Witchcraft certainly looks significantly lamer when there's no ominous background music, dramatic camera angles, spooky lighting, thunder, smoke and special effects... :P
My understanding is that lookdown is used because the game's in-game timer counts lag frames in addition to normal frames -- it's effectively a real-time clock instead of the usual frame counter. Thus, anything you can do to reduce lag will get you a faster time. We're just not used to this applying to real-time runners as well as to TASers. :)
I didn't really understand that. If getting from point A to point B takes the same amount of (wall clock) time regardless of the framerate (meaning that with a lower framerate you simply "jump" longer steps between frames so that the overall speed remains the same), how would it affect any in-game timer if that timer counts real time and not frames? (If it counted frames, it would actually be advantageous to have as a low framerate as possible.)
I do understand, however, that a lower framerate could make your running speed slower by some small fraction if the timing routines in the game are less than perfect.
How can you make sure that continuing kills the entertainment by default far more than any longer boss battle with default weapons could do?
You make it sound like dying and using continues is the only way to get "non-default" weapons. (Having never played this game I don't know if that's so, but it would sound quite implausible, as it makes little sense.)
I'm assuming you can get the higher-level weapons by regular play. It then becomes a question of managing your resources: Save stronger weapons for the bosses, or use them on the normal enemies... The optimal strategy might not be trivial to find out, but that's what TASing is all about.
Btw, I have a question:
If I remember correctly past discussions, unassisted speedruns of this game often use the trick of constantly looking at the floor because it helps the framerate (less to draw = higher framerate). However, does this also affect the running speed, or does it only affect how many frames per second the screen is updated? (In the vast majority of 3D games the framerate does not affect the playing speed. A lower framerate simply means that the player "jumps" in larger steps between frames, so the overall speed from point A to point B remains the same.)
Because, frankly, a significant portion of the run just showing floors and walls up close is a bit boring...
I would only ever consider disassembly for RNG purposes.
Given that, I wonder how feasible it would be to create a tutorial on how to find (and interpret) the randon number generator code for a game. It might help many people get started. (I know that most games have their own custom RNGs and there are approximately as many different implementations as there are games with RNGs, but perhaps there still are common ways to finding and understanding them.)
Design a planetary system that allows an incoming object to spin 5 laps around one planet, turn somehow and then spin 3 laps around the same planet before breaking free of orbit.
Since the n-body problem has no (finite) analytical solution, wouldn't this require effectively using (or developing) an n-body simulation that performs a numerical approximation, and then just trying more or less arbitrary combinations until you stumble across one that gives the desired result?
I agree with the sentiment that learning a console's assembly language just to be able to find out how the game works, find exploitable glitches and so on, is the really, really hard way of doing it.
Understanding someone else's code, regardless of the programming language, is often very laborious. Imagine that you are trying to understand someone else's code, and that there are no comments whatsoever, and all the variables and functions have been named with numbers (indicating memory addresses) instead of descriptive names. Add to that the fact that the "language" itself is as primitive and nondescriptive as you can possibly get, and that the programs are often extremely large (especially because pure asm is quite verbose). In many cases the asm will not have been written by a human, but generated with a compiler, making understanding it even harder, as the human design element has been removed. (I don't know if NES games were primarily written in asm or a higher-level language, although back in those days, in the mid-80's, writing games directly in asm was pretty common, but the more modern the console, the less likely that they were written in asm directly.)
Not that it's impossible, though. People have deciphered the inner workings of RNGs, password codes, and made even patches and hacks by purely studying the asm dumps of games. However, this is far from easy, especially if you are learning asm for the first time.
Not that I want to discourage you, but it would indeed be much easier to find glitches and bugs the "traditional" way.
One thing to consider: TASes simulate in principle what would be possible on the real gaming device, if the player was perfect. Feeding a physical coin to an arcade will incur a delay of many frames because the coin has to physically travel from the feeding slot to the trigger that registers it. This, I assume, is not emulated in the emulator. Feeding a coin on each frame (or even on each 10th frame) would be physically impossible on the real arcade.
Also, in a real arcade you can only feed a limited amount of coins before the container gets full. Ostensibly there's no such limitation in an emulator.
(Disclaimer: This post was written only half-seriously.)
So on a toroidal world gravity would still always point "down" at point A regardless of the proportions of the torus, which is an interesting result. It could, in principle, make a toroidal world plausible.
Of course gravity would be "normal" only at the points which are closest or farthest from the center of the torus. Gravity gets slanted when you are anywhere else, seemingly quite significantly at points. This would mean that on large parts of the map gravity would be heavily oblique with respect to the ground, causing interesting results (and possibly making life very difficult if not impossible).
I'm assuming that if the surface of the planet was completely smooth (iow. it's a mathematical torus) and we put a ball on point B, it would roll towards A due to gravity (and finally settle on A if friction stops it eventually). Would this be a correct assessment?
The difference between death in a console game and in an arcade game is that in the former death often incurs some kind of penalty (you lose your powerups, or you have to start the level over, etc) while in arcade games the main motivation for death is to induce the player to pay more money (and doing so will usually cause a reward rather than a penalty in terms of gameplay, eg. in the form of your powerups being replenished rather than removed, etc.)
Hence death in an arcade game is just the means to buy yourself the rewards (with virtual money that incurs no real penalty). The death itself is not the relevant issue, really. It just simply happens to usually be the only way to "insert more coins" imposed by the game. If in some arcade game you could insert coins at any time and get an immediate reward, the question would be exactly the same.
Thus I don't think death/continues in console games is comparable to them in arcade games, and hence the judgement/ruling should be independent in both cases. One should not think that "if we allow death in console games, we should also allow it in arcade games" because they are not the same thing. Allowing one does not automatically mean the other must be allowed as well.
What about console games that give you unlimited lives and continues?
I'd say it should probably be considered on a case-by-case basis rather than it being a hard rule. If overuse of continues detracts from the entertainment or seriously breaks the "flow" of the run in a negative way, even if the overall completion time becomes slightly faster, it may be better to not to use them at all. (A good point presented in the metal slug thread was that if continues can be used to make the run faster, shouldn't they be used as often as possible to do so? Using them only occasionally is really arbitrary and hard to justify.)
It's probably better not to make a hard rule on this, but at most a guideline (along the lines of "generally continues should not be used in arcade games unless there's a good reason for them and they don't detract from the enjoyment of the run").
Stop talking! You need to sit your skank ass down and learn when to shut... the FUCK UP! COMPRENDE!? Put a fucking limit to your discussion man! How long did you intend to discuss things? Move along. Do not consider this as sarcasm or a joke, consider it as a direct insult! Wanna discuss the word insult? How and from where it originated?
Fine. I'll just have to suck it up and submit to being the buttmonkey of some people here because of some of my past behavior. It doesn't matter if I'm being blamed justly or unjustly, I just have to accept it and shut up.
I think the difficulty here is that discussions that involve you, Warp, never end. There is always some minor detail that requires multiple paragraphs of detailed discussion, or some trivial miscommunication that requires you to restate your entire thesis all over again. Nobody else is interested in these things to that level of pedanticism, so when you try to direct the conversation in that direction, people get irritated. You're bringing legalistic levels of precision debate to a casual chat; can you see how that would aggravate people?
Pretty much this.
adelikat wrote:
Well said Derakon
Ok, this pretty much confirms what I suspected: I did not do anything inherently wrong in this particular case, but because of my past behavior people are being prejudiced against everything I write, and the worst is always assumed. I was singled out and blamed for "derailing" because of prejudice, not because of what I did.
