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subanark wrote:
The question of if this should be published is based on notability.
Is this "the" snakes game for TI-83? How old is it?
If the answer is "Yes" and predates this site, it is probably ok to publish.
I picked this version of Snake because it had the most hits when searching and the site hosting it has a very long history, i.e. I picked the most prolific variant that has clearly been around for a while and I intentionally chose not to alter it in the hopes of avoiding the homebrew debate. Having said that, I don't have firm data to prove exactly how long this version has been floating around, other than to say it's been around the block so much that it's definitely public domain at this point. :)
I'm.. er.. not sure why xy2_ decided to announce that video outside of this forum so early - the whole point of having a thread with a huge (spoilers) alert in the title is to, well, try not to make a bunch of spoilers, but there's no real harm - we were going to include that movie in the submission anyway, so it's only jumping the gun by a few days.
In other news, my current plan is to have the video done by Thursday and to submit on Friday. We do not currently have a firm commitment on a total control TAS, so we'll have to wing it. We also don't have any firm suggestions on console verified runs, although there's honestly a fairly limited library to work with at the moment. We all have to face the reality that there is no way to keep upping the hype we created at AGDQ 2015 but I'm not willing to admit total defeat - I'll do everything I can to make this memorable, probably by hamming up Brain Age for a start. :)
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moozooh wrote:
That aside, like SmashManiac noted, using assembly would likely be the single largest improvement possible in a genre like this, and I have a suspicion that both parts of the TAS would benefit from it.
As I've mentioned a few times it's not possible to both run a program and TAS it, which is why this started out this way in the first place. :) If you can figure out a way to get something in assembly and make a movie file with it please let me know.
Thanks again for your feedback, I definitely appreciate it.
Indeed, there are quite a number of them. Keep in mind that I had to enter everything by hand and the longer the program takes to write the longer the run would be (unless someone figures out a way to sanely wrap Lua around everything, which would be a bit of a chore). Also take note that I was deliberately picking a game that has been published for a long time to try to avoid the whole homebrew debate, although that's a fairly weak stance on my part; I don't want this to be considered homebrew for the purposes of the debate as that brings in a whole other can of worms, and this run introduces enough of those as it is.
I honestly didn't realize exactly how long the run was going to end up being until I was two thirds of the way through and by that point I was committed. If there is agreement that it would be permissible to change the source code to benefit TAS'ing, in theory we could change some aspects of the code to make things go faster, but I was deliberately avoiding doing anything like that, for better or worse.
Just to make it clear, I made this and I consider it about as fun as watching paint dry. It was just as bad making it, trust me. This is Vault material and a first pass at this genre in the hopes that the attention it creates gathers more interested TAS'ers. Thanks for the feedback!
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JosJuice wrote:
While looking a bit closer at the encode that was posted here, I noticed that you made a new line after typing the A at the end of the program. Is there any reason for that?
I initially believed that it wasn't entering A in when saving and I deliberately hit enter after typing it to ensure it was "registered" - in theory, if removing it doesn't cause problems we can probably hex that in with no problems based on the nature of the RNG.
JosJuice wrote:
If you want to avoid the "serious mojibake", use these characters: → instead of ü, ᴇ2 instead of û2, and ʟA instead of áA. You are also lacking a space in Output(10fPart(B),int(B)," , and there's something weird with the parentheses, but maybe that's just how the markup works?
I can substitute the characters. I copied everything directly out of a converted file but perhaps the space is being mangled in some other way. I'll try to fix a few things if I can.
JosJuice wrote:
The reason that the game ends when the snake is 100 tiles long is that the outermost loop is a For loop that runs until A=ᴇ2 (where ᴇ2 means 10^2, i.e. 100). It's a bit unexpected to have a For loop there, but it does work as a method of not getting an error when the snake hits 100. The TI-83 can only keep 99 elements in lists IIRC, unlike newer calculators in the series, so trying to execute A→dim(ʟA with A=100 would lead to the game exiting with ERR:INVALID DIM.
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JosJuice wrote:
Since the game gets random numbers using rand/randInt, you should be able to manipulate the RNG by running 0→rand on the homescreen.
This would give me a different initial pattern but would provide no other benefit, I'm afraid.
Regarding being different than human play, I'd challenge anyone who thinks this is even remotely possible to try it. A human would have to make literally hundreds of 5-frame window button presses throughout the run *or* be able to see into the future. This is largely because of the poor controls in the game, admittedly, but I think any human would give up in frustration and mental exhaustion long before that.
