Posts for Warp


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feos wrote:
Even after having read the rules added to the page?
You mean this page? http://tasvideos.org/FastestCompletion.html I see nothing that would disqualify a game that jumps from the very start to the end credits in a fraction of a second, so am I assumed that will be considered the fastest completion?
Post subject: Re: Cheating at real-time speedruns by hidden modding
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Koh1fds wrote:
Warp wrote:
If the changes are subtle enough, such as making one particular random event non-random, nobody would notice. People would just think that the runner got lucky in that one instance.)
It wouldn't work that well if runner stream his attempts. It will be noticed after some tries.
In that example I was specifically talking about how someone could hypothetically cheat at a GDQ marathon.
So what's to point to cheat on GDQ?
I didn't give that example with the idea that it would be somehow beneficial or reasonable for someone to try to cheat at GDQ. The idea behind that example was to demonstrate how difficult it can be to detect smart cheating: Even at a public event like GDQ, where you control next to nothing of what's happening, with hundreds of eyes watching in-situ what you are doing, seeing that you are playing a real console in real-time, and you cannot tamper with the console itself or what it displays, it would still be possible to cheat, and nobody would notice. That's how hard it is to eradicate cheating 100%.
Post subject: Re: Cheating at real-time speedruns by hidden modding
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p4wn3r wrote:
Aside from obvious ways of cheating like splicing segmented runs and editing the audio to cover up the splice, streaming emulator footage that was pre-recorded and act like you're playing it, and using scripts in PC games, there are more elaborate ways.
I don't think there is any reasonable and feasible way to deter all forms of cheating. Heck, cheating could theoretically happen even at events like the Games Done Quick marathons (if I understand correctly, runners usually bring the game they are going to run themselves. As you note, it would be theoretically possible to tamper with the game code and somehow get it into the original cartridge. Wouldn't be completely trivial, of course, as it would probably require some hardware mods inside the cartridge, but it would be theoretically possible. If the changes are subtle enough, such as making one particular random event non-random, nobody would notice. People would just think that the runner got lucky in that one instance.) Perhaps the only way to be 100% sure that this kind of cheating doesn't happen is if GDQ always provided its own copy of the game that's being run, and doesn't allow the runner anywhere near the console. I think even this could be a bit unreasonable, especially with less common games. I suppose that, in the end, cheating is most damaging with games that are very popular among speedrunners (such as certain Mario, Metroid and Zelda games, and so on), but on the other hand scrutiny with these games is much, much higher. If a complete nobody would suddenly get into the top-5 list or something, out of nowhere, the run would certainly be scrutinized to death. Most of the top runners of a given game are usually very known long-time popular speedrunners who usually eg. have a strong presence on twitch.tv. It would be highly unusual if one of these people would suddenly try to cheat (but, of course, also their submissions always go through the verification process, but I'm assuming there's a level of trust still involved in that the submission might not be scrutinized with such a fine-tooth comb as a surprise submission by a completely unknown person.)
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Tompa wrote:
This is where TASes are superior, as they are impossible to cheat, as the input file is provided and has to sync through.
I think there is one very rare exception (that has probably become so rare as to be practically non-existent nowadays, but could theoretically still happen): Abusing faulty emulation to achieve things that are not possible in the real console. Such as abusing glitches that happen only on emulators, because of imperfect emulation. It's up to a judge, or somebody, to find out if some glitch, technique or other advantageous thing happening in the run is due to imperfect emulation or not, and not replicable in the real console. That can be extraordinarily hard to corroborate sometimes (especially if the difference is just a few frames, but even if it allows major skips, especially with less popular games because there's less interest and less scrutiny with them.) And the funny thing about this is that the "cheating" may be completely inadvertent and unintentional. The TASer was simply testing the game to see if he could find something, and stumbled across this technique, without realizing that it was an emulator-only thing. How could he even realize it?
Post subject: Re: New movie flag has been added: Fastest Completion
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Warp wrote:
Is the situation more like "by default the fastest possible completion is any%-vaultable / fastest completion, with a small amount of exceptions, to be decided individually by the judges on a game-by-game basis"?
My question remains unanswered, and I'm still confused.
Post subject: Re: New movie flag has been added: Fastest Completion
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feos wrote:
To finally answer to your question, since avoiding things like a "game end glitch" for games where it's possible is not vaultable, we can't use such a flag for them. And that is our borderline that is inherent to your definition of any%, which is in turn inherent to our definition of the Vault tier (which I'd still love to be renamed to Coins).
I'm a bit confused. It's unclear to me what exact rules are in place to determine what is vaultable (as "any%") and what isn't. You mention "avoiding things like a game end glitch for games where it's possible", but that's one example, not a complete set of rules. Is the situation more like "by default the fastest possible completion is any%-vaultable / fastest completion, with a small amount of exceptions, to be decided individually by the judges on a game-by-game basis"? (I'm not opposing that principle, just asking if it is the principle.)
Post subject: Re: New movie flag has been added: Fastest Completion
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Precisely this was discussed many times years ago. I'm glad it's finally been implemented.
feos wrote:
Suggest rules clarifications and movies to flag.
Back when this was discussed, the question arose whether "fastest completion" means that absolutely anything goes, no matter what. In other words, even if the run just jumps from the main menu to the end credits in a fraction of a second (as has been demonstrated to be possible, even with console verification, at least in one case), literally showing no gameplay (or even the main menu itself) at all. Has this question been resolved with a simple "yes", or are there some more complex criteria? I suppose that it's lucky this can only be done very rarely. (OTOH, this might change in the future. Back when ACE was a completely new discovery one would have thought that it would be limited to just a few games, but more and more games are being discovered to be "ACEable", so it's not possible to say how common any of this might become with time... I'd just hate to see the list of "fastest completion" to be full of 0.5-second runs that do nothing else than to show the end credits.)
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jlun2 wrote:
I'm just really curious if there would be anything using the movie style animations in the future.
The style looked interesting at first, but after seeing the movie I grew to dislike it a bit.
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feos wrote:
Ugh, I'm trying to watch KDL3. Currently 30 minutes in. And it's insanely boring. Standard Kirby gameplay and cuteness, not watered with any obviously crazy tricks or glitches. I only noticed something like a couple glitches so far.
I don't think glitches should be the be-all and end-all of starred runs. But on the other hand, if there's nothing else special or interesting about the run...
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FractalFusion wrote:
I've never heard of a resonance effect or harmonic for electromagnetic waves before, but I don't know about it. I only know about resonance and harmonics in sound waves (e.g. vibrating string).
"Resonance" was probably the completely wrong word to use in this case, but I didn't/don't know the technically proper term (which is probably that "harmonic" instead). I have never actually seen an explanation of why the red receptor cells in our eyes are stimulated by violet light, but I have noticed that the frequency of violet is exactly twice that of low red, and I suspect that's exactly the reason.
Or maybe the blue filter allows a wider range than it appears at first glance.
I suppose that if the blue filter allows violet to pass through, and this is then somehow replicated when composing the end result, and this end result somehow now emanates violet light, it will work. However, if we are digitally composing an RGB image out of it, some kind of algorithm would need to be used for the blue-filter-image to produce purple colors out of it (ie. it would affect also the red component of the pixels). OTOH, I'm assuming that in typical digital compositions RGB isn't the color model used during the process (only as the very end result), so there might be more about it there.
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I have always thought of starred movies not as necessarily "the best of the best" (as the official definition puts it), but rather a small sample of what speedrunning is about. A bit like: Newcomer: "There are thousands of TASes here! This is quite overwhelming. Which one should I watch first?" Us: "Try these, they are really cool." In other words, starred runs are more like representative runs for the site, rather than just a "top n list". I think Bisqwit's original definition (in the original post of this thread) is along those lines: "Special stars are movies that are particularly impressing, and worth being presentational material for this site." That being said, I really have to question if a 3-hour TAS, or even a 1-hour TAS, is such a good representative. If these are "check these cool ones first, to see what this is all about" runs, I think 3 hours is way too much. For that end, I'd say 10 minutes or less should be a goal, 20 minutes at the very most for extraordinarily cool or famous games. Just my opinion.
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A very old method (which is in fact still used in some situations today) for getting color photographs when all you have is a black&white (well, monochromatic) camera is to take three photos with a red, a green and a blue filter in front of the camera, and then combine them. (This method is used even today in some situations. IIRC the Hubble Space Telescope uses essentially this method to get color photos.) There is one thing I don't really understand about this method though. More precisely, I don't understand why violet colors show up in these photos just fine. Why is this a problem? Violet is above blue in the frequency range. Since we have receptor cells for only red, green and blue, but not for violet, in theory we shouldn't be able to see violet at all. The reason why we see violet is complicated. Our blue receptor cells perceive violet frequencies to a degree. This in itself ought to mean that we should see violet colors as dark blue. However, curiously, or red receptor cells also perceive violet, even though red is on the opposite end of the color spectrum. It is my understanding that this is because the frequency of violet is twice that of (low) red, and there's a resonance effect going on, where red cells not only perceive red frequencies but also frequencies that are twice as large (in this case violet). Thus our eyes see violet as a combination of blue and red. This is also the reason why violet can be displayed on TVs and computer monitors: They can be likewise represented as a combination of red and blue, which causes the same illusory violet color perception for our brains. But now enters the color photography using color filters problem: We have a monochromatic camera, and we take three photos with it, with a red, a green and a blue filter, and we combine them and we get a color photograph. And violet colors show up just fine! How? The red filter should be blocking violet frequencies out completely. There should be no violet at all (unless, somehow, the object is emitting both blue and red light). Yet somehow they show up. Do red filters actually let violet frequencies through (perhaps due to the fact that they are twice the frequency of red)?
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I love this: Link to video
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Depending on how it's implemented, you may not be able to get the whole word during the drawing process. It may well be (and will be, if the implementation is smart) that the browser does not get the word at all during the drawing process, and even when one or two letters are revealed, the browser only gets those letters and nothing else. The server sends the browser the whole word only when it's supposed to show it. That way there's absolutely no way of cheating in this manner. At least if the implementation is smart, as said. I understand that finding a cheat is an interesting intellectual exercise and hacking challenge, but in the end... what's the point? If you succeed in creating a cheat, you'll just be ruining the game for yourself, and everybody else.
