Posts for Warp


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Which came first, GNU or Linux? The answer is GNU. The FSF wanted to make an independent and free alternative operating system because all the existing operating systems of the time were either commercial or very system-specific. Also, the most used "OS" (if it can even be called that) for the PC at the time was DOS, which was really ascetic and basically didn't offer anything that a full-featured robust OS should provide. Thus the FSF started developing all the necessary tools for a new Unix-style OS. All these tools were "branded" under the name of GNU software. They could test these tools in existing Unix platforms due to their compatibility. However, the GNU project lacked the most important thing in an OS: The kernel. Most of the necessary tools were there, but no kernel. Hurd was a project to develop this kernel. But then came Linus Torvalds, who had the same idea of creating a free alternative OS, and developed the linux kernel. While he didn't care about the FSF or the GPL license at first, they finally decided to join forces and make a whole OS. Linus provided the kernel and the FSF the rest. Thus GNU/Linux was born. The FSF wants to make a distinction between "GNU/Linux" and "Linux". The former is the linux kernel plus the GNU tools, while the latter is only the kernel (which, at least in theory, could be used with something else than GNU tools). Of course currently "Linux" is used for the whole thing instead of just the kernel. It's, however, a mistake to think that in GNU/Linux "everything that is not the kernel is GNU". The GNU part consists only of the software which is distributed under the GPL license and is made by or approved by the FSF. A Linux distro can come with tons of "third-party" software which is not GNU software (even if they use an OSI-approved license). I actually have no idea how many % of a typical linux distro consists of GNU software, but I would guess that at least 90% of the stuff you can find in /bin/ and in /sbin/ is GNU.
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JXQ wrote:
I think the ninja rank is pure crap, and I've thought this ever since Bisqwit's piss-poor definition of it. I don't believe having this rank (or "master ninja", or "precursor", as I roll my eyes) helps the site in any way. I'm of the opinion that any forum ranks can cause implied superiority and favoritism. The tradeoff is that they give people something to aim for - but aiming for a subjective rank, to me, is just stupid. Although ranks based on concrete rules and not "who Bisqwit thinks fits these conditions" are less likely to cause these feelings, I would still prefer that the ranks were abolished altogether.
IMO if someone takes a little piece of text on the left-side column of an internet forum so seriously, this someone should get a life. Who cares what that little piece of text says? Come on.
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By public acceptance: I. The Doom era: Doom TASes are an accepted "curiosity" among Doom (and possibly other) speedrunners as a comparison between a "perfect" speedrun and a legit one. II. The post-morimoto-smb3 era: A large sector of the public gets the notion that TASes are "fakes", "cheating" and "hoaxes". The major part of the speedrunning community thinks so too and disses/attacks the genre. The existence of Doom TASes is forgotten/ignored for some reason. III. Public acceptance era: Most people, including most speedrunners, start accepting TASes as its own legit and separate form of speedrunning. Many regular speedrunners actually have a positive attitude towards TASes. Although some people still consider them "fake", they start being a minority. Wikipedia actually creates a separate page for TASes instead of keeping it as a little more than a footnote in the speedrun page. IV. The future: ?
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When I code C++, I tend to use uppercase as "notation" for different things, even though I must admit that I could do it better yet. I use ALL_UPPERCASE for constants, StartingCapitals for types and classes, and lowercaseFirstLetter for variables and functions. (Admittedly it might be worth distinguishing between member functions and global functions, but I usually don't do that.) Sometimes I try to use memberVariable_ notation for member variables, but too often I'm too lazy to do that.
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Antonio Vivaldi - Summer - Presto. It's PD too.
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I tend to agree that hungarian notation is seldom worth using. As a rule of thumb: If in a code it's not clear whether a name is eg. a local variable, a member variable, a constant or, heaven forbid, a global variable, then your code is too complicated anyways. Hungarian notation is not going to help.
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Saturn wrote:
The thing about appending with only same frame rate and such is good IMO, otherwise it could ruin your movie.
