went away to read up on every psynergy for each element in an effort to better understand things. First things first, the mixing of elements to create psynergy is pretty much impossible as currently set out by the games - growth being Venus, Venus+Mars, Venus+Jupiter and Venus+Mercury makes that difficult to account for within the theory. Secondly, I'm hesitant to read too much into summons are evidence because that's where the essence of two elements is combined (or 1 if you're talking about the basic summons). Lastly, to me it looks like Mercury/Venus and Mars/Jupiter are related to each other in structure, hopefully you can see that from these lists.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, from what I gathered the elements have the following themes:

Venus:
- Life and plants; growth, thorn, revive, punji trap, etc. (you could make an argument for cure here, given the strength of venus's cure)
- Death and the demonic; assassinate, condemn, thorny grave, poisons, curses, etc.
- Manipulation of Earth; Spire, Quake, Gaia etc.
- Swords; Ragnarok, Helm Splitter, Sabre Dance, Weapons Grace, etc.
- Dragons; because Himi -_-;


Mercury:
- Healing; Ply, Wish, (you could argue fairies belong here as well) (healing is strongly associated with Merc, as opposed to other elements which also have heals, as Merc has the strongest heals available)
- Being Healthy/Restorative Effects; Cure Poison, Restore, Break, etc.
- Manipulation of water as a medium; Douse, Cutting edge etc.
- Manipulation of the state of water; Prism, Frost, Ice, Parch etc.

Mars:
- Manipulation of Flame; Flare, Fire, Blaze, Fume, etc.
- Ability to cause tremendous amounts of heat; Volcano, Lava, Beam, Heat Wave, Arid Heat etc. (or to manipulate existing heat sources, such as planetary)
- Explosions; Blast, Starbust, Fire bomb, Burst, etc.
- Associated with Defense manipulation

Jupiter
- Manipulation of Wind: Whirlwind, Slash, Gale, Fresh Breeze (to some extent), etc.
- Manipulation of Lightning: Plasma, Ray, Thunder Mine, etc.
- Movement: Halt, Speed Punch, Death Leap, Quick Strike, Teleport etc.
- Attack and Resistance manipulation
- Manipulation of the Mind: Sleep, Drain, Mind read etc.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reading through this you can kind of see that Venus/Mercury are set up to be opposites (or complements?) of each other as are Mars/Jupiter. Venus gives life or takes it away while Mercury gives a healthy life given you are living. Venus adepts are generally offensive (see their association with swords) while Mercury are defensive or peaceful. Jupiter can enhance attack while Mars enhance defense. Jupiter can manipulate the mind signalling a heightened mental capacity, while mars adepts are generally portrayed as lower down on the IQ spectrum! You can also ratify this with the other elemental associations -- Venus/Jupiter are both 'attacking' elements are so are mutually weak to each other, similar for Mars/Mercury being 'defensive' elements (purely from psynergy, of course). Mars/Venus and Jupiter/Mercury being symbiotic could also be seen in this with the right interpretation.

What I haven't been able to do is bring this inline with the fundamentals theory, but I'll keep thinking about it because it should be possible.
#123
General Golden Sun / Re: Speedrunner's Tips
22, January, 2015, 11:41:46 PM
Yea the map/area thing is exactly those addresses you listed. I set those up in the lua script a while back to work out every instance of where a retreat glitch might be useful. The criteria being that you need to be on a different map to the first map of the dungeon and you can find doors for every exit door that the first map contains. I think that if there are more doors in the map you are in versus the first map you get vale warps (or Madra warps in GS2) - for instance Venus 1 is almost all vale doors because the first map is the exterior area where all the soldiers are only has 3 possible doors (left to suhalla, right to lalivero, up to venus). However in Altmiller Cave there is a vale door immediately above where Babi is lying, I'll leave the technical data below, but the tldr is I think that's evidence for the door lookup not existing as opposed to an absolute number of doors in each area.

