Posts for Warp

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Posted: 2/20/2010 12:19 PM
Post subject: Re: Input on subframes?
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
arukAdo wrote:
Input in between frames doesnt matter, the game wont pull or use it
Do you mean that it's physically impossible for games to read controller input more than once per frame (eg. because the hardware updates the button flags only once per frame)? Or do you mean that there exist no console games which read controller input more often than once per frame (and behaves differently if it changes between frames)? (Wouldn't this also depend on which console we are talking about?)
Posted: 2/20/2010 12:13 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
petrie911 wrote:
The difference between normal inputs and resets is that, for normal inputs, the input is placed in some register, while the instructions on what to do with the input still comes from the game code. However, pressing the reset button delivers an instruction directly to the processor that doesn't come from the game's code. This, I believe, is what Warp means when he says that the movie file is affecting the console itself.
More or less, yes. I consider resetting the console in the middle of the game to be equivalent to suddenly pulling the plug, which shuts down the console, and then plugging it in again. (There might be some technical differences between the two, but from a practical point of view they are effectively the same thing.) If emulators started supporting emulating shutting down the console by cutting its power supply, would it become an acceptable TASing technique? Again, this starts feeling the same as physically damaging the console to make the game misbehave in a certain way (or using an extraneous device to affect the game, such as a gamegenie).
Posted: 2/19/2010 7:51 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
FODA wrote:
Also, I think that pressing left+right must go in the same cathegory as messing with the hardware. It's not a programming overlook because the console isn't physically supposed to allow for that button combination, so it's a bit of a "cheat".
I'm not so sure of that. If you were able to physically tap left and right alternatively fast enough (let's say, a thousand times per second), I wonder if the hardware could perceive that as if both buttons were pressed at the same time and send the game a notification for both buttons. If that's the case then it's not so much abusing the hardware as purely playing with godlike abilities. Also: Do all existing gamepads physically stop left+right being pressed at the same time?
Posted: 2/18/2010 11:11 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
moozooh wrote:
What exactly is factored into download rate?
It's simply how many times the video file has been downloaded (through bittorrent). Of course this number is not very reliable because there have been several resets on those download statistics during the existence of the bittorrent server, so the download amounts only go back so far. Also nowadays those download amounts are getting less and less informative because of the video streaming available. Many people probably now watch the streamed versions rather than downloading the files, which probably skews any "popularity" counts. These are the reasons why the download counts have been commented out in the statistics page. (I wonder if the statistics routine could get hold of how many times a youtube or other video stream has been watched...) (Edit: If you meant how the ratio value is calculated in the "all-time audience favorites" page, the formula is mentioned there.)
Posted: 2/18/2010 8:14 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Maybe this kind of poll could work with videogame characters? Or videogames?
Posted: 2/18/2010 8:07 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
If a better alternative to "movie file" is devised, it would be a plus if the name was so descriptive that people wouldn't have to guess what exactly it's referring to. While "input file" and "key input file" are clearly distinct from "video file", they might still cause confusion about what they are referring to. Something like "emulator keypress recording file" would be more descriptive, but is it too much of a mouthful?
Posted: 2/18/2010 7:56 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Kuwaga wrote:
Is there no way to make these videos stop buffering across their loop points? Things could get pretty slow on a big page like that.
Yeah, noticed that problem myself too. Pretty annoying. If you have watched several videos, the only way to make them stop buffering and clogging your connection is to go to another page and then come back (or to wait for all of them to finish loading). Reduces the usability of the feature a bit.
Posted: 2/18/2010 7:11 PM
Post subject: A question of terminology
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I think the term "movie file" is rather confusing. It refers to the file where the emulator stores the keypresses, but somebody who doesn't know this could get easily confused and think it refers to the multimedia video file (avi, mkv, mp4 or whatever) where the run has been encoded. I understand that the term is used more or less because of historical reasons. Some/most emulators use that term to refer to their recording files. The term "movie file" is used quite prominently in the movie pages, such as "Download snes9x movie file (.smv)". (The term "movie page" itself is slightly confusing here as well). This confusion about keypress files and video files actually sometimes causes problems when discussing about them. Sometimes it's easy to get confused about whether someone is talking about keypress files, video files, or both. Maybe it would be a good idea to clear up the terminology and make it more unambiguous?
Posted: 2/18/2010 6:55 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I'm honestly surprised nobody has yet offered a bounty for Ocarina of Time any%, which must be one of the most anticipated runs of all time (and reaching levels of vaporware comparable to Duke Nukem Forever).
Posted: 2/18/2010 4:53 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
In my personal experience playing an RPG through before watching the TAS makes the TAS approximately 1000% more enjoyable, so it's highly recommended, if you have the time. (The same is true for many other games as well, eg. Super Metroid.)
Posted: 2/15/2010 6:48 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Btw, some of you might be interested in the Atop The 4th Wall reviews. What the AVGN is to videogames and the Nostalgia Critic is to classic movies/tv-shows, Linkara is to comics. The reviews are actually quite good, IMO. Unrelated, but still on the same website: this is one of the funniest sketches I have seen in a while.
Posted: 2/15/2010 4:42 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Guybrush wrote:
I say it like I say tan, but replace the n with an s.
"Taser" is an informal abreviation for "tool-assisted speedrunner" (or "superplayer", if you really want to nitpick), but how do you pronounce it? Like the word "taser", or like TAS" (as you describe) with an "er" attached?
Posted: 2/15/2010 2:56 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
4 digits ought to be enough for anybody!
Posted: 2/13/2010 5:10 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Truncated wrote:
Boy band metal time! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6I-d7Tyh4Y
Is that what they call "infernal racket"?
