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The main category I'd be interested in watching for this would be "fastest 9999999" for each planet where it's possible in a reasonable amount of time. The game does a good job at making the strategies different for different planets, and it would be interesting to watch. (Hevendor is, of course, humanly impossible, but depending on how the timing scales it may be TASly possible, although it would probably take years).
Sadly, that category would probably be long and boring for everyone else.
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There was a rule change for other tiers: it allowed extra categories for runs so long as they were entertaining and different from the other categories. That seems appropriate for this run.
I haven't watched it yet, so I haven't voted, but if it's entertaining (seems likely), and offers something different from the other categories of the game (which based on the discussion here, it does), I see no reason not to accept it.
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As far as I'm concerned, using a glitched password is no different from using corrupted pre-initialized SRAM. Even if the game decides it doesn't want to attempt to load it, it's not something that can be done within the confines of the game itself.
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CoolKirby wrote:
I always thought they were classified as two different games, but I guess you're right. Well, since the Pokémon Yellow save corruption run is the true any%, we'll need to add branch names to both the Blue and Green runs.
Since both of these movies forego save corruption, should we call Green "no save corruption" and Blue "no save corruption, no Doko Kashira Door glitch"? Or if that's too long, "no save corruption, no door glitch"?
The Doko Kashira Door glitch isn't possible in Blue. Thus, it makes sense that Blue and Green would have different runs in the same category.
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This is effectively skipping a cutscene via editing the save file to just after the cutscene. Skipping cutscenes via resetting is only allowed for battery saves if the game autosaves at the start of the cutscene, and loads at the end; if it doesn't autosave until the end of the cutscene, then resetting to skip the cutscene doesn't work. Password saves should work the same; the game has a point at which it saves, and if it's at the end of the cutscene, bad luck.
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Would "no buffer overflows" work for the less-glitched Pokémon Blue movie? All the faster-completion glitches I know of work by overflowing a buffer somewhere (including the save corruption glitches).
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Smash TASes are normally massively controversial. This one's an easy Yes for entertainment, though, and sounds like it has a decent chance of being a TAS world record as well.
I'm not sure who the fastest character is. It does seem reasonable that Samus might be, though, given how quickly she can move using glitches.
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Radiant wrote:
Of particular note here are the Metroid runs. In the Metroid speedrunning community, which predates the TasVideos site, the three standard runs are Any%, 100%, and Low%; where Any% allows the use of any glitches you can find. That means we should probably not call any Metroid runs "glitched" given that the Metroid community would call them "Any%".
I disagree with your facts here. I was watching Zoasty's stream last night (who holds the world record for many Super Metroid categories, and thus can be considered part of the Metroid community). He was running Super Metroid "any%", unqualified; and although that run allowed most glitches, it appeared to have a restriction that it wasn't allowed to go out of bounds with the X-Ray scope.
On the other hand, this appears to vary from Metroid game to Metroid game (Metroid Prime 1 goes out of bounds in its any% route, and the community generally considers that acceptable).
I think the best solution is for branch names to contain all the information needed to work out the restrictions under which it's played. As such, I think I'd label a Super Metroid any% (by the community's definition) as "in bounds", even though that's an unusual definition for that game; but I'd also label a glitched any% as "out of bounds glitch".
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jlun2 wrote:
Well, that's another reason why real time records shouldn't compete with TASes, since if that SDA run were to be done real time on BizHawk, it'll probably be slower due to said emulation error. :o
My standard example for this is Metroid Prime; it is much much faster on TAS than is theoretically possible on console, because Dolphin gets all the loading times wrong (which is a major problem for that game in particular, because loading periods are playable and the player can be damaged during that time).
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I'd like to see something like that done with lots of synchronization. Starting levels at much the same time, ending them at much the same time, synchronized jumps and the like.
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I don't know much about the N64, Bizhawk, or Zelda, but normally in computer graphics, "dithered alpha" would mean that if something was semi-transparent, you'd make it semitransparent via alternating between transparent and opaque pixels, rather than via averaging its color with the color of whatever was behind it. At a high resolution, the difference is hard to notice for typical 3D landscapes (although it can be a lot more visible in 2D). It's also quite possible that there simply isn't anything that uses dithered alpha in Majora's Mask anyway, in which case the option would do nothing (or possibly that the parts of the game you played through don't have anything semitransparent in).
