Posts for ais523

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Posted: 1/15/2012 3:40 PM
ais523
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Joined: 7/11/2010
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Hmm, for me, this run was missing something, due to the game choice. Kirby moves pretty slowly even with the fire powerup, and spamming fire horizontally lets him/her/it skip large portions of levels. The run seems to get a bit repetitive no matter what Kirby's doing, and there doesn't seem to be any huge demonstration of TAS-level reflexes; it looked more like an unassisted speedrun that happened to have no mistakes, than a TAS. Is there something I'm missing here?
Posted: 1/15/2012 1:24 AM
ais523
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Is this TAS aiming for in-game time, or real time?
Posted: 1/12/2012 9:51 AM
ais523
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Mightn't it be possible to get the emulator to calculate the lag differences, like is done with NESbot, and do the time shifting automatically? Or is Mupen not accurate enough for that?
Posted: 1/11/2012 11:52 AM
ais523
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Completion to credits is a bad metric in games where you can trigger the credits during the game itself (or even before; several games have a credits option in their main menu). It's not really obvious what metric should be used instead, though. (For games with high score tables, creating an entry in there that shows game completion other than via putting it in there directly using save or memory corruption probably counts, though, IMO.)
Posted: 1/8/2012 1:19 AM
ais523
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Yep, we started on the DOS version because Windows TASing wasn't possible at the time. Also, because IMO the DOS version is better. If you're willing to help make suggestions, check the topic out! But be aware of what you're getting into; NetHack is a pretty difficult game to plan routes for.
Posted: 1/8/2012 1:11 AM
ais523
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You can just go for whatever category's the most entertaining, typically, for a TAS. If 6 days takes too much waiting to be interesting, go 7 days, otherwise go 6, would be my guess on entertainment.
Posted: 1/8/2012 12:33 AM
ais523
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What's with the death and use of a continue? I thought we'd already established that that was a bad idea in TASes, no matter how much time it might save, as it makes health management a lot less interesting.
Posted: 12/29/2011 4:57 PM
ais523
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A "glitchfest" is something different: it's a run that favours showing off glitches over going quickly. Large-skip-glitch runs don't do that; typically they only use 1 or 2 glitches, that just happen to skip the entire game.
Posted: 12/29/2011 12:41 AM
ais523
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SDA has a tendency to use "large-skip glitches" to distinguish them from the other kind, as a standard category name. I suppose that makes a lot of sense, but they're often more of the sort used in, say, Sonic runs (zipping past an entire level) rather than the completely crazy glitched stuff we get on TASvideos sometimes. (Those glitches generally can't be done on console, so it's hard to know how SDA would categorise them.)
Posted: 12/28/2011 10:02 PM
ais523
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That ending sure looks a lot like a Game Over screen if you don't know the game. I suppose that when a game gets too glitched, you can't tell a win from a loss…
Posted: 12/27/2011 9:40 PM
ais523
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Hmm, now I almost want to write a script for solving Polarium puzzles optimally. It's just that I have so much else to do…
Posted: 12/26/2011 7:02 PM
ais523
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I'm not convinced that Puzzle mode is the best for a TAS; it's just a sequence of entering the fastest solution to each level, one after the next, and unless there's some sort of crazy glitch it's simply going to be reasonably unimpressive as a TAS. Challenge mode would seem to give more scope for interesting play, especially given that you can accelerate the drops of puzzle sections by swiping down on the cancel button. As for the run so far, there's at least one clear mistake: in puzzle 14 (and analogously in the very similar puzzle 18), you can solve it much faster (no matter whether it's the number of squares or the number of turns in the path that matters for how long the puzzle takes to solve; I'm not sure which it is). Instead of the crazy convoluted path you take, you should start at the top-left corner, use your solution for the bottom two rows, then just hit the top-right corner, to make the resulting rows white/black/black; that'd be a much faster solution to enter. I'm also not convinced this is the only puzzle on which a similar solution would save time, but it's much closer in some of the others, and I'm not certain whether your solution is the best or not. Puzzle 9, there's reasonably simple alternative solutions black/white/black and black/white/white; I'm not sure if either is faster than the black/black/black you use, but it seems plausible. Puzzle 10, white/white/white/black is probably worth considering; and in puzzle 15, there may be a faster route to recolour the same cells (involving spending less time going around the outside of the puzzle).
Posted: 12/25/2011 12:16 PM
ais523
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I think there's definitely value in using tool assistance for things other than superplays of games (whether they go for speed, or some other category); tool assisted Let's Plays, etc, can be fun to watch. (I seem to remember tool assisted Let's Players asking people on this site for advice on the past.) I don't think it'd be appropriate to publish them here, though; probably best for sites to stick to what they're good at. (It'd be fun to have an offtopic thread that links to a best of tool-assisted non-superplays, though.)
Posted: 12/23/2011 12:59 AM
ais523
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Why does the time in the title include the credits? And should it?
Posted: 12/22/2011 10:15 AM
ais523
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To answer your question directly, SMB1 has only the one ending, so there's no way to get a worst (or best) ending in that game.
Posted: 12/22/2011 8:12 AM
ais523
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It means that the game is being played in a way that causes it to give a better ending sequence than normal (the best, to be precise). For instance, Sonic games often have, in their ending, a message saying that you have to collect all the Chaos Emeralds but didn't, if you don't; this counts as an ending other than the best one (although in Sonic games, "best ending" is probably the same as "100%"; the category's more useful in games where the two differ). Quite a lot of games only have one ending which counts as a win, by the way, in which case the "best ending" tag is meaningless and isn't used. If you have questions about what counts as the best ending for any specific game, you can ask in the game thread (and I guess you can also ask here, because any question can be asked here, including duplicates).
