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This looks like a cool horror game, but I literally have no idea of what's going on due to the language barrier. I can't even tell what "END VERSION III END POINT ZERO" is supposed to mean.
As such, I have to vote No for entertainment, and it also makes me question whether this submission even qualifies for Standard, considering that from a viewer perspective it doesn't look like there's much player agency beyond story choices and QTEs.
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A few more issues that I noticed, looking at my current submission: https://tasvideos.mistflux.net/7211S
- The beta character is not encoded properly in the Emulator field.
- The Start Type field is set to Unknown, while I started the movie from power on with default SRAM. The data appears to have been imported before the bogus SRAM warning was fixed on the old site though, but that makes me wonder why I'm not seeing said warning on the new site.
- "Submitted edited" is a bizarre wording to indicate the last update metadata. I'm not sure what the actual intent was.
- The date and time is in a format that is confusing for people outside the USA. I recommend reverting to the ISO 8601 format.
- In the submission comments, I'm not sure why the spacing before the 2nd paragraph has a wider height than the one after it, when I did no such thing.
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adelikat wrote:
The forum password is the one that is ported to the new site, so this is NOT why you can not log in. Attempting to recreate the old phpbb2 logic can be tricky, I suspect some characters in the password are not quite handled correctly.
For reference, the password was 64 characters long and contained spaces, dashes, brackets and ISO 8859-1 characters.
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Thanks for the kind words! I would like to clarify however that this isn't the first TAS of Illusion of Gaia on TASVideos. The current publication is for the All Bosses No Wrong Warp category though, and is barely faster than the current RTA WR of that category.
On an unrelated note, I made a new movie with an improvement of 463 frames. The only difference is that I sometimes walk alongside the School's exterior wall after jumping off from its roof to reach my next destination instead of continuing to jump off all the way down to Seth's House every single time. If someone on the staff could replace the submission file with the new version I linked to in the submission comments, it would be very appreciated.
EDIT: Thank you for updating the submission file with the newer version!
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Fortranm wrote:
Is there any possibility to change the player's location in the save file via bit swap to perform warping in either of the games?
I don't think I previously considered that possibility. Potentially, but only to locations you have previously saved at.
I'm not sure if you could sequence break the game by going back to Crysta early though, or how hard it would be to do so while remaining strong enough to beat the last boss. I don't think it would work, but this may be worth investigating. EDIT: I forgot that the trigger to be able to fight the last boss is the end of the airship sequence, so you can't skip the game that way after all.
Fortranm wrote:
SmashManiac wrote:
The biggest potential time save appears to be the duplication of Starstones.
One of them can be acquired much earlier than the other 4. Would it be possible to enter the final Act of the story right after getting the boat by duplicating this? Even if the story still needs to be progressed normally until the airplane is acquired so that Beruga's Tower becomes accessible, this could still allow skipping Beruga's Lab and getting the best weapon and armor earlier in that case.
Something like that, but I'm not sure about the details. This is information I got from Kretiar when he investigated this himself.
Fortranm wrote:
I guess this discussion should take place in the thread of that game if it were to continue though. :P
Be my guest! My blog post with the technical explanation for Illusion of Gaia could be a good start.
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I did look into it a little bit, as SRAM bit swap is indeed possible in Terranigma. However, the possible outcomes are not as broken as in Illusion of Gaia.
The biggest potential time save appears to be the duplication of Starstones. I could also see some potential with duplicating Gems, Magirocks, stat-boosting potions or even re-spawning bosses for farming, but it's much less likely to yield any time save for these.
As such, it's not something that I'm personally interested in looking into further than that, but I would definitely be interested in seeing someone else giving it a try!
Thanks for the temp encode by the way!
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I'm not sure why the site complains about dirty SRAM. I'm assuming it's because the movie somehow contains a moviesram.srm fils with a length of 0 bytes. I have no idea how it happened.
I tried copy-pasting all inputs to a new movie, but the emulator still complains about an SRAM of 0 bytes when I load it.