Posted: 2/13/2010 1:56 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I think "100" is a bad category name (to be used in the file names) because it's easily confused with the movie id number, especially since the "default" run doesn't have a category name at all. So I suggest that either: 1) Use a word instead of "100" (even if it looks a bit clumsy), or 2) always include a category field, even for the "default" run. I also think the author name should stay. It's more distinctive and memorable than a cold abstract movie id number (in cases where the same game&category has been obsoleted many times and hence the only differentiating thing between them would be the movie id number).
Posted: 2/13/2010 1:47 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Kumquat wrote:
How do I make subtitles that can be used with the videos downloaded from this site?
I'm not an encoder, so you should take this with a grain of salt. If you want to create soft subtitles which can then be embedded into the video file, the two most popular formats are, AFAIK, SRT and SubStation Alpha (the former being a very simplistic format with only rudimentary features, while the latter is very advanced with tons of features, and hence becoming very popular with the fansubbing community). If you create such a file you can make most media players use it alongside the video file, but it's also possible to embed the file into the video file as well (in which case players will automatically give the option to use it).
Posted: 2/11/2010 6:26 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Derakon wrote:
...why? The Gameboy's resolution is only 160x144...
Because it's kewl.
Posted: 2/10/2010 10:45 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Heisanevilgenius wrote:
4. April Fools Day is like two months away, dude.
This would have, indeed, made a perfect April Fools Day submission. Pity that Randil "wasted" it by submitting it now... :) (A submission worthy of April Fools Day by no means implies that it's not worthy of publication. There have been at least one past example where such a "joke" submission was actually such a good idea that it was published and has been regularly obsoleted ever since.) As for whether this run can be considered entertaining or not, let's not forget that Duck Hunt was one of the most widely spread games of the NES because it came bundled with tons of them. Hence a significant percentage of the target audience of this website has at one point in their life played this game, which might raise interest in seeing it beaten perfectly.
Posted: 2/10/2010 10:11 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Dromiceius wrote:
Chess is a great idea. Not only are there hilariously stupid chess AIs on '80s hardware, it should be possible to do bizarre things, like march your king into the enemy camp and still win.
Undoubtedly. However, the problem, as I see it, is that difficulty level and entertainment are on the opposite ends of the scale: 1) For the run to be even mildly entertaining the computer has to move fast (preferably a few seconds per move), but in that case the computer doesn't have any significant amount of time to be a fair challenge and the whole thing just doesn't make much sense. It would be humiliating the computer without giving it any chance to actually fight back. Also the challenge of actually beating the computer to pulp is next to nil at such low difficulty settings. (This is especially true with old consoles and home computers which didn't have any computing prowess to speak of.) 2) On the other hand, setting the difficulty to max, or even to a fair amount so that the computer actually gives a fair challenge, would result in an extremely long and boring run where nothing happens 99.9% of the time. Maybe if a TAS is done with a fair difficulty setting, an exception to the publication rules could be applied and the video cut so that the waiting time between moves is reduced to just a few seconds (maybe with some kind of subtitle or whatever telling how much time really passed).
Posted: 2/10/2010 3:09 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
It looks like a kanji drawn in cursive or semi-cursive script, which might make it hard to recognize for people who aren't accustomed to reading them.
Posted: 2/10/2010 2:49 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I once had a chess game for the ZX Spectrum which was really, really bad. Not only was it really weak, but it would always do the exact same moves (in other words, if you have beaten it once, you could beat it again by playing in the exact same way). But the worst (and most hilarious) thing was that it had a bug that made it not recognize checking in some situations, so it would move something else than the king (or protect it). You could then capture the computer's king and the game would then simply continue. Of course from that point forward the game became more or less nonsensical, but that didn't stop the program from continuing. (I don't remember exactly what happened if you ate all the computer's pieces. I think it then just stood there doing nothing because there was nothing to do.)
Posted: 2/9/2010 12:21 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
dunnius wrote:
I'm opposed to removing publications because they are old or that improvements have been found.
Me too. But that's oversimplifying the issue. The question was not whether runs with known improvements should be removed. The question was whether runs which have been bested by a regular speedrun should be removed. That's a considerably more pressing issue than a simple "it has known improvements". (Note: I'm not saying they should be removed, I'm just clarifying what I understand is being discussed.) Also the other issue was about published runs which break the rules, but that's a bit different. It feels a bit inconsistent that rule-breaking runs are protected from removal for the simple reason that many years ago they got past the radar, for whatever reason. Why do they deserve such protection? Is getting published some kind of merit that must not be removed, ever?
Posted: 2/8/2010 11:38 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Xkeeper wrote:
then why not put it at the end to minimize amount of redundand typing someone has to do every time they decide to watch a movie
I think the main priority in the order of the different fields in the name is not how laborious it is to type, but how they will sort when listed alphabetically. One could argue that sorting primarily by system is not a good idea, but that's a different (although valid) point.
Posted: 2/8/2010 11:33 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
upthorn wrote:
If you go by the rules for palindromes, punctuation and spacing are discarded in the comparison, so the output would satisfy the requirements.
If we are talking about quines, I don't think preserving only the alphabetic characters is enough, especially if losing the punctuation changes the meaning of the sentence. The result of a quine should also be a quine in itself, which when run produces the same result.
Posted: 2/8/2010 11:30 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Xkeeper wrote:
This is for the key input file, smartass.
Since when? People have been talking about both the recording and the video files. What, are you suggesting we use a different naming scheme for them? Wouldn't that be confusing?
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