Very nice SoulCal. :)
Though I wonder why you enabled the widescreen hack at all, if it doesn't work well? Does the run sync with the hack disabled, i.e. can it be disabled for the official encode should you submit the finished run later?
AngerFist wrote:
If you keep this up, I think this could be regarded as a pacifist run, no?
Nah, not even close. A pacifist run would run around the village for >5 minutes until the bell rings, without killing anyone. A pacifist run wouldn't kill foes for grenades, either.
A prominent argument is that natural constants, such as c could have changed over time, citing evidence that it has already changed since its first measurement.
Well, that might address the "x light years away" lower bound, but not the higher lower bound[1] of "the age of a star going supernova".
In either way, the challenge would then be to:
put forth a theory of the initial values of these constants, and how they changed over time
apply those constants to the formulas of GR and QM and see which results you're getting
Check whether those results contradict any existing observations, like the temperature of the CBR. If so, go back to step one or give up.
Check whether those results make any verifyable predictions that current theories don't.
Verify them.
Depending on the results, either sulk or gloat.
That's how science works. So far, I haven't even seen step 1 being done in a coherent way (but then again, I don't frequent literature labeled as "creationist".)
Until that's done, any claims about changes of natural constants are merely excuses to dismiss unpleasant evidence.
[1] Yes, I said "higher lower bound" while still being semantically correct. Hah!
Yeah, carbon dating is a nice red herring. "Yardsticks are so unreliable after a few dozen yards, how can anyone claim to have accurately measured the size of earth?"
Besides, your link is attempting to disclaim measurements of absolute ages, not about relative ages (i.e. "this fish is older than that mammal").
Deeper rock beds tend to be older than the ones above, because there are very very few methods to lift a couple of layers of rock, neatly push a newer layer in between, then settle it down and walk away nonchalantly. God could have done so, but if so he failed to mention it in his instruction manual.
There's also relative measurement. If I find this species A right next to a species B, chances are both creatures existed during the same age.
And of course evolutionary connections. We know that mankind has more similarities to apes than fish, so we can draw a line between those species in the tree of evolution. Doing so often enough, and we can find common ancestors and create rough timelines of who came first. But of course creationists don't like talking about the mutated elephant in the room.
No, I'm not a geologist, evolutionists, biologist or anyone with expertise on these fields. I can't judge the evidence about an upper bound for the age of the earth. But I can judge a paper by the bullshit factor, i.e. the amount of fallacies and handwaving in comparison to actual arguments.
My favourite gems from the thing you linked:
When a ‘date’ differs from that expected, researchers readily invent excuses for rejecting the result. The common application of such posterior reasoning shows that radiometric dating has serious problems.
Application of posterior reasoning is indeed more common than the author of that pdf cares to admit. He accepts the bible as truth, and attempts to fit all observations into that truth, ignoring those that don't fit. This whole paragraph is a very amusing statement about the colour of kettles.
The atheistic evolutionist W.B. Provine admitted:
‘Most of what I learned of the field [evolutionary biology] in graduate (1964–68) school is either wrong or significantly changed.’
Most of what I learned in the field of [computer science] in graduate (1964-68) school is either wrong or significantly changed. Is that unusual in *any* field of science, especially those that benefit from the invention of microchips?
Supernova remnants (SNRs) should keep expanding for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the physical equations. Yet there are no very old, widely expanded (Stage 3) SNRs, and few moderately old (Stage 1) ones in our galaxy, the Milky Way, or in its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds.
Our radio telescopes have not yet found any old, widely expanded stage 3 SNRs in our galaxy, thus they cannot exist.
Our radio telescopes have not yet found god, thus he cannot exist either.
The conclusion is either premature, or there's a crucial step missing in this argumentation: why would you expect telescopes to have found them?
Basing this claim on a paper from 1994 is very suspect. 1994 was the first year where Hubble actually worked. It's not surprising that older, less bright SNRs couldn't be found using the technology back then.
In either case, he acknowledges the existence of supernova and accepts the current scientific research as true by citing their expected duration. Then surely he also accepts the current scientific research for the creation of supernova, which requires a star going through much of his lifecycle, thus being at least a few million years old (hey, it's the same formulas!). Another lower bound for the age of the universe is his mention of the magellan clouds, being 200.000 light years away, yet clearly visible to us. Or the milky way itself, some ten thousand light years from us to the furthest star.
