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I realize many of the other tables in the Epic Pinball collection besides Android weren't as well liked.
But I had this when I was young and was never able to get through the four levels (without cheating in unlimited balls). That was my primary impetus to do this TAS. That and I needed a break from Space Quest.
I don't think any pinball games have a technical 'ending' where play is not allowed to continue. I do consider the Enigma arriving on this table as the point of no new content, and thus I claimed it as the ending for TAS purposes. I could have spent a bit more time and inputs to lose the remaining balls and get a game over screen, but those seemed to be pointless to me as the 'endgame cutscene' had already been viewed.
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I recently proposed some new rules that were adopted regarding CPU frequency for DOS games using JPC-rr.
Also some discussion that arose out of my work on C64 games this year led to a clarification of NTSC vs PAL rules for that system.
Changes and additions do happen. In both of these cases, it took discussion regarding appropriateness as well as potential impact on the site.
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We've been nominated for Speedy TAS!
Hopefully someone will also nominate this run for Lucky TAS considering how much we all put into completely reverse engineering and the RNG mechanism for optimal use.
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What does it take to be considered a 'serious TASer'? Do they have to agree with you?
Alyosha seems to think this game/software is TAS worthy....is Alyosha not a serious TASer? He does code the emulator we use to do many of the TASes on this site.
Just because some of the more senior members of the site may not consider games such as this to be serious, other serious TASers may.
I fear this discussion has offended individuals on both sides of the debate. I do hope none of the offense was intentional.
EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that this post can be viewed as an aggressive attack on Nach. That was not my intent.
I was merely trying to point out that his comment was making too big of an assumption regarding who qualifies as a serious TASer.
The fact that some serious TASers (at least in my opinion) do consider this particular game TAS worthy, suggests to me that it may indeed be non-trivial enough to be accepted as a serious game; at least using Nach's logic that the vault rule is to reject games that serious TASers wouldn't consider valid.
I personally am less sure where I stand on this debate than I was before I originally posted in this topic (my position was mostly neutral at the time). Mainly because I'm now more confused as to how a game is deemed serious or not. I'm quite sure that confusion is not limited to myself.
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It's the confusion that is my primary concern as well, not this particular submission.
This majority of this discussion could (and likely should) have taken place in its own topic, and it only happened here because this is where it started. The biggest problem with it happening here is the unfortunate likelihood that some of the generalized comments from both sides are being specifically (and inappropriately) attributed to this particular run; not being considered as a generalized concepts.
I am probably as guilty of this error as anyone else.
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Let me start by saying I'm not a judge. Still, the minimum necessary work would probably be dependent on the game choice itself.
Some games with multiple route options have a very limited number of route choices (NES Super Mario Bros.). Others may have hundreds of possibilities (NES Key Quest).
To fully test every possibility for a given game may require an unreasonable degree of work to produce a valid TAS.
Thus my personal approach is to test the handful of routes that seem as though they would be fastest and chose the best from those. A good resource to help determining the best route can be via finding a real-time speedrun (though these aren't always the fastest routes).
As long as there aren't obvious routing improvements when compared to your resulting TAS, a judge will likely not reject it for routing reasons.
It's not uncommon for already published runs to obsoleted by better routing.
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No. As with my testing in SQ1, it took at least a change of 1000 to elicit a different RNG seed.
EDIT: For clarification.... All values from 0-999 in the initial RTC yield the same RNG seed when it is first set.
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Ok I'm struggling to put together my RTC spreadsheet. The changes are more complicated than with SQ1, but I'm not sure why.
Here's a spreadsheet with the first 52 seeds. As you can see, The difference between one seed and the next mostly follows a cycle, but there are some anomalies that I don't understand.
This is making it much more difficult to complete the list of 65535 potential seeds as I did with SQ1. (There were anomalies there as well, but much easier to overcome.)
If it helps, the first seed is set at game time 1448 ms. So in my mind, the time in milliseconds-from-midnight when the seed is set should be (the starting RTC time + 1448).
EDIT: Updated Spreadsheet
EDIT 2: I found some errors in the spreadsheet...starting from scratch on this one.
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Excellent points.
Firstly, thank you to all those commenting. As frustrating as this debate has been for many of you, it has exposed the perspectives of various members of the community.
This entire topic then begs the question: Does the term 'educational' actually aid in determining a degree of triviality for a more concrete rule? It seems to have created more confusion than anything.
