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Haha, oh my God! I didn't expect this to happen, although that was a fair, deserved and unique event for me.
I took a vacation for a week and acted a low-performer at work for another week while TASing Chip 'n Dale all days long. So hardly I wanted to beat this game.
Meanwhile, I was seeking for practice to overcome my life shyness, so I took the opportunity to comment on this TAS on Game Done Quick 2024. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2273560382?t=22h58m35s
I still feel embarrassed of broadcasting my childish voice to 2k viewers live, but now I'm convinced the world is not that harsh to me.
Only after I had recovered from the shock of my commentary, an idea of yearly TAS rewards finally hit my mind, but I was skeptical about the potential victory until this day.
I am grateful to this community! My 10 years here have been satisfied, although I don't care about rewards as much as I did in my childhood years
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Reviewer, Experienced player
(599)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1261
Location: Romania
"Without a spinach" is not actually an objective because Olive stops throwing items you have to collect while the spinach is working.
The optimization is questionable because, at least, in theory it's possible to pick the final note in the fastest time on Level 2.
Overall, voting Yes
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Reviewer, Experienced player
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Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1261
Location: Romania
LMP, regardless of its flaws and the -args approach to set it up, still saves all necessary information.
In Doom 1 (aka Ultimate Doom) you cannot play another episode after you finish one. You stare at the ending screen with the text being printed in. No action can be done to jump to the next episode immediately. You need to press Esc, select another episode and difficulty, like you would do if you start that episode on the first place.
Metadata stuff will look the same in all TASes: you invoke Main Menu, select episode (if it's Doom 1) and difficulty, and all this will take a couple of frames. Does it worth it? In some emulator core settings you can set a specific date and time to get a better RNG for your TAS. Why not do the same for Doom, including other LMP demo header parameters, including the episode number and the difficulty?
Another niche point is killing monsters and the main hero at the end of Doom 2, which LMP doesn't record (it gets stuck at Zombieman), but it's not needed in a TAS.
--
Regarding "keyboard + mouse" input, I dislike this idea.
Keyboard gives you a limited set of possible inputs. Mouse has to command all other input ranges for your movement and your turns.
In case of Strafe50, it requires more manual actions. To make SL50 (strafe left), you hold A, Run button (in case, you have autorun = 0 in your dsda-doom.cfg), Strafe button and drag you mouse all the way to the left. I will go nuts if I have to do this in TAStudio, even with its frame copy-paste-clone options.
Maybe you can achieve MF50 SL50 with mouse input alone, I don't know, but it's gonna be another torture to enter mouse coordinates, like (255, -255) or (65535, -65535), to achieve this.
You may propose to use an input interpreter then, to ease the entering of input, but it begs the question: why do you specifically need "keyboard + mouse" input if you effectively end up doing the same that LMP format already stores in? I don't know how the input gets parsed by the game, but I won't be surprised if that's the way the game actually does it.
To quote my proposal from Discord,
"It's gonna be much easier to update XDRE with a "real-life human gadgetless control" mode (or compet-n control restrictions) which will automatically fix MF50...127 to MF50, and change SR50 to SR40 if turning commands are present."
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Reviewer, Experienced player
(599)
Joined: 4/5/2014
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Location: Romania
There was a special controller for this dilogy? Wow!
Watching this TAS makes me feel like the game has the easiest difficulty where you can't lose any ball
Yes vote
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Reviewer, Experienced player
(599)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1261
Location: Romania
Link to video
What you see is what you get. That's basically everything what can be told about this game. Also known as MotoRace USA and Traverse, but for different ports of the game.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/arcade/584166-motorace-usa/faqs/32365
It takes just a little patience to beat every race without dropping your speed once.
There are 5 sets of levels (tiers). Tier 6 and onwards is a copy of Tier 5, with no boost to your maximum speed (420 km/h), so that's basically is the point of stop.
The races are relatively easy to pass without dropping speed once. However, there is a catch. If you override more cars on top-down levels (city and desert), on checkpoint 4 (our of 5 in each tier) you will have to wait for score to count up, and it's really hard to manipulate car sequences and their actions to save time on checkpoint screens. I tried optimizing it all, but a car can crash or drive off roads once it leaves the screen, and this speeds up the spawn of the next car. As a result, overriding a car at the very end of a level might not be a bad option.
In short, it's very hard to aim for real time. I won't be surprised if eventually a TAS will be submitted with "Aims on in-game time, instead of real time" tag.
On top-down levels, the cars can be manipulated by changing your position. On overview levels (where cars drive at you), the range of manipulations is much narrower, not that easy, but is also dependent on your horizontal position.
In the TAS shown above, I tried dropping the speed to let the last reachable car stay in front, to save some time on the upcoming checkpoint screen. I'm sure, the optimization is not acceptable.
User movie #638714449390441826
The game is very boring. I don't feel like investing my time into it. Not even to submit a TAS which aims for in-game time
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
