How feasible would "max destruction % while changing weapons every stage" be? So each stage, you'd have to select the optimal weapons (for all slots) from those available in the store. That would seem to be a pretty clear-cut if arbitrary rule selection.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I watched this after the recent obsoletion, and discovered that the YouTube encode, at least, has badly desynched audio. I haven't checked the other encodes.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It's presumably up to the person who submits the run; I'd imagine everyone has their own standards for when to put a contribution in the "thanks to" section and when to list them as a coauthor.
Regarding the NG+ TAS, it looks like what inichi basically did was:
* Unequip the Bronze Fist weapon from Ayla in his "seed" run (used to generate the NG+ file)
* Glitch starting the NG+ game so that Chrono and Marle can equip the Bronze Fist
* Proceed to walk all over Lavos
Unequipping the Bronze Fist requires a simultaneous-input glitch (much like using the Murder Beam in Super Metroid). So save data is never modified, but it is loaded improperly.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The main standard that TASVideos requires you to meet is that your run has to be stored as a sequence of controller inputs, which can then be used by another person to replicate the run. This requires the emulator you're using to be very stable, in the sense that it has to do exactly the same thing every time given the same sequence of inputs. Otherwise, when the third party tries to replicate your run, the emulator will "desynch" -- something will go subtly wrong, like a jump that was originally just barely long enough will fall short -- and the run will fail. Evidently PS2 emulators aren't up to that standard yet.
You can still make videos of PS2 TASes like rog described. Bisqwit made a TAS of Chrono Chross well before we had a stable PSX emulator by simply recording every frame of the TAS as he made it and splicing them together once it was complete. And I'm sure plenty of us would like to see such TASes made. They just wouldn't be publishable here because they wouldn't be verifiable.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The walkathon has completely different goals, and indeed for a long time we didn't know if it was even possible to complete the warpless walkathon. The game fully expects that you would use the B button and structures many jumps so that you normally would have to. In contrast, there's no question that a minimum-presses run would be able to beat the game; it's just an optimization problem.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It may well be that the counter is also advanced for each frame on the title screen, or something similar. Most games do something like that to get a decently random starting seed.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
"Affect" means to modify, "effect" (when used as a verb) means to bring about or to cause to exist. So if someone is effecting my game, that means I couldn't play without them. :)
Fabian: ITYM "defiantely".
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Are you really that pissed off that people managed to beat inferno by corpse hopping? Its not like the loot they got made the effort worthwhile.
It sounds like his main complaint here is that Blizzard didn't step up the bosses the way they stepped up the mobs. Corpse-hopping should have worked only until you reached the first act boss, at which point you'd have been unable to kill him so what did the corpse-hopping accomplish?
And why do you care about what some crazies did anyway? It doesn't effect your game.
It's not that the players corpse-hopped, it's how Blizzard reacted to them doing it, by brushing it off and ignoring what it meant that that was even a valid tactic.
In short, his rant appears to be "This game isn't as well-designed as it was claimed to be, and Blizzard is refusing to admit that they screwed up." Not having played D3 myself, I can't speak to the first bit. The second bit I can understand -- no company is going to admit that they released anything other than a perfect game if they can possibly avoid it; certainly they aren't going to do anything so soon after launch when less-than-positive official statements could impact sales.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Inferno mode get a patch to upgrade the bosses a few months down the line though. It's not like Blizzard is shy about patching the balance of their games.
(Also, affect, not effect)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'd say not -- it'd be like grouping PSX and PS2 games together. Just because the Wii is more or less a souped-up, backwards-compatible Gamecube doesn't mean they're the same platform.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
In fact, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if, at the time of submission, goofydylan was the only active member of TASVideos who had played this game -- seeing as it's an old NES game in a language that the vast majority of our users do not speak.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The existence of movement presupposes two dimensions: an independent dimension (normally assumed to be time) and a dependent dimension (the dimension moved along). You have to be able to say "when position on dimension A is X0, position on dimension B is Y0; when position on dimension A is X1, position on dimension B is Y1."
