Technically speaking this run is well done and demonstrates a very quick way to jump to the end of the game in a similar manner as how, for example, the run of King's Bounty.
However, unlike King's Bounty, which does this via pure gameplay, this jumps to the end by abusing save data corruption, which is a technique I have always detested because I do not consider it gameplay. I consider it hardware abuse.
Going by the letter of the rules, I would have to vote yes (because, as said, this is well executed and a good demonstration of a technique). However, since I find the used technique personally questionable, I would like to vote no. On the other hand, I would be an enormous hypocrite if I did that because I have complained many times about people abusing the voting system to protest site policies, hence I will not do that.
"Meh" doesn't cut it either because it's not how I feel. Hence my only option left is to abstain from voting. No offense intended to the author.
A quick YT search of the phrase "ponies" brings up what I should have expected. Typing in phrases like "real-life ponies" just brings up videos of MLP characters superimposed in real-life situations. Other similar attempts fail.
This difference would mean that we could ignore the DOS boot time and actually time the game.
Wouldn't this need for emulators to specifically support this? (In other words, start recording/replaying only when the program starts rather than when the system starts.)
Do they support this?
1. It needs to be different than an unassisted run.
I wouldn't say that's a requirement for entertainment. A TAS can be pretty similar to an unassisted run and still be entertaining.
(Rather amusingly your sentence can be interpreted to mean that unassisted runs are not entertaining, which is why TASes need to be different from them in order to be entertaining. I don't think that's what you tried to imply... :P )
3. Never be idle. While waiting, do a little dance or something.
To be fair, that can sometimes be more annoying than entertaining.
My game collection is so large that I'm too lazy to write them all down here. Here's a photo I took (yeah, I know, the image quality is horrid, but I don't own any actual camera currently) about a year ago to give you an idea. (My collection has grown since then by about a dozen games or so.)
I have also bought quite some games on Steam and Xbox Live, so they obviously don't show up there.
I assume that you have also considered all the practical hurdles with this project.
You have to find out the legal status of this kind of business, as well as the exact limits of what is and isn't allowed. In many countries doing this kind of business requires creating a registered association. (While this probably varies wildly from country to country, for example here it's difficult to do anything that involves receiving income, or even just handling significant quantities of money, without being required to create a registered association. Such an association requires several legal duties, such as accounting/bookkeeping, annual general meetings, and so on.) Even if it doesn't in your country, you still will have to have some kind of official bookkeeping for taxing purposes and so on.
Then it would probably be a good idea to contact all the charity organizations you will be dealing with. Most use registered trademarks and they might or might not agree to allow you to use their name in any kind of context (even if it's simply to show a list of votes; even if one single such organization denies you the right to use their name in any context, it will make difficult to show people eg. top lists or statistics; this can be problematic if people ask you for such lists). After all, you wouldn't want the organization's lawyers sending you questions about why you are using their name to make business even though you are not associated with them.
I think that most of the others here seem to forget that a minimum of 80% will go to charity. Even if someone only donates $1, that's still 80 cents that the needy did not have before I started this.
You have not still explained why it's better to donate 20 cents to you and 80 cents to the charity rather than donating the full dollar to said charity.
Why wouldn't I just donate to Charity X's website, taking out the middle man?
That's a quite good question, especially since that other charity is going to take their cut as well. The more links there are in the chain, the less money goes to actually helping the needy.
How will I get paid: I will work a minimum of 44 hours a week.
Doing what, exactly? I don't think counting votes takes 44 hours a week.
I have to say that it just sounds like you want people to pay you $451 a week for doing next to nothing.
As far as I'm concerned, TotalBiscuit puts everyone else to shame.
I watched his video titled "WTF Is... : Revelations 2012 ?" (his newest video on that series) and it was... hmm... unimpressive. I'm not saying it was bad (I have seen considerably worse), I'm just not feeling the awesomeness that you convey in your post when describing his videos.
Now, it's perfectly possible that I just happened to choose one of his weakest videos and that I shouldn't judge his entire work based on that alone (and I'm definitely going to check at least a half dozen more), but the first impression was not all that great, for me at least. (It might also just be a question of personal preference.)
Note that even though an emulator may fail some of those tests, it may still emulate most games accurately (for the simple reason that those games never trigger the things that those tests are testing). AFAIK many of those tests deal with things like running undocumented opcodes and other such unusual behavior.
Yes. Symptoms include, but are not limited to:
- Headaches.
- Acute muscle and joint pain.
- Shivers.
- Hallucinations (usually related to ponies).
- Paranoid delusions.
- Asocial behavior.
- Sleep deprivation.
- Delirium tremens.