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jlun2 wrote:
Uh...I'm not sure about the situation here, but:
Games on multi-carts are acceptable unless there is a standalone version available. (For instance, Duck Hunt is okay, but not Duck Hunt on the Mario/Duck Hunt combo cart.)
Is that the case here?
The situation here is that you can place a Sonic 3 cart and a Sonic & Knuckles cart into your console simultaneously, creating a different game from either, called "Sonic 3 & Knuckles". It basically contains the levels from Sonic & Knuckles, with some modified versions of the levels from Sonic 3 before them, and all the characters from both games.
Sonic 3 is more different from the first half of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, than Sonic & Knuckles is from the second half of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. The combined game is quite similar to the concatenation of the original games, though.
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You need to connect an oscilloscope to an N64 as it plays the game. (Or get someone with an N64bot to do it for you; I guess they'd mostly be happy to check for you, but many of them won't own the game and thus wouldn't be able to.)
It might be possible to check it from the emulator, too, but that might need an emulator with more features than Mupen, and I'm not sure if even Bizhawk has enough.
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I'd still be very surprised if the poweron state of a console were anything like random. I can believe that some bit patterns cannot come up at all, unless they were previously left in memory by a different game.
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I'm against it mostly because it greatly increases the bandwidth with which the player can communicate with the game, giving an unfair advantage.
Many perfectly well-designed games are careful not to use memory before initializing it, so uninitialized memory normally doesn't matter. If, however, you gain control of the instruction pointer via a glitch, you can send it into uninitialized memory "early", before the program starts using it, and in many games it will still have its original contents if you do that. Now, normally a TAS would have to do complicated things in order to get a program into memory (first setting up a bootstrap, then using that bootstrap to enter a program); everything is done via controller inputs, and because a game typically won't have a bootstrap in memory naturally, you need to do complex in-game actions in order to set up the desired memory state before jumping there. If you can just insert the bootstrap (or even an entire program) via uninitialized memory, then there's no point in doing all that (which for me is the main entertainment of the run); you just jump off to unused memory and find that there's a complete program to do whatever you want there.
In other words, this moves total control TASes from playing the game, to moving the instruction pointer; there's no longer a need to play the game in order to actually achieve what you want to do with the game. It also means that most likely, all goals within the game will have an identical input file; all TASes will just be "fastest known jump to uninitailized memory" + "program that does whatever you want".
This isn't just restricted to badly-written or obscure games, either. Ilari informs me on IRC that both SMW and SMW2 would be shorter (and in my opinion less interesting) if uninitialized memory were allowed, much shorter in the case of SMW2. (The existing SMW2 run apparently creates lots of lag to be able to assemble the bootstrap without the game interfering; this wouldn't be necessary if the bootstrap just randomly happened to be in memory anyway.)
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amaurea, your solution to the no-zips is pretty close (identical?) to my "does not enter a solid object, then leave through a different side of the same object".
I think zips/shortcuts should be allowed in a max-ring run, though. Especially because they'll increase the number of rings that can be collected.
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Bond697 wrote:
plus, don't they supply the hardware for part of regionals and during at least parts of nats and worlds? which means you can't do anything to stop the microphone, etc. if you end up with their hardware. not to mention, you need to know exactly where the last sample was even if you do manage to force the samples to 00 through.. some means in front of the crowd of people and your opponent watching.
They used to, but they don't any more, so that they can get more battles happening at once.
e: and no, the graphics state changes based on where in the room you are(causing new graphics to be queued and the state to change), if there's currently a gx-related callback interrupt executing, when the FIFO changes state, box tests and their results etc. it changes very frequently.
VGC battles are done from the main menu, not from a room at all. It's one of the graphically simplest views in the entire game.
before i forget, the tick system is 64-bit. it doesn't loop for a good, long time. you would also need to estimate where it would be when you're starting the battle. and you need to guess when you'll be starting the battle so you can guess where it'll be.
You could turn off the DS, then turn it on when you're told to start the battle; that's done really frequently to prevent the DS losing power.
also, you use the cgear to set up infrared battles. *edit: the vgc battles happen through the competition thing in the main menu. the wifi is on for the normal cgear stuff, but i'm not sure if it's on for that. you don't even get option to go in-game. whether that means wifi is on or not, i'm not sure. i don't really need to know to show that it's really not possible, but i'd like for the info to be right. for the sake of argument, though, let's say it's off.
It isn't. If it were on, the power light would flicker, and it doesn't.
