You could look into IrfanView for batch cropping of your screenshots. I assume you plan to take lots because otherwise it wouldn't be a big deal to crop them manually.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Radiant: so far as I'm aware, you have to lose a match to switch characters. Also, you have to beat the fights before the castle within a certain time after starting the game, or the Amakusa and Zankuro fights are skipped, because your rival (last fight of the game) takes care of them for you. This somewhat limits your options assuming you want to show the proper boss fights of the game.
Speaking of which, Zankuro's first match was my favorite bit. Lots of quiet bits punctuated by sudden motions and counterattacks. The entire thing was pretty well put-together, though I do feel like Kazuki's instant-kill technique was a bit overused. Still easily enough for a yes vote; nice work! And thanks for the encode, fsvgm!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
If you aren't required to use the lense to climb, it would have been cooler and taslike if you climbed the wall without using it. "Winter is coming"
Ehh, they always make their "turn" before using the lens, so it's just showing the viewer that the turns were made at the proper time. It's obvious that the TASer doesn't need the lens to perform the climb.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Honestly this is pretty dull. There's a lot of walking to get to the ball each time, and not a lot of variety en route. I appreciate that a fair amount needs to be manipulated here, and as an adelikat submission of course it looks quite well-optimized...it's just very boring.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Not sure why they dd the jittery background stuff, the background in 6-2 clearly demonstrates there is a better way to do the background. The background in 6-2 not only doesn't jitter, but it is also a billion times more diverse, varied and detailed than the jittery backgrounds and doesn't make you want to vomit too.
6-2 doesn't have any distant background; it's all in the same plane and close-in. The jittery backgrounds are from when they had both near-background and far-background elements and thus needed to simulate parallax scrolling. Unfortunately, per natt they only have one layer to work with, so proper parallax isn't possible on this console (or at least, would require a lot of extra effort to avoid the jitteriness).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Oh, do you lose your ninpo at the end of the first stage 6 boss fight? I was going to ask why you didn't bring more ninpo so the other two bosses could be killed faster.
Otherwise, this looks nicely done. Kind of weird how they copied the level designs but composed all new (and crappy) music, but oh well.
Oh, and thanks for the encode, Spikestuff!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Wow, those are some impressive glitches! It's frankly amazing that new glitches are still being discovered in this game, given how many people have dedicated massive amounts of time to experimenting with it.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Unsure why more companies aren't exploiting the beta feature of Steam for this purpose, does that feature cost them money to use?
It takes time for their employees to implement this feature that maybe one customer in 1000 cares about, and time for them to then support the feature when it doesn't work to that 1 customer's satisfaction. The cost/benefit analysis is horrifically slanted against supporting older versions.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Jetpack and The Simpsons get a large boost from nostalgia value. Personally I found the Jetpack TAS to be unwatchably dull, but I never played the game and thus had no prior emotional attachment; clearly lots of other people (including, say, Nach) felt otherwise.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
TASing can be viewed as turning videogames into puzzle games (and it can also be viewed in many other ways, e.g. as an artform). So if puzzle games are games, then TASers are gamers. :)
But really it's a question of how you identify yourself. Would, say, a construction worker think of themselves as a carpenter because they occasionally have to cut a 2x4 to length? Arguably that's carpentry, but probably the construction worker thinks of themselves as doing construction, not carpentry.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It sees the outcome of moves available to it now, it becomes harder and more complex to then have it predict all the possible outcomes for each option available to it after taking any of the actions that are available now (Exponentially growing spiderweb of possibilities, notably more complex if RNG is manipulable).
An AI would not be able to determine the optimal way to play unless every single possible outcome for every single action is worked out in advance for each RNG state at any moment and you may as well just TAS the damn thing to avoid all the effort you'd otherwise need to employ to craft such a thing.
That's not really an AI though, and we're not talking about the theoretical most-optimal TAS. Because yeah, the only way to provably produce the most optimal TAS is to do a breadth-first search of the input space, which is physically impossible due to the exponential explosion of possible input sequences.
The question is if we could produce an AI that can do a better job of making TASes than human TASers do. And for that, you "just" need better heuristics, creativity, patience, and insight than human TASers have. Still a very hard problem, and I don't think we're near solving it, but that's just because very few people are working on the problem of writing AIs to play games. I don't think it's intractable, and I expect with our current computing power we could readily making a TASing AI if we only knew how.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
if you want to include a "all map completion" then i sugest you doing it while doing a 100% TAS, it would be more logic and might add depth to the route.
