Posts for Warp


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Reading the comment section of those videos, some people point out there something that I think might have a degree of validity to it. Namely: Watching TASes of romhacks (of existing games) and homebrew games is less interesting than watching TASes of more well-known and popular official mainstream games. The more obscure and less-known the romhack or homebrew game is, the less interesting a TAS of it is. I think there might be a point to consider here. Regular speedrunners sometimes do run such romhacks and homebrew games on these marathons, but I think the situation is a bit different. In these cases the interest is in seeing how skillful the runner is. In a TAS, however, there is no real-time skill involved. The reason why it's more interesting to watch TASes of known games is that most people know these games and have either played them or seen them played and speedrun a lot (especially those that get run a lot in these events), and thus there's a point of comparison: People have experienced or seen how the game works when played "normally", and thus can be more appreciative of what happens when a "perfect superhuman player" plays the game. They can see how much more different a "perfect play" is, compared to normal flawed human play. With obscure games that nobody has seen before, however, there is no point of comparison. People haven't seen how the game plays normally, and thus they can't compare it with the superhuman play.
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adelikat wrote:
EZGames69 wrote:
I would really appreciate it if a statement was made IN LIGHT of the new information, not old threads prior to this new information.
The new light, regarding the "TVC incident" doesn't' really change much, I think. It looked pretty obvious what the intent was back then. It was handled in a way Nach and I feel was appropriate.
What's left unclear at least to me is how it was handled. The only information I get from this thread regarding that is the following:
Nach wrote:
This topic was discussed in Thread #20271, which was till today a staff-only topic. It was dealt with at the time, and as can be seen there, we've since enacted rules to not flood. Everyone involved said they will no longer flood in the future. See additional details there.
What I get from this is that it just caused some rules changes, and that "everybody said they won't do it again". That leaves me the impression that the person who was guilty of this, and it appears that it was an intentional act, got no repercussions for his actions. (Of course I can't know what if any repercussions there were, because this is everything I get from this thread.) I kind of have to agree with this:
Mothrayas wrote:
I have no words for how disgraceful this behavior is for a staff member.
That being said, I am all for giving people second chances, don't get me wrong.
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Masterjun wrote:
Warp wrote:
For years I have been wondering, and often commenting about, how TASing exhibitions at the GDQ events have devolved from "speedrunning with superhuman perfect skills" to "let's exploit games and inject our own code into the console"
Looking at the past runs, I wonder how you came to that conclusion. Please elaborate (or quote your old replies).
It may quite well be that if we look at the raw numbers there are way more "genuine" TASes than glitch/exploit demonstrations. However, the latter are the ones that, I would say, people remember the most and, perhaps, even might leave them with the impressions that that's the main goal of TASing. I would guess that every year the majority of work for GDQ goes towards these demonstrations. Which in itself is quite commendable and admirable, and that in itself isn't wrong. It's just that it kind of creates this whole separate category of TASing which isn't really what at least tasvideos.org is about. I'm not saying it should be stopped. Maybe it shouldn't. I'm just thinking out loud here.
Post subject: Re: Is that what you wanted to read?
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Spikestuff wrote:
Fine, I did it.
Honest or facetious, I don't think either behavior is appropriate for a member of the site staff. Think about the wider community you are representing. A job comes with some responsibilities.
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creaothceann wrote:
This doesn't apply to games that use vsync.
The games that did not adjust their own speed to compensate for the speed of the PC were quite obviously not using vsync (because that would have make them automatically adjust to it; their timing would be tied to the display refresh rate, not the speed of the CPU). IIRC vsync didn't even become a thing until well into the 90's.