A video editor will never ruin the movie regardless of the framerates of the input clips. The framerate of the input clips is there only to tell the video editor how to scale the clip, it doesn't affect what the output framerate is. You can have one videoclip at 24fps and another at 30fps and you can output a 25fps mix of them just fine. Naturally the resolution of the clips can be different too. Video editors have advanced algorithms to take care of the details. Besides, the problems I had were something in the range of about 0.1 milliseconds of difference in framerates. VirtualDub refused to append the second videoclip if it didn't have the exact same framerate, bit by bit. I had to hex-edit the avi to make it the same. Anyways, we are talking about a completely different class of program. In a video editor you have graphical tracks and you can move clips around with the mouse, you can stretch them with the mouse, you can fade from one clip to another with the mouse, you can mix two videoclips playing simultaneously (eg. with alpha blending or eg. putting one of the videoclips as a smaller image on top of the other videoclip, etc). You can split videoclips, put space in between, add effects, etc etc. VirtualDub is just a video re-encoder with a few filters.
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Does a temporary server problem really deserve a thread? I don't get it.
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Saturn wrote:
VirtualDub isn't complete in features. Use VirtualDubMod which offers even more in Video Encoding/Editing.
Each time I have tried VirtualDubMod, it has malfunctioned (I don't remember now how, perhaps an access violation crash).
Warp wrote:
Yeah, you can do that with a hex editor too. It still doesn't make the hex editor a video editing software. ;)
You are wrong about it. VirtualDub is especially designed to cut, add, mix and preview all your editings in a seperate window.
Then those features are really hidden. The only features I have found are selecting *part* of the input video to be processed (which is more limited than full-blown cutting), and appending another video to the end of the current video. That another video must have the *exact* same specifications as the current video: resolution and especially framerate, which in AVIs is, IIRC, a 32-bit value denothing something like milliseconds or whatever, and which seldom is the same in two videos which have been created eg. by capturing. Each time I have had to append a video to another I have had to hex-edit the headers of the avis in order to make the framerates equal or else virtualdub refuses to append them. I don't remember ever seen anything even remotely related to mixing in VirtualDub. Perhaps it's just a hidden feature. In a full-blown video editing software you usually have tracks. You can put videos (*any* videos, regardless of resolution and framerate) at any location in any of the tracks, mix between the tracks by eg. fading, move the videos inside the tracks, stretch them, change their scale, etc. You also have audio tracks which work similarly: You can put any audio samples anywhere in any of the tracks, you can mix them, fade between them, stretch them, change their volume, etc etc.
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FractalFusion wrote:
Perhaps it would be good to implement, under each system, a list of game names as links, similar to what SDA is doing. I had no problems browsing there.
I think that's a good idea.
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I really don't understand why making a video seems to be considered so essential. How about simply a series of webpages with concise descriptions and clear helpful screenshots (some of which might be animated gifs)? While a video could be a cool introduction, is it really worth the effort? You can't use a video as a "reference manual" for obvious reasons, you'll have to go back and forward in the video if you missed something, and overall you can't control the speed at which you "learn" from a video. If later you wanted to see something specific again, you'll have to start the video and seek that thing until you find it, while on a webpage you simply click on an url in the contents section. Besides, a video is a large download while a series of webpages isn't (even when there are lots of images).
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I wonder why no-one has noted that savestates are a rather relevant part of TASin too. Everyone speaks as if frame advance was the only technique used. Now, that would be interesting: Who can make the best run on some game *without* any savestates, only frame advance?-)
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Yeah, you can do that with a hex editor too. It still doesn't make the hex editor a video editing software. ;)
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Guybrush wrote:
Encoders here use MEncoder to encode. If you're a Windows user and would like to do other kind of editing than just encoding, I recommend VirtualDub.
Note that VirtualDub is little more than just a re-encoder with filters. It's not a video editor software. VirtualDub is nice when you want to, for example, re-encode a video (and/or its sound) with different settings of with a different codec, or perhaps apply some filters to the image. One typical example where I have found VirtualDub useful was when I captured video from my TV card and then wanted to re-encode it to a smaller avi using xvid as well as applying deinterlacing and temporal smoother filters to it. However, with VirtualDub you won't be able to edit videos. Video editing in this context means that you take a video, cut it, preview it, add perhaps another video in between, add a soundtrack, mix different soundtracks into one, fade from one soundtrack to another, add subtitles, etc etc.
