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Apologies if this is a duplicate thread; if another one exists, I forgot about/couldn't find it.
It would be cool to see emulators given the support to load an archive (or a folder) full of movie files, and have them function like a playlist. There could be hotkeys to cycle through the movies or to loop them.
I can see this having two big advantages. The first is the ability to create blooper reels which could show the evolution of a trick, or showcase the different ways to complete a part of a game, or just for entertainment.
The second reason would be as a better sort of documentation of game tricks. I have always thought that this site's wiki could use actual movie clips demonstrating tricks, instead of just wiki text, so that a potential TASer wanting to learn a trick could see it in action to analyze it frame-by-frame. Having an archive full of small replay files would be much more convenient than having to search for the trick in a published TAS (especially one that was obsoleted, as old tricks could unexpectedly become useful again), or worse, a trick that was never used in a published TAS but may be useful in the future. Furthermore, the trick demos could make use of subtitles, and also demonstrate the trick very slowly and methodically for comprehension, compared to seeing them happen at lighting speed in a published run.
I'm not a good programmer, but it doesn't seem like it would be a difficult feature to add, especially if the movie files aren't loaded into memory and the playlist just acts as a browser.
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Oh man. I got excited when I saw this because I know this game!
Unfortunately, this is a terrible run. I did a test run three years ago that was faster than this.
1) First boss: you can defeat him without landing on the ground.
2) Second boss: You can hit all the organ pipes in order. You waste tons of time running to the other side of the room.
3) Entire tomato factory: PLEASE USE THE RUN BUTTON!!!! (This reminds me of the old version of the Little Mermaid run that didn't realize there was a "run" button.)
4) In the vent shafts, you can jump over many of the gaps and save tons of time.
5) In the lab, forget squashing bugs: there's a glitch where if you try to run up against the door and let a bug hit you, you'll be instantly taken to the next level.
6) Utilize your HP better. You're missing many opportunities for damage boosts and time-saving damage.
7) Nuke silo: Oh my god, you're still not using the run button.
8) Tomato level: I can't watch this anymore.
Edit: I just noticed that the music to this game was composed by Mark Van Hecke, the same guy who did the music for A Boy and his Blob. Interesting.
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I have thought about making one of these myself to the tune of Weird Al's "Everything you know is wrong". Though I don't know how YouTube would take the copyright. The tagline would have been "We don't break the rules... we just find the loopholes."
Also, shameless self-plug: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHlp143FCDk&feature=player_detailpage#t=68
This would make for a good 5-second WTF moment.
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Now I remember why I haven't played this game for years. This game has probably the strangest and most irritating sense of humor I have ever seen in a game, and the level design isn't too good either.
I'm loving all the glitches. The initial encounter with Andre had me laughing pretty hard.
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Whoa. This was unexpected.
I'd like to see a high-score TAS for this game, perhaps later when Dolphin is more stable. I always pulled my hair out trying to five-star all the levels.
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Here I was using the word "accident" to mean "unexpected". If a glitch is found, then it is certain that something unexpected happened to a player at some time.
It is true that you can logically deduce the nature of a glitch, but before you do that, you need to find evidence that a glitch could exist, and that is found by gaining a thorough understanding of how a game is supposed to work, then waiting for (or trying to cause) an unexpected result.
For instance, the Pokémon Yellow movies were made with lots of hard work and understanding of assembly programming, but it was all possible because one day a TASer was watching the game's RAM and found something unexpected happen when they reset the game after saving.
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All glitches are basically discovered on accident. They could be discovered while playing a game normally, or by intentionally trying to confuse the game and watching what happens.
When a glitch is discovered, it can be researched, experimented with, and abused to its maximum potential with a TAS. Pushing a glitch to its maximum potential often involves frame-perfect input and memory watching to figure out just how it works.
Many "zipping" glitches (Like the ones in Zelda 2 and Battle of Olympus) are due to pressing Left+Right on a controller on the same frame, something that has unpredictable results because many programmers didn't account for it, because it was assumed impossible to do. Yet, it is possible through either breaking a control pad, or using different types of control pads (L+R can be done surprisingly frequently when playing NES Virtual Console games with a Wii remote), or by just using a keyboard.
