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EEssentia wrote:
If you could jump directly to the last boss--or heck--even directly to the ending by utilizing TASing, where would the fun be in watching the game?
That would be utilizing TASing to its very extremes.
And yet there are a few runs that do that on this site. Notably, though, they tend to be accompanied with other runs that don't; default for TASes seems to be three categories, "glitched any%" that hits the boss or ending via any means possible (and typically skipping most of the game); and any% and 100% as per SDA. Many games either don't allow glitched any%, or people haven't found a way to make it happen yet.
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I've been following this submission in the forums, and was very impressed about it, even if I didn't post.
Not voting for now, because I'm at work and haven't watched it. I expect I'll most likely vote Yes once I have, though.
Was that first wild encounter, in view of a trainer, a manipulated random one, or some glitch involving holding a direction when saving? Without seeing the input, it's hard to tell from the video. (I can sort of see everything else that's going on there, though.)
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SXL wrote:
Can't watch this, keeps blinking. What codec do I need ? Care to youtube it ?
What do you mean by "blinking"? It might be that what you're seeing is exactly what the WIP is; a lot of things happening very fast. For instance, we cast a spell over and over again in Vlad's Tower, which would necessarily change the screen between two views very quickly. (Ilari says it's a typical x264 encode with no unusual options, so it's unlikely to be a codec problem if you can watch other TASes on the sites, especially other encodes by Ilari.) Also, are you trying to watch the 30fps version, or the actual-time one?
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New WIP encode, people! WIP by me and dwangoAC, encode by Ilari: http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110519.mkv (full speed, you can't see much but luck manipulation delays here), http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110519-special.mkv (one frame every time anything happens, with timings arranged to make it a constant 30fps; this version is probably much easier to follow, especially with slowdown). This encode charts much of the slaughter of the Castle, which is how we decided to fix the alignment issue. (We've since slaughtered the other barracks too, but that isn't in the encode.)
As usual, I'm not entirely sure what I'll do next once alignment and luck are back to normal. We have several more glitches that need setting up, although we have everything we need for actual ascension now but the candles. (Everything beyond here is setting up things to make the ascension run go faster.) Much of what we'll be doing is filling levels with monsters, one way or another; there are a few creative ways to do that. We also need a huge number of cursed potions of gain level, and I'm still not sure about how to go about getting them (some other NetHack players I've been talking to pointed out that chain-wishing is the fastest method, but I don't want to do too much of that). One other thing we need in order to get really large numbers of monsters around quickly (which we'll need for Air, as we want to fill about 2/3 of the plane with monsters in a single turn) is the ability to polypile; we have a spellbook of polymorph but can't currently cast it. (I was wondering about using the cursed armour destruction bug to max out Intelligence, but don't have the items required to do it yet.)
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There's something bizarrely wrong with the titles (the HTML titles, normally shown in browser address bars) of the pages such as http://tasvideos.org/movies.cgi?id=1234,1235,1236 where multiple movies are specified in the same URL. Spaces seem to be inserted in the wrong locations in the title, making the numbers hard to read.
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Surely the biggest reason of all would be a game that doesn't emulate properly?
More seriously, for a game to be harder to make an interesting TAS than to make an interesting speedrun, would be a game where the two routes were very different. (Imagine a series of jumps that nobody can make in realtime, that are easy to do in frame advance, and lead to a faster but massively more difficult route through the level. It's hard to see how that could happen in the absence of some really weird glitches, though.)
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Yes vote.
I found this a bit hard to follow, but likely because of the game; I could tell that a lot of effort went into the routeplanning, though. And you really show off how weak the hero is with the death abuse.
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errror1 wrote:
that's what I figured, for each turn you would need to manipulate about 5 different things for each foocubus, but I think it's interesting in theory.
I'm guessing you can't get your final alignment point during the monsters turn rather then having to kill something.
Even if we could, it wouldn't matter. We can't get permission to enter the quest until the end of turn 2000 action 1 (on Neferet's turn), so we may as well use that action itself to gain alignment. Arranging a monster to gain us alignment, acting before Neferet, would simply leave us with a blank action on 2000:1 which we couldn't use for anything.
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errror1 wrote:
the d100 only comes up if you get a good result, if you get a level drain with Drain resistance nothing happens and you can be seduced the next turn. You still have a ton of stuff that you would need to manipulate like the 1 in 25 cancel chance, and getting them to seduce you as often as possible.
