Posts for moozooh

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Try again in 3-4 years.
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Yes, these people are called publishers. Badger them if videos look bad. (Beware, though: harsh replies from adelikat's side are not to be unexpected.) Also, if you read Johannes's first two posts, he was on about a different thing; namely, increasing bitrate limit for N64 or abolishing it altogether.
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Wow, guys. :\ The FAQ articles all insist the visual quality must be good. And it is usually good even within the 4 MB/s limit. If it's not good, the bitrate is increased further until it's good, and Bisqwit approves. If it doesn't look good it means the bitrate is low, but that's not the 4 MB/s limit's fault, it's the encoder's fault. The limit is not absolute, it's only there to ensure no bloated files are published when the site administrators' can't supervise the process. It's you who are missing the point.
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There certainly are some pre-defined elements and traps, but they don't make the general level appearance repetitive. Kind of like the original Diablo.
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Managed to reach level 13 three times now, but the ice caves are killing me (when I don't have a compass + cape + climbing gloves combo). :( I guess I'll have to grind in order to buy that stage 13 shortcut…
Post subject: Spelunky: an awesome 2D platforming roguelike hybrid
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Slightly less than a week ago, I've encountered a platformer with nearly endless replayability: Spelunky (~11 MB, seems to be Windows-only at the moment). It's developed by the same guy who did Aquaria. Basically, it's a platforming game similar to Dangerous Dave and La-Mulana, except the levels are entirely randomized akin to roguelike games like NetHack. The goal is to reach the last level. There are many items, as well as treasures, to collect, and monsters to kill. There also are shops which you can lift, secrets that you can find, and numerous other awesome things. Be warned: the game is fun, but brutally hard to finish. So far I'm on my ~270th attempt, and I haven't even caught a glimpse of level 11 yet…
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Johannes wrote:
I never said most games need to exceed the limit. The point from the beginning was that the ones that do need to exceed the limit should not look bad. Many N64 encodes look bad.
How many of them have 400+ kbps for video? Please do tell.
Johannes wrote:
The point was never what was considered complex to encode, it was that games that need it should be given higher bitrate.
My point is, a "complex 3D game" (found 7 instances of this phrase in your previous posts, btw) isn't necessarily complex to encode, and thus doesn't need high bitrate to look good, which you seem to claim so rigorously.
Johannes wrote:
In my opinion, we should forget about the 4 MB/min limit, and use the lowest bitrate that will actually look good, instead of striving to barely fit the 4 MB/min limit
Once again: the limit is there to prevent accidental publishing of bloated files. The limit is not absolute, and it has been raised when needed, which is exactly what you're asking about. This is what you're overlooking! Also, I'd still like you to list the bitrates of N64 encodes you consider bad.
Johannes wrote:
and possibly sacrificing things like seekability and compability in the process, just to get a somewhat decent looking (and sounding) video file
How compatible is "compatible"? How good is "good"? There is no universal solution.
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I'm afraid you're overlooking a lot. First of all, about 90% of the encodes for any platform don't even come close to the limit you're talking about. Next, "complex 3D games" and "simple 2D games" doesn't tell anything about encoding complexity. Not a single thing. I don't know your experience in video encoding, but what really kills codecs are things like scaling, fast randomly moving objects, multi-layered backgrounds, particle bursts or small areas of a sprite shifting against each other, gradual fade-ins/fadeouts and various color oscillation. Generally, 3D games presented on the consoles we have an ability to TAS on currently only exhibit the first and the last item of that list. On the contrary, gradients and general blur seen as a result of texture filtration actually save bits because blurred image is easier to compress using MPEG family codecs. And, the most important one yet, the limit can be raised if it's proven to be impossible to create a decently-looking encode within the 4MB/min limit. What I do agree, however, is that in certain cases, a small bitrate increase (especially for audio) would be welcome. And while I'm at it, I'd also like to point out that "simple" platforms' sound does never mean it's simple for a codec to handle. Crispness, sharp attacks, noises and such are much harder to compress, and thus require a somewhat higher bitrate.
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Two comments. First, the date should be "2005—2009", or "January 2009", or just "2009", since it is a snapshot of the site's movie material by the start of 2009. Just "2005" doesn't convey such message. Second, the keywords are to be written as follows: word1; word2; word3. Currently they're written as: word1,word2,word3, and are thus parsed as a single word.
