While it's admirable that one single input file finishes two games of such length at the same time, I have to agree with the opinion that with these particular games in question the dual-game input idea feels a bit wasted and doesn't add a lot to anything. It's almost like watching two independent runs of the two games, side by side. The only thing the author had to do is to here and there alternate inputs a bit to avoid the same input affecting both games at the same time (in an undesirable way). While certainly laborious due to the length of the games, it doesn't sound very difficult nor challenging, which kind of detracts from the entertainment (and even technical) value. The vast majority of what the author had to do to avoid the input for one game messing the other one is invisible to the viewer, and there is little to no visual synchronization between the two runs (which is one of the major ideas in multigame runs).
Assume that someone would TAS a computer golf game (a relatively modern one, ie. one with realistic physics and rules, in 3D, etc). The obvious goal would be, naturally, to finish the course in as few strokes as possible. However, since holes-in-one are usually impossible in many of the holes (the par 4's, except maybe the very shortest ones, and par 5's), the question becomes how should the tee shots be played in the TAS.
One could argue for two possibilities:
1) Aim for absolutely perfect play.
TASing is all about what would it be if a perfect, god-like being would play the game. In this case every single shot should be absolutely perfect. All tee shots should go as far as the game allows, and hit the fairway dead-center (or in the most optimal location possible). If the green is reachable with the tee shot (but a hole-in-one is not physically possible), then it should obviously be done. If the game keeps score of fairway hits and greens-in-regulation, the natural secondary goal is to get the highest course records on these.
The reasoning for this is obvious: The player is simply perfect, like a god-like being, and hence every single hit should be as perfect and sublime as possible, with no flaws nor deficiencies.
2) Showing off.
While the aim is still the absolutely minimum score achievable in the course, the TASer makes his own task as difficult as possible, usually by hitting the tee shot way off course, and then succeeding in sinking it in regardless, from the most unlikeliest of places (from far-away bunkers, deep grass, from behind trees, etc). The TASer also tries to make incredible trick shots, like the ball going way off, bouncing on a tree and then going to the hole.
The minor "problem" with this is that the tee shots now become imperfect, and only the second shot (or subsequent shots if the hole is impossible to reach in two) is perfect. So in a way it's not a god-like perfect being playing an absolutely perfect and flawless game, but more like a complete beginner making the tee shot and the god-like being patching up. So while the trick shooting might be more amusing and entertaining, it introduces a degree of imperfection to the play.
So I was wondering what would be the preferred way of TASing such a golf game, if one would ever be made.
It's a pity that nowadays with a little ingenuity, computer trickery, or both, one can fake such feats extremely realistically, so it's really hard to tell if they really did throw the ball like 50 times until they got it in, and then used that shot, or if they used fakery. It would be nice to know for sure.
Often it can be easier to count the lines and make an educated guess and tweak it for off-by-one or two errors and see if you get a close match.
The major problem in counting lines for someone who doesn't know the writing system is that it's not trivial.
The problem is that it's not really "lines" (as in "more or less linear segments") but "strokes". There are many cases where there may seem to be two lines, but in fact it's only counted as one because it's drawn as one single uninterrupted stroke. There's a proper way of drawing kanjis (which is an entire artform in itself), and in order to know how many strokes there are in a kanji, you have to know how it's drawn properly.
One rule of thumb which can be used is that if there's a horizontal line on top of the kanji and it immediately continues vertically down, it's one single stroke. But of course there are countless exceptions and special situations.
Maybe instead of taking a snapshot of frames with the greatest change, take a snapshot from between two frames with greatest changes. If frames with greatest change can be considered "cuts" in film terminology (in games it would happen eg. when changing from one level to another), the snapshot would be taken from the middle of the "scene".
Not completely related, but this got me thinking about something.
Many years ago, when I was working at the University here, there was a Go tournament held at the school. There happened to be a webcam from which you could see most of the tables (the original purpose of the webcam was and is to see the length of the queue of people to the school restaurant). Since the images produced by the webcam were accessible online, I got the idea that I would make a small script which would store an image from the webcam each 10 seconds or so during the tournament, and afterwards I would make a 25 fps video from them, resulting in a video which shows the entire tournament day in 10 minutes or such.
I was wondering: If someone were TASing and had a small script which took a snapshot of the emulator window each 10 seconds or whatever timespan (only during the TASing process, of course) and then a 25 fps (or such) video was made from these snapshots, how it would look like. The video could show the entire TASing process from beginning to end in just a few minutes, very highly sped up. (Not that it would be helpful to anybody in any way, but could perhaps be interesting.)
Topics are locked if being able to post in them would produce more noise (alternatively, fruitless work) than information.
Isn't it highly subjective what is "noise" and what is "information"? Some post might be completely out-of-place and off-topic in a certain group, but then the proper course of action is to move it to the appropriate group rather than locking it.
Imagine if there's a good topic for a subject, then a new one is posted. People interested in the subject would have to read both to learn about it, and for someone new it might not be immediately obvious which one to post in. Thus, we lock one topic to divert all traffic about it into the other.
