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Derakon wrote:
Otherwise the main gimmick is that each level has a segment where you take advantage of time travel to team up with yourself -- which means that most levels have what amounts to an escort mission. They tend to be short, but still. Most missions also have a normal AI sidekick who travels with you, though I never seemed to have any trouble with them getting killed. They might be invulnerable.
IIRC, when using 2-player co-op (which I think should be the preferred mode) the second player controls that sidekick. Unless you're in one of those "team up with yourself" sections, then he controls the future (or past) Cortez. Which would take away the entire (boring) escort bit. Yay for co-op.
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Unless I am misunderstanding something, just encoding at 30fps by decimating the frames would result in movies of the same quality we have now. At least, I understood YouTube reduces the fps by decimating. So, blending would actually increase the quality of the videos, as flicker effects would still be visible, instead of having sprites remain solid or disappear.
And how exactly would halving the fps increase the bitrate?
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Flygon wrote:
It's worth noting that a TODO of mine is finding out the maximum bitrate of Original mode to find out what the max effective bitrate should be for HD encodes.
If we're going to adapt (probably downgrade) our bitrate to the maximum that YouTube can handle, why are we still encoding in 60 FPS instead of 30?
Patashu wrote:
If you upload one gigabyte of footage and I watch it at 360p, how much of that gigabyte am I downloading?
Depends on the original resolution. But, given x is the original vertical resolution, you're watching (360 / x) ^ 2 GB of the original gigabyte. Unless I'm gravely mistaking.
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I already greatly enjoyed the glitched runs of this game, and this one just breaks the game so much more. Almost the whole of the game is skipped, something I had never expected of this game. Although this run does not so much have the "super-human precision" that some other runs have, it is still a great display of how games can get dissected by TASers (and normal runners, for that matter).
As this run clearly shows, there is a significant difference between the USA and Japanese ROM versions. I feel that (especially due to the Japanese ROM having a glitch that allows much, much faster completion of the game) this definitely warrants publication alongside the USA version, if not even obsoletion of it, due to this ROM being considered the better of the two.
An easy yes vote as far as I'm concerned.
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antd wrote:
too bad there's no built-in avi recorder, since it plays so slowly.
Once again I second you. I also miss this. I get that there are much more important features to work on, but this would allow us to share our work more easily (which adds that extra tidbit of enthusiasm). I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement, but considering the workaround I used when I made this, it'd be awesome to not-need that. And also there's really no way right now to properly record the audio.
EDIT: Nevermind half this post, Toad King beat me to it. Nice to know about that function, but still a bummer as far as the audio is concerned.
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There's a good chance the first halve of those cheats (so for the maximum speed cheat: 810F6BA4) are actually the memory addresses they change. If you're looking for something like current speed, I suggest you confirm that those addresses are maximum and minimum speed and look for addresses close to these. But, there's a very good chance it's stored in a complicated way, like maybe x/y/z components.
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I'm not sure about it, but usually a GameShark code contains the memory address it's supposed to manipulate. So yes, those would be useful, although I don't know enough about GameShark to actually dissect the codes.
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I don't really mind which game, I also think that game choice is not why this challenge failed to gain much participation.
The goal you chose requires people to know the game really, really, really well before they can even choose a starting point, let alone know where to go from there on. For each game, there are only a few TASers who know it well enough to take up this kind of challenge.
I suggest that next time you take a different approach to the challenge itself, so that even somebody who has never heard of the game before can play it for a few minutes, and can then start doing the challenge.
I also suggest you don't pick any game for N64, PSX, DOS or any system which doesn't really have a stable emulator yet. Mupen and PCSX are still very prone to desyncs, and JPC isn't really easy to use.
If the next challenge sounds like something that I could actually do (giving a fixed starting position would help a lot, from reset (and clean SRAM) would be even better) I'd be very happy to give it a try.
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Voted meh. Although I somehow liked all the noise this run produced, just shooting everything at first sight gets boring after a while. Can't you shoot targets later without losing points? It would add more variation to the run.
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No vote, it's an awfully tedious watch and it looks more like sloppy real-time play then tool-assisted play to me. Bad game choice and I wonder who thought of putting this on that list.
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I agree with Lord Tom, perhaps something like the individual level (IL) tables found over at SDA could pose a solution to this problem. However, even if we had these, F-Zero would be a difficult case as practice does not cover all tracks. This means that you would either have to do only some tracks, which seems an odd solution to me, or you'd do the GPs. Then again, as the latter does not allow you to pick certain levels, it would become more of a individual cup thing.
Still, for racing games in which all levels can be done individually, I think an IL table is a very good solution that, at the very least, should be taking into consideration.
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I've yet to read 1984, but I'm quite sure I'll like it, as I can recommend Animal Farm (also by Orwell) to anyone. I've also finished the Sword of Truth series which I also though was very good. However, of all Fantasy, The Hobbit and everything by Raymond E. Feist stands out. I'd like to note that (almost) all his works take place in the same universe, creating a certain feeling of familiarity and recognition that I haven't found anywhere else so far.
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Going into FCEUX, running the game and disabling the background, I found the even then Shadax can go behind it (as he's only half visible behind some blackness). So, it seems that the game does indeed draw some tiles, then some sprites, then some tiles.
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Nothing will ever need to be in front of the floor or walls, so that's just background I assume. All the other things can be solved by using a clever drawing order. Which is usually from the bottom to the top.