Think of this run as a demonstration of speedcoding and an invitation to others to create even better works for the TI-83. I encourage anyone who is considering this to contemplate creating a Lua script or keyboard macros at the very least and make sure you don't make any mistakes at all when writing the program because hexing things in after the fact is a horrible experience. I would love to see some of the other TI-Basic games run, and who knows, perhaps there's something out there that would make it to Moons. For now, I'm glad I finally finished this run that I started so many months ago, and I have other things I need to be focusing on, so I'll let this run's fate play out.
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BrunoVisnadi wrote:
So it is impossible to get a 'ROM' of this game?
There's a downloadable file at the page link, but unfortunately you can either record a movie or load an additional ROM file but not both in BizHawk (or at least that was the case when I started this months ago). I should probably add that information to the submission text. :)
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d-feather wrote:
Despite being a little repetitive, it's still a good watch if not for the part where you come incredibly close to losing (around 1:45 in).
I happen to think that almost losing but not actually losing is part of the fun, personally. :)
I'm glad to see so many people have enjoyed this run. Thanks for the feedback, all!
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This is a heads-up that submissions for AGDQ 2016 will open on October 10th and will be due on October 17th. As before, I'll be organizing the submission and if possible I'll make an overall pitch video, although I probably won't use greenscreen this time. We're very solid on Brain Age thanks to the diligent work by micro500 and xy2_ and all of the artists who have contributed who are nearly too numerous to mention. Aside from Brain Age, we don't technically have any other committed content for AGDQ 2016 and I'm actively looking for suggestions.
I think Super Scribblenauts is still possible but volunteer efforts on that game have stagnated; I'll try to rekindle that this week. We can always pitch another race but I don't currently have a game selected and I'm looking for suggestions. Aside from that, I've been holding out hope that Masterjun, p4plus2, or Tompa can come up with some kind of glitchfest or exploit run but none of them have committed to anything as of yet. Finally, we can always show a console-verified run of some sort but I'm not sure what to pitch and I'm looking for suggestions there as well.
This is the first of three deadlines; once we make the submission we wait and see what gets accepted by the game selection committee, with an answer likely by October 28th. From that point there's literally only about a month until the soft deadline for all runs to be functionally complete; I'm setting that deadline as December 6th. Finally, the marathon starts less than a month after my soft deadline and we could be on as early as January 2nd. When you look at the schedule this way there really isn't all that much time left to prepare, so we need to get moving as soon as possible.
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CoolKirby wrote:
However, do be mindful of the copyright on some memes (such as the trollface) and images from Futurama, just in case. The marathon is nonprofit but it might still be considered profiting from their images.
I will take on following up with GDQ staff on this (they are already aware of the concern). From my perspective, this is fair use via being a parody and because the artwork is not being sold, nor is any work reproduced in full in any capacity. We should probably stay away from trollface just on general principles and I don't want to deliberately attempt to attract unwanted attention in this area but I don't personally feel we should be limiting creativity due to fear of reprisal. As the primary organizer along with micro500 it will be my neck in the noose if this goes sideways so I have a substantial vested interest in ensuring we're acting in good faith.
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moozooh wrote:
If you're so close to finishing the 2015 turn TAS but still yet to investigate all the new discoveries that require completely revamping the plan (which would delay the submission by months at best), why not finish and submit the 2015-turn first, using the 2015-turn era knowledge, while it's still the year 2015.
Derakon wrote:
I agree with Moozooh. I'm sure the set up and payoff of the 2006-turn run will be amazing, but the 2015-turn run already does a ton of interesting stuff that many people will love to see. And the existence of the 2015 run won't diminish the accomplishment of the 2006 run any.
Because the new, new plan does not require us to create a different dungeon layout we might be able to salvage the vast majority of the run, albeit possibly with some hex editing. In the current run, we do things like learn detect monsters while being attacked by Vlad when we could use that time for something more useful, so it's possible we'll "hex" in different actions during that time and then get the end state to line up so that what was done after that is still usable. If we have room to do everything we need to without going back to hex things in I'm actually in favor of that - we have to spend the turns leading up to turn 2,000 doing *something* and as long as there are enough turns I don't have a big problem with doing "unneeded" things, so long as they are interesting in and of themselves. For Vlad, it's a hilarious setup while we tank massive amounts of damage while twinking and ultimately steal the amulet and leave him standing there impotently so I think we can keep that in even if we could have been more efficient.
Having said all that, I have a window of time from now until AGDQ 2016 prep kicks into high gear so I'll do my best to work with ais523 on this while we can. If we can come up with something that is optimal from a turncount perspective and I can convince ais523 that what we have either serves a purpose or does no harm we should be able to finish this singular run without fragmentation, with the option open in the future to obsolete it with a "truly perfect" run. That's my take, anyway. :)
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TL;DR: Submission handlers, please substitute this movie that is 3 frames faster and has a taunt during the last fight.
