Posts for Warp


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Seems like conventions consists mostly of waiting in lines. The joy. I don't know exactly why, but "20% cooler uncle" sounds a bit creepy.
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MUGG wrote:
But I'm debating technically they are still speedruns.
We thus come back to my original question: How do you define "speedrun". On the surface it might have a trivial definition, but with all the new techniques that allow reaching the (sometimes a bit arbitrarily defined) "end" of the game without actually playing the game, the definition might become a bit fuzzier. Traditionally speedrunning is playing the game through as fast as possible. With some of these tricks not much of that is left anymore.
The moment where power is turned on and the game loads, you are in the game's boundaries and need to finish it (by triggering credits) as quickly as possible. Everything goes. Savegame corruption, ACE and now this controller glitch. As long as it is possible with just controller input, it's allowed.
In principle I would agree that as long as it happens purely via controller input (and especially without resetting!) it's a legit "completion" of the game. Although personally I would argue that once you start executing your own code instead of the game's code, the game, and thus the speedrun, has ended, and the game hasn't been completed. But that's of course just my (quite unpopular) opinion. (No need to start that discussion again. Just wanted to present a differing point of view.)
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Alyosha wrote:
In general I don't think there is a target audience, after all we do this as an enjoyable hobby, we aren't selling anything. I don't see the need to use formal business terms or come up with a definition to what we do. Even in the context of GDQ's, it's more important that preparers and presenters are themselves interested and fascinated by what they are doing, more then trying to cater to some 'target audience.' That earnest interest shows through in the presentation.
I think it would be a good idea to retain a degree of entertainment for the average casual viewer in order to keep this hobby alive for the foreseeable future. If it becomes boring to the average viewer, then there will be less people interested in TASing, and thus less newcomers, and as the old ones end their hobby eventually, it might end in obscurity. Of course this doesn't mean that we should just publish anything and everything. Some minimum technical standards are needed too. It needs to be properly balanced, and not go too far into the extremes.
Post subject: How do you define "speedrun"?
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I was watching a Doom (the new one) speedrun on YouTube, and some of the comments complained that the runner went out of bounds (causing clear graphical glitches in unmodeled areas of the levels), saying that it wasn't a "real" speedrun at all. This is, of course, a really extreme (and perhaps naive) attitude, although we shouldn't be just laughing at it. A significant portion of people who watch speedruns casually would like to see "glitchless" runs quite a lot. I think this raises the question of who we are making these runs for. Who is the target audience? This question becomes a lot more relevant if and when we start getting tool-assisted "speedruns" that don't actually play the game at all. The game starts, we might get a glimpse of the main menu, if even that, and the end screen pops up. That's it. (This possibility was, of course, demonstrated quite beautifully at SGDQ 2016.) For all intents and purposes that was no "speedrun" at all. There was even less of a "superplay" (because nothing was being played.) The game proper didn't even start, much less was played. The technique may be interesting for the hard-core aficionados who follow closely the techniques being used. But for the casual viewer? Some might become interested in reading about the technique... but it's just that: A wall of text containing lots of technical stuff, most of which will go above the head of the average viewer, and which might not be even all that interesting. So is that the future of TASing, from the point of view of the casual viewer? Just a wall of text containing technical stuff? Is that really a "speedrun", or even a "superplay"? Or is it simply a "technical guide to hack the console through the gamepad port, using game X and a specialized device"? The latter is interesting for certain, but hardly a "speedrun". And it's mostly interesting for the technical aficionados who like to read about these things. Certainly a TAS that just jumps to the end screen has no entertainment per se (not in the classical sense). I know that in Vault runs entertainment is a complete non-issue, but come on, could there be even a minimum standard? Something to actually look at on the screen? I mean other than the ending of the game. So, I ask once again: Who is the target audience of tool-assisted speedruns? How do you define "speedrun"? I'm not saying that such TASes shouldn't be accepted, but maybe we need to define some categories in order to retain something to actually look at. Categories that do not have such strong entertainment requirements. Else we may end up in a situation where we don't actually have any speedrun of some games at all (not from the perspective of the casual viewer), just a collection of endings, and some technical wall of text explaining stuff.
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Would it obsolete the current any% run?
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Brevity actually helps keep the entertainment. If this were like 10 minutes of the same, it would become boring, but as it is, it's fun.
