While more confusing in terms of what these videos really are about, that term would more explicitly state that we aim for pure speed. "Time-attack" is generally used for games of racing type and such, where the player tries to beat the previous record (ie. complete the track or whatever faster than the previous record holder). Thus the term you suggest would convey that we try to beat games as fast as possible, always trying to beat existing records.
Not that "tool-assisted speedrun" would drastically mean something different, but IMO it's more descriptive. We are not beating racing games here. (Well, not exclusively.)
I think entropy is a fine answer though: it is a cumulative product of human culture, which can only arise as the entropy in the universe increases.
Btw, I'm not sure if you have a confusion about what entropy is. I think you have it backwards: The more entropy there is, the less order there is. You have to decrease the amount of entropy to get a less chaotic system.
Besides, reading the wikipedia article about entropy doesn't give one the feeling that it has anything to do with this.
"In physics, entropy, symbolized by S, from the Greek μετατροπή (metatropi) meaning "transformation",[3][4] is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[5] Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics and the combined law of thermodynamics, which deal with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed."
"Quantitatively, entropy is defined by the differential quantity dS = δQ / T, where δQ is the amount of heat absorbed in an isothermal and reversible process in which the system goes from one state to another, and T is the absolute temperature at which the process is occurring.[6] Entropy is one of the factors that determines the free energy of the system. This thermodynamic definition of entropy is only valid for a system in equilibrium (because temperature is defined only for a system in equilibrium), while the statistical definition of entropy (see below) applies to any system. Thus the statistical definition is usually considered the fundamental definition of entropy."
According to these definitions entropy has everything to do with energy. The more entropy there is in a system, the less "useful" energy there is (energy which can be used to do work).
To emphasize. Imagine you had a machine which made random pen marks on papers all day. You would agree that most papers have no message on it. But maybe one random mark comes out to look like "Hello world." Was the message intentional? No. I would argue the message isn't on the paper, only random pen marks are. It's your brain which incorrectly finds meaning where there was none. (It just so happens, most of the time our brain finds meaning where there is some.) But the point is, the message isn't there without our brains.
That doesn't explain what is it that is being transferred. You are simply describing one property of this mysterious "thing", not what is the mechanism by which it's transferred from one place to another.
I could compare your description to this:
Q: "What is it that makes a car advance? I can't understand it."
A: "Note that for a car to advance in a meaningful way it needs a person inside it, looking where the car is going and steering the wheel as necessary. Else it will just advance without control and crash."
Yes, the "answer" is describing a property of cars, but it isn't answering the original question.
Sure, to transfer information from one person to another we need two persons: The writer and the reader. This is quite obvious. There are also some other properties needed for these persons (eg. a common language). However, these are just requirements for the transferral to work, it doesn't really explain how the information is being transferred, ie. what is the physical phenomenon acting here.
As I said in my original post, the amount of mass and energy in the written paper is not all by itself the thing that transfers the information. The amount of mass and energy can be completely *identical* in another piece of paper, yet that another piece of paper may not transfer any information at all from one person to another. Given two papers with the *exact* same amount of mass and energy, what is it that makes one contain "more" than the other, what is it that makes one cause a reaction while the other doesn't? It's not energy. What is it, then?
I owned a Spectrum 128+A. Not a "console" per se, but close. It didn't have a gamepad.
Speaking of the gamepad, it took some hours of playing to get accustomed to the directional buttons being pressed just with one thumb (instead of the three-finger controlling of the keyboard cursor keys), but once I got the hang of it, it's quite cool to play with it.
It seems to be reduced to one of two things--
tool assisted speedruns
and
tool assisted superplay
are not the same, do not strive for the same goals, and are generally incompatable. Faster movies not sometimes more boaring, slower movies are sometimes more entertaining. We haphazardly publish movies based on one or both of these criteria. Some people would rather this site be the former, some would rather it be the latter.
The funny thing is: The former is clearly defined, but I have never seen anyone giving a clear, unambiguous definition of the latter. A few people nitpick about the word "superplay" in the forum logo (as if that was the true goal of the site) but I don't remember any of them actually *defining* what "superplay" is.
My guess is that there's *no* simple, clear and unambiguous definition. They just want something different.
What is information? Clearly it's not a form of energy. If it's not a form of energy then it's nothing. How can you transfer nothing from one place to another in such a way that it will have an effect on the destination?
Or if that answer is disqualified, then: Entropy.
What is entropy and how do you transfer it from one place to another? What is the physical mechanism by which entropy causes a reaction?