If that issue can be fixed, I do not know how, but I'm assuming it won't be a problem. Please let me know if there is any action required on my part.
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Additional feedback:
- Most lsnes builds are still using an insecure HTTP link.
- There is currently a bug in the old site where a really long and complex password can be used to log in to the forums but not for the main side. Because of that' I could not log in on the new site. I'm not sure how many people will be affected by this.
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I'm using lsnes rr2-β23, and I'm trying to optimize a TAS where the player character needs to run through the same general route multiple times.
In the Edit Movie window, I can see options to copy and paste input frames by right-clicking on the frame number, and it sounds like it would be very helpful. However, I can't figure out how to select the frames to copy in the first place!
Can someone help?
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adelikat wrote:
SmashManiac wrote:
Holy moley, security finally!
Technical feedback:
- RSS feeds are not working.
- There is no CSP HTTP header. This would greatly improve security, and also fix the mixed content warnings that occur while browsing the forums.
- The Referrer-Policy HTTP header is set to an unsafe value.
- I realize this is not possible on the demo site as it is hosted on a subdomain, but I'm hoping for an inclusion in the HSTS preload list is planned for the final release.
Wow, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I'd love to talk to you more about this stuff.
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Holy moley, security finally!
Technical feedback:
- RSS feeds are not working.
- There is no CSP HTTP header. This would greatly improve security, and also fix the mixed content warnings that occur while browsing the forums.
- The Referrer-Policy HTTP header is set to an unsafe value.
- I realize this is not possible on the demo site as it is hosted on a subdomain, but I'm hoping for an inclusion in the HSTS preload list is planned for the final release.
Design feedback:
- The new design looks great on my 1080p TV.
- It kinda bothers me a little bit that the new theme looks exactly like Twitch's.
Keep up the good work!
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Warp wrote:
Speaking of that, I think it would be a good idea to add the SHA-256 hash of the distributed exe file (and perhaps other, even more secure hashes).
It's not a bad idea, but if file hashes were published right now, they would still be distributed over insecure HTTP, and thus could not be trusted either.
feos wrote:
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Until all the remaining quirks are being ironed out, is it possible to simply mirror the HTTP version and implement a CSP with the upgrade-insecure-requests directive over it? It's supported by all major browsers nowadays.
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To add to my previous post, TASVideos also distributes their own software (lsnes, for example). The fact that there is no secure way to download said software due to the required insecure HTTP connection puts all TASVideos users at risk of downloading malware instead, even if TASVideos itself is not infected.
I do not understand why this critical issue is not considered a priority, considering TASVideos already accepts HTTPS connections with a bad certificate, and considering how easy it is to install and automatically renew free trusted HTTPS certificates nowadays. It's not like I'm the only one with this opinion either: dwangoAC was complaining about this issue in a stream recently, and Bisqwit's previous post certainly suggests that he agrees as well.
If the issue is a lack of volunteers, please let us know! I'd be willing to help on this regard myself if needed, and I'm sure many others would as well!
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I hate to say this, but I have to vote No here simply because this particular electronic version of Backgammon is slow and ear-piercing. I couldn't assess what was actually going on because of this unfortunately.
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I always assumed arbitrary controllers that can plugged in a console's controller port with a compliant interface were fair game on TASVideos, but I just stumbled on something that made me doubt this.
I recently stumbled on this forum post describing how it's possible to modify an N64 controller to get really weird properties in GoldenEye 007:
https://forums.the-elite.net/index.php?topic=23894.0
Now, this trick was banned for RTA runs, but I can't find a clear-cut answer in the case of a TAS. On one hand, it sounds like invalid hardware usage like the crooked cartridge trick. On the other hand, TASVideos uses plenty of tricks not normally supported by official controllers, like pressing opposite direction on a D-pad, or like pressing the extra 4 buttons not present on a normal SNES controller.
So, is this trick valid or invalid for TAS?
