I find it deeply insulting nobody has challenged my excellent claim.
Let's say that the universe is in fact only a picosecond old. Everything up to one picosecond ago was carefully set up by God to seem just as if the current time were a perfectly natural result of those initial conditions.
Does it matter?
In other words, a god that "lies" by "artificially" setting everything up in an apparently completely natural way is functionally equivalent to no god at all.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I assume Warp is talking about the fossil record, which has life starting in the oceans, proceeding from there onto the land, and only then moving into the air. That would make concurrent creation of air and sea creatures difficult.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
arflech: I haven't been working on Jetblade because I moved to other hobbies, frankly. I have too many and maintaining interest in just one for a sustained period is often beyond me. Also, in August I moved into a house that required some renovation so I've been dedicating most of my spare energy to that instead.
Unlike my sarcastic comment earlier, though, I don't object to open source and I'm glad I made the source for Jetblade available. Anyone interested in it is welcome to pick up where I left off. Mostly the game needs content now; I've sorted all of the big map generation issues.
Atma: Unless I miss my guess, Super Meat Boy is Flash-based, and thus would be problematic to run under Hourglass even if Steam weren't an issue.
pirate_sephiroth: honestly this bundle is miles better than the last one. I've heard good things about Jamestown, NightSky, and Shank, and Super Meat Boy is excellent. Bit.Trip Runner is a bit niche but I enjoyed it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
So if I understand you correctly:
* Once someone makes a free indie game, they're never allowed to make a for-profit game. Nifflas is a bastard for wanting to get paid for his new works.
* Pixel bears no responsibility for ensuring reasonable licensing terms, artistic oversight, etc. prior to allowing the project to move forward.
Remember that Pixel could easily have refused to make a commercial version of the game. He would have been well within his rights and there's not a damned thing Nifflas or anyone else could have done about it. All those people who think that Cave Story+ is the only version of the game would instead likely never have played the game at all, since they'd never have heard of it.
You can definitely argue if the port was a crappy job (and I agree that it's rough in many areas, though Toroko's portrait is the only situation where the graphics are poor IMO), but I don't think you can reasonably paint Nifflas as some kind of asshole villain here.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I got CS+ mostly to show support for Pixel. The remixed music is terrible (but the original music is still available), the graphics are nice, the gameplay's the same as always, the translation is...serviceable, though I preferred Balrog's old "Huzzah" over the "Oh yeah". And apparently there's an extra level or two somewhere, though I haven't looked for them yet.
And besides, it was only $10. I can justify that kind of purchase pretty easily.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I already own SMB and Bit.Trip Runner, and I just purchased Cave Story+ a few days ago (currently stuck on the Core battle on Hard).
IMO they've been pushing the Humble Bundles a bit too hard. Though it is nice for me as an OSX user that their offers are almost always cross-platform compatible.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
1. Assuming you're talking about how he deflected the shots from the blue bird warriors, he jumped, then turned around for a frame so his shield would block the shot. It's too quick to notice easily. The jumping was to avoid having to stop to turn around.
2. A combination of the Jump spell and manipulating where the enemy spawns from, looks like. The enemy spawns based on your current height, so he jumped to get it to spawn higher than usual, and then jumped again to bounce over it up onto the wall.
You don't have to do that to beat the Great Palace, though. It's an unintended route.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Ahh, yes, the "if you're not an author/musician/athlete/chef/etc. then you can't criticize books/music/sports/food/etc." attitude.
He could have been less insulting but he did have a point -- compact, "elegant" code is typically much harder to understand than straightforward, simple code. Code golf has artistic value but I wouldn't want it anywhere near a serious project.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
There's a WIP of a Sonic 1 tool-assisted score run out there somewhere. Generally the first two levels of each act were played for speed (for the 50k score bonus) and the last level, where that bonus was impossible due to the boss, would be much more leisurely. It was okay, I guess. The big score chains from bouncing off of enemies were definitely the highlight.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
He discusses the Good End in the movie description; apparently it just involves going out of your way to get a bunch of random collectibles and isn't all that interesting to watch.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
You also get a different boss for the Clock Tower level if you don't save the girls. I don't know that the bosses and the marginally different level (when you fail the pillar jumping section) are enough to be worth a second branch though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
That doesn't explain the loading screens. What does it need them for?
Loading screens can cover for more than just loading data off of media. If that data is compressed, for example, then CPU time needs to be spent on uncompressing it, which could take long enough for a loading screen to be needed.