Blublu wrote:
I guess information or inspiration
What is "information" or "inspiration"? Clearly not a form of energy. How can you transfer nothing from one place to another and still have an effect?
the run looked terrible, how the hell are you supposed to know whats going on? all you see is you walk forwards, side step, shoot one or twice then hit the finish... i voted no because it is too hard to see your route and to see what is going on.
This has puzzled me for long time:
A piece of paper with some text written on it is nothing more than paper (which is made of wood and other materials) and ink. There's nothing else there than paper and ink.
Yet that paper can contain information which someone can use to do something, eg. something he didn't know. Think about a recipe: Someone writes a recipe on paper (eg. a book) and some time later a completely different person who he has never met and who has absolutely no connection with him, can take that piece of paper and act according to the instructions in the recipe and do something he didn't previously know how to do. Is amount of knowledge and experience increased.
Clearly something *more* than just paper and ink was transmitted. It caused a reaction which paper and ink alone, all by themselves, cannot cause.
But what exactly is what was transmitted? It's certainly not any form of energy. The amount of energy in the paper and ink only depends on their amount, and it has no relation to this information which was transmitted from one person to the other.
If it's not energy, then what is it? Something *was* transmitted, but what? How can you measure it? How can you describe its physical properties?
Normally a reaction is the direct consequence of a force or some other form of energy (such as heat). However, in this case the reaction was not the direct consequence of any form of energy because there was no particular form of energy which would cause this particular reaction. Something else was transmitted and caused the reaction.
snes9x-related question: I see that in the snes9x.conf file you can map controller buttons to different types of commands. For example, if you wanted to map button 8 to quick save 0, you would write:
J00:B7 = QuickSave000
However, I know this only because it's one of the very few examples given in the snes9x documentation. Nowhere can I find a full list of possible commands (and their explanations) which can be used there. Searching for "quicksave000" in google only returns 4 results, none of which is helpful.
Does anyone have any idea about this?
Err, split files like this have always been, and will always be, useful to dial-up users who don't have second phone lines.
I have heard that argument before, and I have never understood it.
How is having a dialup any different from having a 100Mbps optic cable in this regard? No matter what the speed of your connection, the connection can drop at any moment for whatever reason. You'd better use a downloading software which can resume an interrupted download, no matter what your downloading speed is. Why would downloading speed make any difference?
I can't think of any other reason why dialup would make a difference either. AFAIK it's not like it was cheaper to download 10 files of 10MB each than one file of 100MB (assuming, again, that you are using a software which can resume an interrupted download, which you should have anyways, regardless of your connection speed and price).
I have never understood the need for some people to split their archives into a myriad of small files. It wasn't useful 15 years ago, and it's much less useful today (when >100MB files are extremely common). It just doesn't make any sense.
The two unused shoulder buttons (the gamepad has 4) could indeed be remapped to something useful in the emulator. I'll have to look how joy4key is used.
Now that you have a gamepad, try playing "Doukutsu Monogatari" (Cave Story) again. If you haven't played it, you NEED TO. You'll appreciate the game, and your gamepad, a lot. Edit: Well, Cave Story is a Windows game, but judging from your post, you might be using GNU/Linux ... so try using Wine to play it. Or not, it's up to you.
I do have Windows in this machine too, although I almost never use it. I could try it. Thanks for the tip.
Got tired of playing snes games with the keyboard (can't play laying on the sofa) so I bought one of these:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/gaming/pc_gaming/gamepads/devices/301&cl=us,en
It worked pretty well in linux and snes9x after a minor configuration.
I have never actually owned a console (well, besides the PSP). Perhaps now I will get the feeling of what is it like to play one. :P
2. not even to 100% in sync to the realtime emulator framecounter (according to hero)
If I understood correctly the only difference can be caused by lag frames. However, lag frames cannot be "exploited" to get a smaller timer value (at the expense of a longer movie), and thus it's not relevant if that counter is not completely in sync with the emulator's frame counter. Optimizing the number of frames will automatically optimize that internal counter too. In that way they are "in sync".
When people say "in-game clock" what they generally mean is "timer that the game displays". So yeah, the second clock is less important because its end result is never displayed in normal gameplay.
Given that the clock displays only the minutes that argument is kind of moot. Unless you can improve the movie so that this shown minute count is smaller, then arguing "this is faster by the game's internal clock" is more or less pointless. If you need to use a ram watcher to see the "real" value of that clock, you may as well use the second clock too.
IMO getting a perfect score in a game like track&field is at least so interesting that it deserves at least one movie. If you improve the existing score, I believe it could replace the three existing ones or something.
My main desire for this site has always been to see it return to Tool-Assisted Superplay Movies, instead of Tool-Assisted Speedruns.
Return to? When has it been anything else than a site containing speedruns? Completing games as fast as possible has been the main goal of the site from day 1. I was there.
