Posts for Warp


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So, if the definition of "adventure game" is "progress is based primarily on the collection/usage of specific inventory items to solve a specific intellectual challenges/puzzles; hand/eye coordination and/or reflexive skills are rarely a main aspect of these games", could someone give examples of very representative and archetypal adventure games, other than point-and-click ones?
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I suppose it has never been defined whether "entertainment" should be one experienced while watching the run, from what's happening with the game on screen, or whether the "entertainment" comes from reading the background material, the explanation of how the run was made. Let's admit it, this run isn't very "entertaining" to someone who has no knowledge of what's happening behind the scenes, ie. without having to read a long (highly technical) explanation of how it was done. You can't just give a video of this run to someone to watch and expect it to be entertaining, because it essentially just shows the ending screen of the game. OTOH nothing dictates that the "entertainment" value of a run must come from the visual aspect of the run itself, independently of knowing the technical details behind its creation. But then, one could also argue that what's entertaining is not the run itself, but the document explaining the technical details. Are we publishing a run, or are we publishing a technical document about hacking a game using the controller port of the console?
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DrD2k9 wrote:
I'm not personally familiar with The Talos Principle, but I watched a youtube clip of the game. It strikes me as more of a Portal type game; or a series of environment manipulation puzzles. Perhaps that's too nitpicky of a distinction from an adventure game for some people.
The Talos Principle is different from Portal in this regard because in the former you actually need to find and collect puzzle pieces, and then literally solve those puzzles in order to advance (often by literally opening doors by solving a puzzle). In Portal you don't collect anything. This is why I mentioned The Talos Principle in particular, because of the "in an adventure game you search for and collect items which are then used to solve puzzles", which fits it perfectly.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
MetroidVania games as adventure games? While these games often have a similar situation where progress is limited until a certain item is acquired, the difference between these and adventure games lies in the use of the item. Items collected in adventure games tend to allow progression by enabling the player to solve one (or in some cases a small number of) specific puzzle(s) using that item. Items collected in Metroidvania games by contrast are more akin to power-ups that tend to allow for infinite uses to allow a more widespread exploration of the game-world, but not necessary allow solution of one (or a few) particular puzzles. Another key difference is that Metroidvania games quite often include developing skills of action/platforming as a primary means of progressing through the game. Adventure games rarely require a significant level of reflex based (hand/eye coordination type) gaming skills, but instead tend to focus on challenging the minds ability to think through a solution to a problem.
I think that the distinction that you are making here is that in metroidvania style games you search for (sometimes literal) keys to open (sometimes literal) doors, which usually require zero effort to open once you have whatever objects acts as the "key" to it, while in adventure games you search for puzzle pieces, which then have to be used in a non-trivial manner in order to be able to advance in the game. In this sense I would actually classify most Zelda games, even the 3D ones, as metroidvania, because almost the entire game (except for some sidequests) consists pretty much of obtaining objects which, once gotten, act as keys to trivially open obstacles. (Even beating bosses is usually done just to get an object that the boss drops, which allows advancing in the game. Although sometimes in these types of games it's not always a literal object, but just merely defeating the boss opens a new path that was previously blocked eg. by an NPC or other such thing.) I also think this classification principle would make The Talos Principle and adventure game. Maybe it is?
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I think that the whole concept of "adventure game" is poorly defined (not just here, but in general), even ill-defined, and too broad. Whenever I see "adventure game" in sites like tvtropes or Steam, it doesn't seem to have a very well-defined or clear definition, and the games listed there seem to be very random in genre, style and content. The main problem, as you point out here, is that it's just too broad, and hard to define in a manner that would not include like 50+% of games out there. Even attempts at a stricter definition easily encompass games that belong quite clearly to some other category. For example, are open-world RPG games "adventure games"? I think that whatever definition of "adventure game" you come up with will encompass the vast majority of RPG games. If "adventure game" encompasses such wide variety of game types as western-style and Japanese-style RPGs, metroidvania games, open world games like the GTA series or the Assassin's Creed series, more open-world and story-heavy interactive first-person shooters, and so on, it's a bit too broad of a category to be really useful. It doesn't delimit game genres enough to be very useful. If such different games as Skyrim, GTA5, Super Metroid, Braid, The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, and Dishonored all fall into the "adventure game" category, it's a bit too broad. It doesn't really tell what kind of game it is.
