My favourite glitches I am aware of:
- Murder Beam (Super Metroid)
I honestly don't understand what's so "cool" about this glitch.
Ok, it might have some cool factor for someone who has *played* the game through, then sees instructions for this glitch somewhere and then plays the end again using it.
However, for a viewer this glitch is just horrible. The original "story" in the end battle, when played in the usual way, is quite clear and easy to see even to someone who has never played the game. However, when this glitch is used the story becomes completely destroyed and the whole end battle ends up filled with visual artifacts (because of the snes engine not being able to draw all the sprites), causing the end battle to be completely confusing. With the glitch not only is the main boss heavily artifacted, with large pieces appearing and reappearing, the storywise important part of the metroid coming in and helping the hero(ine) is completely destroyed because the sprites never even appear on screen due to the heavy sprite engine artifacts.
In other words, when the glitch is used, the end battle becomes very confusing, full of visual artifacts, the story gets completely destroyed and the viewer just can't know what is happening. The end battle becomes visually and storywise destroyed. And what is worse: Using the glitch doesn't make the run faster! I just can't understand what's so "cool" about this.
I would call that doppler shift, not the doppler effect. (Whereas, to me, the doppler effect is when the doppler shift changes direction by passing the detector.) Again, I realize the dictionary doesn't agree with me, but changes in frequency due to relative motion of emitter and detector are so universal as to be not worth calling the phenomenon anything as grandiose as an "effect".
The fact that the doppler effect is *always* explained with the ambulance example and that people have thus become confused about what the doppler effect really means and use it to denote the wrong thing doesn't make it the right thing.
Since DosBOX emulates *everything* then it may be possible. However, if DosBOX uses multithreading then trying to make a non-desyncing recording may be very difficult. If it's a single-threaded program then it may be possible.
Well, since most if not all, MPEG4 codecs use JPEG image compression to produce the keyframes, anything which decreases the size of a JPEG will automatically decrease the size of an MPEG4 encoded video.
In a typical MPEG4 video keyframes are very rare (unless there's a *lot* of change in the video), usually spaced hundreds of frames apart. Reducing the size of keyframes will not reduce the size of the whole video a lot. On the contrary, if we assume that blurring actually hurts the in-between frames (I don't know if it does, but let's just assume) then it will hurt the whole video a lot because over 90% of frames will be in-between frames.
Furthermore, because of how MPEG4 generates non-keyframes using motion detection/prediction algorithms, anything which helps those algorithms to detect motion will result in fewer keyframes necessary, also reducing the filesize of the MPEG4 encoded video.
But the question remains: Does motion blur help the encoder finding the shapes and their motion vectors or not?
I don't know how it actually works, but I can think of at least one argument pro and another con:
Pro: Motion-blur makes it easier for the encoder to find matching shapes because blurred images reduce the need to find very exact matches (IOW. more imprecise shapes will resemble each other in content and form thanks to the blurring).
Con: Motion-blur makes it harder to find matching shapes because the image is fuzzy and it's hard to guess what has moved and where. Almost anything could match almost anything else, making the motion vectors erratic and the contents of the moving shapes change a lot. (Also given that MPEG4 by default - probably - assign less bits for the lower end of the spectrum, the blurred content will show artifacts more easily than sharp content.)
I can't say which one of those is true.
By the way, speaking of the English language, why does 99% of English-speaking people and some % of non-English-speaking people write "it's" when they should write "its"? You can see it *everywhere*, from random webpages and random forum posts to serious news articles (I mean in the news agency websites, not usenet, although you of course can see it a lot there too) and other similar serious online articles, and so on.
Is it really so hard for people to think of "it's" as "it is" and that way check if the sentence sounds good? Nobody says "the car lost it is wheel while turning" or "the program saved it is state in a file". Yet that's what most people *write*, just condensed (with "it's").
Of course you can see other similar errors, such as "you're" instead of "your", but those are much rarer.
