Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
I'm currently noting how many frames each of the zombie boosts saves. Then, I'll test how many we can do with the given amount of life, so that only the worse boosts are avoided. When I finish it I put here the link for the WIP.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
I could get to the place in which the reset will happen about 700 frames sooner, but I still didn't optimize the zombie boost routing. I'll probably do that tomorrow, and then I send the movie file.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
TASeditor wrote:
Great stuff. Wasn't expecting that much to shave off. I knew the last boss would be improveable. And yes the lag in this game for lsnes is weird stuff.
In 4:47 in your encode, when you jump up using the hammer saved 1 frame in my TAS. Have you tried that?
Yes vote.
That's actually a 'new' trick I overlooked!
Using the hammer after a long jump cancels the long jump, making Stanley to decelerate every 3 frames instead of 4. I've edited the movie in that part and I could save 2 frames. I tried applying it in many other jumps in the run, but unfortunately it wasn't useful anywhere else, especially because you can't move while using the hammer, there isn't always a wall to cancel the hammer, and it isn't always useful to decelerate faster. That specific star is the only place where all this 3 conditions met: you don't need to move, you can easily cancel the hammer, and decelerating is useful to get 0 speed sooner.
Thanks for pointing this out!
Here's the movie file: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/28302606867133060
please, judge, replace it :)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
The only run out of these 3 that I believe that should be a Newcomer Recommendation is the SMW one. I personally liked SMB3 much more, but it has in-house jokes and stuff that look like 'hack', as Adelikat said. It's a pity if we can't Newcomer the SMW run just because it's not stared.
I don't think that it is 'unfair' that it has a moon, I just think moon runs should also be eligible for Newcomer Recommendations. The requisites for a run being stared and newcomer'd are different, and there're many moon runs that are awesome for newcomers.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
WST wrote:
adelikat wrote:
The name of the game here is SPEED. Not just the most entertaining TAS of the lot. So to me it is a no-brainer, CD Man. Everything flies at warp speed faster than anyone can comprehend. It is the fastest movie on the site.
For me it is just way too fast to become “the speedy TAS” of the year %)
I mean, it’s so fast that you can’t even notice the speed, it ends before you even think of it
Being so fast that you can't even understand properly what is happening is a positive point in this category. Of course it's not the most entertaining movie, but it's certainly the most 'speedy' one.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
I agree with the previous posts that this was not a good game choice. I was really excited to this TAS race, but when we saw the game, it was kinda disappointing. Especially when we found that there are ways to glitch to the end and that we were supposed to do it (of course we could just play normally, but not only 'Breaking the game completely is highly encouraged', we also received instructions specifically saying how to do it. I think it is a mistake to spoil glitches in the instructions. This was done exactly because it's impossible to find these glitches in 4 hours but the submissions were supposed to apply them.
I'll tell how our team worked and unfortunately failed in the end:
When we read the articles about the game, I actually got kinda scared. I had no idea how to follow those instructions and beat the game that way, and I'm sure that scared and discouraged every less experienced TASer that wanted to give it a try.
After a while we could understand what we were supposed to do - getting 20 sticks, buying a fuel can, crafting them into a campfire, getting a sniper rifle and putting the campfire in a specific place to warp to the boss and kill him with the rifle. That's pretty much written in the instructions.
Getting the sticks (and money to the fuel can) was a pain because it was solely item drop manipulation. It depends on how you enter the room and how, and in which order, you kill the zombies. That's heavy luck manipulation, not really something suitable for a TAS speed race. Route planning was also pretty annoying. When we got the fuel can, we moved to the cave in which there was a chest with the rifle, despite we didn't even have 10 sticks yet. As we spent a lot of time understanding and executing the campfire glitch, we had only a few minutes left in this moment. I rushed to the cave failing to get sticks, and when I opened the chest, it just didn't give me the rifle. It turned out that what the chest gives depends of luck, and you can't really manipulate it inside the cave, we would have to change the whole run. So we just gave up there.
The TAS speed race is supposed to be fun, and this was not fun at all, at least for me. Streemerz was a much better game for this, in my opinion. If there are so many people saying the same thing about this, there might be some true in what's being said.
