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AKA wrote:
If anyone wants to do it then I hope they actually try to plan it out first by writing ideas down and critizing what they're actually doing; rather than diving into it, doing a bunch of random shit and praying that it will get accepted.
Yes!
Personally I wouldn't mind three categories: time, entertainment 1p adventure, entertainment 4p (preferably with SRAM and 3 mathces with all twelve characters as mentioned before: Hmm... Kirby Pikachu Ness Jigglypuff, Falcon Link Fox Samus, Mario Luigi Yoshi DK? First one would be a float fest :)
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Oh, I was using memory address 7E0226 and 7E0227 to track where the game thinks the cursor is... I take it you're using a script to generate a movie file whereas I'm using snes9x+Lua to control the game directly. And it doesn't seem to control the mouse, hence the joypad hack.
Well, that seems like quite a challenge :) I have faith in you though.
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It's a fighting game. But as pointed out it offers more variety in level design, plus the strategy for quickness is more interesting (well, to me at least) -- instead of trying to do max damage you can cheap your opponent off the stage. It's clearly a fighting game though, just not in the traditional SFII sense.
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I'm using a hack that allows joypad input by the way... If you could get the actual mouse working that would be a huge time saver right there as I assume you could move arbitrarily fast between points on the screen.
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Yeah, stamps for the win. I guess if you could remove a couple more colors (trivial for some images, not so much for others) you could potentially make other usefully shaped stamps, though I can't think of what off hand.
So are you making a better script Mr. Bisqwit? I'll post my code later today probably. It's pretty ugly right now though :S
I'm partial to the Mandelbrot set pictures myself :) Also some of the dithering on the color wheels is very impressive, I did a couple tests on a similar image (from the scolorq site you linked to) and they looked like crap compared to those
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Xkeeper wrote:
It is more or less a "brawler" (like RCR) in that you have a few special moves without being a combofest like SF2 or whatever... Even in a movie like that, the RCR run could still take some time out and play a game of baseball with items :)
Yeah, and RCR has two published runs, a time attack and the previously mentioned awesomely funny baseball-involving playaround. Even though "no one" likes the time attack and it probably wouldn't have been published if there hadn't been the legacy movie published back in the days before everyone started getting so picky ;)
Even if this is not the one because it is "too unoptimized" there should be a time attack category for this game.
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Bisqwit: Thanks for the dithering info and many wise words on optimization. It'll be fun to see what can be done.
LagDotCom: Yes, two of my favorite ones are Mario and the soup can, and those are dither free. Of course, the source images just happen to use colors very similar to the fixed palette. Fancy that, it's easy to paint Mario in Mario Paint :)
I like this one, too, which is also dither free:
A few more for good measure. The top Roy Lichtenstein seemed like a good candidate as it had few colors, but took a lot of tweaking just to get this far.
I think the last one is really cool. It helps that I like the Simpsons AND Abbey Road... but it also converted well.
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On the race to the end level you should have beaten up the enemies entertainingly and gotten to the end at the last second. Kidding :D
Big yes here, though I still think a time attack would be a cool and publishable run.
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Zurreco:
Maybe I need to clarify. Obviously, something objective like deciding whether a run looks as short as possible benefits from an experienced eye. That's where a "random nobody" would fail utterly at judging a submission. Something like "entertainment" however does not require any sort of special talent. They can precisely "judge" whether they liked watching the movie. I may not be able to tell you how much a wine has been "refined," but I can tell you whether I like it or not.
TASVideos is not about finding purely "refined" runs, but about entertaining people. In that sense, anybody can "judge" movies and I feel that their input is valuable. I don't think a "random nobody" would be a good Judge with the ability to accept movies and whatnot.
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stickyman05 wrote:
Alden, I hope I can have your mario paint children... even though I cannot become pregnant... to a cartridge... or at all...
Anything for you sticky :)
Glad folks enjoyed these, thank you for your kind words.
Warp wrote:
The creation of those images (sped up if necessary) would make great youtube videos.
Indeed, especially the color ones. It paints one color at a time so it's fun seeing random blobs turn into recognizable images. At this time, they would need to sped up a lot though; I recorded the drawing of Kirby and it takes over 2 hours in real time :O Speaking of which...
LagDotCom wrote:
Also, if your program doesn't do it already, it should probably draw boustrophedon for speed.
Yes, I thought about that. I've always liked the image of "as the ox plows the field". Right now it doesn't for simplicity's sake.
LagDotCom wrote:
A nice thing would be converting SVGs into Mario Paint 'movies'
That would be awesome, and the file format looks nice (well if you don't hate XML. Which I don't... yet.)
Warp wrote:
Programs like imagemagick can take a user-defined color palette and then color-reduce + dither an image using that palette.
Bisqwit wrote:
And a program called scolorq does that with winning quality.
That's pretty much how I did the color ones, albeit by hand. Mario Paint does have a standard palette of 15 colors (perhaps more in predefined stamps, I haven't checked). I created a custom palette of those colors and let my imaging software go to town. After that it was pretty much the same as the B/W ones, but with more colors. scolorq looks great, however from the page it looks like it does not support custom palettes as of yet... unless I missed something. Any other suggestions for good palette reducing? I'm on Windows XP btw :S
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Zurreco wrote:
That's like saying that your average joe off the streets would be the best wine judge.
Well that smacks of elitism :) If I can't tell the difference between a $50 and a $100 bottle, why should I let other people tell me I should pay more because it's "better"? Why should we dictate what people should like? I'm not implying that we should solely "give the people what they want" -- in that case I suppose it would be mostly pr0n -- but ivory tower hand waving has a way of putting people off.