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Kung Knut wrote:
For the record, I voted yes, because I was entertained.
I'm curious to know which part of the 0.78 seconds was the most entertaining.
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And here we go. It immediately became a flamewar. Sigh. Clearly none of you is going to stop. Fine. I'll stop reading this thread. I'm not interested. Please contain your political bickering inside this one thread. Leave the rest of the forum politics-free, thank you.
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andypanther wrote:
But why is that necessary in the first place? Why can't they just have a life advice video without sending you the clear message that Elizabeth Warren is a terrible candidate? Even if they have to use a controversial figure like Jordan Peterson, they could have left Warren out of the whole thing. But PragerU is a political channel, sending those messages is the point. Go to their recent videos and they'll tell you how "Hate Speech Doesn't Exist", liberally use right wing slurs like "social justice warrior" and feature extremists like Carl Benjamin, Paul Joseph Watson and Steve Bannon.
Could you please just stop? I wish that there were at least one place on the internet free of politics.
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Coincidentally blackpenredpen posted another way to solve it. Link to video
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Isn't this what compression is all about? Removing needless repetition from data? Use a compressor program that uses flat compression (iow. treats all the files as if they were one single file, rather than compressing every file independently of each other).
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andypanther wrote:
Don't watch Peterson's videos, he's a charlatan. He'll tell you to clean your room, which is a good idea, but then he'll also try to explain how our shared "Judeo-Christian values" are threatened by the "cultural marxists" and how we are all going to end up in some Gulag camp if we don't misgender trans people on purpose.
Straw-manning is not exactly helping anything. Please stop this. Let tasvideos.org be one of the few places still left that's free of identity politics. I don't care where you locate yourself in the political spectrum and what political opinions you have. I just want at least one forum on the internet to be free from it. I just want one place where I can go and have a discussion about something else than current real-life politics. If a posted video is inappropriate for a topic, let the moderators remove it if they deem it necessary. Don't make a war about it.
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I must admit that rather than clarifying, this discussion only made me more confused about whether my original assertion is "correct" or not.
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Memory wrote:
The fact that it is SMB3 isn't exactly irrelevant. I wished people watched TASes without looking at what game it was but fact is that they do look at the game and we just have to deal with that fact.
The choice of game is indeed quite relevant in terms of the enjoyability of the wider public (especially the demographic that are naturally interested in watching speedruns). A lot more people are more interested in watching, for example, a Super Mario Bros speedrun because they have themselves played it or, at the very least, know it and have seen it. The interest in watching some obscure game that almost nobody has played is much less so. In general, if you know a game well, especially if you have played it a lot, it's more interesting to see it being speedrun. However, in this case this becomes less relevant because the game isn't actually being speedrun. There's no gameplay. There's nothing to be seen. There's no awesome superhuman skill visible on screen at any moment. There's no astonishing gameplay to be enjoyed by. There's just an ending screen. You could just as well make a google image search for "super mario bros 3 ending screen" and get the same amount of visual enjoyment.
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blackpenredpen recently dealt in a youtube video with what could be considered a challenge. He first gave a simplified version of the challenge: 1/(3*4) + (1*2)/(3*4*5) + (1*2*3)/(3*4*5*6) + (1*2*3*4)/(3*4*5*6*7) + ... = ? Then he gave the original challenge, which was: 17/(75*76) + (17*18)/(75*76*77) + (17*18*19)/(75*76*77*78) + (17*18*19*20)/(75*76*77*78*79) + ... = ?
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But I thought that according to GR there is no gravitational "force". An object in free-fall is in inertial (ie. non-accelerating) motion which looks non-linear because of the curvature of space-time. Conversely, an object resting on the ground is in constant acceleration, ie. non-inertial motion, in relation to this curved space-time, which is why it experiences acceleration (which can be measured).
