To those that think the visual output is not as impressive -- he could have written the exact same payload as the last video, so I don't see why that should be an issue. The cool part is the massive improvement in actual bootstrapping time.
I think that your very post wonderfully demonstrates why it's an issue: Only those who have a deep and intimate knowledge of the technical details of the hacking process can fully appreciate it. Those who do not know what's going on will only see some numbers appearing and a "pi" character being printed here and there. There's little to see for those who don't know the technical details, iow. 99% of the viewership.
The payload didn't have to be the same as with the first submission. However, I do think it should have been at least as visually (and auditorily) clear that "hey, we are running our own code, not just glitching the game." (I still think that a "rickroll hack" would have been a million times better than this. Both those who know the technical details, and the average viewer, can fully appreciate what's going on.)
Protesting the obsoletion of the first submission with what I consider a vastly inferior one is quite moot at this point, but whatever.
What are the copyright policies on use of these images?
You'll have to ask the owners of the game's copyright (because they own the rights to the graphics and any derived products), but using them probably falls under fair use clauses.
Are these public domain or owned by the site owner?
Most definitely not. You cannot take someone else's property (in this case a proprietary game's graphics) and declare it PD or your own. In this particular case it probably (but IANAL) falls under fair use clauses (using screenshots of games for the use of commentary, review or parody is generally protected by fair use in most jurisdictions.)
Haruhi Suzumiya and Pinkie Pie... both are reality warpers, both are genki girls... I suppose some parallels could indeed by drawn.
(OTOH, with Haruhi the reality warping is canon, while with Pinkie it's just a fan interpretation of some cartoon gags which were most probably not intended to be canon "reality warping". OTOH, who cares. :P )
Not everyone is an MLP fan, and hell, a fair amount of people outright despise the idiotic fandom it spawned.
That's really lousy reasoning for arguing why this submission is somehow an "improvement."
It's not the content per se. It's how visually impressive it is. Printing some numbers and characters on screen is not very impressive. Showing full-screen graphics and playing music is. And I am talking from the perspective of the average viewer here.
This has nothing to do with MLP in itself. If this had, for example, displayed a picture of Rick Astley and played the "never gonna give you up" song, I would have voted yes in a heartbeat. I would have honestly considered that an improvement over the first submission (because now there would have been a joke that a good majority of people would recognize and appreciate, and it would have been an impressive feat even without understanding the technical details.)
I still think that replacing a "total hack" (in the visual sense) with something that simply prints some numbers on screen is a shame.
The right decision was definitely made to have this obsolete the last run.
Also, doing roughly the same level of game-breaking in roughly a quarter of the time seems like a significant technical improvement
Since this is not really a speedrun (because by convention a speedrun is completing the game as fast as possible), a shorter time in itself cannot be considered an improvement per se. (It could be considered an improvement if the executed code were the same, but not IMO if it's something totally different, especially if it's something significantly less impressive.)
I would consider this an improvement if the arbitrary code did something more impressive than the first submission. This, in my opinion, is significantly less impressive. Thus not an improvement. I stand by my no vote. (Not that it will change anything, but I think every opinion counts for something at least.)
I'm not completely sure I understand what's going on here. And I'm not talking about the run. I'm talking about people's reaction to it, and how it was accepted as some kind of "improvement" on the other run. What "improvement"?
This is not a regular speedrun. It has no specific goal. Unless you count "hack the game into executing arbitrary code" as a goal. However, if that is what's considered the "goal" of the run, then defining "improvement" is completely and horrendously arbitrary. If someone makes a 1 minute shorter run that executes 1 second worth of arbitrary code, does that constitute an "improvement"?
Are we going to accept all "executes arbitrary code" submissions now? Or are we going to accept only those that "improve" (by an extremely subjective measurement stick) on the previous one, and have it replace it?
And about this submission in particular, personally I don't see how this "improves" anything compared to the other one. Sure, it gets to the arbitrary code faster, but the code being run is, to be frank, less than impressive. Not to diminish the author's efforts, but I'm just being honest and expressing my personal views here. It prints numbers on screen, and makes a small animation out of a character. Neither of which looks extremely impressive to me. (Yes, I appreciate the fact that it's executing arbitrary code on the console, which ought to not be possible in normal circumstances, but I already saw that in the previous submission and, honestly speaking, I was more impressed with that one than this one.)
Maybe if this had done something a lot more surprising and visual, but getting there faster, perhaps then I could consider it a true improvement. As it is now, I'm sorry but I just don't. I'm voting no, and these are my arguments why.
(I wouldn't mind this being published. It replacing the other one, however, is a shame IMO.)
I think that if the problem is in gens not being 100% accurate with lag frames, then it would be quite unfortunate. Even if gens were to be made more accurate, it would obviously desync the existing runs, so either those runs would need to be fixed somehow, or someone would have to make completely new versions of those runs for the fixed emulator.
If the only difference between the two emulators would be a few lag frames more here and there, then in theory it would be possible to auto-convert the runs (by simply automatically adding extra frames in the run where the new emulator lags while the old one doesn't.) However, if the different timings affect things like RNGs, then there's little that could be done to autoconvert the runs.
Okay, how about answers that can't apply to any question asked ever?
What exactly is it that you want?