On the other hand, he claims evidence that "the world is really only a few thousand years old". What'd I miss? Why wouldn't he have lost any last bit of credibility at this point?
There are many lines of evidence that the radiometric dates are not the objective evidence for an old Earth that many claim, and that the world is really only thousands of years old.
There are many anomalies in current scientific results, which instantly invalidates everything every "evolutionist" scientist has ever said about the age of anything. There are also a few anomalies that might be construed in a way that's compatible with the bible, so we'll use them as evidence for creation (see also quote #1).
Maybe these improvements are in places that I don't use.
Exactly. You don't use them because you didn't know them from KDE3, so you learned to live without them. Go look for them, give them a chance, there's good stuff in there.
If you'd been a longtime KDE4 user, switching to KDE3 would likely yield a similar reaction from you. "Feature X is gone, KDE3 sucks!".
Nach wrote:
But you can't have them directly in the sense I described.
Is this about the device notifier? Defaulting to one icon per device doesn't scale well, so KDE4 opted to have one icon. How often do you eject devices that you need this?
You can add the device notifier to your desktop, it'll then give you the full list. If you add it to the panel, I think it defaults to one icon for all. I'm not sure whether you can add the full notifier to a panel of sufficient size, but if that really does irk you, it's a simple thing to patch.
Nach wrote:
It is KDE's team fault for removing/changing what once existed throughout, without having any way to use a method which many people prefer.
It's not like they just removed stuff because they liked removing stuff. KDE4 was rebuild from ground up, and some things that didn't work well or weren't perceived as high-priority features simply weren't reimplemented. The rebuilt was needed for several reasons, and it enabled several features you will never see in KDE3. A GUI that isn't rendered entirely in software, for example.
Reads less like a researched article but more like a subjective soapbox.
Indeed.
To clarify, there's nothing wrong with just, I just object to labeling it an "article". Despite the current state of journalism in countries everywhere, "article" still has connotations to something researched, factual. I'd classify yours somewhere between "rant" and "random blog post".
It's not well-researched, it has a very limited, subjective POV (GUIs must be made to suit YOUR personal use case / preferences), it doesn't offer anything constructive except bitching both about the direction of current mainstream GUIs as well as about every other alternative (gnome sucks, trinity has an awful name, bla bla), and you focus on perceived regressions without even acknowledging any improvements that went along with it.
FYI, you can have applets in your KDE4 panels, right-click works fine, and okteta has configurable line sizes, defaulting to 16 bytes on my install. On 4.7.x at least.
For the record, I'm using KDE3 on my desktop and KDE4 on my notebook. Workflows are different, but I get things done on both, and there's just a single regression related to multi-monitor systems that's preventing me from switching my desktop to KDE4, too. I don't disagree that the early KDE4 releases were unusable, but IMHO by now the improvements outweigh the regressions - as long as you accept that it's different and make the effort to adjust to it. Trying to make KDE4 look and behave like KDE3 won't work, but that's not KDE4s fault, it's the fault of the ranting guy with the shoehorn.
Reads less like a researched article but more like a subjective soapbox.
Beginning an article about UIs with Windows 3 is somewhat laughable, if you consider where they started, and where MS copied their ideas from. (Not saying the other major UI developers didn't get "inspiration" left and right, but during the 80s/early 90s MS was usually the last one to get a feature everyone else considered to be standard. Like you said, win95 was the first one that could truly replace DOS for you, which was a state others had achieved 10 years earlier.)
And btw, Trinity is not exclusively a religious concept.
Noun, trinity (plural trinities)
* A group or set of three people or things; triad; trio; trine.
* The state of being three; threeness.
Not sure what's wrong with that name for a project that maintains version 3 of KDE.
If some religious zealot really must assign a christian connotation to that word, he'll surely also refuse to use an UI based on heathen "magic" creatures, right?
We should also really officially discourage ripping a CD yourself.
officially encouraging getting pirated versions is obviously a no-go.
Lacking psxjin support, you could manually compare checksums using md5sum (linux) or this tool (windows). That should hopefully allow you to spot any differences in CD3/4 before it's too late.
Well, is your iso simply a different version or is it a bad dump?
