If you can run it in a virtual machine you can use the 'take snapshot' ability to make savestates. Either record the footage externally and slice it by hand or have it recorded within the virtual machine as well (ouch!)
Alternatively, you can pummel the frame rate with the right tools, and get slow motion.
I don't get to write down my dreams often, I normally forget too much for it to be worth sharing, so here are some ones that I have:
(also, I wrote these for myself, so if any references need clarification let me know)
19th November 2010
at home:
chris had apparently eaten a bunch of chocolate gold coins before. they looked like early, hand-crafted one and two dollar coins, as my mother (or grandmother?) told me. apparently they would make him sick because earlier they were in contact with (imagine my bedroom but with my mother's bed in it again) torches with solid flame looking things in the corners of the bed. the bed was made up and the blankets taken off, and a torch fell onto the golden coins and transferred the sickness to them.
so I waited around a while at the dining room table and eventually he wretched on the kitchen floor, but a very very tiny amount of vomit only.
after that he played...stepmania for some reason? no, ffr, or something like it, and the song was something like across rooftops or some other fgo. he kept missing notes but it wasn't getting displayed that it was for some reason. my mother commented about how good he was at it but I commented that there'd no way he was that good, it was dropping lots of notes. nicky tried too but I forget how well that went.
transformice:
coins instead of cheese??
-finally, a level which had a timelimit of many many minutes (15-75) and had no dangers, only coins that spewed out from above. thought to myself 'hats better be more expensive to compensate for this' but they costed cheese before not coins, right??? rofl. and apparently they were, with blue and gold buttons with thousands written on them. anyway apparently there were also super items and I was tempted to use them to screw around. instead I got bored and looked for other servers (each server had a description and portraits of humans like Obama/Biden below them to repesent their leaders or something), and apprantly some of them are RP servers
-transformice rp: was pixelated and different graphics for some reason. I arrived on a fully constructed scene and never made it past the left side - it was made of wood with houses and no one seemed to be around. I was walljumping up the top and along a passage on the ceiling and down the other side when I heard someone pose from the leftmost house, and made my way back. there was a female mouse instead and we rped through text. I didn't have a character initially and didn't know anything about the backstory of mouse land at all, and took on the persona of a mouse who was always stuck in his books studying. for instance after the female mouse said that she was the daughter? of the king, he thought back and remembered reading a bit about it in a book once and some basic qualities about the king, and urged her to add more
out in the lawn:
still thinking about transformice:
lead sandwich (which had a blue thing in the middle of the triangular cut), cheeseandwich (cheese on left side, sandwich on right), sandwich was like cheese but didn't give cheese, other elements in the transformice editor
found a pixel editor where I tried to edit my head to look like a kangaroo head or something like that
took the lawnmower out and mowed past a bunch of signs for certain hardcore? songs to pick them up - not sure what the songs were for, mom wanted me to pick them up for some reason
assignment presentation time:
I forget why but I went into our house's laundry/shower room to study. it was tinted yellow and on a ladder a builder or something was standing near the roof.
on the day I had only done the research work and not written up a presentation to read off of in front of the class (and we were all outdoors in a place like my backyard, with them waiting near the trampoline and me looking at the notes on the stretch near the pool - but before that on the first day of presentations, we were in a different grassy area near a building, sitting around on a stone/log area) so the tutor had typed one up and given it to me. I was worried that it wouldn't meld well because it wasn't mine and I didn't have enough time to figure it out but I was urged to start and did, and I improvized around it and mixed in my own knowledge and it went quite well in the end.
