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Has anyone thought of developing the "input animation" thing further?
Animated Input (For Real)
One idea I had is to create something similar to Star Control, where the cockpit view of the ship pilot is animated to correspond the player input:
Currently, FCEU has nice and informative image of a NES controller that shows the active input, but adding hands to it might make it funnier to watch. For a more interesting result, a unique image for every 256 button combinations could be made, so that the input display would look more versatile with all the different hand movements. It would take some work to draw all the 256 images, but mostly they should be based on each other, so that the animation would not get too jerky and hard to follow.
There are many possibilities for drawing 256 images, so it would not necessarily need to be the player hands. For a purely visual experience, any 256 images could be used. Use your imagination for funny results here.
TAS Music
Same as above, but with 255 different sound effects. (For a poorer experience, 8 sound effects could be used, one for each button.)
Assigning various instrument samples for the buttons might be a good idea. Afterall, TAS input files resemble MIDI tracks and usually have some repeating rhythms. Lots of drums and percussions might work to avoid cacophonic or monotonus melodies.
Additionally, this could be combined with 256 (or 8) images of a musician.
MorTAS Kombat
This is another idea I got from Star Control: How about making two TAS input files fight against each other with space ships? This would require some serious work from the coder, but the resulting program might be hilarious. The program, preferably called MorTAS Kombat, would load two input files and use them to move two simple player characters or space ships. The buttons could be assigned for something like this:
D-Pad: Movement
A: Fire weapon 1
B: Fire weapon 2
Select: Something special
Start: Something special 2
For additional fun, left-right combination should be made to produce super speed.
For even more additional fun, long wobbling patterns on D-Pad should activate a powerful self-destruct attack.
Maybe some fighting game hack would be easier to make for this purpose than a completely new game?
Color a Dinosaur!
Number of frames in the TAS (movie size) = Number of pixels in the dinosaur (image size)
Number of available input patterns on a single frame (256) = Number of available colors for each pixel (256)
Number of existing TAS movies (thousands!) = Number of different dinosaurs (thousands!)
Replay-Generated Meta-TAS (Oh-yes!)
First, generate a continuous real-time stream of random input for the controller. Or preferably, use an existing TAS input.
Then, assign additional replayed input of an existing TAS (a meta-movie) for emulator functions:
D-Pad: frame advance
A: save state
B: load state
Select: switch save slot
Start: fast-forward
Then, replay some movie and watch how the input of an existing TAS uses the emulator to record a new TAS. In other words, the result would be TAS input visualized as a TAS-making process.
Generally
Input -> Input Visualization Tool -> Output
Just think of ways to use the input to produce surprising, artistic, informative, funny or redundant output. Please, go ahead and develop your own ideas. Have fun!
I have no experience in graphics design or coding, so I could not implement any of these things. These are just ideas that happened to come to my mind. Nothing useful, but hopefully funny. I'm not expecting anyone to make these silly things reality, but if it happens for any of these ideas, I will LMAO and donate 1500 rerecords (for any game on FCEU or Gens) for the author of the tool.
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My estimate is that this movie can still be improved by at least a minute. The boss fights were generally the most noticeable parts that could be improved in your run, like the first boss fight, which can be done faster by not walking behind the boss. Sorry, voting "no".
Anyway, it is GREAT to have another person here who is interested recording movies with this game. Please don't take this "no" vote too hard, VolcanoStormWind. I'm your friend and I like the movie to some extent.
Oh, I think www.speedruns.net might be glad to publish your movie.
NesVideoAgent wrote:
I really need 3 axes to beat the last guardian the fastest way
Are you sure about that? The final boss can be damaged only by killing the snakes that it releases at even pace. Using the spears might be equally fast.
I enjoyed watching that one. It has:
- short lenght (I watched it three times without getting bored!)
- funny graphics
- happiness
- funny (stupid) music
- speed powerups
- suspense
- death as a shortcut!
- 1985
- ninjas
If girfanatic501 (or anybody) makes a new movie that improves it further, I will very likely vote "yes" for it. The game makes me smile.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Yep, the problem with multimedia re-recording is that the resulting product can not be validated: there's no way to verify whether it was actually the product of playing or if some video editing trickery transpired.
