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DarkKobold wrote:
Uh, I'm 100% more on the Lua side - I'd say people like Aqfaq, FatRatKnight, Aglar, theenglishman, and others get fun out of shaving even 1 frame. But, I find Lua totally fun. Most of my TASes get as far as lua scripts, and 1 level - because I just find it a blast to write scripts, and figure out how the game works.
Wouldn't you TAS whole game (more than 1 level) if it was actually fun all the way to final keypresses?
(as for Lua stuff, that's a bit different from the point, because programming is fun on its own)
I can see 3 main factors that take away fun from the TASing process:
1. Worn-out goal choice (aiming for speed works well for viewers, not makers)
2. Poor tools (still a lot of tedious work must be done manually)
3. Anticipation of possible negative response (TAS makers must cater for viewers response thus limiting own imagination)
To solve pt.3 there's Youtube, where creators can post whatever poop they like.
To lighten pt.2 I'm working on new TASEdit, also new tools appear from time to time.
But the main problem is pt.1, so new ideas should be encouraged by administration explicitly. Not just April the 1st.
nitsuja wrote:
Then I propose we compete for "maximum average audio volume" (while still beating the game) instead of "minimum frame count". I think that could approximate a measure of entertainment, while still having an emphasis on speed except in some pathological cases. (Anyone willing to try it for April 1st?)
This is rather fresh idea. But wouldn't it easily degrade into abusing same loudest sound all the time? Repetitiveness can be persistent, but not entertaining, so maybe averaged volume is not too good approximation of entertainment. Now what about audio signal envelope shapes? I mean, if we compressed WAV output of the movie, we'd get larger files for movies with more stuff going on (within same time limit). Same goes for AVI (remember old Gunstar Heroes movie that was so colorful that it had unusually oversized encode).
But that would still be too rough and one-sided entertainment approximation. Also it won't directly provoke creativity (like "aiming for speed" boosts it naturally), and we'd better preserve this feature.
When criticizing feos's romantic mumblings I may have appeared too cynical, but actually I beleive that TASing process can be fun. And should be. Like playing Braid is fun even though you don't compete with anyone. Nah, Braid is bad example, because it has man-crafted puzzles that are boring after finishing them once.
I think I should clarify what I meant by fun/rewarding experience.
Fun aspects of the process (TASing):
* competitive enjoyment (frequent here)
* positive feedback (impossible + hard work -> possible)
* personal feeling of achievement (final product)
* community status/ranks/comments/etc (the more the better)
* personal feeling of self-perfection (see feos' BS about asceticism)
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That's interesting idea. Reminds me how Object-Oriented Programming made code better structurized and thus easier to get/more popular.
I'm talking about Kuwaga's rendition, because OP sounds too unrealistic.
I'll think about further developing these thoughts in TASEdit Markers paradigm.
scubed wrote:
you wouldn't want to just give a number of frames. That would still be prone to desyncing. (And is easily accomplished by run length encoding.) Consider if you wanted to go to the end of a platform. Instead of saying number of frames, you could run until the "on ground" bit disabled, then go back 1 frame.
Usually you don't have formal rules, instead you have desired chain of events that must be considered when recording even first event. You don't run all the way until ground ends, usually you run just enough for jumping to land you safely on next platform.
Also most events are too vague to express verbally. What's exciting about TASes, most of time you don't have enough words to describe what you want from the AI to do. Watch latest Megaman movie - can you possibly express what's going on there?
And sometimes you don't even know what exactly you want to do with the game, because you don't know what you can do with it. So you must experiment until satisfaction, and meanwhile record TAS manually.
Example:
"Run right until the point from where high jump will possibly lead Mario into floating Koopa, so that he will bounce just in time to miss Bullet Bill and look cool when doing it, maybe also shoot that Koopa from behind or make enemies collide or something better, whichever will look more entertaining"
But here's what can be done in similar fashion to the idea:
If TASer can divide his movie into verbal parts (not for AI, but for himself or for TASing partner or movie watchers), then he can move his scope to higher level of abstraction. For example, he can navigate his movie by jumping from Marker to Marker, not just from one frame to another.
Actual keypresses must still be done by human, but now it will be possible to find similarly named chunks and copy/paste them around (aforementioned macros).
What's important: TASer should be allowed to enforce his own logic of dividing movie into parts. Some people like to go deeper than others. It's also very game-dependent.
So. AI and bots aside, current TASing process can be enhanced a lot, and this idea is one of good examples.
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Warp wrote:
I'm not exactly sure I understand your point.
Ultimately, I'd prefer Bisqwit (or someone else) to invent something like walkathon but less game-specific and more natural then pacifist runs. But seeing it's unlikely, I'd be satisfied with a Judge guideline saying that playarounds should be highly encouraged, so that people can experiment with submissions more freely.
