UK keyboards have this weird right angley looking character with one line shorter than the other. Yeah.
edit - just made it a lot shorter, nothing important was cut out
I'm starting to see the same here. I see a lot of possibilities regarding making the run as perfect as you can, but I also think it may be too ambitious to mine down to the core. You can always submit improvements later. In the meanwhile let's see what we can find.
The primary reason why that may be a bad choice is how is level 5/level 6 is gonna work? In original mode you wouldn't run into that problem. Of course whichever you choose, you can run the other one later because they're fundamentally different anyway. And maybe in arcade mode you could choose to run just levels 1-5. But if it's true that difficulty levels carry over from one level to the next and I don't see how to get around the bias that creates for level 6 easily.
Let's try to find out what the range of possibilities is and then figure out what's feasible in IL's and SS.
I just ran a series of test runs on level 1. I noticed you can pick up yellow tranqus from at least one or two boxes along the way and get blue ones for completed missions. Difficult to establish what the difference is before we can make difficulty level studying more systematic. Even if the manual has it they're supposed to be different.
Yeah you really have to keep an eye on the gauge. I noticed that now that I've gotten fairly confident at typing correctly, I'd have to relearn making little mistakes. I wonder what the optimal way to do that would be. Maybe you don't really need a method if it's such a small detail in the end.
The question of optimizing continue usage - Only place where it's clearly wasted is right at the end, say the final phase of a boss fight. But is it better to lose one right before a boss fight than it would be if it had happened say half-way through the level or at the very start? Maybe you end up getting the same difficulty for the boss fight in either case. Or maybe as early as possible is best if the effect ripples through the whole level? Let's experiment.
Sorry but the options menu only has word size: large or small. Meaning how big the text boxes are.
For the sight-impaired or something.
On my last set of experiment runs, I noticed you sometimes get shorter and really fast-to-type words from genre dictionaries, but sometimes even double the length of other words in the same area, so it's one of those luck-determined things.
One last note on genre dics - you're right that they're short-lasting. Actually their effect is limited to the mission or to a predefined set of zombies in the area you picked the item up in.
Again I thought I'd bring up the idea of being prepared to let certain things slip just for the sake of getting some sort of run out in a reasonable time. That's what I'd do if I saw there was gonna be a lot of complications.
I'm only probably as enthusiastic about the game as you are and glad to be able to help out in whatever ways I can. I'll be happy to be part of the preparations for this run for as long as I'm around, but I am already planning a departure within the month probably for an unknown time period.
So what do I mean by analytical/empirical approach to route planning? The empirical approach would be just timing yourself doing different routes to establish an average time taken for each of them. That's simple to do, but requires lots of repetitions, plus you can't make 100% sure conclusions, because it's a form of inductive thinking as I see it. The analytical approach would be more trying to break the game's flow down into little parts like for example: "If I take route A here it's followed by 2.56 seconds of camera panning before 2 zombies of difficulty level C appear on the screen. There's a 25% probability of getting a yellow tranquilizer from the box. Is this the optimal route choice?" That sort of thinking can help you make conclusive conclusions if you can find out how much camera movement, how many zombies, how many items etc. each branch has and somehow sum it all up and compare with all the alternatives. I'm thinking you could do that by recording yourself playing and studying the videos afterwards.
Speaking of recording oneself playing (recording the screen that is) I did a brief study of word lengths just to see how that'd work out. I captured ten runs of the "Mr. B Guy" drill, which is the one that you have to get all A's and B's in. The word length increases steadily as you go along so I thought maybe it's passing through different difficulty/word length categories. I managed to create a table of the results which does show e.g. that the first 5 words are 3-5 letters long, then the next category would be 5-8 letters etc. And the point is if you collected more data you could eventually work out what the current difficulty level of the game is by looking at the word lengths. And this in turn would help assess in a more scientific way what the effect of losing a continue or picking up a tranquilizer is in as concrete terms as possible. That might be a possible starting point for a more analytical approach to optimizing your strategies. Still I wouldn't say you absolutely had to do that in order to produce an SDA-standards-meeting run by any means.
Another way to get more insight on how the difficulty level works would be to try to access the word lists in the game's data files. I don't know if that's just not doable. I already tried opening the .bin files in NotePad, but I guess it was never going to be that easy.
