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Kirkq:
Keep in mind that my 14% aims for realtime only. The ingame time goal was just to get a 0:27 clock display, regardless of the seconds, which I could satisfy without any sacrifices in realtime in the end.
As for the multiple category issue, here is my opinion on that very same one mentioned some time ago, with all the pointless ingame/realtime variations just like you stated. Hope you don't mind when I quote it instead of writing the same stuff again:
Saturn wrote:
I actually agree that in-game runs are not really necessary in the end. The only exception for this category is the any%, because it allows to collect the Plasma Beam and therefore makes the run more entertaining to watch overall, due to the much faster boss fights and more variety through the new items.
100% in-game is pointless, since the quicker boss fights and the high variety are still there, no matter of your aim. It doesn't make the any% in-game obsolete though, because it's much longer and with alot more interruptions.
14%/6% in-game is pointless as well, for the very same reasons as the 100%: no route change, equal variety and boss duration no matter what.
100% glitched and saves the animals is also pointless. The latter is obvious by itself (99,9% same run until the escape), the glitched is pointless due to the 6% run where it has the most solid purpose. It would also kind of destroy the meaning of a 100% run: to show off everything the game has to offer, which includes bosses in first place that would be partly skipped otherwise.
The 14% Speedbooster route is at least one minute slower than the Ice route, so a separate category makes no sense as well, but it would still be a great addition to the description of the 14% Ice route run if that category would exist.
Full Map completion makes no sense as well, being a run form without a truly solid goal.
In the end, there are only 5 (if counting the "legit" any% runs as one) truly unique categories with solid goals for this game that would be worth a addition:
* Any% - due to the major difference both, real- and ingame oriented
* 100% realtime - For obvious reasons, to show off everything the game has to offer
* Low% / 14% realtime - due to it's uniqueness and the high difficulty because of the minimal equipment, making it a very suitable run for TAS conditions
* NBMB (glitched any%/low%) realtime - due to it's unique tricks and the lowest completion time and item collection. Because of the NBMB conditons, this doesn't interfere with the true any% and the true low% (14%) runs though
* RBO/Suitless realtime - due to being the most variative run form of all categories, and due to the extremely high difficulty, making it a very TAS suitable run form as well.
Ask anybody who knows SM and it's run forms well enough, they should confirm that overall.
Mmbossman:
That's why I said "against 90% of the judge guidelines". Your first 2 points fall under the small upper "Sum-up" part of them, which is the other ~10%.
As for point 3, you greatly exaggerate, and you know it. Please check this post for an as objective view as it can be about the 14% category and it's goals. They are not different than in a 100% run that also goes out of the "fastest way" to beat the game.
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Bisqwit:
I want to sincerely thank you for respecting the voice of the audience and giving this run a second chance.
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
There's one or two neat tricks that don't appear, such as the lake missle skip, but those would be better shown off on Saturn's Youtube Channel. I don't feel that it's worth 100MB to download the movie file for just that.
There is more than that, such as the completely different strategies at some bosses, the totally different big Metroid skip, or many tricks you won't see anywhere else due to the general equipment-restrictions over the entire run.
To everybody who complains about omitting tricks, please note that there were other ones used instead, which IMO were more entertaining to see overall. It's basicly just a slight speed/entertainment trade-off, and it doesn't cause any difference in the game clock completion time anyway. There is also a nice benefit in the old Tourian escape shaft that way, since it has to be passed 2 times over the run, each of them showing a different approach: the classic walljump strategy at the beginning, and the new platform jumping method at the end, which greatly increases variety for almost no cost of speed.
And in response to everybody who thinks the 14% run has poor/arbitrary goals, if you look objectively on it, you'll see that they are not different than in a 100%. Both runs go out of the "fastest time" way to either collect as many or as few items as possible in order to complete the game, and both don't use the OOR/OOB glitch to accomplish that. Because of that, the 6%, even though it's by the number the true low%, doesn't interfere with this 3 main categories (100%/any%/low%), since it uses game-breaking glitches combined with SRAM corruption/manipulation, as OmegaWatcher noticed very well, that have a category of it's own on this site.
Furthermore, if going by the logic that the 6% obsoletes the 14% run, shouldn't it obsolete both of the "legit" any% runs as well, being clearly faster in both, real- and ingame time? It doesn't. Why? Because the legit any% runs are just much more entertaining to watch, as they don't skip most of the game and every single boss. Same should go, at least if you want to be objectively fair, for the 14%.
