So... imagine this run were made on White Label, and instead of the maximum score possible it were the lowest score possible.
Apparently, somebody went and did exactly that:
Link to video
Second loop starts at 38:25, and that's the one to watch. The final score is 0.
The author says this was done on FBA 0.2.97.43 and they experienced no desync problems while making it.
I wouldn't be against such use of level select in principle since you aren't skipping any gameplay to your advantage in this case, but it could set a potentially problematic precedent for the use of similar in-game features elsewhere in the future, including cases where it's not so clear-cut. If this is allowed, the reasoning from both the player for choosing the particular way to utilize the feature and the judge for allowing it needs to be bulletproof so that the limits are well-understood and don't set anything on a slippery slope.
Also, on an unrelated note, even if a person is young and not part of an at-risk group, they still shouldn't ignore lockdown measures. While they may be able to handle getting infected, the average person who is infected with COVID-19 spreads the disease to 3 other people before they get better. As such, within a few weeks time, many elderly and at-risk people who had no contact with the original patient zero will have gotten sick or died by the time that the infection is traced back to its source.
Above all, listen to the advice of epidemiologists who are experts in the field. These people have spent their entire lives training for exactly this scenario, so they are better equipped to deal with this than anyone else is.
This, this, this.
Getting infected is more dangerous for others than it is for you personally, since some of the people who will (usually unknowingly) contract COVID from you may be at a higher degree of risk of permanent damage. Most importantly it makes doctors' lives worse. They die to the disease and tend to spread it around to vulnerable people if they aren't sufficiently protected themselves—which in many places is still exactly the case. This pandemic has already decimated the availability of medical staff around the world since they, by definition, are exposed to the contagious, and while they take time to recover, others have to work and expose themselves even more. And it's not a secret that constant physical and emotional stress and lack of sleep reduce the capability of the immune system further, meaning by the time they do contract the virus, their bodies are already likely to be in a weakened state.
Additionally, it's crucially important to understand two things.
1. There is still no confirmation of any kind that acquired immunity to the virus will stick. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest this may be the case, either. It was not the case for SARS and the common cold coronaviruses, after all. The most likely scenario is that the immunity is short-term and will wane after a couple months, at which point you'd be at a risk (and putting others at risk) again. When the vaccine is developed, you will most likely need to re-vaccinate every year, similarly to the flu vaccine, and unlike the flu vaccine, governments will likely be treating this very, very seriously to avoid new waves of the epidemic.
2. The probability of long-term or permanent damage to lungs and/or kidneys is much higher than the probability of death (on the order of 10–20% as opposed to the 1–5% for death) and it does not depend in any way on the availability of medical equipment such as ventilators. Recovery statistics do not reflect this at all. So getting sick multiple times means bearing the risk of long-term damage that many times even if your symptoms are not severe. Would you go to a meeting during a pandemic if you knew you had a 1/10 chance of breaking your leg in the process? Because that's the kind of lottery you'd be playing.
Source code leaks rarely affect patent right application in any capacity since patents protect technical solutions and never the code itself. With said solutions documented and made publicly available as part of the patenting process, it "leaks" them automatically. But for the record, here is a list of patents that may be relevant to the Xbox. Note that the ones from the 90s have already expired.
Even looking at the code and having some idea for emulation from that code would be illegal.
Actually no, that's not how copyright works. It doesn't protect ideas—only implementations thereof. Moreover, if there is only one reasonable way some solution can be implemented, it may not even be eligible for protection. This is just to illustrate that the copyright is not quite as powerful as it often appears due to the constant bullying by the likes of Nintendo.
It is true that the implementation has to be built from the ground up rather than copied and sanitized, but it doesn't mean the leaked code cannot be used as a reference material. In this respect it's no different from developer datasheets or hardware reverse-engineering (decapped ROM chips, etc.) used in emulation development since the 90s. Those are also subject to copyright; never stopped anyone.
Feels drab and painfully slow at the beginning but gets interesting some three minutes in when some of the more surprising routes start being taken thanks to the glitches. Good job. Not to say I enjoyed it, but it kept me watching.
The game would've certainly benefited from a bit more open (or less obvious) level solutions. And from less-grating sound effects.
If you want to remake your savestates, you'll have to rewind to the earliest point where you need one. In practice, replaying it from the start is the easiest solution. For convenience, use the auto-stop and turbo functions built into the Play Movie dialogue.
In the future, make a savestate at the beginning of every major section (e.g. a new stage), and don't touch it until you're 100% sure you're done working on it. This will make rewinding much faster.
Posting this to inform y'all that this thread has been merged with the original MK1 thread from 2004. There was a ~3 year gap between the last post of the old thread and the first post of the new thread, so there should be no continuity problems.
Our of curiosity, which pair of runs would be the most different between each other in terms of gameplay:
1) non-clock-stop vs. clock-stop,
2) non-clock-stop vs. real-time, or
3) clock-stop vs. real-time?
This could help put things into perspective (then again it could also complicate them, but it would be interesting to know regardless).
Could it be that your computer can't emulate it any faster? BizHawk is somewhat more resource-intensive than FCEUX. Also check if you have any framerate limiters in your system (such as RTSS or the one inside the nVidia driver), that tripped me up some time ago.
To be fair, that's not obvious. My other guesses included:
* Little Obscure Testament to Apparent Destitution
* Lexically Offensive Tribute to Appallment and Disgust
* Luxurious Opulence of Tirelessly Amassed Dough
* Literal Ordinary Totally Average Duck (I really bet on this one, too...)
I was wondering, has any dis-assembly work been done on this game to get some strong evidence of where things are optimal or not? It still looks like it's mostly empircal guess work finding strategies and it would interesting to know if there are any really un-intuitive strategies that could still save more time.