Map 146 (altmiller entrance)
                   World Map - Door 1
                   Door 2 - Door 3
                   Door 4 - Map 147 Door 10

Map 2: Babi's room
                   Door 10 - Map 146 Door 4
                   Door 11 - Map 148 Door 20

Map 3: Room after Babi
                   Door 20 - Map 147 Door 11
                   Door 21 - Map 149 Door 30

Map 4: Squalls Room
                   Door 30 - Map 148 Door 21
                   Door 31 - Map 150 Door 40
etc

All of the doors lead to Vale, for what it's worth.

Just for fun here are two notable retreat warps;

- Mercury lighthouse has one of the worst (but at the same time, best!) map design of any dungeon. In particular, the final room of the dungeon (where you cast ply and rise to the top of the lighthouse) is actually on the first map of the dungeon. In the room where you get Mia, going into retreat mode and walking down the left set of stairs will send you to map/door 3A05 which just happens to correspond with the exit door from using ply on the statue AFTER you defeat saturos (causing a hilarious cutscene where Jenna's face is everywhere, and allowing you to beat the game without saving Mia)

- Going into retreat mode and saving/resetting can get you out of bounds in the first map of the dungeon (see my tret thread for an example). The out of bounds world is pretty crazy, some more than others. One skip this allows is the Vale Cave skip which saves ~30s in a normal run, but is notoriously difficult to pull off. Here is a map of the area you try to navigate (completely off screen, of course)

You start in the bottom left of this picture. Each grid corresponds to one x/y square as defined by my lua script which is basically the the space the size of a douse puddle. Doors are really weird OOB, sometimes you can only access them from one direction and other times walls are only partially solid (i.e. you can walk through them left to right, but not right to left). I may start another thread about this because there's some odd behavior I should document that you might be interested in.
#124
Golden Sun / Re: Tret OOB Weirdness
22, January, 2015, 11:15:20 PM
Quote from: Fox on 22, January, 2015, 07:19:11 PM
Quote4) In the 0x02000410-0x02000420 range of the memory you'll notice that there are some changes as you wander around. e.g. load up the battery file and just hold up and see how it changes. This reminds me of what happens when Isaac walks past a door .. what is going on here?
Same stuff +0x20 on GS2.. so..

Quote from: From my page: http://gsdata.wikia.com/wiki/RAM_Map02000420 = Map and door number (Different in battle)
02000424 = Sanctum map and door number
02000428 = Current map and door number
0200042C = Area?
0200042E = Map and door number when you win or flee a battle. FFFF to use current map and door number instead.
02000432 = Map and door number when you lose a battle. FFFF to use sanctum map and door number instead.
02000436 = Battle Background
0200043A = Graphic Map Index. (For file index table on map/pal/tilesets; see 0802F380)
0200043C = X
02000440 = Z
02000444 = Y
02000448 = Direction

I wonder if this helps any?
Not quite, theres no XZY coordinate that I can see for GS1 in this range and those addresses that you list would correspond to the mystery area. I'll post some images to help illustrate what is going on.

1) http://i.imgur.com/Fp9oMX1.png Just moving straight up from where the battery file puts you gives you a change in these two addresses only
2) http://i.imgur.com/8Xh99qd.png moving around a bit you start to see changes in these addresses
3) http://i.imgur.com/Jb6wbWu.png more changes in the same addresses!
4) http://i.imgur.com/1nIpcCM.jpg If you try to enter a door anywhere, the same addresses change (interestingly, I only ever see C and 4 walking towards/away from doors in that last changing byte from my limited testing I just did)
5) If you walk around tret a lot more you can actually get this to happen


At this place the 11 has cropped up in the 02000448 range
#125
General Golden Sun / Re: Speedrunner's Tips
22, January, 2015, 12:13:10 PM
Quote from: Fox on 22, January, 2015, 11:23:57 AM
Oh wow, thanks for all this!