For those who might not know the 14% category very well, please check this old 14% run from 2003 for an example. It's a popular, and one of the oldest run forms that exist for this game. That means that many people will undeniable be interested to see it taken to it's limits, knowing that the SM-community (which will be a big part of the people who would watch that run) is pretty large by itself.
In the end, we should weight which decision causes more benefits than it does damage, to satisfy the majority of people. If we reject it, the only benefit would be one less category for the site, but therefore people will miss the chance to see a TAS version of this popular run-form, that also might attract those who look for more than just any% and 100% runs to the site. Is this loss worth it as a whole?
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DarkKobold wrote:
Perhaps if you had been slightly more polite, respectful, and courteous, your submission may have had another chance.
But that would go against the rule to "judge the runs, not the players" again, wouldn't it? I only stated the things how they are in my suggestion here, and people know it.
Bisqwit:
I don't know why we have to make things so complicated, but here are the explicit suggestions for the 14%/2136 run, with clear reasons stated to them by this people (no idea why you found only 2):
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
What justifies the action to not revive a run with 8 suggestions, when we clearly have a rule that the audience should always be a part of the decision, since that's for whom we publish the movies here after all?
Superjupi:
The rules to define the 14% category are very simple:
"Low% that doesn't use out-of-room travelling / OOB glitching"
or simply said
"glitchless/legit Low%".
But that was mentioned often enough already, wasn't it?
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As everybody can see, the decision which runs to revive was once again based on mmbossman's/adelikat's individual opinions, not the amount of suggestions other people did for the runs. Makes me wonder why we even had to start this thread to waste other peoples times after all...
To make the best out of this situation, maybe we should at least delete any paragraph in guidelines (such as this one) that state that the "audience has voice", to not fool the people who read them before deciding to work on/submit their runs here? Since obviously this is not the case in this days anymore.
Really sad to see why TASvideos has to deserve this fate, being such a great site in the past. I only hope Bisqwit will be more careful in the future when deciding to whom he gives judging powers.
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Here is a recent best-of-five (or 3 winning sets) tennis match between my cousin and me, played on our favourite SNES tennis game:
Jimmy Connors' Pro Tennis Tour (E) - Cousin VS Saturn
For those who don't know this game, JCPTT has the huge advantage to the popular "Super Tennis" in the fact that you can increase your ball shot speed the longer you hold the hit button before releasing it. Combined with various net play possibilities like agressive volleys, stop balls and lobs, you can make direct points from many positions, which increases the action and variety of the game. The key to win is finding a optimal system to build up your points every time, while trying to abuse the players weakpoints as much as possible.
A few comments about this match:
The breaking point in it was the end of the 3rd set, where I had several set points at 5:3 to go with a 2-1 lead in them. I didn't manage to use any of them and lost the next 4 games in a row to give that set away with 7:5. Got somewhat frustrated after that, while my cousin, who really improved in this game recently, kept playing very agressive and with almost no mistakes, managing to beat me this time in a great way.
A must see for anybody who knows this game or would like to see advanced strategies and a true quality match between 2 experienced players.
Enjoy!
PS:
Used the European/English/PAL version because it allows for more variety and faster shots than the NTSC/US version.
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A pretty good Hawk performance. Considering he is IMO very limited when it comes to showing off many different combos and variety, you nevertheless managed to make a solid run I thoroughly enjoyed watching. The only thing that you missed are to use his grabbing techniques a bit more often, as they always look pretty cool. Other than that there is nothing to complain about, so overall you did a good job on it. Thanks for sharing, SDR.
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OmegaWatcher wrote:
I'd like to point a few examples of attitudes took by OTHER users that really made me sick in the 16% run thread:
This is a good point, but just to make my view on this clear, I didn't mind any of the quotes you listed except Angerfist's troll response, and mmbossmans ignorant reply right below it.
As for the bias, of course mmbossman will never admit it in the interest to keep his own reputation here clean, but the fact that all he could do was giving a ignorant troll response when I provided clear and obvious arguments against his own reasons for rejection, clearly indicates bias here. Same goes for ignoring the multiple attempts asking to take position on why other runs with even more arbitrary goals (like the "small only" SMW one) got published right away while the 14% didn't.
