Posts for Warp

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Posted: 4/5/2010 7:31 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
andrewg wrote:
i mean tasvideos shouldnt have accepted this run because it breaks site rules anyhow. it has set a standard meaning future runs shohld have the same exceptions...
You really don't seem to understand what the term "exception" means. If someone really wants to tempt fate and deliberately make a run using the Japanese ROM and try to appeal to the unique exception made with this publication, then by all means go right ahead. I just don't understand why. If you use the English ROM, and the run improves this publication significantly, it will have approximately 100% chance of getting published. Using the J ROM much less. So why take the chance? It's not like a TAS of this game can be done in a few days. You risk doing potentially months of hard work which may go to waste simply because you wanted to play with the rules. Maybe it will get accepted, but why take the risk? It makes no sense.
Posted: 4/5/2010 11:51 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Swordless Link wrote:
<i>Besides, there might be a real possibility that if someone made a submission using the J ROM, it might get rejected because it's breaking the rules.</i> As if I care. This of course is assuming we submit it anyway.
You deliberately want to break the rules and don't care if the submission gets rejected because of that? I honestly don't understand that attitude. Is it some kind of protest against something?
Posted: 4/5/2010 7:54 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Swordless Link wrote:
XD The next run <b>will</b> be done on the J ROM. This run being published has ensured that.
Says who? Besides, there might be a real possibility that if someone made a submission using the J ROM, it might get rejected because it's breaking the rules. (Remember, this publication did not set a precedent. It was published as a special exception to the rules. It doesn't mean the rules have changed.)
Posted: 4/5/2010 7:51 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I think this run would deserve its star back. One of the main purposes of stars is to give a hint to newcomers. "New here? Want to see some really cool TAS movies? Try these first to get you started." Thus the main target audience of starred movies are those people who have not yet seen any TAS movies yet (or only very few of them). A movie which is so fast-paced and/or glitched that it just leaves you wondering what the heck is going on might not be the best material for a first-time viewer. It might just look like the game is being corrupted somehow, and the viewer has no idea what's going on and why. Thus the best material for first-time viewers are those runs which are slick, comprehensible and easy to understand what's going on, while still being cool-looking. I think this movie is such. Hence it would deserve its star back.
Posted: 4/4/2010 4:10 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Ren wrote:
If possible, 100% of OoT TASers would skip all text anyway.
But that's the point: It's not possible. Most of the text is unskippable (even if it can be dismissed quickly), so the viewer has to watch all the text. Hence it's better if the viewer has a chance of actually understanding the text rather than having to watch strange runic symbols for minutes and minutes.
Posted: 4/2/2010 7:01 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
zaphod77 wrote:
The theory of a TAS is that it should be possible to play back on real hardware.
That's incorrect. The theory of a TAS is that a perfect, god-like being would be able to match the completion time of the TAS on the real console (give or take a few frames due to possible tiny differences between the emulator and the real hardware) and how it would look like. All the glitches, rng manipulation and such techniques are perfectly replicable on the real console, even if it's a one-time event (due to whatever randomness there might be left when the console is started/reset). It would be possible for a perfect god-like being to replicate the completion time because he would be able to use all the same tricks and techniques. (Heck, a god-like being would probably be able to complete the game faster on the real console because TASers are fallible humans, even when using tools to aid them.)
Posted: 4/2/2010 6:51 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
If I may expand on what I already wrote in the "blades of steel" thread: I am one of the few people who have been an active member of the site since the very beginning, since the very first "alpha" versions of the website made by Bisqwit, since his very first attempt at SMB using Famtasia. We discussed about running games using an emulator with savestates from the very beginning. Personally it was always clear to me from the very start that running a game on an emulator is different from running the game on a real console. There always are tiny differences which make them just slightly different (for example an emulator cannot hope to match the clock frequencies of the console with a nanosecond accuracy). But that has never been the point. The main point of TASing, from the very beginning, has been: If we assumed an absolutely perfect and all-powerful god-like being who has absolute knowledge of what the console and the game are doing and can predict absolutely everything with complete perfection and accuracy, what would it look like if such a being would play a console game? A TAS recorded on an emulator might not be replayable on a real console, but that doesn't mean that a perfect god-like player would be unable to match the time of the TAS in the console (give or take a few frames). The exact sequence of events that happens in the TAS might not be replayable as-is on the console, but the overall events and most importantly the completion time could perfectly be replicated on the real console by a god-like being, even if a few details go slightly differently. That's the point. So in other words, it's not about "could this pre-recorded TAS be replayed on a real console?" (and has never been), but "could a god-like perfect player complete Super Metroid in 21:35?", and the answer is: Yes (give or take a few frames). And such a run would look pretty much like the TAS. I haven't followed the regular speedrunning community quite closely, but as far as I know, bar a few dissenting opinions, in general TASing is seen there as a valuable resource. Lots of work goes into making TASes of popular games, and things like new glitches and routes are being found all the time, and some speedrunners have used these glitches and routes on their regular speedruns. If anything, this goes to show that TASing is not purely theoretical, but that TASing techniques can work on the real console: The same glitches work there as well (assuming a human can pull them off, ie. they don't require frame perfection to trigger).