Well, you could always ask the author to explain the parts which look suspicious. Every existing trick can be replicated and people who know the game will easily spot even tiny game modifications or video edits. No validation system could ever be 100% fool-proof, but I think that the best movies would have a higher probability of being valid, because a good TASer needs no video editing trickery to produce movies that look suspicious. :)
I suppose one of the easiest ways to cheat would be to fix some random encounters in RPGs. Generally, valid luck-manipulation would be hard to verify. But most of the times the cheater would be caught eventually or the cheated movie (probably featuring sloppy gameplay) improved by someone who can TAS for real.
Interestingly, the validation problem goes both ways: If somebody made a completely valid movie, which uses a super rare glitch that nobody could ever replicate, people might not believe it to be valid. The poor TASer ninja would then be very sad.
To further make the validation problem seem bigger than it is: Somebody might make an invalid TAS unintenionally by using a bad/hacked ROM without knowing it. This could happen easily, unless some sort of ROM checksum type of solution is used for verifying that everyone uses the same version of the game.
In any case, the validation problem will surely not ruin the fun of Multimedia TASing (MTAS?) any more than it ruins the fun of the SDA-style speedrunning.
stickyman05 wrote:
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nfq wrote:
nothing matters...
Absolute statements like that have a tendency of being contradictory or confusing in some way.
1. Nothing matters.
2. So, the statement "nothing matters" does not matter.
3. So, I don't need to care about statement 1?
4. So, maybe there's a chance that something matters after all?
Maybe there's something wrong with that logic, but to me it seems ok. It makes certain type of absolute statements look silly:
1. Everything ends someday.
2. So, the situation that "everything ends" is a valid statement, ends someday.
3. So, there might be something that does not end afterall. Right?
Similarly:
1. Everything is temporary.
2. So, the temporality of everything is temporary too.
3. So, does this mean that everything is not temporary afterall?
Also:
1. Everything is relative.
2. So, relativity is relative too.
3. So, relativity is not absolute.
4. So, there might be something that is not relative afterall?
Oh, this one seems cool:
Everything should be questioned!
Well, just like nfq, I'm not good with logic, because I lack some conceptual tools for better handling of these situations, but in any case, statements like "nothing matters" don't matter to me. The world is more complicated than that. And maybe it is not the logic of the statement that is important here anyway. The more important thing is that it is certainly possible to genuinely have the negative feeling that nothing has purpose. The feeling can be problematic for some people and the problems should be resolved somehow. I'm not professional with that kind of stuff, but for me, purposefullness is not necessarily required for anything.
Fabian wrote:
Do you have any advice for me? What do you think I should do? Thanks.
Your own answer to that question seems to suggest that the question is rethorical in the sense that nobody can really give you any better advice than you yourself did. Nobody really knows what you should do. People have different backgrounds and worldviews, so it is meaningless to even try giving any normative advice. It would not work. Just like you can't tell someone to "just relax", if the person in question hears a voice in his/her head or has some serious phobia.
Well, anyway, here comes some random thoughts of mine that got summoned by this thread, possibly not helpful at all:
I can't understand the thought of "wasting time". I have cancelled school twice, but I still feel the years were not anyhow wasted. Maybe I missed some point somewhere.
People get confused easily these days, because it seems that the world tells them what they should be. I've met many people who have tremendous pressure on them and the source of the pressure is external. The world tells you to grow up, even though there exists no such people as "adults". The world tells you to gather property and achieve some certain thing that actually has no more or less meaning than some other thing. If you stop and listen carefully, nobody really forces you to achieve some certain thing. People mess around. The world is silent. Enjoy the silence.
