TASVideos

Posted: 1/13/2016 12:21 PM

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ais523

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arandomgameTASer wrote:

Warp wrote:
Modifying the game code itself using the emulator is also not considered legit.
'cept the glitch used to do an ACE has been VERIFIED ON A CONSOLE.

I'm pretty sure Warp was referring to modifying the ROM directly via editing it, which is something you can't do on a console (without a flashcart or similar additional hardware), and is different from ACE. This is more commonly known as a "romhack", and although we do accept TASes of those here, they have a very high bar (both the run, and the edits to the game, are under scrutiny).

Posted: 1/13/2016 2:41 AM

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ais523

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In response to one of RGamma's questions, I'd say that the purpose of a TASing tool (whether an emulator or an Hourglass-alike) is to provide as repeatable an environment as possible. So that at least gives a baseline as to what sort of glitches we can expect to work. Something like this already comes up in NetHack. I TAS the DOS version, which is a DPMI game; in order to run it on a practical DOS system, you need to first run an extra program known as a "DPMI extender". One particularly well-known DPMI extender is Windows, and that's what most people use in practice; however, if you have a pure-DOS system, you'd need to use something else. More than one extender is available (although my choice is somewhat forced because JPC-RR only emulates one correctly), and they have slightly different lag properties, memory layouts, etc.. In this case, it seems to be most reasonable to rule that any extender that emulates correctly can be used; it's sort-of like the difference between running a NES and FDS version of the same game, or a GB and SGB version. I'm actually excited to see what sort of glitches might be opened up by running games on unusual hardware (that they're theoretically designed for, just unusual). PC games often claim to support a wide range of platforms, and if you can take advantage of that to make ACE happen in an unusual way, it'd be interesting to see it. Whether doing so is "speedrun-legal" or not will depend somewhat on the details.

Posted: 1/12/2016 6:09 PM

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ais523

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One thing that bothers me in terms of considering ACE outside normal gameplay is that many games have some really weird bugs. There are cases where games have ended up executing controller presses when the ACE potential isn't what the players were aiming for, and they've had to hold certain buttons simply to insert a harmless instruction and thus prevent the game crashing. A less dramatic example is the many games that are written expecting the player to save just before a section of the game and reset whenever it doesn't go perfectly; developers are aware of this tendency and balance around it. Speedrunners normally don't have to do this because they often have the skill to get through a section first time, but casual players reset for this purpose a lot. (In competitive Pokémon, players resetting because they lose a battle – thus causing the other player to have to wait about 30 seconds while it tries in vain to restore the connection – is, or at least used to be, a major problem. The most likely reason people are doing this is because they're used to resetting from losses during non-competitive play.)

Posted: 1/10/2016 11:25 PM

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ais523

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I'm glad that this submission is on the site, so that people can look at it and see what the winning GDQ run was like. I don't think it should be published as a movie. Let it be rejected; it's clearly improvable. (There's a glitch that I couldn't make work, but which I got far enough with to make it seem like it should work: if you go two screens east of the final boss, move one screen to the west, and reset 42 frames later, there is a 1 in 65536 chance that you will be able to glitch into the final boss room by holding left after reloading the game, and a 65535 in 65536 chance that you will end up deleting the save file. I didn't manage to get the luck manipulation done, but these odds are easily in range of what's viable to manipulate in a TAS. Things that affect randomness here include the background music, global frame counter, and the player's inventory.)

Posted: 1/10/2016 6:18 PM

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ais523

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The problem there is that it gives a huge advantage to people who have TASed the game before. If it's popular, there will be some.

Posted: 1/10/2016 6:15 PM

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ais523

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I guess my problem with this is that because the competition was biased so that a TAS and realtime run could be reasonably comparable, it meant putting so many restrictions on the TASes that it wasn't really like TASing any more (and in particular, the TAS failed to exhibit any sort of TAS-like behaviour).