Posted: 3/31/2010 5:33 PM
Post subject: Re: Happy April fools!
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
henke37 wrote:
It's about that time again. So I figured that we could use a topic to track all the submissions that are obviously going to be rejected tomorrow. As they show up, post a link to their submission page.
The relatively recently submitted Duck Hunt TAS would have made a perfect april fools submission, but it was submitted too early and not really in jest...
Posted: 3/30/2010 8:31 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Kumquat wrote:
I think we should be allowed to change them however we like (within the system's limitations, of course), and they should be recorded in the movie file.
You mean the movie file should change the system settings of the (emulated) console before it starts the game? (Is that even possible? Don't most older consoles and handhelds start the game immediately, without any possible system menus popping up first?)
Posted: 3/30/2010 1:14 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
MrGrunz wrote:
japanese text saves a shitload of time ;) you won't believe how much it actually saves, it is a lot
This proves that Japanese is a lot faster to read than English... :P
Posted: 3/27/2010 8:13 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
arflech wrote:
The only good thing about MS Works is being able to open files that some jerkoff sends to you in the proprietary Works format (open-source implementations are incomplete), but I believe Microsoft even makes available a converter for that.
AFAIK Microsoft offers viewers for most/all of their proprietary file formats free to download. If they aren't installed in the system already, they can be found at microsoft.com somewhere. It's not like one needs to buy MS Office/Works/whatever just to view files made with them.
Posted: 3/26/2010 12:10 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Dacicus wrote:
No floppy drive :'( :'( :'(
Maybe that point was in jest, but anyways, I thought laptops stopped having floppy drives something like 10 years ago or such. And who needs floppy drives anymore? USB memory sticks have effectively replaced them 100% long time ago. They serve the exact same purpose and have several orders of magnitude more capacity.
Posted: 3/26/2010 6:55 AM
Post subject: Re: Making our own game
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
henke37 wrote:
  • You don't need one to make a game.
One what?
Kuwaga wrote:
Flash doesn't strike me as a good choice. It's not very performative nor accurate, is it?
Why does that matter? If the TASing support is in the game itself, it doesn't matter if the game runs at 100 FPS in one computer and at 1 FPS in another.
Posted: 3/25/2010 10:05 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
EEssentia wrote:
The cinematics are just annoying, if you ask me. They are not part of the true TAS--they're skipped as fast as possible! They're not really meant to be watchable/readable.
Maybe we could then also skip the long side-hopping parts. They are annoying and don't contribute to anything. It's just Link traveling from one place to another, without anything important happening, and on the contrary being very annoying. (And a TAS tries to skip these travels also as fast as possible, after all.) Conversations with NPCs are all skipped as fast as possible in a TAS and aren't meant to be watchable/readable, so skip those as well. When Link gets an object from a chest, then those aren't "really" part of the TAS either. Remove those too. Climbing long ladders is boring and also done as fast as possible. Useless. Skip them. Hey, if we cut out all the boring parts we'll end up having a 5-minute run through Ocarina of Time. No boring parts whatsoever.
Posted: 3/25/2010 9:56 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
This run feels very well suitable for TASing. It's short and sweet, and watching it is quite entertaining. (Maybe I am somewhat biased because I have played the game in the past, but still...)
Posted: 3/25/2010 9:54 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
rex4 wrote:
For the movie that will obsolete this one one day, could someone please make an edited movie which, even very roughly, have cutted all the cinematics etc (and put its link on the submission, not obscurely in one of the many pages of the discussion about the submission) ? You really spend more time watching/skiping them than watching the run...