It's not a question of laws of physics; it's a question of definitions of words.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Thanks for the information, creaothceann. So it actually does work by setting an interrupt that causes the systems to reset themselves. Good to know.
Also my conservative guess, earlier in the thread, at 16 cycles per instruction wasn't actually that conservative! Ha!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Thanks for the explanation. Aside from verifying the run, can the very concept of mid-frame resets be verified?
As I understand it, resetting the console is an inherently analog process -- you're disrupting power to the device. Of course the device needs power to operate, so when you press the button, it has no choice but to stop what it's doing.
I suppose a reset button could also set an interrupt, in which case the CPU would be obligated to go down a different path than it normally would. I'm fairly sure this isn't how it actually works, but even if it did I don't know if it would make a difference in how the reset is perceived. Possibly the CPU would be allowed to finish its current instruction, but it certainly wouldn't be able to finish the entire frame.
In short, mid-frame resets are not a controversial concept. If you mash reset while saving your game in Chronotrigger, you're going to corrupt your savefile due to interrupted instructions, even though saving only takes a single frame.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
This save corruption abuse thing is getting kind of ridiculous. While I agree that this should obsolete previous runs, I'd love to see proof that this actually works on a SNES. Of course, how the hell could you ever get the sort of precise timing needed to pull this off? I have no answers.
Timing for this kind of thing is even trickier than replicating a standard TAS on real hardware, because you have to send the reset command at a very specific time between instructions. The SNES's CPU runs at about 21MHz; if we assume it takes 16 clock cycles to run one instruction (almost certainly a gross exaggeration), and that the reset command can arrive at any point during a specific command to result in the desired corruption (probably not true) then that means that the reset command would have to arrive in a window of time only 16 / 21000000 = 761 nanoseconds in size.
In short, don't expect to see this run verified on the console.
Regarding the run itself, I have to say this didn't look very different at all from the run inichi made back then. I think it's entirely reasonable to list him as a coauthor; he deserves credit for figuring out the strategy even if none of his input survives in the finished version.
Also, 233k rerecords? What took so much experimentation? Finding the exact time to trigger the resets?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Have people tried trading their recorded movies back and forth to ensure syncing is stable on different computers?
Otherwise, sounds like great news! I look forward to the inevitable new Mario TASes. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Just a quick note on the description: the game can have hundreds of active balls at once, hence the 100-ball powerup (which from what I recall when watching actually replaces every active ball with 100 balls each).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If you can't get something better than a video stream from the guy who breaks your record, and you made a good effort to beat it even then, then I'd say you're in the clear. Otherwise there's way too much potential for someone to make a faked video and basically troll the TAS creators with impossible speed.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If you require a framerate of 60FPS and allow a single input to take only 1 frame* then to be shorter than King's Bounty it'd have to be at least under 600 turns, and it's well past that.
I guess the question is, is NetHack written in a way that requires waiting for a screen refresh before more input can be accepted? If it isn't, then your only limitation is the keyboard polling speed.
* realistically it would take 2, wouldn't it? One frame to depress, one frame to release?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm inclined to agree with Truncated. One line per game is easier to read than mashing everything together.
Of course, functionally people are most likely to be using their browsers' search functionality to find a specific game on the page. Even then though I think that it'll be easier to find and click on the search result when there's one game per line.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'd like to learn and understand what you guys find boring and why.
It depends on how much is happening in the TAS and if you understand what is happening. TASes which are fast, like Sonic, where a lot of things are happening all the time, are entertaining, because the brain has more things to analyze.
For what it's worth, I find many Sonic TASes to be exhausting to watch, and pretty quickly my brain just starts tuning stuff out. I can't keep up with what's going on, and that actually makes it less entertaining for me.
That has more to do with the sheer speed of the game (in terms of how quickly stuff moves) than with the gameplay though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
