Posts for Warp


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I have for long liked the idea if Bisqwit created a separate "sub-site" of tasvideos, something separate (but linked from here), where relatively short tool-assisted playaround videos could be published showing something else than game completions. Videos like "the weirdest way of beating the boss" or "the most amusing way of crashing the game" (not necessarily the fastest, as suggested). The videos wouldn't have to start from reset but from anywhere (but the tricks shown should be (at least in theory) replicable in the real console by normal play). Entertainment from something else than just completing the game. These would obviously not be "speedruns", so the sub-site would have to be named as something else.
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arkiandruski wrote:
As for RPG runs: the problem with those is you need a knowledge of the game before you notice what's happening. Memories of the game are what makes the run amazing, not watching the battles, so I'm not sure there will be an RPG run that will appeal to a new user. (When I first saw the Chrono Trigger run, as well as all the Dragon Warriors, I said "so?")
You assume that "new users" have never played those games. Many have (they are, after all, widely popular games), and many visitors might be interested in seeing a TAS of them.
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Morrison wrote:
Anyone agree or disagree with some of these ideas?
Personally I think I agree with basically everything you wrote. I have for long complained about having so many starred Super Mario movies. They are just too many. In my opinion the rule of thumb should be: A maximum of 2 starred movies for a given game franchise (such as Super Mario), and only if the game franchise consists of very many games. Speaking of the SMB movies, personally I like the SMB2 one more than the SMB3 one.
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FODA wrote:
The people who think we're cheating didn't read to understand our goals. Or they don't have a sufficiently open mind.
In theory there is a "legit" interpretation to "they are cheating": Someone might have the opinion that the only admirable way of speedrunning a game is to do it without the aid of any ancillary program (such as an emulator) nor in-game "cheats" not normally available in normal play (such as using a god-mode in certain FPS games), and that someone using an emulator to make a tool-assisted speedrun is "cheating" and shows no skill. Even someone who fully understands how and why TASes are made could still think negatively of them and call them "cheating" because he thinks that there's nothing admirable in them. Of course I'm certain that at least 99% of people who call TASes "cheating" do it for the wrong reason: They think that we try to pass TASes for regular speedruns, trying to fool people, basically creating a fake speedrun in order to gather the admiration of the speedrunning fans.
Banned User
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GashouseGorilla wrote:
The reason I asked this question is because, most of the time, your TAS speedruns are the only ones posted on Google Video. It's possibly the only easy way for non-experienced gamers to see the entire game, and when you skip an entire section of the game by abusing errors, they don't get to see everything.
Speedruns (tool-assisted or not) are often not a good way to see a complete walkthrough of a game. Many regular speedruns skip entire sections of the game too (the Quake, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 speedruns being excellent examples). The only difference with tool-assisted ones is that we try to find the absolute extreme minimal completion time without the limits imposed by human imperfection. That's one of the basic goals of TASes: How fast could the game be completed if it human imperfection was not a limiting factor? Regular speedruns are awesome shows of skill, and they are really admirable in that category. However, TASes do not and don't even attempt to show skills. They just attempt to show what would happen if the human factor was removed completely.
Also, a lot of people on Google Video flame you guys for being cheaters (which is technically true, because you're using emulator tricks).
Not abusing programming errors in the games would do little to help that problem, now would it? So I don't see your point here.
They want to see real speedruns with no cheats.
And how exactly would avoiding exploiting programming errors in the games help that? Tool-assisted speedruns are still tool-assisted even if programming errors in games were not exploited. If they want to see regular speedruns they should go to SDA. I really don't understand your point here.
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LagDotCom wrote:
Look at adelikat's Gradius for an example of a movie that ends input extremely early - further input can actually kill the player. It's assumed that a watcher would not provide the input, thus, the movie completes the game.
Can the game be completed faster by adding additional input to the movie?
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Blublu wrote:
Ending the input early should only be allowed if it does not result in the game completing slower.
Actually the section of the rules I posted the link to seems to assume, at least in spirit, that that's the case. In other words, that the game completion itself is the same in both cases (give or take a few frames, possibly), but the record file could be ended a bit earlier than the actual game ending, thus saving a few frames from the record file. I'm not even sure that the person who wrote that section of the rules was thinking about option #1 actually making the game completion slower than option #2. If that's the case then it seems that there's no rule for this case. The letter of the rules (although possibly not the spirit) would allow such a movie, but it may just be a case of nobody having thought of such possibility. Of course one could argue that defining the exact point at which the game "ends" might be quite fuzzy with many games. Does the game end at the frame when the last hit to the last boss is delivered? Does the game end when the last boss dying animation ends? Does the game end at the first frame that the screen changes after the boss has been defeated? It's quite clear that the game has not ended if the last boss is still alive. However, if the rule is "the movie recording must play the entire game to the end" it becomes a problem of definition what is this endpoint in this game. When can the movie recording be ended for it to be acceptable? If the movie recording is stopped 0.5 seconds before the last boss dies, is that acceptable? (There certainly are published examples where there's even a larger margin between movie and and last-boss-death.) Edit: Perhaps the rule could be: "The movie file can only be ended when it's not possible to complete the game any faster by adding additional input after the movie has ended." Of course someone could feel that's unfair. A movie is a movie.
