Posts for Warp


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Kejardon wrote:
DaTeL237 wrote:
that's a property of float calculations... and integer (exact) numbers usually won't suffice
Having programmed a good bit myself and understanding various ways to store numbers, this is a really silly statement. Integers are far more appropriate for basically all position variables. I can't think of a case where I'd prefer a float instead.
That depends on the accuracy and range of the positions you want to use. Sure, eg. 32-bit integers have a rather large range of possible values. However, if you need to represent the location of something relatively precisely, and your level is very large, it just might be that the 32-bit integer is not enough. Even if it is enough to pinpoint any location, the integers may fall short when you want to move a location in a rectilinear way towards a given direction, especially if the direction can be defined relatively accurately. Basically what you are doing here is fixed-point arithmetic. The problem with fixed-point arithmetic is that increasing accuracy decreases range, and vice-versa. If your fixed-point values have a too low accuracy (too few bits reserved for the "decimal part"), you will get large rounding errors, which may become obvious eg. when moving objects around. On the other hand, if you have large accuracy (many bits reserved for the "decimal part"), the minimum-maximum range will suffer. Also there's only so much you can do with fixed-point arithmetic. Representing very small or very large values is impossible after a certain point. Even if your locations never get even close to these limits, intermediate values in calculations may get very large or very small, and overflow/underflow, screwing up the results. Floating point arithmetic alleviates this problem by having a dynamic range (with a fixed accuracy). If you use 64-bit floating point values, you will even get a larger range of integer values than you would get with 32-bit integers. And the great thing is that floating point arithmetic is not especially slow because it's hardware-accelerated.
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Kejardon wrote:
Why would you even use an exponential value for a character's position?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-1985 Guess what FPUs use.
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qFox wrote:
The reason for condoned consoles, as stated above, is to verifiy that a player indeed only used tools that did not affect the game whatsoever (and also to have an exact framecount, which is rather difficult to do on youtube).
It's rather ironic that in the regular speedrunning community it's a rule that the speedrun must be made in a real console because if it was made in an emulator there's no way to verify if cheating was done, while in the TAS community it's the exact opposite: TASes must be made with an emulator rather than with a console because it's the only way to make sure that no cheating was done.
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How about we start smaller? Are there any graphics artists among the readers? How about creating TAS-related wallpapers, logos, icons, skins (eg for winamp), themes (eg. for firefox, PSP, etc), and so on?
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arflech wrote:
Basically, whenever any Mickey Mouse property is about to enter the public domain, Disney leads a lobbying charge to get Congress to move the goalposts back
Disney is rather hypocrite in this matter. For instance, they didn't have any problem adapting "The Jungle Book" from 1894 only a few years after it entered public domain by natural copyright expiration.
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Xkeeper wrote:
Screw the game, I have Lua!
Red dots on a black background, using low-quality mpeg encoding? The dots are practically invisible, so all that is left is a white square moving around.
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Deviance wrote:
The "Frame Battles" are what really killed most of the fun imo
I think that's not exactly accurate. The same basic goal has existed from the very beginning: To complete the game as fast as possible, using any means possible. Already when there were something like 20 movies published, people were already commenting and suggesting tiny shortcuts which could save fractions of a second in existing publications. That phenomenon hasn't changed a bit. What has changed is the tools. Back then all we had was famtasia. That's it. Just famtasia. That emulator didn't have luxuries like frame advance and it was very prone to breaking your movie if you loaded the wrong savestate (because the movie was not saved in the savestate file). If you want to think that frame polishing has killed most of the fun, then the major culprit for this are the emulators and other tools, not the people making the movies. The goals haven't changed, only the tools. Now we do have better tools to save that last frame, and people are using them. I would, in fact, say that it's plain wrong to blame the TASers, because they are doing just what the whole TASing has been always about. What you and the others are remembering about the "good old days" is basically the limited emulator tools, which more or less forced imperfect movies to be made (against the goals of TASing). What I find ironic is that people seem to always complain about how extreme frame polishing is boring and that the videos should be more about entertainment and fun, yet when suggestions have been made (like a dozen of times already, during the years) about creating special categories for that exact purpose (eg. machinima videos, "powerplay" videos, etc.) it never catches up. People will just nitpick and complain, and nobody will actually go and do something to implement those suggestions.
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As a generalization of the situation, suppose you have an array of n elements, and each element can have a range of values between 0 and (m-1) (in other words, the total amount of possible array contents is m^n). Also suppose you fill it with consecutive values starting from 0, mod m (ie. each time you put the value (m-1) you start over from 0, etc). How many unique permutations does the array have?
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This is an easy one, but got me puzzled for a while when I encountered it in something I was coding. Assume you have an array of 24 integers. Each element of that array can get a value between 0 and 7. Thus the total amount of different contents for such as an array is 8^24 ~ 4*10^21 Now assume that you fill the array with some values and then calculate all the possible permutations of that array. The amount of permutations for 24 elements is: 24! ~ 6*10^23 Now here's the apparent paradox: The total amount of different contents is about 4*10^21, and naturally all those permutations should be among them as well. How come the total amount of permutations, 6*10^23, is way larger than the total amount of possible different array contents?
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moozooh wrote:
Arguably MM1 is the most glitched game in the series, which is to say, it's so glitched it's actually incomprehensible. MM2 is also glitched but is noticeably easier on the brain, so I pick it over MM1.
OTOH, it might be a good idea to have at least one starred run with the notion that "when we say we abuse glitches, we really mean it", and the MM1 run is the quintessential example. There are tons of no or only lightly glitched starred runs, so does it harm to have at least one which really shows off what glitch abuse is all about?