Posted: 1/10/2016 6:10 PM

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ais523

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For a long time, SDA banned deathwarping and savewarping (in addition to any method of getting out of bounds). Eventually, though, the rule was repealed because it was getting hard to define in a consistent way and was holding back speedrunning (many communities just decided to ignore the SDA rules, and you had talk of people making "SDA-legal" runs as a separate category). Deathwarps and savewarps, at least, are things that game designers take into consideration during the game design. In VVVVVV, there is one percent-bearing item that can only be accessed via a deathwarp (and in fact, the map has to change in no-deaths mode to give it to you for free). I speedrun Neverwinter Nights. Some runners use 1024×768 screen resolution, either to make the video easier to capture, or so that they can put splits, timers, etc., alongside the game on their Twitch stream. Some runners use 1366×768 screen resolution because it's the size of their screen. Would you say that both of these are legitimate ways to play the game? Now, suppose I told you that there's a glitch that only works in widescreen screen resolutions (the glitch depends on the camera angle to work, and you can't get it to the angle in question on a 4:3 resolution). Does this make one of the screen resolutions an invalid way to play? Does it make the glitch itself illegal? There's no need to change the screen resolution to make the glitch work. (There is such a glitch. However, there's a way to do the same thing that's both faster and less RNG-dependent, so the glitch isn't currently used on runs.) On the note of save/reload glitches: back when I first started routing Neverwinter Nights, I started routing both single-segment and single-segment-with-resets. (Saving and reloading in the middle of a single-segment run is still a different category at SDA. I have no problem with this; if savewarping has a particularly bad effect on a run it means that you can submit a run without.) Eventually we discovered that it's possible to skip a reasonably common cutscene via saving and reloading in the middle of it. Now everybody runs single-segment-with-resets, and nobody runs single-segment; we just don't want to waste our time watching that cutscene every time it comes up. Category choice is often influenced by what people want to play. So I guess the way to look at things is: the boundary between gameplay and metagameplay sometimes isn't as clear as it seems, and when it is clear, you can categorise various parts of metagameplay in and out (and some categories are going to appeal more to runners than others, which may not be the categories that appeal to you as a viewer).

Posted: 1/9/2016 11:37 PM

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ais523

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Would it be possible to write the payload faster using subframe input? Or were you constrained by having to use the game's own controller polling routines rather than having space in memory to write your own, and not being able to write those routines more than once per frame? (Actually, it strikes me that subframe input might run fast enough to do a runtime equivalent of beam-racing, allowing you to write 6502 instructions in realtime on controller 2 that would run at appropriate places on each frame, although you'd be wasting a lot of CPU cycles just reading the controller.)

Posted: 1/2/2016 6:30 PM

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ais523

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In the actual Pac-Man arcade game, each of the four ghosts has its own separate AI. I'm not sure if this was preserved for the NES version.

Posted: 1/2/2016 3:12 AM

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ais523

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Can you oneshot the plusle/minun with a move other than Mud Shot, without a critical hit? If you could, it'd save on the text box you get for using a super-effective move. On route 115, is it really faster to bike round the spinning trainer rather than manipulating them to change direction? (Based on how Emerald's RNG works, it probably is, but I just wanted to make sure.) Can you manipulate the Pelipper's second Protect to fail, or do you need to be on lower health for some reason? (Obviously you need to be on low health, but is there nowhere faster to damage yourself down?)

Posted: 12/12/2015 11:37 PM

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ais523

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NetHack 3.6.0 actually contains fixes for many of the bugs discovered and exploited in the making of the TAS; I've been sending bug reports to the devteam. As a result, it wouldn't really make sense to TAS it, given that the TAS has actually influenced its direction.

Posted: 11/12/2015 12:38 AM

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I'm actually unsure that the 2003 turn plan works, come to think of it. I haven't checked, but I'm unsure that it's possible to get the hypercharged monster through the portal from Earth onto Air without wasting time.

Posted: 10/25/2015 5:12 PM

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ais523

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I'd like to pitch in, and mention that this sort of kaizohack solution TAS is what got me interested in the concept of TASing in the first place (and eventually lead me to find TASvideos, via encode subtitles). So it's definitely beneficial to have runs like this around; there's a subset of people who'd never know about TASing otherwise.

