It will take a complete overhaul of the media, honestly. All that they focus on it seems is the big R and D. How many of the other candidates running for president did you hear about this year? Probably Rosanne Barr and that was about it. The last time they got MAJOR coverage was probably Ross Perot. This is not a case of Fox News or CNN or other similar stations being bad, but everybody as all media as a whole. However with the growing advent of things like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (and other technology to come), maybe this will be fixed in the next decade or so. Then again, probably not.
The media in this election was looking for a good story to sell. If you looked at the polls, Obama consistently had a strategic lead over Romney (I don't know if you saw the New York Times' "paths to the White House" thing, but basically if every swing state had been a 50% tossup, then Obama was 80% likely to win). But the media were consistently calling it "neck and neck" and doing their best to make the election sound as undecided as possible. Why? Because close contests are more interesting, and sell more eyeballs. The media is not about news any more, but about entertainment, or at least anything that will get people to watch their advertising.
I do hope that less traditional ways of promulgating information will step up to fill in the gaps left by mainstream media, but they have a long ways to go; a huge number of people still get all their news from TV.
5. The style of campaigning by both sides is outdated. All I see is Nuremburg style rallies where a canditate will fire out propaganda unchalleged, and ads. There is debates, but they're very narrowly focused. Since the nominee's know what questions to expect. Its very easy to have a perfectly prepared answer, attack and rebuff.
We used to have more freeform debates. They absolutely terrified the candidates because they couldn't just parrot their talking points. So they agreed to fix the debates to stick to a very narrow focus; that way they can just safely talk past each other.
And as for the voting system, there's been a lot of debate on that and stories of mistakes, family buying stations, editing software on stations, etc. There has to be a way to fix it and possibly even allow online voting.
No. No online voting, not now, not ever.
You have two fundamental problems with online voting, and they have nothing to do with failures of implementation. The first is that someone can look over your shoulder and verify that you're voting the way you're supposed to (i.e. votes can be sold or coerced). This is already a big enough issue as to render online voting unacceptable (and voting by mail has similar issues, I must admit). But the second issue is that there's no paper trail. If someone does find a way to change your vote, then there's no record of what your vote was originally, no authoritative, trustworthy fallback option. Assuming that you can make a system secure enough that votes cannot be changed is absurdly overconfident; if nothing else, remember that people will have access to the physical machines the votes are stored on. With physical security compromised you've lost already.
Of course physical votes can be tampered with as well, but it's much harder to do that on a significant scale. You go from one guy logging onto a machine and running a script, to thousands of people going to each polling place and destroying/replacing ballots. The scale is big enough to render it infeasible.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It's actually because the level has slopes in it. All levels with slopes in them have different terrain detection.
As stated, that would mean that a level with slopes uses different rules for collision detection regardless of whether or not slopes are actually involved. Which actually isn't implausible -- slopes can interact with other objects in weird ways, so it's not unreasonable to require special handling for all collisions even if a slope isn't obviously involved.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yeah, the encodes are always awesome. Thanks, Mothrayas!
Kriole: so you're saying that there's two drop rates, one for getting the first soul, and one for getting souls after that? And that the first-soul rate is lower?
Good to hear that manipulation is easier -- in realtime play I always found DoS to just be horribly grindy compared to AoS.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Random question -- are the souls in DoS on average more rare than the ones in AoS? I always had that impression but as far as I can tell there's no numbers published for AoS so I can't do a direct comparison.
DoS just felt really stingy with powerups in general, and getting any non-boss/key soul was a horrible grind.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Another question: Even if "bad game choice" is thusly removed as a reason for rejection, does that mean that any submission for a game that has no published TAS would be automatically accepted, or would there still be a minimum standards of quality that the TAS must surpass? For instance, if the run looks sloppy or seems to have suboptimal parts that could be improved, would that still be grounds for rejection (even if it's the first submission ever made for that particular game)?
The "must match or beat existing records" rule wouldn't be relaxed for vault movies. If a seemingly-suboptimal movie is submitted, then, the easiest way to reject it would be to demonstrate that it isn't optimal in some area, either by linking to an existing run that is faster, or by having another player quickly make a short movie demonstrating superior technique in some part of the run. If the submittor cannot justify his worsened performance for that section, then he's failed to match or beat existing records.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
What if the game is different for different characters?