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Zephyr Breeze is possibly the least likeable character in the entire series.
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Bobo the King wrote:
But it could easily be a problem in multi-platform games. If the Genesis port of an SNES game is virtually identical, there is nothing stopping me from taking all of the tricks found by someone else in the SNES version and making my own Genesis version. I get sole authorship credit despite having discovered nothing. The SNES run's authors can't really do anything about it because they're busy with the SNES run and probably have little interest in duplicating their work on another console.
If I'm understanding correctly, you are painting this kind of scenario: Person A is working on a run of a game for console X (and is posting tricks and WIPs and whatever), and then person B takes the same game for console Y and uses those same tricks, and finishes the run before person A and gets it published first, and without crediting the work of the other person? I find this both such a highly implausible scenario, and I really don't see how restricting TASes of a game to one single platform fixes this in any way. (How would this restriction stop person B from doing that, and have his game published?) I really don't see this as any kind of sensible argument against accepting the same game for different platforms as their own independent games with their own independent TASes. In the case of Doom in particular, the restriction would be really nonsensical because eg. the N64 version is completely different from the DOS version. The levels are completely different. You could just as well consider them separate episodes. It's not like the N64 is identical to the DOS version, just with a lower framerate and resolution or something. But even with games that do resemble each other, and are pretty much ports of each other, I really don't see the harm. It's not like we will run out of space or something.
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Personally I don't really see a reason why we shouldn't consider and accept a game for a different platform as its own independent entry. So what if a similar game with the same name exists for another completely different console? Who cares? This seems to be yet another case where we are saving space for nothing. It's not like we have a limited number of spots for TASes and we are running out of them and need to be conservative and eliminate seeming "redundancy". One concrete example I would really love to see is Doom TASes for all the different platforms for which a version of the game has been made. So what if the DOS version is the "principal" one? That would still make eg. the N64 version interesting to see.
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moozooh wrote:
Let's face it. Adding support for features that do not exist in the game costs money.
For like a year or more after the PS4 was launched, a significant portion of the games that were published were actually "remastered" PS3 games. And porting and remastering a game from one console to a completely incompatible newer console is not a very easy task. Yet lots of game studios did exactly that. And apparently it was profitable because the remastered versions sold quite well. Adding VR support to an existing game ought to be a significantly smaller task, especially if the game doesn't use any fancy rendering or scene geometry tricks that do not work in stereo vision. (Some games do, making them harder to add good VR support, as the stereo vision reveals the tricks used, making the unrealistic. These are tricks like objects being much smaller and closer than they ought to be, among other things. However, likewise quite many games do not do this.) Valve did it with Half-Life 2. I doubt it was a humongous task to them. Adding VR support may well revitalize the sales of a particular game. And if nothing else, it would contribute to making VR more widely adopted and accepted. A gaming device needs a healthy triple-A game library, else it's doomed to failure. This has been seen time and again during the history of video games. But Valve did pretty much an 180, and discouraged anybody from adding VR support to any existing game (with, perhaps, the exception of vehicle simulators). And they started tacitly dissing sit-down VR, implying that room-scale VR is the only way to go. Unfortunately, it seems that most game studios are believing them. Add the outrageous pricing of the headsets to the mix, a price point well outside the budget of the average gamer, and you have a formula for failure. (I may well be wrong on this, but I'm seeing all the signs.)
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Invariel wrote:
What you are effectively asking is that every game studio across the planet drop what they are doing, dig up all of their old projects, read the code for all of those old projects, figure out where best to implement VR code into those old projects [without fixing known bugs], and then release those old projects with brand new VR support, probably for free because you're not going to pay for a thing when you can use a readily available VR driver off of the internet, just because you want them to. Nobody is going to do that. Zero studios, zero people.
And thus VR may turn out to be a failure. Abysmal game library. No support nor interest from game developers. "Zero studios, zero people." Just like the PS Vita. Do you understand the point I'm trying to make?
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Invariel wrote:
Which you expect developers to jump out of their seats and make for you, right now, because you want it.