Granted that e.g. Star Ocean for the SNES used gobs of compression without noticeable delays, so who knows.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Realljoel's Dad mode in Iji is literally impossible; per my friendly Iji maniac, you must kill every enemy to lower a barrier* before a timer runs out**. Too bad!
* Barrier does not actually lower
** Even given the above, the timer is too short to allow for killing everything and making it to the exit in time.
As for packet spoofing, that'd have to be part of the input file, wouldn't it? And I don't see how you could set that up. Running a separate server program is also currently infeasible, as I understand it, since Hourglass only runs one program at a time, and besides servers probably aren't so amenable to the tricks it plays to force reproducibility, since they lack a display refresh which it can use to force a consistent framerate.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think the "I did not think them" means that he didn't realize those tricks existed (that being what "them" refers to). And of course the "it's crazy" indicates he's impressed.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yeah, a lot of nominally unnecessary words are added to discourse in the name of being polite.
Plus, it provides some indication that the author is trying to improve -- after all, the first step to improvement is recognizing that you have a problem. :) Thus the apology tells me "This person cares about how they present themselves online, and they're doing their best." I'll be far more inclined to treat them with respect than I will be those who are just lazy and don't care that their spelling and grammar are atrocious.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If the second law of thermodynamics is reversed, then you would lose entropy on each "energy transaction"; the easiest way to imagine a universe bound by those rules would be to have one just like ours except that time flows backwards.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I wouldn't be surprised if that "test run" was really just an unassisted run with savestates -- not very optimized, in other words. All it has to do is unlock Albus Mode; it doesn't have to be remotely fast about it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Two questions:
1) The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it's not possible to know both the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time. However, what happens at absolute zero temperature, where all motion stops?
I believe at absolute zero it becomes impossible to acquire information about the object -- there's no way to "sense" it that wouldn't impart energy to the particle, thereby raising its temperature and rendering its momentum uncertain.
2) I know extremely little about thermodynamics, but it sounds to me like the second law is just a consequence of the first law, and hence redundant. Please correct my understanding.
Let me explain: The first law states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. In other words, a closed system cannot produce more energy than it contains.
The second law states that the entropy of a closed system never decreases. In other words, the amount of energy available for useful work in a closed system never increases.
This sounds to me like a simple consequence of the first law. If the amount of energy available for useful work inside a closed system could increase, that would mean that the closed system could produce more energy than it contains (by doing more work than what its available energy would allow), which would be against the first law.
Entropy is more than just energy; it's energy in a useful form. My reading of the second law is that basically there is waste in any energy transformation that cannot be usefully captured (because the capture process involves its own waste).
I'm not a physicist and these are not remotely authoritative answers; just my understanding.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Having now watched the run, I found it quite enjoyable. Voting yes. Great job, Aglar!
I do think that ais523's proposal, if implemented well, should be able to obsolete this run though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
A quick and dirty translation of finalserafin's post: "Everyone has their own opinion, this is just mine. In any case, the category is too personal (ed: arbitrary?) to be published, and the run doesn't achieve its goal anyway (because it uses zips), which is the main reason why I voted no. The fact that the emeralds are skipped is a comparatively minor issue (my vote would have been a weak "yes" if there had been no zips)."
I've made my case for why zips and ejections are different, but of course I've yet to view the movie to see if ejections are abused, so to speak.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
From reading the above posts, my impression is that this run simply refrains from using a particular glitch that - to an untrained eye - resembles another glitch that IS still exploited. I haven't watched it yet, but I think my vote will really depend on whether I, a TAS layperson, would agree with Derakon that the omitted glitch substantially changes the run.
To be clear, sprite ejection is not a glitch. It's a fundamental mechanic of discrete (i.e. non-continuous) physics systems, which basically all games use. You can't detect a collision between two objects before those two objects are actually intersecting; at that point, you have to decide how to fix things so that the objects no longer intersect. Typically this involves backing out one or both of the objects -- sprite ejection -- though plenty of games simply destroy the offending object (c.f. most scrolling shmups). Depending on how many resources you can dedicate to the task (and how skilled of a programmer you are), collision response can be more or less accurate, but in any case it's not a glitch.
Zipping is the game going "oh crap, my usual routines for fixing object intersection aren't working." Sprite ejection is perfectly normal and expected behavior whenever two objects bump into each other. That's why they're qualitatively different.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
