Posts for Bisqwit


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Derakon wrote:
A quick look at a FAQ suggests that the merchants change what they sell when you whip them.
Allright, thanks.
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In principle I am against targeting any person, banned or otherwise.
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Wow. I had no idea this kind of port of Castlevania exists. It is very good, the TAS is very good too. Interesting to watch. P.S. What's with the shopkeepers you have to lash a few times with the whip before they sell you something?
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I made the first release of this software. You can compile on Linux systems. I was not able to cross-compile it for mingw. http://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/hudmaker.html New features: It can now be configured without having to recompile it. The configuration is supplied in an XML file. Example configuration:
Language: xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <hudmaker> <input type="video"> <file>/tmp/video.raw</file> <bpp>16</bpp> <width>256</width> <height>224</height> <fps> <nom>60</nom> <den>1</den> </fps> </input> <input type="audio"> <file>/tmp/audio.raw</file> <rate>48000</rate> <channels>2</channels> <bits>16</bits> </input> <output> <bpp>24</bpp> <width>2048</width> <height>1792</height> <fps> <nom>30</nom> <den>1</den> </fps> <!-- These frames will be sampled: --> <firstframe>0</firstframe> <lastframe>2147483647</lastframe> <!-- Add this number of empty frames in the beginning before beginning of stream (to overlap subtitles/logo) --> <delay>0</delay> <recipe> mencoder NESVSETTINGS - -o /tmp/result.avi -mc 0 -aspect 4/3 -oac mp3lame -lameopts aq=0:preset=extreme -sws 7 -ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=1:fullrange=on:threads=4:me=dia:subme=0:partitions=none:no_8x8dct:b_adapt=0:no_mixed_refs:trellis=0:weightp=0:no_weightb:scenecut=0:no_deblock:no_cabac:bframes=0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=3:mbd=2:trell:cbp:v4mv:cmp=6:precmp=3:dia=-3:predia=-4:vb_strategy=1:aspect=4/3 </recipe> </output> <overlays> <width>2800</width> <height>2400</height> <font>Monapo</font> <overlay> <file>/home/bisqwit/povray/nesvlogov5/logo_%u_%u_f%03d.png</file> <startframe>0</startframe> <numframes>248</numframes> <fadelength>0</fadelength> <fadewidth>0</fadewidth> </overlay> <hud startframe="250" endframe="780" tasvideos="1"> <text size="13.0">囲碁★九路盤対局</text> <text size="9.0">IGO - Kyuu Roban Taikyoku in 4:50.33</text> <text size="7.0">Played by Joel Yliluoma</text> </hud> <hud startframe="860" endframe="1100" tasvideos="1"> <text size="9.4">This is a tool-assisted speedrun.</text> <text size="14.0">http://TASvideos.org/</text> </hud> </overlays> </hudmaker>
Example result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CALw_xr6GpQ (Not produced with this exact configuration file, but close.)
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Сοnɡrаtulаtіоnѕ.
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agwawaf wrote:
Thanks. I've improved from room1 to room5. Room1 I saved 4frames and I got 9370. Room2 I saved 2frames and I got 9220. Room3 I saved 11frames and I got 8070. I got 8080 as well, but this made me a frame or 2frames later. Room4 I saved a frame and I got 9330. Room5 I saved 21frames and I got 9300.