As you see, it's pretty obvious, so don't be misled by anybody trying to tell you the otherwise. What you observe yourself is what counts, not what anybody is trying to tell you.
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Not a fan of suggesting my own runs for this, but since the 14% (or glitchless/legit Low%) Super Metroid run got rejected against the clear majority of the audience, and 90% of the Judge Guidelines, I thought it should be mentioned in the interest of the TAS community as a whole.
Of course it will require to drop the bias against the author/Super Metroid/silly category restrictions most people disagreed with a bit, but trust me, it's worth it to make TASvideos a better place for the general audience instead of the judges themself.
If it's not possible, then please disregard this post.
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Cpadolf:
I see. Even though the Ceres improvement isn't faster ingame time wise, I can perfectly understand that a faster clock display was worth it.
Hero:
Very interesting news. So the key to reach a lower ingame time with the new route would be a 3rd PB pack from the Red Brinstar hopper room. Actually a pretty obvious choice if you think of it now. The delay is pretty minimal (around half the time to get Spazer), and the time gains at Mother Brain would be even bigger than with charged Spazer/Wave/Ice shots, thanks to my 4-hit PB combo strategy.
It will however be somewhat slower in realtime no matter what, since you would lose more than 11 seconds from the additional pickup screens/door transitions only, alongside the detour to get it and the lag of the PB to destroy the blocks, which in my rough test would result in a ~17,5 sec total delay. Too much to catch up at the MB fight.
Now IIRC, our conclusion was that the Spazer route seen in your current realtime-oriented any% is improvable by ~20 seconds to just barely break the 0:24 mark, and the new 2-PB packs route would save 10 ingame seconds at most, then even with the additional 5-10 sec that could be saved through a 3rd PB pack, you would still end up with a ingame time of ~23:40 at best, while a optimized ingame route will easily allow a sub 23:30.
So no, I don't think it will be reachable, and because of that, I would just go for lowest realtime by skipping the 3rd pack, as you would still end up with 0:23 anyway. If somebody plans to do a test run of the 3x PB pack route to know the time differences for sure, he is of course welcome to give it a try.
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Thanks.
Hmmm, since you mentioned to be at Phantoon a long time ago already, do I understand it right that you guys restarted the run once again? If that is so, may I ask until which point you got in the previous attempt before cancelling it?
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It has been a long time since the last progress report, and I was wondering how the any% runs are comming along. Is anyone willing to give a small update?
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Nope, it's a fake slope that only looks like one, but is in fact just air. You can see it clearly in WIP 7 when I get momentum right before jumping into the roof-Missiles.
Though I was really close to get a recharge in the broken Tube room slopes, but it was still not enough, due to the slopes starting very flat, while the tube edges get in the way just when it would be possible.
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If there are arguments that hero's run is just too old and outdated to maintain the best category this game can offer, you could always replace it with inichi's legit any% in 3:13 run, that according to himself is only improvable by ~30 sec, nothing over such a long time span. Just a note.
EDIT:
Sorry, fixed.
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Oh my God... This is by far the most glitched run that was ever produced, not to mention one that is so complex that nobody will ever understand what is going on unless he will study the game mechanics for a very long time and have general knowledge of the game. I'm absolutely fascinated and shocked how advanced it is, and what a incredible and deep technical knowledge you got in this game, inichi. Makes perfect sense that you decided to keep the entire progress secret after all.
I also hope it's blatantly obvious for you people that this run should get its own "glitched" category, and in no way obsolete the traditional, classic any% category that hero's run currently represents. This category, now that the glitched run exists that breaks the game in every possible way, should not use the SRAM-corruption tricks, nor the pause-skip tricks to avoid some bosses. Furthermore this "glitched" run shouldn't be compared to the "legit" any%, as they represent completely different conditions that have nothing to do with technical quality of a TAS.
In any case, this is a stunning and very rare run that definitely took a lot of work to get done, so I obviously vote YES for it. My respect to you, inichi.
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Solon:
1. What RT-55J said. Additionally comes the fact that Samus loses almost all of her equipment after Mother Brains drain beam, which will slow her down especially in morphball mazes during the escape.