Exactly. You understood perfectly. The alternative is that they just create a few VR-only "room-scale" triple-A games, and the system withers away into obscurity due to the lack of a healthy library of games. VR could have literally thousands of triple-A games right now. The OR development kit has been around for about three years. They had plenty of time to add quick support to most existing games. That could have sky-rocketed the popularity of VR right from the start. But they didn't. And now VR has a pityable game library. And for the looks of it, they aren't going to add support to any of the new traditional games either. All we have is some robot repair simulators and gallery shooters, most of which have PS2-grade graphics. To say that VR has, so far, turned out to be a disappointment, is an understatement.
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Invariel wrote:
One of the core tenets of being a developer (and, I apologize to any other developers in the thread who will want to lynch me for sharing this trade secret) is that you don't re-do work that's already been done properly. If this third party driver does exactly what is necessary for older games to work with VR in the most basic capacity, there's no need for a team of developers to implement it for each individual and ancient game, knowing that they won't be paid for the task, and that they have more important things to do.
As I commented earlier, the driver has limitations mainly related to head-tracking. Since looking around independently of where you are aiming has not been coded into the game, the driver can't do it itself. Thus it has a very limited range of how far you can look to the side, away from where you are aiming. Thus the VR support is limited.
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moozooh wrote:
Which is understandable, because in cases with many (most?) older games adding VR support entails rewriting the entire rendering pipeline from the ground up.
If a third party driver can do most of it automatically, it's nevertheless too difficult and laborious for the developers to do it having the source code of the game?
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What you are seeing is completely contradictory to what I am seeing. For years I was expecting them to simply "slap VR into the same old games", and now I'm disappointed that they are not. Because that's exactly what I wanted: To be able to experience my all-time favorite games in VR. Instead, they are dissing traditional games completely, saying that VR "doesn't work" with them, and they have zero intention of adding VR support to them. They are instead adamant in creating custom VR-only games that work differently from traditional games. You are saying the exact opposite of what I am saying.
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moozooh wrote:
I think you aren't seeing it because the way current VR games are done is, basically, take a normal game and tack on a two-axis viewpoint control.
I don't really understand what you mean. I'm disappointed precisely because they are not doing that. They are convinced that VR "doesn't work" with traditional games, and they have to come up with custom VR-exclusive games. I am also disappointed in how Valve seems to think that "room-scale VR" is the only way to go, and how so many people, including so many developers, are following them. I see room-scale VR as severely limiting in terms of game mechanics and gameplay. And there is obviously absolutely no space for traditional first-person shooters or any other such genre. They are completely out of the question. It almost feels like VR has "failed" already, in a sense. It "doesn't work".
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andypanther wrote:
I really feel like a minority for having literally zero interest in VR.
I have been really excited and expectant of VR since the very first announcements of the Oculus Rift, and especially after I got to try the first development kit. I could just imagine how mind-blowingly awesome it would be to play my all-favorite games in VR, like Portal, Portal2, Mirror's Edge, Skyrim and Alien Isolation, among many others. However, I'm quite disappointed at how it turned out to be. While the OR has from the very beginning, and even to some extent to this day, emphasized the sit-down experience of more traditional games, mainly HTC/Valve decided that VR "doesn't work" with any of those traditional first-person perspective games (or even most third-person perspective ones), and it seems that Oculus has pretty much followed suit, alongside the vast majority of game developers. Which in practice means that I will most probably never experience those games in VR, at least not official support. (There are third-party drivers and mods that can be used to play many existing games in VR, but almost invariably there are limitations, especially related to head-tracking. Most typically there's a very limited range within which you can turn your head before the edges of the rendered world come into view, which probably just destroys the immersion. This is because independent head movement has not been programmed into the game itself.) I want to experience Portal2 VR, Mirror's Edge VR, Doom VR, Alien Isolation VR... but the developers are not going to add support. And it seems that they have zero plans of adding support to any future games of those genres either. Because VR "doesn't work" with them (meaning it causes nausea to most people). At most what you'll get is what Bethesda announced with respect to Fallout 4: They announced that they will be adding VR support to the game... as room-scale VR. In other words, rather than having your regular Fallout 4, just with stereo vision, they will be offering a crippled "room-scale VR" version. Meaning standing still, shooting around, and "teleporting" to move. And, of course, only for the Vive. Yeah, I'm sure "room-scale VR Fallout 4" would be nice to experience once, as a tech demo and an experience, but I suspect that as an actual game it will mostly suck. Being limited by the restriction of "room-scale VR" sounds like it will just suck all the fun out of actually playing such a game. (Not to talk about how long you will be able to play a game while standing up. My feet hurt just from thinking about it.) Somehow I'm not very excited about paying 900€ for some tech demos and crippled games. I will most probably get myself a headset some time in the future, when the prices come significantly down. I hope that game developers will reach an agreement of offering VR support to more traditional games, even if it causes nausea to some people. You demonstrably get used to it (as has been demonstrated by many people eg. on youtube). It's not an insurmountable problem, and personally I'm fully ready to give it a try, to make myself accustomed to the system and get over the nausea, even if it takes weeks or months. I fear, however, that game developers are not going to give me even the chance to try. And that's why I am finding this whole VR so disappointing.
