What should the level of optimization for the Battle Frontier part be? 'Absolutely as fast as I can think of making it' or 'every challenge is annihilated quickly with perfect luck and no holdups'?
So, do you think that your NES boots up with a perfect 0000FFFF0000FFFF... uninitialized RAM pattern? That's just as unlikely, yet we accept it out of tradition.
I think it should be the "intended state", if there is such a thing. If there isn't, it should be the most likely one, if that can be determined.
I believe the following to be true:
1) There is no intended state (as in, the creators of the NES did not guarantee or expect uninitialized RAM to be in any particular state, because it would be foolish to rely upon anyway).
2) Each NES has a different 'most likely state' (due to manufacturing differences, etc).
This makes what you are proposing difficult.
Well, there are 7 movies listed that uses the easiest difficulty. I wonder if any of those cases could be applied here in one way or another.
These seem to be cases like:
1) Fighting enemies isn't interesting/and creates more lag, so we choose the easiest difficulty.
2) There are TASes for both difficulties.
3) All the difficulty does is grant more HP and thus make things take more time, so we choose the easiest difficulty.
I'm pretty sure it works like this: If playing on hardest difficulty introduces tedium and artificial length rather than interestingly changing the strategies and planning required, then an easier difficulty should be chosen. Otherwise, the hardest difficulty should be chosen.
Emulators don't work like that. The SMS and Genesis are completely different hardware and architectures, there's no sense in making one emulator do both. (The only reason why Dolphin does both Gamecube and Wii and many emulators do both GB and GBA is because of their extreme similarity.)
So are we going to say that a nuclear bomb detonated near the NES console and by chance the radiation made all the bits change to the proper value for the credits to run?
Or that the electrons in the NES all randomly quantum tunneled so that they form a desired state?
A TAS should abuse the software, but not the hardware in my opinion.
So, do you think that your NES boots up with a perfect 0000FFFF0000FFFF... uninitialized RAM pattern? That's just as unlikely, yet we accept it out of tradition.
I don't understand the desire to limit tases from doing things that could just as well be done by real time runners. I feel like that defeats the entire purpose of a tas.
It's not like I'm thrilled to see resetting used in real-time runs either...
If to get the WR in a real time run you must get a good RNG on the first stage, then runners will reset until they get that good RNG, uninitialized RAM or no uninitialized RAM.
Is this game going to get so good, low time, that it come down to a frame war? Well, I sure hope so. :D
EDIT: Forgot to post my comments. This video is so full of win. It gets my yes vote.
If any games deserve being frame warred over, it's the contra trilogy :)
I actually think the frame warredness of the contra trilogy is outdated due to new findings in each game. Maybe it can be trimmed down a lot with a closer look?
Just like most TASers/TASes won't need sub-frame resets, most won't need uninitialized RAM tinkering. But when it can be used to do something cool/needed for optimal RNG, it ought to be there and available.
If it's used for a really dodgy reason, e.g. to make a 1 in a billion chance really specifically picked set of RAM values that create code to execute or anything else odd like that, then the submission will be rejected for not being physically feasible, I'd think.
(Also, think of how cool uninitialized RAM changing april fools jokes could be!)
Sadly whenever I try to complete the superswim to be as perfect as possible, It seems it doesn't even feel like it's perfect, It feels like it could be 100x better.. I'm only holding on by a thin line before I literally go nuts.. >_> Also that superswim script I made could be better as well, I guess. I need to configure and play around with it more.
Anyways, before you guys even ask, the TAS is going very poorly due to me being damn lazy and unmotivated.. :(
abahbob started TASing dis again, maybe you should collab
Clearly TASes of the future will be fully fledged scripts that vary from the input file whenever uninitialized RAM has an effect on the game's behaviour.
For the case of Blades of Steel, a super determined human who wanted the best possible real time world record would reset until uninitialized RAM gave him the perfect RNG for his route. Why is a TAS not allowed to pick the best possible starting RNG if a human is allowed to?
Is this the command & conquer where you could run a line of sandbags all the way to your enemy's base and build inside of their base, and they wouldn't think of destroying the sandbags?
I approve of making Todd's Adventures in Slime World TASes shorter.
(Not sure about the 'each scenario deserves its own TAS' part, mind you. That would mean more TASes of this game would exist! :O )
CEN64 is open source ( https://github.com/tj90241/cen64 ) so whenever it is at a good state of completion it can be integrated into Bizhawk and given TAS tools that way.
(Of course, when that will be I have no idea, but I'm pretty excited for it!)