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feos wrote:
Yes, I think as long as gameplay doesn't speed up or slow down, we should allow faster CPU emulation
The thing I worry about this (which I stated in another thread) is that there might be a particular speed that causes glitches in the game that don't happen otherwise. To be fair, this isn't unprecedented in (unassisted) console speedrunning. Ocarina of Time being, perhaps, one of the most prominent examples: The game works differently on the three major platforms it has been released, ie. the N64, iQue, GameCube and Wii. All the platforms are allowed by the OoT speedrunning community, and they are allowed as the one and same category (ie. all runs in all platforms go to the same list, and a run by one runner on one platform may obsolete a run by the same author on another platform, if it's faster.) For a short time the iQue version held the top positions because it was faster than the N64 version (until the Wii version obsoleted it because it allows a glitch that doesn't work in the other versions). However, when we are talking about PCs, we aren't just talking about three or four different platforms that can run the same game. We are literally talking about hundreds or even thousands of different setups (since, after all, a PC can be built with components from a wild variety of manufacturers, with all kinds of differences between them). And emulating a PC opens up even more possibilities (because emulation can eg. choose CPU clockrates that have never been used in practice.) Even if a more modern DOS game did take into account differences in speed of the hardware and future-proofed itself, it may still be possible that with some speeds and/or some combinations of hardware it will exhibit glitches that it doesn't otherwise. I'm not sure how happy I would be if DOS game TASes started appearing that require a very specific setup, rather than the same run being possible with all PCs that the game supports.
Post subject: Re: Rule review for DOS games (at least via JPC-rr)?
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DrD2k9 wrote:
Warp wrote:
If someone makes a TAS of such a game by emulating a 20MHz PC, what stops someone else from just doing the same with an emulated 21MHz PC? And a third person from doing so with an emulated 22MHz PC?
If a human speedruns a game on a 20MHz PC, what stops someone else from just doing the same with a 21MHz PC? And a third person from doing so with a 22MHz PC? Humans CAN. Why cant a TAS?
Do you seriously not understand how ridiculous that is? If any emulation speed can be chosen, TASing the game becomes completely meaningless. Why would you even TAS the game? You choose a particular emulation speed, and the next person simply chooses a speed that's higher and beats your run, even if the input is otherwise identical. Obsoleting someone's run becomes quite trivial. And, on top of that, to the viewer there's absolutely nothing to see, because ostensibly a DOS game from the mid-80's can probably be completed in a second in a PC running at 100GHz, if that's the speed you choose. Take a video of any existing speedrun, and speed it up a thousand-fold, so for example a 15-minute speedrun becomes 1 second long. Let's see how much you enjoy it. Now do that, and declare that 1 second is now the official speedrun length for that game, rather than 15 minutes, and keep a straight face. This is completely ridiculous.
Post subject: Re: Rule review for DOS games (at least via JPC-rr)?
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DrD2k9 wrote:
Using faster technology is no more cheating than using any other type technological advancement is cheating. That includes all other types of TASing tools including frame advance, piano roll, and even savestates. These all could be considered as a form of cheating from a developer's perspective.
Those aren't the same thing at all. Using a faster computer to make the game run faster than it should, when the game itself doesn't adjust for that increase in speed, feels as much cheating as making a NES emulator run faster than it should. You can't argue that the latter isn't cheating because "frame advance" and "savestates". If someone makes a TAS of such a game by emulating a 20MHz PC, what stops someone else from just doing the same with an emulated 21MHz PC? And a third person from doing so with an emulated 22MHz PC? We would never, in a million years, accept a TAS of a NES game running on an emulator that's running faster than it should to achieve a shorter wallclock time. Why should we do that with any MS-DOS game?
(The problem with the very early DOS games is that developers didn't realize that PCs would become faster in the near future, and assumed that all PCs are the same speed, just like the "8-bit home computers" and consoles of the time.)
Can you substantiate this claim?
Is that a claim that needs substantiating? The very fact that DOS games exist that assume a certain speed from the computer, and don't adjust for varying speed at all, making them run at ridiculous speeds with a much faster PC. Surely the developers didn't intend for the game to become unplayable because it's just running way too fast in a future PC. But even if you could prove with absolute certainty that the developers of a particular game knew this perfectly well and simply didn't care because they were lazy, that doesn't really make much of a difference with respect to whether we should allow arbitrary emulation speeds when TASing those games. Allowing arbitrary emulation speeds just makes the TAS pointless, because the only upper limit is how fast you can emulate it in your modern PC.
If we're going to disqualify games from vault/awards/etc. simply because they are run on a faster system (something the developers didn't 'intended'), then we should disqualify any run that use glitches from vault/awards/etc. as well, because those runs also use situations that the developer didn't intend.
