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The TASTools "Fast forward to end" simply does nothing for me. Nor do any of the other buttons you have, except "Record" and "Toggle read-only". On SNES, by the way.
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I think you misinterpreted that. I don't think he means that Mario's stars are the same as Luigi's stars, but that if you make a 242 star run, Mario's stars in that run would be the same as Mario's stars in his 120 star run. The same goes for Luigi. So I think yes, a 242 star run would already have all the content of both a Mario 120 star run and a Luigi 120 star run. So not really any point in the latter two.
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If it wasn't for the cutscene before entering the book (and you still have to wait through another cutscene after that before you can give your final input) the run would be a lot faster. When I was TASing this, it felt like the second half or so was just waiting. The moment HourGlass gets mouse support, I think I'll redo this with cutscene skipping and possibly a 100%.
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Patashu wrote:
And that would be scientific and meaningful.
For science.
Seriously though, I can understand why some people are upset. It's not really the decisions made as much as the way they were made. TASVideos is the most mature and intelligent community I have come across on the internet and the voting process and very active forums make you feel a valued part of it. And then suddenly it feels like that democracy is gone.
The tier system is suggested in a thread with an unrelated poll question. There is quite a big part of the community that feels there should be a part of the site just for speed records, regardless of entertainment, so the poll question ("Should game choice be abolished as a rejection reason?") gets a very positive response (84%, at the time of writing). However, the tier system itself isn't all that clear to many people and before many of the questions are answered the staff decides to go through with the system anyway.
Then it suddenly turns out that even for the Vault, which in the eyes of many was the place for records of any and all games, there exist acceptence criteria. Suddenly a record of a board game isn't good enough for the vault because... It's a board game and board game's don't make entertaining TASes. Wasn't the entire point of the Vault to abolish entertainment as a factor?
And then the flag system. It's a fine system, but to add arbitrary flags to movies* just for the sake of "funny lists"? Those lists are fine, but keep them somewhere else. As said, there are people that like AVGN (although honestly, does anyone above 16?) and there are people that hate him. Do you really want to confront the latter with his face whenever they want to see a movie that coincidentally he reviewed? Especially when there exist perfectly viable options to keep such a list without shoving it in everybody's face? No. And I realise that this has been turned back now, but I expect the site staff not to give in to such childish "oh this is fun let's do this" wimps and just implement them without really thinking (or even talking) about it.
Then there's suddenly two feeds, which confuses the hell out of everybody as well and there's probably a lot more that I can't remember right now that made a lot of people go "Whoa, whoa. What?". That shouldn't happen. Nobody should ever feel that way. Nobody should ever check TASVideos and think "Wait a second, they did what?!" (unless they haven't checked the site for at least three weeks). It's perfectly okay if people disagree with some of the decisions, but they should at least be made to understand your reasons before anything happens.
Now I'm not trying to make anyone look or feel bad. The site staff has always done a great job in discussing their decisions with the community thorougly before making any large changes. Some submission are in the queue for weeks on end because the community is still discussing it. So what's with the sudden rush? Is there some sort of deadline we don't know of? Does the world actually end on 21/12/1012 if we don't have a tier system and an AVGN list?
Then there's some personal peeves I have**, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I can very well imagine that this whole situation combined with certain personal annoyances can be reason enough to decide to leave. Come on staff, what's going on here?
* Seriously guys, that's like making a list of objects by giving each object a bool that says whether it's in that list or not. Something like "list of movies reviewed by AVGN" shouldn't require altering the publication's data.
** Among others: BizHawk. Not the emulator itself, though. But as far as I know, any new emulator is carefully scrutinized before it is deemed "accurate" and movies made with it are accepted. BizHawk seems to be exempt from this as the moment a new system core is released, it is accepted, without any feedback from the community whatsoever.
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Those suicides are brilliant. Yes vote. On a side note: I didn't really mind the rupee counter noise that much. As you can't see what's going on in the run pretty much all sounds are annoying, and the rupee counter not that much more.
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Scepheo wrote:
it's probably the current record, but I'm fairly sure it's still not optimal.
Turns out I was right! As such, I'd like to replace the movie file with this one. It's an improvement of 40 frames, made mostly by optimizing corners (which, in this game, is horribly counter-intuitive sometimes).
Also, YouTube encode.