And how different? In Castlevania: Bloodlines, a few of the levels branch at points to force the two characters along different paths, but that probably accounts for maybe 1-1.5 levels' worth of difference at most; everywhere else they share the same path.
The N64 Castlevania, AIUI, has different characters seeing substantially different portions of the game world, in contrast.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think that collecting the Hellfire soul should be collected.
Niceeeeee
English is not my native language, I am destined to make an error every now and then...
Mothrayas wrote:
Maybe the run could start from SRAM in order to do it on Hard Mode, so that you get Hellfire at the end?
The problem with this game is that the collected souls and items are transfered from the first play through, no way to start a clean Hard Mode without hacking the save-file. Which is probably questionable if it is to be allowed for this game.
Isn't there a way to basically drop all of your souls, items, and money prior to starting the Hard Mode run? It wouldn't require hacking, just special preparation.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think the important thing the current "game choice" rejections accomplished is ensuring that people would not stumble across boring movies while browsing the site. Unfortunately this has the negative corollary that people sometimes can't find content that exists even though they're looking specifically for it -- because that content was rejected.
In other words, I see basically a user interface issue here -- there's little way to tell the good runs from the bad except for via the stars/moons system, which is pretty coarse. Perhaps you should be able to filter the runs that are displayed based on their ratings (e.g. only show runs with ratings of 7+). I guess your tiers are trying to accomplish something similar, by handing out moons to every run that might possibly be interesting to someone who has no prior experience with the game in question (i.e. good game choices), but it still seems kind of coarse to me.
Still, your suggestion is an improvement over the current behavior. I do think that the ability to filter results based on their rating, with a default filter at some sensible value (e.g. "Currently showing runs with ratings above 7.5 (showing 284, hiding 46)"), would accomplish much the same thing while avoiding the drama of judges "consigning runs to the Vault" or whatever. But if that's not on the table then I'd be happy enough with your suggestion.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Exactly. This is not a personal pet project, nor a commercial emulator. It is an open source project. The programmers are not in any way better than any other person on the team. We are all equal. All input is equal. That's the point of free software.
I personally don't care about the emulator name, but I find the attitude here disturbing. There is absolutely no lack of respect in trying to contribute to an open source emulator by trying to get a better name for it. And the code does not belong to you because you coded it. You released it under a copyleft license--it belongs to everyone.
What.
No, not all contributors are created equal. If your only contribution is to complain about what the people who are actually being productive* are doing, then your "contributions" will be ignored. Put another way, you can buy yourself a vote in how the project is managed by contributing to the project in meaningful ways. Once you show that your voice is one worth listening to, the existing de-facto management will be more likely to pay attention to you.
"Open source" is not equivalent to anarchy or democracy or any other government/management system. The two concepts are orthogonal. That said, most open-source projects are run via an ad-hoc meritocracy, where the people who care enough to dedicate their time to improvements are the ones who get to decide where things are going.
On its own, all that "open source" means is that if you don't like what the people in charge are doing, then you can make your own copy of the program and do what you like with it. So feel free to fork BizHawk and call it whatever you like.
* i.e. coding, designing, making art, basically anything that actually results in visible changes to the program.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
By that I basically meant any run except for the original X/X2 run has a very low degree of visible synchronicity. I didn't mean to imply that your multi-run wasn't optimized; sorry.
They're neat ideas and I bet they were a lot of fun to make (since they so greatly complexify the TASing "puzzle"), but I find them to be unwatchable.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
We really need to do a side-by-side encoding with this, and put it on the movie page.
As I understand it, one of the reasons that Defender of the Crown could be "inserted" into the run so easily is that Adventures of Lolo doesn't need input on most frames (basically, once you commit to a given square, input is ignored until you finish moving into that square). So there's lots of room for whatever input Defender of the Crown needs. As such, there wouldn't be much visual synchronicity between the two runs, making a side-by-side encode more confusing than anything else.