Posted: 12/18/2011 10:31 PM
ais523
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The "branch name" box is about what goal you were aiming for. If you were trying to complete the game in the fastest time possible without any restrictions, you can leave it empty. If your time was slowed due to restrictions, such as trying to aim to complete every level in the game, you mention that in the branch name box (that example would be "all levels"; there are others, and if you have a particular category in mind, you can explain and someone can tell you what it would be called).
Posted: 12/17/2011 9:16 PM
ais523
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N. Harmonik wrote:
I'm certain that the 3D Sonic games would be great choices for tool-assisted scorerunning; as the Balow brothers have often demonstrated, getting to the goal in the fastest time doesn't always mean they get the highest rank (thus, definitely not the highest score) possible. The question is, just how much do you waver from the beaten path in order to pick up a stray ring or destroy an enemy for points? In Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy, the number of coins acquired for each course is used as the high score. Assuming that there are no enemies that give out an infinite number of coins and that no enemies will respawn, doing these games might be a good idea.
If I remember correctly, in Super Mario 64 there are enemies that respawn, but they don't give coins the second time. This means it's pretty likely that there's deliberately a finite high score in each level.
Posted: 12/10/2011 9:38 PM
ais523
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If your movie syncs with all the save files you've found, it's very likely that it'll sync with the save file produced by a verification movie too, so a verification movie shouldn't be too hard to produce. (It doesn't have to be a TAS, just recorded on an emulator.)
Posted: 12/8/2011 11:35 PM
ais523
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Aha! Dragging the seek cursor doesn't work, nor does visiting the video via any other link. However, if I go to your channel, I can watch it there. Mystery not solved, but at least I can watch the run now! Thanks for your suggestions.
Posted: 12/8/2011 5:25 PM
ais523
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Is it still doing that for you? I tried arriving at Part 2 from a variety of links and resizing the player, but I never had the video fail to load on me yet. You did click the links I gave in this topic and weren't just following my account as I uploaded things and sometimes trashed them when the uploader choked, right? Maybe YouTube just hated you that day, and you should try again.
Yep, still doing it. It happens for an apparently random selection of other videos on YouTube too. (I clicked on the link in my quote of your post, and in the original post, to test.) I'm not sure what the pattern is. If it helps, I'm using Epiphany on Ubuntu to watch, although the browser is unlikely to matter so much as the version of Flash involved.
Posted: 12/7/2011 9:45 PM
ais523
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Yay, YouTube has started working now that I've switched to the old uploader, so I may have some videos to show you tonight. Okay, it's ready! Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7
Part 2 doesn't work for me, for whatever reason (it's NaN seconds long…). Parts 1 and 3 work just fine, so I'm not sure what's up there.
Posted: 12/5/2011 4:38 PM
ais523
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I've heard, from other people, that the "emulation errors" in MMBN4 happen on actual hardware too, except the original GBA. (That is, they happen running on a GBA SP, or a DS, too.) That puts it in a bit of a weird position as far as TASing is concerned, as the problem isn't even necessarily an emulator bug.
Posted: 11/26/2011 5:01 PM
ais523
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OK, so I've watched this, with a particular mind to the category selected. In response to the whole sprite ejection issue, I noticed three obvious wrong-looking ejections, in Labyrinth Zone 1, Scrap Brain 2, and Scrap Brain 3. It's interesting to note that the one in Labyrinth Zone 1 didn't lead to a sequence break (it was merely to get onto a platform faster), but I feel it should be handled the same way as the one in Scrap Brain 2, which does, as they're both clearly the same glitch. The one in Scrap Brain 3 was the only one that actually bothered me; even though it wasn't a zip, it was notably different from the other ejections I spotted, because it used a diagonal surface. In order to create a good "low-glitch" category for the game, I'd suggest banning zips, but also sprite ejections that eject Sonic out a different side of the sprite from which he entered (unless the sprite is destroyed in the process). For instance, if a sprite is entered from above, it needs to be left from above, and if it's entered from the left side, it needs to be left from the left side. That would hopefully allow the everyday use of sprite ejections that has nothing to do with sequence breaking, but ban the sequence break in Scrap Brain 3. (I think the Scrap Brain 2 sequence break still works, though, unless the conveyor belt also counts as a sprite.) (EDIT: That said, the run clearly conforms to the category listed. The debate's more about whether it's an entertaining category; I think it is, but could be improved, so have voted Yes.)
Posted: 11/12/2011 9:29 PM
ais523
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Nahoc wrote:
Wait... it looks highly doubtful to me that you managed to make this run syncs on a real N64. There are a lot of lag differences between a real N64 and Mupen64, especially in Super Mario 64. Also, how in hell would you get the same exact RNG when playing back the "120 stars" run? Really, really inconceivable...
My guesses as the answers to these questions: it's possible to detect if the console is lagging by monitoring the voltage input to the controller (so the N64bot can automatically adjust for Mupen being wrong about what the lag actually is), and that the RNG is reset to a constant value at power-on (with the problems matching up the RNG only happening when hexing during a run, because obviously TASes don't battery-save and reset the console). I don't know for certain, though.
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