2. Getting the Energy Tank in the Red Brinstar spike room. This triggers the Norfair elevator door to open, regardless of whether you kill Kraid. Not really a true sequence break because of that, as you're usually supposed to fight him later anyway to reach East Norfair, which I avoided again due to the shinespark shortcut after Ice Beam, that again required early Speed Booster. So there are basicly multiple other sequence breaks that together contributed to the Kraid skip in the end.
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Thanks everyone!
RT-55J:
Most likely, yes.
Cpadolf:
Yeah, heading towards the end of a long project always boosts the motivation, and the fact that Tourian will probably be the hardest part of the run doesn't change that either. It's actually a pretty similar situation I had with the 100% SoE run in Omnitopia. :-)
Kyrsimys:
Cpadolf is right. In lava, you can't get any speed if having speed booster, which makes you end up like you would just run without the dash button all the time. Deequipping it is much faster and easily saves the time it takes to enter the menu as well.
As for the Missiles, I will need every single one at Mother Brain, due to the Plasma skip. I actually planned to have even more ammo for it, but the new "Phantoon Skip" sequence break and the route change I had to use with it, forced me to skip a few of them. Luckily I found a good alternative to compensate that, so it's not that bad. :-)
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evilchen wrote:
btw its intresting that if i pick up 2 different items for example, the first changes the amount of the second item and vice versa - that makes it really hard to find optimal item pickups
(sometimes i pickup items i really dont need but they increase the amount of needed items on the NEXT pickup... strange huh?)
Yeah, that was mentioned before as well. The amount of items you pick up always depends on the previous one.
Btw, do you plan to post WIPs of your run, or rather prefer the big release?
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Next WIP is out, with once again many little speed tricks that were never seen/done before. One of them, the "Sandfall Shinespark", is especially useful, as it allows for a pretty big, new route shortcut.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHqON7Tt6Q
More details and further trick-info/demonstrations in the video description.
Enjoy!
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Glad to see you're still working on the run, evilchen.
There is only one spot in the desert where you get teleported towards Nobilia. This spot obviously repeats if you move up, just like the screens do, but the location of it within the screens never change. Just check my run to see exacty where this spot is.
Good luck on the further parts of the run. Looking forward to see it done someday and how much faster the any% would generally be compared to my 100% run. :-)
PS:
As for whether the desert-warp is a glitch or not, I think it is one. It's so irregular and unrealistic that I highly doubt it's a intentional addition by the programmers.
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Excellent run.
The optimization level is extremely high this time, and now we can clearly see how well our old techs already were at early Zebes until Brinstar, allowing only for tiny 11 frames improvement over such a long time span.
For those who wonder, a part of that improvment comes from the Torizo area alone (between the pre-Torizo bat room entrance and exit), and I'm glad to announce that you're the first SM-TASer who actually managed to match the time from my latest attempt there (dated mid-October 2008), that combined techs from my old any% at the tricky to optimize red door, and the low-jump bomb grab tech.
Also great improvement in the X-Ray room and at the Metroids. I actually wondered why you didn't use the X-Ray more often in the previous run, as it seemed to be a logical choice to manipulate the PB drops without the need to delay time when killing the Metroids, but thought you had a reason for it. Good to see that the tech turned out to be the fastest nevertheless.
Oh, and respect for developing a even faster X-Ray climb tech consisting of weird turn around abuses. This once again shows exceptional analyzing skills from your side, Cpadolf.
All in all a very good job on this. 8/9,5.
EDIT:
What I wonder though, you mentioned in the description to use a "cam hack" for optimizing the out-of-room parts. Do you mind giving a bit more information about what it is, and where to get it? This might be a useful tool for everybody who plans to do runs that use OOR travelling.
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Thanks everyone!
I totally agree that Redesign has endless potential to make a entertaining TAS due to the new physics. That's why I picked it up in the first place, despite that it also takes much more optimization and planning work than the original game because of it. I think the effort is worth it in the end.
Derakon:
Nope, I use the previously mentioned zig-zag tech to 1-walljump underwater, just like I did in the RBO run in SM. Cancelling the spinjump would work as well, but you lose 1 or 2 frames due to being forced to release the jump button during it. The only time I did the cancel was to get the item drops in the Kago room with the help of the grapple hook, which are definitely worth this small sacrifice.
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Good news, the next WIP is out!
Be prepared for crazy boss strategies, some interesting suitless water navigation techniques, and a totally new sequence break I found just a few weeks ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBfX1ZyBg78
Enjoy!