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Bonus points for using Castlevania II music from the FDS version at times. That was positively unexpected. (I don't know if Nach Mothrayas recognized that when he posted his comment about the music.)
But yeah, the game does not look interesting.
My pet peeve is bad physics, i.e. acceleration and jump curves and things like that, in SMB clones, and this game is a quite obvious offender.
Nor does the play look particularly impressive: in fact, there were a couple of spots that looked like needless stops / slow downs. Even without those, it still would not look very interesting.
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Wow. A parade of bad dreams, all of a sudden.
First, I had to euthanize my best friend for some government policy reason (I forget exactly what circumstances). By stabbing the heart with a couple of wooden spears (each of a person's length), which I did. The person was aware, but did not resist. Then I woke up, wondering the proverbial "wtf".
A couple of hours later (I know the time because I went to WC in the meantime and then back to sleep), there was an outbreak of some kind. It was not exactly the zombie apocalypse, but close enough that it could be described in seriousness with that word. I forgot the details already, but plastic had something to do with it. It made people mindlessly just want to infect others by biting them. I closely escaped.
And while escaping still somewhat localized outbreak, some kilometer away I tried to take a shortcut somewhere and sank into deep snow and had to yell help. Which I did not get before my cat woke me up again.
Yesterday? Mostly nothing happened. I watched FF6 100% from latest SDA marathon.
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YoungJ1997lol wrote:
In the words of Bisqwit, "...too long, didn't read, lol."
For the reference, here's the original context (do note the little print):
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=286815#286815
Which pirate_sephiroth ripped into his signature, somehow producing the ill impression that the line is a representative line of me.
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CoolKirby wrote:
The encode I watched was this one, which shows from 1-1 to the beginning of 4-1. The part I was talking about starts at 5:04. It looks like the bot moves the screen about a pixel or two forward about every 70 frames, which is what it's supposed to do.
I see. I have no idea what kind of hazard it was predicting in that situation.
Possibly the left button was given too high chance in that situation, and consequently whenever it did try jumping it made negative progress. I can't remember.
EDIT: Or, that may have been before I created the special if-condition seen above that distinguishes disappearing to the top of the screen from disappearing into a pit, and it thought it was dying whenever it jumps too high.
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CoolKirby wrote:
Why does the bot get hung up on the stairs in 2-3 for so long?
I don't have the video here at my hand, but there were a few situations like that where no matter what it did, it ended up suffering a way or another. The randomness just did not produce good enough input to survive an incoming monster or a pit. So instead, it kept choosing input that is safe or inches Mario forward by a subpixel.
Remember it did not evaluate just the input that you see in the movie; it evaluated the following 240 frames. In order for a small number of frames of input to be chosen, it would have to not die during the whole 70 or 240 frames of input it had randomly generated. This mechanism was to ensure that it won't i.e. greedily accelerate into a pit or a monster with no chance of stopping in time. It tried to anticipate upcoming situations. However there were situations where it was next to impossible to come up entirely randomly with input that makes Mario survive for the whole upcoming 70-240 frames. That's where you see the dithering phenomenon.
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CoolKirby wrote:
How does BisqBot know to enter pipes to save time? Is D-Pad down part of the "random input" the bot uses on top of a pipe?
The pipe entry event (among a few others, such as grabbing a mushroom) was given a high reward score in the evaluation, and yes, it tried the down-button once in a while (though I may have manually inserted the button into its list of buttons combinations for a moment).
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Cooljay wrote:
Thank you for you for reply Bisqwit, I was actually talking about the FCEU bot. It's interesting watching feos' encode of it playing Super Mario Bros. Always wondered what goes on the bot's mind and how he sees the world code wise.
Oh. Well, like so:
10 Play 70 frames with random input.
20 Evaluate progress
30 If progress was better than the last time, remember this input
40 Load savestate
50 Repeat 10-50, some 100000 times
60 Play the first 20 frames of the chosen (remembered) input
70 Make savestate
80 Goto 10
That was pretty much the core of all of my bots. The number of frames and the number of retries and the definition of "random input" and the means for evaluating progress varied depending on task/game.
In SMB1, progress would be defined by the difference of Mario's X coordinate to his X coordinate when the save was made, and to lesser degree, the number of points, and to bigger degree, whether Mario died.
In Rockman1, it would be defined by the framecount where the desired bonus item appears, among other things, or in the case of the Wily2 glitch navigator, same as above.