If it's just a different version it's acceptable to keep it. If it's a bad dump, you should try to switch if possible.
On that topic, how can a star collapse further through degeneracy pressure?
The pauli exclusion principle states that no two fermions can occupy the same state, not cannot occupy the same state unless pushed hard enough.
So what exactly happens if you add more mass? How can the star compress further without violating the pauli exclusion principle?
With more pressure, electrons must move to higher energy levels to compress further. When they're energetic enough, they may combine with protons to neutrons, which can be compressed further (assuming there are protons present, but if we're talking about star remnants there are).
After that, I can only see a lot of handwaving with "oh, then they probably split up into quarks. Then preons. And then they just form a black hole, screw Pauli!".
Is that the current state of research, or is there an explanation that might remove the handwaving?
It will be interesting to see where Lil Gecko's TAS ends, since there shouldn't be a diff between english and japanese text.
Is that an assumption or well researched knowledge?
Text bubbles don't appear to be influenced by the amount of characters to display (though I haven't made frame comparisons), and on the scenes I checked the amount of text bubbles was equal in both languages... but you never know where they managed to sneak an additional bubble in to make it fit.
Using the chess board is the most intuitive proof. The one I came up with is a bit more complicated:
The first row has 7 squares left, thus it must contain an uneven amount of vertical tiles spanning row1 and row2, let's call it v1.
The second row has thus (8-v1) squares remaining, which is uneven, so the amount of vertical tiles between row2 and row3 is uneven, called v3
.... v1, v2, v3, v4, v5, v6 and v7 are uneven (and with an uneven v7, we could fill the last row, so it might work out).
Adding them yields an uneven number, so any solution will contain an uneven amount of vertical tiles.
Similarly, we can conclude that we need an uneven amount of horizontal tiles.
So the total amount of tiles we'll use must be even. But the board requires exactly (8x8 - 2)/2 = 31 tiles.
/edit: hmm.. if you randomly remove one black and one white field from a chess board, it will always be possible to fill the remaining board with 2x1-pieces. There's a simple constructive proof which I'm too lazy to write down.
According to several benchmarks that popped up, skyrim should run close to 60 fps at medium details on 1680x1050. What other titles are you experiencing trouble in?
Your current GPU is stronger than those found inside XBox360 or PS3, so any cross-platform title is going to work just fine on your GPU if you configure the detail levels similar to the console version. There shouldn't be any real need to upgrade until the next-gen consoles come along, unless you like playing PC-only interactive benchmarks like Crysis. (though funny enough, crysis and even crysis 2 will work on your GPU if configured accordingly)
On the other hand, you could also get a new GPU now, to enjoy some higher resolutions - and then upgrade again in 1-2 years when next-gen arrives. Whether or not you skip this step entirely depends on your budget and your willingness to spend 100-200 bucks on a bit of eye-candy (and ~30 bucks over two years on the larger power consumption of highend GPUs).
Since at any given time, there's always a shiny new version right at the horizon, I've found it to be useful to set certain requirements for an upgrade, then buy as soon as a product satisfies those. For example, my current CPU is a dual-core, and I'll upgrade as soon as I find "a quad-core with greater per-core performance and less or equal power draw." I may or may not stick to that goal and go with a 125W octa-core at some point, but at least this goal keeps me from obsessing over every new CPU. "Meh, too much power draw, not interested".
moozooh wrote:
a 80+ standard 500+ watt PSU — ≈70$;
a roomy thick-walled tower case — ≈60$;
a set of minimally-comfortable peripherals — ≈30$;
a set of non-shitty headphones (because it's cheaper to get acceptable sound out of headphones) — ≈20$;
a TN-based 20"+ monitor — ≈150$.
Total: 900$.
There's no need to get a new monitor for each upgrade, nor any of the other things I quoted.
An average 100$ 5.1 sound system will last more than 10 years and is well worth the price. In 10 years, you'll have bitten through enough headphone cables and rubbed off enough of the ear-protecting foam that the proper sound system may still be cheaper in the long run..
Getting every missable item would include, amongst other things:
Become the king of the jump rope
Complete all the Chocobo stuff and defeating Ozma
Deliver all mognet letters and do the mognet central sidequests
Catch 99 Frogs
Race Hippaul to level 80
Become a Rank S treasure hunter
Get the Excalibur II
I'm pretty sure the last goal is incompatible with the previous ones even under TAS conditions (where you cannot skip FMVs), so don't bother. There is no way to get everything in one playthrough, thus there's no real 100% run.
