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eternaljwh wrote:
This would be slightly more interesting if you posted the odds of generating a blasting artifact on the upstair.
Agreed that it is an interesting calculation; I've added it to the submission. It seems to be around 1 in 3 million, most of which is the low chance of a suitable artifact generating.
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Something that confuses me is trying to get to the Rules and Guidelines from the site's homepage. The fastest route I've found is the very unintuitive Submissions > Submit Movie > Rules/Guidelines; perhaps the links should be somewhere more prominent (say, on the About page?)
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Warp wrote:
I suppose the game has been programmed so that even though everything is randomly generated, it's not possible to get the Amulet of Yendor on the first level?
I think it's actually possible to use the cream pie bug (applying a wielded cream pie corrupts memory) to glitch a ring of regeneration into the Amulet of Yendor within the first ten turns or so, and without ever moving from the upstairs. I haven't tried this yet, though (I was trying to do something even more insane with the glitch, but it wasn't working). The glitch is one that I'll be categorising out in my full-game run (that's currently in progress), as seeing the game done without memory corruption is probably more interesting.
If you ignore memory corruption, it isn't possible to get a random Amulet of Yendor, as its spawn chance is zero. (Likewise for other plot-relevant items, other than candles.)
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I like games where it's possible, but really really hard to die in the tutorial.
In this game it's meant to be impossible. But this is TASVideos...
Yes vote.
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Warp wrote:
rhebus wrote:
autopickup is part of the game. it's not cheating at all.
Especially if, like the description says, it's the default option rather than an option you have to turn on.
Most people actually turn it off (even though the default in the official version is on), partly because of this sort of thing, but more because there are all sorts of things you don't actually want to pick up. Artifacts are rare, but carrying around heavy corpses or statues doesn't really do much for a character's lifespan.
It's also far from uncommon to patch the game to make the option a bit more discriminate. (It can be made a bit more discriminate in the official version of NetHack, but there's a common patch that makes it even more so.)
EDIT: Note also that autopickup isn't an action, or at least not a time-consuming action. Manual pickup takes 1 turn, but autopickup takes 0.
As for people wondering what the run would look like played more slowly, here's what text you get if no cutscenes are skipped and all endgame messages are viewed:
It is written in the Book of The Lady:
After the Creation, the cruel god Moloch rebelled
against the authority of Marduk the Creator.
Moloch stole from Marduk the most powerful of all
the artifacts of the gods, the Amulet of Yendor,
and he hid it in the dark cavities of Gehennom, the
Under World, where he now lurks, and bides his time.
Your goddess The Lady seeks to possess the Amulet, and with it
to gain deserved ascendance over the other gods.
You, a newly trained Rambler, have been heralded
from birth as the instrument of The Lady. You are destined
to recover the Amulet for your deity, or die in the
attempt. Your hour of destiny has come. For the sake
of us all: Go bravely with The Lady!
--More--
Aloha 5, welcome to NetHack! You are a neutral female human Tourist.--More--
You are blasted by the silver saber named Grayswandir's power!--More--
You die... Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 zorkmids.--More--
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n)
Weapons
a - 37 +2 darts (in quiver)
Armor
m - an uncursed +0 Hawaiian shirt (being worn)
Comestibles
b - 2 uncursed tripe rations
c - 3 uncursed food rations
d - an uncursed banana
e - 2 uncursed fortune cookies
f - an uncursed carrot
g - 2 uncursed cream pies
h - an uncursed tin of jackal meat
i - an uncursed pancake
Scrolls
k - 3 uncursed scrolls of magic mapping
l - a blessed scroll of magic mapping
Potions
j - 2 uncursed potions of extra healing
Tools
n - an expensive camera (0:43)
o - an uncursed credit card
(end)
Do you want to see your attributes? [ynq] (n)
Final Attributes:
You were nominally aligned.
You are dead.
--More--
Do you want to see your conduct? [ynq] (n)
Voluntary challenges:
You went without food.
You were an atheist.
You never hit with a wielded weapon.
You were a pacifist.
You were illiterate.
You never genocided any monsters.
You never polymorphed an object.
You never changed form.
You used no wishes.
--More--
----------
/ \
/ REST \
/ IN \
/ PEACE \
/ \
| 5 |
| 771 Au |
| killed by |
| touching |
| Grayswandir |
| |
| 2004 |
*| * * * | *
_________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)_______
Aloha 5 the Tourist...
You died in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 1 with 0 points,
and 771 pieces of gold, after 1 move.
You were level 1 with a maximum of 10 hit points when you died.
--More--
No Points Name Hp [max]
0 5-Tou-Hum-Fem-Neu died in The Dungeons of Doom on
level 1. Killed by touching Grayswandir. - [10]
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eternaljwh wrote:
Does nethack save the RNG state when you save?
No. In theory this could be used for luck manipulation, but saving upsets lots of other things too, such as remaining movement energy (NetHack's equivalent of a subpixel). The major issue with doing the run realtime would be pressing direction keys into walls thousands of times in a row without miscounting.
On the other hand, I frequently test bits of the run by just copy-pasting input into my terminal, which is a lot more reliable, and actually a plausible way to TAS when I'm not online and so can't ssh into dwangoAC's emulator. So doing that would make sense.
It won't be possible for a while, though, without changing the computer clock. Due to the way NetHack's difficulty settings work, based on the current date and time and the phase of the moon, it won't actually be possible to play at highest difficulty for years, so the TAS is set quite a way into the future.
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I haven't made any progress on the "serious" run for a while (dwangoAC and I both had busy periods at work). Luckily, one of the busy periods for me ends today, so hopefully there should be progress soon, once I've caught up on various other non-work things.
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It comes to 60 metric megabytes as an animated GIF, unless there's some ingenious way to reduce the size of those that I don't know of. (The run's quite watchable from the GIF, though.)
Here's a suitably silly lossless encode: (edit: this was a pastebin link, but it's now died)
That's a UUencoded gzipped tarball of PNG files representing individual frames. You can make an animated GIF out of those, if you like.
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I have to vote No on this one. Ingenious category choice, but the run is clearly suboptimal. (No crits in the second battle in the game, when they'd clearly save time? This is a Pokémon game...)
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I have no idea why TasVideoAgent didn't give this thread a title. On any other day, I'd complain, but on April 1 I'm fine with it. I didn't do that deliberately, though, so please don't judge my submission on TVA's glitches.
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Somehow I don't think this will ever be beaten in the category, in terms of time. However, there's the entertainment factor to worry about. Could we have an encode, please?
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What about the issue of (E) vs. (J)? That's come up in a couple of games that have no (U) version, and IIRC both decisions have been made (usually by the run author). The argument there would be in-English vs. original-timings (PAL ports are generally timed incorrectly; arguably, where the PAL game is the original, it's the NTSC port that's timed incorrectly, but games are rarely released only in Europe and then later ported to NTSC).
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FractalFusion wrote:
I'm trying to find out how the Pokemon encounter mechanic works, but the way it is implemented is needlessly confusing, and is proof of how much Nintendo hates game modification devices. There are also subtle changes in Emerald as compared to Ruby and Sapphire, so I do not know for sure how much of the page applies to Emerald.
The reason for the RNG-related RNG cycling seems to be to make Synchronize work (something that's exploited when manipulating the RNG in realtime, but would seem suboptimal in a TAS). It does the same thing in fourth generation DS games too.
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Note that at least one movie ([1570] DS Space Invaders Extreme 2 by FractalFusion in 07:56.48) takes the hardest/least optimal route, in order to make the run more entertaining. I suppose what happens depends a lot on what routeplanning does to the game, and in particular how interesting a choice it is in the game in question. In games where routeplanning is difficult, finding a faster route is an important improvement, and suboptimal routes tends not to be too interesting; in some games, the difference between routes is obvious but only fastest/fastest without glitches/100% categories are interesting, and routes that aren't optimal for one of those are rejected (e.g. #2976: Kyman, MICKEY_Vis11189, Moltov, Nahoc, SilentSlayers, snark, sonicpacker & Eru's N64 Super Mario 64 "16 stars" in 13:28.40 was rejected for goal choice). There's definitely scope for "suboptimal" route choices if you can find a category where they're optimal, though (such as playarounds, hardest-route/best ending games, and the in-game time/real-time distinction); although only the most entertaining few categories tend to be allowed for any game.
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As for the no-A-button category, how many stars could be collected without the A button if you already had the Bowser keys allowing you to reach other parts of the Castle?
The reason I ask is that the category might be more interesting if done from a save rather than from a clean cartridge; to be precise, I would suggest the one produced by the 0 star TAS. I think there would be rather more fun in a longer run in that category, even if it's impossible to make it complete the game (I take it BitS is impossible without jumping)?
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I actually found this a bit repetitive, as it's going so fast that all the levels look the same. I'm not sure if anything can be done about that, though; I fear it's a case of a game being too good a game choice. Perhaps I should watch it at 10% speed or something.
(Not voting because I suspect my preferences on this are different from other people's; I'm the sort of person who likes to be able to really see what a TAS is doing.)
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There isn't a poll entry for my opinion on this, which is that using continues should be a separate category, and like any other category should be rejected for bad goal choice if it isn't entertaining for that game. (Much like "no damage" is a category, and one that's often avoided on the basis that it's less interesting than a takes-damage-to-save-time run.) Sometimes a continueless run might be rejected for bad goal choice; sometimes a continued one might be. It depends on how entertaining it would be in context.
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You can probably get a much lower score by getting over 100000 points, earning a continue, then getting a game over just before (or on) the final boss (resetting your score) and continuing from the continue. (Or do you have to do it at the start of 4-3? I can't remember, but either way, it'd make the score a lot lower.) What score is attained by the existing SML run? If iti's substantially less than the amount needed to get a continue, low score might actually be an interesting category. But this isn't the way to do it.