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I was unable to get this movie to sync until I disabled all Wiimotes in the controller configuration. I have had this problem with other Dolphin movies - I'm not sure if it's specific to my hardware or not.
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xRavenXP wrote:
Hello TasVideos friends, how are you? Next, there is an option in the script.avs called "trimframe" and the value I found has the number 654321. I went to make the HD encode of a movie with more than 1000,000 frames (one million frames) and the movie only gives that 654321. I use an old version of EncodingPackage that does not have this limit, but does not have this "trimframe" line. What number should I put in order for the "trimframe" to be unlimited?
I await reply. Thank you very much.
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Hooo-leee ****. Gonna be strapping in and enjoying this video during a workday soon. Suikoden I/II were two of my favorite PSX titles of all time and I played them relentlessly when I was young.
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This is a very obvious yes vote. Seeing Tetris played at the highest level is already mind-exploding; seeing Tetris at a TAS level is just a thing of beauty.
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Even though I'm familiar with RE, the gameplay didn't keep me captivated enough to not skip around the raw video. I switched over to watching the commentary though and that was entertaining enough that I watched the whole run.
The game seems pretty good for being custom a thing, and the technical quality is there, but it's not the kind of game that really shines in a TAS setting IMO. As such, I must submit a No vote for entertainment. If this gets published, I think it would do the run a great service to have the commentary linked in the description.
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First, the run is exciting and was a good watch! The platforming is daring and precise, just as a TAS should be.
Second, the game is very aesthetically pleasing and pretty impressive for C64 hardware. It has such an interesting premise and conclusion too.
Yes vote.
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I'm writing this up kinda drunk so the explanation might ramble a bit. We can use Descartes' theorem to figure out the radius of the smallest circle. But to do that we need to figure out the size of the mid-sized circle. We can use triangles to figure that out because you can basically use them to figure out everything.
We set our coordinates origin to the middle of the diagram, where the two large circles are tangent. We know that circle C is tangent to circle A, which means that the segment AC is equal to the sum of the radii of A and C, or AC = rA + rC. Since C is tangent to P, then we can create the segment CB by adding rA to CP. Since AC and CB are of equal lengths, the triangle ABC is Isosceles and a segment from C to the midpoint of AB bisects the triangle, which would give us C.
Alright, let's figure shit out. We need the length of AB so that we can bisect it and get a perpendicular line. AB is defined by the points (0,-2) (5,0), and we want a parameterized line so we can can find the midpoint, so here we go:
Sweet, so now we need a line perpendicular to AB that passes through the point (2.5, -1). First, the point slope equation for our segment AB [(0,-2),(5,0)] is y=0.4x-2. For the perpendicular line:
Figure out where our perpendicular line intersects the x-axis:
So the center of C is (2.1,0), which means the radius of C is 0.9. Since we have our three tangent circles now, we can just apply Descartes' theorem. The curvature k of a circle is the inverse of its radius, where k is positive if the circle is externally tangent, which all of our circles are:
So if I didn't botch this too badly, the radius of the smallest circle is 0.225.
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Congrats on the publication Sand; it was fun to learn how to use JPC and process your movie!
Radiant wrote:
Congrats on getting this published!
A note on the game's publication text: the names "Mystical Gems of Lascorbanos", "Coins of Tenure", and "Crown of the Ages" are strictly from the NES version. The DOS version calls them "rare gems, a sack of rare coins and a jeweled crown".
Thank you for pointing that out! I've updated the publication text to use the DOS names.
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Yes vote because the run is entertaining. The usage of the penguin suit is quite good and the rest of the TAS seems technically sound to me, though I don't know the game well.
I share the same concerns over the category as many others in this thread but I am not factoring those concerns into my vote.
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Virtual dub can encode videos using any VFW encoders you have installed. There is a VFW x264 encoder you can download. You select Video > Compression, then choose an encoder. When you "save as avi" from the file menu, it will encode using that encoder.
Virtualdub has a bunch of filters you can apply. You can crop with a null filter, you can resize, etc. Just search for tutorials on how to do that stuff. Here's one I found in like 5 seconds: http://granjow.net/virtualdub-tutorial-editing.html
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You can do a nearest neighbor resize using this function.