DwangoAC, you did an awesome job managing the speed TAS competition again, please just take this as a suggestion for next time. I'm sure this can be really fun with a proper game. I suggest trying any platform game with some window for optimization and for route-planning, that would already be great.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Samsara posted exactly what I think about this TASer of 2015 voting. Alyosha indeed did a nice job this year, and Hetfield90 made some awesome Mega Man TASes. Despite I was also nominated for Rookie of 2015, I understand why Hetfield90 will be the winner in this category. The any% TASes I've done with Amaraticando did bring some novel concepts and ideas to SMW and SDW, but it was also, and especially, about heavy optimization (7 rerecords per frame is a pain); and the game end glitch was just a small optimization. Hetfield90's work brought a lot of new concepts, he made much more TASes than us, and Mega Man is a very entertaining game, maybe more than SMW. But I think someone who pretty much made all TASes of the same game isn't who I'm looking for as the TASer of the year. The same goes for Alyosha, who made some entertaining TASes, but most of his job was to improve old unoptimal TASes. Please don't get me wrong, I appreciated and admired a lot the TASes of them both. For sure they are awesome contributors of TASVideos. But the thing is that the TASer of the year needs to be who made the best, most amazing work. Someone who TASed different consoles, types of games, maybe 3D stuff, etc. That's why I voted for Samsara and arandomgameTASer, and not in who made the biggest absolute quantity of TASes.
It seems until now that Hetfield90 will win this voting, but we are still in the beginning. Let's see what will happen in the next days.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
After a good reflection during the nomination period, I voted for Samsara and arandomgameTASer. There're many awesome candidates, though, but I tried to not vote in too much people. Good luck!
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
thatguy wrote:
"Infinitesimal" means "greater than zero, but smaller than any real number greater than zero"
Warp, let n be a positive real number, and consider n/''infinitesimal''. As infinitesimal is smaller then any real number greater than zero, n/infinitesimal is bigger then any real positive number. If you say n/infinitesimal is m, being m any big real number, there will be a number k so that n/k = m. And as k is greater than zero, infinitesimal <k> m, for every real m. Thus, n/infinitesimal is infinity.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
I'm trying to play a A2600 movie in Bizhawk, and I'm not getting to sync it. I get an warning when I play the movie that says ''No sync settings found, using currently configured settings for this core''. I don't really know how to change my sync settings. What should I do?
EDIT: Also, I tried to change the profile from 'Casual Gaming' to 'Tool Assisted Speedruns', and the message ' Attempt to change sync-relevant settings while recording BLOCKED,' appeared. (Nevermind, that was my mistake)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
What a tricky decision! I'll be voting for Samsara as I loved much of her job this year. I would agree with arandomgameTASer about the crazy amount of Alyosha's TASes not being necessarily an indicative of TASer of the year, but now I realize I still haven't watched most of his TASes for some reason. I sure will do so before voting, it is undeniable that he also did an awesome job this year.
It's really hard to be fair as it's difficult to watch everyone's movies. I hope we have more nominations soon so that I know where to start watching!
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Well, this is total control, and I found it extremely impressive in a technical point of view. I remember being amazed with this at AGDQ. I'm sure there was a lot of hard work behind this run and I congratulate the authors on this, you guys made an awesome job!
However, I have to agree with Samsara about the entertainment factor. This run differs a bit from both SMW total controls runs and from the PI day run, and I think that's a negative point that worth to be discussed:
I still didn't re-watch the PI day run, all I remember is that the letter PI was drawn many times, and pi was written to many decimal places. That was something visually interesting and easy to follow, while pretty entertaining in my opinion.
In the first SMW run, 2 new games were programmed with input. That was something absolutely novel, that amazed a lot of people here as we remember. The second SMW run was even more amazing as it programmed the entirety of SMB, a much more complex game then Pong and Snake.
This run doesn't have these same qualities the 3 previous had. What we see is a long text that goes up extremely fast and obligates us to pause the video to understand what is happening. Of course, after we pause the video and actually understand what is happening, it gets a bit interesting. And needing to pause the video to understand what is happening uses to be a positive point in a TAS, but I don't think it is a positive point in a total control run. It sounds weird to me to publish something that uses total control to create something that aims for entertainment, but you can't understand it if you watch the encode.