Would the rule benefit from dropping the word 'educational' all together and just stick with 'non-serious' (Assuming that can be defined)?
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This is beautiful. If we punch at the right time, we should alter the RNG seed for damage calculation and may be able to make him not punch at all (after the first punch).
EDIT: Which random values yield what actions for the robot battle?
EDIT #2: Trying to use the lua script causes JPC-rr to freeze until I terminate the lua; then the emulator continues running. Ideas? Never mind...got it to work (not that I know how i accomplished this)
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Unfortunately we can't use this unless we chose to kill Arnoid in the machine instead of the pods. (And that assumes there doesn't need RNG to get him to arrive there...i haven't checked) EDIT: Even if every other place RNG was used yielded the fastest options, I doubt it would make up for the extra time to use the machine to kill Arnoid.
This I was already pretty confident of.
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I noticed that as well, I just haven't had a chance to play around with anything else yet.
I've got to try and find where the first random is called and then adjust my RTC spreadsheet to see if I can even set a starting RTC to yield 2048. (or any of the other values which are also in the cycle)
26624
18432
43008
34816
59392
51200
10240
With the variety of options, it hopefully won't be very hard.
I am also curious to see if it will still take a minimum of 1000 millisecond RTC change to produce a change in the RNG seed value, or if that was specific to the AGI system.
Something that may be affected by RNG that I haven't had a chance to confirm yet is the timing of the buckets on the conveyor lift in the garbage freighter.
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All of these are multiples of 16384. As such, dividing 16384/2 yields 8192. This seed results in a revolving seed of 2 numbers (8192 and 40960). 40960 is 8192 less than 49152.
Adding 8192 to 16394 yields 24576 which also results in a revolving 2 value sequence of RNG seeds.
Continuing this example:
4096 yields a revolving 4 value sequence
2048 yields a revolving 8 value sequence
1024 yields a revolving 16 value sequence
and so on.
Basically an even numbered seed is much more predictable and possibly more useful than an odd numbered seed.
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Awesome. I'll work with this as soon as I can and try to determine an ideal starting RTC. Unfortunately none of the unchanging RNG seeds yield Arnoid showing up for the Pods (unless my math is wrong).
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^Yea, sorry about that. A good chunk of that was my fault and I truly don't stand on either side of the argument.
The following is to attempt to answer my own earlier question--Why is 'learn something' a less valid goal than 'save the princess', 'kill everyone else', or 'click on Waldo's picture' as a game goal? (italics new)
As a generalization (not a concrete law), the site perceives video games as software intended for purposes of recreational entertainment. Edutainment is, however, primarily intended to teach or exercise knowledge of a particular subject. While a recreational video game may also provide an opportunity to learn, the learning is not the intent of the game. For the purposes of this site, edutainment is therefore NOT a video game in the recreational sense because its intent is education, not recreation.
The key delineation in my opinion is 'recreation vs. education' as the intent of the software's creators.
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This is perhaps the best argument I've read against TASes of most educational games and likely the most valid way to help in determining when one is not worthy of consideration for vault.
The inability to lose is a hallmark of many edutainment games.
EDIT: It should never be the sole reason any title is rejected though.
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Via analogy, lets use this logic for a different recreational activity: Watching a TV show like "Star Trek" would be considered a recreational activity as it's not intended to teach anything. But watching a TV show like "NOVA" would NOT be a recreational activity because the primary purpose of the documentary was to teach you about scientific aspects of the world in which we live (school subject). Therefore using the above logic "Star Trek" is an entertainment medium, but "NOVA" is just a dressed up education tool and should not be considered a real show.
Sounds absurd that way doesn't it?
The only thing about this particular submission that fails to differentiate it as a game instead of a tool then, is the extra step of solving a math problem before you can shoot a particular piece of trash off the screen or enter a given hole in the enemy ship.
Here are two examples of similar goals from games that are already accepted on the site with a key difference being the added step of math is missing.
1) Shoot stuff on screen from a cockpit - Top Gun
2) Hit a particular hole while dodging enemies, then do it again multiple times - The key level of Donkey Kong Jr.
Thank you ALL for your perspectives! I never expected the debate to get this intense. One final question from me, then I'll politely bow out of the current debate.Though I may join a future one from either side of the argument.
