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FODA wrote:
I wouldn't buy that you've found the fastest route on SMB if you assumed it required pressing -> + B most of the time. What about the glitches we don't know about?
That's the killer in heuristics. It misses finding all the new glitches and little tricks that can be used to gain marginal improvements.
A heuristic bot, that is programmed with the assumptions in mind that running right with B held and jumping to avoid bumping into platforms is the way to victory, would never discover the fact that jumping backwards accelerates faster than jumping forwards, when starting from zero velocity.
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qFox wrote:
I think shooting in between with power of 1 will hardly cause any delay (unless you do it three times per level ;). If you time it between the powerfluctuations...
Doing it once per level should lower the bonus-delays.
Yeah, that should help. I'll see about trying it some day.
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According to Finalfighter, there are many people in Japan who think that publishing video captures from video games breaks the (copyright?) law.
Apparently, even someone has been arrested because of it.
The copyright laws are much tighter in Japan than they are in many other countries. It can easily be seen for example by browsing the Japanese Wikipedia; it has no (or very few) image captures of video games (and very few images in general) because of the legal issues.
According to Finalfighter, I-Filter is a software installed in many places where children might use computers, and as such, it takes a very steep line in which things to censor.
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VANDAL wrote:
I found the site's address difficult to remember <...> so I usually would just type in Bisqwit in google search
And you found "Bisqwit" easy to remember and type? ;)
I know it's easy for me because I've done it thousands of times for 13 years, but others have complained :)
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I found this site... err, by creating it.
Warp wrote:
Bisqwit: Do you remember what were the first videos ever published at nesvideos? It would be an interesting trivia.
If anyone does, that would be Nach -- he has also been around since the very early days.
These are also two snapshots of the site from early.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/backup-nesvideos.htmlhttp://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/nesv-old/
It is possible that Rockman 2 was the first one. It was not SMB3, because I had a call for the Japanese ROM on the site for some while before I could encode it. (That who responded to my request, later had a published TAS but hasn't much been seen otherwise.)
After that, probably what followed were Morimoto's Gradius, Rockman and Youkai Douchuuki, then my own SMB2 (a couple of those) and my SMB1, followed by Michael Fried's SMB1, SMB2j by us both...
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Warp wrote:
IMO the logic should go the other way: The more the "header" characters, the "smaller" the header. In other words, 1 header character = main header, 2 header characters = subheader, 3 header characters = subsubheader, etc. That way it's much easier to create hierarchical sections (each with their own header) on the fly, while writing the text.
Yeah, I have considered the same thing.
The original idea was that more "!" = more important.
Maybe some day the markup will be changed.
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Highness wrote:
In such occations, would it be possible through assembly to cripple quick mans movement?
Not cripple, but we already know the algorithm of Quickman's AI.
It includes situations where he will run towards a wall for up to 90 frames straight; those could be used.
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Mlandry wrote:
We could possibly make a list of games that are ok to use fan-translations for (with a confirmation of permission from you before they actually start the run) or maybe for a game with several translations, choose which 1 is the best and stick with that one.
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Andy Olivera wrote:
My two cents: include the patch/patcher with the movie. That way, if the patch is obsoleted, the correct version will always be available for use with the run.
Sounds like an idea that solves most of the problem. Simple answers are sometimes the best.
In which situations could it be applied? I don't want it to become a loophole for accepting all kinds of "translations" that happen to hack the game in unknown ways.
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Xkeeper wrote:
Highness wrote:
I still think it would be optimal to allow a hacked translation of the hard type version.
I fully agree with this position.
I'm also leaning towards the general direction of accepting hack-translations, at least on case-by-case basis.
<Issue>The issue that called for creating the rule was that translations are updated by the translators, and being a translator myself, I feel that a translator wouldn't like their older version being showcased somewhere when a newer version is available. Because of the sync issue, a movie existing will make it more difficult for the old version to disappear in favor of the new version. And if it does, then nobody can play that movie.</Issue>
I just haven't figured out yet how to diminish that issue.
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Chamale wrote:
Bittorrent is a major problem when downloading large, unpopular or old movies.
Bittorrent is not a problem. It is a solution.
Without Bittorrent, you would be relying on a single source. Bittorrent gives you more sources.
Anyone who can contribute uploading bandwidth, can do so without having to set up servers, and that bandwidth is immediately available for anyone who wants to download those files.
It is not the software that is at issue. It is the resources. Resources come from contributors.
If I offered the AVIs for direct HTTP downloading from my server, everyone would be relying on that single source which can provide approximately 80 kB/s in total (shared for all clients, meaning divided. There are hundreds of clients.).
Others may have bigger upload bandwidths, but the issue is not "how". It is "who". Who will contribute?
You can put the AVI on some large filesharing site such as archive.org, but even then you are relying on that single source hoping that it has enough upload bandwidth to satisfy all clients.
