Player (6)
Joined: 10/25/2009
Posts: 22
Lex's movie/screenshot links to lex.clansfx.co.uk have been restored (as they've been broken for some time). Also, the mission records page has moved to the Worms Knowledge Base. It's not impossible that in the not-too-far future we'll make a new, updated demo version of W:A, with the capability to play replays, which would mean that you wouldn't need to own the game to watch/validate the replays.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Hey! Thanks, CyberShadow, for the hosting! :D You guys can watch the old TAS demonstrations now, thanks to my good friend here. They're pretty awesome. I've stopped playing Worms Armageddon in general, but CyberShadow and Deadcode are still around, and I'm still here available for questions etc. Would-be-double-post edit: WTF? Where did the mission records page go? All the other sites on Nanacide are still there. Would-be-triple-post edit: Aha! I found it! It was ported over to the Worms Knowledge Base, here, as posted by CyberShadow above... Haha.
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1286
Location: Finland
Awesome, thanks for restoring the mission records, I was looking for them a while back. All your efforts and contributions to WA are greatly appreciated!
Editor, Expert player (2459)
Joined: 4/8/2005
Posts: 1573
Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
These demos are very impressive. I hope to see them here someday: http://tasvideos.org/Movies-PC.html
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
For those interested in Worms Armageddon, I posted 2 demos of trajectory mapping in this thread.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Here's an advanced screenshot of the aimbot at work with full trajectory mapping. Deadcode worked hard on the homing missile aimbot, and it looked great: The homing missile "runs out of time" after some amount of time homing and gets thrown in its current trajectory, which is why you see the orbiting paths around the homing point, then the arc toward the enemy worm. My worm (currently off-screen) isn't actually aiming there at this point in time. The aimbot allows me to drag my cursor anywhere and place where I want the shot to go, then the bot performs the necessary actions to fire at the right angle and power in the minimum time. This shot was exceedingly hard to find. I tried mousing all around the area before getting this perfect shot. This was just after a normal unassisted online game, when I was editing the replay to see if the shot I wanted to do was possible. It turned out it was, but ridiculously hard to do. Edit: I would make a video of myself playing around with the aimbot in realtime, but my Fraps is being exceedingly laggy and I can't get it to record smoothly.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I've started encoding a few more mission TAS to x264. Here are the first 3 missions with a higher resolution (1280×960 for the first 2) than my previous mission encodes. I encoded mission 3 in full 1920×1200 at 50fps to capture the move at the end, so beware. It may be choppy (or very choppy) on some machines, though my machine plays it back at full speed. Remember, these are judged first by number of turns used, then turn time spent, based on the in-game turn timer. The reasoning behind this is explained earlier in the thread. Each frame is 0.02 sec because the game runs at a constant 50fps. Now that I've updated my ffdshow, I'm going to see if I can get lossless x264 to encode smaller files, considering the large black sky areas. Edit: Oh, right. Here's some info about the TAS themselves:
    Mission 1: I use a rope attached to the left to move to the right quickly so I'm in range to attach to the pumpkin I need use to fly to the other side of the map. This allowed me to get a sub-7-second clear of this mission. Also, I go within detonation range of an instant mine, but don't set it off because the mine checks only once every 5 frames. Note: The goal is just to get that glowing crate on the right side. That's why this one ends so quickly. Mission 2: I've described this earlier in the thread, but now you can see the jumps I do to manipulate the AI by changing the random seed. Mission 3: That bat at the beginning is always awesome to see. It's used in unassisted records of this mission too. I managed to shave a turn off by manipulating the AI into killing itself. Always hilarious! At the end, I do a ridiculous move involving using an air strike from a rope and grabbing a Damage×2 MID-FLIGHT, which doubles the air strike damage, killing my target. It looks so awesome, I had to capture it with this resolution.
Edit: I heard some people have major issues playing back these videos (even the first 2), so I made 25fps versions of them:
Joined: 1/8/2011
Posts: 1
Location: Russia, Kursk
I made this W:A speedruns using virtual machine and slow motion Mario Castle Tower in ~23 seconds YouTube (dead), WA Replay File Test Stuff Rope Race ( in ~23 seconds too :) ) YouTube (dead), WA Replay File ...and Hardcore Wall-x-Wall (not so cool) YouTube (dead), WA Replay File
Editor, Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 2086
Aah, yes. I had been wondering on how a WA TAS would look and what part of the game to TAS. This looks pretty impressive, and faster than I had imagined. Given that there's a replay file, this looks legit too.
Joined: 3/18/2006
Posts: 971
Location: Great Britain
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I've encoded my Mission Impossible 2 TAS from 2007 and uploaded it to YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3JItjyKVPI Can someone with an actual 1920×1080 1080p monitor tell me if the video looks sharp and perfect in the YouTube player's 1080p mode? If so, I may upload more to YouTube in this format. I like the still camera showing the entire map. My monitor's 1920×1200, which, I think, is the reason that the video looks messy on my monitor in fullscreen. Edit: No, it's YouTube's shitty post-processing.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Here are the current WA TASes well-encoded to h264 video; way better than my newbish earlier encodes in this thread. These archives each contain all 33 mission TASes in video form, for the first time! :D This first link has the higher-quality YUV 4:4:4 10-bit encodes with CRF 14. Don't worry if you don't know what that means. The point is, these videos are for videophiles like me. They only work in newer video playback systems. http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/worms/movies/wa-tas-videos-hq-allmissions.zip (424 MB) This second link has the more-compatible YUV 4:2:0 8-bit encodes with CRF 20 which save file size and still look very good. All video players should be able to play these videos without issues. http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/worms/movies/wa-tas-videos-allmissions.zip (256 MB)
Warepire
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2174
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Could you pull down the quality a bit on those 8-bit encodes? My media PC with 4.8 GHz Dual Core with 4 GB RAM, running nothing but MPC-HC (latest version), cannot render this in real time... :(
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
It's just a problem with your renderer randomly dropping frames. I'm certain your computer can handle those encodes just fine. Use madVR. It could also be the decoder failing. Try using LAV Filters, ffdshow-tryouts or even VLC. Installing the latest CCCP should make it work just fine.
