Jump to content
IGNORED

VGS Weekly Contest - Caveman Games


BeaIank

Recommended Posts

21 minutes ago, bertsampson said:

Sorry, no time to post score.  Will fix later.

30 seconds on the saber race?! I'd love to hear the right strategy to try it out after if you arent a skinny who doesn't like sharing. That's the most baffling time on the board. Second goes to defcode getting 56 seconds on dino run. Those are herculean 

Edited by NESfiend
Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, NESfiend said:

30 seconds on the saber race?! I'd love to hear the right strategy to try it out after if you arent a skinny who doesn't like sharing. That's the most baffling time on the board. Second goes to defcode getting 56 seconds on dino run. Those are herculean 

Now that the competition is over, I'll share what I found. I reverse engineered some of the events to figure out exactly how they work. Here's what I remember.

Mate toss: This is the first one I looked into. The speed is changed every time the mate swings around one rotation on screen. If less than 3/8 rotations have been made on the dpad, the speed goes down. Less than 6/8 (and equal or more than 3/8), the speed stays the same. 6/8 to 15/8 increases the speed. I believe any more keeps the speed the same (numbers may be a couple off, I'm going from memory). The most interesting thing is the rotation doesn't make sure you go though all the in between angles. So, if you start pressing right and then press up, it counts as 6/8 of a rotation (counter clockwise). When actually doing this I found alternating left and right was the easiest. Finally, the distances are based off of the amount (speed/2 + angle) where speed maxes at 15 and angle maxes at 7 (note that the /2 rounds down so a speed of 15 is the same as 14). Then +1 if using a character who has strength in that event. This number takes a distance from a lookup table (I believe the top three are 72, 90, and 92) then finally 0-3 foots are added on at random. This makes 95 the max.

Fire starting: I didn't fully reverse this one, I just played around with TAS tools. The first half is to mash A until you get half way (you can actually stop a bit early and momentum will push the cursor above half). Then press down 7 times to get the smoke going (the speed should be every 21 frames which I believe is ~171 BPM (yes I had a metronome going when doing this)). Then you can hold down to finish. Once you start slowing down press up briefly to take in more air. Fun fact the best I got with a very loosely optimized TAS was 14.9 which I matched on my NES.

Dino race: For this one I looked into how the boosts worked. (I also looked into speed, but that's mostly mash harder to go faster). Every time a boost is used a random number between 0 and 255 is picked. If it's above a threshold, the boost succeeds. That threshold is raised every boost. Here are the thresholds in hex (0x00, 0x30, 0x60, 0x90, 0xC0), any more than the 5th boost automatically fails. So, obviously the best strategy is to go for the lucky five boosts. The probability is (16/16)*(13/16)*(10/16)*(7/16)*(4/16) ~= 5.6% or about 1 in 18. When I went for five boosts I got lucky and got it on the fifth try. With five boosts, if you time it right you don't even need to jump over anything.

Saber race: I looked a lot into this one and basically all I found was mash harder to go faster. The one other thing is landing on the far edge of the pools gives you a speed boost. Since, there's not more than mashing to this one, I sucked at it. How bert got 30 seconds is beyond me.

Dino-vaulting: 30 is the most and isn't that hard to get, so I didn't even look into this.

Edited by 0xDEAFC0DE
  • Like 2
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was nice being first place even if only for a few hours and because of an oversight...

Some of these times are insane. I never knew that the boosts in the Dino Race were just random. I always thought that you had to wait for a given amount of time or travel a certain distance in order to get another boost which is why I only ever used 4 boosts.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Events Team · Posted

Final and correct scoreboard posted.

This was one impressive week.
13 players went prehistoric and most impressive, 7 of them maxed out the Mate toss event and 8 of them maxed out the Dino Vault event.
But still, one competitor stood almost in the bronze age and came out as 1st place, scoring 44 out 50 possible points. Congratulations to @0xDEAFC0DE for taking the 1st place this week.
@Tablew/chairs secured 2nd place by scoring 42 out of 50 possible points.
@Gaia Gensouki  managed to get 3rd with 40 total points out of 50 possible points, leaving NESfiend out of the podium, with a 4th place. That is what he gets for only scoring 36 out of 50 possible points!

Once more, thank you all for participating in our humble weekly contest.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, BeaIank said:

Final and correct scoreboard posted.

I spotted two small errors. Tablew/chairs only got 4 points for fire starting even though they were tied for third (and should get 6 points putting them in untied second place overall). Richardhead is in 12th on dino race when he should be 6th (maybe because the score is missing the leading 0). Other than that everything looks good. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Events Team · Posted
12 minutes ago, 0xDEAFC0DE said:

I spotted two small errors. Tablew/chairs only got 4 points for fire starting even though they were tied for third (and should get 6 points putting them in untied second place overall). Richardhead is in 12th on dino race when he should be 6th (maybe because the score is missing the leading 0). Other than that everything looks good. 

Fixed that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, bertsampson said:

You went somewhere?  You still post often, just no scores.  I thought maybe you misplaced your NES.

I have been away from the NES more often than not, but I'm just taking that much awaited break I kept talking about since I didn't expect to have much playing time anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, BeaIank said:

Fixed that.

My Dino Race time was updated. Scoreboard says 63.9. I got it down to 61.9. Don't worry, it doesn't change anything in the standings. I would like it corrected in case I ever play this again and want to check back to my old scores to try to beat them. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • The topic was unpinned

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...