Honestly I doubt it would help. The problem is the item jingles that play every time you grab an item -- it's something like 5-6 seconds per item, there's 100 of them in the game, and relatively few of them actually come in handy for going faster. In a hypothetical encode that skips the jingles and the door transitions, this isn't so much of an issue, but those hypothetical encodes aren't meant to be used as the basis for judging runs (nevermind that probably there are plenty of people who have voted on SM submissions in the past having only watched such "cutsceneless" runs).
The secondary issue is that map coverage is always going to be a "...why would you bother?" category for a lot of people. We've had Castlevania: Symphony of the Night/Circle of the Moon map coverage runs and IIRC both got rejected for being too arbitrary (SotN does track your map% and even uses it to get the good ending, but IIRC we got into a fight about the glitches that enable extra map% beyond the normal max of 200.6%). But yeah, a 100% + map% run would probably get a lot of reactions along the lines of "so why did you bother to make all these little detours while getting all the items?" and "slower than the actual 100% run, voting no".
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
TASVideos is not the sole authority for publishing TASes. Hell, there's tons of Nicovideo TASes that gain plenty of popularity and that nobody ever thinks about submitting here because they don't care about us. And there's the Worms Armageddon folks, the Doom community has basically been producing TASes since before this site even existed, people have been making Smash Bros. TASes using ingame slowdown features on YouTube for years, etc.
TASVideos is a site promoting TASes for general audiences. This is why we get into such huge fights about what is and isn't worth publishing. We aren't a community dedicated to a specific game; odds are good we aren't going to be interested in the super-specific kinds of runs that such communities tend to produce as they mine their game(s) of choice for ever-more-outré ways to play it.
We rejected a "coinless capless cannonless" run of Super Mario 64 (a moderately well-established "conduct" in the SM64 community), and nobody can say that SM64 doesn't produce entertaining runs. It's still popular on YouTube. There's all kinds of gimmick runs like low-map% for Symphony of the Night which similarly did not get published here (though I don't recall if specifically low-map% was even submitted).
Even though the communities for those games love these kinds of stunts, the TASing world at large is generally less interested. That doesn't make your run valueless. It just means that it's a bit too targeted at your community's tastes. You still have the run; nothing's going to take it from you. Put it up on YouTube, enjoy it with your friends, share it around, et cetera. Don't rely on TASVideos to in some way "validate" your actions.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Spikestuff, these don't fit into the criterea. They were still done with rerecording, an AI doesn't have that.
For an AI to play effectively, it must be able to predict the future state of the game. It does that, effectively, by emulating the game and seeing the consequences of decisions it can make right at this moment. Humans do this too, just in a more abstract sense. It seems silly to mandate that an AI be required to re-implement the game from scratch when there's a working copy readily available.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'm not remotely an expert at the game, but from what I understand there are secret doors that are only reachable when you're "falling off the screen" due to dying. So the runner commits suicide at that location to trigger the secret door. In other words, it's not a glitch.
(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Ehh, to be honest that one dragged on too long. And the fact that every single "pass" was a 1-Up farming session meant there wasn't much variety. It would've been nice to see Mario navigate one of the hyperspeed sections without touching a single enemy, maybe.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Fighting Magus at North Cape surely will make the run more unique. Is it still literally impossible to defeat Lavos at Ocean Palace at lowest levels even with Green dream and the equipments from sealed chests?
I wouldn't be surprised. Ocean Palace Lavos spams the "destruction rains from the heavens" attack every other turn, if I recall correctly, and it's a full party wipe's worth of (I think) non-elemental damage even if you're at normal levels. The Green Dream could keep one party member alive through one of those, but I don't think there's enough time to set up Lifeline like that Let's Play does with endgame Lavos. Mostly because you won't have had the chance to get the Speed Tabs you need to get actions fast enough.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Thanks for the run, FatRatKnight, and thanks for the encode, Spikestuff! The subtitles were a big help in explaining what was going on and in particular explaining what the small detours were for. It's impressive how, uh, reckless the run can be, thanks to the health refills after every treasure room. I can't imagine that Gauntlet II will be so forgiving, whenever someone gets around to tackling it...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Man, Zelda's a little more blue and eyeball-y than I remember her being.
That was pretty awesome. I do wonder if there was room for one more damage boost en route to the flute though, since you end that section with 1 full heart. Anyway, great work!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Those look good to me; there's some good information in there. If you're getting tired of writing subtitles, then I think what you've already written is plenty. In general though subtitles don't hurt runs; in the absolute worst case the viewer can just turn them off.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