Random input would generally contain a small array of possible inputs (left, right, left+a, right+a, right+b+a, and so on), and it would pick an input from that array, stick to that choice for a few frames (generally 1-20), then choose another. Or, every frame, it would have some 10% chance of toggling some button.
Cooljay wrote:
Another issue is lack of opinion as well typically too.
I found out that a simple coin toss between "rulez" and "sux" worked very well (rigged such that the chance for dissing was only about 10 %). Of course, it would be random and worthless, but the idea was not really that the bot had a personality and opinion. It was just for the fun of it.
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Cooljay wrote:
What was the greatest challenge you ever faced with making Bisqbot ?
Hi Cooljay!
It depends on which "BisqBot" you are talking about. Is it the IRC bot you see? Is it the FCEU hack I created? Or some other thing that I may have called BisqBot at some time?
I will presume you meant the IRC bot.
The greatest challenges were social. Convincing people why it would be a good idea to use BisqBot's non-standard means for channel administration (autovoice/-op management), or why to join its agent network with my non-standard ircII scripts requiring the use of that arcane IRC client. That kind of things I struggled in the late 90s or early 00s.
People are difficult. I know my way around program logic, but not so much with people. And honestly not all of my ideas were great. Monumental, perhaps, but not practical, and not better than other solutions.
But I can label the two technically most challenging portions of BisqBot.
Firstly, the Finnish parsing and reformatting system, which used an online demo by a leading translation/analyzation developer company that day. My program parsed everything that was said on select IRC channels, and when sentences that adequately matched a certain grammatical structure were encountered, the topic was restructured in a way that appeared like the bot had a passionate opinion about the topic. For example, someone might say, "if you like reading, I suggest you go to library and loan some of those books that we were talking about" and the bot might comment "to like reading is really great" or something to that effect.
Occassional misinterpreted sentences were also funny. Once someone explained that he saw the neighbor's dog chasing a squirrel to a tree, and the bot emphatically approved chasing the neighbor to a tree.
In any case, it was something I was really proud of, because in Finnish, changing the structure of a sentence is not simply a matter of choosing select words and putting them in another order: One also needs to change the inflection of most of the words (conjugate them properly). Not too easy, knowing that there are more than 1500 ways a verb can be conjugated in Finnish. :-) One Finnish word may encode information that would be expressed in two or four words in English.
A classic example is "juoksentelisinkohan", which could be translated as "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly". Removing a few select syllables can produce e.g. "juoksinkohan" = "I wonder if I ran", or "juoksinko" = "did I run?", or "juoksinhan" = "I did run, you know", or "juoksisin" = "I would run", or "juoksentelin" = "I ran around aimlessly", or "juoksin" = "I ran". Getting other forms may require more radical changes, such as "juosta" = "to run", "juostessaan" = "while he/she/it was running", "juostuaan" = "having ran", or "juoksu" = "a run".
It also took some compound words, split them to their constituents, replaced one of the components with "kupo", reconjugated the word in its original format and passed the word forward for one of its agents, Mog (the Moogle), to say on the channel. For example, someone might say "I can't remember my password", and Mog would reply (secretly prompted by BisqBot), "your kupoword" (of course, in Finnish). Finnish has a lot of compound words, so this feature also triggered frequently and often in ways that were humorous at least to me.
Unfortunately, eventually the company took their demo offline, and I no longer could use their tools that did the actual grammatical parsing of a sentence and the conjugation. Turns out they don't even sell those programs as standalone versions anymore. What a pity.
At some point I considered implementing similar feature to deal with English, using the CMU Link parser, but from what I have tried, chances of it successfully parsing something said in IRC were quite slim, due to typos, grammatical errors, and the generally ambiguous nature of English grammar. And because English is not particularly conjugated, the entertainment value of the bot's comments would still be not as great as it was for Finnish.
The other complex thing would be the Pokémon battle simulator and database. It has quite an extensive set of recognized commands, and its backed by data that I dumped from the Pokémon Red/Blue/Gold/Silver ROMs back when very little of that data was available in the Internet.
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feos wrote:
Bisqwit, what's your top 10 of NES/Famicom soundtracks (per game)?