I bought a PSP some time ago because I got a *really* good bargain (89 euros for the value pack instead of the regular 230 euros or so).
I was a bit skeptical about whether I would play it much or not, but it results that it is quite addictive to play with it. I did not only buy Tales of Eternia almost immediately (good game), but it results that other types of games are quite addictive too. Ridge Racer (which I got with the value pack as an added bonus) is cool, but I have later also bought Mercury (cool idea) and Everybody's Golf (really addictive). I also have Wipeout Pure.
I think that the issue I mentioned about the graphics hardware may be relevant too. I don't know exactly what the CPU can and cannot read from the GPU (in a PC architecture such as the xbox), but I'm pretty certain that simply storing (and later restoring) the RAM of the graphics card is not enough. You have to also store the entire state of the GPU, which is something I'm not at all sure the CPU can do (if my guess is correct that the CPU cannot read the state flags of the GPU).
After all, there's much more going on in a graphics card than just what is stored in its RAM.
It is true that the sentence could be written the way you did.
However, it is now a different sentence from the one I wrote.
You seem to imply that the semicolon adds richness to the sentences. I happen to disagree. IMO it makes the sentences poorer, and writing them properly makes them richer and more expressive.
In this sense I think the comparison with the potential form in Finnish is not accurate because, in my opinion, using the potential form adds to the richness of the language instead of making it poorer and more artificial-looking. IMO the semicolon doesn't add anything to the language, only substracts.
The real shame is that most people using ad blockers want to avoid the real invasive and annoying advertising, but by blocking out all advertising they also block the non intrusive advertising of websites who depend on advertising revenue.
I think that the revenue comes only when users click on the ads. Someone who uses ad blockers is quite unlikely to click on any ad even if they aren't blocked...
Second, the fidelity factor. As can be witnessed with most other transform codecs (be it audio, video or picture compression), it's easier for them to encode gradients/clear tones/etc. than edgy transitions/noise/etc.. Blurring smears all the sharp edges which is a huge bonus for an encoder.
Yet when you start decreasing the bitrate of an MPEG4 video, the smooth transitions are the ones usually showing visible artifacts first while sharp edges maintain their integrity longer. I guess this is because, as I said, MPEG4 by default assign more bits to the higher end of the frequency spectrum than the lower end.
Just because a JPEG benefits from blurring doesn't necessarily mean that MPEG4 does too, even though both use the same fourier transform principle. I'm not saying that MPEG4 does not benefit, I'm just saying that it's not *automatically* so, and that my own experience has shown some signs of the contrary. I could be wrong too, though.
I like the semicolon; it brings some nice variety. I'm not sure about its proper use though; I use it the same way as in Finnish.
I could write like that in IRC, a discussion forum and other such informal contexts, but I wouldn't write like that in formal text. In the latter case I would write:
"I like the semicolon because it brings some nice variety. I'm not sure about its proper use though. I use it the same way as in Finnish."
I see no real need for semicolon there. It doesn't bring anything that couldn't be expressed better. It just feels artificial.
Usually if two sentences are closely related you can join them with a conjunction or another particle or a comma. If they are not as related, you can just perfectly separate them with a period. (This paragraph is a good example of this.)
Task-switching in multitasking OSes (which the xbox has too) does something like this (the task-switcher saves the state of the current process, interrupts it to do something else, then restores the state and continues the process) so in theory it could be possible.
The only difficulty I see is storing and restoring the entire contents of the graphics card, which might prove difficult (because it might not be enough to just copy the contents of the readable RAM of the graphics card).
Also if the game uses temp files (which at least in theory could be possible), that might be difficult to detect and save/restore). (Of course if the temp files are kept in the HD as they are, then it might work. Perhaps.)
Motion blur actually helps modern MPEG 4 encoders, since all of them heavily rely on the motion vectors and the amount of overall movement on the screen
Can you explain the exact technique in MPEG4 which makes benefit of motion blur?
I know that MPEG4 searches for shapes in the input which move on the screen and tries to outline those shapes and store just the difference in the shapes and their content. One would think that blurring the image just makes it more difficult to find such shapes. But of course that doesn't mean that MPEG4 doesn't *another* technique which is well-suited for motion-blurred video (or that the shape-searching isn't so smart that it couldn't find the shapes even if motion blur is used).
I have also noticed that MPEG4 uses more bits for the higher values of the spectrum than the lower values, which means that sharp changes in the image sometimes can even look better than smooth transitions (which may in some cases present visible artifacts due to low amount of bits used to store the info).
mwl wrote:
Whoa, I didn't know about the 14'02" D2 run. Thanks for the heads-up.
Semicolons are usually used to join two sentences that "share" a relationship. For example: I'm bad at history and english; I like foreign languages.
That doesn't even sound good. I would say "I'm bad at history and English, but I like foreign languages." Using a semicolon there feels more like artificial.
Note that these are recorded with motion blur - I wouldn't be surprised if this increased the size of the AVIs.
Why would it?
1) You probably mean that it would reduce the quality of the AVIs. MPEG4 is always (well, in practice at least) encoded with a certain bitrate, so the end result will always be of a certain size (plus/minus a small variation), and if the input is harder for the encoder, it would just cause the quality of the result to decrease (not its size to increase).
2) Why would motion blur be more difficult for MPEG4 than non-motion-blurred video?
I have never really understood the need for the semicolon punctuation mark. Can anyone give any good example of a sentence where substituting a semicolon with a period changes the sentence in any way?
In Finnish the semicolon is practically inexistent in the written language. Only in technical text (which eg. has lists of words etc) it might sometimes be used, but basically never to form sentences. (Of course that doesn't stop people from using it in written Finnish. However, AFAIK it's not part of the "official" guidelines of written Finnish, nor in any way necessary.)
If you want some challenge, Finnish and Japanese are the hardest languages to learn for non-natives.
A study has shown that, quite curiously, Finnish is one of the easiest languages for a child to learn as his native language, even though it is considered rather hard for an adult to learn as a foreign language.
The same study showed that among the hardest languages for a child to learn as his native language are, not quite surprisingly, German and, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, English.
One of the reasons why Finnish may be a bit hard to learn for an adult is that Finnish is a highly agglutinative language (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative), which is somewhat of a rarity in European and American languages, and thus people who are not accustomed to agglutinative languages can have a hard time learning that way of thinking.
There's a superb example of the agglutinative nature of Finnish: The sentence "I wonder if I should run around (aimlessly)" can be all condensed into one word in Finnish: "Juoksentelisinkohan".
Agglutination also means that words are very flexible. Nouns can be inflected in 14 ways and sometimes even more (English nouns are not inflected at all), and verbs have more than 130 inflected forms (compare that to the about 5 verb inflections in English; even Spanish, which has rich verb inflections, has only about 50 or so). This adds to the difficulty of learning the language.
I think it's erroneous to claim that speed was not the aim in this "walkathon". Of course it was. It's just that a limitation was imposed for entertainment reasons, in order to get a different category of run for the same game. In other words, it's a "how fast can be the game completed without pressing the b button at all?", ie. speed was still the main goal even with the imposed limitation. This is no different from "how fast can this game be completed without using any warps?" or "how fast can this game be completed by using this alternative route/character" which are accepted (and by all means acceptable) forms of TASing.
However, I fully agree that a mere 3 frame improvement is way too little for this kind of special concept TAS. This was more a curiosity than a really serious record-breaking TAS, and thus this kind of "obsolete by 3 frames" would be way overboard.
A 10-second improvement would more like it (but of course most probably impossible).