As for tool-assisted-machinima-videos-without-montage, there's no such community in the Internet, and without established community it's much less rewarding to make them, so I'll pass.
DarkKobold, I do not refuse that there may some special kind of fun that I don't get. But I want to make sure you don't confuse "fun experience" with "rewarding experience", as these are completely different feelings. Could you elaborate on that matter? What exactly is fun in exhaustiive frame-polishing (when you're not competing in a framewar with someone else)?
DarkKobold wrote:
Don't confuse your opinion of fun as being everyone's opinion of fun.
Don't attack me, okay? I'm still trying to recall my will to TAS, and I don't understand how the hell I had enough motivation for this. Probably it was all because of "world record" thingy which sadly doesn't bother me now.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Are you being ironic? Because what you wrote is exactly the message that I taught when I created this site.
Well, congratulations, your teachings are in vain. Maybe if you invented some units to measure entertainment, so that ego-people could compete for these units as well as for frames... Or if you made the site less egocentristic and more somewhat machinima-related... then people would consider learning TASing to create art, to find another side of their favourite game or to improve their minds through intense efforts (which is debatable and unexplored anyway). But currently they only learn TASing to beat existing record or make one for some obscure game. I know I did.
Because TASing is difficult. It's like playing some hardcore game (IWBTG), but its genre is turn-based strategy and at the end some people might call you a cheater. Well, I'm fine with ignorants (insufficient PR is to blame), but the problem is that the "gameplay" is not fun 99% of time (when framewhoring). It became especially tedious when we got Lag Counter and Lua, so we lost any excuse for being imperfect.
TL;DR: It would be great if someone could define new set of rules involving using tools while not aiming for speed. Or aiming, but without so much stress. Somehow.
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feos wrote:
Asceticism overcomes human limitations, makes human a superhuman. So do we, making play a superplay, involving both artistic eye and nerdish work.
Uh, you're touching subjects too timid to discuss openly. At least not on gamers' forum.
feos wrote:
moozooh wrote:
A game doesn't do or act on its own, it reacts; that is, responds to the actions of the player. Consequently it can't have abilities to explore; the word you're looking for is possibility.
If you teach your dog to do some cool things, it may be called reacting to your commands. We provide commands to these games. But how they process our commands may appear really unexpectable! Though everithing is deterministic and reproducible, not everyone has enough knowledge and motivation to work everything he needs out. Because it requires reverse engineering more or less (finding RAM addresses is that too).
Moozooh's point is about using strict terminology. Only Subject can have abilities, an Object (game) can have possibilities. In Russian it's the same different words (способности/возможности)
Anyway, that first post is just a bunch of pathos mataphors, you suck at this. The text doesn't even look very honest itself, how would you expect it to make people think more openly?
Noone know why people TAS. TASing is not very rewarding process itself, so people created external reasonings - competitions (world record) and community support. But it's the same story as at, say, Demoscene. TASing is not special in that matter.
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FatRatKnight wrote:
Although, the spiky weapon can knock away projectiles, any possible lag reduction must make up for purchasing it from the shop as well as the time taken to equip it.
Unfortunately with this weapon you cannot grapple, so you have to reequip it every time. Thus this way of lag reduction doesn't pay off (at least it didn't pay off in my old tests, although maybe I wasn't managing lag as efficiently as possible, because there was no Lag Counter tool in 2006).
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Well actually I synced feos' Battletoads WIP 8 on both 2.1.5 and 2.1.6
Ah, I see! You used old FCEUX 2.1.5-Interim which is basically 2.1.4. It even says emuVersion 2.10.40 in your movie, and this Rockin' Kats submission was made in interim too, good thing that this particular game syncs with official release of 2.1.5.
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
FCEUX 2.1.4, FCEUX 2.1.5 and FCEUX 2.1.6 shares the same code that used for emulating games, it didn't changed.
Actually id did! And that's why I was surprised that Rockin' Kats sync on both 2.1.4 and 2.1.5.
Try that WIP of Battletoads you mentioned, it syncs on 2.1.4 and doesn't sync on 2.1.5, because in 2.1.5 there's nasty bug caused by mapper revision.
This bug was fixed in 2.1.6, so Battletoads (and probably all other runs made for 2.1.4) will sync in 2.1.6 (while not necessary syncing in 2.1.5).
MESHUGGAH wrote:
But newer versions which will have corrections/improvements/further developed code won't sync this run.
Sure, but this also applies to any other NES game. And Rockin' Kats actually appears to be more sync-stable than Battletoads.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
last night feos contacted me about debugging Battletoads. I actually discovered that both games shares these kind of issues (cpu cycle dependency, and RTI in input polls). And I improved his upcoming WIP with 68 frames (the warping section) after a bit of trace log comparing and translating feos' notes from russian to english.
