I actually spent most of the time as wossname the mage girl, since her spells are so powerful and her attacks are the only way to heal aside from save rooms. But yeah, Julius gets reserved for bosses where I need the extra range.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Well, it is a few centuries before he gets to go seal Dracula properly. It's only fair that he age a bit in the interim.
Side note: Julius got screwed by age in Dawn of Sorrow. The game takes place one year after Aria of Sorrow, and Julius can't fly, can barely slide, can't run, and generally just mopes around complaining about how old he is. :\
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
-Misses MANY shortcuts that Derakon has been posting about publicly in the thread and youtube account.
I just want to note that you probably meant Pekopon here again; if I've been posting tips for Drill Dozer, then I really need to re-examine my life to figure out where the missing hours are... :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Couldn't you do something where a script would try to play through your movie, checking at each frame if removing input changes the game memory? If inputs are truly ignored, then removing them should have no effect on the game state. That would be a portable, if rather brute-force, way to clean up input files.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If I had to try to describe what's being aimed for here, I think it meets the following qualifications:
* Plays with inhuman reflexes and perfect knowledge of the game
* Follows the generally-accepted standard path through the game
* Does not use glitches
The problem is that, of those three qualities, only one can really be quantifiably measured, and that's the first one. We can tell when a player isn't playing as fast as they could, makes route mistakes, or isn't using a capability that speeds up the game. We can't tell what the "generally-accepted standard path" is, and we can't always tell what is and what isn't a glitch. But the categories (aside from the genre categories) should be strongly-defined, in my opinion -- I grant that I can't think of a good, straightforward justification for that stance, but it's my stance anyway.
Really this is just one more way to make speed/entertainment tradeoffs; it's just to a degree that isn't normally seen on the site (SMB3 and River City Ransom are good examples of tradeoffs made to a similar extent).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I love having entertaining runs on the site. But I also like being able to find the movies I like without having to sift through piles of garbage to find the genuinely good runs.
I don't think these goals are mutually exclusive, though they currently conflict with the site design. This has been discussed to death, but really what the site needs is a less-shallow heirarchy and more ways to find runs than just by the news and the by-console lists.
Edit: mucked up my BBcode.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think on the whole this category is just too fuzzy. It's impossible to know what the creators intended and what they overlooked. Someone in the Super Metroid thread put forward the theory that the mockball (a trick that lets you maintain full speed while in morphball form) was a sort of "intentional oversight" - some programmer noticed it, liked it, and decided to just not write in any checks to interfere with it. Which, to me, sounds ludicrous, but of course there's no way of knowing.
Now, some games have a stronger claim towards a "standard route" than others...but those tend to be the games where this category is less useful, too. A standard route in a 2D Sonic game would just involve not using zipping glitches, which is a much more specific and useful category, IMO. "Standard routes" in Mario 64, regarding the star doors, would mean not using backwards longjumps (but what's a standard route to get an individual star?).
In short, I'd say that trying to apply this category to any game where it would have any meaning would just result in a lot of arguing on the forums about whether or not the run qualifies for the category and how to tell that other runs don't.
Frankly, I say that we need to just allow for more runs, period. If someone makes a run and other people find it entertaining, it should be available on the site somewhere - not necessarily along with the fully-published runs, but linked in somewhere. Alden's been going on about this for ages, and I agree with him pretty much 100%. Then if there's demand for, say, a Sonic run that doesn't use zipping glitches, someone can make it and, if it's well-received, it goes on the site. Maybe it doesn't get an encoding, but at least it's there.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
As far as slow downloads are concerned, the torrents tend to be blazingly fast for new TASes, but for anything much older than a few months, people have pruned out the list of torrents they're seeding, so the only seed you get is Bisqwit, who has limited upload capacity.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
For normal play, players 8 makes the game easier for classes that have cheap damage - melee classes, classes whose spells cost less than their regen rate, and so on. That's because the increased experience means that you're at a higher level than you'd normally be, and the increased droprate means you have better gear. Put a different way, monster difficulty is not solely a matter of how many hitpoints the monster has and how much damage it deals. Later acts have more monsters and monsters with more dangerous abilities.
For TAS play, I suspect that the only options that would be seen as acceptable would be players 1 or players 8, with no switching mid-game (otherwise it looks too much like cheating); given a choice between the two, players 1 is the clear winner, especially since the sorceress definitively does not have cheap damage.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
While that would be technically impressive, it would be even harder to watch than the 4x Mega Man TAS, even granted that you can turn the music off in D2. And it'd be incredibly hard to make and wouldn't necessarily make things that much faster - I can't see it being worthwhile.
