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I gave it a yes, it was extremely entertaining for me to watch. Thank you for the run :)
Because of the cheat code, I don't think either that it can be published in moons, even with enormous "CAUTION!!" signs everywhere; anyway, it was already discussed.
But now I'm wondering...
If it was remade with pauses and had an alternate encode that removes them, I guess the judging would have to be made from the "normal" run (with pauses), am I right? I really don't know, in fact ^^.
If so, I'm afraid that the entertainment value would not be enough for the moons, but is the goal OK for the vault?
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Some images in the Castlevania page are not hosted on the site, too.
http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/Castlevania.html
The ones in the "Misc. tricks" tab and the two images used for the hunchbacks on the "Enemies" tab.
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zoboner wrote:
Ok je tiens a vous féllicités pour l'hummanisme dont vous faites pare, car il n'est pas donné a tout le monde de donner de son temps et de ça personne ici bas!!!
Donc au risque de parraitre re-lou, je tiens encore a vous remerciés pour ce geste.
Donc je transmettrais dans l'après-midi le texte du any% a vince1919 et le 100% a Grincevent...
...Je laisse a Grincevent le loisir de me dire si il souhaite couper le texte en 2 pour en laisser une partie a xy2_ que je contacterais au besoins.
Ahah, t'inquiètes, c'est pas "relou". A la limite c'est un peu surprenant de lire quasiment une envolée lyrique de remerciements parce qu'on se propose de donner un coup de main pour traduire :P
Pas besoin de couper ton texte arbitrairement en deux non plus, te prends pas la tête et envoie carrément le truc complet à xy2_ et à moi en même temps. On s'organisera avec ça.
Donc, xy2_, je sais pas si t'as Skype, mais si oui, tu peux m'ajouter en contact. Pseudo, pour changer: Grincevent
Je propose Skype parce que c'est là où t'es sûr de me trouver facilement, je suis pas souvent sur IRC en ce moment. Mais si vraiment Skype ça te va pas, je ferai l'effort de me connecter sur IRC plus souvent. C'est toi qui vois ^^.
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Je viens de me souvenir (après vérification ^^) que j'avais aidé pour traduire le texte du any%. Je vais donc me re-présenter et saisir ma chance de devenir ton traducteur officiel.
Mais ça empêche pas d'autres personnes de se proposer vu que le texte semble être assez long; plus il y a de gens qui se lancent dans la traduction (avec ou sans coopération), plus t'auras de chances de l'avoir vite.
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I have some ideas that could create interesting situations, especially in the context of something like a GDQ. They revolve around giving some control over the game to a second player while someone else tries to speedrun or simply finish the game, or part of it.
Depending on the game used and what can be done with ACE, it can be hard to do, I actually have no idea ^^.
-something like "simon says": the second controller can be used to issue "rules" into the game, for a limited time. A basic example would be stopping some actions from working in the game: "no running", "don't use that weapon/item" or block any button on the controller, including left/right/up or down...
-player 2 gains control over the environment or enemies. You could make the enemies jump when you want, or outright control some of them. What if in a megaman game, the runner has to face robot masters that are controlled by someone else? Either you give total control over the boss (seems hard) or you can "simply" choose the patterns of their attacks (will Bowser jump or throw hammers/a fireball in SMB?).
For the environment, you can imagine a second player that decides what item is in a "?" block (Mario again for the example) or manually controls some moving platforms.
I've only listed some little ideas as examples, there are many ways to make things fun, I think.
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Nach wrote:
Overall, I think this year's AGDQ block was our best ever. Although our explanation wasn't as good as last year's.
I wrote up a summary of the various opinions, discussions, and feedback I found all over, as well as what kind of improvements we saw with this "advertising".
About the explanation part, I think I did have a different experience watching it because I've watched the french restream first.
Since the commentators (RealMyop, Keylie and Synahel) were "simply" here to watch and, well, comment the show, they could concentrate on that (and a little on the chat, too). They didn't have to make sure that TASBot works, verify if things go as planned, troubleshoot the desyncs, etc...
For example, thanks to Keylie who participated in the speed TAS preparation, and Synahel who apparently played the game before commenting, the commentaries were precise and quite in-depth (they even explained the different possible routes). Ok, the fact that they could start explaining the race (and the game) way before it actually started helped a lot, too. It goes for the entire block, they had time to freely talk between the runs and during the different setups.
Zelda 2 was ok. After all, it was like commenting the normal TAS. Tricks were explained, etc...
Then there was Brain Age. They were all familiar with what to expect from a TAS of this game, and knew beforehand that it was done on a real DS. No problems here for the commentaries, except one little mistake with the Twitch chat parts, leading to people possibly thinking that it was a fake chat that was drawn.
For the rest of the block, they were discovering it at the same time as the viewers. They knew about (and explained quickly) the tricks leading to the total controls, but just didn't know about the payloads, obviously, since they were made to be a surprise. And they did well.
