Can't really abuse combos in a TAS setting; you get the bulk of your Mythril weapons by communicating with other players with the game, and it's just more AP you have to budget out anyway.
After re-watching the final battles, yeah I don't see any useful way to dump totema summons either. Too bad mythril weapons are out of reach for a TAS, combo attacks would be just as powerful and would look awesome.
Man I wish the run maker was part of this community. I have questions about that run. Mostly pertaining to the final battles.
Did the generic hume fighter have Beatdown? I can see the templar not having it since that's a Gladiator skill for Bangaa, but the humes should both have it.
During the first Remedi battle, was the fencer just there to soak attacks and set up positioning?
Montblanc has Red Spring, can we eat having Montblanc using it more often (and on the whole party) in order to give the Bangaa Gladiator skills instead of templar for haste?
General annoyance, not directed towards anyone in this thread.
I love how people assume that because God doesn't intervene in day to day life that he doesn't exist/can't be omnipotent/can't be omniscient.
Let me ask you this.
1) Are you or do you know a parent?
2) Do you/the parent you know do everything for your/their children?
3) If yes, how does that child behave when the child doesn't get their way? If no, why not?
What is your opinion on the (probably misunderstood and/or misinterpreted) Greek Philosophy that perfection is immaterial, therefore all matter is corrupt?
Nach, I, uh, didn't mention Babel/the division of languages/the Jaredites. Just the flood and the upheaval of the whole face of the land (Babel happens a generation or two after Peleg if I'm reading Genesis correctly). Though I'm interested in seeing how the measurements of the ark spell out the word Tongue.
Also, to prove this part of what Nach said:
You're looking at things on a superficial expressed belief system or conformance with rituals. The Bible won the battle of minds in its pervasive ideas that people don't even realize they were ever consciously conforming with.
1) Leprosy. From what I've seen biblical leprosy wasn't contagious and people knew this - evidenced in Captain Nathan seeking a cure for his leprosy from Elisha; if I'm remembering this story correctly he was still leading his army so the culture he came from didn't consider leprosy to be ritually unclean.
2) Don't eat blood. From what I can tell, this was one of the wholly new things that Mosaic Jehovanism did in the middle east after the Exodus from Egypt. And yet I can guarantee that the very idea of digesting blood will put some of us off our lunches. It's implied that the eating of blood was a common ritualistic thing in that era/region given it had to be spelled out to the Hebrews.
It was actually a tactic of Christianity in general (and especially proto-catholicism) to subvert local faiths by saying "We have a feast day during Saturnalia/The Day of the Dead/The First Full Moon of Spring, and we honor so-and-so during that feast. We're not so different!." That was the one of the big reasons the romans didn't particularly like Christians (other one being that early Christianity was about inward, private worship and basically all other local faiths of the region/era were about outward ritualistic worship, and the Roman Empire in particular used the rituals to keep the public in check).
However, Europeans kept a number of their traditions, mostly modifying Christian concepts, such as Easter, Yule, May Day, as well as other cultural tidbits knocking around in their stories and oral traditions.
That would be why I use the term "ate" and not "displaced" or "destroyed". Vodou came about in much the same way - it's a combination of African Vodun and Catholicism.
The bible won the battle of the mind viruses because the roman emperors *consults notes* definitely as early as Constantine but possibly earlier wanted to harness the power of this new Christianity cult, only it backfired on them and Christianity ate the pagan (read: non-Abrahamic) religions of the Mediterranean.
The thing about the biblical story of Noah and the Flood is that, after the flood story we get Peleg, in whose days the whole face of the earth was changed. So yeah, plate tectonics kinda mess with that as well.
Bear in mind that most cultures have some sort of flood legend; the Norse are interesting in that their flood legend of Ragnarok is supposed to be endgame. It's just we're currently attributing that to the ice age more than anything else.
Personman - realistically, are there any examples of where easy mode and hard mode runs of the same game would be different enough to warrant separate categories?
Again, this would necessarily be true of any Nail 'n Scale runs that get published due to a fundamental mechanical difference (jump height) allowing for radically faster strategies on one difficulty over another. In one case (stage 34), you'd skip the level on any% hard because of a forced wait for an indestructible enemy that's going to block your path no matter what you do on Hard, while on easy you'd save that level skip for a different stage because you can get to where you need to go just quickly enough for the enemy to not be blocking you - allowing both 47 (a level requiring TAS-tier precision anyway on Hard) and 48 (largest level in the entire game) to be skipped later on.
Well the White Mage could have found use as a time mage, depending on factors, but without the input file I can't science around with it and this may end up being faster to use the nu mou as bait anyway.
The last mission before going to Ambervale, the one where they're fighting Ritz and her lackeys... it occurs to me that it may be better in the long run to eat a slower battle here and save the totema bombs for during the boss rush. Especially if Ritz can be manipulated into standing right next to the cliff and getting a crit/using knockback. I'm fairly certain I got a quick kill on her once doing that.
It just occurred to me that we're arguing open/closed systems in a religious discussion thread, and that open/closed systems are a perfect way to explain the God/No God debate to someone who doesn't believe in God but does understand astrophysics. And the analogy could even be inverted to explain open/closed systems to someone who has a hard time with that concept but does have some deist beliefs.
(Edit: reordered to open/closed in order to match up with how they'd correspond with God/No God in the hypothetical analogy)
I think I'm beginning to see why I'm having trouble accepting the assumption of the universe being a closed system.