Here's a list of all the things that might benefit from systematic empirical exploration (probably by studying recordings of gameplay). I made it so if anyone else would be interested in helping out they'd have an idea of what's there to do:
-trying to establish difficulty/word length categories in the way I outlined two paragraphs up or by other means
-trying to establish what tranqus and continues do to the difficulty
-just plain trying out different routes and measuring time taken to reach the boss or whatever - I imagine you'll have a lot to work in this if you're the only one doing it, and in any case others could help confirm your findings
-other stuff as well
I just had a realization that should further discourage overly perfectionism about the run: if you wanted to find out which zombies are the best to take damage from, you'd have to count in the effect of the difficulty level I think. Which I guess changes according to how early you lost the first continue and how many continues you've lost so far. So it's even more complicated if I see this correctly.
I noticed that if you use the "adjust display" option, you can lift the perfect gauge up to the very top of the screen. This means you can see certain zombies' text boxes earlier. Works at least for the guy jumping down off the bridge near the end of chap. 1. It would mean to change a default setting, though, by some interpretations at least... The "default" button doesn't change the view back, but if it's not the boot default it's not the boot default.
BTW you mentioned earlier that you have a WPM of something like 120. How does that convert to the WPM used by the game? What results are you getting in the post-chapter evaluations?
Quote from T3tsuya:
Oh my. This is looking to be a lot more complicated than I first thought.
I'm starting to see the same here. I see a lot of possibilities regarding making the run as perfect as you can, but I also think it may be too ambitious to mine down to the core. You can always submit improvements later. In the meanwhile let's see what we can find.
Quote from T3tsuya:
On original mode vs arcade mode. I picked arcade mode as the arbitrary default selection, I didn't want to overcomplicate things, but Sega seems to have done that for me. I think I'm going to stick to an arcade mode run though as it seems the difficulty scaling is in both modes.
The primary reason why that may be a bad choice is how is level 5/level 6 is gonna work? In original mode you wouldn't run into that problem. Of course whichever you choose, you can run the other one later because they're fundamentally different anyway. And maybe in arcade mode you could choose to run just levels 1-5. But if it's true that difficulty levels carry over from one level to the next and I don't see how to get around the bias that creates for level 6 easily.
Quote from T3tsuya:
I'll definitely be praying to the RNG gods[.]
Let's try to find out what the range of possibilities is and then figure out what's feasible in IL's and SS.
Quote from T3tsuya:
The strengths look fixed. I have not yet observed a yellow or blue tranquilizer in level 1 ...
I just ran a series of test runs on level 1. I noticed you can pick up yellow tranqus from at least one or two boxes along the way and get blue ones for completed missions. Difficult to establish what the difference is before we can make difficulty level studying more systematic. Even if the manual has it they're supposed to be different.
Quote from T3tsuya:
On health items vs continues, I -THINK- it might benefit me to find fast places to get hit, keep my combo relatively low so I dont get more health and then coast on my one remaining health until I need to use that continue. I'm thinking it'll be best to pop continues in front of boss fights to keep phrase length down.
Yeah you really have to keep an eye on the gauge. I noticed that now that I've gotten fairly confident at typing correctly, I'd have to relearn making little mistakes. I wonder what the optimal way to do that would be. Maybe you don't really need a method if it's such a small detail in the end.
The question of optimizing continue usage - Only place where it's clearly wasted is right at the end, say the final phase of a boss fight. But is it better to lose one right before a boss fight than it would be if it had happened say half-way through the level or at the very start? Maybe you end up getting the same difficulty for the boss fight in either case. Or maybe as early as possible is best if the effect ripples through the whole level? Let's experiment.
Quote from T3tsuya:
COULD ALWAYS CHICKEN OUT AND SET WORD LENGTH TO SHORT.
Sorry but the options menu only has word size: large or small. Meaning how big the text boxes are.
Quote from T3tsuya:
On dictionaries, not only do the genre dictionaries keep the words shorter, I've found it's usually the same stock set of words. You can memorize them the best you can and get those typed out fairly quickly. But they really do not last long and they're usually only used for zombie challenges which Im skipping anyway.
