Posts for Warp


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Baxter wrote:
Sounds to me exactly the same as tags... and you can already search for that.
Most of the current tags are rather meaningless. The genre tags are not really all that useful, and tags like "abuses programming errors" are even less useful (because of the way they are used). Even if there's a way to list movies which have a certain tag, this feature is certainly pretty well hidden. I suggest more openness.
If you mean, being able to list like the most glitch movies at the top, going down till the least glitched moveis at the bottom
No. I mean there are certain movies which are categorized eg. as "extremely glitched" and then you can list those movies.
I'm sorry, I don't think that it's a good idea.
I find that a bit amusing. First you say that it's already possible to list movies by tags, and then you say it's not a good idea. Does that mean that the feature should be removed? ;)
There is already a tag for abusing programming errors in the game
Which, as used, is completely meaningless and useless (because it's applied liberally to almost any run for the sole reason that the author wanted the tag). Also, it can't be used to find the glitchest runs.
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Aqfaq wrote:
Could someone please add "One player controls 10 characters" tag to the Humans movie. The tag is missing from that movie and the case does not differ in any way from the Maniac Mansion movie, which is said to control 3 characters.
Thinking about it, can we really say that the player is "controlling n characters"? He is certainly not controlling them at the same time, which I think is a relevant thing. He is controlling them sequentially, never controlling more than one character at a time. This is rather different from TASes like gooftroop, where the two characters are genuinely controlled at the same time, with two controllers. Perhaps this distinction should be made, and the existing tags corrected?
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If enough people make enough minigame-tases, someone should make a compilation avi of the best ones. :)
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I think it may be a good idea to at least distinguish between "controls 2 characters", which is rather admirable, and "controls more than 2 characters", which is even more admirable. My original idea was that maybe even more granularity could be used. Controlling 3 characters is "cooler" than controlling just 2, but perhaps not as "cool" as controlling 4 characters. But on the other hand, after a certain point specifying the exact number of controlled characters stops being so relevant. "Controls 8 characters" and "controls 10 characters" are approximately equal in "coolness". That's why I suggested a compromise like "controls over 4 characters".
Post subject: Idea: List movies by category
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Now it's possible to list movies like by console type or sorted by rating. How about creating some categories which could be assigned to movies (similar to the current tags, but with the purpose of this idea) and the possibility to list movies belonging to such a category? For example, one category could be "extremely glitched runs". This category could be applied to runs like rockman, LoZ2-glitched and castlevania-hod-glitched. Then it should be possible to list all movies belonging to this category. This way you could get one listing of "extremely glitched runs".
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How about a more generic "one player controls over 4 characters" for all the cases where more than 4 characters are controlled? IMO no need to create a distinct tag for every possible amount of controlled characters.
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Btw, as I said in my original post, I understand that there may be technical reasons for the runner to use low-quality settings for the game. However, my point was that it doesn't really matter: It still makes the game look bad, and rather boring to watch because it's not visually so impressive as it could be. That's one reason I sometimes dislike some regular speedruns. The optimal thing would be if the game supported recording. Some games actually do (such as for example Quake, or at least its patched version, as the core engine is open source). This way the runner could make the run at any settings he wants, but the video could be created with the highest quality settings. Of course this is just wishful thinking, as only a handful of games support this. Anyways, as for ruining interactive cutscenes, I don't think there's excuse. Ruining them destroys entertainment for no reason.
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Boco wrote:
Well, I'm sorry, but the lack of standardisation of hardware (and effort by developers) means the game looks like crap at low settings, which are the only settings anyone who doesn't have a spare $5000 every 6 months can manage. These are not faults of the speedrunners.
My computer is about 3 years old and it can play FEAR at almost maximum settings (only soft shadows make it too slow). If this speedrunner can only play the game at the lowest possible settings it means his computer must be over 5 years old or something. That's a rather long time in the gaming world.
"Flaws" like "being able to skip the story" and "different graphical experiences for different users" are unique to Western games.
The alternative to "different graphical experiences" is that games are either made for 10 years old PCs, or games are made only for a small amount of people who have a modern PC. It's not like gaming consoles were free of the "having to upgrade" problem. For example, the xbox was introduced in 2001. The xbox360 was introduced in 2005. Only 4 years later. That's quicker than the average PC gamer will buy a new PC. So even if you are a console gamer, if you want the latest and fanciest games you'll have to buy a new console from time to time. Consoles are no better in this regard than PCs. In fact, with consoles the problem may actually be worse: Either you upgrade or you don't play the game at all. With many PC games you can still play the game with your 10yo computer if you want. It may not be the fastest and fanciest, but at least you can.