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Ren wrote:
I'm getting "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it." in 10ish torrents that were running a while back (I kept my torrent program off for a while).
Right, forgot to startup the tracker once I rebooted.
Thanks for the reminder.
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Boco wrote:
Also keep in mind that you can and should use Frost towers to slow down the flyers and keep them in range longer.
Utilizing this fantastic idea, I went ahead with the ~infinite money hack and created this room in level 6.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt.png
The important idea here is that the outer layer of the maze consists of Zero Towers (freezers). The inner after that is BFG towers (plasma), and further inside are missiles. All of these have a range that covers the edges of the screen as well as the tunnels right beside them. The center of the screen consists of anti-aerial defenses as usual, with occasional freezers intermixed. At the bottom of screen, where I didn't expect anything to enter anytime soon, I put sniper towers which have a range of half of the board.
In several corner spots, I put sonic turrets in order to mazimize the profit of the freezers.
This strategy worked excellently. First observation, the bottom right corner of the anti-aerial defense rectangle was not actually needed until wave 86. The bottom of the screen was very idle as well.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_b.png
At wave 93, it started to become very crowded. This is when the most dangerous aerial attack begins.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_c.png
My grid actually handled them quite well. No helicopters survived.
At wave 99, the screen becomes permanently crowded. The bottom also is now in use. The enemies just have way too many hitpoints (more than 1.6 million).
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_d.png
Wave 100 is the last aerial attack. A few helicopters actually survived this assault which was hard enough to put the game crawling at about 1 fps.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_e.png
The next two or three hours were spent in this same wave, guiding the enemies back and worth through the maze at very low FPS. I actually converted some of the aerial defence towers into snipers and BFGs as no aerial enemies were expected anymore.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_f.png
Finally, it came down to the last enemy. I accidentally left it slip, though it still had over a million hps so it would have been exhausting to kill it.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level6perfectsetup_attempt_g.png
Here is the anticlimatic ending of the game.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_ending.png
By the way, here is a maze for level 5 which completes the level without interaction. http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level5perfectsetup.png
Similarly, for level 4... http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno_level4perfectsetup.png
______________
"But consider this: Our technologies are compatible. Cybermen plus Daleks ― together we could upgrade the universe."
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I hacked Xenotactic a bit. Basically giving myself infinite money.
I still didn't pass level 6 :)
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno6b.png
For the record, none of the walking aliens got past the white turret, but the aerial ones…
I didn't alternate the maze ends in this version.
EDIT: The second time was also a failure. The green turrets in this image deliver ~23000 hp of damage each. My point was to test how many DCAs you need to fend off successfully the aerial attacks. The answer is more than 27.
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno6c.png
(The reason why there were un-upgraded DCAs on the field, was that the cost of the first upgrade was ~23000$ in this hack. (And the second upgrade gives most of that back.) My starting money was also ~23000$, so I couldn't exactly do everything I wanted.)
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I finally passed map 4 after I realized that the point is not to build long paths for just the long paths' sake, but to make the enemies walk past the same weapons again and again, maximizing their profit ― and also to upgrade a few turrets to full instead of many to middle.
Screenshot here: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno4f.jpg
Applying these principles, I passed level 5 on my first attempt. In this stage, I also applied the principle of making the enemies walk the same route back and forth by changing the location of the exit hole from the maze. I am happy to have discovered this strategy independently, although I see others have used it as well. Screenshot here: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/xeno5a.jpg
I still haven't had need to concentrate fire. You can click on the enemies and all available weapons will concentrate fire on that particular enemy.
Oh, "am" / "pm".
phpBB has a single field for date and time format in the user profile.
I used a regexp to convert the formatted datetime into a date-only field,
because date+time would have been too wide.
It goes like this:
$first_post_time = create_date($board_config['default_dateformat'], $topic_rowset[$i]['topic_time'], $board_config['board_timezone']);
$first_post_time = trim(ereg_replace('[0-9]+:[0-9][0-9:]+', '', $first_post_time));
Anyone have ideas how to change this so that it fixes not only P.JBoy's problem, but also the same potential problem for any other datetime format user may have entered in their profile?
For the record, mine is Y-m-d H:i:s, which looks like "2007-07-10 15:30:24".
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moozooh wrote:
Umm, actually, wouldn't Mario fall into the pit if he goes through the wall? You only can go under a tile, not through a middle of a tile.
True, but more importantly, as I posted previously, the screen does not scroll without Mario walking to the right. Ejection does not count as walking.
If Mario is ejected to the screen right edge, he's just stuck there.
Chamale wrote:
The times they're changing
If you want to end SMB with Mario being terminally stuck in the right edge of the screen, you needn't look further but the 1-1 stage. You can do so in the bonus cave.
Or, in 1-2: interrupt the movie when Mario enters the wall.
Or 4-2, similar.
No, I don't see a rule change.