An important part is that they made sure people knew that those things were done on real and unmodified hardware (consoles and games), reminding that fact occasionally.
So, where am I going with all that? I'm throwing the idea to have someone extra on site whose role is explaining (and only that, nothing more) what is going on or what will be shown while the others are preparing the runs. A commentator with no other worry than commenting might be worth it. It shouldn't stop the others if they also want to do some explaining when they are done with the setups, of course.
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Time for oldies!
Tennis for two, one of the first video games in history:
And some Space Invaders:
The other numbers (1, 7, 8 or 0) are not interesting, because they're less recognizable.
The obvious idea is to match the requested answer, so you just have to pick one you like or one that fits in a good place with the seed.
Bonus points if the invaders are drawn in a somewhat random order to keep the surprise longer (or simply make it more dynamic). The black and white can be reversed to be more faithful to the game, but it would take longer to draw, and make it harder to display them "randomly".
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andypanther wrote:
Ok, I'll try to get a different charger to try.
You sure it's not the battery? Replacing it should be cheaper than a gamepad.
Thanks for your help!
I'm not sure if it's the charger or the battery (or something else), but you have to try one thing at a time, and if you can borrow a charger to test if it works, that's a good start. It's harder to borrow a gamepad battery ^^.
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I've left mine without charging for some long periods of time and it still works right now (it was always empty when I didn't charge it for a while because it always drains the battery slowly even when it's "off").
For yours, I can't really say what the problem is, but I think it's either a problem with the battery or the charger.
If when you plug it with the charger, you can see the orange LED light up (bottom right of the gamepad, approximately) and it still doesn't work, I'd go for the battery.
Or maybe it's the ON/OFF button, who knows? When turning the console on (using the button on the console), the gamepad should start, too. And vice versa.
I hope my post was as useful as possible to help you find what's not working exactly.
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And here's the Doom Guy, I don't know how many more pictures are needed.
Edit: changed the picture, there was a problem with transparency that still existed in the file (looked a little different/bad in some areas with the BrainAgeTools).
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Going for the animals that need to be saved and killed:
Still some wild lone pixels even after trying to remove most of them.
Edit: and I wanted to keep the pixellated look, good idea or not, you judge :P
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I think the best, obviously, is to aim to have some spare time. Even if it's a lot of spare time, that wouldn't be a problem for the TAS block. There is always a lot that can be said about how TASes are made, and if you can explain without hurry the "making of" what happened at the TAS block, that's perfect.
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Hard to say if any of the glitches found can lead to a game end glitch, but they're all promising.
I'll add one, for completion's sake.
MoltovM has shown the one in 5-1, where if you destroy only one block with the hammer (by letting it go at the right time) and jump in the little gap created, funny things happen:
I've found something similar in 3-3, the earliest level where I could replicate that setting. You have to place the timed block (didn't find a better name ^^) where shown in the picture to create the same kind of gap, then use an enemy to go and jump in it from the right:
Don't do this on VBA, when I tried it stopped and gave me error messages about some opcodes. It works with BizHawk, though.
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Mine comes from a drawing I've made a long time ago:
Leading to this, that I used for a while on another forum:
But there were variations for special occasions, like this one for April fools:
For Christmas:
And at one time, for whatever reason, everybody decided to "pikachize" their avatar for fun on that other forum:
Then I ended up "Okamizing" mine later, giving it more contrast and just a bit of color:
I can't go back to the first one, I find it too... Grey, now :P
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micro500 wrote:
I tried making the font monospaced:
You're limited by the size of the M, so I made each character column 15px wide. This of course means you can fit less text on screen.
I like it a lot. And I have some kind of Terminator - or Robocop maybe - feeling with the font. After checking, I think it doesn't match either of those movies, but the feeling is still here, the font reminds me of what you would see in a movie when a robot analyses something in first person view.
And now it just gave me a random idea...
It could be a follow up to another "text picture" in the vein of:
"Starting 'taking_over_all_humankind.exe'
...
failed to launch: not enough memory
Starting 'lethal_laser_eyes.exe'
...
failed to launch: lasers not responding"
It's just an example, I'm sure someone can come up with something better (and that can fit in the window ^^). The idea is that ROB tries to go rogue and that fails, leading to the "BSOD" picture.
The one from feos would be my choice if there was a way to make it look, without a doubt and almost instantly, like a real BSOD (for example with an actual blue background). But since that can't be done with Brain Age, I also think it's more important to have something that is easily readable.
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That's an easy yes vote, I loved it, and the run looks very solid, like concrete :D
I think it's my favorite Mega Man game. The music, the bosses, all the weapons are useful in the stages and well balanced.
Thank you for creating the TAS :)
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The problem with the technical rating is that I find the notion vague, and almost impossible to give a fair vote.