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I went ahead and added an additional paragraph to that section.
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Too late for anything, but I just got the thought that the still-non-existent future LoZ:OoT run which will obsolete the current one should get an honorary "vaporware TAS of the year" award for being the TAS everyone knows will come and which will obsolete the current one, which everyone has been waiting for forever, but is still nowhere to be seen... :P
Post subject: One thing I hate about (regular) speedruns
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When TASes are considered for publication, the entertainment value has great importance. If there is more than one way of doing something throughout the movie, and especially if these options are all equally fast, the most entertaining option should be chosen, or else the submission has a high probability of being rejected. Also in some cases even some things which may make the run slightly faster might still be rejected if they have an exceedingly negative impact on entertainment. This is a rather good principle in that it ensures a certain quality of entertainment, especially when from several choices the most entertaining one is required. In the regular speedrunning community, however, it seems that they couldn't care less about entertainment. Even in situations where it doesn't really matter speedwise what you do (for example in interactive cutscenes which you can't skip), speedrunners often couldn't give a rat's ass about what is the most entertaining thing to do. They don't have to: Their run will be published anyways. For example the HL:OF speedrun at SDA is a good example of this. In interactive cutscenes, instead of focusing into the story, following it and letting the viewer follow it too, it seems that the speedrunner made the best of his efforts to actually ruin those cutscenes and make them as unwatchable as he possibly could. He did this by, among other things, constantly (and very annoyingly) turning on and off his night vision goggles (this causes a doubly annoying effect: the screen flashes constantly, so it's almost impossible to follow what's happening in the cutscene, and turning the goggles on and off is accompanied with a noise which completely overwhelms the dialog). A lesser example, and one which can be more argued for in terms of speedrunning, but still very annoying, is the FEAR speedrun (well, both of them, actually). The game itself is technically superb: It has superb graphics with very detailed textures, reflections, bump mapping, dynamic lighting and dynamic shadows. The game utilizes this graphics engine very well in many places, eg. by creating very cool dynamic lighting effects. The speedruns, however, have been made with the *lowest* possible graphics settings (low-resolution textures, no bump-mapping, no dynamic shadows) and with the gamma correction turned to maximum (which effectively kills lighting almost completely, making everything look almost flat-shaded). The original game, with high quality settings, looks absolutely superb. The speedruns, with their lowest-possible quality settings and gamma correction turned to maximum, make the game look like absolute crap. Having played the game, looking at the speedruns like that is quite painful. All the marvelous graphics, lighting and shadowing completely destroyed. It almost looks like you were watching Quake2 with a monitor with a way too bright gamma correction. I understand that from a speedrunning point of view they may want to get the highest possible framerate (to be able to react fast to everything), and by bumping gamma correction to the max they ensure that they can see everything, but from the entertainment point of view the visual quality of the video is completely destroyed and absolute crap. These runs would *never* be publishing-worthy as TASes here because of these visual quality issues. Of course they don't care. The speedruns are published nevertheless. They don't give a rat's ass about entertainment issues. Some speedrunners complain that TASing destroys the value of real speedrunning. Well, if they concentrated a bit more on actually making their runs *entertaining*, that would help a lot, IMO. EDIT: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE MAKING STUPID COMMENTS Please don't read selectively "I hate speedruns", skipping everything else, and then make an ass of yourself by commenting on that mistaken assumption. To make things absolutely clear: I like regular speedruns. I follow SDA and check it on a regular basis to see if new speedruns have been published for games I have played or like. Just last week I noticed a new speedrun of Driver (for the PC), which I immediately downloaded and liked. Moreover, I'm a huge fan of the QdQ speedruns and follow them even with more passion. (In fact, I even *bought* Quake (in a pack which had Quakes 1-3) partially because I wanted to see the QdQ speedruns on the actual game.) So no, I do *not* hate speedruns in general. This is *not* an attack on speedruns or the speedrunning community. What I do dislike is that in a few speedruns the runner seems to do his best to annoy the viewer whenever he can and doesn't seem to care at all about how entertaining the "boring" parts (eg. unskippable interactive cutscenes) of the run are. I also dislike when a runner selects the lowest possible graphical settings for the game, making it look like crap (although I understand there may be technical reasons to do that).