You can pad a video using this function.
The resizing padding in TiKevin83's first example would be:
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The Strider games lend themselves to being TASed really well and it shows in this TAS. The combat is fast and fun, and the bosses are dispatched perfectly. You've managed to save a non-trivial amount of time over the last TAS as well which is impressive. Yes vote.
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PCSX2 does have AVI dumping and rerecording built in, at least as of 1.7. The avi dumping is VFW based and supports RGB32 or YV12 colorspace dumping.
I just tested the AVI recording and it works fine. I don't know about potential filesize issues like splitting, etc.
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feos wrote:
Hard to give advises when it's about being considered art or not.
Very true.
I think what you said about it being obviously superhuman to an audience that is naive about a game wraps up the sentiment I was trying to find. IMO Ehrgeiz doesn't have the speed or freedom necessary to achieve that kind display, TAS or not. My input in the playarounds I've done is very tight, but even then it mostly looks like a really skilled player more than a superhuman playing the game.
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I was thinking about what it would take to get a playaround for PSX Ehrgeiz published on the site, figured I could ask here. I've made a few playarounds for the game, where the goals specifically are "use all of the characters moves", "get a perfect every round", and "do the previous goals as fast as possible." My goals felt pretty loose, there aren't any agreed-upon speedrunning categories for the game, and I do questionable stuff like setting the rounds-to-win to 1 to keep the movie shorter. That is all to say I never bothered to try to make it "publication worthy" as a result.
The fighting game playarounds that are published on the site are all very extreme examples where the game is broken pretty badly, fast insane situations are set up, 2 players are used to make the action even more insane. I'm wondering, for a fighting game playaround, is that necessarily where the bar is set? I'm talking about TASes like Marvel vs. Capcom, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, etc.
I don't think it's even possible to play Ehrgeiz at a level that is comparable to things like Marvel vs Capcom, so does that mean it's a non-starter? If it's not a non-starter, what kind of goals or constraints might make an Ehrgeiz playaround publishable?
The playaround I talked about is here: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=497018#497018
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This is a game changer! I personally wouldn't even have considered TASing on Dolphin due to being so spoiled with TAStudio, so this opens up a lot of possibilities. Hopefully one day this can become part of the official builds and help improve Dolphin as TASing emulator in general.
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It blows my mind that techniques at this level of complexity and precision have been found, let alone that they could even be put into practice. The movie makes almost no sense at all, and then it's suddenly over. Which is great.
Easy yes vote for a TAS that deserves a lot of attention.
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Oh dang! I love this game - I played it so much when I was young. I would love to see a TAS of this, battle animations or not. I haven't watched your WIP yet but I do see how every battle being a flash of kills and imperceptible menuing could be a bore.
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Alright, strike the comment about it not playing back correctly on my media players. I compared playback of the ffv1 framedump to my converted encodes and they match up exactly. What I had been doing as a shortcut is comparing my encodes against Ubercapitalist's temp encode since I could access and play it quickly, and there's something about the way his encode is done that throws off the timing compared to mine.
The quick map restart that is done right at the beginning is much faster on his encode, though the rest of the encode then lines up exactly, including the audio. It looks like my ffv1 dumps match up with the emulation though, so maybe he did some editing for his temp.
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That thread was helpful in understanding more about how this timecode situation works, thanks for sharing Aktan. I was not using ffvs back when you wrote your plugin, so I don't know how the plugin has changed if at all. Based on the discussion in this thread, it seems like things have changed though, as in the comparison I did, I did not find dropped frames in either video. Where frames actually showed up relative to the other video shifted around as I mentioned, but each video had all of the same unique frames as far as I could tell (I did not do a proper, exhaustive search however).
Based on the discussion in that thread, I think I have a better understanding of why two different plugins might produce these results. What I'm still struggling with though is why the output from Dolphin has so many issues with playback in all of the playback software I have. Avisynth, VirtualDub, MPC-HD, and even Windows' built-in players all play the FFV1 encode incorrectly. Based on what I know about the FFV1 encodes now, it seems like all of the information to play the video back correctly is present in the file, yet this conversion step has to happen first still.