I have achieved mostly nothing in my life (if you measure it in the way contemporary western media measures it), but I've been happier than most people I've met. My whole property would easily fit in a chest. I have not planned my life financially at all. Things will work out somehow. If I meet a brick wall someday and can't zip through it, I'll enjoy the drama. Tragedies are one of my favorite forms of art anyway. Like, I once dated a girl whose father was a millionaire. She was beautiful, I cared about her, she loved me and everything seemed great. Anyway, I dumped her, because of another girl, who I had fantasised about for a long time even before the current relationship had started. Sadly, this new girlfriend turned out to have some tragic childhood traumas that made the relationship very difficult, so it did not last long. In the process I did learn a lot about all kinds of important things that I would have otherwise missed, even though I lost the potential load of money from the first girl's father and my fantasies about the other girl shattered. I think I also lost the concept of romantic love at some point, for the time being. Sometimes our decisions have surprising results. It is funny and makes life enjoyable in the long run, even though eventually all of us will be hurt badly at some point.
All the other people can handle life until they die, so it can't be that bad for you or me either. Many people are poor in this world and lack water to drink. That is sad, but I have done nothing to change it. So, the fact that I don't know what to do for living seems a bit embarrassing, when my basic needs are satisfied, even though I have no real job. I could choose any school I want, but I seem to get bored in them at some point, because there is currently no urgent need for me to achieve formal education. Maybe I should look further into the future, but it is difficult, when nobody forces me to do so. Maybe I'm just stupid and can't see the whole picture, but if I look at some cats, they seem to lay around and hunt some small animals. I have no need to achieve more than they do, but I must admit I pollute a bit more than cats, which is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate, if you don't know "what to do with your life", if you have some externally delivered need for "doing something with your life". Anyway, try not to worry if possible, something happens sooner or later and every uncertain situation in life will get resolved in a way or another as time passes. Hopefully you find a way to resolve the problems yourself.
[redundant]Well, that didn't help much, I suppose.[/redundant]
AKA wrote:
Although to cap it off there is still things about life and the universe that puzzle me and I'm afraid I'll never be able to figure it all out before my time comes to an end.
Yeah, and no matter how much you know, you still have no chance of fully understanding even yourself (although, maybe with some drugs, one might achieve a temporal state of seemingly "understanding everything"). For me, it is possible to cope with the puzzling feeling and even enjoy the constant precense of a mystery. Enjoy what you've got. There's plenty of possibilities for small-scale "eurekas" every day, but it requires an open-minded attitude and realistical acceptance of one's own incompetence. I have no tremendous urge to understand stuff, but I thoroughly enjoy when I learn something new. Sometimes I intentionally seek experiences that are against my normal life, like visiting a gay bar, just to avoid getting stuck into some strict thought models. Negative closed-mindedness can occur easily and I may not even notice it myself. I agree with AKA that sharing knowledge is important. We live interesting times, when I think about that. Oh, but I don't want to derail Fabian's nice thread too much.
The squirrel comic Dromiceius posted is good. It took me many years before I learned to enjoy squirrels. I like the sound they make. They seem to be puzzled most of the time, possibly due to the presence of a human, but they enjoy the silence of the forest. If you can enjoy the silence of the forest, then you have no worries. *sigh*
Maybe somebody (like moozooh, who can write well) should make a thread called "TASer Interviews", which would include about 100 questions for TASers to answer, if they want to, so that people could answer some questions without making multiple threads like this one. I'm sure some people (like me) would be interested sharing their thoughts about stuff.
Oh, I almost forgot:
Dear Fabian,
What do you think about squirrels?
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The play quality was ok, good job Chamale!
However, I'm voting "no", because the hardest difficulty setting was not used. COM level 3 is much harder opponent and might produce a more entertaining result. Right?
This is one of the childhood games I played a lot with friends (mostly against each other, which was so fun back then!), so hopefully I know what I'm talking about here.
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zefiris wrote:
I can't think of many right-to-left ot top-to-bottom games.
Yeah, it is strange. I suppose Tetris is not a top-to-bottom game in this sense. I wish there were a "mirroring" function in the emulators, so you could play all the platformers to the opposite direction. It might give new insight to the games.
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I have some hope that this will be cool to see. Good luck AngerFist!
By the way, has anyone considered making a multi-game TAS for autoscroller games? I think that even with 10 autoscrollers, it might still look interesting as opposed to 10 platformer games, because autoscrollers move at constant speed and have strictly limited possibilities for movements, thus being easier to follow.
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moozooh wrote:
Aqfaq wrote:
Looks great. I wish there were more Contra games for adelikat to devastate.