Per game? It is difficult to condense the list to just 10. I'll try anyway. In alphabetic order:
Akumajou Densetsu (many tracks)
Guardian Legend (many tracks)
Jinguji 3 (mostly title)
Kirby's Adventure (most tracks)
Mega Man 2 (many tracks. Particularly Bubbleman and Wily1 themes)
Mega Man 4 (many tracks. Particularly Dustman theme.)
Star Tropics (many tracks)
Star Tropics 2 (many tracks)
Solstice (most tracks)
Simon's Quest (most tracks. Particularly the town theme)
Runners up include Tecmo Wrestling, Alien 3 (title), Duck Tales (moon theme), Destiny of Emperor (a few tracks), others of the Jinguji series, others of the Mega Man series, selected picks from the Final Fantasy series, and many others.
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YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Bisqwit: DO you have a favourite sport? and if so, what is your favorite sports moment?
Hi YoungJ1997lol. Long nickname.
On the question: Not really. When I was a child, my parents pretty much kept a very tight and small budget on my television watching, so I did not grow a particular infatuation to it. Additionally, they only watched boring sports such as biathlon or skijumping, never any ice hockey matches or things like that. I'm not sure if they watched Formula 1 championships. I kind of grew to be an outsider to all of that stuff (a theme not limited to sports).
Even to this day I don't really follow any sports. Maybe it would be different, if I had good friends who did so enthusiastically, and I hung around with them. But that is and has not been the case.
True, you did not ask about following sports. But I'm not really that much of a sports practitioner either. Of course, if I take a larger meaning for the word sports, any intellectual activity could be called sports... I don't think I want to go there.
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scrimpeh wrote:
Every color in the RGB colorspace (covering the entire spectrum of human vision)
Sorry, but that statement is incorrect.
It covers the entire spectrum representable by a 24-bit RGB display device.
Please refer to this image about color gamut.
The larger gray shape represents the range of colors that an average human can see. The triangle represents the range of color perceptions that an RGB display can generate: much smaller than the human range of perception.
(Reference: R. W. G. Hunt (2004). The Reproduction of Colour (6th ed.). Chichester UK: Wiley–IS&T Series in Imaging Science and Technology. ISBN 0-470-02425-9.)
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Dacicus wrote:
Bisqwit: What do you think is a reasonable approach to copyright law? You've made posts about examples that you think are excessive, but not what you think is appropriate?
This was also a difficult question.
Defining absolute boundaries and rules is not really my forte, and neither is obeying those boundaries and rules, really.
The purpose of the patent law is to protect an inventor for a period of time so that they can prototype, market and sell their invention for a suitable period of time, without having their potential income destroyed by someone else who just copies the idea and already has all the other framework ready.
Similarly, the purpose of the copyright law is to protect an author for a period of time, so that they can decide themselves where the information that they produced will appear, and how it is distributed and how they can profit from it.
The purpose of both schemes is to encourage innovation and the development of culture, by guaranteeing an author that they get a chance to get a reasonable compensation of their work.
However, today both schemes have pretty much been turned into weapons, mostly due to greed -- i.e. society driven by stock market and investors who care about nothing but profits. Profit has become the absolute virtue. As such, innovation and development are hindered, because for anything that you invent and create, there's a chance that you are infringing some megacompany's patent arsenal, and that they will sue you for infringement the moment you become successful; and for anything that you author and create, there is a likelihood that the company whom you entrusted with making it known worldwide, will sue your fans who actually love your creation and who wish to help it becoming more known by sharing it.
So how to fix it? This gets me back to the question of absolute boundaries and rules: I don't see how any particular set of rules could possibly work before a more fundamental change happens: A change in the values for a society as a whole. As long as the values wrong, people find way to subvert and pervert the rules, and to poke holes in the rules, finding the corner cases that justify changing the rules in a manner that is bad in the long term. I could say, "copyright monopoly lasting 70 years after author's death is ridiculous and should be changed to e.g. 10 years after the creation", or anything to that effect, but people would still find perfectly reasonable rationale why such opinion is wrong.
How should the values of the society change then? In my eye the best solution to that would be the fulfillment of Ezekiel 11:19-20: "And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God." :-)
Now that may sound like I'm just contradicting what I just wrote: about statutes and ordinances. The key is in the part about stony heart versus flesh heart: When Yeshua taught about his yoke being easy, he referred to following the commandments, ordinances and statutes according to how His spirit directs (which fulfills the entire Torah without conflicts, with Matthew 22:36-40 being the foundation to it), not according to the letter of the law.