Hey! These were my notes! :D
Nice job with improvement, but it's still far from what could be achieved by reverse-engineering that stuff I addressed there.
Huh, but where did you find RTI in input polls there?? I see standard poll procedure, nothing fancy. As for cpu cycle dependency, well, majority of NES games have this issue, don't blame RK for that.
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Yeah, I guess this game is too complex for a 3 weeks contest. You either devote all your time to TASing it, or you forfeit.
A lot of tricks were already found before the contest, and players had to master them just to produce anything submit-worthy.
Maybe for next DTC judges should pick some less-known game, so that contestants can find unique tricks themselves, some will find more then others.
It's still awesome that a couple of new tricks were found during this contest. Probably it's time to create "Rockin'Kats Tricks" page in Game Resources.
Team1's movie seems more like 1st-test run, where many bland places were deliberately left unoptimized, and more attention was put into finding new tricks.
Team2 put more effort into acrobatics, these almost match Aglar's level of polish. Great that you achieved this high level in such short time. And of course advanced luck manipulation, it was basically the decisive point of the contest.
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Watched this twice after watching Team1's movie, and yet didn't get bored! The game has enough variety and tricks, and its pace isn't as slow as in some other NES platformers.
Gotta admire FatRatKnight's patience for putting so much effort into solving acrobatic puzzles throughout all 5 channels. Last time I tried to TAS the game (5 years ago) I've only found enough patience to polish Channel X, and it took me same 3 weeks or so.
Well, sure, some parts here looked less optimized than in Aglar's wip, but it's hard to compare because of different channels route and therefore different lag picture.
So even though this run is improvable, I agree it's not wise to continue polishing it using same old tools (savestates and Frame Advance), because it would require investing too much time for increasingly smaller amounts of saved frames.
Oh, and nice touch with subtitles, I wish people used them more often.
There was a line in the subtitles about not using dances to avoid lag. If I remember correctly from my experience, there IS some room for dances, but it should be done very carefully. I understand that you didn't have the time for that.
FatRatKnight wrote:
Unfortunately, we crashed into a pretty severe problem at the refight of that same boss. Namely, the lack of any decent RNGs within several hundred RNG-rolls. We couldn't get anything less than 8 sets of light-drops in decent time.
So we took an alternate solution: Destroy those side minions. For whatever reason, destroying them prevents further light drops. Fun, no more need to manipulate that.
That actually went pretty fast, good idea. (plus some variety for entertainment) Although maybe it would be faster to manipulate by waiting in channel select screen. Team1 did it in rather stylish manner (roulette-like choosing).
MESHUGGAH wrote:
It worths mention that the game has MANY emulator issues, which won't be fixed in the near future
Can you tell what are these issues in particular?
BTW, both contestants' runs sync well on 2.1.5 and 2.1.4a (and on 2.1.6 as well), using OldPPU of course.
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Derakon wrote:
* End input as soon as the game will end on its own (with no further input)
* End input as soon as it is impossible for further input to prevent the end of the game
* End input as soon as the game begins its ending
When we're talking about pure speedruns, I think only the first type of ending suits TASing ideas in full.
To achieve fastest completion we're using every resource the game provides. When possible, we even use the game engine as a hexeditor to edit RAM.
So it's only natural to use the game engine as an eventeditor to program auto-completion of some levels. Usually it's more difficult to prepare everything right instead of playing manually. And when TASer manages to find a clever way to end input earlier, I consider it a valid trick, on par with route planning and resource management.
King's Bounty is good example. If TASer can find a way to program all game events in 10 frames of title screen input, why should he continue pressing buttons for several minutes if he already won the game in perspective?
This submission is okay, no co-authorship needed, but I'd like to see the improvement Adelikat mentioned (that one involving route change).
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goofydylan8 wrote:
Is it possible to use the Zapper while using TAS Editor or is that feature not built in yet?
I tried but could not figure out a way for it to work.
Currently Tas Editor goes through heavy remaking, but there's no plans to add the zapper feature.
NES zapper games are too trivial to optimize, I don't think you need that amount of precision Taseditor provides. In fact, you can make frame-perfect TAS of, say, Duck Hunt, without even Frame Advance key.
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Let me grumble too.
Encodes actually kill TASing spirit hidden inside watchers.
When people were forced to watch runs on emulator, they had a chance to tinker about, test whatever parts of the run seemed improvable, or just play this new game they didn't know about before seeing the TAS. And when playing the game people find tricks and glitches. They don't find them when watching encodes.
No wonder that majority of recent newcomers aren't TASers (while in the past majority of this forum members tried to tas something).