Posted: 10/25/2015 2:14 PM

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ais523

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OK, so I've been trying to plan what the endgame looks like now, taking into account all the glitches/strategies we've found while the TAS has been under construction. Assuming we're allowing even very low-probability events, and I haven't made a mistake (or if I have, that it's fixable), we can do it in 2003. Here's the new plan. Two actions of that plan seem very hard to pull off. Possibly the easier (!) is the long sequence of monster actions at the Vibrating Square level revisit, that involves two 200 teleport fails on the same monster action, and also manipulates a spontaneous polyself immediately afterwards on the following turn boundary. The reason I think this one might be easier is that I have a plan that looks like it might work: fill the level with monsters, traps, and in particular quantum mechanics, and just let mechanic after mechanic teleport us in the hope that at least one of them lands us on the right square (then keep teleporting round until the spontaneous polyself lines up). The harder one is crossing Air in one monster action and then landing in the perfect place on Fire. A hypercharged conflicted engulfer will move around at random, repeatedly engulfing and unengulfing us. If its random walk takes us to the portal (already unlikely), then we get dropped straight onto Fire, and have to manipulate the portal to be 4 squares North of us (this is closer than the 5 squares West that was previously the best known portal placement). Pulling off something this unlikely probably involves a computer search for an appropriate seed in advance, then planning the rest of the run around it so that the seed gets hit at the right moment. Another problem with the 2003 turn plan is that for every 4 squares of the random walk, we need to spend 1 turn boundary earlier in the game. This might mean up to 1000 or so turns, each of whose boundaries is just spent hypercharging a monster, which is going to look repetitive (and also kind-of flickery because hypercharging involves changing level) no matter what we do, so I'm not sure it would be that entertaining. I also have a 2004-turn plan that avoids these problems (using a different and equally impressive strategy for Air, that's slightly slower, and using a manual polyself rather than a turn boundary polyself on D:1). At this point I'm not really sure which to aim for. It might depend on how entertaining we can make hypercharging. EDIT: The 2004 turn plan is now online here. dwangoAC and I both have some reservations about the 2003 turn plan, both due to grindiness, and because it seems to be beyond what's reasonably possible to manipulate. So we may have to settle for this one instead.

Posted: 10/23/2015 3:30 AM

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ais523

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More big news. Delayed levport kick-in is now confirmed to a) exist as a glitch, and b) be capable of levporting the Amulet. This means that we can go from the vibrating square level to dlvl 1 in one monster action. The setup is really complex. The easiest setup involves crawling out of water, as shown in this recording (as you might be able to tell from the character name, it was done using "lizard mode", a new debug tool that lets you set up the level like you want and then turn off all debug powers so that everything happens identically to a non-debug game). This setup happens to be humanly possible (if unlikely, I'd call it about a 1 in 10 chance), but it's bad for a speedrun (when tool-assisted) because it can't be done in a form that flies or levitates (in particular, it can't be done as an air elemental). For this glitch to be TAS-worthy, we need to at least tie 2006 turns. I feel it might be beatable, though (2005 would be even better!) I haven't tried routing the post-T:2000 area with this glitch. I suspect it may be faster to find an faster setup (e.g. via the use of 200 teleport fail) than trying to use the one we've confirmed to work. (I feel like I have a good handle on the glitch now; in the test, it's acting exactly like I thought it would. eternaljwh's description of it is pretty accurate; you just need to step a levport trap and subsequently the Amulet on the same monster action (i.e. when the game runs the loop that performs one action for each monster). The problem is that most player-repositioning monster effects avoid traps.) EDIT: Also, I don't think this has been mentioned anywhere on TASvideos yet (it's been mentioned on IRC but that's about it), so here you go: there's an alternative way to quickly fill a level with monsters ("turn undead" on a stack of corpses in inventory) that costs a player action rather than a turn boundary. In the 2006 turn plan, turn boundaries, rather than player actions, were the limiting factor through much of the run, so it's possible that this will lead to an improvement.

Posted: 10/4/2015 6:30 PM

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ais523

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Could you upload the video of the stream to YouTube or a similar video hosting service, so that it can be linked from the publication?

Posted: 9/26/2015 10:58 PM

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ais523

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Someone's written one already: this guide is pretty famous (although not really specific to computer games).

Posted: 9/24/2015 9:52 PM
(Edited: 9/25/2015 2:40 PM)

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ais523

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Sharkey91 wrote:

Yes, ais523 I forgot that

Actually I think it's a hardlock not a softlock, I just assumed softlock because it usually is. (Now I almost want to test it, but I don't have my SM64DS cart handy and don't know how to glitch into the Bowser levels as Yoshi without TAS tools.)

Posted: 9/22/2015 9:46 PM

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ais523

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It's also worth mentioning that when Bowser breathes fire against Yoshi, the game softlocks if you have no other characters unlocked. So there are at least two barriers to a Yoshi-only completion.

Posted: 9/15/2015 9:33 AM

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ais523

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Well, in this case the discovery of the trick had nothing to do with the making of the TAS (except for the fact that it was discovered discussing the TAS); it's in a completely different part of the game. I guess this TAS is unusual because it's had a lot of scrutiny from the NetHack community already, which typically knows more about the game than the TASvideos community. The other reason is that my motivation to complete the 2015-turn version of the TAS has been flagging for a while, because we've got past the parts where we're making general-purpose improvements to our character and moving on to getting very bogged down in the details of the plan; we've been stalled for a while because of being unsure what to do next. I have a suspicion that an attempt to stick to the old plan would continue to go really slowly, especially as there's now less motivation to work out how to bring its desired T:2000 state about.

