the only thing staff members would actually have access to is all userfiles including those hidden, so you'd need to find a different way to store them.
and at least know that 2 teams have done this without even having to view the site.
Also, just to clarify, I hope that by "have done this" you mean "uploaded files to userfiles" and not "abused staff privilege to look at input files for this contest".
"have done this" refers to uploading to the userfiles, which staff members would know without even need to look at the site (due to that being announced offsite).
The original purpose of my stopping by the thread is to invite people (after your final submission is made, which may also mean after the deadline has passed) to join my team's Discord server for combining strategies and knowledge. Crime City was a lot of fun and while there might not be that much knowledge to share, there is a lot of coordination to be done for getting the usual DTC-based final submission going.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
I'll clarify some points about my post. It is not to undermine the trust in staff. Staff using other users movies to improve on their own movies to gain an advantage in this contest would be incredibly silly and would be a breach of trust.
However, other contestants should know that staff at the very very least *would* know about this uploading. It is placed in the same section that other staff only updates are posted, so staff would be somewhat expected to check that area. Staff might also end up clicking the links accidentally, or even nearly do so, simply by not being vigilant enough with links from that staff only section. I'd rather have it too that we don't have blind trust in staff, there are numerous places you can upload a movie which will not give staff even the knowledge that you made an upload of your movie. Hidden means hidden from public view, not staff view, and staff don't need to go digging through your profile to know if you uploaded or not.
EDIT: Also a disclaimer, my team submitted at least 4 weeks ago, we're definitely not at all going to cheat here (if not just due to the trust issues) and there's no way for us to have done so.
Thank you so much for these clarifications.
For transparency, we submitted at 10/28/2023 2:36:49 AM EST and are really happy with what we've done.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
The original purpose of my stopping by the thread is to invite people (after your final submission is made, which may also mean after the deadline has passed) to join my team's Discord server for combining strategies and knowledge. Crime City was a lot of fun and while there might not be that much knowledge to share, there is a lot of coordination to be done for getting the usual DTC-based final submission going.
I can't wait to join your Discord and share strats and war stories! I'm not going to do it now cause our team is terribly last minute in our submission and changing everything, but I'll join in 3 hours for sure.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
As for my experience, now that the submissions are closed, I never did any TASing groundwork, as I simply couldn't rekindle my desire for TASing. I did state I considered myself retired from TASing, and drifting interests has firmly asserted itself in my habits.
That said, I did analyze some bits of the game and threw together an enemy hitbox script. It was a lot easier to guess some positioning related stuff for my teammates to work with from there. Hopefully our discord makes it easy enough to find.
I want to say that I had such a blast doing my first DTC - and 3rd TAS ever.
WarHippy, you deserve all the praise I can give, you came up with strategies saving frames out of nowhere and gave me a run for my money. Working with you was a complete blast, and you had skills that were so complementary to mine I couldn't have hoped for a better match.
g0go, you already know how I feel about you. Thanks for carrying the Mario Party 3 TAS single handedly (and still contributing to this DTC) while I was too busy working on this DTC, and for the great discussion and pointing out the obvious flaws in our strategies.
enderpal, do not feel sorry you couldn't participate as much as you wanted, studies are always more important. I really hope you had fun with this competition, and I know I was always genuinely happy to see your contributions when they happened.
I'm currently celebrating the end of the DTC in Invariel's Discord VC, and discovering what you guys have been up to during this time is going to be a new happy core memory. I underestimated how this community has smart, talented, kind, intelligent and dedicated people way beyond what I expected before. The strategy you found and tools you used are beyond anything I imagined. I was right to be scared of you guys for 7 weeks, and I'm happy that fear motivated me to better myself.
My heart is full of admiration for all of you guys. I was always intimidated to start TASing and get involved in the community because I feel like a small potato with no experience and you have seemingly infinite talented people... and I was completely right. This whole community is insane. I'm grateful for the DTC to be a great entry point for a newcomer, and I'm more than honored and humbled to take my first step among the Hall of Titans.
The game pick was great. It's a game that's simple enough that I could easily see someone joining this DTC and having a fun experience with Crime City being their first ever TAS; and its hidden complexity can make for a serious challenge for the more experienced participants.
I was part of the DTC party last night, and I gotta say that I was impressed by all the information that the other teams managed to find, and the creativity of how teams tackled problems with different solutions. Shoutouts to Team 3's Lua script, that basically shows everything you need to know about the game. With how close the final times are, I can't wait to see the comparison encode for this. It's gonna be good.
Thanks Darkman for organising the contest. It was a fun one.
Banjo-Tooie runner, DTC 8, 9, 10, and 11 winner, but more importantly, "When's GR?"
Current projects:
Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge - 100% (50 minutes)
Mario Party 1 - All Boards (est: 4-6 hours)
Mario Party 3 - All Minigames (est: 40-50 minutes, not sure)
"Ooooh, I saved some more subpixels. Look at those sweet subpixels. You can't look at them, because they're subpixels, but they look so good." - The8bitbeast
"It's as if I knew what was going to happen. It's as if I had the plan written in front of me and I was reading it. I mean, I do have it in front of me, but I'm not reading it." -garagedooropener
Final Results
First of all, it took a bit of learning AviSynth, VirtualDub, and trial-and-error, but I managed to make a basic encode showing all the teams' input files at once. Team 6 also provided an extended input file that was used for the encode.