Editor, Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 2086
Lex wrote:
Here are the current WA TASes well-encoded to h264 video; way better than my newbish earlier encodes in this thread. These archives each contain all 33 mission TASes in video form, for the first time! :D This first link has the higher-quality YUV 4:4:4 10-bit encodes with CRF 14. Don't worry if you don't know what that means. The point is, these videos are for videophiles like me. They only work in newer video playback systems. http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/worms/movies/wa-tas-videos-hq-allmissions.zip (424 MB) This second link has the more-compatible YUV 4:2:0 8-bit encodes with CRF 20 which save file size and still look very good. All video players should be able to play these videos without issues. http://lex.clansfx.co.uk/worms/movies/wa-tas-videos-allmissions.zip (256 MB)
Ahahaha, oh god, those were awesome. In between the downright suicidal enemy AI, to crazy roping skills, to very sophisticated shots that take out multiple worms at once and prepare more to be slain next round, and the occasional move that happens so fast I need to rewatch it and pause constantly to even see what's even happening, to moves that are crazy random or imaginative, I can't even pick out my favorite moment. Wonderful work right there
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
:D I love how the missions have such a huge variety of gameplay styles. It would be hard to cover this much differing gameplay in miscellaneous videos on random maps. I wish the Worms Armageddon Challenge Base ("The Challenge Base") was still around. There were high-quality user-submitted challenges there and the reward for beating the challenges was some sort of currency. There were TASes of many of the challenges purchaseable with this currency, among other rewards. I made most (all?) of said TASes. :) My favorite things about TASing WA are the aimbots, trajectory mapping, and AI manipulation. Who doesn't love when every turn kills the AI more, including their turns? :D Edit: Hmm. This post started a new page. The mission TAS video encodes are all viewable on the previous page, downloadable from this post.
Joined: 8/10/2011
Posts: 8
Location: Sweden
I watched all levels and it's easily one of the best TASes I've seen. I laughed out load at almost every move. Especially since there were so many, completely different strats used. But most impressive gotta be the rope swinging and damage boosts. Good run, just incredible.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Someone asked me in a PM why I'm not submitting these TASes to TASvideos. Here's my response to clarify this situation. Firstly, WA is a commercial game, so the replay files can only be played back by someone with a copy of it installed. This shouldn't be a factor because almost all these other TASed games are commercial games so you have to have a copy of those to play those TASes, but some consider it to be just because it's a PC game and they think of PC games differently. Obviously I disagree. Secondly, and most importantly, the TAS build is private, so only a small number of people can compete. This makes WA TASes on TASvideos unacceptable. There are plans to fix this so that there can be a public TAS build without being able to cheat in offline unassisted competitions, but that hasn't happened yet because the WA developers have other priorities and an elegant solution isn't easy. Thirdly, the established timing for WA TASes is not the same as the TASvideos generic game timing. Our community's WA TASes care only about turn time, not total time, because we have decided that to be more entertaining. Adelikat has mentioned in IRC that exceptions can be made for different timing. However, the fact that the build is private is not acceptable to me for TASvideos submission. If I submit here, I want everyone to be able to compete.
Active player (372)
Joined: 9/25/2011
Posts: 652
Lex wrote:
Someone asked me in a PM why I'm not submitting these TASes to TASvideos.
That was me. :) First, I have to say that Lex's TAS of WA is awesome! If you haven't seen it, see it! Second, though I understand the reservations, I still think this has a place on TASVideos. TASVideos is a site to showcase quality tool-assisted speedruns. Though some may view this site as a place to compete, I see it as a place for quality art, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. So even if people are restricted from using certain tools, I still think the art belongs here. That's my $0.02 worth.
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
For the record, not all the best mission times were by me. About half are by Deadcode, the author of the tools, and 2 are by Wyvern, another trusted player like me. The full list with replay downloads is here. Thanks for the praise! It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy knowing people appreciate our hard work.
Skilled player (1706)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4952
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
Hey, what happens if you pit the bot against itself on local multiplayer? Is that possible?
Lex
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
No. "Start the game" stays dithered out and unclickable. However, you can start the game with one worm, kill it off, and watch the game continue between all the AI.
Post subject: Re: Worms Armageddon TAS
Kaleu
He/Him
Joined: 12/9/2016
Posts: 1
Location: Brasil
1st post, hello world! I like to make W:A Time Trial Rope Race speedrun, I made some but they are not top tier speedruns. Lex and Deadcode could reproduce the maps much better, however, it might be fun to watch something new. I recommend downloading the video or the small replay file if you have W:A installed. If you choose YouTube make sure to watch it in 720p50/1080p50 for the best possible experience, still will skip some frames. Map: TTRR 2016-22 by Kaleu YouTube. Video File (.mp4) | 29.9 MB. Replay File (.WAgame) | 11 KB. ____________________________________________________ Map: TTRR 2016-65 by Kaleu YouTube. Video File (.mp4) | 21.5 MB. Replay File (.WAgame) | 11 KB.