Quotehe's just chilling at 0,0 the whole time you're in lamakan desert
Reminds me of how all rooms in Superstar Saga that don't use non-scripted warps have one at (0,0), and it goes to room 0, which is a debug room. (I think it has to do with how warps are stored, a pointer to warps is stored to RAM, and so they use one "blank" warp that includes a "last warp" flag.) I have not figured out if there are any glitches in Superstar Saga that can give you access to this, though. ; Probably only a few rooms would be applicable, though, so no idea if things like the Fungitown Glitch could be applied elsewhere.
That sounds more like the vale door (activate the retreat glitch, some doors will send you outside vale. We believe this happens because you look up a door that doesn't exist and rather than crashing it sends you to vale). In golden sun's case, the devs were lazy and store almost all of the sprites that are unused off screen somewhere - almost always at 0,0. e.g. in Golden Sun 2 you can see that the boat/felix's sprite is store at 0,0 on the world map when not used. Similarly, in areas like the northern reaches if you enter that using Felix as opposed to the ship (because buggy terrain allows you to do that) you can find the ship at 0,0. And one last example, Saturos/Alex are just chilling at 0,0 before the cutscene to fight saturos calls him to appear from behind the lighthouse.

Quote
Quoteencounters are disabled when you have reveal activated
Hm... I wonder if Reveal is applied directly to the map in this instance? I guess I'll look it up some time?
Otherwise, reveal can replace tiles with other tiles, and tiles themselves have a flag for which collection of battles could occur. (You can assign a map/room two battle collections based on flag and door number, if you want, and map tiles pick which one to be applied... if the one being applied is 00, then no battles happen.),
Seems likely, and they just forgot to add battles to the tiles that have this applied. Might also explain some of the oddness at lamakan as well/
#126
Golden Sun / Re: Tret OOB Weirdness
22, January, 2015, 11:57:57 AM
Quote from: Luna_blade on 22, January, 2015, 11:30:47 AM
Highly interesting.

I'm no expert but does it matter that there are two cutscenes in trets room?
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think so. Tret's "room" is connected to the entire interior, so you're able to trigger the tret fight by wandering out of bounds in the right direction. The second cutscene has no overworld/in dungeon trigger (as far as I'm aware) and that only plays after you defeat tret.

The doors I've been able to trigger (32 and 22 but I didn't record the coordinates for a 22 door, there's a few 32 doors) correspond to falling down certain breakable leaves.
#127
0) Sorry for bumping this, but I couldn't resist!
1) I love your Theory about Sol/Luna alignments within each element. I'm not completely sold on your categorisation, but I definitely can see the macroscopic picture fitting within the golden sun universe. (For instance, Venus is pretty strongly associated with life and death and that seems somewhat difficult to bring into your current breakdown. Similarly, poison and acid seem pretty similar at a heuristic level but are aligned with venus/mars respectively and even combined in Haures so I'm a little dubious of acid being a large part of mars. And along those lines Crystalux being a justification for crystaline structures when thats a Venus/Merc summon again seems like a bit of a stretch (although there's a good argument for many rigid structures within Venus to be incorporated somehow within this - eg. crystals, metal, stone and so on)). ANYWAY.. I disgress. Point is, it's a really clever way to view the light/dark "psynergy" thing and I hope its canon!
2) On dark "psynergy" like shadow shield. One could make an argument that Dark Psynergy works off of the absence of psynergy. A kind of anti-psynergy if you will. There's a pretty good case for that;
- Psy grenades could be seen as the dark psynergy version of a crystal powder or bramble seed
- Dark psynergy seems strongly tied to the vortexes, which sap adepts of PP
- "dark psynergy" doesn't cost any PP to cast (or falls outside of the "known" psynergy)
#128
Golden Sun / Tret OOB Weirdness
22, January, 2015, 10:50:50 AM
Using the retreat glitch you can get out of bounds in a number of locations in the game. Generally speaking, the game is reasonably well behaved aside from various junk data lying around. There is one particular out of bounds (OOB) area which does not behave well - you may guess from the topic title that it is tret. Unlike other dungeons, tret has certain areas which will soft lock the game if you walk to them and even a location which will crash the game if you walk there. We in the speedrunning community have no idea why the game is crashing or soft locking, and we strongly suspect there are some other things at play here. I was watching the memory as I moved through tret and it constantly seems like Isaac was running near doors because of how the memory was changing.

