Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Do you have access to the source code of a commercial rom?
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 11/10/2006
Posts: 7
Location: Clifton Park, New York
Well, yes.
I've been watching speedruns from this site for a looong time. But I've never wanted to actually make one until I saw the run of X2 - Wolvie's Revenge GBA which my company made. Now I wonder if I should do one for a game I've worked on.
Either way, as a programmer, watching all the "exploits" on this site has been really insightful into bugs we probably still ship with. Haha.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
haha... yeah, of course it's alowed, since some guys here disassemble NES games. Why didn't you work at KONAMI... damn... =D
Oh.. you're from Vicarious? Pretty good ports those.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
No, those ports are really nice, especially THPS. It plays just like the PSX versions.
fruitofwisdom wrote:
Now I wonder if I should do one for a game I've worked on
Which game is that? Please tell me it's not Spyro...
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
If you can submit a movie that breaks a game more than a current published or submitted movie, please do. If robots, disassemblies, debuggers and RAM viewers are fair game, inside information like source code access is just another tool.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
fruitofwisdom wrote:
But I've never wanted to actually make one until I saw the run of X2 - Wolvie's Revenge GBA which my company made.
Oh goody, now I have who to yell at.
I've tried encoding that movie at least 3 dozen times now with all sorts of options, nothing seems to preserve the video at all. All the changing colors, little movements all over the screen every which way, scaling the screen like that, it just doesn't last well under MPEG-4 technologies.
Now if the MPAA designed this game, understandable to try to make the video so uncompressable, but for a game, it really is quite ridiculus.
Now while it's great to make a game and show off all sorts of cool effects, please think of us poor little guys who want to use MPEG-4 :P
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 11/10/2006
Posts: 7
Location: Clifton Park, New York
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Which game is that? Please tell me it's not Spyro...
I wrote a little code for Spyro Orange. What I'd really like to see is a speedrun of Crash Purple and Spyro Orange using the same controller input (a la Mega Man X and X2). I don't know if that'd be possible though...
Nach wrote:
Oh goody, now I have who to yell at.
Haha, sorry about that. Our art team can be a little crazy. And the zoom in/zoom out effects must be brutal. :)
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
It is brutal, unforunetly I don't see how I can publish the video unless I create a huge AVI.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Is it legit to do a speedrun for a game you have source code access to? Or is that cheating? I don't really see a rule against it...
Valid, and even recommended.
However, if you do produce such a tool-assisted movie, then in such a submission, you should explain the pieces of information that you utilized in the movie. I realize you can't go and publish pieces of code; your company would probably sue you for that. But if you utilize things like inner knowledge of the game physics, checkpoints, glitches on damage accumulation, power charts and such, you should explain them in your submission.
Joined: 11/10/2006
Posts: 7
Location: Clifton Park, New York
Very true. While I can't post code used for AI logic and such, it's not unreasonable to present damage amounts, movement speeds, etc., as the consumer has access to this as well, if only from an observational perspective.
I was mainly just curious when I asked my original question, but if anyone is presently making (or planning to make) a speedrun of another VV game, I would welcome discussions about bugs, exploitable design, and more.
Thanks for the answers everyone!
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Uh... can you provide a list with these VV games for the GBA? Or can I find it somewhere?
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Then that's already covered under the rules, if he tries to intentionally add a bug to the programming and exploit it, or, even more in the gray area, intentionally forgets to remove a bug from the game, and it slips past QA, more power to him.
That's why the mockball is allowed, and the wild warping in Crystalis is not.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Slipping tasable tricks past QA is easy. For example:
Stand with your back to a wall. Now hold left and put right on 30Hz autofire while hitting (down and B) every 6th frame. After doing this perfectly for 2 seconds or so, the game warps you a hard-coded 32 pixels into the wall. If your timing's off by 1 frame and it doesn't work.
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
Joined: 11/10/2006
Posts: 7
Location: Clifton Park, New York
All good ideas. I'm sure any intentional "bug" would be obvious upon submission here. It wouldn't be hard, though, to slip in a little something before a final release candidate. The days become pretty frenetic and though we try and do peer code review, we don't look at every line. I'm not condoning such an activity, we all remember SimCopter... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Controversy. Then again, there are a good many easter eggs no one's ever found.