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arandomgameTASer wrote:
Warp wrote:
I'm still not sure why Moons has to be this mix of different categories, rather than a pure "non-any% non-100% runs that are worthy of publication" category, with Vault being for all any% and 100% runs.
That would be messy and weird.
I don't understand. How would having two clearly-defined unambiguous tiers for different types of runs "messy and weird". It would be significantly less "messy and weird" than the current system, where Moons is a mishmash of different categories with no other common requirement than a subjective "it's entertaining enough".
Warp wrote:
(I would still like to see Vault being lifted from its "garbage dump" status to a place of glory: Only the very best runs get the honor of being published there. The rest get either rejected because of being sub-optimal, or just dumped to Moons because people found it entertaining enough to publish.
???? That would just flip flop the problem to Moons being the garbage dump instead of Vault.
No, Moons would be the tier for all non-any% non-100% runs. It would be easier to get your run published there because the only requirement is entertainment, rather than beating someone else's high score. But that doesn't mean it would be a dump for everything. It would be a different category.
Warp wrote:
True for the most part, but what if you TAS like Where's Waldo or something and it takes you 15 minutes? Like, should you be proud of that?
Yes. You got the world record on that game. That ought to be an achievement worthy of recognition. Why not?
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If talking about the current state of the gaming industry, I think that VR is an interesting subject. It seems that everybody is hailing VR as the next big thing, something that will completely revolutionize gaming and take it to a completely new level. I'm just not seeing it. For a very long time it was envisioned that VR headsets would become pretty much essentially a new form of display, which would be used in almost all 3D games. Just like your regular display, but with stereo vision and head-tracking. It would significantly enhance the gaming experience when you would see your games in stereo, like it were the real world. But it turns out that VR "doesn't work" with traditional games. With this they don't mean that there's a technical reason why it can't be used with basically every 3D game out there. It would be pretty trivial to add VR headset support to almost any game. No, what they are talking about is nausea. Because many people get nausea if playing a traditional game with traditional controls (ie. keyboard+mouse or gamepad), this problem is considered so severe that game developers have pretty much abandoned the idea of adding VR support to their traditional games completely. You are not going to see VR support in games like Portal2, Mirror's Edge, Skyrim, Alien Isolation or Doom (at least not official support from the game developers). And you most probably won't be getting VR support in any new games using traditional controls (eg. first-person shooters). Because it "doesn't work". (There are third-party mods and drivers that can be used to add partial support to many games, but this support is often very limited because it has not been integrated in the game itself. Eg usually head-tracking is very limited.) I think Half-Life 2 has VR support, but I get the impression that Valve added it before they decided that VR "doesn't work" with such games, so it's there kind of by accident (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they remove the support in the future). It seems that the only existing genre that has fully accepted VR is the vehicle simulation genre (with which I mean space simulators, flight simulators, truck simulators, racing games and the like.) Other than that, there seems to be only an extremely narrow range of game genres that "work" with VR. It doesn't exactly help that HTC/Valve seems to think that "room-scale VR" is the only proper way to do VR, and seems to be tacitly dissing sit-down VR. And it seems that the public at large is agreeing with them. (When you see people talking about it, it almost feels like they are talking about a religious experience.) But I just can't see a future for "room-scale VR". It's highly restrictive in terms of game mechanics and game design. Almost none of the movement actions that are typical of video games (running, jumping, climbing, jumping from ledges and over chasms, parkouring, running from cover to cover, circling the enemy, running backwards while shooting at the enemy... to name just a few) are possible. Moving even a moderate distances is not possible (not to talk about exploring a building or a vast overworld spanning tens of miles across), other than "teleporting", which just sounds like an unfun kludge to get around the limitation. If you look at the popular VR games at this moment, most of them seem to consist of you standing still and shooting around. Or standing still and manipulating objects. Or standing still and repairing a robot. In fact, in terms of game design and game mechanics, "room-scale VR" reminds me quite a lot of the infamous Kinect. Sure, VR is a thousand times more accurate and a million times a better experience, but other than that, in terms of game mechanics, they are surprisingly similar. Similar mode of control, similar restrictions. And we all know how successful the Kinect was. Microsoft really, really tried to push it as the next big thing, several times, and some serious triple-A games were made for it... but in the