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Speedrunning in general is bigger than ever before right now. While I would honestly be hoping it would've made for a greater boost to the popularity of tasvideos, there are plenty of new users, submissions and progress on games being made. I'd certainly call the community far from "dying" at this point.
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Lil_Gecko wrote:
Try number 2 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQqaB0cc_I
MrPyt1001 suggested that I got more than 50 Star Points in YI4.
I'll probably do that if I can manage.
Any help, feedback are appreciated
Excellent. Great watch so far, I can't wait to see more.
What on earth is happening with that spinning platform in YI-3 anyway?
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It's easy. Just kidnap the owner's daughter and demand to be given every award -ever- if he ever wants to see her again.
This is how you get far in life.
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This is useless for a speedrun, but too fun not to share.
It's been known for a while that you can get very high speeds by holding up when letting go off a ring. (The reason for that is that holding up preserves whatever mid-air speed Rayman has, and holding onto rings adds to Rayman's mid-air speed)
Turns out, if you go at such high speeds, some rather, interesting, things tend to happen.
Link to video
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Very good improvement to the testrun. What I like about this game is that the enemy placement makes a pacifist goal very nontrivial, and the run was very entertaining.
It's unfortunate there is one enemy that can only be bypassed using special weapons. I guess the "no subweapon" goal takes precedence over pacifism there.
Yes vote.
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puppy610 wrote:
Any TASes from any game system. ATM the scheduled TASes are:
- SNES Super Mario World Arbitrary Code Execution by Masterjun
- DS Brain Age by Ryuto
- Windows VVVVVV 20 Trinkets no Death Mode by Masterjun
- NES Arkanoid Warpless by Baxter
- NES The Legend of Zelda Swordless Challenge by Baxter
- Super Mario Bros. Walkathon Warpless by Happylee
More are currently being scheduled. Time estimates will be released soon.
I'll have you know that I alone own the intellectual property for my TASes and will cease and desist the shit out of you if you stream them
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Very nice going saving this many frames. I'll need to rewatch the first run to see the differences though. Still hoping you'll be able to find a way to go through the final level pacifist.
Do keep it up.
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feos wrote:
scrimpeh wrote:
Lastly, while they may often look alike, Luck Manipulation is not to be confused with Enemy/AI Manipulation. To the uninitiated, this damage boost in Castlevania (.gif taken from Grincevent) may look like luck manipulation, but the Medusa Head's spawn is in fact entirely fixed and dependent on your y position, which is not RNG-based.
I disagree. Enemy/AI relies on something that determines its actions, and player position can be a source of entropy. Also, I fail to see how RNG is luck, but manipulatable actions of NPCs are not luck. It's just we have "complex" RNGs in some games, where a bunch of addresses gets mixed in and then determines random actions, and there are also "simple" RNGs, where actions depend on addresses directly.
In my opinion, Enemy/AI manipulation becomes luck manipulation when entropy gets involved, i.e. there is no visible correlation between what the player does and how the enemy reacts. Especially, without TAS tools, an unassisted runner should not be able to reliably get a desired outcome in those cases.
However, games in which you can easily predict an AI's behaviour should not be considered luck manipulation. In the example I used, the enemy's spawning Y position is directly tied to the player's Y position. No entropy involved at all.
There are some edge cases to this, of course. For example, what if an enemy's action depends on if the player's X position is odd or even?
This is easy for a TASer to figure out, so easy that I wouldn't call it luck manipulation. Yet it can still technically be considered randomness, since it's not predictable by a normal player.
There's other interesting cases regarding sources of entropy too. Some games like Super Mario Bros. and Gimmick! make "random" events dependent on certain digits in the player's score. If the conditions to trigger these events are known, there is nothing random (and therefore nothing lucky) about them at all.
tl;dr: If an enemy's actions are unpredictable to a human, enemy manipulation is luck manipulation as well. If they are predictable, I don't think they can be considered that.