basically an allegory for mobile networking presentation lol
I forget what the subject was, though. something about personal health and something that could spurt out of you
insect game:
-cartoonishly drawn spiders and wasps and insects and a tile based platformer like landscape, arrived at in a group of people black and white and cartoonily drawn with moving boundaries from frame to frame, have to go right to accomplish...something, spider bobbing up and down hiding a guy up in an alcove who would make them nicer - getting stuck to the side of a sticky |_| block makes you immune to (wasps?), then jump over the next set, then there's a tunnel with a low ceiling and a bulge in the ground and the juggernaut is approaching, a spider that always bobs down low enough to cover the entire column. apparently he's a source of information and services (think black market informant or something) but we had to go back and talk to something to fix that. then a 'wasp' (actually a spider on a string) comes down and eats my friend. I over the top go WELL THANKS A LOT FOR THAT WASP! in a voice wailing and about to scream and pummel it as hard as I can over and over, and it gets wrapped up in something (its own tongue? its own body?) and I finally calm down and slow, and then break down into welling tears
11th January 2010
-There existing a beta version of tyrian that was only the first (two?) levels but a lot harder - the level 1 boss shot rapidly as it moved all around, more enemies? it seemed to be higher resolution (and thus levels that were larger across , yet composed of the same tiles, so everything was smaller and repeated a lot more) and have a longer ship select list too, which seems to defeat the point of it being a beta if it's better.
-Me and my little brother were sitting in the house late at night, with no lights on except the big tv out there and the smaller one out in the back which I was sitting at. we had these gold cards which we got for beating the last level of Super Mario World (or something similar to it); we had to hold it up to the TV to read it and squint because the engraved writing on it was really small and was the the kind of font type you see on userbars, the one that uses 5x5 pixel squares for each character. anyway it didn't actually reflect the light the tv was giving off, it was just a bright solid gold colour all through, and it had a few engravings of a yoshi and an angry sun on the card besides the text, which was something like 'For beating Super Mario World you unlock one last world, a place where you can get endless one ups and fulfill your dreams...' playing it on the TV it was quite low quality in graphics, everything was single colour blobs, there were these worm things made up of yellow circles that as they snaked around slowly followed the path they left behind, and if they stopped their tail kept moving forward and bunched up behind them, pushing them forward a bit still and moving their trail behind them. I commented that the programming for them was far more complicated then anything else I had seen, and strangely it was even in a beta of this particular game. IIRC you weren't one of the snakes though, you were a little yellow circle that moved around and collected powerups? there were other enemy circles of a slightly oranger hue? there was a powerup to shoot twin white shots ahead of you that moved at a high speed, but upon my little brother losing it I saw a token with a mushroom on it fly away into the game screen and he exclaimed something "Drats!" or whatever
-Game in the high school corridor (floor 2 through the english classrooms); this one I don't recall as well, but it seemed to be about laying eggs?!? and using them for points and various things. it was far into the game and everyone had levelled up all the things they had done a lot, so for instance laying eggs didn't show any pain or stress or lock you into place, it just happened instantly and you picked it up. the only thing I recall doing was looking towards someone else who had a 41 point faded blue egg and a larger 101 point egg in his lap, and I stole the 41 point egg and went away with it before he noticed and commented that it was gone.
-Went back to Gaia Online, poked around in various things; saw a beauty contest top 100, and amongst the avatars (set up four high and 27-26-24-23ish wide, like one of those things they put you on in high school to take group photos) I found all four of my own, yet one ( http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/inventory-3.png ) was oriented backwards and another (an earlier version of the same one I think) was kneeling over. one would presume that all of http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/inventory-6.pnghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/inventory-5.pnghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/inventory-4.png would be in there but unsurprisingly I didn't seem to remember the intricate detail, and most of the ones I were imagining seemed to be the early, robe wearing, fox helmet iterations I came up with. regardless they were all in this top 100, and I fiddled around with the avatar configurations and figured out that there were more settings then before, you could make them bend forward on the upper body as one of them was, or have an :awesome: face. I also experimentally turned my avatar around and all the ones on the beauty contest top 100 turned around, and the one that was turned around face forward. I set it back and poked around more, seeing that there was a way to fiddle with...wheels for your avatar, however that worked, presumably like any other wearable item, giving lots of settings for rotation and transformation and even importing the image with lots of different tabs and lots of complicated drop down menus and sliders for each one, at seeing you could import the image I thought 'well doesn't it ruin the point of gaia online if you can just import in whatever you like and look like anything?' and moved on...
