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Improved the SMB MP TAS. Super Mario Bros (JPN/USA PRG0) by Brandon Evans in 145 presses and 05:46.33. In addition to tightening up the speed significantly, I walked on a Bullet Bill in 8-2 to avoid jumping, and I luck manipulated the Hammer Bros. to be completely irrelevant in 8-3, saving two presses total. 8-3 can probably be optimized for time as the manipulation is fairly complex. Also, I had to delay the beginning of the 8-4 swimming section by 1 frame to make it possible to kill Bowser. I'm sure there are plenty of other potential speed improvements for those who know more about the game physics than I do.
Also, Kung Fu looks like a really good game for a Minimum Holds TAS. The strategy would be to tap left once, jump, and continue jumping whenever you hit the ground. You could also try to make it so that the minimum number of enemies spawn. When the enemies do spawn, you can time the initiation of the jump sequence so that you can always kick them while in there air, and the kick helps you stay in the air. None of this is particularly trivial, but it might be a fun challenge for anyone who'd like to try.
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What? I lost!? Shame on you TASVideos.org for not recognizing the beautiful, nearly impossible to tame complexities of the ageless masterpiece that is The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle! lol why did I even get nominated? I'm glad to see two of my favorite TASes won. Congrats to all. Here's hoping you still will encode things regardless of how busy you've become with TASing, feos.
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I haven't done any research on this game specifically, but it seems to be a prequel to Arcade's Revenge, the game I'm TASing, and I believe much of the mechanics have been ported from it. You can watch the Wolverine sections of my WIP, and you're welcome to query me on the IRC and discuss it.
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Everyone is so fixated on the term "brute-force" here. If I even remotely understand what crollo is saying, he's not suggesting creating a framework for brute-forcing various games; he's suggesting that we combine our resources to run heuristic algorithms instead of just using our own computers. I personally think this is a good idea, although I'm not sure how high the demand would be for it. How often do people write bots for TASes that take days to process? I honestly wouldn't know. If you want to put time into writing the program, I'm sure it'd find some use, but I doubt many people would be willing to make the same investment unless the demand is much higher than I would assume.
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YoungJ1997lol wrote:
say, how do you use the savestate undo in fceux?
I'm assuming you're wondering how you can record at an earlier part in the movie? Play the movie back in Read-Only, pause where you want to start recording again, save a state, change to Read+Write mode, then load the state you just saved.
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YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Brandon wrote:
Probably not the best game choice, but I'll reserve my judgement until I watch it. Also, please use FCEUX!
i could if i would, but every time i do a rerecord, it takes time!
e.g: 1 rerecord, .5 seconds
10 rerecords: 1 second
300 rerecords: 10 seconds
it takes forever!!!
I've been working on Arcade's Revenge since March and it's still not done yet. Hundreds of thousands of rerecords. Get used to using these techniques. More importantly, why does this even relate to your emulator choice?
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If you can think of a game that this type of run would be entertaining for, try making a proof of concept. I can't think of any runs that would be published under these criteria; most games would have the maximum score as the record. Even Super Mario Bros. would have this issue as you can gain infinite lives using the Koopa trick, then run through the same level over again by racking up points, committing suicide, and repeating. Still, who knows if it will get published? Even if they wouldn't get accepted, you can maintain a page archiving these movies and records just like I do for Minimum Buttons. If you feel strongly about this, go for it!
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Svimmer wrote:
Brandon wrote:
partyboy1a wrote:
If we say that "minimal presses" is a good goal, then it should be "minimal presses ingame" for this particular game, as I don't see any point in waiting for all those menus.
The problem with exceptions like this is consistency. When you start adding conditions onto what parts count as presses, you get problems, and it'd be impossible to create scripts that score these runs properly with them. However, I wouldn't mind a "Press/Entertainment tradeoff" category just like we have with our speed runs. The submission text could mention where extra presses were taken in order to prevent alienating the audience, and the judge could decide whether this was a good decision or not.
I envision a sort of solution to this: code a sort of extra button into the emulators being used (I know there's a lot of different ones) that sets/unsets a flag for whether or not the button presses at a particular time in the TAS count for the press total i.e. whether they are ingame or not. The flag would be visible on the screen during playback just like the arrow key symbols and A and B button are displayed in the Sonic run posted earlier. If the runner used that flag to show what he thinks is "ingame" in the game he's running and the verifiers agreed, the script-generated count (which would be made to reflect whether the flag is up or not) would be correct again.
What do you think of this idea?
I can still see the game-specific rules thing is going to be a problem, but at least this would restore scripted counting of button presses if it works.
I think this is too convoluted. I still think the "Presses/Entertainment tradeoff" idea is the best solution possible, but I would discourage ever using that to begin with. The goal of these runs are not to be entertaining; it's to show how many buttons it takes to beat a game. If we justify sacrificing button presses for entertainment in the case of menus, there are other places where it could be justified as well. For example, in mugg's SML run, I could say that it's boring to watch him wait for the timer to go out, and then justify that he sacrifice that interesting button saving trick for the sake of entertainment. I think the lowest amount of presses should win, always.
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...
Where do you even learn how to program this well? Why is every TASer so much more competent than literally every other programmer I've ever met? I want to learn how to do stuff like this...or just understand it.
