Generally, you want to maximize the temperature gradient between stove and water, and minimize the temperature gradient between water and environment. Cold water is good in both cases. Strategy a) results in a lower water temperature in the pot, which is good.
Keeping some water outside the pot at room temperature would prevent that part of water from losing heat, but if you do that, the water inside the pot will be a lot hotter - since it'll still have the same surface area, it'll radiate a lot more heat.
There are a lot of other factors that come into play. A microwave oven doesn't depend on classic heat transfer. A higher temperature gradient will also cool your stove, which could hamper or kill a campfire. It'd also cause a regular stove to drain more electricity to keep its temperature if it's self-regulating. If it isn't, the stove's temperature is another factor.
Since you mentioned boiling, that's another problem: as soon as your water gets hot enough to evaporate, you'll be losing a lot of heat (even with a lid), which is another reason to stick with a).
For your standard stove-and-a-pot example, I'm pretty sure a) is preferable. You could construct an example where strategy b) is better, but that wouldn't be a very common one.
As a patchwork, we might introduce a SuperMetroidHacks page on the wiki, listing all submissions and publications on different hacks, along with a link to the IPS.
A few good runs were rejected or obsoleted simply for technical reasons, but they don't deserve to be forgotten. Collecting them in one place and linking that on the published SM hack runs might do the trick.
Unless you feel like figuring out how to compile them from source.
That won't help much. Whoever added rerecording support did so with little regard to linux or mac compatibility. The sources won't compile any more. I've tried fixing the build problems (missing includes and #ifdefs etc), but that wasn't enough. You'd have to rewrite some features without using the winapi.
wine on linux works well enough. Should work on mac, too.
this is wrong, x/0 is undefined.
limy->0+ x/y = infinity (for x > 0), but that cannot be simplified to your statement.
/edit: fixed the limit to spoil p4wn3er's fun with nitpicking
| *0
multiplying both sides by zero will not produce an equivalent equation. Whatever you derive from the new equation will not allow you to make statements about the initial value of x.
x*0/0=infinity*0
You're assuming that 0/0 = 1 and infinity*0 = 0. That's wrong twice, neither is a defined value.
x=0
again, I doubt that. Not a single line of your reasoning was correct. You can approach these problems by using proper limits, but as soon as you blindly drop the limits you get wrong results.
It is unknown whether verifying a number's stopping time is decidable at all. Since we don't know, we can't have an algorithm that can verify any number in a finite amount of time; if we had one we'd know it's decidable.
Let me repeat that: there is no known algorithm (which includes application of "mathematical methods") that can verify any number you want. If you find one, submit a paper; you've just proven the collatz conjecture to be decidable.
When someone gives you a number, you can try several approaches to find an answer:
* you can run it through a computer and hope that it'll find an answer within a reasonable timeframe. If the recursion yields 1 or a circle, you'll have your answer. If it grows without bounds or you run out of computing time, you haven't gained anything.
* you can try searching for invariants like p4wn3r suggested. This could prove that the number grows without bounds. For example, find a property of n_0. Use that property to prove that for a certain i>0, n_i > n_0, and n_i has the same property as n_0. Finding a useful property is non-trivial though, and you can't brute force an infinite number of possible properties, either.
* you can try a million other things, though there's currently no guarantee that any of these things will yield an answer.
The practical solution would be: if someone gives you an alleged counter-example, you reply: "prove it!" :p
Of course this is improvable, even the non-hacked 100% is, after countless iterations of several excellent TASers.
But when watching the run, I couldn't find a single spot that looked slow or unoptimized.
In fact, the run managed to surprise me several times with clever application of known tricks or clever abuse of this hack's changed mechanics.
The route looks good. It employs a lot of non-obvious sequence breaks, including some breaks that weren't seen in previous submissions or youtube-runs.
Yes vote.
Not sure about this. The hack may have the potential to show something new, but most of this 0-star run is just the same old: bowser-slinging.
Voting meh.
Are we sure this is the PS2 version rather than the Windows version?
AFAIR the windows version didn't have lock-on / aiming rectangles as seen in one mission. The resolution might be a hint; if I was playing the windows version I'd turn it way up. I couldn't find anything else that would indicate the PS2-version though, but my knowledge of the game is limited to a few playthroughs years ago.
Since nicovideo shows me more black screens than actual videos and the flash player stutters from time to time, I've resorted to downloading the videos before watching, using the usual tools that linux provides. Until Flash 9, video files could be found in /tmp, where the flash plugin stored them. Flash 10 deletes its temporary files after opening, so they can't be found in the filesystem. Here's how to get them anyway:
Open your flash-enabled browser and navigate to the video page as explained in the first post. Refresh a few thousand times until the video plays.
Hit pause, wait for the video to finish loading.
Find the PID of the flash plugin (if ran in a separate task) or your browser, e.g.
~> ps a | grep flashplayer.so
It might look like this:
4209 pts/1 SLl+ 2:33 /opt/firefox/plugin-container /opt/Adobe/flash-player32/plugin/libflashplayer.so 4128 plugin true
Get all open file handles from flash:
~> ls -l /proc/<PID>/fd/
You should see an entry like:
lr-x------ 1 tub users 64 Jul 21 00:28 16 -> /tmp/FlashXXq0Uros (deleted)
The symlink you're looking for points to a deleted file in /tmp/ that starts with "Flash". Note the name of the symbolic link, in this example it's 16.