Link to videoReminder to self: upload contest entries to user files later, add neatly formatted spreadsheet comparison images.
Here are the times, from first to last input needed to reach the ending.
Participation Trophy6th Place: Team 1 - 07:04.10 - User movie #6383481165838709655th Place: Team 5 - 07:01.18 - User movie #6383481228737321694th Place: Team 6 - 07:00.83 - User movie #638348124071385178Bronze Trophy3rd Place: Team 3 - 06:57.92 - User movie #638348119116981353Silver Trophy2rd Place: Team 2 - 06:56.90 - User movie #638348117734457371Gold Trophy1rd Place: Team 4 - 06:56.03 - User movie #638348121401609504
Congratulations to g0goTBC, Lightmopp, WarHippy, and enderpal7 for the winning entry! Also a special thanks to all the participants for joining in on this contest, and the previous hosts for advice.
Comparison table
Here's a spreadsheet of the cumulative time by segment.
Here's a spreadsheet of the time to complete each section, with a sum of best to the side as well.
Post-Script
This was a fun and interesting learning experience for me. While I have been a GM for a mystery tournament before, actually being the showrunner was a bit more complex. There were a few unexpected bumps here and there but in the end it ended up being pretty smooth.
Some games I considered but from the advice I received I had to cut:
Gunner's Heaven/Rapid Reload (PSX): It's a game that can be described as "We got Gunstar Heroes on PlayStation". Not used due to complexity from being that description and RTA runs being north of 30 minutes which would be a bit too long.
RoboCop (Arcade): This would've been my perfect pick if I hadn't found an offsite TAS out there. The most frustrating thing about that discovery was that the TAS I found was still slower than the SDA record.
Alien Syndrome (Arcade): Playing this game for speed would've been an interesting routing challenge, though I might not ask for doing a full 2 loop clear. This wasn't picked since there's already a published TAS of the SMS version that could've influenced some strategies despite being quite different.
Why does one stage appear darker in some of the team's movies? Is it a result of in-game technique or just some emulator differences?
EDIT: Nevermind I'm dumb I see they knocked the lights down
Anyway the game was short enough to keep your interest and once again shows you that even seemingly simple games can have varying techniques. I regret not joining but arcade was something I didn't feel comfortable with. Great contest though, results were close!
We're currently working on a new input file in the Team 3 discord that'll combine the best strats together (which really is just slapping Team 4's Stage 6 inputs onto Team 2's movie, plus some minor improvements on Stage 6's boss).
The SOB shown in Darkman's chart as a note won't be close to this final movie. It's slightly misleading, as it combines incompatible strategies together to have a faster than possible movie under the contest rules. More specifically, Team 2 uses death to save time on Stage 5, while Team 4 does so on Stage 4. You have a limited number of lives so you can't do both, and Team 2's Stage 4 boss fight strategy does not work if death is used to save time (mainly as it requires the Assault Rifle weapon). Stage 4's boss is also where Team 2 ultimately pulls ahead as once Stage 5 is finished, Team 2 will be 15 frames ahead (until they fall behind on Stage 6's boss, where Team 4 takes the lead).
Darkman425 wrote:
No continues allowed which for this game I doubt would save time anyways
On the flip side, I joined the competition with zero motivation at first, and my motivation grew. I guess you never know in which direction it will go.
Joined: 4/7/2015
Posts: 330
Location: Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
Petition to change the name of this game to Damage Booster.
Congratulations to the teams, specially Team 4!
I miss joining DTC...
Games are basically math with a visual representation of this math, that's why I make the scripts, to re-see games as math.
My things:
YouTube, GitHub, Pastebin, Twitter
Participation Trophy
6th Place: Team 1 - 07:04.10 - User movie #638348116583870965
5th Place: Team 5 - 07:01.18 - User movie #638348122873732169
4th Place: Team 6 - 07:00.83 - User movie #638348124071385178
Bronze Trophy
3rd Place: Team 3 - 06:57.92 - User movie #638348119116981353
Silver Trophy
2rd Place: Team 2 - 06:56.90 - User movie #638348117734457371
Gold Trophy
1rd Place: Team 4 - 06:56.03 - User movie #638348121401609504
Congratulations to g0goTBC, Lightmopp, WarHippy, and enderpal7 for the winning entry! Also a special thanks to all the participants for joining in on this contest, and the previous hosts for advice.
Comparison table
Here's a spreadsheet of the cumulative time by segment.
Here's a spreadsheet of the time to complete each section, with a sum of best to the side as well.
Post-Script
This was a fun and interesting learning experience for me. While I have been a GM for a mystery tournament before, actually being the showrunner was a bit more complex. There were a few unexpected bumps here and there but in the end it ended up being pretty smooth.
Some games I considered but from the advice I received I had to cut:
