When to end input often has no clear answer. Therefore we have always let the author make that decision for themselves.
Perhaps there should be a more unambiguous guideline. I have always liked the "no further input appended to the end of the movie can make the game end faster or slower (or cause the game to not end at all)" principle.
Of course, there's also the formula which allows you to calculate any Fibonacci number very quickly by abusing the series' relationship with the golden ratio. No recursion needed; just N*3 multiplications and some basic arithmetic (and the square root of 5, but that can be precalculated). I suppose you might start to run into trouble with floating point precision after awhile though.
I think that the point of the task was not to calculate the Fibonacci number as fast as possible, but to take any given recursive function and make a generic solution that would make it more efficient. Fibonacci was just an example.
Naturally if you wanted to calculate the Fibonacci number faster, you would just use an iterative loop rather than doing it recursively. (The problem with the naive recursive solution is that it's converting an essentially O(n) solution into an O(n2) solution by needlessly calculating the same values many times.)
Also, agreed, I haven't enjoyed a Final Fantasy since 10.
I have a theory: Anything from Square Enix where Nobuo Uematsu was involved is great, anything where Uematsu was not involved sucks.
(Although FF XIV breaks this theory badly.)
That's some impressive bit of faulty logic you have there.
These games don't load the entire level data at once. They could have easily made Hocus Pocus a single episode with 36 levels without increasing memory demands.
Yeah. Consider, for example, the NES which has 2 kilobytes of RAM, and games like Dragon Warrior 4, which are just huge for that architecture.
Based on those JRPGs you listed, I will suggest Tales of Vesperia and Eternal Sonata.
I listed Eternal Sonata in my original post. As for Tales of Vesperia, I'd love to get my hands on it, but it's RIDICULOUSLY priced (for example at play.com you can get a used version for a "mere" 143 euros, and new at 200 euros; I'm not paying that kind of money for a 3-years-old game that would normally cost about 20 or 30 euros at this point).
ElectroSpecter wrote:
- Bioshock: Unique, atmospheric, detailed, and addicting.
- The Orange Box: Half-Life 2 and Portal. 'Nuff said.
As I said, I can't play first-person shooters with a gamepad. (And I own those for Windows anyways.)
I purchased an Xbox 360 some time ago mainly because of a bunch of games not available for Windows (and partially also because I'm getting tired of the instability of most Windows games). So now I have purchased and played many of the games I wanted to play and I'm currently in the situation where I actually don't have any games for the Xbox 360 to play. I'm looking for suggestions on what to try next, iow. the best Xbox 360 games ever.
To give a picture of what I like, these are the better games I have played so far: Gears of War 1 and 2, Eternal Sonata, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Fable 2, Infinite Undiscovery, Alan Wake. I also have FF XIII, but didn't like it too much (I think Square Enix has lost the ball years ago; I haven't liked any of their games in the past half decade).
Games of similar genres you don't need to suggest (because I have them for Windows), and which I have also liked: Fable, Oblivion, Fallout 3, four Princes of Persia (sands of time, warrior within, two thrones, prince of persia (2008)), Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham asylum, The Last Remnant.
While the lists above are quite RPG-heavy, I'm open to any genre, really.
But don't bother with first-person shooters. I can't play them with a gamepad, no matter how great the game might otherwise be. (The closest thing I can manage are games similar to Gears of War.)
The comparison video is great, but it's annoyingly unseekable (or at least my version of mplayer cannot seek it). Probably lacks keyframes or something.
Some "Watch now using" links are duplicated (in some cases several times) here: http://tasvideos.org/Awards/2010.html
I'm wondering if it happens because the same movie is listed in the same page more than once. It seems that those which are listed there more than once have problems with the "watch now" links.
The sad thing about this game is that it could have been much better, even on the NES. The developers just didn't try hard enough, made a mediocre and basically unfinished product and tried to sell it. It's almost like some clever coder had come up with an idea, made a prototype of the idea (iow. an alpha version of the program) and rather than develop it further it was just slightly padded (with some additional pictures) and shipped as-is. A bit like the horrendous Atari 2600 Pac-Man.
Both observers can see the light coming from (the same) distant stars located in directions orthogonal to their relative motion, so their observable universes overlap. Their interaction universes will also overlap in a similar manner, but in the future instead of in the past; but the two observers' will be outside each other's observable and interaction universes. The observable and interaction universes may overlap in some regions and they may be disjoint in others.
I didn't quite understand the explanation. If a star is observable from both A and B, couldn't an observer at the star transmit information from A to B (which ought to be impossible)? The star can observe light coming from A and rely the information it gets to B.
andymac wrote:
I think put simply, if A and B are travelling faster than the speed of light away from each other
I think it's technically not correct to say that "A and B are traveling faster than the speed of light" because that's a violation of special relativity (and hence also general relativity). Rather "the distance between A and B grows faster than the speed of light". At a quick glance it might sound like the same thing, but it's not, which is why I like to make the distinction as it is, AFAIK, relevant. The latter is caused by a change in the geometry of space (which is allowed by GR).
then it would be impossible to send a probe or a signal from A to B, because by the time the signal reached a point where the two observable universes intersected, then it wouldn't be part of both A nd B's observable universe anymore.
Both A and B can observe the same star. This would mean that the star could eg. tell B about the existence of A (because the star can observe both) eg. by sending a photograph of it, which seems to violate the principle that it's impossible for A and B to know about each other. This is what confuses me. Obviously something else is happening here.
There's something that I don't quite understand about General Relativity, so I was hoping if someone could clarify.
If I understand correctly, GR does not forbid two points in space (and hence eg. two particles at those points) receding from each other faster than c (caused, for example, by the metric expansion of space). Effectively what this causes is a horizon between these two points: One point cannot see or in any other way transmit information to the other point.
Point A will thus have its own observable universe, which would be the part of the universe which is receding from A slower than c, and point B will be outside this. Likewise point B will have its own observable universe and A will be outside of it.
So my question could be summarized as: Can these two observable universes overlap?
Either of the two possible answers is baffling.
If the answer is "yes", then it would introduce a contradiction: A could send a probe at sublight speed to the overlapping part, which is perfectly possible because it's inside A's observable universe, but since it is also inside B's observable universe (after all, the observable universes are overlapping here), the probe could now go to B at sublight speed. Hence you just transmitted a probe at sublight speed from A to B, which is a contradiction to the original premise.
If the answer is "no" then it introduces a different problematic situation: Assume that B is just barely outside A's observable universe (in other words, A and B are receding from each other just slightly faster than c). If B's observable universe cannot overlap with A's, it would mean that B's observable universe would have to be very small to not to "touch" A's. However, from B's point of view it would have to be the other way around (B has a "normal" observable universe and A has a tiny one).
Obviously there must a third option I'm not seeing here. (I bet it's a similar thing to the classic "if you are in a train traveling at 0.9c and walk at 0.2c from the rear to the front of the train, you just exceeded c" conundrum. However, I don't know what the proper explanation is in this case.)
However, we received an email from one Mr. Lonato Paul, who told us That you are dead and he is your next of kin and that you died in a car Accident four months back.To our findings we discover that this Mr. Lonato Paul is a liar and imposer that is why we contact you before any release of funds
That's literally everything that was in the email. Nothing else.
I bet in a few years they will simply start just sending messages like "want money?" and nothing else.
the m64 format doesn't even have input written for lag frames, so it will always hex no matter how much lag you have!
Does that mean that if the length of the movie is calculated by how many frames of input there is in the file, it will get wrong value (because lag frames are not taken into account)?
The scammers really are getting lazier by the year. I just got this:
Nigerian scammer wrote:
LETTER OF INTENT
Dear Sir,
I need your consent to transfer $14.5 million dollars in Unclaimed Deposit which has remained unclaimed since 1999. The Funds will be moved to any of our correspondent Banks in "YOUR NAME" immediately to secure the funds first.
The Principal will be shared on a 50/50 basis.
Yours faithfully,
Mr. Harrison Ken
That's the entirety of the email. No story about a dethroned prince or a heartbreaking story about someone dying of cancer. No explanation or rationale why the transfer is necessary. Just straight to the point.
You could also use a different nico link, such as nicozon http://www.nicozon.net/watch/sm12887548
Just change the movie number to view the videos you want without making an account.
For some reason it isn't working. The player loads with something that looks like a snapshot of the run, but when I press the play icon on it, it goes black, some garbled characters scroll on the upper edge, and nothing else happens. There's no network traffic either, so it isn't downloading anything. The progress bar still advances, though.
Is there actually a way to watch the video somehow? No player shows up at least here, nor can I find any obvious link or button for that effect. (And my Japanese is not good enough to decipher the mystic runes in that page.)
spweasel wrote:
In my opinion, "no Side-BLJs" is a less arbitrary goal than "no sword except against Ganon" or "kills no enemies except bosses".
I have to fully disagree with that opinion.
The goals you are comparing them to are not glitches. They are legitimate goals which are popular not only in TASing but in speedrunning in general.
The "except against Ganon" part of the "no sword" goal is simply by necessity rather than being an arbitrary random choice. It would lack that qualifier if it was possible. Basically it's just a "no sword" run.
The "minimum kills" category doesn't even need to be explained. Only kill what is absolutely necessary. No different than eg. only collect the stars that are absolutely necessary (which in this case would be none).
However, forbidding one glitch which is no significantly different from other glitches is completely arbitrary and serves no necessity. The comparison is just invalid.
It also relies on people self-reporting accurately, but very often people over or underestimate things, or pretend to be something they're not. A better test would involve interaction to see how well they cope in an actual situation related to their job, and that can't be standardized.
Perhaps the purpose of the test is to eliminate the pessimists and emos.
The concept of a side-BLJ seems pretty arbitrary. I don't think it is appropriate to define a category based on the past.
Actually that's a quite good additional point. If the glitch which allowed completing the game with only 1 star had been discovered before any 16-star runs had been created (and hence it would have gone directly from 70 stars to 1 star), there would be no concept of "16-star run" and the number 16 would be completely arbitrary. (Because it is, really.)
I don't know for certain, but I wouldn't be surprised that if you arbitrarily forbade a carefully-selected list of glitches, you would come up with an equally arbitrary number of minimum amount of stars that have to be collected (other than 70, 16 or 1).
But I really do believe 70 star will be the greatest category.
In a way a 70-star run would make more sense than a 16-star run because the latter is an arbitrary number which is only dictated by the cronology of discovered glitches, while the former is the "official" minimum number of stars one has to collect to complete the game in the normal way. In other words, the 70-star run would comply to the often-suggested category "uses the route intended by the game developers".
OTOH, if you are going to collect the required 70 stars, why don't go the extra mile and collect all 120 stars while you are at it?