Wouldn't topic merging (which the forum software actually supports) be the proper course of action?
Imagine if a topic is devoid of content or misleading. Posts in it become pointless as they riff on the topic's existence, then joke with each other. Locking it saves other people the trouble of thinking the topic is legitimate.
Again, it's quite subjective what can be classified as "devoid of content or misleading" so badly that it deserves locking.
Other forums also practice things like locking topics that are too old
Replying to very old threads which have not had any activity for years is quite commonly frowned upon, but personally I have never understood the rationale behind this. Why is it frowned upon? What's so bad about it?
Granted, in a few cases the new post might be completely obsolete because the original post is not relevant anylonger. For example, if there was some 5 years old thread with someone making a question about how to do something with famtasia, and then today someone responded to that question, it would be quite a useless and obsolete post. However, why would it be bad per se? The person who made the post 5 years later was probably just trying to be helpful. Is that a bad thing (even if the help happened to be misaimed)?
However, from what I have seen (elsewhere, not really here) is that responding to any topic which is very old is frowned upon, regardless of what that topic might be and how relevant answering to it may be. This could become especially jarring if someone actually comes up with some recent and interesting new information about that topic in question, and rather than creating a new topic with a lone post and an obscure reference to the 5-year-old thread, he responds to the thread in question, to keep the context clear, and then someone would criticize him for posting to a very old thread. I really don't see the problem.
(Maybe in extremely popular and high-traffic forums where there may be something like 50 active threads per group at a time, it might make sense to lock old threads for the simple reason of keeping the amount of active threads down to a manageable size. However, the tasvideos forum isn't such a high-traffic one, as there are typically a dozen or so threads active at a time at max, and it's quite easy to follow.)
Your points are valid for your argument, but I don't think that was the original intent of this thread.
I wasn't really endorsing the idea in the original post per se (an idea which seems quite vague... something like "play normally, except that tool-assistance is used to avoid death"). I simply took the opportunity to remind people of this suggestion which is similar and which many people who want "more normal" playthgoughs could perhaps like.
A "just normal human play, but death is avoided using savestates" would usually be rather boring, if not even exasperating to watch. However, I do believe that "as fast as superhumanly possible, but using the route intended by the developers" could be more interesting, at least with some games.
You misunderstand.
The idea with "uses the route intended by the game developers" is not "tool-assistance is used, but the playing is done like a human would".
It's still "super-play". The run can be flawless and frame-perfect, enemies can be shot with perfect accuracy or avoided by the closest sub-pixel approach possible, ladders can be caught as early as possible, luck can be manipulated for optimal item drops, and so on. The only restriction is that no shortcuts are used which the game developers didn't intend to be used (ie. by abusing a bug, glitch or level design oversight).
This is not so much different than eg. a 100% completion run. Such a run doesn't become less of a "super-play" just because it collects all coins: It's simply uses an alternative goal for entertainment purposes, but still achieves that goal as fast and perfectly as possible.
I suggested a new category "uses the route intended by the game developers" in that thread linked by arkiandruski, and I have suggested it earlier as well. See the details in that thread in my first post there.
I still think that category could have merit at least with some runs. It would satisfy those who want to see a more "normal" playthrough of the game, which is still done flawlessly and with superhuman perfection.
For some reason the suggestion has never got much popularity, though. I really can't understand why.
And a bonus one that some of you already know the answer to:
You are a rude warrior that needs to pass two men. One always tells the truth and the other always lies. They wont let you pass until you have figured out who is the lying one. What is the fastest way to do so?
Does "fastest" mean "the least amount of questions" (which would be one), or is it some kind of trick question (which the "you are a rude warrior" leads me to suspect)?
I remember something like this having been discussed years ago here as well. Anyways, my response back then and now is still:
Final Fantasy (style of JRPG) + Tekken (style of combat).
Tekken-type games are boring in the long run, at least in single-player mode. What would make them significantly more interesting would be if there was an involved storyline and gameplay outside of the fighting. A JRPG-style game with Tekken-style encounters would be the optimal.
In JRPGs you usually learn new skills and get new armor, weapons and accessories as you advance. This could work well with Tekken-style fighting, not only in the form of weapons and armor, but also in the form of unlocking new, more effective combos.
I wrote this in the Chessmaster submission thread, but got no responses, so I'm wondering if it simply got unnoticed, being in the gruefood group and all. So I apologize for repeating what I have already wrote, but I would be interested in hearing people's opinions on this:
Warp wrote:
Not that these would necessarily make publish-worthy submissions, but I started thinking of alternative goals for such a game (even if it's at the easiest difficulty levels) which might make it funnier to watch, and ought to be a lot more challenging for a TASer to do:
- Least amount of moves to first capture all the opponent's pieces (leaving the opponent's king only) and then checkmating.
- Sacrifice the maximum amount possible of your own pieces in the least amount of moves, after which you still manage to checkmate the opponent.
- A combination of both: First sacrifice the maximum amount possible of your own pieces and then capture all of the opponent's pieces and then checkmate.