end it was just a failure. I'm not saying that VR will likewise be a failure, but I'm seeing the signs. Rather than being a generic display peripheral, it turned out to be a very specialized and narrow one, requiring (mostly) custom games that are specifically designed for it (with the exception of vehicle simulators and very few other genres), and with very limiting and restrictive requirements for game design and game mechanics. Maybe VR will turn out to be ok, and become highly successful, with a library of tens of thousands of big-budget triple-A games, and with VR headsets being a stock peripheral in most households. Or it might turn out to be another Kinect. Or another PS Vita: Impressive specs, but an abysmal library of triple-A games, and quickly forgotten by everybody. A short-lived curiosity. An expensive vehicle simulator peripheral almost exclusively for the enthusiasts. (I'm still hoping it will turn out ok, though, especially now that Razer OSVR is bringing some healthy competition to the market, to combat the de facto monopoly of those two other companies and their outrageous pricing. PS VR might also have something of an impact, especially since they are emphasizing the sit-down experience, and aiming for a more affordable price.)
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feos wrote:
Are you kidding? It proves that I wasn't casting a shade by linking that damn article. How many times I have to repeat that?
"Casting a shade"? On what? What does that even mean? I would like you to explain clearly and unambiguously what is it that you are trying to say, rather than have us second-guessing. It's difficult to have a conversation when you are not willing to talk.
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One thing is a bit unclear to me: If an any% run is accepted to Moons because of high entertainment value, and then later someone makes a boring but faster any% version which obsoletes it, will this new run be (kind of) "demoted" to Vault, or will it remain in Moons? I'm still not sure why Moons has to be this mix of different categories, rather than a pure "non-any% non-100% runs that are worthy of publication" category, with Vault being for all any% and 100% runs. (I would still like to see Vault being lifted from its "garbage dump" status to a place of glory: Only the very best runs get the honor of being published there. The rest get either rejected because of being sub-optimal, or just dumped to Moons because people found it entertaining enough to publish. Getting your run to Vault should be badge of honor, for being the best, for achieving the top, the world record for that game. It should not feel like infamy and shame.)
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Intuitively one might think that drawing all games would end up squarely in the middle (especially if using a tie breaking system like the Sonneborn-Berger score), but that is indeed not so. Here is a results crosstable of a situation where player T has drawn all of his games, yet is in position 20:
          A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U
 1 A 10.5 . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 2 B 10.5 = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 3 C 10.5 = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 4 D 10.5 = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 5 E 10.5 = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 6 F 10.5 = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 7 G 10.5 = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 8 H 10.5 = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = = 1
 9 I 10.5 = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = = 1
10 J 10.5 = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = = 1
11 K 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = = 1
12 L 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = = 1
13 M 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = = 1
14 N 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = = 1
15 O 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = = 1
16 P 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = = 1
17 Q 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = = 1
18 R 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = = 1
19 S 10.5 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . = 1
20 T 10.0 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . =
21 U  0.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 = .
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Suppose there's a round-robin tournament of 21 players, where each player plays each other player once (ie. 210 games played in total). Each game can end in win, loss or draw. Each player gets one point for a win, and half a point for a draw. If one of the players draws every single one of his games (with all the other players winning/losing at least one of their games), this player will end up exactly at position 11 (ie. exactly in the middle). True or false?
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fcxiaopengyou wrote:
How to improve my English?
Watch all movies and TV series without subtitles. (Yes, I'm being completely serious, and it does work. With time it will improve your English significantly.)
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Lex wrote:
I'm with Nach there. I think it's more likely that the current theories surrounding quantum mechanics just result from a lack of understanding of the observed data.
I wouldn't hold such an opinion if I didn't understand quantum mechanics (and I don't.) Just because something may be highly unintuitive doesn't mean it's wrong.