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Post-mortem: At 24:25 into the movie you miss one of those rocks. Was it simply physically impossible to get it, or did you simply not notice it?
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Should shorter names be selected (when they save frames) when starting a new TAS of some RPG? Maybe. Depends on the case, really. (If it is done, I really prefer if people used rational characters (such as "C" instead of "Charmander", etc.) instead of some confusing character (such as "!", as used in some run).) Should a movie obsolete another, with the only difference between them being the shorter names? Definitely not. In the vast majority of cases we are talking about several-hours-long RPG runs. Saving some seconds because of shorter names isn't really an issue IMO.
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I actually found a glitch which can be used at least in the first level to save a few seconds (the playable character wraps around from the left and bottom sides of the screen to the right side of the screen, allowing then skipping the jumping game with the dogs). There are also additional strategies that can be used in the last level to save some additional seconds as well. All in all, my run could be improved by something like 20 seconds, give or take 10 seconds, probably. Still not enough to warrant a publication, though. (I assume a publication-worthy run of this game would have to be something like 5 minutes long at max.)
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I think rerecords/s is just fine, and I don't find it unfair at all. It's just a statistic, and an easy one to calculate.
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Hmm, about that battery charging, I'm thinking... Suppose you have a charged and an uncharged capacitor. Now connect one of the pins of the charged capacitor with one of the pins of the uncharged one (leave the other pins unconnected). What happens? I'm actually not 100% certain of what actually happens, but my reasoning is the following: Now there's a metal plate with a high abundance of positive (or negative) charges connected to another metal plate with much less positive (or negative) charges. In other words, there's a potential difference between the two plates. What ought to happen in this case? I believe that the charges will tend to even out, in other words, start moving from the charged metal plate to the uncharged one, until a state of balance is reached. If this is the case, what it effectively means is that the previously-charged capacitor loses part of its charge and the previously-uncharged capacitor gains charge. Now, I don't know if this situation can be compared to batteries, but maybe, just maybe, there's some theoretical plausibility to the battery-charging claim in that video.
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VANDAL wrote:
Batteries eh? I always found this one to be quite funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3qPrlun45c
Just so that nobody gets the wrong impression from that video: http://www.snopes.com/photos/humor/batteryhack.asp
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adelikat wrote:
What is holding this submission up is my general ignorance of this game and inability to answer this: Does this submission match or beat the published "100% kills" movie in number of kills?
From what I saw (before it desynced), it surpassed my movie in number of kills. (Although I can't say for sure for the volcano rocks and the fireballs. Maybe it missed a few fireballs I didn't...)
Post subject: Re: How do in-game gameplay videos work?
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Bisqwit wrote:
In Super Mario Bros I think it is keypad input, because I have seen it desync.
It seems that desyncing recordings are a much older problem than I thought... :P
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I wonder if eg. SDA would refuse to publish a speedrun of this game... (If not, what's the difference?)
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I suppose the technical rating is quite a difficult issue, and one which is very prone to cross-contamination of categories (in other words, if the TAS really sucks on entertainment, almost nobody is going to rate it very high on the technical side either, no matter how perfect it is technically). Rating a TAS for its technical quality would indeed require fair amount of work. Short of trying a TAS yourself, the only other alternative would be to read the submission text carefully (if it contains a "future improvements" type section, that's a quite clear sign that even the author himself was not completely satisfied about the technical quality of his own run) and, especially, the discussion thread about that submission. In the best-case scenario this thread will be full of questions along the lines of "at x:y, why did you do this instead of that", and the author would reply why. Also, in the best-case scenario, there exists a "tricks" page for that game, which you can consult for more information (unfortunately this is so for only a few games). In some cases submission texts assume that you have read all the submission texts of all the previous versions of that run, which requires even more work. If the submission description is terse and the submission discussion thread short, there aren't many options left. Then the only thing that one can do is to try to guess the technical quality of the run by watching it carefully. Of course in some cases this can be misleading: Sometimes something can look like sloppy playing, while in fact it's the most optimal way of playing that part (or doesn't affect the length of the movie negatively). Sometimes it's the other way around: There may be sloppy playing which is very hard to see because it looks optimal to the untrained eye. Sometimes a part of the movie may be optimal for what it's trying to do, but what is unknown to the viewer is that a different, faster route would actually