Decent attempt at switchback (VectorTD):
13,487,212 points with $4,669,030 and 9 lives left.
Definitely think I can improve that one - I messed up in either level 10 or 15 and had to buy my first red tower then - that $2500 would have made a big difference. I'm almost positive the scoring is based on the money you have, so getting the best score really means being as frugal as possible.
http://www.overthemonkey.com/vectortd_switchback_13487212.png
My attempt at the spiral map (round the twist):
10,717,101 points with $3,316,113 and 4 lives left.
Borrowed a bit of the strategy off of foda. It's definitely improvable by a bit - I built a few towers early, when I could have waited another turn or two. I think it might be worth building a level 1 purple during the early game, as well...
http://www.overthemonkey.com/vectortd_roundthetwist_10717101.png
A lot of the suggestions made so far, particularly primorial#soup's list, don't seem to make a game TAS-proof to me. Making the game glitchless, lacking in short paths, etc doesn't make a game hard to TAS it just makes it so that a TAS is easy to do - a speedrun would be capable of being extremely close to the TAS.
My definition of a TAS-Proof game would be one that makes it incredibly hard to find the 'perfect' route from beginning to end - even with all the TAS tools available, you'll never know if you made all the perfect decisions.
One example that sounds good to me is a game something like Dynasty Warriors 2+ but even more random. Imagine trying to find a perfect way to manipulate tens to hundreds of enemies at once to get the quickest outcome. Even this actual game seems near impossible to TAS. Setting out to create an un-TAS-able game could even be more so.
I'm confused... Upthorn, you're saying there is no place to discuss hacks, but there is. If the hack runs in an SNES emulator, then you can talk about it in the SNES forum which makes perfect sense to me. Someone coming to the site looking for discussion about Super Demo World would know exactly where to look. More forums != good.
I'd much prefer a backwards running TAS, with Mario randomly falling asleep in hilarious spots which would otherwise be dull perhaps. You can't go slower than going backwards right? it's negative speed :p
I think this game is definitely TASable, and your run wasn't too bad, but overall I'm going to have to vote no. Damage manipulation definitely looks improvable and things don't always look frame perfect.
Definitely submit it - even if it does get rejected it's nice to have a permanent host of the m64 where people who care can find it.
Do whatever it is you want - better runs are made when you are doing what you want to do with it, even if it makes it less likely to be published - 70 star still has its fun.
The 16 star run is the minimal completion run for this game - use all known glitches to get through the game as quick as possible. The 120 star run is basically the full completion game (although it doesn't get all coins, etc) - use all known glitches to get all the stars and complete the game as quick as possible. A 70 star run is meant to be a run that completes the game as intended, which should mean that it doesn't use any glitches in the game - so no BLJ, no MIPS, etc. The point of it isn't 'get through the 70 star door without glitches', but 'get through the game without glitches'. Even so, I don't know if I'd vote yes just because I don't know if there is room on this site for a run of this sort - 120 and 16 stars take the two points I'd like to see. I don't like 'not this glitch' runs, unless the glitch is something like in zelda 2 where the glitch takes away all of the gameplay of the game (note that the BLJ glitch and MIPS glitch do not take away the gameplay - there is still 16 stars worth of mario doing all his crazy tricks).
All this said, I would still love to see a 70 star run and I'd watch all the WIPs of it along the way, but I probably wouldn't vote it onto the site - no matter how good it is.
Reason behind leaving the star: it takes 15 stars in order to get MIPS(the rabbit) to appear. MIPS can be used to glitch through the star door (that normally requires 30 stars to get through). You cannot get to Bowser2, however, until you climb aboard Bowser's sub and get that star - hence the need for getting 16 stars. After that it's just glitching to Bowser 3 and beating Bowser 3 to end the game.
I first interpreted your question as "what purpose is it to provide it as a screenshot (instead of just code)", hence I changed it to link to the actual code.
Upon second reading, I interpreted it as "what tool do you use to make a screenshot like that".
Yeah - I did mean the second question. And as you and JXQ said I was being lazy with my words - 'whatcha' => 'what did you' in that particular instance. I'll try not to do that anymore.
Bisqwit wrote:
So, I use a custom-written PHP script that highlights the code and produces HTML, and then I view it up in Mozilla Firefox, adjust the font size and capture the screenshot and crop it.
Darn, I was hoping it was a full code => image script - I've yet to find one that does that well and just don't feel like making one myself :p