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Well, if possible, you could search around in RAM and try to find the RNG output values. That way you wouldn't have to disassemble, but you could make sure that the number is at a certain value before you perform your action that creates the drop.
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A TAS of a game about TAS mechanics. How meta!
This run blew my mind almost as much as the game itself did when I first played it. It was unexpected and amazing to see all the sequence breaks and shortcuts that had been found. Wonderful!
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I don't know what Ganon's movement algorithm is, but in this video Ganon always fires his fireballs from the same positions in the same order.
Plus the stats are the same.
I'd throw my vote in for "you're watching him reload save states"
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Good movie. I can't wait for the day when we'll be able to TAS the PC version, but this watered-down and terrible-sounding version of the game will have to do for now.
In Pencil Pentathlon 1, did you check to see if it's faster to go to the checkpoint and then use a death-warp after breaking the first cage? That's something I always wanted to test.
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Looking forward to watching this. I will wait for an encode, as I can't seem to nail down the correct ROM/emulator versions.
I also hope my original runs of this game at least somewhat helped. It was a lot of work optimizing those berries.
Also, I learned long after I tried running this game that there is a cheat code to give yourself all the powers. You can use it to test levels to see if it's actually optimal to save cages for later. Did you guys ever use that?
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Please please please make a full game run out of this. This game has so many entertaining glitches and to see a video like this an hour long would be amazing. :)
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After watching this run, I see no reason to ever play Yoshi's Island again, or perhaps even to watch another TAS again. I feel like I've seen it all. It's that good.
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I understand the capabilities of a fm3 file. But I do not think you understand what the topic creator was asking.
The topic creator was discussing the idea of a "showcase run", something like advanced video commentary that shows you alternate routes or outtakes while you are watching the run, similar to how special features on a blu - ray movie work. The purpose is for entertainment and insight.
If you want to load outtakes manually you can already do that by creating a folder full of save state - based fm2 files, which would remove the branch limitation anyway. So I do not see how fm3 files are relevant to this conversation.
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feos wrote:
I love how people completely ignore the post where they're pointed to a movie that does contain input branches inside. And comments to frames the author chooses. And is quite small in size overall. It only lacks support for arbitrary slot amounts.
What I am suggesting is a replay file format that has the ability to save and load savestates while you are watching the movie. It is very different than what the fm3 files do.
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Warp wrote:
If a savestate takes some kilobytes of space, and in a typical TAS the author makes thousands of savestates, that would make a rather big file. Several tens of megabytes at least, I'd estimate.
Of course the vast majority of those savestates will consist mostly of repeated data (because the data probably doesn't change much between savestates.) The file would either have to be compressed, or the emulator would have to store only the changes between savestates (which could become complicated as the author jumps back and forth in the run...)
A meta-movie would not necessarily have to contain any savestates by itself, unless the desired state is not already encountered in the movie. The meta-movie could command the emulator to take a savestate, then later command the emulator to rewind to that savestate.
Also, it would not have to show every savestate the TASer uses, but only those they wish to show. For instance, if the TASer wishes to showcase 3 possible strategies to beat a level, they might load states hundreds of times in playing through the level, but they would only have to command the meta-movie to rewind 2 times. So the final viewer will only see 2 rewinds, as the movie restarts the level twice to show all 3 different strategies.
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I'm still waiting for emulator developers to create "meta-movies" that preserve savestate use. That way you could show an outtake reel in a TAS.
They wouldn't be submittable for publication, for obvious reasons, but they'd be a nice and efficient way to show off a series of tricks or glitches, if a movie file itself had the power to save and load savestates.
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As the guy who TASed the first GBC Rayman game, I think this looks really, really suboptimal. Voting no.
I think it's funny how they somehow managed to make the music even worse than in the last game. Also, some of the music choices in this game are really WTF. I mean, Woods of Light music in the Cave of Bad Dreams? Seriously?
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We can TAS if we want to
We can leave your friends behind.
Cuz' your friends don't TAS and if they don't TAS
Then they're no friends of mine.
We can load if we want to
A state that they will never find.
And we can play like we come from out of this world
leave the records far behind.