-Went into a desert with plateaus and rocky cliffs, looked to my left and saw an abandoned, ruined building spread out across a sandy plateau and went in, going underground beneath it into a place with brownish hallways
-At the bottom of a shaft: Biomechanical war dog, design seemed to be inspired by the shape of http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/Mechadragon/dogmech13.jpg only higher tech, lots of spiky sections going backwards, looked like a hulking wolf in that kind of very tall/wide shape built into sleek yet spiky red armour plating that mostly went backward and thus exposed the organic components to the front, e.g. there was a red helmet that went over the muzzle and showed off the lower parts of the face and jaws. growling and looking menacing, had VII painted in stick figure letters on one of its shoulders. Supposedly never created and hasn't yet fought or done anything, a girl comments "It's bad enough that it's named after <some>!" (<some> was something like desert eagle or something, but it WASN'T FFVII)
-said wardog was raised on a circular platform to the top of a cylinder, where it was going to be released on the world and fight. it howled and ran along a very long hallway, meaning it'd be a while before it actually got anywhere. in that time I saw another biomechanical being in the same style only it was anthro, a male being that was a grey feline only built like say a tiger, thick and powerful yet still agile, he too had the same style of armour; red and spiky in lots of segments going backwards, exposing all of his broad face and parts of his front (backs of the arms maybe?). he smirked with eyes glowing and said something like "He's not getting out of here without a fight first", not verbatim but regardless he was challenging the new, presumably more powerful biomech to a fight so perhaps his honour was at stake or the likes. he goes up the disc too, we don't see it but the growling and shaking from above is an implied fight, one of the guys at the bottom calls everyone else over, inspired by that scene in the Matrix where he goes 'Hey, Morpheus is fighting Neo!"
-Wardog explored the caves above the deep underground facility, was a fairly rich brown in colour, lit and smooth, had lots of less used looking tunnels (sometimes with debris) heading off into other directions. reading the warwolf's inscriptions further we saw that it had more then just VII painted in black on its shoulder but whole lists of different roman numerals, going horizontal in long lengths and vertical in individual tokens depending on where I looked. supposed to indicate some kind of code or message that could be read off of the warwolf's body, but if it's just numbers how? must have required some kind of decoding but I didn't think of it then. as we explored we saw a boy, looking like a japanese highschool boy, very charming and sophisticated and all that, and the girl I was with commented that "Ah, he knows robotics! He can be the next dark lord." and we never said anything else to him.
-We split off and explored (went back?) on our own, later on another guy ran up and joined us from behind, I forget what he was supposed to be. at one point high up on a ledge was an elevator that went up into another area and it got me thinking; later on I asked him about it and he told me about the Stealthship, with stealth action transport to each area, where you could win the I-Spy ship that was stealthed at all times. was for a node-based board game or similar, stealthship was divided into lots of areas, each one invisible to the others? something like that. looked spherical in shape?
-anyway, down below there was a car park in the cave, every time we came up to it (we did it twice) a car with headlights came around, went tightly behind one parked car in front of us to the left then in front of it again, meaning we'd have to weave around it. then there'd be another as we went around the hairpin turn to the left.
-transistions into a university? setting where I get off of one train and as we travel across a wide expanse without actually going into any buildings someone else asks me if I use the other train to get home; as we approach the train station on the far side a train comes through it with I think deep blue carriages, I look at it and see a destination written on each carriage (in either yellow or white, with the destination in big bold letters then some kind of subheading in smaller letters below it left justified), but none are where I go home or close to it so I say that I couldn't use this train. as I walk up to a bridge and look down on top of it, looking off as the tracks vanish into the distance in the brownish chasm between the platform and the ground on the other side of it, the platform being very sleek looking and made of marble but almost featureless, except for what looked like a bus stop a bit further away with information on it. there was possibly a second set of tracks too a bit further off which would have also had a train in it
I've also dreamed about made-up BYOND games (BYOND is a platform for tile-based multiplayer games, look it up) (said tile based game was in a supersized mansion, it was a co-operative dungeon crawler/rpg type thing with your icon getting coloured to indicate status effects) and lots of roguelikes based off of Castle of the Winds, IVAN and angband/ToME, among many other things.
I also just realized that the cartoonish black and white look mentioned in that dream was probably based off of the Fancy Pants Adventure flash games, which would also explain the spiders.
