Presumably the alternate run would be a City of Gold run. But I have trouble believing that the game isn't trivializable even without the Teleporter; you just need to manipulate layouts so you can fall to the bottom of the level, and then grab a ledge to avoid going splat. Maybe you'd have to pause from time to time to toss a bomb.
Frankly I doubt there's a set of rules you can use that makes a TAS look anything like normal play. Level layout manipulation is just too powerful (and/or the generator is too able to give easy layouts).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
For the curious, here are the "kills" in this run:
Dracula
Slogra+Gaibon
Doppleganger10
Alraune
Dracula
I'm curious why the Alraune needed to die. I see you get a Heart Refresh there, but you already had one and a Duplicator, so what does another accomplish?
I found this reasonably entertaining, but frankly there's very little here that's not in your 100% run, and that run also has a lot of cool stuff this one doesn't thanks to the greater availability of relics. Thanks for making it, though, and thanks for the excellent commentary!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
(Reposted from erroneous posting in the Windows wishlist thread)
Nyet 3 could be interesting. It's a Tetris-with-challenges game, except the challenges include things like "snakes depositing blocks on the playfield" and "barriers that open and close across the middle of the field", and you can buy items to make some of the challenges easier -- except that items are expensive so you can't clear every or even most of the challenges by cheesing them with items.
Or maybe it'd just be a dull puzzle-game TAS. Who knows.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Nyet 3 could be interesting. It's a Tetris-with-challenges game, except the challenges include things like "snakes depositing blocks on the playfield" and "barriers that open and close across the middle of the field", and you can buy items to make some of the challenges easier -- except that items are expensive so you can't clear every or even most of the challenges by cheesing them with items.
Or maybe it'd just be a dull puzzle-game TAS. Who knows.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Truly a classic for the ages. Especially the way the music resets every time you shoot someone. Truly, I was entertained for a whopping 30 seconds...maybe.
Honestly the only entertaining zapper game superplay I've ever seen was a robot that knew how to play Duck Hunt. It had a zapper mounted on servos and a camera to look at the screen, spot the ducks, and shoot them. And it was pretty successful too!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Hm, okay, alternate hypothesis: there's a list of active objects somewhere in memory, which includes Magna's projectiles. This list is of fixed size; thus, if you generate too many projectiles, it overflows. Chest location data is in a queue of some kind after this list, and some aspect of cleaning up after Magna's projectiles (possibly setting their positions to fixed values?) causes the chests to be teleported.
If this is the case, the main requirement should be generating enough projectile spam.
What I'd recommend doing is looking at memory to see where the projectiles' X/Y locations are and what happens when they get cleaned up. Then see what parts of memory get updated when you collect a chest. That should give you some idea of how the two are interacting.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
My reasons for trying C++:
i. Compiled (different from python)
ii. Cross platform (I want to build a client-server application for my linux server + windows client)
iii. Manual memory management (I should probably at least try)
iv. Visual Studio is apparently the best thing since sliced bread.
For II, Python is cross-platform, in the sense that the code you write on one platform will work on another (barring certain exceptions that are also problematic for any other language). If what you're thinking of is communication between computers, or between programs on the same computers (i.e. networked programs), then Python can do that, too.
As for IV, pretty much every major programming language has at least one associated IDE that a significant fraction of its users will swear by, and another significant fraction will swear at. :) IDEs can save you some typing, and they can save time spent looking up what a function is called, what parameters it takes, etc. It's worth trying at least one, even if you eventually decide that you'll just stick with a text editor (as many do).
I definitely agree that it's worth trying a compiled language so you get a feel for what the compiler can do for you. Learning how memory management works will make you a better programmer even in languages that handle garbage collection for you...but it can also be a difficult task.
I'll add one other thing to reasons to try C++: learning to cope with pointers and references. Many modern languages gloss over how you're accessing objects; C++ does not. You'll learn a lot about how "computers actually work" by manipulating pointers directly.
In any case, good luck!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Interesting. Maybe the projectiles from Magna's attack are turning into the chests when they go offscreen? Something like they get partially garbage-collected and the "next" object in whatever appropriate data structure overwrites their properties...except for their position, hence why the chests teleport. That could explain why the chests disappear when they go offscreen, too -- the corrupted objects are getting correctly garbage-collected.
This is total shot-in-the-dark supposition, mind you. But you might try seeing if changing what other objects are around has an effect. Stuff like killing enemies, luring enemies into the area, creating auras with your sword, simply having the sword swinging, etc. Additionally, if there's other interactive objects (like switches, say) in this game, they might also be potential teleportation targets. It's been ages since I played it so I can't remember.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I remember a game on the Commodore 64 that was played from the first person. I think you were either a robot or in a hazmat suit or something, because your default weapon was some kind of claw thing (that you could see in the now classic from-the-bottom-right FPS view). You could also get a pistol and machinegun, and wander around some kind of complex, and in some rooms there'd be other people for you to fight (and maybe interact with nonviolently too, I can't recall). I was too young to really figure out what was going on or what I was supposed to do though. The novelty of what is basically an FPS on the C64 stuck with me, though.
