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Conquest of the Crystal Palace Level 1
Link to video
Sorry for poor video quality. Any help in optimizing for youtube would be appreciated.
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Good news. Switching the core to NEShawk didn't desync the movie at all. Continuing with new core.
But if NEShawk is more accurate, why is QuickNES the default?
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Man, it was hard to find this thread. Super Necro Go.
So, I was watching Aloysha's run on youtube and one of the speedrunners for this game, known as spiderweb_ called it out for being sloppy. He claims that at least 10 seconds can be saved on one boss fight! Obviously I couldn't let that stand, also 10 seconds would definitely put it below 11 minutes, so it feels like a milestone, right?
But I wasn't going to be lazy and just reuse input from the last run. No. The published run mostly beat mine by reducing lag. I was going to start from scratch! I pulled up Bizhawk version 2.2.2, the latest build on the site as of now, and opened TAStudio to start this run again. By the way, I have no idea why I was so reticent to use the program before. It is freaking fantastic.
My quest was to cut lag down to nothing. I would be the lag killer. I would make red lines on the piano scroll the enemy and work to eradicate them. Did I get rid of all the lag? Hell no, the game's laggy as hell. Still I think I did a decent job of cutting it down. I also put more thought into where I took damage. Also, I use the dog to triple jump on vertical scrolling screens
Anyways, here's stage 1 220 frames faster than the published run. I hope that this will get at least some attention. I'll cry if it doesn't. I'll see if I can get video posted sometime over the weekend. ROM is Conquest_of_the_Crystal_Palace_(U). Checksum 28cd4cd685b0f1b58d0aec9a8da325d8. Emulator is Bizhawk.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1119921075/conquestcrystalpalacelevelonev1.bk2
I'll look into posting video over the weekend. Thank you for watching.
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Example
I had to go through so many steps to actually find that page when it should be somewhere near the top and fully visible. It doesn't show up on the site search engine, and I can't see any links that go to it.
There is an auto-generated page like that for every game on the site. It's incredibly useful and interesting to look at. We should be working on building this feature.
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Damn, my skimming skills have failed me..
So, if fastest completion involves memory corruption, does that mean a run without corruption would have to qualify for Moons?
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I know that not everyone will agree, but I support the disallowing of memory corruption for vault purposes. That was probably a tough decision to come by. I think ACE has its place, but I never enjoyed the runs that took advantage of it. Also, although I know it's really tough to test and search for, it really feels like completely breaking the spirit of the game.
But really I support it mostly for entertainment purposes.
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So's the video I posted. I still found it entertaining, and there are a lot of (still) TAS only tricks to cover.
Also, it's not just routing. Often new movement techniques and glitches are found, and a lot of movies in the past have beaten previous movies through "minor movement optimization".
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So I might be late to the party, and I hope I'm in the right forum, but when browsing youtube recently I came across this.
Link to video
I was thinking it might be cool to do something similar with TASes as part of an educational series. The idea is to take certain hotly contested games. Off the top of my head I can think of Super Mario Bros, Megaman, Super Metroid, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and Super Mario 64. I know there are a bunch more. Using those games, go through the history of when and how certain glitches and strategies were found and what effect that had on the final project. On quite a few games on this site, the first run accepted on the site is very different from the most recent run.
I know I would be incredibly interested in seeing one of these, and most of the history for these games I believe is documented in the forums and the submission files. This would also show how much work and ingenuity actually goes into a high level TAS, and emphasize the community aspect of TASing.
So what do you all think? Is this something worth doing? Any suggestions on formatting or other games that can be covered (maybe Gods has enough of a history, I don't know)? Also, slightly related, should a single video just cover one aspect of the history or put all branches in a single video, since discoveries in one branch often effects others? I'd really like to know what other people think and whether it's worth maybe making some official videos here.
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Damn, you got through this quick, huh?
It looks pretty well optimized, though. I know from TASing this myself that the enemies are often placed in a way to always force you to wait if you're trying to go through as quick as possible, requiring a whole bunch of shenanigans to try getting them off your back.
I like that the run actually does get crazier as it goes along, mostly thanks to the amount of stuff that threatens the character near the end of the game.
Yes vote.
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So, I did actually complete a test up to that point. I'm sure switching to Leo and taking the pizza is faster. Also it allows you to take more hints later in the run.
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When I talked to adelikat earlier, he said the site was written in a language that no one who works here is an expert in, and redesigning the site is less of a fun project than making kick ass emulators, so volunteers have been scarce.
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I've been waiting a long time for someone to make an improvement of my old run. I had almost given up hope..