I know the Movie Rules specifies using authentic hardware, but breaking a controller's D-pad or pressing non-existant buttons doesn't sound very authentic either, so I'm not sure what applies here.
I guess it depends on whether the modification messes with the controller port interface specifications? I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know whether that's the case here or not...
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After working on a really crazy route for the past 2 weeks, I made a 20:11 TAS that abuses sub-frame resets to duplicate Red Jewels:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/68531266844059737
This is possible because a diary's checksum does not change when swapping bits in the same 16-bit position in SRAM, allowing for save corruption exploits. This checksum property was discovered by Raeven0.
I don't really have the time to optimize it at the frame level for a submission though, so if anyone wants to team up with me to help me on this regard, please let me know!
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feos wrote:
If the ending itself is just that long, it doesn't matter if you make the game jump to the beginning of that ending or to its end. What matters is when you trigger the ending itself, and actual gameplay is what happens before this ending, it's the thing that makes the ending happen. So we measure optimality of that, and movies end when it ends. If route 2 triggers the ending later, then it's less optimal in terms of Vault.
Gotcha! Thanks again feos and Samsara for clarifying this!
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Thanks Samsara for the clear answer!
That makes me a bit sad though as I personally view end of post-input more meaningful than end of gameplay. Not sure how others feel about this, but it may be worth reviewing this case at some point in the future.
That said, I guess I shouldn't complain as it saves me a lot of extra work for now!
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Thanks feos, but your answer appear contradictory to me. I'm not sure if it's because the term "actual gameplay" means something different than what I expect, or because I was unclear in the first place, so allow me to clarify the 2 routes.
Route 1: Warp to the last level, then beat the final boss in 5 minutes. The ending cutscene cannot be interacted with and is 20 minutes long. Total AVI time after the initial warp: 25 minutes,
Route 2: Warp to the last level as before, but then leave, take 15 minutes to make a massive detour halfway around the world to acquire a power-up, then glitch the game using said power-up to wrong warp to the final scene of the ending cutscene without defeating the final boss. The ending cutscene now ends almost immediately afterwards. Total AVI time after the initial warp: 15 minutes.
As such, isn't route 1 containing less actual gameplay than route 2, thus invalidating route 2 for Vault even though the latter's AVI time is faster?
I understand that input time vs interactive state time can both be considered "actual gameplay" and is a matter of opinion, but that logic doesn't apply in this case so I'm still confused here.
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Question here!
The Judge Guidelines currently state the following:
There are two basic opinions as to what kind of TAS ending is better:
- Minimize input length, the game should reach a stage where it completes itself, no matter how long it takes.
- Game must be brought to a certain completion state as soon as possible, after which no normal game input can prevent the game from completing, even when this lengthens the movie file length considerably.
The author can tweak their movie's ending as a stylistic choice, even after it was accepted (but before it is published). However, a run looking to obsolete a published run needs to do more than just tweak the movie's ending, as we aim to avoid meaningless publications. A run with real improvements is free to use a different ending than previous movies did.
I'm currently working on a fastest completion TAS where the ending cutscene for the game lasts for about 20 minutes. I have the choice between 2 completely different routes. Route 1 has a shorter input time and immediately reaches the beginning of the ending cutscene afterwards. Route 2 takes about 10 additional minutes of input time, but immediately wrong warps to the END screen at the very end of the ending cutscene, saving about 10 minutes to reach that state.
In other words, route 1 reaches a game completion state earlier, while route 2 reaches a later game completion state earlier.
Am I correct to say that both routes are valid for Vault based on the stylistic choice I want, as described in the Judge Guidelines?
I'm asking because it's not clear whether the stylistic choice is limited between input time vs game completion state, or also includes which game completion state the author prefers to reach first.
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Wow, that was fast! That teleport at the beginning is quite fascinating as well! Yes vote!
By the way, you should add a link to your previous TAS submission with all the tricks you described there, as there doesn't seem to be a way to find it now that it has been cancelled.
