TASVideos

Posted: 8/11/2011 6:14 PM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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I like how nobody has even suggested that the two authors would actually work on the run physically at the same place. Only online interaction is thinkable. You are such nerds. (As if I had any such friends... ;) )

Posted: 8/11/2011 8:30 AM

Post subject: Re: Half-Life Hazard Course TAS

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland

quvu wrote:

Pause slowmotion is also a perfect tool for perfect bunnyhops. Since every -command gets killed once the game is paused. That means i will get a fresh +jump each new frame the game proceeds.

Doesn't that mean that the run is impossible to replicate in real-time, even if you had perfect reflexes? Because in a real-time run you either can't get that fresh +jump on each new frame, or you would have to pause, which would add at least one additional frame to the run. In other words, technically speaking this is cheating.

Posted: 8/11/2011 8:23 AM

Post subject: Re: READ THIS!!!!!

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Warp

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FractalFusion wrote:

Yes, "The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" is officially wrong (correct title is "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link"), but for consistency, I'd put it this way.

Now this raises an interesting question. What's more important, using the official name, or modifying names as necessary for consistency? (Wasn't one of the principles that started this whole renaming project that we should always prefer the official names?)

Posted: 8/11/2011 7:02 AM

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Warp

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Saethori wrote:

Technically, it can be said that resetting at the frame a password is available, then resetting to input the password (at times this would be faster) would technically be okay. However... resetting so frequently like that could be extremely jarring, so it would still be a good idea in most situations to make the speed/entertainment tradeoff of simply progressing normally.

I think it would also go against the principle of tool-assistance that we can "see into the future". TASes don't need to wait for things to happen in order to "predict" that they will happen. Luck manipulation is the most obvious example, but there are others as well (eg. knowing in advance when and where monsters will appear, and eg. choosing a path based on that information before, technically speaking, the information becomes available in a normal first-time playthrough). Making an exception with passwords (iow. passwords can only be used when they have appeared on screen) would be quite arbitrary and doesn't make much sense in this context.

Posted: 8/10/2011 6:22 PM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

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Even if the freezing had no drawbacks at all, I think I wouldn't take the risk. It may be a bit pessimistic, but the way the world is going right now (with all the climate change, oil crisis, economic crisis, terrorism, the not-minuscule chance of worldwide islamization, the possibility of nuclear war due to more and more countries developing nukes, and so on) I wouldn't bet on the world being a nice place in 200 years. Better enjoy the good times now than risk a possibly dark future.

Posted: 8/9/2011 11:39 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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Also with the non-alternating blending it wouldn't actually look like flicker, but just transparency (either 66% or 33% transparency depending on whether it's on at even or odd frames). OTOH even that's better than the sprite simply disappearing (or looking normal).

Posted: 8/9/2011 10:47 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

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While cooking I thought about this: Suppose you want to boil 5 dl of water. Or in terms of a physics problem, you want it to reach a certain temperature. You have a pot and an electric stove. Consider two strategies: a) You just put the 5 dl of water in the pot and wait for it to reach the desired temperature. b) You first add 1 dl of water and wait for it to reach the desired temperature, then you add another dl and wait again for the desired temperature, and so on five times, until you have the 5 dl in the pot at the desired temperature. Is one of these methods faster, or are they equally fast?

Posted: 8/9/2011 10:36 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

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creaothceann wrote:

the other is skipping non-gameplay that the viewer doesn't want to see (non-skippable movies are are a bad design choice for a reason, after all).

How do we know who wants or doesn't want to see cutscenes? Many people don't, but that doesn't mean nobody wants. (Personally I like watching the cutscenes in certain games, eg. LoZ:OoT. They don't bother me at all.)

Posted: 8/9/2011 6:52 AM

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Warp

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Derakon wrote:

Thank you for the detailed debunking, Amaurea.

Seconded. It's also a very good point how these people who preach about alignments and how they cause all kinds of catastrophic effects on the Earth never seem to mention or acknowledge the effect of the Moon on the Earth. This effect is larger by several orders of magnitude than the effect any other astronomical body has on Earth (with the possible exception of the Sun), yet it's never linked to earthquakes or anything else. If gravitation from other bodies were affecting earthquakes, the Moon would be by far the biggest cause. In the end, there's always a hint of supernatural astrological thinking behind these hypotheses, even if they are not explicitly mentioned. The roots are certainly in astrology.

Posted: 8/9/2011 6:08 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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Let's consider for a moment the real slippery slope that could potentially result from allowing passwords to save time. There are many games where you can use a password to jump directly to a certain level. Why shouldn't it be allowed in such a game to use a password to jump directly from the start to the final level? After all, it saves a lot of time. If we don't allow those passwords to be used in that fashion, but we do allow the kind of usage as discussed here, then this rule becomes very arbitrary.

Posted: 8/8/2011 6:45 AM

Post subject: Re: "Comet" Elenin and Solar Alignments

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Warp

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Joined: 3/10/2004
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sonicpacker wrote:

Essentially, the hype behind "comet" Elenin is that every time it is in alignment with the Earth and the Sun, major seismic activity occurs. I say "comet" in quotes because many people are not sure it is just a comet. Others believe that it is a comet and that there is a larger, as of yet unseen, object following it.

