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Aqfaq: Thanks! I give up though, what's the theme?
mmbossman: My description of the list leaves something to be desired I suppose. I meant something more along the lines of "skips a significant portion of the game, more so than can be done unassisted". You obviously can't come up with an objective metric for it. I'm just going to list games that I feel are appropriate. Some examples of what I don't think is appropriate: SMB and SMB3 -- warping DOES skip most of the game, but it's trivial to do basically the same thing unassisted; Sonic games -- a lot of levels are played quickly, even "skipped" by bypassing a lot of stuff, but each level is still played. Again, it's arbitrary, but that's the point -- we don't need more Statistics pages.
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Thank you for your feedback as well.
Do you really feel that the threat of "argument" outweighs any usefulness that could be derived from my suggestion? The fact that you foresee argument tells me that it would in fact be useful, even to the point of people being passionate enough to argue about it. Personally, I don't think most people will care that much, but a couple of people will, and hopefully they will feel like helping me.
In my experience, argument can be a productive means to an end. Civil and intelligent dialog allows all parties to weigh various options and come to a conclusion. Admittedly, arguments "on the Internet" can be long, drawn out, over-emotional and under-rational flame wars. In the end, people who are not willing to compromise may end up feeling hurt. But you know what? At the end of the day we are still alive, and maybe have learned something in the process.
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Raiscan wrote:
No.
Thanks for the feedback. I really don't see the harm in it though -- I'm not going to stick it on the front page or anything.
Anyways, I seem to remember a way to list all movies within a certain category, but couldn't find it... was I hallucinating?
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I want to start a collection of "themed" movie lists.
The first one that sprung to mind is something like "Doesn't actually play the game" -- in other words, movies that exploit glitches/programming/luck manipulation to skip most of the actual game. My list so far:
King's Bounty (the epitome of this "genre")
A Link to the Past
Pokemon Green and Yellow
Mario 64
Might and Magic
Chrono Trigger NewGame +
I'm pretty sure there are others that would be great -- any suggestions? Also, any suggestions for other themes?
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Nice! A good solution. The downside is having to find the memory address for each game, though that's not terribly hard.
You and part of Braid inspired me to try to make a true rewind -- one that plays each frame going back and at the same FPS, rather than jumping back a second or two each time you press rewind.
http://lua.pastey.net/96030-1tab
It's pretty fun. Holding Select on the second controller rewinds. I have it set to hold a minute of gameplay, but you can change it to hold more or less by altering the second line. More means it needs more RAM though obviously. It also seems to stutter a bit once in a while... So if somebody can help optimize the idea a bit I would appreciate it :)
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If it's set in the if block, then it only sets every other frame, because the next frame will not have select and will not go into the if block. Don't know if that's any clearer.
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Surprised that no one seems to have mentioned this game yet. I just played the demo at a friend's house who has a 360, and it's pretty fun. The basic premise is that it is a platformer where you can make time go backwards -- reminding me very much of TASing (or Sands of Time but much less limited as far as I know)
Anyone else played it? Is the rest of the game as fun as the demo? I'm totally getting it if/when they come out with a pc version :)
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Yes, if it's out of the if block it basically would not take input.
Except for changing the implementation to do as you suggest (have a brief period where Lua could see what you were trying to push and change it before the emulator sees it), using the second controller is really the only option. You just need to warn people to set Select on the second controller and use that (you could even rebind your keys temporarily).
In a perfect world, I'd love to see input from the full keyboard instead of just from controllers :)
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Xkeeper wrote:
Trying to read and write a joypad to "hook" buttons.
joy = joypad.read(1);
if joy["select"] then
joy["select"] = nil;
joypad.set(1, joy);
end;
This sometimes works. It's like the game thinks that the select button is constantly being pressed ala turbofire... so I can't get it to work at all.
Any help is greatly appreciated; the manual isn't helpful either in that it uses "joypad.write" (when it's joypad.set)
I believe joypad.set sets the input for the next frame and joypad.read only works on buttons that have already been sent to the emulator... so it has to register you actually pressing select for a frame, which eliminates select for the next frame (and also eliminates any different player input for the next frame... for example you press select and A, the next frame you press just B but it will show just A) Since that next frame doesn't have select, it reads from the keyboard again.
I would suggest reading select (or another button) on the second joypad. There might be a way to do what you are attempting but the second joypad will probably be easier :)
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> Bisqwit
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I am glad to hear that we share similar visions of what we can do here. Obviously there's not going to be a huge change overnight, but I look forward to tinkering with new ideas and sharing movies with everyone here. I don't really think that a major site redesign is needed, though it would probably help to some degree.
To me, the fatal flaw with having "starred" runs was just that, the stars. It was viewed as a hall of fame rather than just a starting point, though it did serve well as the latter. Perhaps we can bring the stars back but without the actual stars?
And as to the name suggestion, I'm not too disappointed by your view of it -- after all, I too enjoy seeing my name up in lights :)
AKA:
Thank you for your input. The solutions you speak of are actually already happening, as I'm sure you know: many people, ourselves included, test many games; there has recently been a lot of promising work on making rerecording emulators for more systems; and the new Mupen is being worked on as we speak. I hope that all these activities continue and bring us many great movies. And I do think that simply letting in a bunch of shoddy movies with new goals would not beneficial in the least. However I don't understand how it is "negative" to provide people with opportunities to enjoy a more diverse set of precisely played, unique movies. If you don't like them, then you don't have to watch them -- but at the same time, it would be best to organize things such that you don't have to wade through too many movies that you don't want to watch to get to the ones you do. I have faith that it can be done.