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arflech wrote:
I once heard "Dragostea Din Tei" at Wal-Mart.
Well, I haven't heard anything at a Wal-Mart because I have never been to one. Take that.
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CSS supports non-repeating background images (and the non-repeating flag can be set for the horizontal and vertical separately). It should be fairly trivial to set it up as thus.
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arkiandruski wrote:
It is three player. The Genesis version of Lost Vikings allows for cooperative play, so up to three people can take control of a Viking. The TAS uses three controllers and controls all three vikings simultaneously.
I see. I may have been remembering an older version of the run.
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rogueyoshi wrote:
ill be upping this to youtube tonight. run is way too good...
A 3-hour movie which is 461 megabytes in size to youtube? I must be missing something here.
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Baxter wrote:
Lost Vikings (3 players)
Lost Viking is not a three-player game by any definition of the word. - It's a 1-player game. There isn't even a multiplayer option (AFAIK; at least the PC version didn't). - Consequently, it's played with one single controller. - The playable characters are not played simultaneously, but in turns. - Moreover, controlling three playable characters in alternation is part of the core gameplay, and mandatory to complete the game. A multiplayer game is, by definition, a game where more than one human player, using more than one controller, one for each player, control that many (optional) playable characters. Categorizing Lost Vikings as a 3-player game is as silly as categorizing Command&Conquer as a 1000-player (or whatever) game for the sole reason that the player can control that many playable characters. (And no, this doesn't mean the Lost Vikings TAS isn't enjoyable.)
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I have noticed the same problem sometimes, although not from tasvideos torrents. Redownloading the torrent always helped.
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curtmack wrote:
(this usage will be familiar to speakers of French, who have two "they" pronouns, one for entirely female groups and one for all-male or mixed groups)
As far as I remember, it was the same in Spanish: Masculine pronouns also doubled for gender-neutral pronouns when talking about mixed-gender groups of people. AFAIK, it has always been the same in English: "Man" can refer to a masculine person, but also to a person in general (eg. "mankind", "where no man has gone before"). Also, AFAIK, masculine pronouns have been used as gender-neutral pronouns as well. It has only been in recent decades that political correctness has introduced the completely artificial notion into the English language that using the masculine pronouns and nouns for people in general is not "politically correct".
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Kirkq wrote:
Is there some place documenting exactly how to not make these sorts of complicating errors when making an N64 TAS? I skimmed through the FAQ and found nothing of particular interest on the subject. Perhaps I'm not looking in the correct spot?
I think someone should make a page for this.
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Rridgway wrote:
Note: I am not talking about our emotional aspects, such as language and emotions, although our regional annotations (accents) are not exclusive to us.
Whenever there's a discussion about "what is it that humans have that other animals don't have, what makes humans so special?", it always goes like: "Humans can do thing X." "But animal species Y can also do that. Thus it's not a defining character of the human species." Repeat ad infinitum. What they usually fail to see is that humans have all those qualities *at the same time*, while the listed animal species only have one or two of them at a time. No animal species has the combination of qualities as humans do, even if no single quality is exclusive to humans.
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Princess Peach is certainly the epitome of "Damsel in distress". When you look at her, you get the feeling she has been bred for that sole purpose. When you look "damsel in distress" in an encyclopedia, there should be that snapshot above where she says "Do you mean... me?!?" and nothing else is needed. She is kinda cute, though. (And this in a completely non-sexual way.)
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jimsfriend wrote:
why don't we scrap the star thing and have a TAS of the month or something?
I don't see how those would be mutually exclusive.
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Baxter wrote:
Edit: it also says that Bisqwit holds 2 current records... which is true (and thus not outdated).
From the article you get very easily the impression that Megaman is one of them, even though it doesn't explicitly say that. Well, it's not like it's a really big deal. :)
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Dromiceius wrote:
I'll say this, though: if someone makes a solo Tifa run of FF7, I'll watch it no matter how long/redundant it is. :D
I thought Cloud cannot be removed from the party?
Post subject: Solo Character Run
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In games with multiple playable characters (ie. mostly RPGs) it's a relatively common self-imposed challenge to make a Solo Character Run, ie. completing the game using only one playable character. I was wondering what would be the coolness factor of this if done tool-assisted. Of course there are games where you are forced to take the additional playable characters (in these cases the self-imposed challenge could be, for example, to just let the other characters die and never resurrect them, unless the game auto-resurrects them after battle), and whether this is suitable for the category or not would depend on the exact game mechanics. OTOH there are a few games where all but one playable character are optional. The pokemon games are the most obvious example. How high would this category score on the entertainment vs. "no, not yet another category!" scale?
Post subject: Re: TAS Race (new list idea)
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I think he said the pictures were a mock-up, not something he genuinely calculated.
mz wrote:
- To promote significant obsoletions, TASes would get extra points depending on how much of an improvement it has against the obsoleted movie. For example, a new movie 5% faster than the old one would get +5 extra points, a movie 20% faster would get +20 extra points, etc.
Would "100% faster" mean that the new movie is 0 frames in length, or half the frames than the older one? Both interpretations could be sensible: - "n% faster" means that we subtract n% of the frames of the current run. This means that eg. "25% faster" means that, for example, if the old run consisted of 100000 frames, the new run uses 75000 frames. It also would mean that "100% faster" means that the new run is 0 frames long. - "n% faster" means that the old run has n% frames more than the new run. In other words, "25% faster" means that if the new run consists of 100000 frames, it means the old run had 125000 frames. Also "100% faster" means that if the new run consists of 100000 frames, the old run consists of 200000 frames.