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In a conversation about physics and general relativity I said that in GR, essentially, an accelerometer is enough to tell if you are accelerating or not. If the accelerometer says zero acceleration, then you are not accelerating, no matter what. If it says non-zero acceleration, then you are accelerating, no matter what. (And this does not depend on anything else, and isn't relative to anything else.) So, for example, a free-falling accelerometer will show zero acceleration, so it's not accelerating according to GR. An accelerometer resting on the ground will show a non-zero acceleration, so it is accelerating, according to GR. Is this actually correct, or did I speak out of my posterior?
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feos wrote:
Warp wrote:
When the encode of the run could just as well be simply a screenshot of the ending screen, perhaps some fine-tuning of the definition could be in place. I'd hate for TASes to just consists of ending screen screenshots and a note that "it can be achieved in 0.12 seconds". It would suck everything that makes speedrunning cool to watch out of it.
That reminds me of NetHack. IIRC the movie of it would be unwatchable in real time. Of course it would have lots of in-game actions and "traditional gameplay", but measuring it by real time alone can be misleading.
With some types of games that's pretty much inevitable, eg. like text-based adventures where there's virtually no delay anywhere, so text can be written as fast as the hardware allows, or games where everything happens by clicking things on screen and there are no delays anywhere. Even real-time speedruns can be astonishingly short. For example the world record for Civilization VI is 284 milliseconds. However, in all these example cases the games are actually completed "as intended", at least in principle.
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feos wrote:
This movie is clearly a tool-assisted speedrun. It's also clearly a demonstration. I would call it "play" because you play a game when you send it your inputs and it reacts, that's the only definition that I find objective and reliable. It's clearly superhuman because you can in no way replicate it without tools. Superplay is something that is "cooler" than regular play, so it's a synonym of superhuman play to me. What's left is the term "gameplay".
When the encode of the run could just as well be simply a screenshot of the ending screen, perhaps some fine-tuning of the definition could be in place. I'd hate for TASes to just consists of ending screen screenshots and a note that "it can be achieved in 0.12 seconds". It would suck everything that makes speedrunning cool to watch out of it.
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It's hard to define "what is gameplay" and what constitutes game completion in terms of the length of the input alone. One of the oldest (possibly the oldest) examples we have of ridiculously short gameplay is the Genesis King's Bounty TAS, over ten years ago. While the entire TAS is 10 seconds long, only about 0.3 seconds of it is actual gameplay. But the thing is that the TAS actually completes the game in a completely legitimate way, according to the game's own internal rules. It doesn't even abuse any glitches, and just plays completely legitimately. Yet still completes the game in 0.3 seconds of actual gameplay. Of course King's Bounty is rather special because the game can be completed that fast officially, as explicitly programmed. There's nothing in the programming that would stop the player from just trying out his luck to see if the final item can be found at a random location. This kind of game is extraordinarily rare (almost unique). Any definition of a "proper" TAS that would reject this SMB3 run should not be such that it would reject that King's Bounty run.
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As I commented in the "allowed or not?" thread in the general forum, this might be a case where we either replace the current any% run with this one, or we have to come up with a better definition of what a proper acceptable TAS is. Personally, I'd hate seeing the any% run replaced with a "run" that contains no gameplay and does nothing more than show the ending screen. It would just suck everything that makes watching a TAS enjoyable out of it. It might be interesting from a technical perspective, it's not exactly a viewing experience.
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Warp wrote:
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the Kirby Avalance TAS should be accepted either. It's just that the reason is different from the stated one (ie. "it's replicable via unassisted play"), which I think is a bit silly.