Accurate depiction of early symptoms:
Link to video
An emulator which can't emulate lag correctly would not be able to sync up (relaibly) even if the games were 100% deterministic.
As I said, a more accurate emulator should always be preferred over a less accurate one. The rest of my post was a comment on the reasoning you mentioned for this, ie. that it's because the TAS should be replicable on the console, which isn't actually the case in practice. However, even though the TAS may not be replicable on the console, that doesn't mean the emulator isn't accurate.
In other words, the reason for banning an emulator cannot be "its keypress files cannot be replicated on the console". That's an impossible demand to make for consoles with nondeterministic sources of random timing.
It goes without saying that a more accurate emulator should always be preferred over a less accurate one, and that a run being faster (even if it's just by one frame) because of emulation inaccuracy is unacceptable.
That being said, the expression "keypresses may be performed on the original hardware" is a big vague and misleading (especially since the word "may" can be interpreted in different ways).
Some games in some consoles behave in a completely deterministic way, always reacting the same way when certain buttons are pressed at certain times. In these cases the run can be replicated in the original console if you have the means to supply the properly timed button input to the console (which usually means you need a device to do that).
However, not all games in all consoles behave in a completely deterministic way. There are many sources of nondeterminacy in many consoles (as a rule of thumb, the more modern the console, the more likely it is that games do not behave in a deterministic way). In fact, AFAIK, this can go as far back as the NES, where a game can in theory act in a non-deterministic way if it so chooses (by reading the RAM immediately after power on, since IIRC the RAM is not zeroed or reset in any way by the console when it boots up, and can contain random values which cannot be affected from the outside). In more modern consoles there are more plentiful sources of nondeterminacy (such as reading a data CD).
In these cases a TAS cannot be reliably replicated on the console. However, does that mean that the TAS is cheating? Not really.
In the case of consoles/games with nondetermistic sources of randomness that cannot be affected, what the TAS is doing is a hypothetical run in one example case (assuming that the emulator is otherwise very accurate): In other words, if the console happened to have that precise set of circumstances for all of its sources of nondeterministic randomness, how the perfect run would look like. The exact situation may be practically impossible to replicate on the console, but that doesn't mean that the run wouldn't look exactly like that on the console assuming that it wasn't.
It also means that a hypothetical perfect player, who can see the entire state of the console at each moment and react to everything with perfect timing, could make a run that looks extremely similar to the TAS (or could even be a bit faster, depending on how the randomness happens to behave).
I second the request for a cutsceneless encode. I usually make these for Super Metroid, and they make a huge difference in the fluidity of the action. I haven't seen one for OOT, but I'm sure it would be a nice watch there too. Making such encodes is pretty straightforward (at least for snes9x): Just find a memory address which indicates whether you are in a cutscene or not, and set speedmode to maximum for their duration.
I oppose the very idea of editing the "raw footage" of the video like this as a matter of principle.
The TASing community fought for years to get rid of the label of TASes being "fake" and "hoaxes", and stupid accusations that the games were hacked and the videos sped up or edited. After many years the TASing community slowly and painfully got the widespread acceptance that it deserved as a legitimate form of speedrunning and entertainment.
When we start editing the video footage, cutting out parts of it, we just open ourselves to be accused of cheating by making the runs look faster than they really are via editing the video footage.
And as I already commented, if we start cutting the "boring" cutscenes, why stop there? Who decides what's boring and what isn't? Why don't we start cutting also other "boring" parts of the run that "disrupt fluidity"?
No, just no. Please stop it.
If your internet connection is so poor that you can't load a couple of pages, I think the problem is in your end.
Have you just not noticed the almost constant problems on tasvideos? 500 errors galore, and 10+ second loads happen all the time.
And changing the design of the rating system fixes this problem how, exactly?
Derakon wrote:
Reducing the number of pages that the site has to generate would reduce the load on the server, thus giving it more spare cycles to generate other pages. It's only an incremental improvement, sure, but it wouldn't be pointless.
I'm getting mixed signals here. People complain that they don't rate because it's so many clicks away. A design change is suggested that would ostensibly make them rate more often.
Exactly how does this help reduce the traffic? Wouldn't it be the exact opposite?
(Besides, I don't think the problems the server is having is due to ratings. It's not like the server receives dozens of ratings per second.)
Could you be a bit more specific what exactly makes the current design so much of a "hassle"?
If you haven't noticed, the site has been awfully slow. Sometimes—more often than not when I actually need something—it may take several minutes to load the page over the countless "internal server errors".
Changing the rating system design is not going to help that problem. It would just be fighting the symptoms rather than the root cause.
If that's the only reason to change the current design, that's a really bad one.
I have also bought quite some games on Steam and Xbox Live, so they obviously don't show up there.
