Rayman Pirate-Community

This is the main topic to discuss tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) of Rayman games, or the process of generating perfect optimized controller input to complete the game in the fastest way possible.

OK as demostration i am going to post the first Rayman 2 TAS on the N64 version just to see if someone discovers more optimized strategies
this tas is more like a ideal run of what humans can acomplish

see it by yourselfs to see how is it and recomend strategies to better parts

So I understand that this is a human-theory TAS but I'm curious, when it comes to Rayman 2 what kind of input is actually not possible for humans but actually useful for speedrunning?

some parts probably are not humanly possible like the strat i use for tasing murphy skip that at the end of the second jump its some frames faster but murphy skip in itself is very difficult tasing rayman 2 unless we do tasing tools for rayman 2 pc is probably really boring cuz there are not a lot of like entertaining stuff

It took me a while to see understand what TAS meant too, I was always pretty confused by how exactly the tools helped.

Tool assisted runs are very nice.
Rayman 2 doesn't have to have TAS only strategies for it to be special.
TAS could also perform 10 thousand frame perfect inputs in a row. That's just not humanly possible.

A trick may also require over a dozen frame perfect inputs.
Making it not humanly viable. Yet possible in theory.

TAS may also be
slowing the game down
recording inputs in advance using input software
savestates to try over and over again
rng manipulation (often has its own tools to grab info needed)
frame advance to select the exact frame you want.

You could say any tool that helps you to perform better. Even a shitty run can be called TAS if tools were used to make it easier and potentially faster.

That's pretty interesting then, so it's done to try perfect the run and say it's theoretically possible to achieve such a time humanly, but in reality it would be extremely difficult to perfect. I remember even watching some TAS of an old NES game recently and thinking "how are they this good at it", only to find out what "tool assisted speedrun" meant.

Lucidruns wrote: Sun Jan 31, 2021 8:49 pm OK as demostration i am going to post the first Rayman 2 TAS on the N64 version just to see if someone discovers more optimized strategies
this tas is more like a ideal run of what humans can acomplish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk1U1GWJpFQ
see it by yourselfs to see how is it and recomend strategies to better parts

So, I finally got to watch your TAS and while there's a few things I didn't quite understand, such as the weird restart in the Walk of Power and the death at the beginning of the Pirate Ship, it's pretty impressive nonetheless! Shaving 15 minutes off the current (human) record is quite an achievement.

had some problems while tasing cause some captures aborted and thats because the death on the start of the prision ship

Oh, I see! Any reason you beat Axel the regular way rather than strafe-jumping up the slope? That's what I see most people do.

so it only works in pc try it yourself first of all its more difficult to do ack strafe jumps in n64 and the axel fight idk why but in n64 axel litteraly has aimbot intalled and if you do strafe jumps he will probably hit you and you cannot keep doing backwrds strafe jumps there i tried it and spend like 100 rerecords on that then i gave up and just
did the normal strat

Well man, if you couldn't get it to work in a TAS, I can't imagine what it would be like to attempt it on a regular run.

Still, I wonder what could cause such a difference.

probably cause the code of axel is different in n64 and also is harder to do back strafe jumps in slides cause you have to have a perfectly straight angle and a minor bad movement ot hit of axel also even getting to axel normally and doing back jumps to skip it i couldnt get it to work

Now this is particularly insightful regarding the way the game was developed. The PC and Nintendo 64 versions are so close that I would have expected pretty much all the high-level code to be the same, and then of course the interfaces with the hardware to differ, but clearly, a fair bunch of changes were made that appear to have had unexpected consequences on the way the game is played.

Are you sure about that? In raym.app, I don't see any obvious difference between Axel's code on PC and N64, but then the function names on N64 seem to be messed up, so maybe I'm not seeing it properly…

i will upload a comparasion to my channel in some days

Nice, I definitely look forward to finding out more about this.

After reading Droolie's answer is the raym.app topic I suppose the code is actually different then?

I'll have to look at it again, but I didn't notice any major differences apart from the confusing function names, which Droolie confirmed are just from Raymap.

probably the major difference is the backwards strafe jumps that are apparently much harder and hadent aid much cause some problems irl