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Kuwaga wrote:
What are your opinions on Etz haChayim, the Kabbalah Tree of Life?
Oops. Sorry for the delayed reply.
You asked a difficult question, and I wanted to reply with a well-researched answer.
Turns out I never had the time to do proper research to answer your question.
As I understand it, the Kabbalah is part of Jewish Mysticism. How I view it, is that it is a form of New Age'ism (though it may be really old). In a way, it is no different from any other human philosophy which seeks to elevate the human into a high position, to seek higher knowledge, to seek something supernatural, by human's own devices without a relationship with God.
Considering these traits, I would rather readily group Kabbalah into the things that the God of Israel labels as witchcraft.
As for Etz haChayim in particular, I do not know what is the Kabbalah concept thereof, but I know about the Tree of Life mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible. (Tree of the Life is an English translation of the Hebrew words etz ha-chayim.) It is also mentioned in the Proverbs and in the Revelation. By "know", I mean it's a passing mention. I have heard people who teach that the Tree of Life is actually Yeshua, the essence of God (also known as Jesus), and I know a few scriptures (at least in the so called New Testament) that can be quoted to support that interpretation, but I personally have not studied the topic enough to make an educated opinion either way. Sorry about that.
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Lex wrote:
I don't think pairs of pixels with extreme color difference would occur except at the edges of the resulting 16×16 squares, and the overall image would look smooth.
Feel free to go ahead and prove me wrong. I'm still not sure I completely understand what you have in mind.
For the record, here is the source code of the program I generated my picture with.
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Lex wrote:
I suggest interlacing all the squares, horizontally and vertically, left to right and top to bottom. Somehow, I imagine the resulting image would be at least more smoothly gradiented than this. The resulting image would have small 16×16 squares with similar colors instead of these much-larger squares.
I was thinking about that, but I realized that it's not enough to go with R=0,G=0; R=1,G=0; R=0,G=1; R=3,G=1; and so on all the way to R=255,G=254. Eventually you will need to cover pairs with large differences like R=0,G=128; R=200,G=0 and at that point the interlacing will look very ugly indeed.
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WST wrote:
Well, if we start not from that we have 3-dimensional color space, but from the image posted above. We already have 4096×4096 pixels. Is it possible to reorder them in another way? Hmm, now I see that it’s not so easy as it may seem to be…
Reordering them won't help the fact that the data is still 3-dimensional.
But, you could flip every odd square horizontally/vertically. Then you'd get this: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/truecolor2.png
Or you might do that, and swap the blue and red axis. Then you'd get this: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/snap/truecolor2b.png Which incidentally highlights how much better the eye is at detecting changes in red or green color than changes in blue color.
It would look nicer if the pixels were ordered, so entire image looked solid…
There is a rather hard problem in mapping contiguous three-dimensional data into two dimensions without overlaps or cuts. A trivial way of solving it is to slice it in thin layers and put the layers next to each others, as was done here. The dimensions of the data is 256x256x256 (red, green and blue channels each have 256 distinct values, for a total of 16777216 distinct combinations of red+green+blue).
Here, the cube was dissected into 256 squares along the blue dimension, each of 256x256 size (red and green axis), and they were arranged on the sheet in a grid formation, so that each successive square is progressively more blue.
What kind of ordering do you suggest?
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I made another one, called Gellosphere.
Contrary to my previous one (Trivial pursuit), this one should actually pose some challenge. As usual, required components of the solution do not include fast reactions or bunnyjump skills, but possessing them may help in devising creative shortcuts.
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Surprised creditment!
I had no idea that I had previously done any contribution towards TASes for this game, considering I know next to nothing about this game to begin with, but so it happens to be. I had apparently provided the calculations for someone's mathematics. There is always a possibility to be surprised.
I watched maybe 50 % of this TAS and was sufficiently mind-blanked; then I stopped, because it had gotten repetitive and aside from the playback bar in the Youtube video, and from the increasing max HP of TheW, there was no indication whatsoever that you were closer to the end than you were in the beginning. Also, all the cool music gets interrupted continuously and reset back to the beginning of the song, so you cannot even enjoy that. I wouldn't mind the interruptions so much if the song did not get reset to its beginning every time, but...
Good job, I presume. My vote is abstained. I would say, 'meh', but I presume it would not be fair for the phenomenal accomplishment that is this TAS. I just did not personally find it very entertaining, but it is a rather good mind-blanker.
