Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
I'm gonna throw in another recommendation for score instead of just time. Back when Dolphin was first in the works I had thought long and hard, and actually watched a lot of the speedruns of time WRs versus score WRs. I decided that score runs would be 1) more entertaining and 2) create a more difficult category to compete with and calculate routes for.
I just feel like score is a little bit... weird. It's not like you MUST collect all the bananas and get the lowest time to max the score. You have to optimize your banana choice and combine it with a low time, which makes the TASing much more tedious for me.
I wouldn't care much if both type of runs would be published on the site, though. I think they both have their highs and lows.
Edit: currently on floor 10.
I'm gonna agree with Nahoc here that it sounds like both runs would be qualitatively different enough to warrant being published. They amount to different path optimization goals; both paths have the potential to be entertaining and I don't think you could say that one is always going to be more entertaining than the other.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Did you think about actually completing the bonus floors? This feels to me like those SSB-TASes, where the runner just suicides in the bonus levels. Personally, I never liked that. But I would respect the decision, if you'd really go for fastest time everywhere.
Current project: Gex 3 any%
Paused: Gex 64 any%
There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
^ A TAS going for score is pointless, as you could theorically max out the counter by playing the E9 stage over and over : collect at least 100 bananas -> 1-up, suicide and repeat (the score doesn't reset after each death).
It doesn't take a lot of reasoning to see why it could never be published, or even why someone wouldn't bother playing the stage thousandths of times just for a TAS.
Presumably the TAS would be operating under the restriction that suicide is not allowed. There are plenty of TASes which have rules based on "Well, this would be entertaining, except for this one weird bit, so I'll have to make a rule so that bit doesn't interfere."
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
^ A TAS going for score is pointless, as you could theorically max out the counter by playing the E9 stage over and over : collect at least 100 bananas -> 1-up, suicide and repeat (the score doesn't reset after each death).
It doesn't take a lot of reasoning to see why it could never be published, or even why someone wouldn't bother playing the stage thousandths of times just for a TAS.
I was more thinking of something like a 100% run or something, just beat all the stages getting all the bananas.
I feel like a speed run would be entertaining, and a score one would be enternaining. Although I don't think it should be called "highest score", it should be more something like "100%" or something... (which does change the goal slightly)
Joined: 6/21/2004
Posts: 247
Location: New Hampshire
hegyak wrote:
Andypro,
the factor is, "Will it be entertaining?" To me, a score run sounds dull. While a flat speed run sounds exciting.
I recommend looking up some videos of high score records, in this case. For simpler levels, the goal remains "get to the end as fast as possible". But there are plenty of levels that provide risk/reward tradeoffs that, if taken, are often more harrowing and impressive than the standard M.O. of barreling at the goal.
This is one of the best examples I can think of, A11 (the guitar-shaped level). The "speed only" run would just make a beeline for the warp on the right and would be 90% just holding forward; whereas the high score run, well:
Link to video
(no, I have NO IDEA how packattack did this without tools)
Maybe someday I oughta try my hand at this TASing thing and make a score run if no one else will... :p
I'm bad, just made a new thread about these games thinking no one else thought of 'em haha
Downloading the isos now and probably going to play around with them tonight on dolphin, I'll upload what I can come up with by the end of this week.
I'm bad, just made a new thread about these games thinking no one else thought of 'em haha
Downloading the isos now and probably going to play around with them tonight on dolphin, I'll upload what I can come up with by the end of this week.
Did you come up with something?
I'm still interested in TASing this game, but the physics are just too plain weird.. Holding diagonal seems faster at start, but sometimes during falls too. It makes no sense and ends up making the game really hard to TAS. If anyone can figure it out (maybe via memory viewing) tell me!
Joined: 1/16/2008
Posts: 358
Location: The Netherlands
Nahoc wrote:
I'm still interested in TASing this game, but the physics are just too plain weird.. Holding diagonal seems faster at start, but sometimes during falls too. It makes no sense and ends up making the game really hard to TAS. If anyone can figure it out (maybe via memory viewing) tell me!
I wanted to try and figure some stuff out, but then discovered that there are no proper memory inspection tools :/ (because dolphin's byte order doesn't allow the general memory watch tools to be used)
I'm still interested in TASing this game, but the physics are just too plain weird.. Holding diagonal seems faster at start, but sometimes during falls too. It makes no sense and ends up making the game really hard to TAS. If anyone can figure it out (maybe via memory viewing) tell me!
I wanted to try and figure some stuff out, but then discovered that there are no proper memory inspection tools :/ (because dolphin's byte order doesn't allow the general memory watch tools to be used)
Cheat engine works fine, you just need to add custom types for big endian.
I'm slowly working on a thread with the fastest times for each level (tas-only) located here:
http://tasvideos.org/Nahoc/SMB.html
if you guys would like to participate for more competition that'd be fun! :D
