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I'm in the process of TASing this game as well, IIRC four levels done. I'm compare yours to mine when I get home...
EDIT: Done. Here's the comparison (2 MB).
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/hinotocomp.avi
Yours is on the right.
In the first stage, you beat me by about 5 frames. Congratulations.
In the second stage, I beat you by about 30 frames. (I had regained those 5 frames even before reaching the boss's cube.)
I guess you'll have to redo stage 2 :)
I'll cancel my WIP, because I don't feel like restarting and it's in excess to have so many authors working on this small insignificant game.
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I'll remove it from Mega Man.
Quoting myself at http://tasvideos.org/forum/p/100196#100196…
> By "semi-important goals" I'm usually referring to quests that are normally
> done in the playing, that are considered part of the game's plot. They don't
> need to be mandatory or optional.
> Maybe that tag doesn't belong to this movie... Hmm.
Focus on the "considered part of the game's plot". I.e. an event, which could be referred to as a fact, if a sequel was made.
I'll add it in Wizards&Warriors as well, since you could consider that saving the five (?) damsels is at the core of the plot. Leaving them there to rot, and saving another damsel twice, is not how the game is supposed to end, although the grand goal is in killing the evil wizard.
Ps: If you haven't noticed, there are many other categories that are used inconsistently. In fact, nearly all of them are probably inconsistent and incomplete. The genres especially.
This used to be warned about at http://tasvideos.org/MovieSearch.html (category search).
Consistencifying them is the editorspublishers' job :P
(The reason it's not the editors' job is because there are quite many editors and the site provides no means to track changes in the categories; it's too easy to insert errors there (even inadvertedly) and nobody to notice it. A changelog feature in them would allow reopening it to editors.)
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adelikat wrote:
The debate is settled, the "wild warp" cheat is fair game. It would have been nice to have some explanation on why this debugging code is okay and not others but alas...
In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to accept the previous movie. I think, I raised the concern about the feature being a rules-breaker, but then went and published the movie regardless because it had received good votes.
But, what is done is done. I don't take down movies that have already been published. But perhaps, it could be moved into the concept demo category.
If that is done, this movie should be judged separately.
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Mr. Pwnage wrote:
I noticed that the "magnet beam solidification" subtitle from v8 was retained in this version, even though that code extension wasn't actually used. The rest of the subtitle file was significantly different, so where did that come from?
I decided to not use the magnet beam patch, because some might feel it changes the game. I however forgot to remove that subtitle.
comicalflop wrote:
I actually think the subtitles that explain to old watchers to skip to 9:30 is not needed
Perhaps...
comicalflop wrote:
semi-important generally refers to goals in the game that are optional yet recommended, I'm pretty sure the seconds boss fights are not optional i.e. you have to fight them to procede.
By "semi-important goals" I'm usually referring to quests that are normally done in the playing, that are considered part of the game's plot. They don't need to be mandatory or optional.
Maybe that tag doesn't belong to this movie... Hmm.
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fruitofwisdom wrote:
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.
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nitsuja wrote:
(The only possible benefit I could think of would be to reduce the amount of arguing over whether a given movie should be a concept demo, but maybe that argument is a form of useful input in deciding where the movie should go.)
I really don't understand where this arguing suddenly became from, and why. It has never been a problem before... Is it some kind of mass reaction? (I.e. everyone is shouting, maybe I should too?)
moozooh wrote:
I really think Bisqwit needs a good assistant at his site management, because I don't want to (and don't think I have a right to) blame him for general reluctance to accept certain changes or improve some aspects of the site that somewhat hinder its progress. Because I can assure you that if I had a per-game movie listing system, I'd gladly help maintaining its content.
As far as movie publishing is concerned, granting stars (or editing the recommendation status in general) is currently the only web-accessible feature in the site, that only I have access to. All other features have been made to at least one other user.
All other only-for-me features require server access, including:
- Removing old torrent files from tracker
- Updating the site source code (layout and functionality)
- Repairing the database and database maintenance in general.
There have so far been approximately two users, who have had a copy of the site's source code. Also Warp has had partial write access to the source code for developing modules.
I have considered opening up the source code of the site entirely (in fact, I recently even set up an SVN server for easing that goal), but I haven't done it, most importantly because there has been nobody who is so interested in the source code that they would ask. I won't open it publicly, because of security concerns. There are pathnames and stuff in it that I'd rather not disclose (need-to-know).
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Antarctic Adventure has been done at least once, on this site. It was not published.
However, I cannot find it anywhere; even the Search yields nothing useful. I don't know why.
Anyway, unless you can do something unexpected in this game, I don't recommend TASing it. It is quite a boring game.
However, it's a cool game especially in that it's completely non-violent (if you don't count eating fish as violent).
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Yes, Bag Of Magic Food indeed did post an informative post. Hard to believe, yes.
Truncated wrote:
I tried to find where Bisqwit explained this, but I couldn't.