You seriously cannot understand the ridiculous idea of allowing any emulation speed you want for DOS games? Once again: If someone decides to make a TAS of a DOS game by emulating a PC running at, let's say, 20MHz, what stops someone else from doing the same thing but emulating a PC at 30MHz? Or 100MHz? Or 1GHz? It becomes meaningless. Obsoleting the TAS becomes meaningless, when you can simply do so by adding another MHz to the emulation speed.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
While gaining complete control and doing arbitrary things can be very interesting; I'd dare to bet that many in attendance at these events would be perfectly thrilled by a TAS exhibition that simply beats games much faster than a human could ever hope to, instead of having ACE or extra non-game related stuff in the TAS Block that isn't actually playing a game.
For years I have been wondering, and often commenting about, how TASing exhibitions at the GDQ events have devolved from "speedrunning with superhuman perfect skills" to "let's exploit games and inject our own code into the console"... which has pretty much nothing to do with TASing. After all, how many "I inject my own demo program into the console using an exploit in this particular game" TASes do we have at tasvideos, from the several thousands of published runs? Like a couple? I find it ironic that the TAS block at GDQ is, for the most part, not representative of what TASing, and tasvideos.org, is about, at least when it comes to those ACE exploits. We don't hack games here and inject code into the console to run our self-made demos and games. (Sure, many TASers do that as a hobby, but generally we don't publish such experiments here because that's not what tasvideos is about.) We are, essentially, just presenting custom console demos at GDQ, even though GDQ is about speedrunning. It's not a demo scene party. (Yes, there are usually also more "genuine" tool-assisted speedruns, but still... It always feels like they are the less prominent thing in the TAS exhibition.) Also, year after year we are just making our own lives harder, because we always have/want to surpass the previous years in "coolness" of the ACE payload. Of course it might not be entirely our fault either. When in a few occasions there has been a pure-speedrunning TAS exhibition, the community feedback has often been somewhat lukewarm, even negative at parts. I sometimes get the feeling that the GDQ audience doesn't know what it wants: They come to see speedruns, but then they complain when they get speedruns rather than glitch exhibitions and custom demos. It's a dilemma. Perhaps there is no answer.
Post subject: Re: Rule review for DOS games (at least via JPC-rr)?
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Radiant wrote:
In the late 1980s, PCs running at 4.7 MHz and at 20 MHz were both available on the market, and are both part of the target platform despite one being over four times faster!
I think you would agree that it feels cheating to use a faster computer than what the original developers of the game intended. Surely the developers didn't intend for the game to run 4 times faster depending on which kind of PC you have. (The problem with the very early DOS games is that developers didn't realize that PCs would become faster in the near future, and assumed that all PCs are the same speed, just like the "8-bit home computers" and consoles of the time.) There was a discussion quite recently about this, and I don't think any sort of conclusion or decisions were really reached. In my opinion, if a clear-cut fair system cannot be established due to practical reasons (after all, who gets to decide what speed the original developers "intended" the game to run at?), then these early DOS games that run faster on faster PCs should be excluded from anything where completion time matters (including awards and, perhaps, Vault? Because Vault is all about completion time, and when the completion time can be semi-"cheated" by emulating a faster PC, it kind of makes it pointless. Who gets to decide what the "correct" speed is?)
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Nach wrote:
We used to have an innovative award which largely overlaps with the concept, but people stopped wanting that award.
Does this mean there is no innovation in TASing anymore?
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AngerFist wrote:
Such a weak reasoning. For the 500th time, if a run deserves a star, let it have it, regardless of name of the game, category or platform.
The original purpose of the stars was to form a representative sample of TASes that illustrate what's so cool about TASes, not really just a list of best-regarded TASes. Such a representative list should be varied, and I think a variety of platforms should be one of the aspects to consider in that. I would be honestly interested in knowing what you think makes a TAS "deserve" a star. A star isn't (IMO) really any sort of award granted to notorious TASes, and thus no TAS "deserves" it.
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I'm currently playing a game named Quantum Conundrum. The narrator voice is played by John de Lancie. Due to the slightly weird and humorous nature of the game, it's quite easy to imagine him being Discord.
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
the internal angle + the external angle is 180
Isn't the internal angle + the external angle at a vertex 360 degrees?
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FatRatKnight wrote:
In one case (Mario Golf: Advance Tour comes to mind), a perfect run of hole-in-ones is only possible after a rather lengthy level-up session and probably +40% Drive clubs in hand. Then you can hole-in-one every Par 5 in the game.