^^^
Oh, there exists a SNES game called Realm, which has very Contra-like gameplay with all the different weapons and lots of boss fights. I believe the game can be completed in 10 minutes. It is fast-paced and has nice graphics:
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Wow, thanks!
Phew, I'm relieved you finished it finally, Lion Mukking. Well done!
Oh, there was some lag in the lava level (in the part where you needed to wait for your ride) but maybe it was unavoidable or a result of speed/entertainment trade-off? To me it seemed to be the many bats and some hyenas nearby that caused a lot of action on-screen and then some lag.
Heh, it was funny how you lured the hyena into the lava. It sank so fast that it did not even splash!
Well, it is a superb TAS. Just like Contra without the armed wolf and exploding robots, so only slightly less entertaining. Technically, I can't imagine this being improved below 14 minutes without some serious jungle-bungle-bugs. Mukki is really careful with small details.
Anyway, there exists some tricks that fail only barely, so the future of this movie is still open for surprises, as always.
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Nice solutions. I remember getting stuck in a few levels for a very long time, when I completed this game some years ago.
The movie is long only because the game has many levels. That is not so bad thing. Voting "yes".
Rick wrote:
Who the heck voted no?
Your question could be optimized a bit by skipping the "heck".
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Currently, there are about 18 different tricks/glitches that I've found in Gods. Here is a list of them:
Fast Turnaround
Fast Shooting
Health Bonus Score Overflow
Misplaced Death Animation
Obscured Climbing Animation and Total Graphics Overflow
Falling Mechanics Fluctuation
Bomb Jumping
Bomb Climbing
Chaotic Overflow Glitches
Fast Item Usage
Item Annihilation
Using "Wrong" Keys to Open Doors
Misplaced Sound Effect
(Some) Damaged Enemies Cause Less Collision Damage
Absent Boss AI
Skipping Event Triggers
Gameplay Demo Desynch
Wandering Shopkeeper & Game Freezing
+ some level specific stuff
+ some minor oddities
I could write a wiki page explaining all of these briefly, but I'm not sure if it is a good idea. Afterall, Gods is not that popular game. I would like to hear opinions: wiki page or forum-exclusive?
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VolcanoStormWind wrote:
Well this treasure room looks very nice, but I think it's not in the Genesis version, because I read somewhere that when you get immortality you get like 20 lives, so this place should be in a way or another, accessible just after you beat the last guardian.
Even if the secret is triggered only with a huge number of lives, that is not a problem in the Genesis version, because you can get about 25 extra lives with the health bonus score overflow glitch (by dying simultaneously with level completion).
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Truncated wrote:
One thought I had: did you time the difference in taking a hit in the shortcut VS killing one of the monsters before the level ends? You said they were stronger, but you have to wait for some time to enter the shortcut too.
Hahah, guess what, young Truncated from 2005. Your idea works afterall, because shooting from ladders takes only 8 frames, while shooting on ground takes 10 frames. So, with ladder-shooting, it is indeed faster to kill one of the monsters in the end instead of the monster at the shortcut. Thanks for the tip, I managed to improve world 1-1 by 6 frames. :)
6 frames is technically 3 in-game states, because every frame is duplicated, so you can see that the improvement is very subtle. Gods is full of this kind of situations where some completely different strategies take almost exactly the same time. Third strategy in world 1-1 is to die at the first key. It will be 24 frames faster until the beginning of level 1-3, thanks to less time wasted in lives bonus countdown. However, I have not managed to do it AND avoid spawning the enemy in the end of world 1-2, so I need to bump to that enemy and waste health, which causes serious problems in world 1-3.
Oh, but I found yet another improvement. I'll explain it here for your amusement.
I still need to wait for the world 1-1 shortcut to open, so I thought about ways to use that waiting time. I then realised that using this waiting time to switch the inventory slot (twice) will save time later. That is because when I buy an invulnerability from the shop, the merchant puts it in the first item slot. In my current fastest movie, I need to switch the slot three times to use the invulnerability, but in my future movie, I will need to do it only once, thanks to the well used waiting time at the shortcut. Got it? It is a rather surprising timesaver: Switch item slot (twice) in world 1-1 to use an item faster in world 1-3 (more than a minute later). Also, the waiting time at the shortcut seems to be the only possible place to switch the item slots for free. This item handling detail saves 8 frames. Cool, huh?