How about, instead of hitting a (yet to be implemented) "mark as screenshot" key, you just hit the "screenshot" key and submit the screenshot together with your movie later?
* Whatever was going on with the grapple beam just prior to first getting super missiles; never seen anything like that before. But it could be replaced by careful jumps (doable in realtime, even), so this doesn't really count.
That bridge is a one-way street. You cannot stand on it, you will fall through. When approaching from below, it's solid though.
Grapple is one way to avoid falling through. The other option would be to bomb-jump over, but that's slow. You're supposed to shinespark over, but that defeats the purpose of sequence breaking.
I'm trying to remember a place in the original game that had these kind of blocks, but can't come up with any.. are they an addition to the hack, or maybe some unused remnants from the original?
Derakon wrote:
The hack author put a lot of sequence breaks into the game. The one that really breaks things wide open is getting powerbombs from Norfair; normally you're supposed to get them only after defeating Mother Brain, which requires beating Kraid and Ridley too.
Yeah, as it turns out those are a nice red herring :)
sequence breaks... check.
hell's run... check.
speed booster action... double check.
boss fights... uh.. I think there was ONE, but I blinked and missed it.
As usual, this run skips even more of the interesting stuff, but the remaining run is certainly worth watching. I believe it's interesting even to those that haven't played the hack.
Thus, yes vote on publishing and replacing mockingbird. Well done to cpadolf, hoandjzj and kriole!
I'd like to see an explanation about the glitching at the end though. It starts right when leaving draygon's room, so it can't be just the speed booster?
Oh. So if you can use that method on the L3/L4-gates before draygon, then you've indeed skipped.. xray, and in turn PBs. Awesome!
But skipping SB means that you cannot release the L2 lock, either (unless you go through ridley first), so you'd have to find a way to reach draygon from the pirate ship's front door with no locks released. Good luck with that! ;)
Ok, so despite this, it still shouldn't be possible to skip speedbooster, right?
Why would you want to? Unless you find a way to skip the L1 lock as well, it's somewhat pointless.
Skipping SB would require you to get PBs from Tourian (Norfair and Chozo won't work), so you'd have to fight Kraid, Ridley and MB. This prevents getting XRay from Tourian. Since you can't do the L4 lock without SB, you'll need to grab the XRay from the pirate ship. That's a LOT of ground to cover without speedbooster.
Possible? Doubtful. Faster? Certainly not.
Those two PBs are the same item. As soon as you pick up one of them, both disappear.
You can only get the Chozodia PBs if you reach them without tripping the alarms. If you do get them, you need to exit through Chozodia - painful without gravity, but not impossible.
If, on the other hand, you go kill MB without grabbing the chozo PBs, you must pick up the Tourian PBs to exit Tourian. Once you do, the PBs from Chozodia are gone.
If you're sneaky and get the PBs from Norfair, you've broken the sequence (although the hack's author clearly intended you to), and you can still choose whether to get the Chozodia or Tourian PBs for your 100% collection. With early PBs, you might even find a way to get the Chozodia PBs without going through the obstacle course, but Tourian PBs are still faster to get.
If you want, you could even get the Norfair PBs, kill mother brain, skip the Tourian PBs, then grab the ones in Chozodia.
Yes, really. On my playthrough, I got the chozodia pack and later the one in Norfair, but none in Tourian.
I was going for 100% items without alerting the pirates, but that doesn't seem to be possible :(
Wow that's strange! Does that mean if you go to Chozodia to get that PB early (the one near the bottom of its room, underneath several morph ball passages, is the one I'm thinking of), and then back to Norfair, that the chozo statue behind the speed blocks above the lava no longer has a PB in it?
No, that one is still there. The PB in Tourian vanishes. You can either get the PB from Chozodia or the one from Tourian, never both.
The one in Norfair is unrelated, you need to pick it up either way.
Killing Mother Brain doesn't change anything about PBs, it'll only move the XRay.
You get less stuff per pickup: 50 energy per tank, 5 missiles, 2 Super Missiles or 2 Power Bombs per pack. Which is 1499 energy, 225 missiles, 50 super missiles, 50 power bombs.
Oh, I forgot that e-tanks only give 50E in this hack, not 100.
Anyway, I reviewed the E-tanks that can be acquired without SB/PB, and I couldn't find any in Chozodia or western norfair. If you have to backtrack to Brinstar anyway, you may as well grab Varia.
But even without a suitless lava run and boss fights, this run is great!
You've skipped the charge beam. Wow. Good to see that the route turned out to be faster with your additions.
Could you avoid the detour for Varia by picking up more e-tanks? Getting the tank in brinstar instead of the one near varia would leave you with two, getting the one below the lava makes three on your way back. You'll need at least one more for the lava runs, probably two considering all the heated rooms, and I can't even remember one tank that could be aquired without a larger detour. Have you looked into this already?
The grapple-shortcut out of the Speed Booster room isn't possible in the other direction?
Too bad that almost all of the bosses are skipped this time. They'd make the run more interesting.
I'll be looking over the route again when I have more time. It'll be a yes vote in any case.
mplayer is known to have issues with some mp4 videos. Even though the status information printed to the console will cheerfully announce how much A/V-desync there is, it doesn't make any effort to correct it.
Seeking through the video will temporarily sync A/V, but it'll soon continue to drift apart again.
mplayer -nocorrect-pts x.mp4
can remedy that. Don't set that option as a default, though, because it'll cause some .avis to desync.
if you weren't using mplayer.. ignore that ;)
