For some reason, thinking about Twitch Plays Pokémon lead me to the following question:
For a given game, what is the shortest series of inputs which, when repeated indefinitely, will eventually complete the game?
I don't have a good name for this category, nor am I at all sure that anyone would ever want to try to make a movie that explores it ^_^ But it seemed like an interesting new way to view a game as a puzzle, and one that TAS tools would be uniquely suited for exploring.
Obviously, every TAS is already an entry in this category, just not a very good one. In many, many cases, the very beginning and very end can be made to overlap trivially (e.g. in any justice-based right-holder). It seems like maybe a good cutoff point for "Is this worth considering" is if you can shorten to the input to at least half of the total length of the movie file, ie., cause it to loop fully at least once, though maybe it could still be interesting to do less than that. In the extreme case, it would be pretty magical to find a 50-frame loop that beats a multi-hour RPG or something, but that will probably never happen.
Anyway, just this just came to me and I thought some people might get a kick out of thinking about it, so here it is. Has anyone ever done anything similar?
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I'm also in favor of allowing any game type to be Vault-eligible as long as it demonstrates something unique compared to regular timeattacking.
That doesn't sound like the purpose of the Vault. The Vault is intended to have strictly-fastest runs, with no regard to entertainment or novelty value; runs that sacrifice speed for either of those have to make it into Moons to be published.
With respect to your comment, this means that even if the fastest TAS were only a second faster than the fastest RTA, with the exact same route, the Vault should still publish the TAS. (Note that it IS a requirement that the TAS be faster than all known RTAs)
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Agree with others that if a game has a clearly defined end state, the Vault should accept the fastest movie that reaches it.
Was amazingly entertained by this. More by the submission text than the video, but honestly that is true for me for a lot of TASes, even ones that get stars.
Yes vote.
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I agree with everyone who is saying that for low glitch categories to be worthwhile, they need to very explicitly call out which glitches they are forgoing, and the author needs to provide a compelling explanation for why those glitches in particular add up to a category worth supporting. Or at least a run so amazing that everyone agrees.
This doesn't seem to do that.
I personally get basically no entertainment out of glitchless runs (I'd rather watch an RTA), so I'm abstaining from voting, since this obviously isn't for me.
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Welcome!
TASing is time-consuming and finnicky and frustrating. Don't expect to produce an amazing final product in a short time! I have been hanging out here for years, occasionally trying my hand at actually TASing something, and only in the last few months have I felt that I was actually getting somewhere that might eventually lead to a publication.
I don't say this to scare you off - I hope you stick with it! Many people pick it up much more quickly than I, especially those who are very motivated to spend a lot of their time on one project - a big part of my problem is that I enjoy TASing for a while, but then I get distracted by a million other things. In contrast, the user got4n, who I believe is a similar age to you, showed up earlier this year and is already winning awards and blowing everyone away with how prolific e is.
What I've been doing recently is learning by going over an existing run in the fceux TAS Editor, both to look for improvements, and to understand more deeply how people who are really good at TASing do things. Going over the existing input, trying out variations, and seeing why they did what they did is very instructive. Picking a game you like and doing this would be my first recommendation, but of course it's fine if you just want to jump in and start your own run from scratch instead.
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Pretty much on board with Warp here. I don't see "you'll never see anything like these elsewhere on TASVideos" as a compelling enough reason to include a movie as, frankly, awful as that one. I think the demo tier should be strive to include only the absolute best non-TAS TAS-ish movies the community has to offer, and should also strive for uniqueness - I do not think there is much value in including multiple different payloads for the same total control run, for instance.
Making music with button inputs is something that is showcased in amazing normal TASes like the OoT run currently on the workbench, where it is both done better and presented in a more suitable context. I really see no place for that NES Test run in any new publication category whatsoever, much less one meant to highlight the most technically impressive (but non-speedrun) feats we are capable of.
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I'm not quite sure I'm ready to claim that we are "part of the demoscene", but I support the creation of this tier.
I would vote against that NES Test run, though - there's really nothing technically impressive about it, and it's not very musically interesting either. In 2007 perhaps it was a neat trick but I think we've come a long way since then.
Certainly I wouldn't want us to put it forward as part of our initial bid for inclusion in a scene that produces things like this.