So far, I've found almost 3 seconds of improvements over the current publication. I'm not sure when I complete the new version, though.
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It gets too complicated. Those definitions would probably always be either too vague or too game specific.
* Luck manipulation to affect enemy item drops
* Luck manipulation to make the enemy behave a certain way
* Luck manipulation to prevent some time-wasting event from happening
* Luck manipulation for critical hits
* Full control of the Random Number Generator (for the shining force run)
There is also the type of luck manipulation where the player first manipulates something and then makes a correct guess. Like in Turtles(?), where some boss is manipulated to appear in one of the few possible caves and then the player guesses what cave is the correct one. Also, in King's Bounty, the player first manipulates the Sceptre of Order in a desirable location and then makes a guess that it is there. This type of situations are different from manipulating item drops, because they have two phases.
Dwedit wrote:
Uses UP+DOWN or LEFT+RIGHT
Well, this is the most clear case and might be worth mentioning separately, since it is an emulator setting too.
Currently, FCEU has nice and informative image of a NES controller that shows the active input, but adding hands to it might make it funnier to watch. For a more interesting result, a unique image for every 256 button combinations could be made, so that the input display would look more versatile with all the different hand movements. It would take some work to draw all the 256 images, but mostly they should be based on each other, so that the animation would not get too jerky and hard to follow.
There are many possibilities for drawing 256 images, so it would not necessarily need to be the player hands. For a purely visual experience, any 256 images could be used. Use your imagination for funny results here.
TAS Music
Same as above, but with 255 different sound effects. (For a poorer experience, 8 sound effects could be used, one for each button.)
Assigning various instrument samples for the buttons might be a good idea. Afterall, TAS input files resemble MIDI tracks and usually have some repeating rhythms. Lots of drums and percussions might work to avoid cacophonic or monotonus melodies.
Additionally, this could be combined with 256 (or 8) images of a musician.
MorTAS Kombat
This is another idea I got from Star Control: How about making two TAS input files fight against each other with space ships? This would require some serious work from the coder, but the resulting program might be hilarious. The program, preferably called MorTAS Kombat, would load two input files and use them to move two simple player characters or space ships. The buttons could be assigned for something like this:
D-Pad: Movement
A: Fire weapon 1
B: Fire weapon 2
Select: Something special
Start: Something special 2
For additional fun, left-right combination should be made to produce super speed.
For even more additional fun, long wobbling patterns on D-Pad should activate a powerful self-destruct attack.
Maybe some fighting game hack would be easier to make for this purpose than a completely new game?
Color a Dinosaur!
Number of frames in the TAS (movie size) = Number of pixels in the dinosaur (image size)
Number of available input patterns on a single frame (256) = Number of available colors for each pixel (256)
Number of existing TAS movies (thousands!) = Number of different dinosaurs (thousands!)
Replay-Generated Meta-TAS (Oh-yes!)
First, generate a continuous real-time stream of random input for the controller. Or preferably, use an existing TAS input.
Then, assign additional replayed input of an existing TAS (a meta-movie) for emulator functions:
D-Pad: frame advance
A: save state
B: load state
Select: switch save slot
Start: fast-forward
Then, replay some movie and watch how the input of an existing TAS uses the emulator to record a new TAS. In other words, the result would be TAS input visualized as a TAS-making process.
Generally
Input -> Input Visualization Tool -> Output
Just think of ways to use the input to produce surprising, artistic, informative, funny or redundant output. Please, go ahead and develop your own ideas. Have fun!
I have no experience in graphics design or coding, so I could not implement any of these things. These are just ideas that happened to come to my mind. Nothing useful, but hopefully funny. I'm not expecting anyone to make these silly things reality, but if it happens for any of these ideas, I will LMAO and donate 1500 rerecords (for any game on FCEU or Gens) for the author of the tool.
Awesome!
Sega Genesis:
Horrible!