I recognize that the site primarily wants entertaining videos and educational titles aren't usually very entertaining. But the whole point of the Vault being created to begin with was as a repository of well-made but poorly-entertaining speed-based TAS runs. So, where's the harm in hosting/publishing well-made but poorly-entertaining speed-based TAS runs of educational titles?
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Ok. So is Mario's Time Machine a dressed up education tool? Or does it have enough platforming optimization potential that it can be considered a worthy game? (people keep trying for this game) Where (and how) do we draw the line?
In my opinion, the key difference between a tool and a game (educational or not) is that games have a purpose for progressing through the game; tools don't.
Using the calculator example (dressed up or not): Does the calculator application have an reason to progress through to an end-goal? If no and it's just a tool for solving math problems, it's not a game.
If the goal is explicitly 'solve X number of problems to get to the end game credits', then YES it has an end-goal and is therefore a game regardless of how boring or trivial it may be.
Thank you for your perspective, BTW.
It still doesn't answer why we don't consider education a valid video game goal.
Why is 'learn something' a less valid goal than 'save the princess', 'kill everyone else', or 'click on Waldo's picture' as a game goal?
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I understand that and agree that it's the explicit purpose of this edutainment title. But why does that inherently make it not an actual video game? What law says 'actual' video games have to be for entertainment purposes only?
Essentially the root question is 'Why is education not considered a valid video game goal?'
Restating what i said earlier--I don't care one way or the other what the site decides, I'm just trying to better understand the logic of the community on this subject.
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Thanks for the clarification. I'm trying to work out the spreadsheets.
EDIT: OK, I've got the RNG sequence spreadsheet updated to show what RNG value we need for a fast Arnoid. There are a LOT of options for potential RNG seeds that yield him arriving with a 2 second delay.
Once the address is found I can update my starting seed spreadsheet so I know what initial RTC to set.
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Truly, this brings up the question on why edutainment games aren't considered 'actual' video games to begin with.
Let me start by saying that I don't have a particular preference either way on what the site ultimately chooses regarding edutainment titles.
But for the sake of debate...here are some thoughts.
I'd like to believe that creators of edutainment titles were indeed attempting to create a fun video game that also provided educational value. It's true (and unfortunate) that many edutainment titles don't tend to be fun or entertaining, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were intended to be any less 'actual' video games by their creators. If anything they were trying to be more that 'just' video games. So why is our default perspective that edutainment titles are not 'actual' video games unless enough of us deem them worthy of moon/star tier?
If the whole point of the vault tier is records regardless of entertainment value, why aren't edutainment titles worthy to be accepted? If the current submission was simply about matching colors instead of solving math (thereby eliminating the educational value) would the run suddenly be acceptable for vault as it would no longer be an edutainment title?
If the educational information was removed from "Mario's Time Machine" it would simply be another platformer, and a fairly poor one at that. But there are a lot of other poor games which have already been accepted to the vault.
And to build on Alyosha's question of why 'do basic math' is an unpublishable goal? Verbally describing what we often do with platformer games could be stated as 'push a button when the character reaches point x on the screen.' While it maybe much more complex to optimize the latter, why is it inherently a more acceptable goal?
EDIT: My apologies to both Alyosha and Mothrayas for repetition. I was typing this as you both submitted your recent responses.
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So is the returned value for a random(min,max) call calculated before or after the RNG seed is updated?
If before, then your above calculations would be correct.
However, if random(min,max) is calculated afterwards, then the calculation for the new RNG seed is your step 'a' above and the result of that step would never exceed 65535. Thus you'd never have anything but zeros in the left 4 hex digits for step 'b'
Or am I misreading/miscalculating something?
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As far as the rat sequence, I believe the random calls are completely cosmetic. I've changed the initial RTC time and not had de-sync issues with that scene.
The total number of random calls before a given point is not as important as knowing the sequence of seed/return values for when the random function is called. We don't need to predict Arnoid's RNG per-se so much as simply know what it is.
If a table of the seed value sequence can be constructed (which should be an easy modification of the old one), then it only becomes necessary to change the initial RTC time to yield the desired RNG seed value for the screen on which Arnoid arrives.
The biggest challenge is finding the memory address for the RNG seed, which c-square is attempting to do. We can then use his lua to follow the RNG. Once we have that we can choose an initial RTC that will both prevent the scorpazoid from spawning as well as yielding the shortest usable time for Arnoid.
I hope all that made sense.