Sounds good. Without these changes it might have been that someone obsoletes your movie in succession with minor frame-improvements after seeing your strategy. Keep up the good work. がんばってよ。
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I did a very brief watch-through of your movie, and then it became a less brief watch-through. Comments are here! Room 2, 3: Timer reading is not as good as mine. No idea about frames. Room 5: This was faster than my room 5. Room 8: Interesting solution. It looks much slower than mine. But then again, I used a fireball here. Your timer 9090, my 9210. Room 10: Those collision avoids looked very accurate. Room 11: Here's where my bot was stuck. You cleared it of course. You used fireballs. Clearly different, yes. I did delay a lot here, I'm not sure about comparison. Your timer 8900, my timer 8730. Your tradeoff with room 8 was a win. Room 12: You waited for a dragon. It was more noticeable than in my movie. Not a time factor, but an entertainment factor. Room 13: Your strategy was considerably different than mine. We both collected a fireball here. I think your strategy was much faster. Room 14: Very interesting strategy, but you used a fireball. In the end, timing difference will be interesting. Your timer 8660, my timer 8650. Room 16: Interesting micro-optimizations, as well as partially mirroring my strategy. Your timer 9320, my timer 9300. Probably faster than mine. Room 17: You had a large fireball here. I had two small ones... Your timer at hourglass 9040, mine 8980. At end 4360, mine 4340. Good. Room 20: Your timer 8180, my timer 8130. Very good. I've seen enough, just skimming through the rest of them. You also collected the Solomon's Seals, which hints towards that you aim for the best ending as well. Room 30: WOW! That was awesome! I'm glad that at least some of this room's pain could be mitigated. This was a huge improvement. Room 32: No suicide. Good, compares better. Room 34: You took the hourglass?! Wow. Impressive. I wonder why I did not? :( Room 36: I used a fireball here, and so did you, though I had to view it twice to see it. I used a large one, yours was a small one and you still have a large one remaining. Same timer reading at end. Room 37 (the unaided ascent to space): Looks faster than mine. Room 39 (ascent of spiral): Your timer 8880, my timer 8870. Yours is probably slightly faster, though it does not look as impressive accompishment as mine :-( Room 43: Your large fireball saved you a lot of time here. Room 44: I skimmed through this room, but I think we had radically different routes here. Room 46: Cool solution. Room 48: I think I noticed some micro-optimizations despite fastforward. Princess: Wait. What? This was one of those "Wait. Kirby can run?" moments. Solomon: Some benefit here as well. Looking forward to the publication!
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Congratulations. Please do verify that you do go for the same category (the best ending, nowarps) and that you do not fall behind in level timers, at least not greatly. :) And that you used the same version, of course. The Japanese version has a considerably different timing than the USA version.
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I suggest the "anyone else" option. I'm rather ignorant to today's upgrade & replace & throw away culture, and wouldn't know which display cards to suggest to anyone. Sorry about that.
Post subject: Re: Finnish election 2011
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Dada wrote:
I suppose this shouldn't be too hard to believe, coming from you, but it's still somewhat surprising that you'd actually refuse to vote for someone because of a personal belief that there is no God.
I have nothing against atheists in general. What I was talking about was empathetic atheism, putting emphasis on atheism. Such people who judge their peers with atheism, i.e. recommend a peer if he/she is an an atheist and strongly dismiss as a loon if he/she believes in a god. Such a person is likely to vote against anything that anyhow positively helps belief systems of any sort. Such a person will likely emphatetically work to weed out any religion-related teaching from schools, at least any such that works from attesting perspective. Any such that begins from the assumption that the claims of the religion are a fact. Such a person is sometimes even beyond the ideal of "I disagree with you, but I support your right to believe so". Such a person is likely to make statements like "we are educated and smart people; we don't need 'Holy books' written by sheep-herders thousands of years ago to tell us how to behave"; and they thus explicitly abandon that which to me is God's wisdom that is infinitely better-founded than what humans collectively can devise. In my Bible-biased view, such a person is likely to make decisions that will make the people progressively more ill, and which will collect God's wrath upon the nation. These are my thoughts on why I would not vote for an emphatetically atheist candidate, even if they happen to be driving some goal that I positively agree with, even if nobody else was driving that particular goal. Maybe I should call them atheism fundamentalists or fanatic atheists for better clarity.
Post subject: Re: Finnish election 2011
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Truncated wrote:
In the Swedish media at least, there has been a focus on Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna/True Finns, and their success. This is partly because they have a critical view of immigration (which is a very sensitive issue in Sweden) and because they want to get rid of compulsory education of Swedish.