In light of this, I suppose I have to update my preference a bit: I prefer the lowest score even if it means a longer run, unless achieving the lowest possible score requires an unreasonable amount of extra time, especially if this extra time is spent somewhere else other than playing the game where the final score is being counted. Optimally, the game which we are "scoring" in this manner ought to start as soon as reasonably possible, with no or very minimal "preparation" elsewhere in the game (unless this preparation is relatively short and helps achieving a better score. What is and isn't "too long" is up to debate and the individual video game in question.)
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Every single person knows the famous equation E=mc2, but not many people know what it actually means. If I understand correctly, it simply establishes the equivalence of (rest) mass and energy, and the formula is simply a conversion formula between the two. In fact, the relationship is completely linear, using a constant conversion factor (of c2). This means that 1 kg of mass has (by definition) exactly 89875517873681764 joules of energy. Or, conversely, if there are 89875517873681764 joules of energy in something, that something has exactly 1 kg of mass. (Hmm, wouldn't that be a nifty definition of the kilogram? Although I suspect that would be a circular definition, if the joule is defined in terms of the kilogram, which would mean that you can't define the kilogram in terms of joules. But I digress.) One nifty thing about the equation is that the units on both sides of the equal sign match. Of course this is a necessity, else it would be an invalid equation. It still feels nifty, though, given that it's not immediately obvious how a joule is equal to kg*(m/s)2. But the question arises: Why precisely c, and not some other velocity? How did Einstein come up with c in particular? Why couldn't it have been some other velocity? It is my understanding that the c isn't there willy-nilly, or as a wild guess, but it's actually derived. It can't be anything else than c, and it's derived from what we know about physics. Does anyone have a simple explanation of how you can derive that the velocity that has to be used in that formula is precisely c, and not something else?
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p4wn3r wrote:
Pretty much every textbook I've seen either just states it or uses completely circular arguments to prove it.
Could you give an example of such a circular argument used in textbooks, out of curiosity?
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feos wrote:
Alright, I've read the 2 threads at SDA and the 2 threads for the NES Zelda 100% submissions. Here's what I think.
This argument convinced me, at least.
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Many, many years ago I posed the question somewhere about future golf games. The question was, essentially, about what would be a better "sub-goal" for the run (besides fastest completion / lowest score): A run that makes perfect hits every single time (always hits the driveway, and pretty much makes a "perfect" game in every possible aspect), or a run that showcases nigh impossible feats (such as hitting the ball way off course, into the rough, hitting trees, or whatever, while still almost miraculously recovering and getting the lowest possible score). Back then there weren't really all that many realistic golf games that were yet TASable, but now finally we are reaching that point, as this run demonstrates. Of course the question being presented here is slightly different: What is better, the lowest possible time at the cost of the score, or the lowest possible score, at the cost of time? Personally, I'm inclined towards the lowest possible score, even if achieving it is slower (but, of course, still as fast as possible). Getting penalties just doesn't feel right for a run that's supposed to be superhumanly perfect.
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EZGames69 wrote:
where does it say that this run doesn't start from power on?
Well, the submission text says: "This TAS is a run of the 9 Hole course in Wii Sports, with the goal of completing the course as fast as possible. Time begins when "9 Hole Game" is selected" Maybe I got confused about what was meant by that.
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I'd say that the most reasonable form of such "tournament" is to announce a particular goal (usually something other than just get to the end) to be achieved in a particular game, and an amount of time (maybe something like 48 hours?) for people to make submissions. The person who creates the input that achieves said goal fastest wins.
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Memory wrote:
Our timing: Starts at 0:00 in the encode and lasts until last input RTA Timing: Starts at 0:30 in the encode and ends when the ball goes into the final hole There was some additional menuing that would cost time under our timing method but not RTA timing.
I'm not completely sure how this is related to my original concern, where I thought that the rules state that runs must always start from the console power-on. In fact, reading the rules, I don't see an exception to that rule.
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In one of his latest videos, blackpenredpen states that you can't use L'Hopital's rule in order to solve lim(x->0) sin(x)/x because "that would be circular reasoning". I didn't really understand why.
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Memory wrote:
The point is that we start timing from start of recording input and that by entering and exiting the game twice you waste time that would be accounted for in our timing method but not one that starts upon choosing "9 Hole".
I must admit that I didn't understand that explanation. I would appreciate some elaboration.
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One thing that I'm thinking here is that this is using timing that's perhaps not supported by the rules (in general timing should start from console startup). Would this require an exception to be accepted?