Posts for Warp


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TASeditor wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzyUcXR05Z4
That was a lot less fun than I thought it would be.
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You know that kind of talk makes you sound like a desperate lonely virgin nerd? ;)
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thecoreyburton wrote:
I know we can't share images unless it's freeware
Being freeware doesn't rescind copyright. That being said, probably no original author cares.
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Nobody has even to this day made any comment about this movie, so I'm assuming nobody has actually checked it. Just check it. It's the most "TAS" movie I have seen. Even more than Groundhog Day. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435705/
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If marshmallow is put in an airtight container and air is sucked out of the container, does the marshmallow a) shrink, b) expand, or c) stay the same, and why?
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I think you bring up a good point. Many really old DOS games did not have any timing routines, and instead assumed that the PC had a fixed speed (like if it were a console). Thus if you run the game in a faster PC, the game will run faster. Thus, you can speed up a game by running it on a "faster PC"... which doesn't feel right. It's essentially like emulating the game at a higher speed than normal. (Granted, I don't know if this is really the case with this particular game, but it certainly is the case with some other very old DOS games.)
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I wonder why Einstein didn't get a Nobel for his work on relativity even later, when it was pretty much experimentally established that yes, it's a very good description of reality.
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Ah, so that's the reason why she has such a technicolor mane and tail.
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As many have pointed out, switching AJ's and RD's traits would have fit a lot better. It would fit a lot better AJ's personality to be a down-to-earth non-nonsense pragmatic and above all loyal character (up to a fault). Likewise it would fit a lot better RD to be honest to a fault (rapid-firing harsh truths even when they hurt). Moreover, playing the typical sketch where the element of honesty has really hard time not telling the truth (á la AJ in Party of One) would fit RD a lot better than AJ. It would fit really naturally. In the case of AJ, however, it feels forced and artificial.
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Oh, and forgot to mention, those 5 minutes in Equestria gave a taste of things to come in the next season. In other words, that horrible castle with six ponies that do not belong there. (Yes, they really looked completely out-of-place there. Like in, what exactly do they do there all day? One is a farmer, one is a fashionista, one takes care of wild animals, one takes care of the weather, and one should be helping with a bakery. What exactly are they doing in that ugly castle? Loafing around from the looks of it... Seriously.) I'm most definitely not looking forward to that in the fifth season.
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I finally got around to watching Rainbow Rocks. I must confess I was really prejudiced against the movie, but was open to have it surprise me. Unfortunately it didn't. It was mostly boring and bland, with really lazy uninspired humor and odd pacing, very unbefitting the original show. Humanoid Dash was a total jerkass all throughout and by far the least likable character of them all (very much unlike in the FiM show.) Perhaps the only enjoyable part was the one that happened in Equestria. The entire five minutes of it. That actually felt like what it should be. Oh, and also the cameo by a certain sister; that was the only moment I actually smiled.
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I was reading the list of Nobel laureates in physics, and I noticed that the vast majority of those prizes are for particle/quantum physics and electromagnetism, and only a very small minority of them are for other subjects such as astrophysics. (Even Einstein got his Nobel prize for particle physics rather than his most famous work.) I wonder why that is.
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CoolKirby wrote:
There are threads for Gruefood Delight and Obsoletely Fabulous suggestions, but they are hard to find, especially if you never knew they existed.
Let's sticky them so that even less people will see them... ;)
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The video indeed looks visibly smoother in 60fps mode on a compatible browser.
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How was the comparison video made?
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I would say that if a chess (or whichever game) engine can be manipulated to make any arbitrary moves, that's not as interesting as playing an optimal game against a stronger engine that can't be affected so fundamentally. (I would guess that most of the even slightly competent chess engines cannot be manipulated into making moves you want because, among other things, they use opening libraries, and obviously won't make bad moves at least if the player follows a standard opening. It becomes fuzzier if the player makes a move not in any standard opening, but even then I doubt a decent engine can be manipulated into making egregiously bad moves, at least if it has time to process even a modest amount of plies.) I think the challenge should be "how fast can this engine be beaten when it's playing at its strongest". With more advanced engines it can become quite challenging because it's not anymore just a question of grinding with savestates. You really need to find the optimal moves. Perhaps one possible way of making a long chess game more interesting for the viewer is, if the chess game is one of those that show what moves the computer is considering, to add on-screen commentary of those moves, what they look on the board, what they mean, what consequences they have, etc.
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Aren't player points calculated on-the-fly from your published runs and their data? In other words, it's not like you have some kind of virtual wallet where your points are collected and stored as you get them (and which you could use for something).
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Your color tags are mismatched.
Post subject: Am I the only one who suffers from "sticky blindness"?