Interesting. Interesting to hear a foreign view on Finnish elections. So the voting and vote counting is now over. True Finns, i.e. Perussuomalaiset (which more accurately translates as "Average Finns" in my opinion) did rise a lot, and they became the third largest party. I principally supported three parties: The Pirate Party, the Christian Democrats, and the True Finns. I knew True Finns were going to rise in any case, so I focused my attention to The Pirate Party, which in my opinion drives some important things which are greatly neglected by most politicians today. Such as critical attention to the subtle driving of censorship and media giants driven copyright laws today. Unfortunately, in the area I live in, the Pirate Party party had no candidates I could really honestly support; all of them had one or more things which I would object to. Most often that would be emphatic atheism. I also did not vote any candidate from Christian Democrats, because I was afraid of that my vote would not really have any practical effect, because that party usually receives a relatively small number of votes in any case. And also, their ideals are nearly the same as those of the True Finns party, with just more emphasis on the Bible. In retrospect, I maybe should have voted them. So I ended up voting for the True Finns party (the candidate which I voted for was not elected, but that does not matter), because the ideals of that party have a great overlap with the ideals I also support. Such as frank and honest dealing with immigration policy (recognizing the treat of Islam and the statistical significance of immigrants-originating violence and crimes), emphasis on how the European Union and the increased self-imposed global liabilities in general adversely affects regular Finnish people, such as farmers, and the nation as whole. I did not vote their leader though, because I don't like him. While I did vote for that party, I am also somewhat concerned about what they bring for the future of Finland. There's always some delicate balance between good extremism and bad extremism. I only hope that they do not become the new nazis. It has been my observation that the other "large" parties up to this date have pretty much played by the rules of those who make lots of money and want to make even more, and by the rules of those lukewarm who just want to do their best to not offend anyone (humanism), which is in my opinion a quite un-Biblical principle. I have never seen any wisdom in voting any of the big parties; especially so after I earned about the oftly-practiced concept of "party discipline", which basically means that every party member must forgo their personal views and vote according to what the party leadership decide. They become puppets, and nothing that they declared in their electorial campaign matters. And then there's the Green party "Vihreät de Gröna", which is all about humanism and green ideals popularism in my opinion. In particular, I find myself in stark opposition to their view of nuclear power. After the votes were counted, I happened to do a brief analysis on the voting statistics. It was funny and insightful in my opinion that pretty much everywhere in Finland, the Green Party receives only neglible votes. They are treated as what they are -- a joke -- everywhere except in Helsinki (and possibly some other big cities). Helsinki, the most nature-deprived area of Finland, suddenly gives the Green Party a support of a whopping 17 %. Wow. So you don't have access to nature, so you compensate for it by nudging on the Green Party? Thanks for the nice thought, people. Too bad the Green Party does nothing that actually helps. (Your mileage may vary; this is just my perception.) Since you asked, Truncated, about the role of Swedish teaching in Finland, I might add that it is my opinion that it should be completely voluntary; it should be added to the palette of foreign languages that can be studied when children begin studying foreign languages, and if the child chooses (or their parent chooses for them) to not study Swedish, not now nor later, then so be it; and if they do study it, so be it. That should be enough. Today, for Finns, English plays a much more major role than Swedish does. Swedish is one of the official languages of Finland, while English is not, but in my opinion if we had compulsory Swedish, we should have compulsory Sami as well (I feel terribly sorry for the situation of Sami-speakers in North Finland), maybe compulsory Romani language as well because there's quite many of them in Finland... And maybe compulsory Russian, because today there are towns in which you hear Russian more than you do hear Finnish (same goes for Swedish, too. With Russian it's a recent phenomenon though). The today situation is a sad joke that is held together by humanism and that is greatly objected towards by most students year after year; it is a historic remnant. But this opinion paid no role in my voting decision.
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Truncated wrote:
「日本語でTAS話しをするの場所。」 ってちょっと変じゃない? 「日本語でTASについて話せる場所。」とか「日本語でTASを相談できる場所」のほうがいいかな。
替えりました。どうもありがとう。
Post subject: Re: Mega Man meets Programming
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Virtual Man with Abstraction Modular Man with Refactoring Function Man with Lambda Function Meh, I don't live up to your name (insane_coder). Maybe that's for the good!
