Posts for Warp


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duksandfish wrote:
But my 2560x800 is just a little bit bigger.
IMO 800 vertical pixels is way too little, no matter how wide the desktop.
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Dromiceius wrote:
Zsh > Bash Period. :p
I just can't help but to love zsh. For example its smart file completion is unparalleled (at least when properly configured). Examples: * Relatively simple: Suppose you have a bunch of files in the current directory and all of them have og+r permissions, except one which doesn't. You write "chmod og+r " and press tab, and zsh intelligently completes to that one file for which the command makes sense. * Still relatively simple: Suppose that you are inside a directory which has many files, but only one of them is a pdf. You write "acroread " and press tab, and it will complete to that pdf file. * Medium: You write, for example, "mplayer " and press tab twice, and it will list all possible things you could give to mplayer as input, not only the possible video/audio files in the current directory, but also things like "cdda://", "tv://" and so on. Pressing tab again will start cycling through the possibilities. Write "mplayer -al" and press tab, and it completes it to "mplayer -alang". * Getting warm: Write "scp something" and press tab, and if "something" was the beginning of a hostname you have used with scp in the past, zsh will complete to it and add a ":" at the end. Press tab again and zsh will ask you for the ssh login details and then start completing the files/directories on the remote computer. * Freaking mental: Suppose you are inside a directory which is git-revisioned, with many files tracked by git. except for one or a few new files which are not yet. You write "git add " and press tab, and if there was only one such file, it will directly complete to it. If there were several, pressing tab again will list those files, and if you press it again, will start cycling through them. Is there something zsh's file completion can't do? Maybe give you the correct lottery numbers for next week (although I'm sure that's also on the works).
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RT-55J wrote:
Behold my exorbitantly large desktop.
My desktop has more pixels than yours (being 1600x1200).
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How about this version in C, from a programmer's point of view?
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

int main()
{
    const char* const msgs[] =
    { "Correct!", "Congrats!", "That's the right answer!" };
    const int msgsAmount = sizeof(msgs)/sizeof(msgs[0]);

    srand(time(0));
    int n1 = 1 + rand() % 10, n2 = 1 + rand() % 10, answer;

    printf("Add these two numbers together: %d and %d\n", n1, n2);
    scanf("%d", &answer);

    if(answer == n1+n2) printf("%s\n", msgs[rand() % msgsAmount]);
    else printf("Sorry, that's incorrect.\n");