Posted: 9/14/2015 2:38 PM

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ais523

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Someone asked about the state of this TAS over at Reddit. I may as well repeat the reply I made there over here, even though it doesn't say much that you don't know already:

/u/ais523 on reddit wrote:

So the current state of the TAS is that, after a long period of it being stuck because both dwangoAC and I were busy with other things, we found a major new glitch that completely changes the end of the game (and thus what we have to do to prepare for it). For people who don't know NetHack: because the game accepts sub-frame input (and the limiting factor on realtime is normally either lag or your keyboard bandwidth), realtime doesn't make much sense for a TAS. So we're doing gametime instead. The area containing one particular item that's needed to beat the game unlocks at turn 2000 (this is due to a programming oversight; nobody really noticed until people started speedrunning NetHack really competitively, because normal gameplay will get there well after turn 2000). A gametime speedrun is thus dedicated to preparing as well as you can so that when turn 2000 hits, you can complete the game as quickly as possible from that point. Previously, the theoretical maximum was believed to be 2015 turns (and because the seed we're using corresponds to a date in 2015, we wanted to be finished in 2015, although really the progress isn't going nearly fast enough; dwangoAC is rather optimistic about that). The new glitch has been confirmed to work (we actually persuaded a player who was near the end of a non-speedrun playthrough on a public server to incorporate it into their game in order to verify the glitch; public server play is popular because it lets you prove you aren't cheating). No speedruns have been completed incorporating the new glitch yet, but there's a theoretical plan to complete the game on 2006, just 7 turns after the unlock. You can read it on my website here. Unfortunately, the new glitch cannot be performed efficiently on the seed we have (it looks like we'd have to waste a whole turn), which means that to use optimally we'd have to restart (although things would go a lot quicker the second time because we're re-TASing ground we've already been over). Additionally, many of the things we've done to set up so far don't make sense in the context of the new glitch. Currently, the situation is that another potential new glitch has been found (via code tracing). It hasn't been confirmed yet; the setup is highly specific (and although there are multiple potential setups, some of which might be humanly possible, the fastest candidate for a setup seems to be TAS-only). This new glitch may well go even faster, and as a bonus probably doesn't conflict with our current seed, meaning that we may be able to incorporate it into the run via the use of a lot of hexing, as opposed to having to redo the run.

Posted: 9/10/2015 6:23 PM

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ais523

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I haven't watched this run yet. From a technical routing point of view, I like the fact that the loops are included; it's interesting to see what route fulfils this category best. On the other hand, they do sound like they would make the run less interesting to watch. I'd be upset if they were removed because it makes the category more arbitrary. So I'll do what I normally do, and just get my TASing entertainment from the submission text (and not vote, both because that'd be against the intended purpose of the voting, and because I use the voting record as a method to remember which videos I've watched).

Posted: 8/16/2015 9:21 PM

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ais523

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For me, the line between acceptable and unacceptable is whether the OCR is running on the image that shows onscreen. Retracing over lines, drawing extra offscreen text, and the like in order to foil the OCR is fine, because that's pretty much within the bounds of what I expect OCR manipulation to be like, and the details are going to depend on what you originally drew (at least to one extent). Drawing in a way that the OCR doesn't see at all isn't fine, because the game isn't about fooling the OCR any more, but about fooling the game's input routines.

Posted: 8/13/2015 6:07 PM

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ais523

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A blank answer needs out of bounds (or something very close to it) in order to enter the "actual" answer. I'd be OK with drawing an actually blank answer because you can explain it, without lying or anyone feeling cheated, as having drawn the answer out-of-bounds (this is one method to actually do it). Drawing what's effectively a blank answer that doesn't look blank is beyond the line, though. (Also, saying that there's technical difficulty because the DS TASbot has never been done before is sort-of missing the point; that'd be like making an unoptimized TAS for a never-before-TASed platform, submitting it, and claiming it should be accepted because of the effort that went into writing the emulator.)

Posted: 8/13/2015 4:15 PM

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ais523

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Warp wrote:

So as long as the answer contains all the letters from one of the valid answers in the same order, it doesn't matter how many additional letters there are in-between them?

That's it, pretty much; IIRC there are a few special cases but they mostly don't come up. (It's also why most of the joke answers tend to be fairly long.)

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