Post subject: ようこそ ☆ このフォーラムについての説明
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ようこそ! TASVideos フォーラムで普段使われているのは英語ですが、この「Japanese」というフォーラムでは、TASについて日本語で話すことができます。 困ったこと、発見したこと、見聞きしたことなど、どうぞ気軽に書き込んでください! ※書き込みにはアカウントの登録が必要です。上部メニューの「Register」から登録をおこなってください。 ちなみに、フォーラムのアカウントはTASVideos本体とも連携しています。また、IDを取得後に変更することはできません。 ※フォーラムの使い方は、上部メニューの「よくある質問」や、PHPBB.HELP J をご覧ください。
Post subject: Tervetuloa / forumin kuvaus
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Tervetuloa TASVideos-forumille! TASVideos-forumin kieli on pääosin englanti, mutta jos et kuitenkaan osaa englantia, tai olet epävarma kielitaidossasi, tällä aliforumilla voit keskustella ja kysyä TAS-aiheisista asioista suomen kielellä, joskin tällöin keskustelun kohderyhmä on rajattu vain suomea osaaviin käyttäjiin.
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Laugh is a healing emotional response, like crying is too. By laughing, the body deals with many types of situations. It's an exit out of an inconvenient or unconventional situation. Humor that plays with subverted expectations is a good example. By laughing we can trivially overcome our own mistakes, and by laughing we can also relieve the mood when someone falls over. I think it's wrong to feel guilt for a harmless primitive response such as that. However, if the person who just had an accident is severely injured in the process, and you are actually witnessing it, it may be wise to cut the laugh short, for it can prevent any possible rescue crew, including yourself, from working effectively.
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Dada wrote:
Warp wrote:
Should animated gifs be banned from tasvideos forum avatars? (Yes, I know I can press esc. I shouldn't have to.)
Personally I think it's okay as long as they aren't incredibly obnoxious.
Well, in my opinion theenglishman's avatar is on the wrong side of that line. Quoting the forum rules… well, it seems the text has been changed. It used to say:
The focus on every post should be your message. This means that overly big signatures (more than 3 lines), graphical signatures, signatures and avatars that distract from the posting (such as graphical advertisements or bbcode abuse) or overly big avatars (larger than 100 pixels in width or height) are not allowed.
Your mileage may vary, but I think theenglishman's car humping avatar is one that distracts from the post content with its "hey lookey here, I'm moving a lot around here to catch your attention" style.
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Warp wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
Patashu wrote:
If you got four NESes and four NESbots, could this be played back on real hardware? :D
Actually just one is required; the same input could be replayed on all four games in succession. Assuming the nesbot has the led input-showing feature, playing the videos simultaneously would still show that the same input is used for all four.
One nesbot could play four NESes, but it could prove difficult to reset them all exactly at the same time. Perhaps if their reset buttons are wired all to the same physical button...
I also meant "one NES". Emphasis on the word "in succession". Of course, in a 1-to-4 situation your point is valid, but that is not what the post you replied to was talking about.
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Patashu wrote:
If you got four NESes and four NESbots, could this be played back on real hardware? :D
Actually just one is required; the same input could be replayed on all four games in succession. Assuming the nesbot has the led input-showing feature, playing the videos simultaneously would still show that the same input is used for all four.