I'm including a goodie-pack so that you can mess around with this yourself and hopefully help us understand exactly what the hell is going on here.

1) Here are a bunch of save files while I am out of bounds in Tret: the save states work with VBA-RR v24, there is also a battery file if those fail: https://www.dropbox.com/s/07j7r0ju1z5r4pb/tret%20oob.rar?dl=0
2) Here is a nifty lua script to help explore out of bounds local AD1 = 0x0200053a --Isaac Cur PP
local AD1Value = 5
local AD2 = 0x0200047a -- Step Counter
local AD2Value = 1

while true do
memory.writeword(AD1, AD1Value)
memory.writebyte(AD2, AD2Value)

gui.text(0,00,"Area: " .. memory.readword(0x02000400))
gui.text(0,10,"Door: " .. memory.readword(0x02000402))


gui.text(40,00,"Actual: " .. memory.readword(0x02000408))
gui.text(40,10,"Actual: " .. memory.readword(0x0200040A))

gui.text(0,20,"X: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030ec4)/1000000)
gui.text(0,30,"Y: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030ecc)/1000000)
gui.text(0,40,"Z: " .. memory.readdword(0x02030ec8)/1000000)

    vba.frameadvance();
end

And here are some codes to lock the camera on isaac (but it's really not that useful)
02030DB8:00000000
02030DBC:00000000
02030DC0:7FFFFFFF
02030DC4:7FFFFFFF

(Incidentally, if you know how to make these codes lock when the X/Y coordinates underflow to 4298 that'd be fantastic!)
3) In tret here are some "bad" locations (X,Y):
- (4283,4241) = game crashes and reset
- (4292,4242) = game crashes, no reset (tries to access door 32 from that area)
4) In the 0x02000410-0x02000420 range of the memory you'll notice that there are some changes as you wander around. e.g. load up the battery file and just hold up and see how it changes. This reminds me of what happens when Isaac walks past a door .. what is going on here?
#129
General Golden Sun / Re: Speedrunner's Tips
22, January, 2015, 10:32:44 AM
Disclaimer: I've worked on the GS1/GS2 speedruns more than anyone else. That said, I'm prone to being wrong about things! But these days I'm reasonably confident :)
Quote from: Misery on 03, December, 2014, 03:57:41 PM
Holding B makes the text go at max speed (of course, text speed should also be set to "fast"). In TLA it also auto-skips to the next text box, but you can skip it faster by pressing another button, so the fastest is to keep B pressed and mash A, I believe.

QuoteThe item duping glitch has no practical application for speedrunning AFAIK, and the hover glitch with the ship definitely doesn't (flying is always faster). As for tiles that don't increase the battle counter, there aren't a lot of them, and you pretty much only enter them out of necessity, so... there's not much you can use that knowledge for.
Not quite true! The current route gets two wild coats in Lemuria which are duped on trial road so that your party outspeeds all the mobs (except the Aka Manah and Wild Gryphons). We get 2 wild coats because the time it takes to get the extra coat from the fountain is less than the time it takes to dupe the wild coat an additional two times.

Quote from: Fox on 03, December, 2014, 04:55:24 PM
The Hover thing without flying was in the event that you're low on PP. (But you probably won't be?) Perhaps we need a Useless theoretical section.

Fleeing calculation already documented a long time ago...

Quote0811CE94 = Calculate chance of fleeing.
5000 + (2000*fleeFails) + (Relative Level * 500) >= Random(0,9999) , Oddly uses the "General" RNG.
Relative Level = Get the average level of all the PCs and subtract the average level of the enemies.