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VANDAL wrote:
Randil wrote:
Allright, after how much time? I turbo'ed several thousand frames without seeing the boss kill himself.
About 11,000 frames later.
This poses a rather interesting question related to http://tasvideos.org/Rules.html#3_the_exact_termination_point_is_subject_to_debate_ Whether the "correct" termination point is #1 (as in this case) or #2 is subject to great debate and controversy. So far it hasn't mattered too much since in the few cases where this has been an issue the difference in movie lengths can be counted in a few frames. However, in this case the difference is enormous and the question becomes much more relevant. It becomes even more relevant given that doing #2 would end the game (vs. end the input) much sooner than #1. One problem I see with this is that the viewer is watching the gameplay, not the input. Even if the movie shows the "playback finished" text (or whatever it was), it can still be confusing why the game is taking so long to end. Question: How much longer would the movie be if you beated the boss as fast as possible?
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What is worse, completely lame sarcasm, or people don't getting it?
Banned User
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Location: Finland
Can you watch the videos at Stage6 without having to log in? I assume you can't watch them online without installing a third-party player. Is this player available for linux? OTOH I think not many linux users want to install a player program just to watch videos from one specific site, but instead they would want to watch them with their own favorite player. (I believe that most linux users have grown naturally wary towards dubious "third-party" closed-source "you must install this if you want to access the contents of this site" type programs and are not likely to install anything like that.)
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moozooh wrote:
What's wrong with GoogleVideo which has nearly no limitations, far less restrictions than YouTube, and doesn't require installing anything?
Poor download size / image quality ratio?
Banned User
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I may be a bit obtuse here, but I don't really understand what's the big idea in this game. It feels like a "how long before you get exasperated and start moving the mouse around wildly, not accomplishing anything" type of game.
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Baxter wrote:
That game reminds me a lot of a game I that is in my opinion a lot better: Gelactic Gravity Golf
I find it quite confusing and less interesting.
Post subject: Another addictive flash game: Gravity pods.
Banned User
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Location: Finland
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Banned User
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Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Bisqwit wrote:
When the registration e-mail says that we have no means of retrieving the password if you forget it, it is not lying. There's only a hash that can be used to verify the validity of an attempted password, but not to know what the actual password is.
Of course this should not be taken as the password security being high, especially given that the login is not SSL-protected and thus passwords travel through the internet as plaintext. Of course people who actually have the resources to examine the IP packets going to tasvideos.org are most probably not interested in forum passwords because they don't have any use for them.
FractalFusion wrote:
Really, just use your head when typing a password. P.S. "you" and "your" do not refer to anyone in particular.
If you avoid using the "you-passive" you won't have to make that kind of remark... :P
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I don't understand why "symbol table alias" "sounds like something with overhead", but if PHP references are indeed much more than C++ (or Java) references, then it might well be that using references should be avoided when coding PHP, especially if it's specifically stated that associative arrays use CoW.
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Tub wrote:
you're not even changing the contents of $data, so why do you wish to use the reference? php internally does reference counting + copy on write, using a reference is actually slower in this case.
I don't understand how using references could be slower than relying on the copy-on-write mechanism. Granted, I don't know too much about the inner workings of PHP, but my guess is that this is not too much different from how, for example, std::string works in C++. At least in gcc, the std::string implementation uses copy-on-write. However, it's naturally still much faster to pass references to strings instead of string instances. Taking a reference to a string is basically equivalent to assigning one pointer to another (which is most probably what the C++ compiler does internally). Copying a std::string instance to another, even if std::string uses internally copy-on-write, produces much more code: It has to copy the pointer to the data (and possibly some other member variables if it has any), it has to increment the reference count, and when the copy goes out of scope it has to decrement the reference count and see if it became zero. None of this is produced when simply using references instead.
Post subject: This flash game roxorz
Banned User
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Banned User
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Posts: 7698
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Chamale wrote:
Turns out Canada has no specific law on video games.
I doubt any country has any law about video games in particular, only about software in general. Are you trying to say that Canada has no laws regarding computer software at all?
Banned User
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Btw, how do you record those videos?
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A minor point: Sometimes you just can't "forget" a CPU-intensive application. Using the CPU intensively raises its temperature, requiring more ventilation. This might be an issue in places (or times of the year) which are very warm and with poorer ventilation. In the worst cases the difference between a mostly idle CPU and a CPU at almost 100% is between a barely inaudible computer and a computer which sounds like a turbine engine. Of course there's also the increased use of electricity. Not only does the CPU use more when it's running at almost 100%, but its fan too.
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Chamale wrote:
In Canada, as long as something is on an obsolete system, it's fine.
It would be interesting to see the exact law section which says that.
Banned User
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Location: Finland
"Finally a Pokémon-run of bearable length. Voting a lot of yes."
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laughing_gas wrote:
Why not just direct stream copy the edited parts in vdub(mod)? Eliminates the quality loss of re-encoding and is faster too.
Direct stream copying can only be done from keyframes forward. There would need to be keyframes at each point where a wanted section starts. Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but I have watched every single Super Metroid video published here and I have never skipped anything.