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What's really stupid and gay is how Archive accepts OGM and not a simiarly-unsupported in hardware but otherwise much superior MKV. :\ ZeXr0, if possible, add timestamps to the corresponding pages, so that it would be possible to know the exact date the material was uploaded on. It's important because it won't always be up to date. And thank you for your effort.
Post subject: Re: Discussion about 2008 movie nominees
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adelikat wrote:
Innovative TAS: 1188M Sega CD Sonic the Hedgehog CD in 17:27.64 by Nitsuja - since this was a ground breaker for both being a new platform and for being the first CD game to be successfully TASed.
Ahem. It's not right to praise an improvement run for its predecessor's merits.
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If you're going to keep retroactively apologizing for every post you've made, I swear I'll brutally murder you.
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P.JBoy wrote:
picture
Amusingly, you've illustrated the very essense of our misunderstanding: while I'm trying to interpret the situation directly (i.e., completing the "game" with normal entry conditions and a definite end goal with superhuman precision), what you're doing is swapping goals, making them easier to attain, or plain irrelevant (using cheats or not attaining the "best ending", essentially). It's somewhat different from thinking outside the box, if I interpret MUGG's conditions correctly. Rather, it's just thinking about something completely different.
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P.JBoy wrote:
Lets think outside the box here. How about a fall under very low gravity? Or if you don't touch the ground until after you've fallen 1000m?
Outside-the-box enough to have a parachute, then?
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MUGG wrote:
Could you survive a fall from 1000m and be completely unharmed afterwards?
Not unless there are debris that can absorb the kinetic energy in the way of your fall, that won't immediately kill or incapacitate you upon interaction. You won't be able to cancel even 10% of it with merely the resouce of your own body, definitely not until the physics is at work here.
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Then your topic title is misleading, I guess?
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But, unless I haven't fully woken up yet, 24.74 isn't faster than 25 by any account.
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There actually is a 2D version of Rayman 2 (GBC), which might have been the thing that confused me. :) I'm pretty sure I even had it somewhere among the GBC ROMs on my player.
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Q3's motion physics is ridiculously complex compared to any 2D platformer, period. :) Though that's the exact reason it has been subjected to these ridiculous amounts of abuse.
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Unless the game is specifically centered around motion physics (like the rubber wire in Umihara Kawase), it's usually much simplier: there are different subpixel values for each type of motion in the game. If Comicalflop says the maximum speed is 55 units per frame, it likely means there are (assuming here; never played Rayman 2) each pixel is treated by the game as 16 said units, making the maximum speed 3.44 pixels per frame (check if it looks so), or 1.72 if it's 32 units per pixel. Position-based triggers, as well as the sprites' on-screen positions, are pretty much always rounded down relatively to your movement direction (i.e., they don't update until you've hit the next "integer" part — a full pixel). In case with more complex motion, various factors ("wind", "slope" and other such effects) may be applied to your speed, but more often than not they just shift your position forward by a pre-determined amount on each frame of effect. The rounding doesn't even happen in calculation per se most of the time, it's just a post-effect pertaining to the display output. Also, in regards to one of your questions: horizontal and vertical speeds are tracked separately; they won't magically combine to produce a value higher than usual for each of them separetely due to rounding.
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The tools are defined by purpose, actually. For instance, it's nothing to do with desynching, if the goal wasn't to record an input movie in the first place. We use tools that aid in speedrunning and other such things. Cheat codes can as well be tools for beating the game. We don't use them because of legitimacy concerns, and not because they aren't tools.
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Every external device, substance, or whatever else like that, that enhances or otherwise modifies the gameplay experience beyond what is originally possible or intended, giving player new or advanced abilities, can be counted as a tool. There is grey area involved, though. Hence why both TASVideos (the "tool" side of the spectrum) and SDA (the opposite side) have rules governing it.
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In a nutshell: this is a codec that's supposed to rival x264-lossless in compression ratio, and uncompressed raw in capturing speed. There actually is a whole lot of sense in making something like this, if you think about the processes involved.
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Eh, NewGame+? OHKO'ing every boss with glitches or Luminaire or whatever? Yeah, that should be very entertaining. >_>
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You can try cutting off one pixel at a time. Your current one is 10x10, right? Try 9x9, then 8x8, until it becomes somewhat manageable but not easy.