We had a (very short) discussion on this very subject in TASVideos Discord just a few days ago:
[10:45 PM] moozooh: with mtpo's popularity i'm surprised its cpu opponent logic hasn't yet been disassembled and thoroughly mapped out
[10:54 PM] RetroEdit: Maybe there are edge cases in the logic that were overlooked? But yeah, I'm a bit surprised too.
[10:56 PM] adelikat: you say that as if doing so would mean optimal strats would be easily found
[10:56 PM] moozooh: well, save for bruteforcing that's also the only way to find optimal strats...
[10:57 PM] RetroEdit: In conjunction with effective search algorithms, yeah, I would expect fully disassembling the behavior to yield optimal strats.
[10:58 PM] MemoryTAS: Certain games have disassembled for years and yet still new discoveries could come
[10:58 PM] MemoryTAS: that's not to say that it's not powerful but
[10:58 PM] moozooh: mtpo has a different decision tree compared to most games
For one, I'm positive that if any further improvements are to be found, that's how they will most likely be found.
The game doesn't consider it a 'game over' until both players lose all of their lives. If a player has two weapons, the player still gets to keep one of them after losing all lives. A continue is a limited resource that isn't used until both players lose all of their lives. Stealing the other player's lives without using up continues is an intended mechanic and it's used in most Contra games. Speaking of Contra games, this isn't the only TAS to use the live stealing mechanic. The two player Contra and Super C TAS also use live stealing.
Life stealing I am completely okay with. I was talking specifically about continues. Now I don't know if EZGames and I misunderstood each other, since I was under the impression that it would end up using continues to afford the constant game overs for the second player, but if only life stealing is used, I have no problems with it whatsoever.
The only places where it saves the most amount of time is in stages 1 and 3. we dont expect to use them anywhere else.
Honestly, I wish you didn't use them at all, especially since it's not that much of a timesaver. I'm very predisposed against using continues because they are an unlimited resource box intended to enable the less-capable players to buy their way past the skill checks, not unlike e.g. level passwords or overly powerful option menus. (Extra lives are somewhat similar in principle, but unlike continues and passwords, etc., they exist within the design space of the game; that is, games are designed with a certain life stock in mind and put score- or item-based ways to increase that stock to manage difficulty.) If this were an arcade game, it'd be an automatic no from me. So in my opinion, if you decide to tap into such a powerful resource, it better be worth more than a couple percent of the total run time lest it become an entertainment liability.
Anyway, what's done is done I suppose. I won't insist you start over, just rantingexpressing my stylistic preference, kek.
This movie ends with initiation of attack against the final boss. This allows a cutscene to play out and stops when user input is needed to scroll text.
Please provide the complete input. Regardless of which version will count for the timing of the run, and whether the submission is or isn't published, this is a common courtesy to the encoders who should not be expected to optimally finish the game in your stead to capture the ending in its entirety.
The native resolution of IGS PolyGame Master boards that Ketsui, Espgaluda, Dodonpachi Daioujou and some other games of the era run on is 448×224 (or 224×448 when vertically oriented), which is automatically corrected by the standard 4:3 CRT arcade monitors. Multiple other hardware boards (such as the CPS) also have non-square pixels.
You are missing the point. It has already been decided that THE GLITCH IS NOT REASON ENOUGH TO WARRANT A NEW BRANCH. Spike clearly showed that, and you somehow completely glossed over that fact. Just because you THINK it could be acceptable doesn’t mean anything.
I agree with adelikat: leave that for the judges to decide. Nach had that opinion in 2010, somebody might have a different one in 2020.
We don't really have a precedent right system where every executive decision made in the past holds true forever. It's much better not to discourage people from pushing the categories they like, even if they don't pass the judgment on entertainment or variety merits. Who knows, some day they might.
This, kind of.
There were also some practical experiments involving counterbalancing gravity and sun's heat energy, but that's wonky and does not work continuously for obvious reasons, let alone produce anything useful. At least the clock tells time.
Haha, that is beautiful! The translator took the word "dump" a bit too literally there. :D
If anyone here can communicate this mistake to the Citra devs, please do.
Note that the French version also doesn't differentiate between the "movie" and "video" in that menu, causing even more confusion.
"The bomb-hoarding hero is back, and now he has a partner on a suicide watch."
Just to confirm, you aren't using the level skip glitch here, right? And the reason to constantly kill off P2 is lag reduction or something?
Given the recent change from "not faster than" to "slower than" for speed rules; these two criteria are now somewhat in conflict.
One criterion (in the rules on triviality) essentially says a run must stand out from human play to be acceptable, while the other criterion (in the rules on speed) essentially says a run simply can't be slower than human play to be acceptable.
I'd like to address this one point. This is actually not a conflict—it is a forward compliance perspective.
When making a new (i.e. first-generation) TAS, it has to do better than what humans are doing at that time. Otherwise there is no point bothering with it when you can just watch the unassisted run and get the same experience.
After the publication, it might so happen that humans find a new strategy that a TAS cannot improve upon.
Because of this, when making an improvement to an existing publication, it has to at least match what it cannot improve. Perhaps it should be clarified that directly comparable sections should be matched, not just final time (e.g. by being faster in one place but slower in another). It should not be slower anywhere, but if it cannot be faster, it doesn't have to be.
Mandating that an improvement outperforms a human run across the board would have been impractical for cases where there are no further improvements to be found with existing knowledge. Enforcing such a rule would make some improvements unpublishable and have us stuck with even worse movies.
In the future, make a savestate at the beginning of every major section (e.g. a new stage), and don't touch it until you're 100% sure you're done working on it. This will make rewinding much faster.