Do you understand that any chaotic system like that is extremely difficult to model or give any kind of function of, because there are so many small things affecting the whole? It's the same thing as with weather forecasting: There are enormous supercomputers calculating weather patterns day and night using really complex formulas and algorithms, and even they get it only half-right.
With weather, often recognizable semi-regular patterns form, such as hurricanes and tornados. The same is true with many other chaotic systems.
I think people should abstain from dumping here irc conversations longer than 10 lines. This thread is for funny quotes, not for dumping extensive irc logs. Quoting hundreds of lines is spamming.
I must admit I'm mildly curious about this spinoff.
On the other hand, given that Lauren Faust has always emphasized that they are ponies, not humans with pony-shaped bodies (and she has always detested any behavior that's more anthropomorphic than equine), making them humanoids sounds like spitting on her ideals.
Warp: I actually have a whole part two of my analysis incoming based on comments I got about the first one I did elsewhere. It touches upon some of the things you mentioned.
I have actually been looking forward to this. Where is it?
What physical principle indicates a certain (constant) amount of water must flow out the hose regardless of any constrictions at the mouth?
We are not talking about every possible system where water flows from point A to point B. We are talking about a garden hose connected to a typical water faucet, which is a very specific situation.
Naturally there are other, quite different situations, where partially obstructing the way will make water flow more slowly. A typical example is a bottle of water. The difference is that there isn't much pressure forcing the water out of of the bottle, and therefore no "n liters of water per second" effect.
A water faucet typically pushes water at a certain rate because the pressure behind it is much more constant. (Of course it's not fully constant because then the water faucet would explode when it's closed, but it's a good-enough approximation.)
One could roughly state that the garden hose emits a certain volume of water per second, regardless of the diameter of the hose. (In practice it's not so precise, but serves as a rough approximation.) I think you can intuitively deduce what that means when the hole is smaller.
It's a hobby, and people who like a certain hobby do care about it.
If it's fun to scrutinize and analyze a work of art, then who are you to belittle that hobby? If you don't care about this particular hobby, then go do something else.
(In fact, that would have made a more interesting plot. What if everything had been changed between the main cast, except for their very identities... now it would become a stronger philosophical issue and a larger problem on how to reverse things.)
Damn, the more I think about that, the more I like the idea (or would have liked if the episode had been made like that, I mean.)
Imagine Twilight explaining to one of the other ponies the situation, and she replying something like "but I like my life as it is now, I don't want to change back; I can't even imagine my life otherwise." This kind of dilemma would have been deep.
Someone said that it was the true selves of the ponies that were shuffled around - but it seems to me that that's exactly what wasn't shuffled.
Yeah. If it were their "true selves" that were shuffled, then one would expect them to be competent at their new jobs.
(In fact, that would have made a more interesting plot. What if everything had been changed between the main cast, except for their very identities. In other words, Dash is now skilled in animal care but extremely timid and shy, ie. exactly how Fluttershy was, Applejack is now a proficient dressmaker like Rarity was, and so on. And everybody would be happy with their careers and talents. (Rarity would have been the odd one out, because unicorns don't control weather... Maybe a different set of more logical switches would be better in this scenario.) Anyway, now it would become a stronger philosophical issue and a larger problem on how to reverse things.)
Sir VG wrote:
There is still 2 more parts coming according to the writers. Hopefully we will get an explanation as to what the hell this episode was about. I'm not bothered by the idea, other than it felt rushed.
My guess is that the events of this episode will not be mentioned again, and instead those two new episodes will concentrate on Twilight being a princess/alicorn. (And hopefully things will be reverted to status quo by the end of the trilogy. But I also hope that if they do revert to status quo, they do it in a much smarter way than this episode, so that it doesn't feel forced or artificial.)
I have been thinking: We actually don't know, and will probably never know, what was going on inside Morimoto's head when he published that SMB3 video.
As I see it, it is, in fact, perfectly possible that he had discovered this new form of creating a run of a NES game by using slowdown and rerecording in an emulator, allowing for almost superhuman feats, and then thought it would be fun to publish a video to impress people about his "incredible skills", and that he deliberately did not mention the methods by which he created it. He probably didn't think of it as such a big deal, and just thought it would be a bit of fun, and therefore there was no actual malice and overt intent to deceive the general public for fame and glory, but nevertheless the misinformation (or rather, not telling how the video was produced) could perfectly well have been intentional at first. (In a later post somewhere he casually mentioned the emulator tools he used, again probably because he didn't think that it was such a big deal, and that it was just a little fun and nothing more.)
If that is actually the case, then calling the video a "fake" would in fact not be all that wrong because it would fulfill perfectly well the description: Deceiving the viewer into thinking it was something that it's not (ie. a genuine real-time run through the game using incredible skills.) He might not have had any outrageously ill intentions with it, and he probably did not do it to gain notoriety or be perceived as a player with almost superhuman skills, and instead probably thought it would be just a fun little exercise with little consequences (and which would probably not be noticed by anybody), but that still wouldn't make it any less of a "fake" in this sense. If there was even the slightest mentality of deceiving the viewer by concealing the methodology, even if for just innocent fun, it can still be accurately called "fake".
This is the impression I get but as said, we will probably never know for sure.