Great job, though. A worthy successor. There's lots of great little moments in this run, and I'm glad to see the entertainment still runs strong.
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Hey, if you want to bring me in over Skype, I might be willing to do a commentary in tandem with you.
Sorry, I missed your work on this run when you were doing it. Getting ready to watch it right now.
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feos wrote:
arkiandruski wrote:
As for a suggestion I have, author's notes and commentary should be more visible and encouraged. Notes should be on the movie page, not hidden in the submission text, and a bigger deal should be made of commentary.
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I'm so glad this is being looked at. Do you have plans to start implementing this? Does this mean we're going to be changing the language of the site to a code that people on the site actually have expertise in, or is this just pushing out ideas? Either way, long overdue.
In response to your ideas
Samsara wrote:
1. More emphasis on publication ratings, for sure. Make it easier to rate movies, give people more of an incentive to rate, perhaps change what gets rated if we can find some things that work better than Entertainment/Tech Quality.
In an ideal world, we would get enough ratings on every movie that we could get a good average rating. Sadly, I think no matter how much you promote it, there will be movies that have next to no ratings just because they don't cover games that are well known enough.
Maybe, instead, we can get a committee of say 20 to 50 people who show good rating habits and assign 5 people to each game that get published to watch and give a rating to. Maybe even writing out a quick review explaining. That way you'll know each movie will have at least five good ratings to help the average
Samsara wrote:
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I'm all for incentivising any kind of help to the site whatsoever, if not player points, then maybe coder points, or something. It's a nice way of saying "we recognize your work" and at the end of the day, how much prestige do player points give anyway?
Samsara wrote:
3. Submission voting changes. An idea I came up with very recently involves changing the question back to "Should this be published?" and giving a Yes/No answer, but upon selecting Yes or No you get different sub-options that provide a reason for your vote, something like a dropdown menu. This seems like a more efficient way of gathering better feedback on movies without requiring everyone to post their thoughts in the thread... But it's still probably a terrible idea in some way.
I think the focus here should not be on the voting per se, but getting people to respond in the thread of the submission queue. Sadly, I don't have any good suggestions for that.
Samsara wrote:
4. I suppose it's high time we really discuss what we want to do with the tiering system. Do we really want to keep tiers in a literal sense, where Vault is under Moons and Moons is under Stars, or should we discard that in favor of a more categorized system, such as Speed and Entertainment? Should we loosen the rules on what goes into Vault, allowing more diversity in there, or should we loosen the rules on what we can and can't accept as new branches in Moons? There's a lot to discuss here, though I would personally like to move away from Vault and "tiers" in some way, shape or form.
I've said my opinion before and it hasn't changed since last time. Drop tiers, keep stars because a curated list of the best runs is actually useful. Make it more category based. Encourage categories outside of fastest completion. Organize site by game.
As for a suggestion I have, author's notes and commentary should be more visible and encouraged. Notes should be on the movie page, not hidden in the submission text, and a bigger deal should be made of commentary.
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Hey, it's been a while since I've been able to post in this thread. I've been busy with a move and the holidays. Still very much in favor of dropping tiers altogether and having everything be in categories.
I really believe that if we take the starting point that Zeuper's link gives us and tweak it just a bit, that would be an amazing first step to improving the organization of the site, and it should be what we concentrate on at the moment.
So Zeuper, with your code how hard would it be to:
Only list games with movies published on the site?
Have the numbers reflect unobsoleted runs only?
Have the list be in alphabetical order first rather than by system?
Have the games listed by most recent publication?
Let the user of the site decide how the list will be populated (give them a choice of sorting options and what to include)?
On the actual game pages can we:
Put the description above the tabs rather than having them hidden in a separate tab we have to click to?
Also, I like each individual game having its own description, but also realize that it would be a huge project and probably require multiple volunteers. That may be for another thread, though.
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Yes, basically, maybe with small changes, but I like their organization system.
Editted to add: Oh, hey, Zeuper posted while I was writing. That's an awesome mockup!
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Well, I think we had a small tangent here. I'd like to hear more opinions on a couple of points.
It seems that we're mostly in agreement for changing this site to be less "tier" based and more around having well defined "categories", am I right?
Does anyone have an opinion on changing the list pages to being the less server intensive list of links, rather than the presentation boxes? Also, what do people think of my proposal here for reorganizing the site into game pages?
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The current system is closer to having two star tiers than feos' proposal.
While I'm not against a demo category, I agree with dunnius, in that I'd like to fix what we currently have before moving on to anything new.