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Radiant wrote:
I would prefer seeing this obsoleted by a version that completes all eight levels.
If you mean a 100% run: that's another category so I doubt it'd obsolete this.
As far as publishing this is concerned: looking back, I don't really feel to strongly either way. Yes, it's probably the current record, but I'm fairly sure it's still not optimal.
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andymac wrote:
I don't remember the initial question asking about the expression of numbers. I thought it was about the naming and referencing conventions.
Yes it is. However, "the 315th busy beaver number" is, in fact, a formal expression of a number.
Warp wrote:
If he meant "physically write it down" then the answer is trivial: No.
I never said it wasn't trivial.
Also Warp, you're right in pointing out that even with the possibility of an infinte amound of symbols it's impossible to represent the real numbers, but you're assuming your set of symbols is countable (be it infinite or not). If your set of symbols is uncountable you can represent the reals just fine.
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adelikat wrote:
Should it ever come up, we could maybe make an exception.
And I assume we'd make that exception because in-game would be entertaining? Oh look, we already covered that bit ;)
Seriously guys, adelikat's proposol is pretty solid. Something is either the real-time record for the game or not. If not, we judge it as we always have.
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GMan wrote:
Scepheo et. al. are saying that it is impossible to actually completely write an arbitrary natural number. In other words, the ellipses I wrote above can contain arbitrarily many S's, yet at some point it is impossible for me to physically write down that many S's.
I think you have misunderstood my point. I don't mean that you actually need to write down a number for it to "count". I consider formal expression just as valid.
Let's consider my view of the "size" (let's go with s(n)) of a number. Let's have a look at a big number and express it in a number of ways:
- 2147483647
- 8th Mersenne prime
- Int.MAXVALUE
- 2^31 - 1
The point is, no matter what formal expression we choose, we still need some amount of characters to express it. Now I consider the size of a number to be the least amount of "units" with which I can express it.
Let's also assume, for the sake of argument, a system in which we can express our numbers. Obviously, our current system is shit as it uses a crapload of pixels (or ink or whatever) to even express something as simple as 0 or 1. We could obviously do better by letting "absolutely nothing" represent 0 and we'll have a single Higgs Boson be 1. Then we'll need to define quite a few primes so we'll define the function m(n) (the nth Mersenne prime) and we'll have it be represented by a neutrino. Now we can get our number by having a neutrino followed by eight Higgs Bosons!
Obviously we can do better than this, so we'll just assume our system S is the optimal system. That is, in our system the size (as defined before, units being elementary particles in this case) of any given number is the minimum of all possible systems.
I've tried, I've honestly tried. I have the best system possible. But I still end up with an infinite amount of numbers that are all non-zero size. I also seem to have an upper limit (u) to my size: the amount of elementary particles in the universe. But as there's infinite numbers, there exists at least one number c for which s(c) > u. Crap, I can't express that number.
GMan wrote:
I personally find this point of argument meaningless, from both sides. Mathematics is a tool. If assuming I can operate on results I cannot write down as if I could is useful to me, then I will make that assumption. If it turns out this assumption introduces problems that make my system no longer suitable to me, I won't. Either way, to claim a certain mathematical system is the "right" one is just nonsense.
I'm not claiming any system to be better than any other system. In fact, I don't see anyone doing this. Where did you get that idea? But still, my point is that no matter how hard you try, there will always be numbers you can't operate on.
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Comicalflop wrote:
The run is super boring.
Nothing happens.
The graphics are atrocious.
The gameplay is super dumb and hard to follow.
The TAS itself isn't impressive; Adelikat got only 100 frames slower in real time.
Music is dumb.
Game is dumb.
Console is dumb.
Any member spending time TASing this system is wasting valuable time that they could be TASing better systems.
You might as well be talking about the NES. Take Super Mario Brothers:
- The run is boring, it's just running right.
- Nothing happens.
- The graphics are hideous. I mean, 16x16 sprites!? Actually, SPRITES?! Really? In this day and age?
- The gameplay makes no sense. I mean, he can walk through walls and pretty much run into enemies (hey, say what you want, but the only reason the gameplay here doesn't make sense is because of glitches, and the same can very much be said of SMB).
- The difference between the real time and tool assisted run is only about 100 frames.
- The music is dumb.
- The game is dumb.
- Console is dumb.
