Posts for Derakon

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Posted: 1/8/2009 8:17 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Well that last line came out of nowhere, and I don't think it was warranted. But you're entitled to your opinion. I'm simply trying to make a distinction that you aren't, as evidenced by your line "N64 games need much larger file sizes to look good." This is not universally true. While it is true in general, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, Paper Mario would look fine with our current "standard" bitrate. My main goal here is to make certain that we don't end up just inflating file sizes unnecessarily.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/8/2009 7:22 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Johannes: it sounded to me like you were saying "All N64 games should be allowed higher filesizes", while I was saying "All games that would look crappy at low filesizes should be allowed higher filesizes". That's the only significant distinction between what I said and what you said. I don't think I've seen an 8-bit or 16-bit TAS yet that would significantly benefit from a higher filesize, but that doesn't mean there won't be one in the future (and I pulled out Gunstar Heroes as an example of a time when we could've used this rule in the past). I do think it quite plausible that there are games out there that don't benefit significantly from a higher filesize, though, and I don't want to see our dialup users get punished just because the encoders weren't as efficient as they could be.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/8/2009 4:30 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
This is just a summation of an infinite series: .5*1 + .25*2 + .125*4 + .0625*8... Each term is the probability of getting heads on that throw (which is just 1/2^n) times the value of getting heads on that throw (2^(n-1)). 2^(n-1)) / (2^n) = 1 / (2^1) = .5 The exponents cancel out, so each term has a value of .5. That means the series does not converge, so the average expected return is infinite (or .5 * 10^1000 given your backup rule).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/8/2009 4:21 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I think it's worth checking at the very least to see if it's possible to beat the final boss at a lower level. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time grinding for no real gain.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/8/2009 4:17 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I suspect this is one place where, again, we need people to make judgment calls. Experienced encoders should be able to say "Look, it looks like crap if I'm at this encode level, but if I bump it up a bit, it looks much better, at the cost of a 40% increased file size" or whatever, regardless of the console in question. On the flipside, I'm sure there are N64 games that wouldn't benefit significantly from larger filesizes, and there's no need to force our dialup users to suffer exorbitantly long download waits. Remember how the original Gunstar Heroes run wasn't encoded because we couldn't at the time achieve an acceptable file size to quality ratio? That's why I'm saying it should just be a judgment call for the game in question.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/7/2009 10:34 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Knowing C is a bit like knowing assembly, in that it gives you a lot of insight into how computers "actually work" than higher-level languages do. Of course, C is abstracting things a lot already, but it does a heck of a lot less abstraction than Java does. I'm very glad I learned C and figured out how pointers, references, and garbage collection work. Now, did C really need to be my first language? Probably not, but in the long run, it didn't hurt. I'll grant that I was very confused a lot of the time starting out, though. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/7/2009 10:32 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The set of computable numbers is countable All computable numbers are real numbers The real numbers are uncountable The countable real numbers are a strict subset of the uncountable real numbers Therefore the computable numbers are a strict subset of the real numbers. That is, there is at least one number in the real numbers that is not in the computable numbers. Therefore not all numbers are computable. This is just a rephrasing of FractalFusion's approach. I'd be more worried about "Hence, the set of computable numbers is countable."