I must admit that I'm enjoying, perhaps in a bit cynical way, the discussion that the new SMB3 submission is generating. I have been asking for years (although can't be bothered to find my own posts about the subject) what happens if a TAS does nothing more than to jump directly from the startup to the ending screen. I even once asked if in the future the site would start consisting on nothing more than 1-second long runs that do nothing more than show the ending screen of the game. Since not many such TASes have existed, it has been a mostly hypothetical question, but it has always loomed in the near future. We are slowly but surely starting to see it happening. The Kirby Avalanche TAS was rejected because, and I'm going to be very blunt and direct here, of what I consider to be more an excuse than anything else. "Replicable via unassisted play". I don't think that excuse is going to fly with this SMB3 submission. (As already said earlier, I agree with it not replacing the any% run, but for a rather different reason.) But this is good. It's generating the proper discussion of what exactly counts as "completing the game". Maybe it will lead to more precise definitions and rules. I'd hate for the current any% run to be thrown in the trashbin and replaced with a "run" that does nothing more than show the end screen. However, to justify rejecting this I think some more specific rules need to be crafted.
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Almost sounds like a question of physics. (Well, biology. But biology is just a branch of physics anyway... :P )
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p4wn3r wrote:
If you think it's improbable that a good chunk of the kinetic energy can be transferred to steam, please share with us why. I am not a specialist in this topic and am just guessing, it would be great to hear.
I'm a complete layman myself. I would guess that ice inside the meteor could explain one of the reasons why it suddenly breaks up into pieces in mid-air (although in many cases it's probably not the only reason). After all, the examples we know of have exploded at relatively low altitudes, meaning that they have already traveled a quite large distance in the Earth's atmosphere without breaking, and then suddenly it just explodes. If the explosion were caused merely by ice sublimation, why would it take that long before it suddenly decides to sublimate? It has traveled through the atmosphere for a quite long distance and time, and at much higher speeds as that (as it's continually slowing down). More likely, at some point during its descent so much physical stress builds up in the asteroid (due to heat changes, perhaps also due to ice inside it, if it has any) that it just breaks up into two or more pieces, and due to the sudden increase in surface area caused by this, it may cause an accelerating chain reaction of these pieces themselves breaking up into even smaller pieces and so on. The total surface area grows without limit, and thus proportionally more air gets compressed in front of it, causing even more kinetic energy to be converted to heat.
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I think the concept of obsoletion is almost completely incompatible with demonstrations and custom code entered via ACE. With your regular any%/100% TAS obsoletion is rather simple and unambiguous in the vast majority of cases: Is the game completed in less frames than the previous one? If yes, then it automatically obsoletes the previous one. (You can have certain limitations and rules on what constitutes "any%" and "100%" for a particular game, but if those rules are met, then obsoletion is pretty simple and straightforward: Just look at the length of the TAS.) With demos, all of that goes out the window. How exactly do you decide if a new demo "obsoletes" an existing one? It's completely subjective and there's quite literally zero objective measurement you can do to make that decision. I think that even community vote is ill-suited for this because people tend to like new things over old ones, and will most likely vote yes on pretty much anything that's submitted, as long as it looks cool and is different enough from the old one. I'm betting most people would vote for obsoleting the old demo even though in a different scenario they would vote for the old one to be better (ie. if two different demos were submitted at the same time, and the community would have to vote which one is the "better" one. In this situations both would be new, and thus the perception is different.) I don't think obsoletion is a good idea for such demos. It would most probably just end up being a "this is the newest submission for this game", as long as the new one is good enough (but not necessarily "better" than the old one). But then, if obsoletion is not applied to such demos, what's the alternative? Just keep a list of all demos for that particular game, every single one of them considered officially published? Maybe. But I think this would require more development on both the backend and the frontend of the site. But then, that part of the site would just become a collection of "best" demos (by some subjective standard). Maybe it's not a bad thing.
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TiKevin83 wrote:
There are at least two other categories of movies that have come up while I've been here. Human theory TASes where the tools restrict themselves to human viable play/routing, and TASes that follow SRC categories but don't fit movie rules.
Should there be some kind of limit on what kind of "TASes" (although in some/many cases I'd use a different acronym, like "TAD", ie. tool-assisted demo) would be published here? Or would it be just an "anything goes" dumping ground for anything that anybody cares to submit, no matter what? If there should be some limits, that exactly would those limits be? Should there be some rules and standards of quality for what gets published? What would those rules and standards be?