So that means you should always Flee if you're Relative level is 10 or higher. (And that there's a possibly from -9 to 10.) ; It's likely that Avoid will be the better option? (Unless its initiation is too slow, but it's probably not.)
In all the current runs, avoid is more or less useless. Here is a comprehensive list of it's uses:
GS1: between Bilibin Cave - second screen of Kolima forest after Mercury lighthouse
GS2: Indra after Kibombo and again after Tundaria (we Madra warp to Indra after collecting Burst and the prong). Airs Rock (because you do it after Aqua Rock (and before Briggs!)) Occasionally, you can use avoid immediately after Lemuria but that is not consistent (due to random encounters)

The fact that the fleeing formula depends on GRN is absolutely essential to the GS1 speedrun -- funnily enough we worked all of that out prior to me contacting you about the memory addresses for the random numbers. Nevertheless, you providing me with that information allowed me to write a script to display the GRN/BRN and work out far more sophisticated strategies for the game.

A great general resource for golden sun runs is my pastebin: http://pastebin.com/u/Plexa and the FAQs within that (amongst the other stuff like scripts and whatnot) here's some stuff you may not be aware of:

Infinite Climb Glitch: (GS1 only) http://pastebin.com/BMSfKkwG useful exactly twice in a speedrun, both in Altin. Allows you to open the menu while climbing a ladder (it's frame perfect btw). Upon saving/reloading it changes Isaac's Z coordinate allowing mostly uninteresting things - it does however allow you to skip part of a living statue cutscene and talk to spritz early dodging some annoying RNG problems (move interacting with objects is really inconsistent RNG manipulation wise). e.g.: http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5797092?t=109m30s -- here's one kind of interesting application of the glitch for what it's worth http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5802329 (bane is coded as if he's a log!)

Lamakan Desert: Reveal/Retreat interact with each other really weird here. If you go into reveal, use the retreat glitch, then leave reveal the objects in the map are horribly messed up. In particular, there are sinkholes embedded into certain walls. If you trigger the fight in this sinkhole the game will send you to 0,0 afterwards (why? who knows) and you can fight the manticore from there. Useful in no save and quit runs, not in one which allows saving (which all the main categories do). (This was not useful in a run because you could get out of bounds using the retreat glitch and simply run to 0,0 and fight the manticore because for some reason he's just chilling at 0,0 the whole time you're in lamakan desert - e.g. www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5797092?t=119m50s )

Reveal/Venus 1 Glitch: The first time you enter Venus Lighthouse (i.e. when you need to change the tunnel ruins path) encounters are disabled when you have reveal activated. Really weird, no idea why this is the case. This is the only dungeon which exhibits this property. e.g. http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5797092?t=213m40s

GS2 "random" puzzles: You probably know this one. The puzzles are generated based on the character's name you currently have control over (normally Felix, but if you memory edit to get Jenna to one of these areas the puzzles will be based off of Jenna's name). ~~G is one option for a name which gives optimal puzzles (i.e. for trial road, since the others take the same amount of time)

GS2 reunion djinn: Isaac's party's djinn are generated based on the GRN seed when when their party is created (after you input Felix's name (or piers if you decide to name him)). With no save files on the cartridge the GRN is consistent. You can manipulate his djinn by clearing Felix's name multiple times (we do it 11 times at the moment to get granite flash ground etc).

Ankhol ruins glitch: I have no explanation, there are no other places where this works. http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4600444 (although if you look into this please let me know!! I'm super curious about this)

Extremely early Iris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFvWDkaU0AE (and yeah you can get into anemos inner sanctum early as well)

Burst Glitch: Only works in Magma rock. For some reason, burst doesn't care about the Z coordinate. e.g. www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4658865?t=240m30 (the whole dungeon is really fun too :) as is airs rock!)