Encodes just make people more lazy, not more happy or anything. So no need to further encourage this vicious tendency, soon it will prevail anyway. Because encoding is much easier than TASing, so I foresee in 2012 all submissions will naturally have 0day encode as a norm. And TASers will be all the same people.
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Found the cause of this problem.
It appears only when you use "Play Movie From Beginning" feature (Shift-R by default).
Some TASers manually switch Read-Only mode and load savestate near beginning to watch their progress, thus they didn't meet this bug.
Now it's fixed in FCEUX 2.1.6 which will probably be released next month.
Details:
When you press "Play Movie From Beginning" while in Read+Write mode, the feature resets emulator and then switches to Read-Only mode.
Now it first switches to Read-Only mode and then resets emulator.
FatRatKnight wrote:
At other times, I had an incomplete record made. That is, despite having recorded several hundred frames at some point, when I replay the movie, those frames did not appear in the movie file at all. Not sure if it's related.
Definitely not related. If you can track the problem, I may try to fix it.
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DarkKobold wrote:
Teams:
Team 1: Acmlm, Alden, Kumquat, XKeeper - "Temporarily Assigned Sobriquet".
Team 2: pirate_sephiroth, FatRatKnight, Tompa, MESHUGGAH
Team 3: Scumtron, Bhetz Rhy, TheRandomPie_IV, MUGG
Team 4: partyboy1a, Nitrogenesis, Truncated, BrandonE - "partycated NitrodonE"
Hey, people, let's share expectations.
Here's hoping that final run will be less than 15 minutes.
And I'm personally rooting for Team 1! Go, romhacking powa!
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I see no problem in unskippable cunscenes, sure they somewhat decrease entertainment by messing with fast pace of runs, but I thought the contest wasn't about entertainment.
I actually like the idea of making entartainment-oriented contest, but that's better for next time.
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
BTW if Rockin Kats wins this is gonna become much more a frame war than a real contest.
Well, framewars are real test for TASer's skills, aren't they? ;)
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
All runs will look exactly the same.
Not necessary. Maybe someone finds better route of channels yet.
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Can't you people see it's a stupid 100 years old NES game. And a very lame game even for those standards.
Ok, now I'm offended. So I'll let you know, you're just afraid of losing a contest that got rid of random winning factors (those factors outside of TASer's comfort zone). I think you'd propose rule of tasing blindfolded just to further confuse winning conditions.
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I'm voting for Chronos Twin and Rockin' Kats.
Sorcerer's Maze and Crouching Tiger are too long for a contest, and Captain Commando isn't suitable, because this contest is all about speed, not entertainment.
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Somewhere in 1999 I found strange PC game "Battlemaster" on a pirate CD called "200 best games: RPG and QUEST", now I know this game was actually Kgen98 + B.SMD ROM. But back then I didn't know anything about emulation, and the game sucked anyway. So I prefer to start counting from late 2000, when I've got fairly regular Internet access and soon (probably in early 2001) learned about Nesticle, ZSNES and Kgen/Genecyst.
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I remember being told that TASvideos isn't purely a records site, so since faster run is presumably more entertaining, it's more valuable than "indisputably legitimate record" run. I voted "Fastest".
Patashu wrote:
What about games that use uninitialized RAM for random numbers (or other quirks of behaviour)? Is there a tool for nesbot that cleans RAM before starting so it'll be like in the TAS?
Honestly, this is such a speculation - about using uninitialized RAM.
Do you recall any single example of NES game using uninitialized RAM as a seed for RNG? I don't. And I know why it wouldn't be practical.
Uninitialized RAM has little entropy, thus it is not good source for RNG seed. When console is switched on, its RAM is cleared/set to FF, and even if there are some differences between consoles from different regions, a value in any particular memory cell is not random enough to serve as a seed for RNG. Player's input is much more reliable for such purpose (truly random).
Warp wrote:
Noob Irdoh wrote:
even the room temperature or a slight variation in the voltage supplied can alter the behaviour and the outcome of the game.
Could you elaborate? Usually computers are by definition deterministic and non-determinism is undesirable and would cause erratic behavior and constant malfunction.
Indeed. This room temperature and stuff is another groundless speculation.
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Thanks for the clarification. Glad to see Adelikat is more reasonable admin than DarkKobold! I guess tech guys simply can't into gentleness (me too).
So I'll just repeat old proposal:
1. Bans should be public. It's as easy as creating one forum topic (in "Sites") with list of banned users in the first post.
2. Forum banning shouldn't automatically cause site banning/IRC banning and so on. These activities are too different.
3. Perma-bans are ruthless, they should only be applied to trolls (it's similar to deleting user account), not to vested members and contributors/TASers.
4. General guideline: bans should be as rare as possible. Once for a moment I had the felling that DK is gonna ban Warp, glad it didn't happen, but the whole atmosphere of admin rampage is not healthy for communities.
5. :)
