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Sadly these are basically correct. I'm going to spend X minutes (or even hours!) to watching your video. At the end of it, I must feel that it was worth my time.
In spite of everything I know about how a TAS is made and any in-depth knowledge I may have about a game, it should still impress me at least a little bit.
Yes it's vague. No I can't describe it any better. But if you could just know what's entertaining and good before trying it, Hollywood would make better stuff.
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At the very least Twilight (flashback in season 1) and Rarity (present day in season 2) have had their parents shown. It's not that they don't exist, it's just that the primary cast are old enough to live on their own, and do.
Besides, having parents within arm's reach makes for less interesting stories.
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In the scene from episode 1 where she's first seen most of the time she's a background character with half her face obscured by various foreground props. There's one cut though where you can see her whole face and whoops, it turns out her eyes were completely out of whack. So I'd say that either it was either an intentional inside joke or just being too lazy to fix an obstructed fault; later someone reused it for a different cut and didn't notice the eyes out of whack. Or maybe it was intentional by someone being sneaky. Either way it's a bit of laugh at someone animator's expense. Fans saw it and thus came her ascension from Background Character #6 to a fan favourite.
Putting her name into the show was a nice gesture to the online community but I still think making her talk was a mistake. Apparently the voice actress was a bit confused as to Derpy's gender and probably tried to make him (!) sound endearing but comes off as somehow mentally handicapped rather than simply clumsy which is probably what set the whole thing off.
Personally I'm not against the voice change to make her sound, uhh, "better", but dropping the name and fixing the eyes is kind of a kick to the whole reason the scene exists. Now you have a drawn out bit which only explains why the building in the background is in shambles plus a whole bunch of filler in which a nameless background character gets a surprising number of lines.
So what you have is the show creators trying to do something nice for the fans and then having it explode in everyone's face when someone uses their privilege to rewrite that bit right out of the proverbial history books. Thus, anger.
----
Aside: as I understand it the first ~15 episodes had been animated and submitted for airing at once. After Derpy first made internet headlines the animation team redid her eyes in future episodes and she can be seen derp'd as her normal appearance starting in episode 16.
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My first dual game movie consisted of a decent amount of fooling around.
If it's entertaining enough the whole way through, there's nothing wrong with trying to submit it. Lots of people have succeeded. But the technical merits of a TAS must still hold up.
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RAM watch, Lua scripting, disassembly of the game...
Anything is fair as long as the output is a .fm2 file which someone else can play back on a stock copy of FCEU
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I put a pair of SSDs into a Dell PowerEdge server with a battery-backed RAID controller. The battery means the controller can claim writes have finished when they really haven't and be safe in case of power failure, but also acts as a write buffer which may prolong the life of the SSDs since these things are kept quite busy.
Performance? 4000 to 6000 IOPS with somewhat random loads and 3500 with very random loads. To put that in perspective random seeking usually sees 150-200 IOPS on a spinning drive and 600-800 for sequential work. (IOPS = I/O Operations Per Second)
So yes, solid state drives really do perform miracles and I encourage everyone to buy one and use it appropriately.
Lex: That drive has the benefit of not being limited by a SATA cable. 12 drives can defeat that limitation, but you can't claim top prize in the performance race just by putting your SSD right onto the PCI bus. Oh wait, yes you can.
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The PS3 isn't a bad streaming media receiver, though it's finicky about the formats is receives.
It supposedly does 3d bluray playback with the latest firmware. But in your situation I do not see any compelling reason to go PS3 if you don't have any games you're looking for.
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My video wasn't meant to be as fast as possible. If it was I would not have simply walked through the X2 intro stage, grabbed Chill Penguin's heart tank at a leisurely pace, teleport out of a suicidal fall at the last instant, or taken cheap shots at Chill Penguin's back while he was busy attacking a wall.
But 6 years is a pretty good run. (and there goes my last non-obsolete video)
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nfq wrote:
i think dates like 050711 are more confusing, they should be written 05 Jul 2011, so that you know for sure which number is the day, month and year.
I think dates should be written as 2011/07/05 - that way it automatically sorts into chronological order by any normal sorting method (until the year 10,000). Either that or it should be mandatory to write out the month's name. These things are confusing.
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Yrr wrote:
True, but I can't imagine a world being only fueled with solar and wind power. We have solar panels (quite a lot of them actually) on our roof and turns out, that they need over two years to produce as much energy as the facility my dad works at consumes in one hour. Considering the continuous rise of energy consumption, it seems to be best to research straight for nuclear fusion.
But, you are right, if we wanted to, we could be building much better solar and wind power plants.
