Posts for Warp


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EZGames69 wrote:
https://youtu.be/M80QS-itM4o
Is it using 8x2 color attributes? I was a ZX Spectrum 128 owner in the 80's and 90's, and don't remember even one single game of the era that would have used any kind of "change color attributes between drawing scanlines" trick to get more colors at once on screen, nor am I even aware of any such game. I have to wonder if the trick was discovered only later, or if it was known by some developers, but they just couldn't figure out how to make a reasonable game design out of it.
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If this game had been published in the 1980's, I don't think many people who know how the Spectrum works would have believed their eyes.
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Ok, I have analyzed what's happening there in my head, and I believe I know what's going on. Normally on the ZX Spectrum you can only have 2 colors on each 8x8 pixel block, and these color blocks cannot move. Thus, normally, you are restricted to that color limitation, and colors cannot scroll but in 8-pixel steps. Here, however, the game achieves something that I have never, ever seen in any Spectrum game made in the 80's or the 90's: It's essentially achieving 8x1 pixel color blocks, at least for that central area. I believe it's achieving this by estimating when the cathode ray is on either side of that central area, and then it just changes the colors for that horizontal row of color blocks. This essentially makes that central area consist of 8x1 color blocks. Not only is this allowing smooth scrolling of colors, it actually allows coloring pixels in a manner that's normally impossible. If you notice, between the red bricks there are black, yellow and blue pixels, much closer to each other than 8 pixels. This would normally be impossible, except here, where the colors can change on each row. My guess is that the playing area is so narrow because there's no way on the Spectrum to actually know where the cathode ray is, and when it's doing a horizontal retrace, and thus it's only done by estimation, and when the estimation kicks in, it could be pretty much anywhere on that blue area on the sides (or on the external border of the image). It might (perhaps) also be related to CPU consumption, as changing colors on each row so fast might be heavy on the CPU. As said, I find it absolutely fascinating that I'm not aware of a single ZX Spectrum game made in the 90's or earlier that had discovered and used this trick. (I suppose that even if some programmers did think of it, they didn't come up with any feasible way to use it in an actual game.)
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For the love of God, somebody please explain to me how that smooth scrolling is achieved. That's... impossible! :o
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The only slight drawback in terms of entertainment I know of is that beating the episode 2 boss takes a very long time (barring some kind of glitch exploit), AFAIK. That's because the only way to beat it is to have a Lost Soul attack it, and it takes forever to kill it. OTOH, personally I wouldn't mind. (Even if there were some kind of glitch that could be used to kill it faster, I'm not sure it would be in the spirit of the category. As a "pacifist" you are supposed to never harm any enemy directly, and abusing some kind of glitch to kill an enemy could be considered in principle harming it directly...)
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Many times it has been discussed what exactly it means for the two categories for rating TASes, entertainment and technical quality, and what their difference is. This TAS showcases absolutely marvelously what technical quality means.
Post subject: Doom pacifist run?
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It's actually possible to beat all three episodes of Doom without pressing the fire button even once (ie. no firing, no punching, no chainsaw, nothing), even on ultra-violence. A few levels require some bosses to die, but that can be done by making enemies fight each other. I was wondering if there would be any interest for somebody to make a "pacifist" run of Doom. I think the challenge is interesting.
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Isn't cooking kind of a tool-assisted activity already?
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If we had some kind of "demo" category (as has been suggested in the past), this could be published as one...
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One compromise I would suggest for the judges: Maybe accept this, but consider it obsoletable by a possible future any% run (that starts from a clean slate) if the parts that are common are faster in it, unless it can be argued that the NG+ version is different enough to justify having both. (Of course we could just have both versions, even though it would be a bit redundant, given that they would be almost identical except for the intro.)
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tendog wrote:
Starting on a clean slate or "True Reset" is one of the least popular categories in Deltarune speedrunning, so it wouldn't have been a useful comparison.