I have to disagree with that sentiment. The cinematics are an important part of what makes watching the TAS entertaining. At least 80% of the actual gameplay is Link side-hopping (with that annoying "uh! oh! huh! ah!" repeating over and over and over and...). The cinematics provide not only entertainment in the form of some kind of storytelling, but they also give a nice break from that constant moaning. Remove the cinematics and there will be almost nothing else left than the annoying moaning. Besides, editing the video goes against the basic principle that we don't edit videos (which would be true cheating): We show exactly how the game is completed as fast as possible, no faster.
Posted: 3/24/2010 3:17 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
zaphod77 wrote:
Since the game has a source of entropy not depend on input from the player in any way, this INVALIDATES ANY TAS of said game.
TASes simulate what would happen if a perfect, god-like entity would play the game. Such perfect entity would also know when to start playing so that any possible random states will be exactly as they should. A TAS simply simulates starting off at the perfect moment. It's still in theory possible to replicate the TAS in the real hardware if we assumed infinite knowledge (even if this is not possible in practice).
Posted: 3/24/2010 3:13 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
henke37 wrote:
Violence wouldn't be a run category, but a game category.
Not all tags define a run category. Many of them are simply descriptive.
Posted: 3/23/2010 9:49 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I'm wondering how having two separate streams (both with the original length of the run) affects file size compared to having only one stream, even if the one stream has double amount of pixels (while keeping the same visual quality). mpeg quality/bitrate does not scale linearly with resolution. Doubling the amount of pixels does not mean you have to double the bitrate to keep the same visual quality. (Of course this particular case might be exceptional in that the two streams would actually have completely different and independent content, and one of them would most probably be a mostly static image with only little change, with most games. It might even be that encoding it into two separate streams actually allows for the file size to be smaller than with one stream because one of the streams can be encoded with a significantly lower bitrate.)
Posted: 3/23/2010 9:44 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Some keyboards are internally constructed in such way that certain key combinations can be all pressed at once while others can't (even if the amount of keys being pressed at once is the same). If your keyboard is one of those, then trying different remappings of the keys might give positive results. However, key autoholding sounds like a better and more convenient solution overall (after all, you just have so many fingers to control multiple characters...)
Posted: 3/22/2010 8:52 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
onReload wrote:
The argument about not knowing what's going on is absurd, by the way. English is my first language and I have no idea what's going on in most of the videos on this site.
In this particular case, if you watch the video, you'll notice that there's a lot of text which is shown on screen long enough to be easily read and understood (provided you know the language, of course). Using the English version is very warranted entertainmentwise.
Posted: 3/20/2010 9:14 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
sgrunt wrote:
Firstly, popularity of a game is not something which should have an impact of whether a game will be published or not
That may be so in theory. However, sometimes it might be a good idea to use a more pragmatic approach: After all, we are offering a service to people, and sometimes it might be a good idea to offer what people want. Popularity of the game is one factor which can be used to determine whether people want to see a run or not. After all, the rules have always been somewhat flexible. (This was not an opinion on whether this particular run should have been published or not. It was just a generic opinion.)
Posted: 3/19/2010 11:25 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I think I'm leaning towards my own suggestion I made many pages ago: Publish, but penalize the technical rating because of known improvements. Publication doesn't have to make this a precedent (if someone in the future tries to allude to this, just ignore him or make an argument about exceptions not nullifying rules). After all, the site is about entertainment, not about competition (although competition can produce good results when done in good faith).
Posted: 3/18/2010 3:02 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Nitpicking, but "flash emulator" is a misnomer. What one emulates is hardware. Programs are run either natively, interpreted or by a runtime system (which is often a bytecode interpreter, but with some languages and runtimes could have a JIT compiler in order to run the code natively). I don't know about the technical details of Flash, but I have the understanding that it's byte-compiled, after which the flash player/plugin interprets this byte code (in which case "flash interpreter" or "flash runtime" would be more accurate).
Posted: 3/17/2010 10:30 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
sgrunt wrote:
Further subdividing the tag into tags as "Corrupts memory", "Uses zipping glitches" (or something similar), "Sequence breaks"/"Uses glitches to skip semi-important goals" (similar to an old tag), etc. would help people find runs more in line with their personal interest than just a generic "run abuses large bugs / lots of bugs"-type tag.
Maybe instead of doing that we should approach this from the opposite direction. In other words, rather than specifying in each video which glitches and other TASing techniques the run uses, we make a list of specific glitches and other techniques, and put links to movies which use those techniques there. This way if someone wants to see a movie which uses a specific TASing technique, he can check that list and pick a movie.
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