Since Dolphin doesn't dump a timecodes file anymore, I didn't figure the VFRtoCFR plugins would be useful anymore, so I never investigated them. Perhaps I'm wrong on that account?
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feos wrote:
Dolphin's dumper only writes unique frames with their timewise positions, but the timebase is 1/60, so the result can be loaded by VFW importers without additional framerate info. Dolphin rounds up timing of every frame to fit into this 60fps grid, even though originally they may not be aligning with it. It's constant fps, but at the same time dedupped.
Ah, thanks for the breakdown. That is in line with what I thought might be going on in the FFV1 encode. A possibly interesting observation on the "framerate" of the FFV1 encode is that using FFVideoSource without parameters will cause VirtualDub to report the framerate as 27.479, whereas LWLibavSource without parameters will report as 60.0 fps. I know from experience that if you do a segmented dump of the game, each segment will have a slightly different reported framerate as well.
I guess this means that FFVideoSource is trying to do some sort of framerate heuristics on the clip to guess a possible/average framerate, given however the frames happen to line up. Maybe it's trying to be too smart or something.
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Given that the last post here was made nearly 3 years ago, and some things have apparently changed, I'd like to provide an update on the ffvs vs libav thing. At least for Resident Evil 4, ffvs (using fpsnum=60) now syncs up to the audio, sort of. Take a look at this comparison video:
Link to video
Interestingly, while the encode that used ffvs does sync up to the audio nowadays, the actual video does not run at the correct frame rate some of the time. This is particularly noticeable at the very beginning during the memory card read and the title screen, where the two videos are noticeably running at different rates. However, once actual gameplay starts, the videos line up almost exactly. I say almost because inspecting the comparison frame by frame reveals that the two videos will be out of sync by exactly 1 frame every now and then, and not necessarily in the same order at any given time (sometimes libav is ahead, sometimes behind).
At sections of the game where the resolution changes (any time the player brings up the inventory screen), the ffvs and libav versions diverge slightly. You can see that the bright magenta flash lasts longer on the ffvs side, and it's harder to notice this, but the ffvs side fades to black more quickly than the libav side. Encodes of this entire TAS (#6832: Ubercapitalist's GC Resident Evil 4 "The Mercenaries: Waterworld" in 08:36.57) sync up with the audio regardless of the import function used, but the LSMASHSource plugin is still the only one that outputs video that matches the emulator output exactly. I will note that feeding the raw output into FFMPEG directly (and muxing with audio there if you want) will output correct video as well that matches up with LSMASHSource output. It's just the ffvs plugin that seems to have issues.
While I have been trying to educate myself with the finer details of how encoding timebases work, I am not entirely sure how it is that this difference in decoding occurs. I think it has something to do with FFV1 encodes actually having timestamps for individual frames rather than a particular framerate, thus effectively producing variable frame rate video. Something about the way AviSynth (and the plugins) handle this falls apart if a constant frame rate conversion is not baked in to the script.
Data for the encode I posted:
Note that StackHorizontal does automatically adjust the second video to fit the parameters of the first video (w/ regards to framerate and some other properties) so I checked to make sure that it wasn't affecting output. Switching which video comes first does not affect the output of each individual video at all, and individually encoded videos line up with what's in the comparison video.
We set our coordinates origin to the middle of the diagram, where the two large circles are tangent. We know that circle C is tangent to circle A, which means that the segment AC is equal to the sum of the radii of A and C, or AC = rA + rC. Since C is tangent to P, then we can create the segment CB by adding rA to CP. Since AC and CB are of equal lengths, the triangle ABC is Isosceles and a segment from C to the midpoint of AB bisects the triangle, which would give us C.
Alright, let's figure shit out. We need the length of AB so that we can bisect it and get a perpendicular line. AB is defined by the points (0,-2) (5,0), and we want a parameterized line so we can can find the midpoint, so here we go:
I can grab something more specific if you want but you'll need to provide a frame number.