That hint system is going to get irritating fast, at least for me. "Hey hey hey hey hey you should go get this item that you skipped! It's over here! Don't you want to know about it?"
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think the "purest" ruleset would have to be either "no swinging the sword outside of boss rooms" or "no killing enemies except for bosses". In the interests of further differentiating the run from the existing run, I'd go with the former; with subweapons unavailable the bossfights become more interesting IMO.
Damaging yourself should be allowed, just as the Contra pacifist run commits suicide at points.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
You extend load times to make things more directly comparable to realtime speedruns. Because like it or not, people compare TASes to them all the time. And you want the time difference to be down to the difference between skillful human play and inhuman play, not down to inaccuracies in emulation.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
From what I remember the judges saying in the past, they generally only pay attention to votes when the comments aren't decisive one way or another. So if the comments are generally saying "The deaths look terrible", then regardless of the votes the run may well not be accepted.
There's also an implicit assumption in your statement that >50% yes votes = will be published, which isn't the case. I doubt there's any kind of official cutoff, since the judging process is rife with special cases.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yeah, I meant "lots of practice will make you good at sight-reading", not "lots of practice will let you play that piece". If I practiced that piece a lot I could probably play it better than he did while sight-reading it, but that's not nearly as impressive. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
CoolKirby: because it's difficult to make the average person understand (and care about) the impact of his actions in a couple of sentences. We're a community that prizes programming and low-level understanding of computers, so we're going to be more interested in the people who made what we do possible.
Similarly, I doubt we'd notice much if, say, an engineer who developed the techniques that make modern structural engineering (bridges, high-rises, etc.) possible had died, because that's not an area we think about much. Meanwhile all the engineers are going "Man this guy was awesome all you people who use the stuff he enabled don't even realize it what the heck is wrong with you?"
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Remaking the run would have been a lot of work, potentially enough that it wouldn't have been finished. There's always a trade-off between making the best run possible and making the best run that you can finish before getting burnt out. Different TASers have different tolerances.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Wow, that's one annoying low-health beep. Also, "it's kinda tough to grab cake and ice cream while blasting through asteroid caves on ten pairs of rollerskates" needs to make it into the publication description somehow. :)
Perhaps damage counts up instead of down? I.e. death is when damage >= damage capacity, not when health <= 0.
At around 00:14 you run into a barrier before jumping onto it, thus killing your horizontal speed. And at 00:34 you enter the elevator from the right instead of from the left, though in that case I could believe that doing so was faster (assuming you needed whatever it was you picked up from the crates). Otherwise, I don't have any argument with the run.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
*sigh*
I can kinda understand the "No items Fox only* Final Destination" mentality when it comes to competitive play, but I'm really looking forward to TASes that use the remaining 99% of the game. That was just...boring.
* Okay, 85% Fox and the rest is split between Marth, Sheik, and Falco.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Oh man, I'd forgotten about that explanation. Yeah, it's a great "intuitive" way to think about relativistic motion. You're moving at a constant rate through 4D space-time; the rate at which time passes (your speed along the time axis) is greatest when you're sitting still, but as you increase your speed in 3D space, your speed in time decreases. Easier to think about with 2D space and time, since you can imagine your velocity as being on the position of a hemisphere. When X and Y velocities are 0, T velocity is 1; when sqrt(X^2 + y^2) is 1, then T velocity is 0 (you're traveling at the speed of light). Because of the way square roots work, you can get going pretty quickly from a classical perspective along X and Y before T starts to fall off noticeably (i.e. the hemisphere is locally flat).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
No.
It's been a long time since I did special relativity, but it's filled with these kinds of word problems. The short version is that at relativistic speeds, things get noticeably dilated and contracted -- the rate at which time passes, the size of the object that is moving, the amount of mass it has, etc. all depend on how fast it's going (in fact this is true at any speed, but the factor is negligible unless your speed is a significant fraction of c). And the math works out so that two objects on a head-on collision, each travelling at .99c from a "stationary" perspective, will each appear from the other's perspective to be traveling at .9999c or the like.
I know this is unsatisfying, so with any luck someone who remembers relativity better will give a more thorough answer.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Racism has similar problems as the "political correctness" movement, yes. In any event my original point wasn't necessarily that FODA was being racist as that he sounded racist -- it was an invitation for him to clarify what he meant in a clearly non-offensive manner (or to reinforce that he really did mean what he seemed to be saying...).
This is tricky to define cleanly; I'm not going to say I have a sufficiently legalistic definition to pass the infamously pedantic bar we set around here. But I'd say that a racist comment, at least as far as I'm concerned, is one that makes a negative and subjective value judgement based on race. So saying that Africans are generally poor is not racist because it's not subjective. Saying that Africans are generally greedy is subjective, and greed is usually a negative quality.
Because it's objective, though I admit I didn't cite sources. European colonialism really messed up African politics, in large part through making arbitrary border distinctions that ignored the existing tribal framework. You try telling two tribes who hate each other "Okay, you're a nation now, play nice," and then handing power to the leader of one of those tribes when you leave. And don't forget about the slave trade; sure it was an existing institution when the Europeans arrived, but they increased demand massively.
(Yes, this could be interpreted as a racist comment according to your standards. Not a single living person today is responsible for colonialism, and even back then not every person was responsible for that either. In fact, only a minority of Europeans engaged in colonialism. Yet you are putting them all together under the same category and assigning global responsibility to them all based solely on where they lived.)
I'm not saying that Europeans living today have any responsibility for what happened in Africa; just saying that Africans living today aren't wholly responsible either. Of course they aren't all entirely free of blame (those perpetuating the bad system are performing bad actions) and they get the responsibility of fixing the mess.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.