But the big advantage I would think is that you could do other stuff as you waited for the monsters, like wish, practice mapping, or manipulate inventory.
not that there is anything wrong with killing monsters, but it's going to take you awhile to get the alignment you need and even mass slaughter might get boring ( unlikely I know ).
Looking into it, multiple foocubus encounters a turn will be completely impractical, simply because we'd have to manipulate all of them giving the right random numbers at once. The chances of that would be incredibly remote if we were trying to do that at any sort of sensible speed. (Generally speaking, we can discard random results to change future results only on our own actions.)
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errror1 wrote:
foocubus can begin an encounter of its own volition right, if it does that does it still use up your turn? If it doesn't and you can do multiple encounters per turn then with an unreasonable amount of luck manipulation and a room full of foocubus it seems like you could gain alignment quickly.
I hadn't thought of that, so I looked into it: there's a d100 turn cooldown on that foocubus ability, and due to terrain layout you'd thus, even using a huge number of foocubi, be limited to gaining 8 points a turn, as you have to wait for the monster turns to come around. (Probably slightly less, as luck-manipulating constant 1% chances while surrounded would be very tricky due to the lack of a wall.)
Compare that to the two kills a turn that can typically be gained with a relatively fast polymorph form, and you get 10 points a turn, minus timings you need to move around rather than attack. (Three is also possible, but would take amounts of manipulation that I don't want to do in non-time-critical parts of the run as it'd just force us to waste the turns elsewhere instead; four is possible in air elemental form, but we'll be using that so much lategame that I want to avoid using it until I have to, to make things less repetitive.) Thus, I think the two approaches would be similar in gametime speed, but I suspect killing things is both faster in realtime, and less repetitive to watch. (Besides, what's an RPG run without the occasional mass slaughter of monsters?)
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errror1 wrote:
would it be quicker to get a Helm of opposite alignment and steal from/damage some shops?
That's possible, but at least five times slower, probably much more because it's harder to repeat. (Shop-related alignment changes go one point at a time; kills typically go five points at a time, except in a few circumstances that aren't relevant here, and can't easily be made relevant.) Foocubi likewise only go one point at a time.
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eternaljwh wrote:
The thought occurred to me that, if you're dedicated to only having seeds possible normally (after the current version was released), you could still use the entire seedspace thanks to the eventual overflow.
I have no idea what happens to DOS if it overflows past year 2038. That's unlikely to be a particularly sensible mode of operation, though... (And we found a pretty good seed anyway, and are unlikely to redo the initial seed now.)
Meanwhile, dwangoAC and I have been making some progress on the run. We've left Gehennom and wrote a bunch of spellbooks back at our low-RNG-jitter stash on level 16, and then went up to the Oracle level, to generate the last two spellbooks we needed (both of which are still currently inside statues that we're carrying around with us, as we don't need the corresponding spells yet, and we need a source of rocks for a glitch later on), and did an infinite carry capacity glitch (by repeatedly stoning, stone-to-fleshing, and taming a water nymph obtained from one of the Oracle fountains; details are on the game resources page). The main issue at the moment is that a side-effect of the glitch left us at almost -300 alignment, which clearly needs to be fixed (in the long term because of the Quest, in the short term because it prevents us using artifacts). As buying our way to a god's favour doesn't work within the first 5000 times, we'll have to go kill a bunch of monsters instead; I'll probably do it at the Castle, so people can have the excitement of watching us clear a really crowded level, unless anyone has a better idea. (And I'll abuse the carry cap glitch at the same time; we only really need it to carry cursed potions of gain level later, but that's no reason not to abuse it for other things too.)
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ZenicReverie wrote:
ais523 wrote:
A slightly bizarre question here. When I was much younger, I used to be left in a creche on occasion, with many other children. There were some games consoles there, although nobody was really old enough to understand them. Now, I'm pretty certain that one of the games there was Super Mario All-Stars, but once when I came to the console, someone had left running what was obviously a Mario game. They were at the start of an underground level, which started with a pit too wide for anyone there to jump across, making it a little hard to continue from that point... (It also definitely wasn't the US version of Mario 2.) Could someone familiar with the series tell me which of the bundled Mario games it was? (There's a small possibility that the people in charge might have swapped in a different Mario game, too, so if it's not from Super Mario All-Stars, that doesn't completely shoot down the possibility.)