I didn't mean the world would be solar/wind only. I meant it would be a good way to supplement the grid. The solar panels on your roof would reduce the grid power consumption of your air conditioner, refrigerator, and other appliances. If you had excess power, you sell it back to the grid and make a little bit of money. If you need more power, you take it from the grid in reduced quantities. In perspective at home with my electronic equipment I have no hope of breaking even.
Now, this facility where your father works is probably a lot bigger than my home. You could probably put a lot more solar panels on it, hypothetically. In that case the power generated would be that much more and you'd pay that much less in grid power costs. Again there's no hope of breaking even on power generation there but it reduces load.
It's not cheap of course. Solar panels produce DC power, so you need a high endurance pure-sine-wave inverter and a transfer switch, and probably some batteries to smooth the power flow. But once it's done your reliance on the grid is dramatically reduced. Multiply this thousands of times over and maybe we don't need as many power stations (nuclear or otherwise) or they can run at reduced capacity. With the batteries every house carries its own UPS.
That's my view on the subject. Much like the Internet this stuff should be decentralized as much as reasonably possible. How feasible this is when working with old infrastructure and high entry costs is a whole other problem.
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Solar and wind could be a lot better if it was done right. If every home had some minimum of solar panels on its roof and the grid was built right we wouldn't need (as many) centralized power stations.
But until then, nuclear remains the best option for centralized generation. The Fukushima incident is a worst case scenario - it took one of the biggest natural disasters (earthquake/tsunamis) on record to cause that. If you want fewer deaths in the world, petition for driverless cars rather than the shutdown of nuclear power stations.
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Just finished watching it. Nothing stands out as blatantly wrong, but if I was forced to nitpick...
I'd like to have heard a bit more about the Doom origins.
Bisqwit's site wasn't the only one dedicated to TAS videos, but it is the one which survived and thrived.
There's several versions of Super Demo World, so you should specify "SDW: The Legend Continues". Even though the original version is much less known.
For the any% and low% runs, you show two different games (Super Metroid vs Metroid Fusion). That seems wrong if you want to compare the various styles. MF 0% vs 100% would probably be the better choice, since the low% SuperMetroid run glitches the the game very badly.
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You'd probably be better using sockets.
Find the socket library for lua and install it. You can send packets to each instance over TCP or UDP on the 127.0.0.1 loopback interface, or even between several PCs on a network (or the internet).
UDP throws data around in discrete lumps, and will be reliable over the loopback address. TCP acts like a serial cable, but beware of trying to read from a TCP socket with no data available because you'll jam up the program.
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For the record, H264 does not suffer quality degredation with high keyint values the way MPEG4/DivX does. You lower it to provide good seek capabilities.
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Stealing a Mage Masher is the easiest way to get one early on, and Zidane's Dyne skills are straight transformations of his regular Skills. You only have Tidal Flame if you have Detect. And Tidal Flame does wreak Black Waltz 1 pretty hard.
You definitely want to pick it up.
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Lua's a relatively new thing and hardly necessary for runs. As for savestates, it's strongly discouraged but most emulators (a few notwithstanding) will include the starting savestate in the video file itself.
In most situations, it just isn't necessary. Only recently has it become an issue.
Also, once upon a time some idiot submitted a dumb mario romhack (sprite modification only) and included the ROM in the ZIP. Since then the upload code has been pretty strict about what it will accept. Now we want to lift that?
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Undie: The game won't really get any faster. Gravity increases, but between DAS (autorepeat, which is 60 Hz, faster than fast tapping which is 30 Hz) and sonic drop you're not going to really see any differences. I'm looking forward to the credit roll though.
Mister Epic: If you're going for fastest clear time, you should probably focus on trying to keep each player on their own side. It's less pimpin', but going to be faster.
And beware of the bugs and glitches. There are phantom pieces after one player sets their piece in place, and during lock flash the other player's inputs hiccup for a moment. The last one is a bitch when playing for real.
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Generally highest resolution, but if I know the native resolution of whatever the video is in, I'll probably just go with that. NES won't give better than 256x240 so why watch it any higher? Let my video card scale it.
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Mega Man X Attract videos are also prone to desyncing. MMX2 has it really bad where different emulators (and versions thereof) will play the battle back differently and X can easily die.
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I assume you mean the workbench and stuff?
Those exist for submissions as listed in the Submission queue. One thread per submission, computer controlled. Threads are made automatically when a submission is made and the wiki content is mirrored to the forum.
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That may or may not literally be what happened, but the behaviour is close enough. The BIOS didn't even autodetect the drive after pressing the Reset button. But that button only nails the CPU. Cutting power to the hard drive got it back up and running.
Not exactly reassuring, but the drive is rather old and been running for a long time.