I prefered it when you could see the description and a link to the artist's comments/forum topic/etc. It shows the kind of intelligence that's put behind each run, and what can be said about it, and will help catch people's attention - especially for ones like that really glitched soccer game, which without a description will make people think "WTF? Why a soccer game?'
My opinion is just use point.
Humans are good at, among other things, filling in detail where it is absent. HQx et all attempt to do this for the human, but lacking AI like techniques will always fall short in how much they can interpolate.
Besides, who watches TASes of video games at 8x normal size?
That said, HQx looks better than Scalex, at least for the provided screen shot.
It would be cumbersome. There's no notion of a frame in java, a key event can appear at any point during operation, and if it's multithreaded then threads can run in any order the OS decided.
The play around needed more tension. A lot of the time was spent just phasing back and forth through objects again and again - it's neat to show off, but once it's shown that it exists it would be best reserved for phasing in new ways/patterns or to escape/get into/out of danger.
I also agree with the person who said that each level should end with a mad dash to the exit, or at least the time near the flag pole should be minimized.
I do understand that making a speed run is tricky when you can't earn any points. It rules out power ups (which rules out breaking bricks), it rules out grabbing coins and hitting coin boxes, it rules out killing anything and kicking shells. Still, surely there's room to play creatively around dodging and misleading every enemy.
There was a run submitted for a game like this, for either the gameboy or the gameboy advance. I forget what the name was so I can't search for it.
EDIT: Found it: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10137
Brute force will -never- be viable for anything but the shortest term tasks.
Much much more likely are programs that are goal-driven, with an awareness of how the program works and when they have achieved it. Then you give them a list of goals and they optimize it genetically.
This has already been done by Bisquit (MM bot that drops powerups, lunar pool bot that plays the whole freaking game, solomon key goal driven bot)
483 rerecords is very low for a movie of this length. Either the game is incredibly trivial to play or you're not trying as many possibilities out to see what's fastest as you could be.
Can someone explain to me what the relevancy is of file extensions for emulator replay files?
Bisqwit wrote:
Did you not also realize that on TASVideos site, that movie files are actually identified by their filename extension, and that by committing the extension .gz exclusively to one movie file format, you are in effect depriving any other emulator the right to use .gz to signify that the movie file is compressed?
Decision problems involving probability distributions are usually very hard to solve and, IIRC, no consensus has been reached yet.
An example that illustrates the non-triviality of these puzzles is the "Two envelopes paradox".
Suppose that you have to choose between two envelopes, one contains X dollars and the other 2X dollars. After choosing an envelope with A dollars, you're given the chance to switch to the other one. To see if it's worthy, you assume that there's 50% chance the other one will have A/2, and another 50% that it'll have 2A. Summing, your expected gain will be 5A/4, thus it's better to switch. However, since that's true for every value, switching before even choosing the envelope would rise your expected value, and this is absurd.
These problems introduce a concept called "expectation", which is hard to formalize in mathematics. By picking a large value, you may think "it's unlikely that the other envelope contains an even larger sum". Basically, in an infinite distribution, the probability of the numbers appearing is not the same. This may influence your players' problem.
I lack the mathematical background to offer a reasonable solution to this problem, I suggest that you look at other paradoxes of probability and decision theories and their proposed solutions and see if it helps you.
EDIT: Wow, it seems Tub posted something similar while I was writing, lol
It's not a paradox, it's like the 'case of the missing dollar' where mathematical concepts are misused to create an apparent contradiction.
I'd solve it something like this:
Pick an envelope. It either has X or 2X, so its expected value is 1.5X.
The other envelope will either have X or 2X, making its expected value also 1.5X.
The 'trick' employed is to consider the case of the two times your amount and 0.5x your amount being irrespective of what amount you picked. Imagine a problem where this actually happened: Two envelopes either had A or 2A in them. When you pick one, the other one updates to randomly have either 2x (your amount) or 0.5x (your amount). Now it WOULD be advantageous to switch. BUT in the case of this problem, if the other envelope offers 2x it's 2x of 1x, and if it offers 1x it's 1x of 2x, essentially cancelling it out.