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Dear Bisqwit:
I was curious about your current thoughts on the goals and direction of this site.
You may have read some of my previous words on these topics, but I will summarize what I personally think will be beneficial to the community. I think that to some extent they are all echoes of what others have said many times before me, so I'm certainly not claiming any revelation.
-Increase organization
This would include a nice text index like FractalFusion has added recently (though hopefully automated), lists like Movies for First Time Viewers, Greatest Hits, Glitched Out...
-Host more movies
With more organization, there will be the means to have a wider variety of runs. For example, movies that aim for speed but are only entertaining to a few people (what is now referred to as the dreaded "bad game choice"); superplay/playaround style movies; other alternate goals. I do not want to confuse this idea with just lowering the standards of movies. It is about having runs that traditionally would be rejected, but still fall within the scope of the site and increase the number (if not the percentage) of movies that each user finds entertaining.
-Remove author's information from the actual publication -- retain it in the submission
To a certain extent people will always want to make movies for the glory, but more and more these days movies are a result of the work of many people (though often not directly). I like the idea of giving the sense that all our movies are created by the community as a whole for entertainment purposes, as opposed to SDA or TwinGalaxies which are all about competition. (I don't view this as the most important change, but I thought I would throw it out there.)
I would be very interested in hearing your take on these and anything else regarding the future of this great site. I'd be happy to clarify any of my comments, at length if need be.
Thank you for your continued support of this great site. It has been a great experience for me and I'm interested in being as helpful as I can.
Sincerely,
alden
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bkDJ wrote:
for the FCM format specifically, that would be a HUGE pain to code in lua
But for fm2 it would be pretty simple... start recording a new movie, open the movie file directly in Lua, and have it send the buttons when needed. I have some code somewhere to read fm2 movies if you want to try it out Randil :)
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mmbossman wrote:
alden wrote:
Certainly, we'd want to have the movie up to our quality standards. Apparently in this specific case this is not the case. However, barring that, I do think that "any run that ... shows something that isn't possible to do unassisted" could be considered within the scope of the site.
You contradicted yourself there.
To clarify, I meant that a run that shows something that isn't possible to do unassisted, that shows something (or preferably many things) not shown in any other movie, and is generally considered to be of high quality should be considered. I apologize if I was a bit hasty in nominating this particular movie since it apparently fails my first test (I don't purport to be any sort of expert on M64, I just like watching it).
mmbossman wrote:
more and more movies with less and less quality
I don't think variety necessitates lower quality... however it certainly opens the door to that. Again, I think reviewing the quality of currently published movies is more productive than stopping new material from being produced. Not to "unpublish" anything but to "separate the wheat from the chaff" so to speak. http://tasvideos.org/905M.html This is my movie, and I think it is easily surpassed by this Mario 64 movie not on technical refinement but certainly on entertainment. So a more precise movie that contained the same unique elements to me would increase the average entertainment value. By the same token, moving my movie and others that are in the same vein (technically precise and somewhat entertaining) away from the super awesome movies would increase the average entertainment in that awesome movie section. Repeating myself again, sorry.
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Certainly, we'd want to have the movie up to our quality standards. Apparently in this specific case this is not the case. However, barring that, I do think that "any run that ... shows something that isn't possible to do unassisted" could be considered within the scope of the site.
"I also like being able to find the movies I like without having to sift through piles of garbage to find the genuinely good runs"
So are you implying that you can go to any random published movie and be entertained? I doubt it. Not everyone is entertained by the same thing. More content could be feasible with more organization. We could have more movies AND make it easier to find the really super duper awesome ones... I know, that's more work, and everyone's busy.
Thanks for listening.
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I'd like to see first: a speed only, entertainment-be-darned category and a non-speed superplay category. But this has potential as well.
If everybody feels that we shouldn't publish more movies because we have "enough" then really the current catalog should be trimmed down.
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The goal would be make an entertaining superplay that shows off tool-assisted tricks that are not practical in a speed-based run. Perhaps this one does not have "enough" entertainment but I don't see how a run like this is not "a movie of a classic console game being played extraordinarily, using an emulator as a tool to overcome human limitations such as skill and reflex," to paraphrase this site's description on the front page.
mmbossman: I can think of two examples of speed and playaround movies that are both published off the top of my head: River City Ransom (which is the one I am assuming you are referring to) and Super Mario Bros 3 (the playaround is a concept demo on a different version, but still)
This movie doesn't show off something incredible? Let's see this run done unassisted then. Just because we're all jaded after watching 10+ runs of this game doesn't mean everyone is.
And yes, I don't reasonably expect it to be published, but my opinion still stands :)
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Yeah I wanted to watch the m64 as well and was disappointed that I didn't find it until I watched the whole thing :)
I seriously think this or something like it could/should be published. This had a lot of entertaining stuff that would never fit into a true speedrun (be it 0, 70, 120 or whatever star count).