When I'm imagining the abstraction and getting to the clause "entropy must increase somewhere within the system" my brain is ruling out a local change to balance the first transaction (local in this case meaning "in close proximity to", not "localized"). I keep imagining something farfetched, such as me imagining a thing means entropy out near Neptune is affected.
It doesn't work that way and I need to stop imagining that it works that way. Proximity is just as important, and with that perspective in mind at least now I can understand why "closed system" is the basic assumption. I still don't agree with it, but I can at least understand it.
Amaraticando: Closed system? Please, do confirm for me where the local information/intelligence had been decreased to allow for our local bursts of information/intelligence. My understanding is that because we can't confirm this, we can't say one way or another if Open System or Closed System is fact.
Me: Open System, Open Canon, Revelatory Religion. I understand on a low level how Conservation of Energy works, thanks to this very thread, and that it's not going to end in the black if this is a closed system.
So by definition this run can't be Vaulted. I think that it's a category with merit (and judging solely by reactions in the thread I'm not alone); Personally I'm just concerned that this was a WIP On The Workbench.
@TaylorTotFTW: If you want to redo the run, you should be able to cancel this submission without penalty. It's worse to get rejected than to cancel because too many rejections will get you barred from submitting to the Workbench for I forget how long. If you don't have them yet, here's a link to Microstorage (where we upload runs that aren't candidates for submission), and here's a link to our Ocarina of Time thread (where you can post wips and get feedback without running into the formal procedures).
(I thought that was because "electricity is hot" but it comes out to be the same thing in the end)
So how does one go about destroying information? Is that even a thing that we can comprehend? My understanding is that even a black hole doesn't destroy matter so much as make it infinitely dense and irretrievable.
(It just occurred to me how silly it is to not consider that destroying matter, but I am genuinely confused on this point having had both "yes that's right" and "no that's not right" be given to me as the answer using the same logic of "the subatomic particles still exist but the atoms they composed no longer do")
Warp: In other words, it's a zero-sum game and the information I use has to come from somewhere within the system. Is that a close enough approximation, or did I make a bad assumption about the argument?
You reject evolution, and invent a conspiracy to explain it.
He just explained Intelligent Design from a programming perspective.
Aqfaq wrote:
The point is: Earth is not a closed system.
In terms of Physics, sure. In terms of information, though, we're not actually yet sure. Some say yes. Some say no. Some just throw their hands in the air and decide to do a handstand because they're tired of people killing each other over this disagreement.
I'm not kidding on this, by the way. Applying the closed/open system definitions in terms of information to human learning is the fundamental disagreement between Prophetic religions (such as Mormons) and non-Prophetic religions (such as Catholics).
Bisqwit... I hate to be 'that guy', but you're hinging your argument on the premise that the universe is a closed system. Is that something that's comparatively easy (in comparison to evolution) to prove/disprove?
(I agree with you on parts of this, mind. At this point I'm just being an ass for the sake of arguing) OH. That's exactly what you were saying. I'm a dumb.
Why do we have a guideline regarding using the hardest difficulty? It's being enforced as a rule even by the judges: TASes are occasionally, though rarely, rejected for not using the hardest difficulty. Should we lessen how strict this is and let difficulty be up to whatever the author chooses? What does "hardest difficulty" mean for a TAS? What does it add to a TAS in terms of entertainment value?
It's a matter of demonstrating mastery of the game. Most of what prevents people from playing on the hardest difficulty is this lack of mastery. In a TAS environment, we have far more control over what goes on in the game (ranging from "frame-perfect inputs" to "manipulating luck" to "programming an entire game inside of another game via clever memory access exploitation") so this lack of mastery really shouldn't be an obstacle.
What does "hardest difficulty" mean in most games? What are the usual differences between easiest and hardest difficulties? How many games would actually have noticeably different TASes if they were done on different difficulties?
Some games, such as Nail'n Scale or Commander Keen 4-6, are programmed so that basic player mechanics are tweaked to facilitate the change in difficulty. Both games I just cited increase jump height on easy compared to the harder settings, leading to different fastest routes in the absence of glitching. This is, incidentally, why my plans for Nail'n Scale are to do absolute fastest on easy, then do skipless% on hard.
With that said, I do have a perfectly cromulent example of when not to use the hardest difficulty: Rugrats Time Travelers on GBC. The only differences between difficulties in that game are "how many bottles do you have to collect to activate the exit" and "how many bottles do you lose when you take a hit", which only increases the amount of time you spend in the level. For real-time play this makes it far more impressive as for the later stages it results in "Damageless, All Bottles", but in a TAS environment it gets very, VERY boring. I was advised to seek a difficulty exemption for that game on those grounds.
But the run should probably be vaulted for obvious reasons.
Um, my understanding is that the vault is only allowed to hold the current fastest any% and 100% runs, and that other categories have to be sufficiently entertaining for moons or else can't be formally accepted...
I have to be honest here. I had no idea Q was a Star Trek character until after discovering MLP:FiM. I blame the fact that I never really paid attention to anything Star Trek until within the past ten years, and even then I only ever watched the original series. I still haven't watched anything TNG yet.
To be perfectly frank, I was always more into Tolkeinesque Fantasy anyway, so Star Trek doesn't appeal to me like it should. The only scifi I really follow is the Dune series and Douglas Adams' stuff. The extent of what I know about Star Wars is that Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader and he did a bunch of bad things ultimately because he couldn't be with the woman he loved. Oh, and something about making a run within so many parsecs (I don't know or care how it works, it sounds cool).
Either way, I now curse/bless/whatever you to hear John DeLancie's voice the next time you read anything that the Sorting Hat says in the Harry Potter series.