Let me guess: NASA and the entire community of astronomers are in a huge conspiracy to keep this secret, right? Oooh, a conspiracy! Of course this isn't anything new. It was first proposed in 1995. The source of this information? No less than extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain.

Posted: 8/8/2011 6:39 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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Location: Finland

Bisqwit wrote:

I've been secretly working on a Mario Paint drawing TAS this year.

Why use ordered dithering when scolorq or even Floyd–Steinberg would create a visually much better result?

Posted: 8/8/2011 6:23 AM

Post subject: Re: Voting privileges and question

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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Location: Finland

Tasvideos.org wrote:

Note: Because of abuse that has happened, lurkers can't vote anymore.

Btw, should the same rule apply to being able to submit a new TAS? Not that this has necessarily been abused per se, but there have been several cases recently where a submitter has clearly not understood the idea with TASes, at least one of them having zero posts when he made the submission.

Posted: 8/8/2011 6:17 AM

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Warp

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nitsuja wrote:

It varies, but scolorq took 11 seconds on the color scale image on my system. I think scolorq can be optimized more as well (it seems to spend about 20% of its time on allocating and deallocating memory on the heap in inner loops, and about another 60% of its time on simply inserting elements into STL vectors, which is a lot of time to be spending on the bookkeeping instead of the actual computation).

Memory allocation can indeed be quite a heavy operation in C/C++, and a program that does so in a critical inner loop is not very well optimized (unless the algorithm absolutely cannot be implemented otherwise which, while rare, is not completely unheard of; although even if this were the case, you could use a fast pool allocator). If the memory allocations cannot be optimized, then this might be a case where implementing the program in Java might result in a faster program (because Java has a much faster memory allocation).

Posted: 8/8/2011 6:11 AM

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Warp

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Joined: 3/10/2004
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subanark wrote:

Also, I don't see how speeding things up is cheating. The frame count is the same no matter how fast you play it.

But if the video is captured that way (and eg. posted on youtube), it will be significantly shorter than it should be, with obvious speedups which scream "cheated!" I'm not sure we need that kind of publicity, especially for an official encode.

Posted: 8/7/2011 4:44 PM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland

Speeding up or skipping parts of the end result of a TAS goes against the basic principles that we do not cheat. We fought hard to (mostly) get rid of the negative hype that we are cheating (hacking the games to make impossible feats possible, editing the resulting videos, and so on). In fact, even today many misinformed people will make such claims when they see a TAS. Actually going and doing exactly what they are incorrectly blaming us of doing isn't going to help the issue.

Posted: 8/6/2011 11:38 AM

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Warp

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Derakon wrote:

Neat! Now add dithering. :)

You should ask Bisqwit about that. He's the dithering guru.

Posted: 8/5/2011 4:20 PM

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Warp

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Randil wrote:

abs(x) is smooth but not analytic at x=0 since the derivative does not exist at this point

How can it be smooth at x=0 since there's a clear discontinuity in the derivative of the function at that point? (The derivative is -1 when x<0 and 1 when x>=0, hence by definition it's not a smooth function, AFAIK.)

Posted: 8/5/2011 4:13 PM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

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This should be added to http://tasvideos.org/Alden/Exhibitions/AVGN.html

Posted: 8/5/2011 11:09 AM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
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Btw, what is the difference between an analytic function and a smooth function? Are all analytic functions smooth (but not the other way around)?

Posted: 8/5/2011 6:16 AM

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Warp

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p4wn3r wrote:

This time, it's significantly more annoying because we have to derive the numerator and the denominator four times to get away from the indetermination

Wait, isn't l'Hôpital's rule valid only if the resulting limit exists? In other words, if applying the rule once results in another indetermination, the rule cannot be applied. (At least that's what I understand from the wikipedia article.) Or is the rule nevertheless valid if by applying it several times you end up with determined limit? (At least the wikipedia article doesn't say so.) If the calculation is nevertheless valid, is the infinite sum essential for the conjecture to become false? If yes, is there a simple/sensible way of expressing that f(x) (and possibly g(x)) must have only a finite number of terms?

Posted: 8/4/2011 8:54 AM

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Warp

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My very first thought, even before starting to watch the video, prompted by the "infinite detail" bit was: How much RAM does this take? Yes, voxel graphics are used in medicine. However, voxed graphics require humongous amounts of RAM, and thus are limited in resolution. You can't pop up "infinite amount of detail" out of nowhere. (Ok, that's technically speaking not true. You can pop up an "infinite amount of detail" without requiring infinite RAM by doing it procedurally. 3D fractals are a good example of this: They can be zoomed indefinitely, and no detail repeats. However, we are not talking about procedurally generated fractals here, but about 3D-scanned objects, like those used in medicine.) Ok, maybe the video would explain. It didn't. I'll believe it when I see it and it's explained what exactly is meant by "unlimited amount of detail" and how it can work on limited RAM.