- A variation of the previous: Minimum amount of moves to leave the opponent without any pieces (other than the king) and yourself with the absolute minimum amount of pieces for a checkmate, and then do so. (The difference is that the order in which the pieces of either side are captured doesn't matter.)
- Win by moving pawns only. If it's impossible to do this without promotion, then promotion is allowed (after which only the promoted pieces and the remaining pawns can be moved), but the amount of promotions should be kept minimal (hence optimallly one promotion, and preferably to the least valuable piece possible).
- Win by moving your knights only, if possible.
I'm wondering if part of the reason could be something like "it has had the star for so long that it's about time to recycle the star and give it to something newer and fresher".
We have to remember that the stars are a guideline to first-time viewers. They usually don't care when a run has been made or how long it has had a star. The important thing is to offer them a good sample of what TASing is all about. The age of a star doesn't matter in this.
Not that these would necessarily make publish-worthy submissions, but I started thinking of alternative goals for such a game (even if it's at the easiest difficulty levels) which might make it funnier to watch, and ought to be a lot more challenging for a TASer to do:
- Least amount of moves to first capture all the opponent's pieces (leaving the opponent's king only) and then checkmating.
- Sacrifice the maximum amount possible of your own pieces in the least amount of moves, after which you still manage to checkmate the opponent.
- A combination of both: First sacrifice the maximum amount possible of your own pieces and then capture all of the opponent's pieces and then checkmate.
- A variation of the previous: Minimum amount of moves to leave the opponent without any pieces (other than the king) and yourself with the absolute minimum amount of pieces for a checkmate, and then do so. (The difference is that the order in which the pieces of either side are captured doesn't matter.)
- Win by moving pawns only. If it's impossible to do this without promotion, then promotion is allowed (after which only the promoted pieces and the remaining pawns can be moved), but the amount of promotions should be kept minimal (hence optimallly one promotion, and preferably to the least valuable piece possible).
- Win by moving your knights only, if possible.
This has been discussed before. IMO playing computer chess on the easiest difficulty is kind of pointless. So you beat the computer? So what? Anyone can do it on the easiest difficulty without resorting to any superhuman abilities (which is what TASing is all about). There's no challenge.
You can manipulate the disastrously poorly playing computer into making funny moves, but it's just not the same as doing it on other types of games (such as a football game) because with chess the computer is not even given any chance to actually defend itself. In a football game the computer is playing as well as it can, without handicaps, so TASing is all about fooling those algorithms. In a chess game at the lowest difficulty level you are basically taking a huge handicap and not even allowing the computer to do anything at all.
You might as well just play a two-player game and make the moves for both players. It's not much different.
What would be nice is to beat the computer hands down on the maximum difficulty level. Of course the problem with this is that the TAS would be really long and thus boring.
This game has a RATE mechanism that causes the board clearing to take longer and longer time until it is practically impractical. By board 27, the bot had already consumed 29 minutes in the movie.
I think this is a real shame and a huge bummer. In practice (at least from a TASing point of view) the game penalizes you for playing too well, so the playing has to be deliberately imperfect if the game is going to be finished in less than a day. In other words, the game forces you to play an imperfect game.
That's a shame. It would be nice to see an absolutely perfect game where each shot is superhumanly accurate, iow. everything that TASing is all about. But it's just not feasible, not even with a "contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs" disclaimer (because in this case the speed is hurt so much that it hurts entertainment as well).
If/when this gets published, the publisher should remember to explain the reason for the missed shots in the description so a casual viewer won't wonder about them.
Pretty much all above-average science fiction, like any noteworthy piece of art, conveys a message. Vast majority of the early sci-fi authors, before the industry commercialized it to the point where cheap thrills won the popularity contest against the subtext (about early 80s or so, I guess), had created the fiction entourage to illustrate their political, social, and pilosophical views and ideas, first and foremost, in the light of technological advancements.
In my opinion using sci-fi as a medium to convey some kind of sociological, political, moral or other such type of message does not necessarily make it good sci-fi, nor is it a requisite. A sci-fi story can be good even if it does not contain any deep message, or even deep and involved story-telling.
I once read the opinion that one requisite of good sci-fi is that it tells a story (or contains relevant elements, plot points or messages) which couldn't be easily told in a non-sci-fi story (usually also non-fantasy, as the line between sci-fi and fantasy can often be quite blurred when talking about story-telling). If a sci-fi story could be told equally easily and fluently in a completely non-sci-fi non-fantasy setting (for example by moving the setting to European colonialists invading some native cultures somewhere, thus introducing a significant difference in technology between two cultures) then it makes the whole point of it being sci-fi kind of moot, from the story-telling point of view. The sci-fi becomes decoration and not an integral part of the story.
The Matrix trilogy could probably not be told very fluently in a non-sci-fi setting. Also Terminator 2 contains pearls like:
Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator wouldn't stop, it would never leave him. It would never hurt him or shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers that came over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only thing that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
(I'm not saying that the Matrix trilogy and Terminator 2 are good sci-fi. I'm just saying that IMO they contain many elements which could not be told in a non-sci-fi story and hence are good candidates for good sci-fi.)