EDIT: to be clear, though, you didn't have a full 360 view or anything like that. You could pan your view left/right, and go through doors by clicking on them or something, but each "scene"/room was strictly 2D, and I don't think you could even aim upwards.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Okay, I've found time to watch this again. Turns out the annotations only glitched out for me when in fullscreen, so with a bit of squinting I was able to read them in the mini-player. Stupid YouTube.
I still don't understand why you got that Heart Refresh in the Inverted Castle where the Sword Card used to be, but otherwise the annotations nicely explained everything. Thanks again for making this run!
Incidentally, you can fairly easily perform the Batlucard glitch in realtime by transforming while a post-boss powerup item (e.g. a Vlad relic) is spawning on your position.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Oh, sweet, you finished! I watched all the WIPs of this and they were awesome; I'll have to rewatch the entire thing with annotations when I can. Out of time right now, unfortunately, and it looks like the annotations get corrupted (like a large rectangle was cut out from them) right about when you get to Olrox's Quarters.
Based on the WIPs I can give a pre-emptive yes vote though. Great work, ForgoneMoose!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Maybe the statement for these should be "I consider it a significant improvement, even though time-wise the very run is exactly the same, and want it published".
That was what I said with my first post in this argument -- this run is an entertainment improvement over the predecessor. And we're targeting Moons here anyway, right? So entertainment is what matters.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
e: Just to poll the thread: If you know that the input ends early and lets the final boss timeout after a certain amount of time, do you still sit through the entire duration of the fight with a frown on your face or do you simply skip through the fight, knowing that the input has ended already? If you do the former, do you also sit through the credits for every single submission that you judge? Would you feel cheated if you found out that the author could skip the credits at the end of a game?
It depends. How interesting are the boss's antics? How much effort goes into setting up the early-input-end? How much input time is saved by timing out the boss rather than beating them directly? How long does the boss take to time out?
In practice, for the vast majority of runs, you cannot save gratuitous amounts of time via early-input-ends, because the developers took pains to ensure that the boss does not have large safe zones for the player to hide in. Thus, ending input early is generally just a matter of fighting the boss "normally" up to 99% done, then launching your last attack from as far away as possible. This can be pretty entertaining (see the any% Gimmick! run, for example, which uses a carefully-aimed shot combined with AI manipulation to hit the boss multiple times). Perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I can't think of any situations where I found myself actually bored by the lack of input, except for this game. Well, River City Ransom came close, but at least the boss was actually doing something while we waited.
Here, there's a large safe zone, as a consequence of the boss having a very simple attack pattern that makes no particular effort to actually aim attacks at the player. The boss doesn't do anything interesting while waiting for timeout; the player doesn't have to do anything particularly interesting to set up the safe zone; it takes a huge amount of time for the timeout to occur. And worst of all, the input still ends when the boss is less than half a second from death if the fight had been persecuted "normally", which makes the amount of time saved by ending early grotesquely tiny compared to the amount of time spent staring at the boss and waiting for it to die on its own. All of these factors combine to make this instance of ending input early pretty dull.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Hooray, more arguing about when movies end.
I don't care what the run time is for this thing. What I care about is that, for most viewers, standing around for 2-3 minutes while the boss just sort of floats there impotently is not very interesting. Ergo this run is an entertainment improvement over its predecessor.
In an ideal world this run would have been "submitted" as an edit of the previous run before it got published, but oh well. I don't think that should be a barrier to this run being published, as an obsoletion of the previous run.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Here, have this encode that I downloaded and never deleted.
Good luck doing all those corner bounces with the glass ball though!
EDIT: fixed link as per below. Sorry about that!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Nice work! I enjoyed watching this, since the game is really a lot harder than it looks.
...in retrospect, this is also pretty obviously based off of some magical-girl anime or manga.
Anyway, the run looks good. I didn't see anything obviously amiss. Thanks for making it!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Awesome work as before! The Catacombs glitchout was impressive, though I have to admit I kind of hope this is the only time such shenanigans prove useful since they do make the game look rather ugly.
Here's hoping the Inverted Castle doesn't get in your way too much!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Cripes, this is getting crazier and crazier. I'm impressed by the degree of nonlinear thinking you're showing here. I will also admit the Cerberos fight made me laugh.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
How much longer would the fight against the last boss have gone on had you tried to kill him as fast as possible?
In any event, great job. I never made it further than the first boss in this game; it's horribly easy to take damage and lose access to your powered-up forms, and Elta's basic form isn't very powerful.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