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dwangoAC wrote:
No judge should be expected to run some random executable.
I would add to that that judges shouldn't be expected to have to verify that the source code of the TAS tools being used are legit, and produce a legit run. Somebody would need to do some kind of verification or at least validation that the source code is legit, and is doing what it's supposed to do (and, preferably, that it's as bug-free as possible). (In the same vein as in my previous post, one could ask if this has been done with currently accepted emulators. I don't know. Maybe not. But as stated, the situation is a bit different in that those emulators have been used for years, with hundreds of games, which gives a relatively high degree of confidence that they work correctly. Also, the very nature of them being generic emulators, rather than specific to one single game, makes it significantly less likely that they could be used to produce illegit output for a particular game.)
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If you want to share your speedruns with the world, I'd suggest you encode them yourself (you can find instructions for this at tasvideos.org and these forums) and upload them to your youtube channel (create one if you don't have any). This all can be done for free, with free tools.
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FractalFusion wrote:
Take a plane that goes through the centers of the spheres. If we reflect across this plane, then the spheres remain the same (by symmetry). So the reflection of the floor through the reflection plane gives another plane (the "ceiling") that touches all three spheres.
A corollary of this seems to be that if there are more than three spheres, as long as their centers are coplanar, there will exist another plane that's tangential to all of them. I'm not sure if there should additionally be the requirement that no three floor touch points should be collinear.
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The newest Numberphile video made me think of this hypothesis: Three non-overlapping spheres (not necessarily of the same radius) are on a floor (ie. a plane). As long as the points where the spheres touch the floor are not collinear, there will exist another plane that also touches all three spheres (in such a way that all three spheres will be on the same side of this second plane). Can this be proven?
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EZGames69 wrote:
The run isnt shorter, the menuing itself is shorter, but that’s not what gets judged in submissions.
I understand that the submission wouldn't be accepted. My objection was to the initial reason given why (ie. "plagiarism").
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feos wrote:
In cases when there's no time-wise improvement, nor entertainment improvements, just cosmetic changes that don't actually make the run more entertaining (the contrary in fact), the movie gets rejected.
Note that in the hypothetical situation I presented the run would be shorter. Just not in its actual gameplay part. I don't think this is unprecedented. I remember cases where submissions have been replaced with some unneeded extra frames removed from the end. The end result is identical, just a few frames shorter. (Do I remember incorrectly, but have those frames been sometimes removed by somebody else than the original author? This would bring this quite close to my hypothetical.)
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Mothrayas wrote:
You are conflating copyright law/infringement with plagiarism, which are two different concepts.
Not really. I was talking solely about plagiarism, which was the stated reason why the submission would be rejected. As stated, plagiarism is copying someone's work without permission and claiming it as your own, without giving credit to the original author. That wouldn't be the case here, because both permission has been explicitly given, and the work would of course be properly credited. (In my hypothetical question of "would it be accepted if I made an otherwise identical run except without that brightness setting?" I was in no way implying that credit to the original author wouldn't be given.)
Now, while TASVideos' usage of Creative Commons allows redistributing published work (among other things) as long as credit is given, that still doesn't mean you can take such a publication, copy the entirety of gameplay TAS work of it, (co)-author yourself on it, and expect it to be published.
I understand that, but my objection was to a site judge stating that it would be rejected because of "plagiarism", when that quite literally cannot be a valid reason (because of the very definition of plagiarism).
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Plagiarism: "an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author" By definition it cannot be plagiarism if the usage license gives me permission to copy the content, as long as I credit the original author. The claim was made that the submission would be rejected because it would be "plagiarism". It cannot be plagiarism if it's published under Creative Commons Attribution (and you give proper credit), no matter how much of it is copied verbatim. So, again, why would it be rejected? It literally cannot be because of "plagiarism".
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Memory wrote:
Warp wrote:
If I made a run that's otherwise identical, except it doesn't set that brightness setting, would it be rejected? It would be faster.
That would be plagiarism so yes it would.
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 wrote:
You are free to: Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Is it too much to ask to abide by your own rules and licenses? You cannot publish something under a certain usage license and then arbitrarily revoke people's rights provided by that license. (Well, I suppose technically speaking you can. Nobody is stopping you. But for consistency and fairness you shouldn't. If you promise something, and use a legal license to give people some rights, you should stand behind your words. If different rules are being imposed than granted by that license, use a different license. (And I'm using the plural "you" here, for the record.))
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Memory wrote:
There has been plenty of precedence for spending time in settings in order to maximize entertainment. Having encoders do extra work for things that can easily be done within the TAS itself is unnecessary.
If I made a run that's otherwise identical, except it doesn't set that brightness setting, would it be rejected? It would be faster.
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Memory wrote:
You can literally just fast forward on the emulator or skip ahead in the video. It's only done once at the start of the run and the rest of the run is constant action. This is not a problem.
That's not the point.