It's not even clear that we can TAS D2 in the first place; don't go leaping off into wild flights of fancy. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Generally "hard" difficulties that just increase the health of enemies don't make runs any more entertaining, since they just amount to using the same strategies, but for longer periods of time. I'd say that's true in this case too.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The problem with parties is that you need characters that can keep up with each other; otherwise you end up with one character fighting enemies with enhanced HP, which just makes things slower. You can use TPs to get PCs to catch up with each other, but it's slow - both players have to have a TP scroll handy (presumably in the belt), then one has to go to town and back to the other player's TP. On an idealized computer, loading times wouldn't be much of an issue, but there's still significant delay...during which period the other player's already moving ahead, which means that even after TPing in, the slow character's fallen behind again.
The main use I could see for multiple PCs would be for parallelizing efforts - for example, one runs off to get a Horadric Cube while the other goes after the Staff of Kings. This could indeed save a lot of time...but it also makes the XP gain trend tricky, since each PC would be skipping more of the game.
In any event, I suspect that for the most part (edit: i.e. outside of act bosses and other unskippables like the Ancients or the Travincal Council), a party in a D2 TAS wouldn't play anything like a party in normal D2 would, and thus there's little room for PC synergies. You'd want to pick classes that stand well on their own, which basically means two sorceresses or two assassins, whichever ends up being faster.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
For my own part, I think the ice cave is an awesome dungeon and it's a shame that it's skipped. Of course, given how the Water Temple is completed, it seems a bit silly to get an item that will never be used (and if you're never going to use it, why get it? And if you aren't going to get it, why run through the dungeon?).
However, that won't stop me from voting...as soon as I can watch the thing, which will be after it's published. Oh, well.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I wouldn't think those plot items would take too long to get; you'll be going to the appropriate map zones to get complete map coverage anyway.
I do think that such a 100% run would be confusing to watch for people that haven't played SotN, and would be entertaining largely for those who understand the sheer amount of effort it takes to luck-manipulate items out of every single monster in the game. There was a "100% map coverage" TAS of CotM that, I believe, was rejected because it just wasn't very entertaining; I fear that something similar would happen to a 100% SotN TAS. If we want to see a more lengthy TAS than the any%, I'd suggest going for all boss kills / no sequence breaks, since there's a well-defined sequence for the game (IIRC the only possible sequence breaks involve glitches of various kinds).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I find this Youtube one more fun to watch (not TAS but interesting) because it shows the fastest way to kill not skip Ganon from scratch.
whoops almost forgot to add the Youtube link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbOmmPFHEts
What the crap? How's that "Cursed Link" glitch work? It looks like by walking out of bounds you get garbage data to overwrite Link's stats somehow...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Sephiroth: BitTorrent is a protocol, not a program. BitTorrent clients, like muTorrent (or I guess you could pronounce it "microTorrent") or Azureus, implement the protocol.
I guess you could have a program, called BitTorrent, that implemented the BitTorrent protocol. But that would just be confusing.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Bisqwit should start automatically seeding the movie at a low level if you stick around for a few minutes. Every published movie on the site should be available via BitTorrent regardless of how many "real" people are currently seeding.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Nice! Few things, though:
* Given that you're playing Luck Mode, how much does it really matter to grab the cross? Your stats as Alucard will get nuked anyway. You have to land on an additional ledge to grab the cross, which probably costs you a few frames.
* Can you luck-manipulate the zombie to not show up, so you don't have to jump over it?
* You do a short-hop off the ledge at the entrance of the mermen/Pot Roast room. I'm guessing this is to make you land sooner, but it also means less time dashing on the ground, which is significantly faster than jumping. Have you compared your times with and without the hop?
* You can play with the "Now Loading" screen - it'll "wave" in different directions depending on input.
* The sound was a bit choppy, which I expect is just a matter of emulator/CPU power. What about the text, though? It seems like there were several columns of pixels missing.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I use a PS2 controller hooked up to a USB adaptor, largely because I needed the adaptor anyway to play StepMania. It works pretty well, though - for SNES games I put Start and Select on the extra two shoulder buttons and remap the "real" Start and Select to save and defrost.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
(Also, I love the possibility of watching a movie still being downloaded. Using a compression scheme quite much foils that chance.)
Agreed, and the one reason why I sometimes find BitTorrent a bit annoying - it frequently ends up that you have almost all of the first 80% of the movie, except for one sliver 10% of the way in...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Go play Kaizo Mario World and don't do anything that it did. ;)
Try to vary the level settings. You're a bit limited here because you're stuck with what SMW can do, but each level should be different from the one previous. Look at the second island: outside level with flying guys, inside level, ghost house, outside level, outside level with no floor, castle. Having lots of variety like this helps keep the player engaged.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Assuming Syreeta is still around, he/she probably figured out what I said ages ago. Which isn't to say that the information isn't useful, but there wasn't much point in posting it. And it's generally agreed that if you don't have anything useful to say, then you shouldn't say anything, at least outside of the off-topic forum.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
