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Well, after slacking off a bit I have newly updated the page with your suggestions and whatnot. I really appreciate the input.
Feel free to let me know if I missed anything, or if you're an editor hop in and fix it yourself ;)
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adelikat wrote:
But I am opposed to the attitude that since it _should_ be that way, we should accept more runs.
I'm with you on that. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Ultimately it's Bisqwit's site, and I don't expect judges to suddenly change their set of guidelines.
So I'll continue rabble-rousing until I'm satisfied :)
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Are there any items that tend to be closer at the start? Once you find an address for one I would venture that the others will be close by in RAM. But even getting one would be a rather tedious task of going out to find the item and then doing a comparison.
Well, maybe not. If the game stores the location of an item it would be that way. If the game stores the item content of a location, it would be significantly easier. Only one way to find out I suppose :)
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Yeah, I think a movie of this game would be cool... Not sure what you mean about items and buildings though: is item placement random, and you are looking for a way to see where they are without actually having to find them?
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upthorn wrote:
Look, xkeeper and moozooh(!), I'm sorry, but this game is incredibly boring to watch.
That's just how it is.
I respect the fact that most people will find this run boring. I wouldn't say it's even close to my all-time favorite movie. But I found it non-boring to watch. That's just how it is. It's boring to you and a bunch of other people. That's just how it is too. But I think it's not really productive to say or imply that it's objectively "boring" and that people who enjoy it are essentially wrong for not recognizing this "fact"
----
I agree with Aqfaq et al that adelikat and mmbossman are not horrible judges/people/whatever. At the risk of sounding like a total kiss-ass, I think they do a very fine job at a thankless task.
----
RE: the restaurant metaphor: one of the reasons restaurants restrict their menu is the physical limitation of how many items you can offer. It's impractical to keep stock of a bunch of things some people won't order. On the flip side, most restaurants are happy to modify their dishes in ways to please specific people. They will generally try to be as flexible as possible with what they have to work with.
The magic of information is that there is little cost to keeping a bunch of stuff around that only a few people will like.
----
I'm sure people are tired of hearing it from me, but something like Gruefood Delight should exist as an officially sanctioned and community run section of this website. This would also be a graceful way of "unpublishing" some old runs. We can point to the main body of publications and say "These are freaking awesome, 90% of people will like them" Then we can point at the others and say "These might be boring to you, but they are legitimate, well-done TAS's and a certain audience will like them" AVI's would not be automatically created for them to conserve resources, if that is thought to be a roadblock.
This increases the full menu size while actually reducing the "Lunch Specials" menu that most people will want. This recognizes the efforts of players in our community and encourages them to continue making movies of all sorts.
Am I way off base here?
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I disagree...
But I'm probably in the minority.
This is the perfect example of a movie in that limbo zone, very amusing to some and not at all to most. Either you publish it and disappoint people looking for another SM64/Sonic/ace-in-the-hole-entertaining movie, or reject it and disappoint people who find (or would find, if they could locate and watch it easily) the run better than a lot of published movies. A solution would be to make this movie and movies like it a larger aspect of the main site, with high visibility compared to current rejects, but low visibility compared to the really totally mind bogglingly entertaining-even-if-you've-never-played-the-game movies. At the same time you could even take some of the borderline published movies and move them "back" a bit into this new area, which would end up making a less sprawling and more highly concentrated "super-entertaining" section.
PS: I haven't played this game, in case that wasn't clear :)
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OK, I want to see the extra levels too. As I pointed out, it was a dumb question -- a "what-if" that doesn't really pertain to the real situation.
Either way, I enjoyed this video (that means I voted Yes!)
The hack is really good compared to most I've seen, and there are definitely aspects of it not covered in the "real" game. I think a good chunk of the audience would like this movie on some level.
Plus it's a new record!
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Um, I mean look at the value of an address, treat it like a ram address, then look at the value of the address pointed to in this way, and do comparisons like equal to last, less than last and so on. At first it would pull up crap, but as you refined it I imagine it could be used to find stuff. As I said though it might not even be applicable to NES, personally I've only seen pointers in snes and gba games.
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Don't know how much they are used on the NES, but an option to treat addresses like a pointer and then filter by the value of the address pointed to would be neat.
There is a bunch of misc ram info in the forums, pretty buried though :S
Sounds awesome, good luck!
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I got to 13 but then realized that it's always the same damn sheep.
So the answer is 1 and a winner is me.
EDIT: I was going to remove this but then I thought it was kind of appropriate.
This is the off topic section, right?
EDIT 2: I bet mr. friend won't like that I'm explaining the gag.
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This shouldn't be too hard to pull off with a Lua script... The two possible stumbling blocks I can think of are whether the script will "see" keyboard input during a read-only playback of a movie (I think it will), and reading the actual contents of the movie file to generate the graphics etc. (probably won't be too hard, especially with the nice new fc2 format).
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This might be a dumb question, but is this hack well known? Would people be against not doing the bonus levels if he hadn't pointed them out in the submission text? Doesn't SMB2J have extra levels, and do all of the movies play through all of them (I really don't know, the only one that mentions it is the SNES one)?
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Right, buried in the help file under "Lua Scripting". Anyone curious enough about that has less need for the premade bot. Perhaps a menu item by the other Lua stuff that says "Run LuaBot" that would point to the front end script (you could still modify the script, so the only hard coded part would be the file path)
OK, sorry to belabor the point :S
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Yes, it's fabulous for those who know about it.
I guess my point was that there's no mention of any BasicBot/LuaBot except buried in the documentation.
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I have no problem with programming it (not really any more complicated than the old BasicBot)... I just think it's quite hidden and complicated to get working. Which isn't horrible, but it's such a great tool...
Cool, got it working, looks good. Those scripts should really come with the "Lua package" or it should explain how to get them in the help doc (also the help doc refers to luabot_back.lua which appears to be luabot_framework.lua on sourceforge.)
Also, was the impetus behind not including these by default a matter of size or something? For something that is supposed to help people who are not as programming "savvy", getting BB running seems quite complicated. Just a thought.