Some thoughts:
- Is it really necessary to have yet another site with tool-assisted speedruns? Of course if it's well made and doesn't disrupt the delicate image of the TAS phenomenon (ie. in plain English: if it doesn't confuse people and start another wave of "these are fake" ranting in forums) then there's nothing wrong with that. However, posting the same videos in two places is dubious, so the videos posted in the site perhaps should be completely unrelated to the videos posted here. But in that case runners would have to make a choice of where to submit their videos: To the largest TAS site in existence or to a new small unknown site. I bet the choice will be quite clear for most people.
- If what you want is to post videos which were rejected here, then take into account that there's usually a good reason why they were rejected. A dumpster of rejected TAS videos might not receive too much popularity.
- However, what you describe sounds more like what you want to do is to make a site with machinima videos. In that case you should definitely *not* use the term "TAS". TAS is not a synonym for "tool-assisted". If you want to publish machinima videos which have been made with emulators, use "tool-assisted machinima" or whatever, not "TAS".
- Take into account that making interesting machinima videos is probably a *lot* harder than making TAS videos. Making a TAS is often quite easy, relatively speaking: Just study the routes, tricks and shortcuts in the game and then spend some hours/months making a frame-by-frame optimal run through it. Entertainment will usually take care of itself along the way. Not so with machinima videos: If you want a machinima to be interesting you actually need some artistical talent and inspiration. Machinimas are short movies, and making them interesting might be even more challenging than regular short movies because you have very limited technology.
- Related to that, machinima videos need editing. Just watching someone play a game is *boring*, even if he tries to make something "funny" from time to time. As I said above, making a good and interesting machinima is very hard and requires talent and inspiration.
- Not to discourage you, but take also into account that your idea is in no way novel: Several dozens such sites have been put up, only a few have survived after the years. Competition is very harsh.
I just watched this for the first time. It is without a doubt the worst film I have ever seen. I guess my question is, what the @#$%? Why has anyone, anywhere, ever claimed this movie was even watchable, much less one of the greatest films of all time?
There may be many reasons why you didn't like that movie:
1) You belong to the so-called "MTV-generation".
2) You watched a movie made in 1968 in 2006 and expected to see the same kind of SFX brainmushing blockbuster as nowadays.
3) You don't understand scifi. Star Trek is not scifi.
4) Any combination of the above.
It doesn't really matter what the rerecord count says. It's simply that a count of 2 tends to raise red flags to people.
I think that the rerecord count should always be accurate. It (kind of) tells how much work went into the run, and it doesn't screw up MovieStatistics.
If for whatever reason the actual rerecord count is lost and the author does not remember what it was, then it should be hex-edited to 0. IIRC MovieStatistics will ignore movies with 0 rerecords in the rerecording statistics (IIRC we did this precisely for this case). Naturally the best would be to never lose the rerecord count, of course.
Also I agree that watching the improvement of some movies has been one of the most interesting thing in this whole TAS community thing. While one might hastily think that improvements just prove that the earlier version was nost perfect and thus it's a bit of a disappointment, it actually doesn't feel like that at all. Instead, improvements show the TASing perfection achievable with the current knowledge and experience, and it's quite interesting to follow how these things have developed during time.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I would like to see more improvements on existing movies (especially the old famtasia ones) than movies of new games. (Not that I don't like seeing those too, but I would like to see more improvements.)
When I was younger (much younger) I owned a Spectrum128. I owned a *lot* of games for it and played a lot.
I recently downloaded some Spectrum128 music in .ay format. Man, those give me fond memories...
These are some of the best pieces I know. (Note that the slight stereo effect was added by aylet; Spectrum128 doesn't naturally support that; but it sounds cool...)
http://kapsi.fi/warp/Xenon.mp3http://kapsi.fi/warp/Deliverance.mp3http://kapsi.fi/warp/AdidasChampionshipFootball.mp3http://kapsi.fi/warp/AstroMarineCorps.mp3
Note that the Spectrum128 had a soundchip with just 3 sound channels. Each channel could play either a note, noise (pitch-dependant) or both at the same time.
