Posts for Derakon

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Posted: 9/17/2010 12:23 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
If we had a 120-star run on the workbench right now that combined all of the best single-star runs from, say, two months ago, I'm sure that run would be accepted. It would be known to be quite unoptimal, but at the same time it'd be a huge improvement over what we have right now. Of course, that would entail someone making a massive run in only two months, which I don't think is feasible.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/17/2010 12:21 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Hophoolio is basically correct. "Hexing" is short for "hex-editing", which refers to modifying a file that is not normally easy to read. But around here it's devolved into "going back in a movie file and changing the input after it has been created". Depending on the game, this may be more or less feasible. In a simple game, for example, you might discover an improvement on level 3 after finishing level 15, go in and change the level 3 input (and move the input for the entire rest of the movie up a bit), and still have the movie work. Games with lots of random events tend to not work so well for this, though, because changing level 3 means that level 4 is slightly different, which means that your input there is no longer valid -- say, an enemy decides to jump instead of duck, and now you run into him instead of going around him. SM64 is not hex-friendly, so you have to get the input right the first time. Any improvements found later will require starting over from the point of the improvement.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/16/2010 3:45 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The "breaks existing records" rule is for non-assisted play. If your run isn't faster than someone sitting in front of a TV without access to slowdown and rerecords, then it's not going to be accepted (unless it's a playaround, in which case we'll bicker about it for weeks before coming to a decision).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/16/2010 3:42 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It has importance if you're relying on it to see if someone cheated when playing a game on the emulator. :) The practical upshot of this is, emulator movies are useless for competitions that are intended to measure your actual skill at the game. Not only rerecords, but slowdown and frame advance can allow you to cheat without there being any record.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/16/2010 12:09 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Yeah, that sounds like a standard multicart. Just because it has character art on it doesn't mean that it was released by Nintendo.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/15/2010 3:47 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Just because a company goes bankrupt doesn't mean their assets weren't bought up for cheap by someone else. In fact it's pretty likely that any remotely popular game owned by a defunct company was bought out, on the off-chance that there'll be a revival sometime down the line.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/14/2010 5:31 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
You can cheat the rerecord count to say anything you like. It's just a number in the file; there's no checks that can make certain that you made a "legit" run on an emulator.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/14/2010 5:30 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Thanks for the encode, sgrunt! The run looked good! Though, why didn't you save your last special weapon shot for the last blow of the final boss so you could end input earlier?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/14/2010 12:22 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
What I'd recommend doing here is learning about string splitting. You have a delimiter, the ';' character, which (should) never show up in your actual strings. So you read in a line, and then split it on the ';' character. That gets you an array of strings. For example, splitting your first line there would get you ["Sun", "Box1", "10", "Group1"]. Then you can look at the last entry in that array to determine which group the line is in. You could also learn to use regular expressions for this. They're tremendously powerful string manipulators. However, I'd say they're overkill at this point. Also, have you considered that "1" would be entirely adequate instead of "Group1"? And you should probably start with 0 instead of 1 so you can use the number as an index into your array of groups -- just remember to check to make certain the number you read in is in-bounds.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/12/2010 11:45 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It's been claimed for judging. No decision can be rendered until 72 hours are up, but now the other judges know they don't need to worry about this particular movie except as viewers.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/10/2010 6:57 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I have to admit I found myself tuning out partway through. The gameplay seemed very repetitive. Fast, but still repetitive. I'm not going to vote as I didn't finish watching the movie, but if I had it'd probably be a Meh.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/10/2010 6:33 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
SoR3 isn't so much crap as it is misadjusted. The Japanese version is much more reasonable difficulty-wise. American "Easy" is Japanese "Normal" except the game ends after Robot-X. American "Normal" is Japanese "Hard" and it really is quite hard. Mind, I'm not a huge fan of the music in SoR 3, especially compared to 2.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/9/2010 6:35 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
This game gets less and less recognizable as time goes by. Very impressive work there, and I think the sheer WTF factor makes it worthwhile.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/9/2010 5:54 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
FractalFusion wrote:
This problem will only get worse in the future. Why bother cycling the RNG when you can do it as little as possible? Probably in the past developers were so paranoid about RNGs being abused that they would actively go out of their way to create complicated RNG algorithms and cycle them every subroutine call, even on the NES. This mentality is pretty much dead nowadays.
Ehh, IMO it's still better to at least cycle the RNG each frame on the main menu. As long as you have a good random starting point it doesn't much matter if your random numbers from then on are predictable. It's a problem though if you have a nonrandom seed. Puzzle Quest on the DS was abusable for this reason.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/9/2010 4:29 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
arkiandruski wrote:
The playstation has another advantage in that there's no joystick, so it will be slightly less complex.
Wouldn't this also mean that movement in the Playstation version would be much less precise? You'd go from being able to choose from hundreds of possible directions to only having eight.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/8/2010 5:36 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I bet if this run was just "no subweapons" people would be decrying it for being too similar to the published run, actually. Some days you just can't win.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/6/2010 4:32 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Ahh, the humble lol, English's most recent addition to the world of punctuation.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/6/2010 4:30 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Found time to watch the encode (thanks, Flygon!), and I enjoyed it. The White Dragon evasions and the Mummy fight were my favorite bits. Nice work!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/6/2010 2:35 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Those who want to get higher quality than they can watch on YouTube? Flash decoders aren't exactly the fastest things in the world. For that matter, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed watching it online but want to have a personal copy so they can watch it anytime without having to track something down on a website.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/5/2010 9:57 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Both of the latter two pictures make it look like Mew is eating his tail.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/5/2010 9:55 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Looking good! I usually used Thetis on Queenbee, though I can't recall why...probably because of the big arc on his aerials.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/5/2010 6:11 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Pointless Boy wrote:
I recall from the published run that there's a way to damage bosses by running into them. If it was possible it would be cool to beat the game without ever swinging the whip or using any other weapons. That might be more interesting to me than this run.
My understanding of that glitch is that it involves hurting the boss while yourself being hurt -- some of the damage you take is shared with the boss. You still need a way to damage the boss.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/5/2010 2:37 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Those look excellent, Ryuto! I look forward to what you can do with the TAS. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/2/2010 3:06 AM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
What the crap? Nice work!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 9/1/2010 10:52 PM
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Derakon
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
If and when we get a better arcade run, it can take the star. This star is simply currently allocated to our best arcade run, and we only have two to choose from.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
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