Vague because it could mean how optimized the TAS is, how "perfect" it is, how hard it was to make, how many "techniques" it uses or requires (luck manipulation, lag reduction, botting, searching RAM/even making RAM maps...), or, interestingly, how technical the TAS looks. As we all know (I hope ^^), the hardest parts to optimize in a TAS are not necessarily the most impressive to watch, and are sometimes near impossible to notice without being told that "yes, that thing was extremely complex to do, I spent hours on this 5 seconds segment to make sure that the next 4 items are the ones I needed." (random invented example)
Let's say that some game is extremely easy to TAS, so the result will be a perfect movie (until some new glitch or ACE is discovered... Or maybe after it is discovered and implemented ^^); does it warrant a very high rating? There is no definitive answer, I think. But I personally tend to prefer "rewarding" TASes that were a pain to create technically. That doesn't mean I would close my eyes to big optimization flaws either. Anyway, I don't vote that often...
The next problem is: "how do I know what went into the making of the movie?".
There are obviously the submission notes, but not always; and they usually don't speak about what was actually technically difficult to do, rather explaining how things work and what tricks were used. I'm sure we can find counter examples, of course. The thing is, if a TAS appeared and was a technical masterpiece, but without a detailed submission text, the ratings would be influenced.
I'll stop before losing track about what I tried to explain at the beginning.
I didn't even write about the entertainment rating. It's less of a problem because it is completely subjective.
In the end, I don't really care about the ratings, I think I've explained why they are not that important to me.
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feos wrote:
How exactly did you check? I see 2-pixel wide lines there.
Arg yes, I did a big mistake and didn't realize even after trying to check... 2x2 pen, but I had in mind "4 pixels" and not 4x4.
I'm going to hide in the corner...
(too bad that the text can't fit with 4x4)
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Good points everywhere in this topic... It's an interesting debate where a lot of things can be compared in terms of difficulty (not the setting in a game, but difficulty "in general"), entertainment or judging: casually playing vs TASing vs speedrunning, moon and vault, categories, etc...
And everything depends on the game. When looking at speedrunning communities for example, they create their own rules that are specific to each game for that aspect. Sometimes there are categories for different difficulty settings, and I don't have examples (sorry, my lazy side), but I'm sure there are games where only one difficulty level is used, and not always the hardest. It's easy to imagine a game where some difficulty settings are pointless to run (only a small number of levels are playable for example).
There might be games where even speedrunning is easier to do on some harder difficulty level (again, no example in mind, sorry), but when playing normally, it doesn't apply. That's where entertainment can make a big difference.
Just to dig a little deeper and cover one more point, the difficulty of TASing a game in one setting or another is obviously (in my opinion) irrelevant.
In my opinion, for the moon tier, the difficulty setting has a lot of similarities with, say, the choice of a character. We want to aim for entertainment. The thing is that it seems harder to create a different category by picking another difficulty level; the game has to offer something really different here.
And there's the vault. Since entertainment is not a requirement, the rules or guidelines about the difficulty level should in theory be "harsher" there, but again, we'll always find games that will need a special treatment.
...And I'm not even sure about the difference I've just made between the moon and vault tiers :p
In the end, I'm still for a guideline to play in the hardest difficulty by default, and after that, we still have judges and the forum to discuss and accept or not the runs case by case. Whatever rules we can come up with will always end up with exceptions. Even the one about finishing the game is not absolute, there are playarounds that don't follow it.
After a little pause, TASBot draws the dots to make them "magically" appear:
Thanks samurai goroh for the font ^^.
And some Space Invaders:
The other numbers (1, 7, 8 or 0) are not interesting, because they're less recognizable.
The obvious idea is to match the requested answer, so you just have to pick one you like or one that fits in a good place with the seed.
Bonus points if the invaders are drawn in a somewhat random order to keep the surprise longer (or simply make it more dynamic). The black and white can be reversed to be more faithful to the game, but it would take longer to draw, and make it harder to display them "randomly".
Edit: changed the picture, there was a problem with transparency that still existed in the file (looked a little different/bad in some areas with the BrainAgeTools).
Still some wild lone pixels even after trying to remove most of them.
Edit: and I wanted to keep the pixellated look, good idea or not, you judge :P
I've found something similar in 3-3, the earliest level where I could replicate that setting. You have to place the timed block (didn't find a better name ^^) where shown in the picture to create the same kind of gap, then use an enemy to go and jump in it from the right:
Don't do this on VBA, when I tried it stopped and gave me error messages about some opcodes. It works with BizHawk, though.
Leading to this, that I used for a while on another forum:
But there were variations for special occasions, like this one for April fools:
For Christmas:
And at one time, for whatever reason, everybody decided to "pikachize" their avatar for fun on that other forum:
Then I ended up "Okamizing" mine later, giving it more contrast and just a bit of color:
I can't go back to the first one, I find it too... Grey, now :PYou're limited by the size of the M, so I made each character column 15px wide. This of course means you can fit less text on screen.
But I don't know why I have this result with all those bad pixels, I made sure to use 4x4 for each "pixel" in the drawing:
