Posts for Warp


Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
The main reason why cheat codes (either directly supported by the game itself, or forced onto it by externally tampering with the program code with a cheating device) is that cheat codes are meant to make gameplay easier (if not outright trivial). TASing is not about what it would look like if the gameplay was as easy as possible, but more or less the opposite: What it would look like if the gameplay was as hard as possible and a superhuman was playing the game. This is the reason why the hardest difficulty setting is preferred in games where you have the option, even when the easiest difficulty setting would result in a faster completion time. It's pretty clear that if this debug code was usable from the very start of the game, the run would not be accepted. Does it make any difference that the code becomes usable only mid-way through the run? (Imagine that the code was usable right from the start, but the author delayed using it until later, in the same way as here. The result would be identical to this, but it would most probably be rejected because the usage of the cheat was completely arbitrary. Why would it make a difference when it becomes possible to use the code?)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Patashu wrote:
If you want to make a godly seeming video of G-Darius, I'd do the following: 1) Kill as little as possible (e.g. to get upgrades and capture minibosses only) and shoot only to kill. 2) When not killing, weave around enemies and around their shots. Make as many close calls as you can and as tight as you can. Show that you are employing perfect reflexes and timing and bullet weaving. Something like the gradius video.
OTOH, that's the easy thing to do, requiring very little work. At least in Gradius 3 killing everything is much harder, even for a TAS, and requires significantly more work. (OTOH, which one would be more entertaining is another question.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
X2poet wrote:
But these no voters are all for the continue.There are some runs using continue or appearing game over before,that proved that it is acceptable,so I use it to do this. So it is not a good justification here.It isn't out of rule.Otherwise it is unfair for doing arcade run I think.
Dying and using continues is not banned in general. The submission was downvoted (and rejected) because in this particular case it is seen as severely degrading the quality of the run (from a TASing perspective) and bordering what could be considered cheating (although there probably is no definite consensus about this).
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
I'd like to say the same thing - while others suspected his connection to multiple accounts, I was oblivious. It is pretty much confirmed that some of his previous accounts (which are numerous) are linked to the massive trolling the site received two years ago. Which means, he started by trolling the site, and then became a useful member.
It's unclear to me if he was banned because of recent abusive activity. If he abused the system two years ago but then repented and became a regular well-behaving user, it seems harsh to ban him as a kind of delayed punishment. Has he been abusing the rating system all this time, up until the ban?
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
ALAKTORN wrote:
I just want to point out that there are 31 yes votes and 9 no/meh combined clearly everyone going "continues aren't entertaining" are a minority
I think the majority of rejected runs have a majority of "yes" votes. It's just that the "no" votes tend to carry more weight to them because usually there are good reasons for someone to vote "no". (Although not always. There's at least one person who always votes "no" on any improvement of an existing run as a matter of principle. However, fortunately most "no" voters have good justification for doing so.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Peach feels a bit underutilized. If you look closely, you can see her sad expression in the character selection screen.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Mister Epic wrote:
Shmups aren't good TAS material. TASing a shmup only gives a movie that doesn't look like a TAS.
I wouldn't go that far. Even fixed-speed scrollers have potential for enteratining TASes, and Gradius(3) is a good example (as you yourself state). I don't think it's the only example in existence, and G-Darius looks like it could have TAS potential. The author should try crazy manoeuvers, miss-being-hit-by-subpixels, juggling with the enemies, 100% kills and other superhuman feats.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
What mozooh said. Having never played this game, I don't know if your ship shoots automatically all the time, or if it's a player's choice, but I'm assuming you are continuously firing by choice. Generally this kind of needless auto-firing is not deemed as very good style in TASing. (At least one run which used such an autofire has been rejected in the past. I think it was Contra, IIRC.) Every shot should count and do something useful (and moreover, the usefulness of each shot should always be maximized, if the game mechanics allow for such distinctions), else it's deemed as a waste and looks sloppy. TASes are not about what a game would look like if a very skilled person played it. They are about what it would look like if a god played it.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
One thing that would really put all this at rest (at least from my perspective, as I am probably the only one questioning this) is if a run using savedata corruption (via resetting) would be confirmed to work on the real console. That would actually be rather cool. I don't know how feasible that would be, however. (Is there any theoretical danger of somehow damaging the battery memory in the physical cartridge if the writing is interrupted? It sounds implausible, but who knows about these things...) Of course finding nowadays a cartridge with a working battery might also be rather implausible. (What kind of batteries did they use? Can they be replaced?)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
ElectroSpecter wrote:
- Assassin's Creed (I and II): If you're into the whole "Christianity is a conspiracy / Dan Brown" thing, this is a fun series.
I had Assassin's Creed for the PC but had serious stability issues with it. It worked ok on the starting city and on the way to the second city in the game (was it Jerusalem? I can't remember now.) However, there the game started being really unstable. It would work for a while, but start get more and more jittery until the game would freeze or crash. Lowering graphics details helped somewhat, but didn't remove the problem. I just couldn't get it to work so I had to stop playing that game. (This type of instability happens quite a lot, which is one of the reasons why I bought the Xbox 360.) I couldn't really get a feeling of how good or bad the game was from that short playing experience. However, I bought Assassin's Creed II for the Xbox 360 due to your suggestion. (Well, your suggestion more like reminded me of its existence.) I wasn't expecting much because I got quite immunized to open sandbox games by Oblivion (which was great, but became boring after some weeks, when the initial amazement passed). I have tried other open sandbox games (such as Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3) but didn't find them very enticing. I was pleasantly surprised by Assassin's Creed II, though. I really liked the game. I can't really explain why, but I liked it. It also has superb graphics for such an open sandbox game. (The Xbox 360 tends to often fall surprisingly short on the graphics side compared to a top-of-the-line PC, most probably because of the limited amount of RAM available. However, with AC2 they really seemed to take the most of what the hardware has to offer, and it shows.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
sgrunt wrote:
nfq wrote:
I would imagine x264 would compress much better than lagarith, so I'd use x264.
It does - at the expense of an RGB-to-YV12 conversion completely outside your control. So, if you don't mind a hit in visual quality, by all means proceed, but I recommend against it.
Does the visual quality really degrade that much in a high-resolution N64 game (which is quite different from games using pixel graphics)? (And even if some color shade gets changed just so slightly, is it really that catastrophic? We are not visual arts purists...)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Randil wrote:
I'm starting to feel like a pain here (sorry), but it's neither of them either. I seem to remember that the game was a lot darker, and that you controlled one character in the same way as in the Diablo games, and that you killed monsters (or aliens, something like that) with firearms.
Was it turn-based or real-time? (IIRC the X-Com games are turn-based.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
Anyway, all I'm asking is next time, watch the movie before starting a debate
Didn't we go over that already? Questioning the validity of using a debug menu is in no way dependent on watching a movie that does so any more than questioning the validity of eg. using a gamegenie code being dependent on watching a movie that does so. (And please understand what I'm saying here. I'm not comparing the debug manu to gamegenie. I'm talking about discussing the validity of using a technique or feature in relation to watching a movie that uses that technique or feature. You seem to claim that you cannot discuss without watching a movie that demonstrates the technique. I claim you can.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
and not interested in finding answer.
I don't understand why you think that. If I'm mistaken and someone corrects me, then it might hurt my pride, but I'll admit my mistake and change my opinion. (This is certainly not the first thread I have done so.)
You ask questions expecting other people to do the work to educate you.
When you don't know something, you ask from people who know better. Is that really something so unthinkable to do? "How to program the NES" doesn't sound like a trivial topic, and there are many people here who have vastly more knowledge than I do about that. What's wrong in asking them? Such a question does not assume that others should go and find out. It just assumes that if someone already knows, he could quickly answer.
And, if you don't know or understand something, don't start with "I don't consider this legitimate." Start with, "I wonder if this is legitimate, as I don't know about the hardware/software of an NES."
But I did say that I am making an assumption, and when I did, you mocked me.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
AnS wrote:
While the game can't completely ignore Reset, it can detect saving interruption and then repeat saving (while RAM contents are still intact after reboot) instead of clearing RAM and showing title screen. Such saving implementation would stop TASer from using reset to corrupt save data.
If that is indeed the case, then I suppose I'll have to revise my opinion on the matter. Although it's still more complicated than just abusing a "normal" bug or glitch, I suppose that if it would be theoretically possible for a game to be reset-safe but isn't, it could be considered a valid exploitable defect in the game programming. Btw, how does a NES game detect that it has been reset, if it can't really control what happens?
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
Translation: I don't know shit about electronics (the very topic I am arguing about) so clearly arguments that have factual basis in electronics are useless on me!
You seem to have some reading comprehension problems. You implied that finding information about this question is easy and simple. As a demonstration you embedded some electronic schematics. There's a huge mismatch here. (Electronic schematics might be easy to understand and comprehend to you. That doesn't mean their interpretation is common knowledge. Presenting electronic schematics as an answer to a programming question is as a far-fetched and complicated answer as you could possibly get. It could only have been worse if you had gone all the way to quantum mechanics and how semiconductors work.) Comprende now? (Well, why am I even asking? Even if you do understand you won't admit it.) Are you getting some kind of thrills from this? Are you enjoying trolling me? Why are you doing this? I have asked you to stop already, but you won't. If you want to answer a question or correct a mistake, just do that. If you don't, then don't. Stop your stupid personal attacks.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Dwedit wrote:
The NES reset button can not be ignored, as it forces the game to jump to the reset vector,
What I meant is whether the game can override the implementation of this signal handler and make it do nothing (at least during the duration of saving data). If the game can override the implementation, then it could make saving a reset-safe operation, but if it can't (and hence saving may always be corrupted by a reset no matter what), then my original objection stands (because in that case resetting cannot really be considered to be input to the game).
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
You are almost right Warp, I don't like your attitude. You are intellectually lazy. You have no desire to educate yourself before making long-winded posts defending your position from a place of ignorance. Additionally, you expect others to do the footwork to inform you, rather than take initiative to learn on your own.
I find it quite amusing that you could have in theory pwnd me with information about this subject that is both trivial to find and understand (like a web page directly describing how a NES program can hook to the reset signal), or simply stating as much, but instead you bring up some electronic schematics from which I'm somehow supposed to "educate myself". That kind of fails to have any argumentative strength. You might understand electronic schematics. I don't. I'm a programmer, not an electronic engineer. I have a rudimentary understanding of electronics, and an even more rudimentary understanding of computer processors (from an electronics point of view). Searching for some schematics would certainly not have been the first thing I would have thought of. So the reset button sends a signal to the CPU. Am I supposed to know what that means from the software side? What does the signal do, exactly? Does it power-cycle the CPU or what? Does it cause to reboot itself? What? How am I supposed to "educate myself" from some electronic schematics, exactly? Well, I suppose I could go buy myself some books about electronics and CPU design. (And btw, I still can't understand your obsession with post lengths. You have mentioned that in the past and not explained yourself when asked. Exactly what does it matter how long a post is, or how many paragraphs it may have? Does it somehow change the points and allegations being made? I don't get it. I find that argument outright silly.) Well, I suppose that I will just have to live with the fact that whenever I question some policy, you will always step in to mock me with ad hominems. I wouldn't even mind so much if you just went straight to the point and answered my questions or corrected where I'm wrong, but no. You have to always make it personal. Just stop it already.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
MUGG wrote:
So is the limit at least 5 hours or more?
The different experiences posted in this thread lead me to think that there is no time limit, only a size limit. (In other words, if the processed video file is larger than some unpublished threshold, it gets rejected.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
MESHUGGAH wrote:
- Saves time in various games Watch this page: http://tasvideos.org/Movies-C3045Y.html Note that most of them uses an input combination (mostly on the 2nd controller) to reset the game which isn't the same as pressing the reset button!
Somehow I get the feeling that some people are incorrectly thinking that I'm opposing the idea of restarting the game in order to save time. That's not at all what I'm saying. If there is, for example, some kind of in-game menu option to quit to the main menu, or if the game supports some special key combination for the same effect, that's ok. (It basically becomes a choice of style whether the author wants to use it or not.) It's not the idea of restarting the game that I'm opposing. It's the idea of forcing the game to stop by external means (eg. by shutting down the power), possibly causing glitches (usually in the savedata). If, however, the reset button of the NES is not actually a power-cycling button, but instead it just sends the game a signal it can trap (and eg. completely ignore at least in principle), then that changes things. In that case the savedata becoming corrupted is a fault of the game itself because the reset routine was not designed to handle it properly. (After all, making the saving reset-safe would be rather trivial: Ignore the reset button during saving. The saving routine could simply raise a flag that the reset routine could check, and if it's raised, it ignores the reset.) In other words, it kind of becomes bug abuse (although a somewhat special kind).
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
By the way, there's some discussion in the Arcade Metal Slug X thread about what constitutes making the run easier by affecting hardware and whether it could be considered legitimate, which I think is interesting and could be considered related to this topic.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
DarkKobold wrote:
Warp wrote:
Granted, I don't know the exact details of the NES hardware, but I'm assuming that when you press the reset button, it's tantamount to pulling the plug: The program just stops right where it was (simply because the CPU stops working), without giving it any chance to do anything. The reset button is not input to the game.
Translation: I don't know, nor do I give a rats ass to figure out, so let me make some bullshit up to support my point.
Wow, great counter-argument! You totally destroyed my arguments and pointed out that they are completely incorrect. Of course if I were wrong you would have pointed out my mistake instead of resorting to an ad hominem, so I assume I am right in my assumption. (I already know you don't like me. There's no need to repeat that over and over. Just get over it.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Scepheo wrote:
Something I'd like to add: One thing I've always wondered about, is why, in HP, the characters never use time travel to find Voldemorts horcruxes. Because even if the Novikov self-consistency principle holds, this is a possible way of using time travel.
You expect consistency and logic in a Harry Potter book?-) (Haven't read the books, just seen the movies, but the whole time traveling thing felt like a one-time gimmick.)
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
But you're supposed to push in the Reset button along with the Power button to help make the battery saves work, so I think it does make a difference!
Could you explain that, as I don't know the details.