Reunion Cutscene Collision Glitch: Reasonably well known glitch; activating the "first flight" cutscene with Felix on land instead of in the ship. Using it you can get to Mars lighthouse immediately, but it's not useful in a speedrun. http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4670543
There are also OOB doors on the world map leading to one of 5 locations (Daila, Atteka Inlet, Yampi Desert (Alhafra Side), Sea of Time, Northern Reaches) which is also not useful

Misc. Collision Glitches: Probably sub-pixel perfect. If you have any idea why this happens I'm very interested! eg. http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/2218076 While this happens with switches (and interactive objects) often, it has happened in other places that haven't been recorded: In GS2 a friend of mine was somehow instantly transported to the middle of the head of the statue that spews out sand in ankhol ruins. In practice in GS1 (on console!) I was able to enter the conveyor belt in Colosso with the conveyor having no impact on my movement (i could move freely without being slowed/sped up or moved if i stood still)

And now *ahem* here's some flashy stuff thats incorporated into the speedruns:
- Here is every fight we take in the current GS1 all djinn run! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IL1nYfjHz2A0pMrCdXkYf_f7yfKfLpBrg2Cq-r5xn-U/edit?usp=sharing
- Flashy menus! www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5779207?t=66m45s
- The assassin blade is really good: www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5797092?t=195m40s
- More flashy menus! http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5797092?t=200m25s
- 5 turn fusion dragon! www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/5779207?t=247m30s
- completely destroying Airs Rock www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4658865?t=111m00s
- manipulating sunshine! www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4658865?t=108m45s only because we need it for ....
- 0-light serpent! www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4658865?t=167m40s
- manipulating the gs2 fountain because why not www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4658865?t=213m0s (and then realising you're short one medal, doh)

EDIT: Almost forgot! Here are all my notes/files/everything I have for helping with GS2 speedruns: http://t.co/EdP1igLKEz
#130
Thanks for that Atrius. I'll take a deeper look into this and see if I can see what's going on.
#131
I have a pretty terrible sub-7 hour any% here http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/c/4298762 I plan to beat this in the next few weeks (current goal; sub-6 hours). Part of the reason I've been looking into these things. The difficult thing is finding 7+ hours to do a run :D

Update: Played around with this a little more, it looks like the game is completely maxed out on sprites. If I try to use Move, pound (or any psynergy that generates sprites) the psynergy just doesn't show up. It still works though, as illustrated by when you use avoid, but interesting nonetheless. Using retreat will crash the game, my guess is that as it removes part of the Felix sprite it frees up some space to generate the dots that retreat makes appear, then possibly the game loads too many of these sprites and crashes/soft locks. I would be very surprised if there wasn't some kind of exploit that arises from this.

Update2: Made a little video of the glitch; http://www.twitch.tv/tl_plexa/b/545777916
#132
Hi all! So a little bit of back story, part of the GS2 speedrun of Airs Rock involves using the Retreat glitch to bypass a lot of the puzzles in the first two rooms. We do this by entering the second room and ending up at a "dead end", set Retreat to a hotkey and have retreat fail, save+reset which loads us back into the first room. Interestingly, the objects from the second room load into the first room which unloads a whirlwindable rock in the top right which allows us to walk right past where it usually is, into the second room and continue on our glitch-happy way. Once weird thing about this is that as we get close to leaving the area there is a noticeable slowdown in Felix's movement. So I was messing around with the area trying to work out (a) why this happens (b) how to prevent it.

So far as (a) is concerned, it's pretty obvious that the RAM is being overloaded with sprites to keep track of. The tornado generating statues from the second room are generating tornadoes in the first room, and those tornadoes aren't being removed, thus you have an excess of sprites. Now I don't *really* care about (b), but it would be nice to know. What I found out in my investigations was something far more interesting.