I think it would be very interesting to have a mechanism for judging what the bulk of the audience (not all us strangely obsessive forum dwellers) enjoys and doesn't, because they do not have the same picky eye for sloppiness and are detached from any sort of "politics". And no, movie rating does not count as this :)
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Warp wrote:
If everything else fails, the images could simply be drawn one pixel at a time.
Flip wrote:
If you're gonna do future pictures, lets see a Wind Waker picture. The cartoony graphics would make it easy enough to convert to a stunning picture I bet
Not quite yet...
Sorry, had to :D
Gory details:
Making these was about as close to "by hand" as you could get without actually drawing it yourself. I leave the heavy lifting to premade solutions and sort of dangle them together. I start by finding an image, cropping and resizing to a size that will fit (about 245x165). Convert to a black-and-white-pixel-only bitmap (this step usually took a bit of tweaking to get a decent final image). This first part is all done "by hand", but finally I run the image through a script that converts it into a monster string of 1's and 0's. And double finally, I run that string through another script that paints the picture, pixel by pixel. (And yes, the scripts are in two different languages :S I'm lazy.)
It's not optimized for speed at all; the Sistine chapel one would take 1 hour and 45 minutes in real time. Thank goodness for turbo :) It could be made much, much faster I bet, but I just stuck with what worked.
The next step is to try true color. Initially I'm planning on reducing the 15 available colors to RGB values, then look at the incoming picture's RGB values and finding the closest match arithmetically. A better solution would be to try to create colors by making patterns from the preset colors, for example blue speckled with black to make a dark blue, but that seems like it would take quite a bit more effort.
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stickyman05 wrote:
Note how Alden and Raiscan (I think) apologized and hugged and became friends again
Hey, fuck you sticky! Take that back!
Baxter wrote:
*a thorough list of potential time savers*
Thank you for that. It looks like Mr. Blaze rebutted some of these, but I'm not an expert though so I'm not sure if what he said makes sense. It's quite a bit more than I expected. I maintain that most people wouldn't notice, not that that's a defensible position :)
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That's good info, thank you. I too would be curious what this Blaze fellow has to say...
And you are absolutely correct that an antd-style run would be way cooler. I just think that this is also pretty cool. I didn't mean to sound too harsh, it's just that implications of "inferior" opinions is a pet peeve of mine (and it happens here a lot more than it should).
Oh, and for the record, I like that the bonus games were failed at top speed :)
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Raiscan wrote:
alden wrote:
Baxter wrote:
... it's not perfect, which is even noticable at 100% speed.
Noticeable by some... anyone care to back up claims of imperfection with a faster version? :)
We don't have to. I'm sure if someone is desperate to get this game published they'll try to themselves.
Why should anyone bother to try to make it faster if it's going to be rejected outright or run the risk of being called imperfect without any solid evidence?
And if I've read your argument correctly, you're not saying it's imperfect but rather that my "...views of entertaining are horrible...." I respect and appreciate the fact that you (and others) don't have to share the same opinions, but frankly, deriding other members of this community for their different views in such a dismissive manner is not very persuasive and frankly a bit disappointing. But I digress.
I guess what I really want to know is why it appears to be not perfect, since I can't see it at 100% like Baxter says.
Also, DarkKobold, Madou Monotagari made me cry, but I try to pick my battles... :)
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Eh, I only used it once or twice and remember it being finicky. Try reading the docs that come with it carefully... and maybe post in that thread with specific problem. Sorry to not be more helpful :S
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I would be interested to see how different this would be. Like Wockes pointed out, without Bane sword it might present a fairly different solution.
One helpful too is VBA Watch: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5174
Of course, you still have to find memory addresses first :S
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Morimoto's was only slightly over 11 minutes actually:
http://tasvideos.org/668M.html
Also, if you can watch emulator movies they did provide an alternate slower 99 life version, in case you missed that in the movie description/submission text :)
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Many current era games fail because of too low difficulty :)
As for older games, I blame the "arcade" mentality that drove publishers to make games that require constant quarter feeding.
And, I love this movie and look forward to the upcoming improvement!
A few more for good measure. The top Roy Lichtenstein seemed like a good candidate as it had few colors, but took a lot of tweaking just to get this far.
I think the last one is really cool. It helps that I like the Simpsons AND Abbey Road... but it also converted well.
Looking much better...
For sticky:
Strangely appropriate art:
Kirby!
Self-referential humor...
Sorry, had to :D
Gory details:
Making these was about as close to "by hand" as you could get without actually drawing it yourself. I leave the heavy lifting to premade solutions and sort of dangle them together. I start by finding an image, cropping and resizing to a size that will fit (about 245x165). Convert to a black-and-white-pixel-only bitmap (this step usually took a bit of tweaking to get a decent final image). This first part is all done "by hand", but finally I run the image through a script that converts it into a monster string of 1's and 0's. And double finally, I run that string through another script that paints the picture, pixel by pixel. (And yes, the scripts are in two different languages :S I'm lazy.)
It's not optimized for speed at all; the Sistine chapel one would take 1 hour and 45 minutes in real time. Thank goodness for turbo :) It could be made much, much faster I bet, but I just stuck with what worked.
The next step is to try true color. Initially I'm planning on reducing the 15 available colors to RGB values, then look at the incoming picture's RGB values and finding the closest match arithmetically. A better solution would be to try to create colors by making patterns from the preset colors, for example blue speckled with black to make a dark blue, but that seems like it would take quite a bit more effort.