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Japanese RPG + Tekken. That combination in fact makes so much sense that I really wonder why there aren't any (or more) of them. I have heard rumors of some RPG games where fights are done slightly Tekken-style, but it seems that those types of RPGs are a very small minority. Think about it: As you progress and get more exp, you can really feel it in the fights. You learn new abilities which you can use (as keypress combinations) and your hits get stronger. There could also be tournament mini-games which could be almost like playing Tekken, so in practice you basically get two game genres in one. One problem I find with the Tekken series is that they are too limited and too small. There's not enough variety, and the stories are really minimal. One small problem with (Japanese) RPGs is that the fights usually seem a bit abstract and detached. They are more like a turn-based board game than real fights (which in fact is the idea, but I think it gets a bit boring after a while). An RPG with Tekken-style fighting would solve both problems.
Post subject: Re: intentionally avoiding bugs to increase entertainment
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IdeaMagnate wrote:
The question that I'd like resolved is this: Is it acceptable to avoid a specific glitch (but to use others) in a tas to increase the entertainment value of a movie?
One problem which I see with this is a question of clutter. The amount of published movies is already approaching 400 (just checked, 392 published movies, 389 video files). This is starting to be a pretty large amount. There are two sides to this coin: On one side it's good that there's a high amount of movies. tasvideos.org has basically become a library of tool-assisted speedrun videos. Take almost any old console game, and there's a good probability that a TAS exists for it here. Many people can see their childhood favorite game TASed. On the downside, however, an enormous amount of movies is an enormous amount of clutter. This has several consequences. People who are not hardcore afficionados easily get lost amont the hundreds of available videos, perhaps try downloading a couple, don't like them and don't know what else to watch really. They may lose interest. Another problem is a question of resources: There's a limited number of regular uploaders for an ever-increasing number of movies. This slows down the average download times for movies because there are less and less people who upload them. I think that the problem would be made only worse if we start making lots of different TAS versions of the same game. It adds to the clutter, it adds to the confusion, and it makes the limited upload problem worse. In my opinion we should: a) improve existing runs, and b) have variety by using different games instead of variety by TASin the same game in different ways. The second point is important for the good side of the coin I described above. IMO two versions of the same game TAS is ok when there's a huge difference in goals between the two. For example it's cool to have two Rygar runs, one which goes all out to just finish the game as soon as possible, and one which is a "full" run (in that it doesn't skip levels by abusing the warp bug). Both movies are interesting for people who have played the game and probably people who haven't. However, I would consider making two versions of the same run with the only difference being that one doesn't use a minor glitch while the other does to be needless clutter. There may be good entertainment reasons for doing it, but do we really need yet another published movie for a game with an existing movie already? I personally would prefer one high-quality run of a game than several with minor differences.
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I also think Angerfist is cool. And quite known because it appears in so many TAS titles... :P
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I used the nick "Warp" for the first time in the internet, IIRC, in 1994 and haven't changed it since. Some people even call me with that name in real life (for example at the local go club).
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Btw, nothing beats http://kanjidict.stc.cx/
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Why does this remind me of the forum psychology laws? ;)
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Thanks for all the ideas. I have included the ones I felt best fitting.
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I would say that if you have enough photons packed in such a small volume that it might cause some damage because of its momentum, its more likely to burn its way through simply because of the radiation energy it has (which has basically nothing to do with momentum). In other words, it would be much easier to burn your enemies with a laser than it would be to try to cause any damage with light momentum.
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Truncated wrote:
Massless particles also have momentum. Solar wind can push objects just like any force.
Solar wind has mass and travels at about 400 km/s.
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Posters whose native language is not English will usually make less grammatical and spelling errors than native speakers, but their vocabulary will usually be somewhat poorer.
Post subject: FPS clichés
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Inspired by the forum laws page (well, I have had this idea for longer, but this gave me the final push to just do it) I started writing a page about FPS game clichés. Any additional ideas are welcome: http://warp.povusers.org/fpscliches.html