Well, I'm not saying this should not be published, I honestly don't know. I just wanted to leave here this point of view. I'm sad to vote meh on this, as I imagine how hard it must have been to make such a complex ACE run. This TAS deserves without a doubt to be watched and it is nice that it exists. I'm just not really sure if it should be as a published run.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Hello, and welcome to TASVideos! That's a good start!
I've watched the video and I'll point out the biggest improvements I could tell from the encode, so that you can apply them in your next runs :). Send us the movie too, anyway. It's better to watch a run in the emulator.
0:57 I notice you lose speed here. If that is unavoidable, you should move until that point using 6/5 (6/5 is described in SMW resources page), so that you can recover speed later. That saves a lot of time overall!
1:57 It is better to be already in the air when Yoshi appears, so that you don't need to jump again and wait to fall on it. Again, it is better to move until Yoshi with 6/5, so that you still have P-Speed after getting him.
Level that starts in 2:24 - you should have gotten p-speed in this level. If you use a lua script, you can see the value of your p-meter - it increases in 2 per frame, and when it reaches 112 your speed starts increasing.
Level that starts in 6:06 - Same thing, always find a way to get p-meter. Also be careful with hitting walls like in 6:10.
I think those are the biggest improvements. There're always a lot of minor improvements, but it doesn't worth pointing them out now. Keep sharing your TASes here, and I'm sure you'll improve over time!
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Each way of sorting the objects corresponds to a solution of a1 + a2 + a3 (...) + an = k, with every variable natural.
Since there is no general formula for diofantine equations, I don't think there is a simple general solution for this. With big n and big k, there will be tons of possibilities, so it's pretty much impossible to express all them in a 'simple' way.
In order to do this automatically one would have to write a code that gets all solutions to that diofantine equation. It should be possible, but I have no idea how to do it as I don't know programming.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Warp wrote:
grassini wrote:
Warp,
don't you have anything more productive to do with your life than write agressive statements about what another person should or not look up for information or do with their free time?
I consider it quite productive to inspire people into healthy skepticism, rationality and science, away from superstition, fairytales, hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Into understanding how the world really works, how science works, and to recognize deductive and argumentative fallacies.
So if even one person becomes intellectually better because of what I have written, I would be very happy.
Tolerating irrationality, superstition, hoaxes and conspiracy theories simply to not hurt feelings is not something I strive for, sorry.
I completely agree with you about this giants thing being conspiratorial, anti-scientific, and etc. And I also agree the lack of skepticism nowadays is a significant problem: There're governments cutting money from science while promoting 'alternative' medicine, and people who do think that medicine works. In Brazil, you can graduate as a astrologist or a naturologist (idk if this word exists in English, it is who studies Naturology, a pseudo-science that alleges to cure diseases with 'natural' methods with absolutely no scientific evidence) in universities. There're doctors who recipe homeopathy or that work with orthomolecular medicine or Reiki. Even a airplane company changed the number of a fly because a 'prophet' said the airplane which that number would crash. So, our society does have a lack of skepticism.
But I don't think that's the way we to make people to think more rationally. Your comment was a bit of aggressive indeed, and it wouldn't change no one's mind. This problem is deeper - to solve it it would be necessary a better scientific divulgation and awareness on schools. Ars4326 certainly has his reasons to consider the possibility of the existence of giants, and it isn't really something that harms anyone. It is just something with lack or proof and strong negative evidences. So, attacking someone just because of his belief in giants is equivalent to attack someone just because he or she believes in a god. It's a disnecessary rudeness that won't change no one's thinking.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Thanks again for the good feedback, guys!
I only noticed now that the video of the console verification hasn't been posted here yet, so I'm posting it.
Thanks for dama1138 for doing this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoXCy2YHXC4
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Ah, now I see that lim to infinity n^(1/n) = 1. I thought it would diverge to infinity for some reason.
So a general solution for x^x^x^x(...) = a is x = a^(1/a)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Skilled player
(1411)
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
If this has a solution, it has to be sqrt 2, since (sqrt 2) ^ 2 = 2
But I don't know how exactly how to prove it is the solution. I guess the partial result would increase slowly as you are adding '^x's, and when it gets to 2 it stops growing, so sqrt 2 ^ (sqrt 2 ^ (sqrt 2 ^ (...) 2))) = 2