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Banner blindness is the phenomenon that many/most people who surf the web regularly tend to completely ignore anything in web pages that looks like an ad banner. They don't even notice what those banners are saying. (This is actually a lesson in good web design: Avoid presenting relevant information in a form that looks like an ad banner. Most people will completely miss it.) I have noticed recently that I "suffer" from this same phenomenon in most web forums with regards to "stickified" threads: I tend to, more or less subconsciously, completely ignore the "sticky" threads at the beginning of a thread list. This is perhaps because, quit ironically, they seldom contain interesting information (although in some cases they might.) I perhaps started noticing this a bit ago when I was looking for a problem I had with a software library, and I searched the support forum for said library for that problem using its search functionality. There was indeed a thread dedicated to that exact problem. Then I noticed that said thread was right there on the front page of the forum all along. It's just that it was stickified, which is why I didn't notice it. Quite ironic, when you think about it. Does anybody else "suffer" from this?
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Serious suggestion: Please never make TAS awards consist of real valuable objects or money. (Of course this will most probably never be the case because it's not like the site is swimming in money, but the possibility is not completely out of the question either. I don't see it as completely impossible that, for example, in the future some company could get interested in this site and start eg. sponsoring some awards in the form of money or goods, like eg. gaming hardware.) I'm saying this because I have witnessed first-hand what real expensive awards to be rewarded for a competition does to an otherwise friendly community. When actual money is involved, it tends to bring out the worst in people. That list above might have been made tongue-in-cheek, but it can become quite real.
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Radiant wrote:
But other than that I agree that "non-entertaining board games" don't belong in the Vault, and I don't see how it adds value to the site to create a new tier for non-entertaining board games.
It would add to the completeness of the site. Every game deserves a TAS, after all. I don't disagree with the sentiment that the "purity" if the vault tier could be kept; it's intended for at most one "any%" and one "100%" TAS of any given game, and perhaps that should be kept so. The vault tier shouldn't become just a dump for "everything else (other than moons)". In the tier redesign discussion thread it was proposed that the current "vault" tier could actually be elevated to this position more strictly. In other words, it would contain all "any%" and "100%" runs regardless of entertainment, and all other goals would go to other tiers. This would increase the clarity of the tiers, remove subjectivity, and help erase the bad rep that the vault tier has. If this redesign is ever done, then creating some kind of new special kind of tier, where things like board games could fit, ought to be possible.
Post subject: Re: A tier for board games?
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adelikat wrote:
I'm a bit confused, because this seems to be your thesis, then you proceed to give a very thorough and convincing argument of why it doesn't make sense to put board games into the vault. The following is almost 100% the exact logic chain we went through when deciding upon the no board games rule back when the vault rules were written:
My point is that since we want to be, in general, inclusive, having a principle of "board games are not publishable" seems wrong. We are dissing an entire genre simply because it doesn't "fit" into the vault tier. I tried to give a reasoning of why it doesn't fit, and thus a reason for creating a new tier.
Pokota wrote:
A raw strategy game like Chess can be beaten in four moves
You assume that you can make the chess engine do whatever moves you want. I highly doubt that if the engine is even mildly competent, it's going to lose in four moves no matter what you do (at least if we are talking about the higher difficulty levels, which is the point). A chess TAS against a competent chess engine at the highest difficulty would be a real challenge. Who can make the computer lose fastest?
Post subject: A tier for board games?
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I think the recent Othello and Scrabble submissions being rejected because "board games aren't vaultable" deserves some discussion. Somehow that principle seems wrong. After all, the original purpose for the vault tier (or one of its original purposes) was the change in policy that "every game deserves a TAS, regardless of entertainment value". Rejecting board games by default seems to go contrary to this idea. That's not to say I advocate blindly accepting board game TASes either, and that's where the dilemma comes into play. The problem with board games is enemy AI, and difficulty levels. Playing on the easiest difficulty feels completely wrong and unbefitting of tool-assisted speedrunning, which ought to emulate a perfect player crushing a computer game at its best. A computer AI on the easiest difficulty presents no challenge at all, so TASing it seems rather pointless. Naturally TASing truly shows its power only if the computer AI is playing at its best. We would get to see how a "perfect player" would crush the AI player even at its strongest. That's the spirit of TAsing. The problem here is, of course, that at the strongest difficulty level the AI can often take a very long time to make a move (even minutes, if we are talking about more complex board games). This is not very watchable... Then of course there's the whole discussion about what exactly constitutes game completion. After all, the vault is for "any%" and "100%" runs only... These categories usually fit poorly into a board game. Unless you consider playing one single game against the computer "any% completion" (but that would probably be stretching the definition quite a bit). It could perhaps suit games where there's some kind of "campaign mode" or such, with an actual goal and ending (eg. becoming a tournament/world champion). Maybe there could be a separate tier for board games, and other similar games, with its own rules of admission? (This could overlap, or be somewhat merged, with the proposed "demo" tier.)
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Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license is not "public domain". But yes, once you submit your run to this site, you can't stop other people from doing almost anything they want with it (with the exception of removing the original copyright info). You may politely ask someone to not use the run you submitted in a way you don't like, but you have no legal way of enforcing it. You agreed to the license, so you are stuck with it.
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Aqfaq wrote:
Daniel Dennett says: Stop Telling People They Don't Have Free Will
Nice appeal to consequences. The truth doesn't even matter. The most valid of arguments.