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I think everyone is being very silly here. This run is an extreme special case of a kind that can crop up pretty much no more than once a year. There is no reason to try to shoehorn it into our existing publication guidelines.
It is of immense historical and cultural importance for our community that this run be easily available in a user-friendly way on tasvideos.org. The easiest way to achieve this is publication. So we should just publish it.
We could come up with an "AGDQ Tier" if we really wanted, or a more general "historical significance" tier. Movies there would be unobsoletable, not eligible for awards, and generally not thought of as publications - we'd just be using the publication flow to avoid the technical effort required to build out an entirely new class of movie page. I don't think any of this is really necessary though - I think we should just publish it (and not obsolete it).
I also think it is very important that the publication page include, preferably as en embed but at least as a link, the video of the stream itself (maybe the entire TAS Block video with a timecode link to the beginning of this run?).
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I know about markers, they have the same problem - I have to have visited that frame before. I guess the answer is just no, fceux doesn't have this feature?
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Also, is there a way to type a frame number and jump to that frame? I'm finding that this would be very useful quite often, and scrolling is very slow and annoying.
You set a bookmark on that frame and jump to it by single leftclick on it. Pressing the key that normally selects the slot works like that too in taseditor.
No, I know this, I do this all the time. I'm looking for a way to jump to a frame I *haven't* bookmarked. e.g., I open up a new instance of fceux/TASEdit, and want to skip to the point I'm working on without scrolling carefully through tens of thousands of frames.
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The "easier" way is using branches as TASeditor suggested. The other way (what I use) is comparing movies in different instances (N emulator for N movies) with frame advance delay and background input.
Can you go into more detail about why you prefer it? It doesn't seem that much harder, if there are big advantages.
Also, I tried this a bit, and the background one falls behind a lot if I hold down frame advance. I didn't know what you meant by "frame advance delay", is that something that mitigates this?
feos wrote:
Heh, in an effort to avoid replies like this, I read through the "TASing Process" section of that exact document, which doesn't answer the question, but didn't find this :)
EDIT: Also, is there a way to type a frame number and jump to that frame? I'm finding that this would be very useful quite often, and scrolling is very slow and annoying.
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Oh, perfect, ok. I had been stupidly misreading "bookmarks/branches" as two different names/uses for the same feature, not realizing the other interface was hidden behind a double click :P I feel a bit silly, but also happy that such an important feature is, in fact, supported!
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Hi! I have been hanging around for a long time, and poked at TAS tools a few times, but never really embarked on a large project or learned much in the way of effective workflows.
I am currently working with an existing input file for an NES game in fceux 2.2.2 TAS Editor, and I find myself wanting to test out two very different strats for a certain segment. It seems natural, in this case, to want "super savestates", that actually save the entire state of input (with no regard to "current frame"), in addition to the standard "bookmark savestates", so that I can switch between the two strats without erasing all the later input. It seems like I could emulate this by duplicating the input file and opening two instances of TAS Editor, but that seems kinda icky. Is there a better way?
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This is awesome and an easy yes vote. I don't see why we should obligate runners to include modes they aren't interested in. I also think it's good that this was submitted alone, as it allows a really neat strategy to be shown off that, as the submission text explains, wouldn't work in an all-modes movie.
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While I'm not in a position to be using this myself right now, I hope I am someday, and regardless, I want to thank you deeply for doing this work! This kind of thing is exactly what we need more of, and I can see some very exciting tools being growing out of it - not that it's not exciting enough already!
I hope word spreads quickly, and people are able to adopt this new methodology soon & successfully!
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I'm sure there's a good reason, but can someone explain to me why during the pause at 9:45 they press Z twice, then equip deku nuts and stick, then press Z, then equip shield, instead of R once, equip shield, R once, equip deku nuts and stick? Seems like two rotations would be faster than three.
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A full minimal-A run would be my personal TAS of the century, but idk why we'd exclude BLJs or demand all stars. The presence of heavy-A-use glitches that skip lots of low-A-use levels makes routing interesting, and as the category evolves, we'll get to see big and exciting differences in routes.
If you just want to watch each star done with minimal A presses, that's why this page exists.
EDIT: Oh dear god it looks like all those videos are gone. Fuck YouTube and its unbelievably awful content policies. I am really really sad right now. If anyone knows whether those videos are preserved anywhere, I'd love to know about it.
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