"Useful comparison"? I don't understand what you mean. Comparison of what to what? Anyway, in general, TASes are not driven by what's popular or unpopular in the real-time speedrunning scene. And we don't generally compare TASes to unassisted speedruns and make decisions based on that. While "new game+" runs are not forbidden in TASes, they are always considered a separate special category and, AFAIK, ineligible for Vault, so they can only be accepted to Moons, and do not exclude the basic any% category that starts from a clean state. I think that it would be a bit boring to have two versions of this run, an any% version and a "NG+" category version, when the only difference between the two is a skipped intro sequence. I think that, following the rules and principles of the site, it would be hard to argue why the any% version shouldn't be published if there's a NG+ version already published ("sorry, we can't accept this; we already have a non-Vault category of this, so we can't accept your any%, not even for Vault" wouldn't make much sense.) Thus we would end up with two runs that are almost identical, except for that intro part. IMO it would be better to just have the actual any% version.
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Well, if nobody is going to argue for accepting this even though it starts from an existing save rather than from scratch, I'm going to vote no. In general, all TASes should start from a clean slate, not from an existing save. I don't care that starting from the existing save file skips an allegedly "boring" intro.
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Patashu wrote:
Warp wrote:
Is the only reason to choose NG+ to skip 3 minutes of intro story? Because if that's the only reason, I'm not sure it's justified. In general TASes should start from a clean slate, not some previous save.
The parts of the game skipped by NG+ are inconsequential and uninteresting from a speedrunning perspective, and I'm sure this run can get into moons anyway.
That's completely inconsequential to my point. Is there an exception in the rules that says "this rule can be ignored if the part it allows to skip is boring"?
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Is the only reason to choose NG+ to skip 3 minutes of intro story? Because if that's the only reason, I'm not sure it's justified. In general TASes should start from a clean slate, not some previous save.
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This song gives me happy feelings. Link to video I also just love that type of strong backbeat syncopation.
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MUGG wrote:
Season 9 trailer
To be absolutely honest, that trailer made me even less interested, if that's even possible...
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Stupid question: What does "ODE" stand for?
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Time for an actual challenge for a change. In his last couple of videos, the youtuber blackpenredpen has tackled the question of finding a non-zero function y such that y'⋅y'' = y''' (iow. the derivative of y times the double-derivative of y is equal to the triple-derivative of y.) It seemed surprisingly non-trivial.
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XTREMAL93 wrote:
for using audio Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari - Twin Dragons Theme (Original Mix) - Kazuo Sawa Will dispute it)
When it comes to music, I doubt you'll have any chance. Music has special extra copyright protection (for some reason).
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I really hate real numbers. Most of them are not natural, most of them are completely irrational, and all of them are so complex.
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I just realized something I hadn't thought of before: The fundamental theorem of arithmetic indirectly proves that the set of all possible finite strings is countable (which in itself proves many other related things, such as the set of algebraic numbers being countable). The fundamental theorem of arithmetic states that any positive whole number n can be expressed as a unique product of primes, which means: n = p1n1 * p2n2 * p3n3 * ... where p1, p2, etc. are all the primes and n1, n2, etc. are nonnegative whole numbers. This means that any (finite) string of nonnegative whole numbers (n1, n2, ...) can be uniquely mapped to positive whole numbers. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic proves this indirectly. Thus it proves that eg. the set of algebraic numbers is countable.
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MUGG wrote:
Magical Mystery Cure, from what I remember, was intended to be the show's finale. The episode was written before it was decided that the show is renewed for more seasons.
I suppose that makes some kind of sense. Twilight got the ultimate upgrade, and that's it. A fitting end to the entire series. (I would still not like at all how it happened, nor why, nor the plot of the episode, but at least the final end result would in some way have made sense as a series ender.) You can really see in season 4 that the writers had absolutely no idea what to do with Twilight after that change. I think it would have been best from all perspectives (the writers, the viewers and the series as a whole) if Twilight had not gone through the transformation at all. Anyway, on the subject of the series having gotten stale and uninteresting, I find this last 8th season to be particularly boring. This whole "school of friendship" arc is boring, uninteresting, and makes little to no sense. It introduces a whole bunch of recurring characters that are shallow and uninteresting, and the fact that they are dragging the whole scenario into almost every single episode of the season is just detrimental. (And, if you think about it, even from an in-universe perspective a "school of friendship", especially one that seems to be like a large high school, with multiple professors, classes and courses, makes little sense. How much is there to teach there, really? The subject matter sounds like something that one single mentor could tutor students on their free time, not something to build an entire school around, with multiple teachers in essentially a full-time job. The whole idea is just stupid and doesn't work, not even as a plot device. At least the map in the previous season somewhat worked as a plot device. This "school" really doesn't.)