After spending a reasonably long time in the room, that starts happening to the menu. This is actually pretty interesting but I am in no way experienced enough to know how to make the best use of this. If people can point me towards the memory addresses of the portraits that would be a huge help to get me started investigating the implications of this glitch. If you'd like to play around with this yourself, I've included a battery file which you can load into your emulator of choice -- just hang around in the first room for a reasonably long time and it should start happening (don't get a fight though, it will refresh everything).
#133
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn / Re: OoB Mechanics
02, July, 2014, 10:23:54 AM
Hi again! (I thought I replied to this thread long ago, clearly I didn't :( my apologies) thank you for all the replies thus far - I've also attached the .dst file to this post. As the title says, hold right to walk through the wall.

With regard to this specific glitch nothing in particular has been discovered one way or another. But I recently saw this video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKWMzq_no1k where someone was using speed multiplier AR codes which allowed them to clip into various objects for seemingly no reason. After testing this myself the behavior is extremely similar to what I described in the OP. That suggests that the cause has nothing to do with memory overload, but to do with how the game handles collisions.

I don't know a lot about where stuff is stored in the memory, but if someone could point me in the right direction for where I could find the addresses for matthews XYZ position, speed, angle (and sveta's for the apollo sanctum section if that's different information) that would be greatly appreciated :)
#134
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn / Re: OoB Mechanics
22, May, 2013, 09:23:48 PM
Yeah I absolutely appreciate that this site is more experienced with hacking/modding GS1/GS2, I was hesitant about posting it here but I reasoned that if there was anyone that was every going to look into DD in some way then they would probably end up here at least once ^^

With regard to notable spots, there isn't really anything of note beyond what I said in the OP. Ayuthay on the rafts seems to be a place where people have this happen often (I've never had it happen myself there though), Kaocho hopping on the lily pads has triggered it in the past (again, not for me), another user reported falling through the bridge in carver's camp, Khyron was able to get it to happen once or twice on staircases and of course theres the save state above at apollo lens.

It's probably worth pointing out that various jumps in the game make matthew go slightly into the 'wall'. There is a jump as you are leaving harapa ruins that does this, as well as jumping onto the 'planets' in the planet puzzle in Belinsk ruins. It could be tied up with this, but I don't think it's likely - rather a poor jump-range calculation is being done.

This also seems to be unrelated to the Endless wall glitch. My theory for the endless wall glitch is that upon loading the game there is some kind of position mis-match causing matthew to fall through the wall. My guess as to why the position mismatch occurs is that I think the endless wall is actually just an object painted onto the landscape and that at the 'joins' in the wall where the glitch works, save/reloading there will make the game think you are on neither half of the wall object causing it to think matthew is on the ground instead - hence the fall. I could be wrong though, but that's what my logic tells me :)
#135
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn / OoB Mechanics
22, May, 2013, 11:37:00 AM
Hey guys! I'm a Golden Sun speedrunner and thus have quite an interest in the glitches in this game. Vanishmantle has been really helpful in confirming a lot of my theories for GS1 and GS2 and since me and the other guy who run Dark Dawn (khyron) are struggling to understand why this worked, we're hoping that the hacking community can again help us out in understanding what is going on here.

Basically at certain points in Dark Dawn the collision detection for matthew (or sveta) stops working and matthew can walk through walls/fall through objects. This is relatively common bug which has plagued many casual runs with the bug happening most often in Ayuthay and Kaocho. My hypothesis for why sometimes the collision turns off is that the game is storing so much information in the RAM that it 'forgets' that collisions should happen and will allow you to walk through stuff. This would be similar to the tweaking glitch in Gev IV pokemon which basically comes about because you ride around in a particular pattern with the bike which (if done right) will cause the edge of the map to not load properly and thus all hell breaks loose.

This would be quite difficult to test because in general it's hard to purposely turn on the glitch... except I happen to have a save state for DesMuMe 0.9.8 which is saved RIGHT before the collision gives way and has given me some useful insight as to the behavior of this glitch (i.e. not moving for even an instant will turn collision back on). The save state is at the apollos lens as depicted below:

The first screen is where the savestate is taken.

If anyone is willing to help investigate this I'll happily supply the necessary files to be able to set this up. I won't make them public for well, obvious legal reasons :)