(And again someone mentioning "multiple paragraphs". This honestly puzzles me to this day. What kind of strange obsession do people seem to have with multiple paragraphs? And yes, I understand it's referring to the length of my posts, not how I format my text. Regardless, specifically mentioning "multiple paragraphs" is odd, and even if speaking about the length of my posts, why should that matter? If somebody doesn't want to read long posts, they are free to skip them. What does it matter, really?)
Drop what, exactly? I don't understand. Could someone please explain?
"Arguing" over off-topic matters in a thread with a clear topic outside the off topic section of the forum.
(This is just my personal interpretation)
I readily admit that the conversation was going off-topic (something especially grave on such an important thread, which is directly linked from the news sections of the site and all) and that me participating on the off-topic discussion was not helping the problem. However, I seriously do not think I deserved being exclusively blamed on the derailing. I did not start the derailing posts, nor was I the only one making posts in the ensuing discussion, nor was I in any way being argumentative or hostile (if somebody got that impression, it was completely unintentional).
If adelikat had said "this is going way off-topic, stop it", then he would have been completely right. However, he chose to blame it exclusively on me by name, which I felt was completely unfounded, unfair and even insulting.
Scepheo wrote:
You tell us to say what it is exactly you did wrong, but perhaps you should simply look at the amount of people telling you to quit it and take that as proof you're doing something wrong.
I have participated and even started some heated (and unnecessary) arguments in the past. I'm not proud of those moments, However, I get the feeling that in this particular case I was a victim of prejudice caused by that past, by people assuming the worst from me, rather than me doing anything inherently wrong (or at least something more wrong than anybody else). I feel that being publicly singled out and solely blamed was harsh and insulting.
Scepheo wrote:
Seriously Warp, stop taking everything we say as a personal attack.
That's sometimes quite difficult to do when an admin makes a public post saying "Another thread being derailed by Warp." If that is not personal, then I don't know what is. (Admittedly, it might have been a joke, or sarcasm, but if it was, it's certainly not apparent. If there was no ill intention from adelikat's part, I sincerely apologize.)
Warp, you need to learn when to drop it. And this is coming from a guy like me.
Drop what, exactly? I don't understand. Could someone please explain?
I have been accused of derailing the thread. I certainly did no such thing. I was certainly not the one who started discussing about speedrun verification and SDA. I simply posted a couple of responses, and I was not the only one participating in that sidetracking conversation. Yet I was accused of "derailing the thread". Not only was I accused of it, I was singled out as the sole culprit.
Exactly what was it that I did wrong, that nobody else did, and for which I deserved to be publicly blamed?
According to DarkKobold above, it seems that me simply participating in the thread is reason enough to blame me exclusively. No other people participating in the thread seem to deserve the honor of being mentioned, only me.
DarkKobold wrote:
This is the 2nd time I've had to split that topic, with you being the most vocal party involved.
Is that really your sole argument to put blame on me? That I participated in the conversation? And exactly what does it mean that I was "the most vocal party involved"? What exactly was it that I did wrong? Nobody has yet explained it to me.
(Well, seemingly Scepheo made some strange accusations, but they make absolutely no sense. Seemingly, according to him, I care a lot about the verification of speedruns and I have repeatedly told people that I care, and that people have made it clear to me several times. I don't have the slightest idea what he is talking about. Where exactly have I shown concern about speedrun verification and that it's harder now? Where, when and who exactly has "made it clear" to me? I wonder if Scepheo is confusing me with somebody else.)
So perhaps if somebody would explain to me what I did wrong, I could avoid doing it again.
Or was it wrong that when an admin put sole blame on me of "derailing the thread", when I did no such thing and was not the only participant in the discussion, I responded to the accusation? If that was the wrong I did, what should have I done? Just accept the blame for something I did not do? Really?
Yes, I'm fully aware of how this isn't an even distribution, as well as the limitations of having a low-resolution approximation of a torus. I don't really care though; the goal was to get an approximate idea of the gravity gradients at various points and I think this simulation is entirely adequate for that purpose. If you'd like to tweak the point distribution or the mass of the points, I can send you the script I wrote.