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I think that the lack of posts in this thread is a good indication of how interest in the show has waned over the years. I don't find that very surprising because my interest in the show has waned. Technically speaking the term "jumping the shark" is used for a TV show that's already losing the interest from the public and, in order to try to compensate and renew interest, the show tries to do something extraordinary, stir things up, do some stunt, trying to make the show popular again, but only succeeding in emphasizing its irrelevance. (The term comes from an infamous episode of the TV show Happy Days where one of the protagonists literally jumps over a shark while water skiing, and is the quintessential original example of a show that's plummeting trying to renew interest with silly stunts which only go to emphasize the complete irrelevance of the series.) In practice, however, in common parlance, the term "jumping the shark" has come to mean a point where a TV show that's at the peak of its popularity, begins a downward trend. A sort of turning point for the show, where success and popularity starts going down. A bit like the TV show having overstayed its welcome, and becoming stale and uninteresting, or too different from what made it so popular. It may start with one particularly bad or controversial episode, or series of episodes, that changes the show radically, for instance (in which case people would say that said episode is the point where the show "jumped the shark".) At least for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, the exact point where the show jumped the shark in this second sense was the finale episode of season 3 (ie. the infamous and completely disgraceful episode "Magical Mystery Cure" that changed the tone of the show forever, for no good reason.) While by season 3 the show was already showing slight signs of becoming stale, it was still very interesting. The finale episode, however, was a definitive turning point. This is the point where there started to be a noticeable decrease in the average quality of the scriptwriting and storytelling. That's not to say that all post-season-3 episodes are bad. Heck, there are some individual episodes that were made much later that would easily make my top-10 list of best episodes of the show. However, regardless of these individual rare gems, it's the overall quality of the scriptwriting that has gone down. Other setting-changing episodes that came later only helped plummet it further, such as the finale of season 4 (which destroyed Twilight's cozy tree library, and replaced it with a really ugly-ass sterile castle.) That could actually be considered in some ways "jumping the shark" in the first sense I described above, although there are actually even better examples of such episodes, such as the finale of season 7, which completely unnecessarily brought Starswirl the Bearded to the present, for no good reason whatsoever. This is precisely what I would classify as the sort of desperate stunt that a show is trying to do in order to garner interest and become relevant once more, but just ends up emphasizing how irrelevant it is, and how desperate the writers are. I'd say other similar "jumping the shark" moments are, for example, making Discord one of the good guys (already in season 3), making Daring Do an actual real character rather than retaining her as an (in-universe) fictional character (season 4), and giving the crusaders their cutie marks (season 5). By this point, the show is becoming more and more irrelevant. It has overstayed its welcome by a long shot. I think they should have ended it at the very most at about season 5, probably sooner. This is not really a show that works as a long-runner (especially not with the sort of writing and storytelling it has devolved into.)
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In another forum the problem of "for any two natural numbers m and n, the nth root of m is either integer or irrational" came up. A rather simple proof was presented. Essentially: If X=m1/n, then Xn is an integer (and more specifically m). This means that X cannot be a non-integer rational number, because a non-integer rational number raised to an integer power cannot be an integer. (Proving this last thing isn't very difficult.) To this I commented: "Now we only have to prove that sqrt(2) is not an integer, and we have proven that it's irrational." I got a bit stumped. How do you prove that sqrt(2) isn't an integer? Sometimes I get stumped on the most trivial things. My math-fu isn't very strong.
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Stupid question: Does "youtube stream" simply mean the YouTube video? It's a bit confusing to use the word "stream" there, because it usually refers to live-streaming in these contexts. (Sure, technically speaking "video stream" does not in itself refer to live-streaming, but it's just that most commonly when people talk about online video services and "streaming", they are talking about live-streaming, not just an uploaded video.)