be possible, which would save time. This is practically impossible to know without experience. I suppose that the technical rating means, in practice: "Does it *look* optimal to you, or does it look like it has mistakes/sloppy playing?" While looks can sometimes be deceiving, it's usually the only thing one can estimate. Anyways, it would be nice if people judged both categories separately: First judge from a purely entertainment point of view: Is it entertaining? Is it interesting to watch? Is it fun? Is it awesome? After that, *forget* about entertainment completely, and look at it from a purely technical point of view: Does it *look* technically good? Can you spot obvious sloppy playing? Is there something which could have been done better? Of course one could argue that nowadays most TASes are done in a technically perfect way (at least hopefully): Basically everyone uses frame advance to get frame perfection, and each single part of the run is (at least hopefully) polished to remove even the last wasted frame. In most games absolute optimization of used frames more or less removes the possibility of performing "technical stunts", which could be judged. Maybe technical quality could also be judged by examining things which seem to be optional in the run. For example, if jumping over an enemy can be done in many ways (all of which are equally fast), doing so the closest possible to the enemy (but without getting hit) could score better from a technical point of view than jumping from a safe distance (something which could be achieved in a regular real-time speedrun). Maybe that's also one of the things one could look for when judging the technical quality of the run: How much does it look like it would be possible to do in a regular speedrun, and how much does it look like it really shows off tool-assistance? Does it avoid enemies at pixel precision, instead of lazily jumping earlier? Does it wait for the last possible frame to do something (eg. jump onto a lift), instead of just lazily doing it earlier? In general: When there are several options for performing some action (without wasting time), does it go the lazy way, of does it show off by doing it at an inhumanly precise moment?
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AKA wrote:
Doesn't choose the good ending which while a liittle slower it would have made the movie more interesting to watch as a whole
A little slower? If I'm not mistaken, getting the "good ending" requires you to reach the chapel as Mr Hyde, which effectively means playing the game through twice, once as Dr Jekyll and once as Mr Hyde. Basically they both play the same levels, and you can never pass Dr Jekyll as Mr Hyde, except in the last level (which means you have to reach the last level as Dr Jekyll, then convert to Mr Hyde and play all the levels as him, until you reach the chapel). Only in the last levels you are able to pass Dr Jekyll, reach the chapel, fight the "boss battle" (I read somewhere that the last "boss" takes something like 30 seconds to explode when it's defeated), and then you convert back to Dr Jekyll where you left him off, and have to reach the chapel with him, ie. play the last level with him (although this time there are no enemies). I have no idea how much this all would take, but my guess is that closer to 40 minutes. No thanks?-)
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DarkKobold wrote:
Also, interest free loans? Yes, I can just see the future of that. Loans can be charged interest to offset the risks involved. None of these are a problem. Even interest can be offset by increased production of an economy.
Loan interest is exactly what causes the exponential growth. If a bank lends some money it *has* and later receives the exact same amount of money, nothing special has happened. However, if a bank lends some money it has and later gets *more* money than it lent, that additional money has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from? Note that this extra money got from loan interest is not physical wealth, like valuables or gold. It's just more money, which doesn't correspond to any physical form of wealth. However, now the bank owns "more" than it did before, and thus it can give bigger loans, from this artificially created money. The more loans it gives, the more additional money it gets from the interests, causing the exponential growth phenomenon. At some point the amount of money got from interest far surpasses the amount of money which was originally equivalent to the physical wealth the bank owned. One could argue that the bank should be forced to acquire physical wealth (such as for example gold or property) which corresponds to the additional money gained from loan interest. This wealth has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from? One place where it can come from is natural resources. However, with exponential growth natural resources are spent quite fast. This is more so given that now natural resources are going into two places: They are acquired by the people taking loans, and they are acquired by the bank to compensate their loan interest profits. An interest-free loan means that the bank (or government) only lends what it has, and gets it back later. The bank doesn't make a profit like this, but is it really the purpose of a bank to make profit, or is it purpose to serve the community? If banks were government-run, then there's no need to make profit (assuming an ideal, non-greedy government). The government simply lends some of its wealth to its citizens for limited time.
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Tub wrote:
meh, I guess this tas shouldn't be on tasvideos, but on youtube.
Too bad there's a 10-minute limit. If there wasn't, maybe I could post it there.
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Yeah, this game is insanely hard. I can't understand how anyone could finish this game playing normally. Even doing so tool-assisted was a real challenge. Especially the last level is simply insane.