The problem is that it's not testing a torus with even density, and it has not been demonstrated that the changing the density distribution does not alter the result.
Another thread being derailed by Warp.
Please stop.
I'm honestly getting really annoyed by your comments. Seemingly anybody else can post whatever they want, but if I dare to express any views whatsoever, it constitutes "arguing" and "derailing the thread". Whenever someone does start arguing, it's never their fault, it's always mine.
Please explain to me why, for example, Derakon's post "that "verified no cheating" blurb in the SDA logo has always struck me as slightly indefensible...", which is what started this side-conversation, nor any of the other posts that were made as a response to it. constitute "derailing the thread", but when I dare to make a response about the subject, it immediately earns a "another thread being derailed by Warp" comment? Why exactly am I singled out and assigned exclusive blame for whatever "derailing" might have happened?
I have to say that as an admin you are seriously lacking some diplomacy skills.
But you keep arguing about stuff not worth arguing about.
I'm not arguing. I'm conversing. Someone makes a post about something, I present my views or opinions about some of the presented points, not to counter or argue them, but to converse and socialize. What is wrong with that? Or is it that differing opinions are always considered "arguing"?
Which is fine, when done once, but it's been made clear to you a few times now that it's starting to get annoying.
I don't even understand what you are referring to. Exactly what have I been saying repeatedly, and which is getting annoying?
This conversation was about verifying the legitimacy of speedruns, as well as some concepts about possible anti-SDA sentiments. What have I said about this subject that "is starting to get annoying"? I don't get it. Could you please explain?
Yeah, here's a first pass where the density is higher inside the torus than at its surface. I did this straightforwardly by basically generating several toroidal shells of linearly increasing minor radii.
Are you putting the mass points in the center of the subdivided volumes or on their corners? Because, as said, if you are putting them on the corners the results will be skewed for test points very close to the surface of the torus (because they will be too close to your small "black holes" and thus experiencing invalidly strong gravitation). (The solution to this ought to be rather simple: The minor radius should be half-way between the subdivision edges.)
Anyways, the results might still be invalid nevertheless due to the distribution of mass points not being even throughout the torus. You shouldn't underestimate the difference in density that you get if you simply make concentric (minor radius varying) toruses of mass points, each one having the same amount of points, each having the same mass: The density of the inner toruses will be significantly higher than the outer ones, which might skew the results.
The solution to that should also be relatively simple: You just have to make the mass of the points relative to the minor radius, rather than all the points having the same mass. I think that the mass should be proportional to the square of the minor radius, if I understand correctly.
(Of course there's another problem: With that point distribution algorithm the points will be less densely distributed on the outer rim of the torus than on the inner rim, again causing an uneven distribution. This becomes more significant as the minor radius approaches the major one.)
Edit: I made a rendering of a cross-section of a torus showing the point distribution discussed above:
The points are significantly more densely packed in the center than closer to the surface.
If someone embeds a very wide image on their post, it causes the entire page to become very wide, requiring horizontal scrolling to read people's posts, which is very annoying. I think something should be done to prevent this.
An approximation of even density may be enough for the purpose (because the whole thing is an approximation, after all). However, there should be an approximation nevertheless. If the points are not distributed evenly inside the torus (as they would not be if you do as I suggested, ie. subdivide the "pyramids" even further into polyhedrons) then their mass has to be inversely proportional to the local density to account for this, else we get a torus that is significantly denser deeper inside than closer to the surface. (As said, I don't know if this changes the results, but it might.)
Actually it's not even strictly necessary to embed subtitle tracks to the mkv files themselves. They could be provided separately, and most players (which support softsubs) have support for using separate subtitle files while playing a video file.
If this got published as a demonstration, then I'd really like to see these two runs being published too. I know they're less distinct from other categories, but I have personally found them to be more entertaining than this.
Good thing we are not setting any precedents here... ;)
