Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Saying that Islam is "not a religion of peace" really serves no other purpose than to drive away an entire religious group because you don't really like them. And yeah, that's clearly bigoted and counterproductive. One could argue what we need right now is for people to try and find some common understanding so we can work together to solve our problems. The propaganda that some Christian and Jewish conservatives are serving up right now, which Bisqwit's signature echoes, runs counter to any such constructive effort.
Anyway, I don't mind Bisqwit having up that signature. If that's what he believes: so be it. I'm not going to pester him about it. But since you asked me what I think about it: I believe it's bigoted and really the exact opposite of what we need these days.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Flygon wrote:
Part of me thinks that forcing a specific vote to be tied to a specific post might be a good idea.
A post must be made to vote, and the vote must be tied to the post.
Isn't it already so that despite there being a poll, Workbench topics aren't really votes? As in: you can vote "no" as much as you like, but if the judge considers the "yes" camp to have far better arguments it will still be accepted? We wouldn't really need a system that warrants a post per vote if all people will end up posting is "voted no as per everybody else" anyway.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Nach wrote:
I've already greatly optimized what we started with from Bisqwit so it runs on a much lighter setup. However, the setup still requires a good GB of RAM to run well (1.5 even better). Most VPSs with that capacity cost several dozens of dollars a month.
Okay, that makes sense. My server has similar capabilities (2 GB RAM) and costs me about €476 per year (including taxes).
If you're in need of another programmer (PHP, MySQL), I've been working as a freelancer for years so I might be able to help you out.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I think the entire intro text at the top of the front page is a bit silly and poorly written. The blatant attempt to trick someone into clicking on a casino link (which, by the way, exist to make you broke with nothing in return) is just awful and I had no idea we were doing this until now.
I can totally get why this site would be expensive to run, though. We do get a fair bit of visitors. But I'm curious as to 1) what exactly it costs, and 2) what we're getting in return for that price (specifications of the server).
That would at least ease my mind in knowing that this thing is necessary.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I'm sorry, but I honestly can't vote yes for such an incredibly easy and boring game. Nostalgia or no nostalgia (I too remember it). Since the run itself is technically good, I'm voting meh.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
henke37 wrote:
One thing I don't understand is why the encode has a minute of nothing at the end.
Just so you can listen to the rest of the awesome music, I guess. (I think it's an old encoding protocol to let the ending music loop once.)
Voted yes since this is one of the games I wanted to see done most (even if it's just episode 1) and Ilari did an amazing job. Anyone who wants to do the rest of the game should talk to him for tips.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Derakon wrote:
Just because a company goes bankrupt doesn't mean their assets weren't bought up for cheap by someone else. In fact it's pretty likely that any remotely popular game owned by a defunct company was bought out, on the off-chance that there'll be a revival sometime down the line.
Exactly, but sometimes this doesn't happen, e.g. if nobody is interested in buying that intellectual property. They can't be auctioned off in the way that an office chair can, either.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
thundrio wrote:
i have a bunch of people at school that really annoy my in how they treat emulators. they come with project 64 and other non rerecording emus, and use the built in pj64 cheats to give link a black tunic, and then they call themselves pro at emulation. they never give a thought to TASing, and it is quite annoying.
Guys are just havin' a good time. Don't be a hater, bro!
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
This is the (probably) final version of the run. Ilari has said he'll probably submit it once he's done with the builds for the version of JPC-RR.
Link to video
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Flygon wrote:
Also, yes, Grunt and I are arguing again. I'm personally siding with _highquality.
Having a suffix is a good idea, but personally I'd use _hd or _1080p since _highquality (or _hq as I would prefer) is also used to refer to higher bitrate encodes. So _hq doesn't necessarily mean higher resolution.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Spider-Waffle wrote:
How is pausing more "watchable" and more entertaining than loading, and since when does subjective entrainment value take priority over speed in a speed run?
This, in itself, is subjective and up for debate. It's true that TAS movies are supposed to be as fast as possible in theory, as that's sort of the "mission statement" of this site, but you'd be incorrect to suggest that everybody agrees with that notion, or that every movie on this site follows it like a dogma.