<adelikat> Bisqwit: after the clone fight there is that long corridor that you zip through. In the old version the sound of you pausing as you zipped started slow and gradually got faster. This time it is fast the whole time. What changed?
<Bisqwit> adelikat: The tempo by which I pressed Start. There's no other meaning to that. I played it differently. Whim.
<Bisqwit> It's not actually a lag issue. It's that the tunnel has a different horizontal movement engine than the rest of the game (due to the liquid). This engine doesn't contain zipping support. Rockman must be kept perpetually in the transformation mode in order to zip, because then it uses the default engine.
<Bisqwit >The rate of transformation is not relevant, only that he must not be allowed to stop transforming before the stripe ends.
<Bisqwit> By pressing Start while transforming, and while the previously created magnet beam still has life in it (preventing weapon dialog from being opened), he is made to transform continuously.
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Graphics glitch at chainsawman. Does Donatello do metamorphosis?
Another graphics glitch at the girl's guardian monster, and since when did Donatello do telekinesis??
The turtles make air bubbles in the water. This I can't credit you for, though.
Cleverly executed suicide.
Nice job with the ladder trick. That's exactly the same as in Rockman 1.
More metamorphosis.
This game lags by default. It runs at 30 fps, except when it really lags which is even slower than that (15 to 20 fps).
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By the way, here's the source code of the Wily killer utilized in the last stage.
I'm still trying to improve it though. (More recent source at http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/bisqbotwilykillersrc.html)
(Note: The source might contain typos; this is a cleaned-up untested version. And, apparently the font ate some underscore characters.)
Sig VG wrote:
I think he's referring to the high ladder grab, like in Wily Level 2.
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FreshFeeling wrote:
Keeping in mind that I don't know anything about low-level Rockman mechanics, the two Cutmans somehow remind me of the way that, in RM2/MM2, Rockman can stand next to Wily 3's boss while detonating a crash bomb to damage it. Are they similar, um, phenomena?
I don't know about the Rockman trio in Iceman battle, but the Cutman duplicate wasn't of that kind of origin at all.
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<Autoguesser type="Missing information" enable="true" extra="incomplete topic title">
By pixelated… do you mean how it looks like when you zoom it to full screen? I assume it looks normal when you play it in normal window.
</Autoguesser>
Ensure that you don't have multiple instances of the media player active at the same time. In some display cards/drivers, only one of the windows can use accelerated features (hardware scaling of window). If the window uses software scaling, it will most likely appear pixelated because Windows does not perform interpolated scaling by default. A 3D game running at the background may also occupy the hardware scaling slot.
If that doesn't help, try rebooting. If that doesn't help, check that your display card's acceleration settings are normal (maxed out). If that doesn't help, ask someone else :P
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Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Hmm, why is it that the Select-tapping to beat the second Wily form sounds faster at the end? Can you make it that speed the whole way through? Is that why you lost time?
Unpausing can be done by both Start and Select. Starts brings up the weapon menu. However, when a shot is on the screen, the weapon menu cannot be displayed, and thus, the game continues immediately. With Select, there's the transformation delay. The penalty? With Start, the onscreen objects get a frame of actual life (hence shots can move past enemies so that they won't hit anymore). With Select, they stick in place. (However, Wily's carriage defies this logic because its movement is programmed in NMI, not object code.)
> I think no one.
Wrong.
I just made it a bit unpredictable.
FreshFeeling wrote:
The highlight for me was the very short and very weird Cutman battle though, I think. Something from the next few frames after selecting 'G' would make an excellent screenshot.
Here are some shots Dehacked took. Can you guess the technical reason behind these?
DonamerDragon wrote:
We always assure everyone that we're not cheating, I think having a program doing for you is just as bad as using a game genie.
We're still only going as far as the game lets you.
And like GeminiSaint said, someone needs to program the bot.
For instance, in the Bombman refight, what BisqBot did was only: after I luckmanipulated Bombman to first do a tall jump and maneuvered Rockman to take damage from Bombman while throwing a bomb himself, it pressed Start randomly for ~200 frames and repeated that ad infinitum searching for the fastest way for scrolling up to happen. (Pressing Start more often yields more lag, hence slower, but pressing it less often may involve Rockman not levitating high enough to scroll to the next screen. And there's Bombman's actions (luck manipulation) to consider; his throwing a bomb is essential for the trick.)
I could do that manually, but it would be an utter, unmotivating waste of my time. That's what tools are for.
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Tub wrote:
my suggestion is to change those pages into a more game-centric way: right now, they're already sorted by game names, but there could be a stronger grouping, including a seperate Movies-<game> page with additional information the Movies-<system> index cannot provide.
In summer 2004, I originally intended the movie pages to be grouped that way -- by game. However, the system cannot work automatically, because game names for different versions are different (think Rockman vs Megaman), and manually maintaining those seemed like too much hassle back then.