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Instead of posting a huge image I'll just link: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=66
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Flygon wrote:
All frames get dropped to one frame in the end anyway, creating a variable framerate output. :p
Yes, but once you have pigeonholed it into a certain output fps, the original timings of the frames are lost. To elaborate, think of this 50 -> 120 case:
original 50 fps   upscaled 120 fps    deldupped vfps

frame 0 @ 0ms	  frame 0 @ 0ms	    frame 0 @ 0ms
                  frame 0 @ 8.3ms
frame 1 @ 20ms    frame 1 @ 16.7ms    frame 1 @ 16.7ms (delta=16.7ms)
                  frame 1 @ 25ms
                  frame 1 @ 33.3ms
frame 2 @ 40ms    frame 2 @ 41.67ms   frame 2 @ 41.67ms (delta=25ms)
                  frame 2 @ 50ms
frame 3 @ 60ms    frame 3 @ 58.3ms    frame 3 @ 58.3ms (delta=16.7ms)
                  frame 3 @ 66.67ms
                  frame 3 @ 75ms
frame 4 @ 80ms    frame 4 @ 83.3ms    frame 4 @ 83.3ms (delta=25ms)
                  frame 4 @ 91.67ms
frame 5 @ 100ms   frame 5 @ 100ms     frame 5 @ 100ms (delta=16.7ms)
                  frame 5 @ 108.3ms
frame 6 @ 120ms   frame 6 @ 116.7ms   frame 6 @ 116.7ms (delta=16.7ms)
                  frame 6 @ 125ms
                  frame 6 @ 133.3ms
frame 7 @ 140ms   frame 7 @ 141.67ms  frame 7 @ 141.67ms (delta=25ms)
                  frame 7 @ 150ms
As you can see, the original material had a stable 20 millisecond interval between frames (1/50 seconds). However, due to pigeonholing into material that has a 8.333 millisecond interval between the frames (1/120 seconds), in the deldupped material, which although has an average framerate of 50 fps, the intervals between two consecutive frames end up alternating between 16.67 milliseconds and 25 milliseconds rather than being a stable 20 milliseconds.
Post subject: Re: Discovering a DOS game's frame rate
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Flygon wrote:
Bisqwit: This is why we dump Nintendo 64 games at 120fps and DeDup them in AviSynth, to drop frames that are duplicated. And there has been absolutely no twitch whatsoever with the varying FPS material that I have processed, that I have noticed, anyway.
As long as the original framerates are very close to 120, 60, 40, 30, 24, 20, 15 or 12 fps, i.e. integer ratios of 120fps, indeed there is no twitch. But if the source is, say, 50.000 fps, then upscaling to 120.000 fps means that out of every 5 frames, 3 frames are duplicated 2 times and 2 frames are duplicated 3 times. Which means, for input frame pattern "01234", the output will have "001112233344", for a total increase of framerate by a non-integer ratio of 2.4 (120/50). Which means that almost half of the frames are shown for a 50% longer time than the other frames. Of course, given that the input is (in the case of this example) already 50 fps to begin with, the difference is only in order of tens of milliseconds, but it needlessly falls into the "your mileage may vary" land.
Post subject: Re: Discovering a DOS game's frame rate
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While finding the highest frame rate can be useful in ensuring that no frame gets skipped, it is not the way to produce the best quality. To make this easier to understand, suppose that you have got video material that has 3fps video and 4fps video. You see that 4fps is the highest, so you choose 4fps for the video. Now, when the input goes to 3fps mode, you will be producing video that has three frames of new material, one duplicate frame, three frames of new material, one duplicate frame, and so on. The end result is that it looks twitchy. The perfect way would be to find the lowest common multiple (LCM). For 3fps and 4ps, it would be 12fps. For 4fps and 6fps, it would also be 12fps. Because 12 can be divided evenly with 3, 4 and 6. Of course, it can get awkward for arbitrary rates; for example, the LCM for 125875/1796 fps and 125875/2108 fps is 31468.75 fps, which is unpractical. Instead of a mathematically correct LCM, it might make sense to try to find an outfps where for all infps, it holds that outfps/infps ≥ 1 and lim(abs(0.5−frac(outfps/infps)) → 0.5) and outfps ≤ max(200, max(infps)).
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nitsuja wrote:
Also, although this issue isn't specific to Lua scripting, keep in mind that the game usually imposes some limit on how far the cursor can actually move in a frame (such as at most +/- 128 pixels on each axis per frame, or 0 pixels if the game is busy thinking).
Thanks Nitsuja. I got it working, though several issues makes it rather difficult, including the fact that the game reacts by several frames delay and outright ignores completely the input at some points...
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Mouse input support (as in, synthesize events for the snes's mouse input device). Yes, no? I cannot find any mention of it in the documentation. I am thinking of Mario Paint. It's been four years since this topic was brought up. Has there been any progress?