If you need testing to see how a real DS acts, I currently have a B2/W2 cartridge in VGC mode (from UK nationals 2013; I never bothered to take it out of that mode in case it became useful for testing later). Obviously, I can't start a battle without a second cart in VGC mode (from the same tournament) to connect it to, but I can check what happens on the battle-starting screen. (Cartridges in VGC mode were previously used to analyze the exact tiebreak rules in VGC; they're meant to be public knowledge, but the official explanations of them are somewhat ambiguous.)
I agree with you that abusing this in realtime is going to be basically impossible, certainly much harder than winning a battle legitimately. I love wondering about whether it's possible or not, though, even if I'd never do it myself.
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When does this seeding happen? If it's at poweron, like the other RNGs, most of those have known values, or typically known values, and so aren't important.
If it's seeded at the start of every battle, then yes, it's going to be rather harder. Many of those are going to be the same every time, though. (Realtime clock and key inputs are trivial to control, you can just not touch the touchpad, the MAC address is fixed, and I think it only samples inputs once a frame so it'll always be at the same point within the vcount?) The microphone is also easy to control, because it's possible to attach an external microphone to the DS, and it could easily be made to always output zeroes.
Dealing with the wireless-related seeding is normally handled by RNGers via simply turning wireless off. I don't believe there's any reason to turn it on at a VGC, either (it uses infrared). The graphics state likely has very low entropy, because the view on screen is particularly simple when starting a battle.
So "all" that you'd need to control would be the various precise timers. That probably does make control very difficult, but because I think the game only acknowledges keys at the transition from one video frame to the next, you could probably find a seed where a range of consecutive frames worked, for all reasonably likely precise-timer values that might happen on those frames.
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Simply stating it's not possible, without evidence, isn't particularly convincing.
If you can press the sequence of keys on an emulator, you can press the sequence of keys in real life too (unless it involves 30Hz mashing, or something like that). If you can calculate the sequence of keys to press via any means at all, you can pre-calculate it and memorize it. If it requires precise timing, you can use a clock or timer to help set it up.
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I never believe that exploits 100% require an emulator, and I'm not convinced you're correct in this case. (Also, you forgot about, or didn't mention, the ability to earn byes in Nationals via online play.)
However, I also don't see how releasing the input file would be useful for people intending to cheat.
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Patashu wrote:
Final Fantasy 1 through 8 (and possibly beyond) have one of the simplest RNGs possible - a table of 256 bytes that advances one every time it is needed.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy 12's RNG isn't that broken; instead, it's around as broken as Pokémon's. Which means that you can turn on the console, perform some actions, and based on the results walk up to a chest, open it, and get the rare drop. And Final Fantasy 12 is pretty recent.
Advance Wars' RNG is actually one of the better ones, but as far as I know careful input would mean that it just cycles up based on frames spent on a certain frame, which would mean it'd still be manipulable in realtime, just difficult. Perhaps I'll try it for fun someday.
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ALAKTORN wrote:
I never understood how he thought the RNG could be manipulable in human play, that’s a ridiculous claim that is never true for any kind of RNG
except for the really shitty RNGs that aren’t based on frame timings, which are few from my experience, luckily; and Pokémon has always been based on frame timings since gen I, AFAIK
The RNG in Pokémon Emerald is based on only frame timings, and people manipulated it in human play regularly. With practice, you can hit an individual frame 1 time in 3 if you have an accurate timer helping you out (this is about what I can manage, and it's consistent with other people experienced at that sort of thing I've been talking to).
In generations 4 and 5, the RNGs tend to not depend on the individual frame, and only advance when they're called into.
In general, though, you should expect the vast majority of RNGs to be manipulable by humans. It's done in Final Fantasy games all the time, for instance (except probably the MMOs). Pretty much anything short of something that measures the timing of every single button press, or that randomizes based on lag, is going to be manipulable by humans; it'll take more tries than a TAS does, but there's nothing inherently difficult about it.
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I've done this several times in realtime on F-Zero: GP Legend (for GBA); I usually fail, and it normally takes me several laps. In other words, it's not easy at all.
For people who don't understand what's going on: the aim is to collide with all the other vehicles hard enough to either break them outright, or to knock them off the track. Doing that normally requires carefully lining up with each one in order to get perfect hits on them, or else to repeatedly grind them down with repeated small hits. This TAS is accurate enough to break several enemy vehicles per second.