Posts for Warp


Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
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Nach wrote:
Okay, I made some cosmetic improvements, and now [ s ] Strikethrough Text[ /s ] is also supported.
That's so lame awesome! :P
Post subject: Re: Submitting a TASrun slower than the current fastest?
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Epsilon wrote:
So, would they deny submission if you went to submit a tas run that was slower than the current fastest run of that game?
In general, a movie which is slower than the existing fastest movie will be accepted only if it has a sensible and rational secondary goal which explains why it's slower (such goals being typically things like 100% completion or using a suboptimal playable character). A run in such a different category will be accepted only if the goal choice is sensible and adds to the entertainment value. In general, the amount of different TASing categories for a single game will tend to be minimized in order to avoid clutter, so there should be a really good reason for the goal choice. It's better to consult the community before spending the time in creating such a run and then have it rejected.
Post subject: Re: crescent moons
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cams wrote:
The movies marked with stars mean the best movies.
No. The movies marked with stars are recommended movies for first-time visitors. They showcase what TASing is all about. Some of the best movies in the site are not starred because they are not necessarily deemed as the first introduction to TASing (eg. because they are long and complicated, and someone who isn't so much into gaming in general or speedrunning in particular may find them boring because they don't understand what's going on). Also, starred movies tend to be selected from a wide variety of game genres, rather than strictly taking the top n highest-rated movies.
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Nach wrote:
Do we currently support any bbcode which consists of only an open and not a close tag?
I suppose not. I just can't see the reason why XML ideology must be imitated, as it only adds useless clutter. (OTOH, even XML supports single tags in the form of <tag />.) But I suppose that if it would require an extensive refactoring of the phpbb engine to support single tags, it's not worth it.
Banned User, Former player
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About the syntax... Is it really necessary to have an opening and a closing tag? Wouldn't it be simpler if you could just write eg. [ frames 12345 ] ?
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dunnius wrote:
It also might be interesting to make it pipeless (except at the beginning of the underground levels), vineless, and powerup-less.
I don't know, that might go too much into the "arbitrary" side.
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Derakon wrote:
Well, the abusers in question were the same people who manage the queue, so I doubt it was a problem this time.
What I'm worrying about is what kind of message they are sending to people...
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Onyx3173 wrote:
I'd like to see a warpless run like this more than a warp run though.
That may actually be an idea to consider, especially if it introduces significantly more places which require special maneuvering because of the no-coins restriction.
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Sir VG wrote:
Voting no because zero coins is an arbitrary condition, and it's slower then present records.
I'm not sure I agree with that. A goal/restriction in TASing a specific game is ok if: 1) it's completely well-defined and unambiguous (ie. not up to interpretation). 2) Introduces a significant level of challenge and/or entertainment to the run (well, the former is usually sensible only if it also implies the latter). For example the "maximum kills" goal in the Gradius 3 TAS is sensible because it's both challenging (even with tool-assistance) and introduces a level of entertainment (because it's cool to see everything destroyed in such a hard game). Additionally, a TAS which uses a special goal or restriction does certainly not need to be as fast as the default "anything goes" run, so using that as an argument for rejection is completely invalid. That said, the problem with this particular run is that while the goal/restriction is quite well-defined and potentially introduces a significant challenge, unfortunately the game levels have been designed so that there are only two places where the restriction really necessitates special maneuvering. That might not be enough to justify publishing the run under a new category...
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scrimpeh wrote:
While I don't think that premature judging isn't a big problem, this certainly sounds like a good idea to me. I do, however think that the delay might be a bit too long, especially for submissions that have "YES!" written all over them. So, for example, Submisssions that are improvements to published runs could have their delay shortened, since there is a solid base to compare the run to. Alternatively, the votes could be used to factor in how long the delay is, so a highly anticipated movie can be published sooner, although I think I'm making things too complex here.
I really don't think it harms anybody or anything if even a clear "YES!" submission is published a couple of days later. I don't think anybody would get that impatient. (Besides the vast majority of submissions get pre-encoded to youtube of whatever, so it's not like people would have to wait the 72 hours to see it.) (And besides, it's not completely unheard of that a supposed improvement to an existing run has been rejected, for whatever reason. "Improvement to existing run" is not, and should not, be some kind of "automatically accepted".)
Banned User, Former player
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It raises the question if it's ok to abuse the submission system for this kind of joke.
Banned User, Former player
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Pentium4 3.4GHz ASUS P5AD2 Premium 3GB RAM (mixed speed) ATI Radeon HD3850 HD: 200GB + 80GB + 30 GB
Banned User, Former player
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Flygon, btw, I have noticed a recent drop in quality of your avatar images. What gives?
Post subject: Re: Keeping the video uncompressed
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Mister Epic wrote:
Instead of using codecs such as H.264 lossless and FFV1, I don't even compress the video, to keep the quality as high as possible.
Nitpicking, but there is no image quality difference between lossless compression and uncompressed video. That's what the term "lossless" means in the first place. (Of course it might be that "H.264 lossless" isn't lossless after all, unlike the name implies...)
Post subject: Re: Hi all^^
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TheDevilsAdmin wrote:
Hi all^^ Im new here and I need some help TASing seems interesting and i want to start doing it but i cant get MUPEN64 to work, But I got the BLJ glitch to work in Pj64, 1964 and NEMU64. I'm pretty good with emulators but this one wont work! The problem is: The rom loads. the sound plays. Where's the video!?
That looks almost like a poem. :P
Banned User, Former player
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scrimpeh wrote:
I doubt any chess run is going to please everybody.
If that was the criterion for accepting runs, then no runs would be published, ever.
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adelikat wrote:
Even more to the point, it doesn't have any _play_ value. What is featured in a TAS that can't be featured in a move list?
You are assuming that the computer always plays in a deterministic way, with the same answers to all your moves. While that might be the case with very primitive chess programs (probably many of the antiquated chess programs made for the consoles of the 80's), most of the competent chess programs do not answer all your moves deterministically. (In fact, computer chess programmers deliberately take measures to avoid the program always answering your moves in the same way for a rather obvious reason: It would make playing against the computer rather boring once you have beaten it once, as you could always beat it again with the same moves, which wouldn't make much sense and would greatly diminish the value of the program as a learning tool.)
Banned User, Former player
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Sandbag wrote:
My suggestion to make a chess game entertaining
I have already suggested things that could make a chess TAS more interesting. Twice. Got zero responses in total, for whatever reason. http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=236041#236041
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What do people here think about my suggestion? To recapitulate: Take a "normal" chess program (rather than combat chess), perhaps for a faster console (eg. the snes or even the N64 or the PS1), set the computer difficulty to something which is bearable but still gives the computer a somewhat fair chance of defending itself (eg. something like 10-15 seconds per move), and then beat the computer in as few moves as possible. (If the chess game supports showing what the computer is "thinking", eg. as a list of moves, definitely turn that feature on. It makes the waiting a bit more interesting.) Of course the limit of how much the computer is allowed the think will necessarily be rather arbitrary. Perhaps if the game has some pre-defined setting (which ends up with the computer thinking about that 10-15 seconds per move), it would be an obvious choice.
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Aktan wrote:
Actually the way H.264 works is that it's harder to decode the bigger the frame is. Since all high resolution videos of games are just simple resize of pixels where each pixel is now a huge block of color, compressing it is very easy for H.264. Basically what I'm saying is, going to high resolution won't take as much bandwidth as you would first imagine.
I'm not exactly sure what you are saying there. It seems that you misunderstood what I wrote. I was not talking about the bitrate or bandwidth needed for a video with a large resolution. I was talking about the processing power needed to decode (ie. decompress) a high-resolution H.264 video stream, which AFAIK increases as the video resolution increases (which is why older Pentium 4 computers have hard time playing H.264 videos which have HD resolutions). (OTOH, I don't know if this is only for HD videos which truly have additional image information in them. It might be lighter to decode if the video consists of a small-resolution original material which has simply been scaled up...)
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I have to agree that the run is technically commendable, but that the game choice is poor. In theory it would sound like battle chess would make for a more entertaining run because of all the animations and battles, but in practice the animation (especially moving the pieces) is so slow that it's painful to watch. Unless there's a way to significantly speed up the animations (I suppose there isn't an in-game setting for this) the end result is quite boring. At least to me it would be even more interesting to see a TAS of a plain regular chess game where the computer is allowed to think eg. something like 10 seconds per move. It would also be more admirable in that the computer is actually given a fair chance to defend itself, rather than the TASer relying on not letting the computer think at all...
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Flygon wrote:
Uh... making a video that large isn't exactly very trivial. Especially for my Hard Drive.
Also take into account that the computing resources required for decoding (ie. playing) an MPEG-4 video is, AFAIK, proportional to the resolution of the video (although I have no idea by which function), and decoding H.264 is a surprisingly heavy operation. Which means, in simpler words, that the larger the resolution of the video, the more CPU power is needed to play it. This can already be seen in HD resolution MPEG-4/H.264 videos, which slower Pentium 4's have a hard time playing in real-time (and even the fastest Pentium 4 struggles to keep up). Not to talk if you were to dramatically increase the resolution even further... Not everybody has a top-of-the-line quad-core computer.
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How is this not completely awesome? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GbaFAF7iME
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Aktan wrote:
I don't know if the owners are completely okay with it, but I do know that archive automatically converts files to other formats which are, for the most part, bigger than the original file. Archive has auto derive, which creates 2 new files. One in MPEG4 with 512 kb bitrate, and another in OGV with around 512 kb bitrate also. If they were worried about space, doing this auto derive wouldn't make much sense.
I suppose you are right. (And given that our encoders go through a lot of trouble to make the video files as small as possible while maintaining maximal image quality, something which not many people bother to do, I'm assuming that our videos are by no means the largest ones people are uploading to archive.org...)
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Btw, I notice that some encoders are using archive.org to store and distribute the same movie in different container formats, such as for example: http://www.archive.org/download/Jprofit22sNesTheLegendOfZeldaswordlessIn2642.97/loz-tas-swordless-jprofit22.mp4 and http://www.archive.org/download/Jprofit22sNesTheLegendOfZeldaswordlessIn2642.97/loz-tas-swordless-jprofit22.mkv Is it really necessary to store the exact same movie twice there, with the only difference being the container format? It feels a bit like abusing the free service provided by archive.org for something it's not intended for. (Of course if the owners of archive.org are completely ok with this, and have explicitly stated so, then there's obviously no problem.)