    return 0;
}
(Not that this code is perfect from design point of view, but you should usually try to minimize the amount of conditionals and instead try to make things more generic. In this case an array makes it a lot easier to eg. add new possible congrat messages, or delete existing ones, by simply adding/removing them from the array, without having to write more conditionals for each one.)
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mmbossman wrote:
    *Is in 3D (three planes of motion is harder to control than two) *Has several different ways to travel, with small to medium differences in acceleration, top velocity, and turning speed. *Has random lag frames *Has multiple random number generators controlling everything from enemy placement, to wind simulation, to room transition time. *Has controls which update input randomly *Has decent programming, without major (game-breaking) glitches, but has several small oversights and multiple applications of these oversights.
These also affect the difficulty: * Choices made earlier can affect the RNG in undesired ways much, much later, and there's no easy way to undo the effect with a short backtracking. If you want to undo the effect, you have to backtrack a lot, and hours of TASing go to waste. This does happen with some games and it can be really irritating. * There simply are so many possible choices very frequently in the game, that making a fast run becomes more a question of strategy rather than framegrinding, and tools are of little help making the correct choices. I really like the mentioned Arkanoid as an example of this.
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I hate to admit my ignorance, but what is this "topic review"? I can't find anything like that in the entire site. Maybe I'm just being blind...
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How about Stickyrr? Ok, rather unimaginative, I admit.
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Doesn't that assume that you don't know how the RNG works and consequently you can't calculate in advance what it will produce for a given series of actions? If the RNG has been disassembled and every affecting factor studied, and its behavior monitored with a memory watcher, there's nothing NP-complex about it. (Ok, perhaps it could *still* be NP, maybe, but it would probably require for the RNG to be cryptologically strong, based on the yet-unsolved-in-less-than-NP factorization of huge numbers. I doubt any console games have such high-quality RNGs.)
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Chamale wrote:
Some other games have technical issues which make them harder to TAS, such as most N64 games, games which tend to desynch, and Baseball Simulator 1.000 (crashes at random when you try to load savestates).
I was not really talking about "hard to TAS because the emulator is lacking", but "hard to TAS because of how the game has been designed/implemented", even if the emulator and other tools work perfectly.
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Comicalflop wrote:
Lemme know if you need more. there's still plenty of reasons; I could go on and on.
Thanks for the explanation. This actually made me appreciate that run a lot more. I think I'm going to read that tricks page and watch the TAS again. :)
moozooh wrote:
Arkanoid comes to mind, simply because it's near-impossible to tell what positions and angles will result in an optimal solution. Scripts, bruteforcing, and memory addresses aren't of much help here.
Yes, Arkanoid is indeed one type of game which is really difficult to perfect due to its completely non-linear nature, requiring a lot more tactical thinking than bruteforce tool-assistance. It really excels in that category.
Post subject: Which game is the hardest to TAS?
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While re-watching the Gradius3 TAS I started to wonder which of the published TASes could be considered the hardest one to make. I know from experience that the Gradius3 TAS with the goal of maximal kills is rather hard. There are times when the screen is so crowded with destroyable objects that trying to kill them all is almost impossible (and, in fact, there are a few places where it apparently is impossible to kill them all because the game mechanics simply can't be stretched enough to do that). However, I doubt Gradius3 is the hardest game overall to TAS (which has been published). Of course "hardest" is a rather subjective measurement, and can in fact depend on what you count as "hard". The amount of rerecords per movie length ratio doesn't necessarily correlate with difficulty of TASing, as it may simply be a symptom of the author aiming for frame perfection. It might also be a symptom of one or a few places in the game which require tons of rerecords to get a perfect result, but overall the game might still be relatively easy to TAS (at least for an experienced TASer). There may also be different categories of "difficulty", such as: 1) Playing the game through as fast as possible is relatively easy, but an additional goal makes it very hard, due to its nature, as it stretches the game mechanics to the limit. I think the Gradius3 TAS is a perfect example of this. 2) The game is so difficult even with tool-assistance, that getting the fastest possible completion requires enormous amounts of work and rerecords. The total amount of rerecords might in this case directly correlate with the difficulty of making the TAS. 3) Getting the fastest completion time might not require humongous amounts of rerecords per se, but requires so much luck manipulation that it requires very deep understanding of how the game mechanics have been implemented (such as how the RNG works and what affects it). Often requires memory watching tools and even disassembling and studying the machine code of the game, or creating bots to grind through the hardest luck-manipulation parts. The TAS itself might not be enormously difficult to do once all the relevant information has been gathered, but it's this information gathering and possibly creation of game-specific tools which requires tons of work, and which makes creating the TAS very hard. 4) The game is simply so long that it takes a very long time to create a TAS completion of it. I suppose any of those RPG TASes which took over a year to make could count. The difficulty in this case correlates more to the perseverance needed to create the TAS. Maybe one heuristic for "very hard to TAS" would be if a newbie TASer would have little hope of competing with the current best submission, without extensive experience in TASing. I think it might be fun to give some kind of award or at least mention to the "hardest game to TAS" published. :)
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ShinyDoofy wrote:
There is such a thing called "free speech" - it involves not thinking like everybody else :)
Brian: "You have to be different!" The Crowd: "Yes, we are all different!" Small lonely voice: "I'm not!"
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Isn't there any graphics artist among us who could create similar trophy images for the current winners?
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I see major problems in having a frame-perfect replay system which does not desync: 1) As mentioned, given that the game loads from a CD or DVD, the loading times are completely random (I bet loading can change from run to run by hundreds of frames, completely at random, depending on the state of the physical disk drive, buffers, etc). 2) If the game uses a RNG, it's highly likely that it uses the system's clock to seed it. This makes every run completely different, and there's no way you can affect the system clock with the controller only. (With an emulator this wouldn't be a problem because the emulator can always start the emulated "system clock" from the exact same point.) 3) If the game uses things like vsync, you once again have a source of randomness which is not controllable. It's likely the vsync is not synced to frame perfection with the CPU and other hardware of the machine. I bet a vsync could vary by several, if not even dozens of frames from run to run. A game like Guitar Hero is possible to be played programmatically because the game does not require frame perfection for 100% score, as there's a significant error tolerance.. It's enough for the playing script to be accurate enough for it to work. Even if it drifts by a few frames it doesn't matter with respect to the final score.