Plenty of movies sacrifice speed for entertainment, and although I don't know the specifics, this might very well be yet another example.
When I was still planning on running FF3j I too was considering not using the encounter reset trick because it's much more tedious to watch than simply getting into a battle and running.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I believe Grand Theft Auto III was pretty bad too. Didn't play it all that much, but randomly falling through floors tends to happen in that game.
The early Quake demos had some annoying bugs as well (of course, most of them were fixed and the final release was solid). Like being able to "swim up" while jumping, or randomly getting stuck when going down slopes (complete with "Player is stuck." console message).
In Final Fantasy 2 (NES) it's possible to easily level up your characters by beating up yourself. Granted, this isn't really a glitch so much as a game design oversight, but it's important. Although I do think people tend to emphasize it too much. Aside from that obvious mistake it actually had a very solid and clever battle system.
The most buggy game in the series is probably Final Fantasy 6, though. It has tons, even arbitrary code execution (the sketch glitch and resulting "attack with a Phoenix Down as weapon" monstrosity). I should put up some new videos demonstrating those glitches since they're very impressive.
And then there's THIS...
Link to video
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I absolutely love VVVVVV. I'm slowly getting better at it. There's no real way to TAS Flash games, unfortunately, but check out this EXCELLENT speedrun:
Link to videoLink to video
Then there's the super gravitron:
Link to video
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. This book explores hacker culture (mostly of the 90s), the public's view of hackers, and the LEA's dealing with them. It's centered around a large sting operation and ensuing court circus and explores how this affected politics and civil libertarianism in particular.
Available online http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html or on eBay. I'm reading the paper version.
Excerpt from the first page:
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching- station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth was told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources of information denied to mere software engineers. They had informants in the computer underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15 -- the first month of a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world. A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, been crashed -- by "hackers."
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
For those who want to see this happen: Ilari is working on running the demo version of Jazz Jackrabbit. Hopefully someone will pick up where he left off once he finishes it. I just uploaded his second WIP to Youtube:
Link to video
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
This is very interesting. Hope you can find some way to break this game to our advantage. I had no idea these bugs existed--FF3j in particular always seemed like a rather solid game to me.
I'll try reading that Japanese page you linked to. Maybe I can find something that will make me interested in running FF3j again. I made a short speedrun test of it a long time ago but decided to stop working on it because the battles were too difficult to manipulate.
Actually, this looks great. Just the fact that attacking with certain tomes does absurd damage at low levels will be a great help.
Nice find!
Here's a video for those who are curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edH3qCkEUKw
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Made and uploaded some random videos today.
Link to video
The Leisure Suit Larry hooker scene in Hercules. That's how my youth looked: green and crisp! Although Youtube filtered out the crisp part when it encoded my movie.
Link to video
Dangerous Dave (CGA). First time I've played it since... OVER A DECADE, probably. I was just trying to beat the game, nothing fancy, but ended up dying on level 8. Love this game.
Link to video
Another Dangerous Dave video. This one showcases a glitch that sends you to a nonexistent level.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
tymime wrote:
Patashu wrote:
It's legal, though; the site only hosts abandonware.
The abandonware concept is not actually recognized by law, so it's still technically illegal. :(
Well, true abandonware occurs when it's likely that no company can make a claim to the copyright of the game or application. Such as when a company goes bankrupt.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
There's really only one thing outsiders like to see, and that's the games they know. That's why Morimoto's SMB3 and MM2 videos became so crazy popular everywhere.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DaShiznawz wrote:
All though I have to disagree with FFIX being tedious to play normally...
It's mostly the battle system. It's slow and ATB bars keep filling during attack animations making it very hard to guess when anyone will get around to making their move. Then there's the auto-counterattacks that just keep stacking up.
I'd love to see a proper FFIX run. I once made a very short film using ePSXe rerecording (but not in any way that would be acceptable for TASVideos) in which I get a Mage Masher on the first steal in the first battle. You also really don't need to ever get money if only you do the duel perfectly. The unassisted run would be a good template.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
Flygon wrote:
I just hope this can encourage more HD encoding...
Sorry for asking this, but I still can't really understand what the idea with the HD encodes is. It's not like the HD resolution adds any info to the video.