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/3/2009 9:53 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I've always felt that the Kirby TASes we have on this site aren't living up to their full potential (at least for the NES and SNES "traditional" Kirby games), precisely for the reason you noted. I think there's plenty of room for a playaround TAS. However, that doesn't mean you'll be able to get away with low technical quality; because it's so hard to objectively judge how entertaining a run is (as opposed to how fast it is), you really need to pull out all the stops to make a good run that doesn't aim for speed. Good luck with your efforts!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/3/2009 2:18 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I figured you'd probably thought of those things, but you never know -- thanks for the answers. The TAS is looking really good!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/3/2009 1:17 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
There's a discussion about obsoletion vs. side-by-side publishing earlier in the thread. I do agree the filename could have been done differently.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/2/2009 6:30 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
That would be a long run. And as noted in the movie description, many of the earlier levels are rehashed several times with minor variations (c.f. Just Dig!). And most of the early levels also aren't very interesting, being mostly a matter of applying the obvious skills in sequence.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 1/1/2009 4:57 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Nice! Is it really faster to take the armor in the train level? It feels like the armor is slower on the ground (takes longer to get into a dash-jump, maybe?) and it only serves to save you from a few hits, as near as I can tell. I assume you took it because its hit-recovery is faster than Zero's? In the first part of Storm Owl's stage, what triggers moving onto the next stage -- reaching the far-right edge of the stage, or being on the ground at the far-right edge of the stage? It might be the latter, in which case you'd want to land faster.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/31/2008 5:09 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Normally the hardest soul is probably Sky Fish, since you need to use the time-freeze soul with good timing just to get access to the enemy that drops it, and then you only have mostly-average odds of getting it. It's a pretty slow, time-consuming process. For rare drops, I haven't the foggiest, since they aren't remotely necessary to complete the game.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/30/2008 7:47 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Sure, I'm not denying that they're fun to watch. They're a pain and a half to make, though. Which is why you got gently mocked for saying that they would be easier to do than non-TAS runs would.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/30/2008 5:17 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Here we go again...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/30/2008 5:07 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The main issue is that in a normal run, you don't care about speed while getting your 100%. You're willing to spend fifteen minutes killing one enemy over and over again to get its soul/rare drop/what have you. In a TAS, that enemy needs to drop it on the first try, which means a lot of luck manipulation. If you want to get both the soul and the rare drop on the same kill, then you've just roughly squared the amount of luck manipulation required. This gets very tedious, very fast.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/30/2008 12:33 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Thanks for the encode, ShinyDoofy! The movie looked good. I think my favorite bit was when the level started, you were managing your lemmings, and then suddenly we started hearing the sound of lemmings dying -- whoops! There's another entrance on the other end of the level!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/29/2008 9:21 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
If we're going to have a repository, it should probably be under source control (CVS or SVN). In fact, how hard would it be to have a Sourceforge project for this?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/29/2008 5:19 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Keep in mind that brute-forcing games is very inefficient. In your Zelda example, let's say that it takes at minimum 15 presses of left/up to get to the old man with the sword. That means that at bare minimum you will be evaluating 4^15 = 1073741824 possible variations (minus variants that are duplicates of ones you've checked before) before reaching your first goal. Basically, any approach that boils down to "exhaustive search" isn't feasible yet and probably never will be. We have to be smarter in our use of bots, or else give them much more limited goals that span only a handful of frames so that we can manually check in and lock down the search tree. I think something like this was done for the Cutman spaz-out section in the current Rockman TAS.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/28/2008 8:01 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It's a meme created by his political opponents, just like most of the more outrageous bad stuff you hear about politicians.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/28/2008 7:55 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It's like the difference between the AIFF files on an audio CD, and an MP3. Or like the difference between a BMP file and a JPG file. What you're capturing in your emulator is raw video, which is very accurate but also takes a lot of space. The "codec" is an algorithm for compressing the video so it takes less space, but you generally have to make a trade for video quality when you do this.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/27/2008 10:58 PM
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Derakon
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Posts: 3960
It's particularly impressive to note that the door transitions and item-get pauses account for about 30 of the 78 minutes in the original movie. The game's a lot faster when you remove all that stuff!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/27/2008 2:50 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The small matters of the red coin stars and the 100-coin stars come to mind...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/27/2008 2:49 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Hey, TakaM -- where's your avatar from? Looks like Link to me, but I've not seen sprites of him that look like that. MMBossMan: I'll give Perian a shot if I run into trouble again. Thanks for the pointer.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/27/2008 1:37 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
That would be fine if I were using Windows, but as I'm on a Mac, it doesn't do me much good. I appreciate the sentiment, though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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