The more optimized multi-runs tends to have similar problems. Yes, the same input is used to control each game, but it doesn't look like that's the case.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Or we could use moons for innovative TASes. I mean, aren't moons supposed to be for "This movie is notable in some unique way" anyway? Seems like an ideal application of that marker.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm not a particle physicist, so take this with an appropriately large grain of salt.
A little googling says that neutrinos are only affected by the weak nuclear force and by gravity. Neutrons in contrast are also affected by the strong nuclear force. I would have to assume that this is the basis for why neutrons have so much less "penetrating power" than neutrinos; the only forces that interact with neutrinos are incredibly weak.
Also, with respect to your scale analogy, let's plug some numbers in assuming that the golfball : football field analogy is vaguely accurate. A golfball has a radius of about 2cm (thus, projected, i.e. flat, area of about 12 square centimeters -- this is back-of-the-envelope stuff here); a non-American football field (since you're from Finland, I assume you didn't mean American football) has an area of about 7140 square meters (thus 71400000 square cm). A particle hitting the field at a random location would thus have about a 1 in 6 million (10^6) chance of "hitting" a nucleus. Hell, we can make this more generous -- say you were off by three orders of magnitude, and it's actually a 1 in 6 billion (10^9) chance.
Now, remember how many molecules we're dealing with here. For example, a mol of iron typically weighs about 56g, and that's 6.02 * 10^23 atoms. A 1-mol sphere of iron would have a radius of a bit over 1cm (thus diameter about 2cm, or roughly the size of a golfball, for a neat bit of symmetry). Passing through a 2cm-block of iron requires passing a stupendous number of 1-in-6-billion chances. Eventually the odds will get you.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
A knife is more than just the edge of the blade. The knife widens out from the edge into something thicker -- otherwise you have a monolayer (2D) or monofilament (1D) construction. Larry Niven had monofilament melee weapons -- they were wires only one atom thick, held together by a stasis field, and so sharp they could cut through anything. Though one wonders why you couldn't just cut with the statis field directly...
Anyway, dropping the blade into the ground would be like trying to drive a wedge through some wood. Even if there's no piercing resistance, you still have to push things sideways to make way for the thicker portion of the blade, and that costs energy.
Sufficiently small objects can penetrate through matter more or less freely, though. Neutrinos pass through the entire Earth all the time because they interact so weakly with normal matter.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I can see where ais523 is coming from regarding assembly. When I was learning to program, I had a horrible time trying to wrap my head around where stuff was coming from; it wasn't until I had a good mental model of how memory actually worked in a computer that I grasped how pointers work. Assembly is thus one possible way to establish that kind of fundamental understanding, and since the language is so simple there's basically no distractions.
That said, when I was taking college courses we didn't touch assembly until we'd already established a solid general-programming foundation. The lessons that assembly teaches can also be learned in other ways.
My personal suggestion for newbie programmers is to start with Python. It has the best combination of power (being able to do a lot of things) and expressiveness (not having to jump through a lot of hoops to do anything) I've ever seen. The reliance on whitespace puts some people off, but after having inherited a codebase from a previous developer, consisting of roughly equal parts C++ and Python, I can say with authority that it's much easier to make unreadable C++ than it is to make unreadable Python, and the whitespace requirements are a big part of that.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Hm, interesting. My laptop's on Flash 11.1.102.55. With it, I did notice a very brief freeze in the SML video at 0:52 in the medium resolution, and in the smallest it visually glitches out:
Didn't notice anything in the Link's Awakening video, but it's sufficiently static that it could be hard to tell (audio's not affected, just video). Also didn't notice anything in the Kirby video.
I don't have access to my home computer to check if it has freezes, but I seem to recall noticing something like that happening.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Looks fine to me, man. The image you linked showing corrupted graphics didn't happen to me, and I didn't notice anything wrong with the SML run at any of the indicated timepoints. Maybe your Flash is on the blink?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Didn't notice anything in the Link's Awakening video, but it's sufficiently static that it could be hard to tell (audio's not affected, just video). Also didn't notice anything in the Kirby video.
I don't have access to my home computer to check if it has freezes, but I seem to recall noticing something like that happening.