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honorableJay wrote:
Too bad Family Feud didn't get done last year, that would've put up a good fight against Pokemon.
At least we know which run will get quite many nominations at the end of this year. :)
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Dwedit wrote:
There is no NES Gryzor. Only Contra or Probotector.
There should be. From the three names, "Gryzor" is the coolest. "Contra" is just banal and mundane. It's like "opposing force" or similar unimaginative names. "Probovector" starts having that cool cyberpunkish sound. However, it's maybe a bit too bombastic, even to the point that it sounds a bit ridiculous. However, "Gryzor" is exotic and cool-sounding, without trying to be too over-the-top (like "Probovector").
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superjupi wrote:
Not every public terminal (actually, very few of them) will have granted you access to a browser that is not Internet Explorer.
I find this rather ironic: One huge goal of public terminals is to make them safe, so that random users won't be able to make harm to the system. And IE is quite notorious for not being very safe. Yet IE is usually the only browser ever used in public terminals. Talk about defeating the whole purpose...
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moozooh wrote:
Btw, the 640x480 encode looks slightly worse at 320x240, as expected.
Note that the 640x480 version has truly more pixel information than the 320x240 (because the former is not just a scaled-up version of the latter), yet it still manages to be rather competitive in quality (even surpassing it) at approximately the same file size. Even if there are more compression artifacts (which is a rather subjective opinion), it's only slightly, as you say. Nowhere near as much as quadrupling the amount of pixels per frame (with truly more information in them) could lead some people to believe.
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Btw, you should add the Milon's Secret Castle to the AVGN list, as he reviewed it recently.
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How about these: http://kapsi.fi/warp/media/JanKenPo-640x480-400kbps.avi http://kapsi.fi/warp/media/JanKenPo-320x240-400kbps.avi http://kapsi.fi/warp/media/JanKenPo-320x240-300kbps.avi Of course it's difficult to say in an absolute scale which one of those has the worst mpeg compression artifacts, as it's rather subjective, but I would dare to say that the two 400kbps videos have at least a rather comparable amount of them. The 640x480 video has more detail in it because of the higher resolution without, IMO, adding significantly to the amount of compression artifacts.
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moozooh wrote:
Do you really believe it's alright to claim that people are wrong without proving it and expect everyone to take your words for granted? If it is so, I'm afraid you need to grow up a bit.
Says the person whose "math" tells that since the larger image has more pixels, all logic says that it cannot be compressed as small as the original image, and makes a condescending post saying so. Your knowledge of math seems to be in par with my ability to remember the exact circumstances of something I did many years ago.
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Ok, fine. I don't have anything to show you. I'm wrong and you are right. The whole suggestion sucks.
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I apologize, but I still find this extremely hilarious:
moozooh wrote:
If you use common sense you'll see that 320x240=76800, while 640x480=307200 pixels, which is 4 times more pixels shown on each frame of a video. No, of course it doesn't explicitly tell that such a video will necessarily consume four times more bitrate, it just means the codec has to compress 4 times as much data overall. There's no way it's going to be more efficient than otherwise, regardless of your experience. Math doesn't work on personal level.
You are basically saying above that, according to "math", a file containing 307200 pixels cannot be compressed to be as small as when compressing a file containing 76800 pixels. Of course that is simply ludicrous. The amount of pixels has absolutely nothing to do with how small they can be compressed (even losslessly). The relevant thing is how much information there is in the file. An image which has been scaled up to quadruple size eg. by linear interpolation of the in-between pixels does have a bit more of information than the original image. However, the amount of information is a fixed amount (basically "each other pixel is the average of the surrounding pixels") and independent of the resolution. The larger image could still be (losslessly) compressed to the same size as the original image (give or take some bytes; I'm talking about magnitudes rather than exact byte counts) because there's no added per-pixel information. If you are unable to get the same image quality for the same bitrate for an up-scaled video, it can only mean one of two things: 1) The video compression format is not smart enough to see the interpolated pixels and take this into account, or 2) you are not using the proper compression options. My experience is that at least some codecs can produce image quality of equal quality with the same bitrate.
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moozooh wrote:
If you use common sense you'll see that 320x240=76800, while 640x480=307200 pixels, which is 4 times more pixels shown on each frame of a video. No, of course it doesn't explicitly tell that such a video will necessarily consume four times more bitrate, it just means the codec has to compress 4 times as much data overall. There's no way it's going to be more efficient than otherwise, regardless of your experience. Math doesn't work on personal level.
The mpeg stream is not storing individual pixels. It's storing information about those pixels. If you upscale a 320x240 image to 640x480, the amount of information in the image has not increased at all. The number of pixels has quadrupled, and the in-between pixels may have been interpolated from the original pixels, but the amount of information conveyed by them has not increased. Even with lossless compression methods you could compress the resulting 640x480 image into the same size as you could compress the original 320x240 image (because, once again, the upscaled image has no additional information compared to the original). You just have to choose the compression technique appropriately. Additionally, mpeg4 searches for shapes in the video to be compressed. If these shapes are represented by vectors, the scale of the shapes doesn't matter.
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I suppose that the point I wanted to make is that because the reason "it looks extremely similar" was given as the main reason for rejection (it was the first reason mentioned in the rejection message), this could set up a bad precedent. For example some of the Super Metroid runs look quite similar to each other, and at least I wouldn't want good runs to be rejected for that reason alone...