> To avoid flooding the Movies-<system>-pages, those pages are only to display the main categorys for the game (as in: the most interesting movies), containing links to the game-specific page with all the other movies.
Deciding which movie is the "main" one is bound to yield similar debates as with the starred movies...
Is it the most complete movie? Or is it the one that is most entertaining to watch?
> http://www.authmann.de/misc/Movies_snes.png
Your idea is intriguing, but I'm afraid there might be too much maintenance in it...
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I haven't watched this, but I would think that waits and other pointless looking maneuvers could be made tolerable to watch in an AVI by proper subtitling that introduces the concept to follow.
It was used in Earthbound, for example. (At 1:47:00)
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Baxter wrote:
Personally, I think the "no B" restriction, is similar to the "peach only" restriction at SMB2, or the "pacifist" restriction at games like Contra.
Agreed. Perhaps the point of "concept demos" is that there's really no point.
"Concept demos" was originally created for game hacks such as Super Demo World.
Later, I extended it to be "concept demos" in the hopes that movies that are cool, but that would otherwise be rejected on the site, can be published on the site nevertheless, but without cluttering the main movie pages.
Perhaps a redesign would be in place.
Perhaps, I have a headache and will think of this some other time.
Edit: And re: JXQ's thoughts, yes, I don't want the site to have a dumpster category.
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Since child, my playing was always goal-oriented. I only aimed towards beating the game.
This is one of the reasons I never liked Zelda. It seemed like an impossible game to win ― I simply didn't have the right frame of mind to go exploring the world. I was totally lost with Zelda. And with Metroid, too.
I liked straight-forward games. **
It all changed when I was introduced to the SNES Final Fantasy series on an emulator. Sure enough, I beated that game ― FF III ― played the same way, struggling towards finding the end of the game. But next in series was FF II, and slowly I started to appreciate the games for the world within. I wanted to talk to every person in the game, find every sidequest, less focus on beating the game but more focus on getting a wider utilization of the game's potential. Actually, Star Control II was similar.
But I'm not there yet. I haven't beaten the deepest levels of Morlia Gallery in Tales of Phantasia, and I haven't got a grasp of the eloquent techniques in FF4―6, that are utilized in timeattacks. I had no idea Goblin Punch had something to do with level numbers *. And I would have never found out.
I use savestates in my emulator playing. My attention span is not the same it used to be when I was a teenager. If my character dies in the game, and I end up losing last 2 hours of progress, chances are I give up with the game and don't touch it again.*** Savestates help me keep focused.
So briefly, my experience is the opposite of EscapePlan9's experience.
There were games I enjoyed playing without a goal-orientation. These were almost exclusively games with some kind of designer in it. Excitebike, Battle City, The Incredible Machine. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D. I enjoyed designing scenes in them and play them together with friends.
*) Exception: Even though I never had the right frame of mind to discover a game's hidden secrets, I did have the patience to use days after days to try to figure out the password coding of games such as Simon's Quest.
**) This does not mean "stupid games". I did like puzzle games.
***) It might be different if I actually purchased those games. But I'm not there. I have never owned games that put me into that kind of situation.
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Hyena wrote:
Okay, my curiousity has finally gotten the best of me. Please tell me what the context of that Bisqwit quote is.
<Dacicus> btw, if you don't mind me asking, what's this crushing death by brick quote about?
<Bisqwit> We were talking about Umihara Kawase.
<Bisqwit> Flagitious tried to improve a certain stage, and it was hindered by the girl moving so fast that when she bumped into a brick, she died instantly (instead of stopping, and springing back).
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A concept demo is a run that is not as clean as the main publications. It doesn't complete the game under normal conditions; either the starting conditions are changed (by an unusual SRAM * or password), or the game is some kind of variant of the main game, or the running conditions are changed (by some technique that changes the game more profoundly than I did for Rockman 1).
*) Chrono Trigger Newgame+ qualifies as one, Castlevania AoS Julius run doesn't qualify. The keyword is quantity.
That being said, I'd rather keep the qualifications open-ended instead of painting myself to a corner when something comes up that I can't quite define clearly.
[Edit: Topics merged.]
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JXQ wrote:
I just noticed the AVI to this run is 6 megs larger than the previous version.
I used a significantly larger bitrate than in the previous version, because I wasn't satisfied with the quality and I thought a larger file (than 160 MB, which is what it was going to be had I used the old settings) may be acceptable.
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trazz wrote:
That might work nicely for an individual movie's page. That's an awful lot of bandwidth for some of the larger collections (e.g., all NES or all Genesis movie pages), though.
It is possible to dedicate a larger page for a single movie and to have the multiple-movie pages list only the information that is there now.
This might actually be a nice new feature...
I'm still trying to improve it though. (More recent source at http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/bisqbotwilykillersrc.html)
(Note: The source might contain typos; this is a cleaned-up untested version. And, apparently the font ate some underscore characters.)
Here are some shots Dehacked took. Can you guess the technical reason behind these?