Except you don't object to NES runs? Why? Well, I assume because you grew up with it so you can at least view the console as it was viewed back when it was released.
TL;DR: If you don't like it, fine. Vote no for all I care. But don't go spitting your baseless Atari-hate everywhere.
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Warp wrote:
I'm not sure I understand your question. We already have a system to represent any natural number. We have had such systems since antiquity.
Assuming you mean "writing it down", that system fails horribly very soon.
Even if you were able to write a digit on every atom in the observable universe, you couldn't write out a googolplex.
As such, you need to use other systems to denote such numbers. In this case we decided to use either 10^100 in a system where we can raise to power or the system where we named a 1 with a googol zeroes a googolplex.
But, assuming the system definition itself is part of a system (otherwise we could just take the representation "x" and let loose infinite systems on it to get all numbers), we run into a problem. I think you'll agree with me that in this universe, we can only create a finite number of representations in any given system. As we need to define the system within this universe as well, we can only define a finite number of systems and create a finite number of representations for these systems. As such, it's impossible to denote all numbers (be it natural, real, complex, even or whatever) regardless of system.
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ElectroSpecter wrote:
Is it possible to somehow reference any number one wants (no matter how large), or is there a certain point past which naming or referencing conventions fail and it's simply impossible to sufficiently define a number other than the fact that it's "very large"?
I'd assume the latter. There is only a finite amount of mass in the universe and it can only be arranged in a finite amount of ways (planck constants). As such, even when we use the entire arrangement of the universe as the representation of a number, we can still only represent a finite amount of numbers.
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How are you going to handle this from a gruefood perspective? Especially as points will be assigned, quite a few runs that have been rejected become eligible for the speedrun (vault) tier (throwing in my support for AnS' naming system). I assume you don't want people grave-digging the gruefood forums looking for movies that are now acceptable, copying them (perhaps literally in the case of some movies, as doing it yourself would result in the exact same input) and submitting them.
Sorry if I missed this, I read through the thread quickly and couldn't find it. And I'd like to say I support the general idea. I've always liked the idea of having TASVideos be more completionist in its speedrun department.
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I'd probably restrict myself to tossing and catching things. As in: whenever something needs to go in the bin, toss it. If your friend asks for a knife, toss it. Hang your keys on the hook, toss them. Obviously rerecording until you get it right (or at least until your friend isn't horribly injured).
And I'd teach my friends to just toss stuff towards me. Also, having school assignments done before we properly get told what we need to do.
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Warp wrote:
ElectroSpecter wrote:
I had one randomly generated: max length, and a mixture of lowercase and capital letters, numbers, and symbols.
Curiously, using normal English (or whichever spoken language) words in a password may be more secure than using random symbols, no matter how egregiously unintuitive that might sound. There was a strip at xkcd about this.
While this is true when comparing 10-random-character passwords with half sentences, ElectroSpecter mentioned that his random-ASCII-character-password was max length. And when looking at identical length, the random password is preferable, as it is (or at least should be) immune to dictionary attacks.
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I'd like to say that I agree with Warp; as useful as learning about a computer's architecture may be, doing so does not require you to know any assembly whatsoever.
So unless you're planning on programming microprocessors, compilers. drivers et cetera (or your program really, really needs all the speed and memory efficiency you can possible squeeze out of it, there's some things compilers just can't do for you) there's not really any reason to learn assembly other than purely out of interest.
Also, I learned C++ by first creating a (approximately) 10-line console-version of pong and then I started making my own Wolfenstein-like raycasting engine. As long as you have enough general programming experience to recognize bad coding, have a feel for designing your program well and the patience to do ten parts reading to each part coding (and more for your first line), I don't think you'll have to much trouble learning C++ by just taking on a project that you know you can't do yet.
As far as Vakan12's problems with Python coding are concerned: you'll just have to learn. My personal favorite Python design environment is Notepad++. No IDE will take care of things like parentheses, colons, semi-colons and the like for you (though some try).
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I also made a bunch of maps. Although only one of them can be solved without using glitches. I know, maps that require glitches aren't exactly in the spirit of Portal, but these were made with runners in mind, and TASVideos isn't exactly shy of glitches either.
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As the majority of the run consists of horribly boring autoscrollers that look nothing like superplay but more like someone who keeps falling asleep only to wake up just in time for the next jump, a strong no vote from me.