That shouldn't stop anyone from creating a more comprehensive run in the future, but as DarkKobold advised there's no point in discussing the requirements until someone actually starts working on such a run.
Huh? When playing, I was under the impression that carrying around puppies or curly affects your movement speed and jumping height. Am I imagining things, or are we talking about different things?
Huzzah! Yes vote!
Glad to see that nitsuja hasn't quit entirely. This is an impressive TAS.
Do you have numbers how much dog-hat and curly-hat slow you down?
Nitrodon wrote:
I've played through this game a couple times[..]
hehe.
It was your run during sgdg that finally introduced me to this game. I'm now on my second playthrough, going for the best ending. But so far I've only gotten my rear kicked in SG.
If it is the same room, this might be a faster way to get the Gravity Suit in an any%, depending on if you have sufficient items to Crystal Flash by then; I kinda doubt it though, since IIRC Phantoon is the first boss fought.
Considering you'll need to grab a total of 3 PB packs by then, this will be slower (if it's possible at all).
You'll grab one PB pack anyway, the second is a 1-room-detour in red brinstar, finding a third will be a problem. The closest one seems to be at the upper right of the landing site, and you'd have to grab it without SB.
Thanks for the explanation. The version without pauses looks a lot more understandable.
Could the menu times be reduced by creating an sram file that contains only the required souls and items, and nothing else?
Awesome, but pretty confusing :)
Would it be possible to extend the movie to 16:9 widescreen to get more space for statistics, somewhat like this?
http://www.authmann.de/misc/tasvideos/sm_comparison.png
This would allow adding additional stats (total frames, item%, rooms visited) to determine route differences. It'd also allow highlighting the best and worst room strategy for the last room.
How do you do the colouring of the different sprites? It appears that they're converted to greyscale, then hue-shifted. I suppose proper palette shifts aren't possible?
One last thing: have you considered delaying each room until the *last* sprite exits the room? This might make it easier to follow, and easier to spot the amount of improvements going on.
Can someone just post a screenshot of the frame that was skipped? That'd save quite a bit of bandwidth for everyone ;)
Yes vote for the improvement (what else?), though it might be prudent to delay publication for a while to see if someone else shows up for the frame wars.
In theory, if you have an imaginary mass, you can travel above the speed of light
Has any imaginary quantity been observed in nature yet? As I understand it, imaginary numbers are only a math trick needed to solve some equations, not a property of the physics systems they describe. Am I wrong here?
I just don't see why it's acceptable for any one game to have near-identical runs side-by-side while the rest have none.
If my memory serves me right, there were three reasons:
Back when the split was made, they weren't near-identical. Only now, several iterations and discoveries later, have the routes converged to a point where they are.
The ingame-run was interesting to speedrunners back when a TAS was basically a speedrun with higher precision. Not only were TASes a good tool to test different routes and room strategies, they could also serve as goalposts, as in "hey, my run is 2 minutes away from perfection. That's pretty good, right?".
But today TASes are using tricks like the Torizo escape, early WS CWJ, luck manipulation to skip ammo and e-tanks, 1-round phantoon, 4-hit Wave-PB combos and other stuff that's pretty much restricted to TASes. Not only aren't the TASes comparable to speedruns any more, they also aren't really helpful for planning speedruns. This ingame-route will never be seen in a regular speedrun.
While it is still interesting to see how much the ingame timer can be lowered, noting this fact does not require publication, nor does a number at the end of the movie make for an interesting movie by default.
The decision to publish both was also meant to prevent postpone a heated debate about the "correct" timing for this game. It had gotten out of hand and was reignited every time a new run with different timing was submitted.
Now that taco&kriole's run has undone the separation, we'll need to consider whether we'll introduce it again to postpone the discussion another time, or whether we'll simply attempt to have the discussion in a civilized manner.
I think you'll agree that all of these reasons were valid back when the split was made.
Though, as I have stated, IMHO at least two of the reasons don't hold any more. We'll see about the third, and maybe someone can come up with new reasons that need to be considered before making a decision.
