Can you do this with one keyboard if you type on it at higher than 60Hz?
I've never heard of a game programmed to know of the existence of second keyboards, so what system is handling and aggregating them, at what layer? Like, is the Flash codebase receiving an arbitrary number of keyboard events per frame, and the Flash game is just going 'when keyboard event, do this' rather than checking in a loop 'this frame, if key A is pressed, ...'? At least I assume libTAS is unable to reach into games or engines and change the ways they read for input.
It's been a billion years, and it looks like it's finally time - the Maniac Mansion TAS is improvable!
https://www.speedrun.com/maniac_mansion_nes/run/m7202xez The WR in RTA timing is 5m29s. Arc's TAS by the same timing would be a 6m15s or so.
One of the few TASes where you can say 'we've gone plaid!' and if anything it's an understatement.
My favourite is the random triangle note that plays at 3:23. What on earth??
My vague thought is that maybe there should be an upper limit on how long a TAS can be before it's automatically rejected, say 24 hours or so. Theoretically a 33 day long TAS that's pure gameplay could be submitted (like for example, a botted procedurally generated game that has a million unique levels in it) and I don't think either this nor that TAS should be accepted, just because both of them have way too much content for any actual human to reasonably consume.
If you are going to go ahead and try to publish this though, good luck!
A bit of a sidestroller, but I can tell from how tight you take your turns that a human would have great difficulty matching this. Looks pixel perfect?
GOOD WORK, DRAGONSLAYER!
Impressive optimization efforts! It's too bad the end result visually appears as 'you kill 30 star dragons in their sleep before they have a chance to fight back'.
I'm curious about this series - how many games do you plan to do in total, or are you not sure yet?
Finally got around to watching this; the graze chaining is hilarious, yes vote.
There's some times where you're doing nothing and there's a bullet on screen you could have grazed, or times when there's plenty of bullets to graze and maybe you could have woven in a kill or two you didn't do; I don't know if these are 'there's a reason why this is optimal' moments or 'the points gained from this fall below the threshold of optimization effort I'm applying this time through' moments. In either case I don't mind, since the overall strategy is justified and held up. (And you do indeed say in the description you haven't done all possible micro-optimizations.)
There are a few instances of this, especially if the bullets are fast; the points that would be gained is under 1,000 and realistically would only be about 200-300 per instance.
Any planes that I didn't kill that I *could* have killed are only worth 1k
In total, im pretty sure all those little instances are worth 30k
Makes sense - Proportional to the score you do get, that'd be the equivalent of wasting a second compared to the truly optimal TAS time. Optimizable but not easily and only if someone really wants to go for it.
afaik, the reason why Hourglass burned out and LibTAS is going strong is because Linux's API is way more friendly to the idea of being TAS'd inside of than Windows. (Or it could just be bad luck, Hourglass's original dev DID vanish after all. But everyone who took it over was smart and determined and couldn't get it all the way there, which makes me think it's relatively nightmarish.)
Wow, this is extremely creative and clever. I find it fascinating that it seems to be PAL exclusive not because of a PAL bug per say, but because the different times things take to happen on PAL allows for the bug to be exploitable rather than merely theoretical.
Finally got around to watching this; the graze chaining is hilarious, yes vote.
There's some times where you're doing nothing and there's a bullet on screen you could have grazed, or times when there's plenty of bullets to graze and maybe you could have woven in a kill or two you didn't do; I don't know if these are 'there's a reason why this is optimal' moments or 'the points gained from this fall below the threshold of optimization effort I'm applying this time through' moments. In either case I don't mind, since the overall strategy is justified and held up. (And you do indeed say in the description you haven't done all possible micro-optimizations.)
So... are we sure there is no way to beat the level at the end? Can you please contact the creators of this hack and ask, please?
Given custom code runs when you die in this level (it doesn't normally say THE END), it can reasonably be assumed that this is the intended progression.
Ooh, this is going to be a treat! I've been wanting more high score shmup TASes and patiently waited for TAS emulation to get stabler and the right person to come along. Watching this later
That's awesome! Do you not TAS? I see you have no submissions yet have been here since I was in first grade. Cool to see you so dedicated to the community nonetheless.
Unfortunately all the genres of game that catch my attention aren't TAS-appropriate for one reason or another (traditional roguelikes, rhythm games, shmups). The closest I ever got was thinking about making DOS TASes, but I couldn't wrap my brain around the interface - I really needed something like TASEditor, which now exists (yay!) but I think not for DOS yet (oh no). Windows games are also mostly off the table for a similar reason.
If I had the patience to figure it out I'd do Tyrian [DOS] "SuperTyrian mode", Meritous [Windows], or Meteos [DS] (probably "Deluge, fastest max score" since "Deluge, all max scores" would be incredibly long).
Also, as Arcade TASing becomes more mature, max score TASes of shmups intrigue... buuut I'm not world class in scoring at any shmup, so I'd basically have to write a research paper to do one of those, haha. I'm looking forward to the day when more of those exist.
