Back in the AGDQ 2016 postmortem phase I set a deadline for AGDQ 2017 of December 31st. I'm now staring down that deadline and I admit that it's going to be a bit hard to hit it even with the huge team that's now helping including micro500, total, Ilari, p4plus2, arkun, MediaMagnet, Tompa, Ange, fuzyll, Ownasaurus, endrift, Mothrayas, and even several GDQ tech team members at this point. Everyone is working on different things, some of it undercover but a lot of it is stuff I can at least hint at. Here is the current plan, with a few redactions:
The NES Classic is a bit of a mess as it filters out things like pressing left on one frame and then right on the next frame so it's really difficult to get anything super accurate or complex. In general, the NES Classic is *not* very good at all, and it's the kind of thing TASBot would look down on for not being perfect. So, uh, we're going to kill two birds with one stone - Since the NES Classic has 30 games on it and a subset of those games are available in all territories, we'll pick that subset of games or a smaller subset and do a death tour, playing the game long enough to do a fastest death and hear the death music then move on to the next game by pressing the Home button to get back to the game selection menu.
Going this route might sound a bit strange, but it means that if there is a desync, it will "re-synchronize" at the edge of each game. It'll give us an opportunity to quickly cycle through several games with times ranging from 5 seconds to 20 seconds, although more for some really hard to die in games in which case we may have to skip them. The whole thing will take between 7 to 10 minutes. The alternative is to pick some other arbitrary short goal or use a simple game like Galaga to do a complete TAS with very conservative button presses of which would not be very interesting. I personally think the fastest death tour seems more interesting but we'll have to see how it plays out and I'm open to suggestions.
Following that, we'll show SMB3 total control and the GeekPwn payload but with AGDQ graphics and different NSF music - the amazing level 1-1 takeover is too good to pass up and most people haven't seen it. We'll transition away from that console and start playing [redacted] which is when things will really get interesting. Fortunately, [redacted] is a very quick hop into complete control and it has the advantage of [redacted] which means we can easily show [redacted]. At one point, we'll allow Twitch Chat to [redacted] which could get kind of crazy. It's going to look like utter randomness because it's Twitch chat but it should still be fun.
From there we'll move to LoZ:LttP which is just long enough for some decent commentary, as in, there's some actual gameplay involved (about 3 minutes), and during that time there's all kinds of crazy things going on thanks to work from Tompa. At the end, we'll trigger a glitch at the Sanctuary which will give us total control, and we'll use it to trigger the mirror effect used to change between light and dark worlds. Instead of transitioning to the dark world, we'll instead transition to [redacted] and show [redacted] which will definitely be the highlight.
I'd love to say more, but giving away the payloads would be a horrible spoiler. If you want to know more and you want to volunteer, contact me - the best way to reach me is on #tasbot in Freenode IRC, accessible easily at
http://chat.TASBot.net as needed. There's still plenty of work left to do, especially if you can help out with some Linux toolchain needs involving data transformation. With the current team we'll be able to flesh out a rough pass by the December 31st deadline but we'll be polishing until my hard, hard deadline of Friday, January 13th at 9:00 PM EST, the night before we present.
In other news, I've been informed by GeekPwn that bank delays and new polices by the Chinese government have held up the award payment. I'll give the $1k I committed to even if the award is not paid on time, but I could *really*
use help with the $2k it will cost us to get to AGDQ 2017 as we still have $1,880 to go to cover those expenses. (Note that I've personally covered all expenses for the many previous events this year and I won't be asking for help with those costs.) As a silver lining, I have a commitment from my employer (Ciena) to match up to $500 of the AGDQ 2017 donation, so the effective donation I'll be making on behalf of TASVideos and the team supporting these projects will be at least $1,500 going to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. At any rate, if you can help with a donation either via
Bitcoin at 1CknXDyb5jTG1Nw1hs437r6fnz7npBSEfA or through
this PayPal donation link I will gladly
give you any game here as a token of my appreciation.
More updates in a few days, possibly even including an update to the very neglected first post in this thread. Thanks as always for the support, this is a great community to represent!