Sounds like 4-2 of Super Mario Bros. I hated that jump.
Looking at the level (from the TAS), I don't think so. That level doesn't start with a very wide jump at all, but rather a sequence of small pits, and doesn't seem to have a very wide jump later on either. (I checked 4-2 of SMB2J as well, in case you'd said the wrong number by mistake, but it doesn't seem to be that one either, as it's aboveground.)
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A slightly bizarre question here. When I was much younger, I used to be left in a creche on occasion, with many other children. There were some games consoles there, although nobody was really old enough to understand them. Now, I'm pretty certain that one of the games there was Super Mario All-Stars, but once when I came to the console, someone had left running what was obviously a Mario game. They were at the start of an underground level, which started with a pit too wide for anyone there to jump across, making it a little hard to continue from that point... (It also definitely wasn't the US version of Mario 2.) Could someone familiar with the series tell me which of the bundled Mario games it was? (There's a small possibility that the people in charge might have swapped in a different Mario game, too, so if it's not from Super Mario All-Stars, that doesn't completely shoot down the possibility.)
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Voting yes. I think that a) entertainment in the camera angles is a valid factor with which to reject a run, but b) the camera angles chosen were fine and not particularly annoying; they didn't detract from the run, at least.
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In the GBA version, Mario Kart Super Circuit, it's actually possible to complete Rainbow Road without pressing A or B, at least in time trial mode. (You get a small speed boost upon hitting a jump, and that, combined with the boost pads on the track, combined with the three mushrooms you get in time trial mode, are just enough to complete the three laps of the race.)
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sgrunt wrote:
Ah, but it's extremely easy to reach the average endpoint in NetHack, and we like having runs with a high difficulty level - which, in this case, could be argued to be the most difficult ending to achieve.
A 1-in-3-million death seems rather more difficult to achieve than ascension. I might not be the best NetHack player in the world, but I'm pretty sure I have a better ascension ratio than that...
(Not that I'm upset about the judge's decision. This really isn't a speedrun or a superplay, it's some sort of crazy demonstration.)
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There's always the Gruefood Delight section. You could try to persuade someone to put it there; it has a publication-esque list of movies rejected for bad game choice, among other things.
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Scepheo wrote:
ais523 wrote:
I'm still waiting for an encode of the actual submission so that I can vote no.
Wait, the watch-before-vote rule doesn't work like that?
Although I can't really tell whether you're being serious (it's way to late and I've had copious amounts of alcohol) I'll just assume you are, so I don't end up being a dickhead for ignoring you. Here goes: The actual submission is just a slightly more optimized version of p4wn3r's old movie. The move list and everything is still the exact same. Hence, just think the old encode to be 0.21 seconds faster and you're done.
I wasn't being entirely serious, although I wasn't entirely joking either. (0.21 seconds is quite a lot in a TAS this long, especially one that's entirely execution-based...)
Voting No, because I don't see any difference between this and an unassisted run, other than move entry speed. (Or even the same game played on an actual chessboard. Or in a book of chess puzzles.) I'm also not all that impressed by the actual solution itself, either; there are faster ways to win, so aiming for that particular ending is just showboating. (It'd be a lot more impressive if you constructed that mate starting from the opening position, against the computer AI; if you're going to use the board-setup feature, though, why don't you just set up the mating position directly?)
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Kofiman wrote:
For bonus points, figure out the difference between 'Fixed' and 'fixed'.
I know that one; it's the difference between fixes targeted at 3.5 and 3.4.4.
Not that it seems likely that either will ever be released, at this rate...
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Tanooki Teabag wrote:
Dacicus wrote:
Another major series shown to be nothing but the same game repeated over and over ;). Anyone willing to try Zelda or Metroid next?
Metroid might be tricky, but the GB Zelda games might make a good quad run - Link's Awakening, the two Oracle games, and the GBA LttP port. Or even just the two Oracle games.
Metroid Zero Mission + Metroid Fusion would likely be the best combination among Metroid games, although all the cutscenes in Fusion would possibly make it too easy.
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There doesn't seem to be an option to do that; presumably a moderator could do it for me? (It wasn't deliberate, seems to be a side-effect of trying to post during the site problems.)