On my last set of experiment runs, I noticed you sometimes get shorter and really fast-to-type words from genre dictionaries, but sometimes even double the length of other words in the same area, so it's one of those luck-determined things.
One last note on genre dics - you're right that they're short-lasting. Actually their effect is limited to the mission or to a predefined set of zombies in the area you picked the item up in.
Quote from T3tsuya:
This is going to take longer than I planned originally, there's going to need to be a lot more testing done routewise and some deeper looks into the strategy of the whole thing, but the end result will be worth it.
Again I thought I'd bring up the idea of being prepared to let certain things slip just for the sake of getting some sort of run out in a reasonable time. That's what I'd do if I saw there was gonna be a lot of complications.
Quote from T3tsuya:
Thank you again for the continued help and support on this. I would have easily submitted a sub-par run without this advice. I really do appreciate it. If you find or think of anything else, please don't hesitate to post it up.
I'm only probably as enthusiastic about the game as you are and glad to be able to help out in whatever ways I can. I'll be happy to be part of the preparations for this run for as long as I'm around, but I am already planning a departure within the month probably for an unknown time period.
So what do I mean by analytical/empirical approach to route planning? The empirical approach would be just timing yourself doing different routes to establish an average time taken for each of them. That's simple to do, but requires lots of repetitions, plus you can't make 100% sure conclusions, because it's a form of inductive thinking as I see it. The analytical approach would be more trying to break the game's flow down into little parts like for example: "If I take route A here it's followed by 2.56 seconds of camera panning before 2 zombies of difficulty level C appear on the screen. There's a 25% probability of getting a yellow tranquilizer from the box. Is this the optimal route choice?" That sort of thinking can help you make conclusive conclusions if you can find out how much camera movement, how many zombies, how many items etc. each branch has and somehow sum it all up and compare with all the alternatives. I'm thinking you could do that by recording yourself playing and studying the videos afterwards.
Speaking of recording oneself playing (recording the screen that is) I did a brief study of word lengths just to see how that'd work out. I captured ten runs of the "Mr. B Guy" drill, which is the one that you have to get all A's and B's in. The word length increases steadily as you go along so I thought maybe it's passing through different difficulty/word length categories. I managed to create a table of the results which does show e.g. that the first 5 words are 3-5 letters long, then the next category would be 5-8 letters etc. And the point is if you collected more data you could eventually work out what the current difficulty level of the game is by looking at the word lengths. And this in turn would help assess in a more scientific way what the effect of losing a continue or picking up a tranquilizer is in as concrete terms as possible. That might be a possible starting point for a more analytical approach to optimizing your strategies. Still I wouldn't say you absolutely had to do that in order to produce an SDA-standards-meeting run by any means.
Another way to get more insight on how the difficulty level works would be to try to access the word lists in the game's data files. I don't know if that's just not doable. I already tried opening the .bin files in NotePad, but I guess it was never going to be that easy.
Here's a list of all the things that might benefit from systematic empirical exploration (probably by studying recordings of gameplay). I made it so if anyone else would be interested in helping out they'd have an idea of what's there to do:
-trying to establish difficulty/word length categories in the way I outlined two paragraphs up or by other means
-trying to establish what tranqus and continues do to the difficulty
-just plain trying out different routes and measuring time taken to reach the boss or whatever - I imagine you'll have a lot to work in this if you're the only one doing it, and in any case others could help confirm your findings
-other stuff as well
I just had a realization that should further discourage overly perfectionism about the run: if you wanted to find out which zombies are the best to take damage from, you'd have to count in the effect of the difficulty level I think. Which I guess changes according to how early you lost the first continue and how many continues you've lost so far. So it's even more complicated if I see this correctly.
I noticed that if you use the "adjust display" option, you can lift the perfect gauge up to the very top of the screen. This means you can see certain zombies' text boxes earlier. Works at least for the guy jumping down off the bridge near the end of chap. 1. It would mean to change a default setting, though, by some interpretations at least... The "default" button doesn't change the view back, but if it's not the boot default it's not the boot default.
BTW you mentioned earlier that you have a WPM of something like 120. How does that convert to the WPM used by the game? What results are you getting in the post-chapter evaluations?