So a few people have asked me why I didn't taunt the opponent and the honest answer is I was so focused on just getting FBA to not crash or desync my movie that it wasn't really a priority. Well, I braved FBA again and while it didn't crash it did desync on me so adding taunting took the better part of an hour. The upshot is I saved 3 frames in the process after taunting Akuma late in the game and discovering a faster method of moving the last pair of crash gems. The downside is someone has to encode this again. I don't know as if the changes warrant a pre-publication encode, though - honestly, the taunt is pretty weak in my opinion but it's the best one that I could do without going back through a much larger portion of the game which I'm not particularly inclined to do. :)
At any rate, enjoy!
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flashthe wrote:
Nice, too bad rebalanced Chun Li could not be used, attack 120%
Would it be faster to manipulate two oo gems to hit two 3x2 gems at one go than doing four chain?
Is the diamond glitch real?
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-puzzle-fighter
In the original game, the diamond was intended to deal only 50% of the damage you’d do by breaking the same pieces without the diamond. However, there was a glitch that allowed you to bypass this and deal 100% of the damage. In order to perform this “diamond trick,” you must first find a place on your playfield where you can rotate your diamond-piece 180 degrees with just one button press (rather than the usual two presses).
I still haven't fixed the formatting and written the level-by-level comments but in brief, I've usually defeated the enemy by the time the diamond drops, and when I do use the diamond, I generally have enough already that I don't really need anything extra; I think there's a place where the diamond in one level can't rotate, I'll go back through and double-check, but I don't think it has a material impact.
Thanks for the note!
Complete at least 1 round with a Super Finish (30+ Counter Blocks).
Your biggest Power Gem must consist of 20 Gems or higher.
To avoid fighting Devilot I needed to not do at least one of the things on the list above. I wanted to finish the game as fast as possible, so ensuring I always took longer than 60 seconds on every round was clearly detrimental to that plan. One of the best ways to send a lot of counter gems is to make crazy long chains, so that was out. I want to actually defeat the opponents and not just chip away at them at the end, so avoiding a Super Finish wasn't ideal. But the last one was fairly easy - a power gem consisting of 20 gems is pretty big, and if you do the math on the distribution of gem colors most of the levels simply don't have enough of one color to make a power gem that large unless a fight involves the enemy sending a lot of counter blocks early on, so I simply kept the power gem size below that threshold.
As you can see, this actually took some thought. :) Take note that I'm behind on updating the submission text but I hope to get to it soon. Thanks for the feedback, all!
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Derakon wrote:
Wow, that's an evil RNG indeed. I enjoyed the run; thanks for making it!
However, isn't there a secret boss that you should probably fight? This video shows a fight with Devilot.
Yes, but that would have made the run longer, and her attack pattern is just a mirror of Akuma's. Also, it requires getting a 20 gem or larger power gem, which isn't a fast process in and of itself (I met all other requirements). I seriously considered doing it anyway but opted to end input early instead.
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Tangent wrote:
This (and auto-scrollers in general) is on a fixed clock aside from the boss, which lasts less than 2 seconds. The rest is similarly trivial.
Invariel wrote:
So, we should unpublish Gradius and every other auto-scrolling shooter?
Tangent, I am somewhat worried that this is indeed how you feel, although don't take this as me putting words in your mouth. I've certainly done auto-shooters before, such as [1576] FDS Otocky by dwangoAC in 17:52.02 - do you consider that something that shouldn't be published? For that matter, [2836] GC Ikaruga "2 players, maximum score" by keylie in 21:29.40 is a Stars tier run but is definitely an auto-scroller in every sense of the word - should that be thrown out as well?
I realize that I'm both an inclusionist and the author of a couple of games in this category and thus I'm quite biased but I think it would be a huge loss to eliminate auto-scrollers entirely. If there's one thing I discovered from the feedback of showing Ikaruga at SGDQ 2015 it's that auto-scrollers and shoot-em-up's are very divisive; people either love them or hate them. I happen to like them due to the sheer difficulty and nostalgia but I recognize that not everyone will, and that's OK. I do hope you can concede that these types of runs are interesting to some and aren't doing harm to the site, but I also realize you have very strong opinions on the matter. :)
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Raelcun wrote:
Because I'm talented at making good life decisions and a 11 hour TAS seems like one of those.
Heh - I make those kinds of.. er.. "good" life decisions regularly myself. :)
I watched the encode. I'm not particularly familiar with this game but it strikes me as a classic JRPG albeit with an interesting reticule mechanic in battle sequences. I know you still have some frames you want to go back to save but overall this looks good. Thanks for the slanted walls explanation - before I read your notes I was wondering why you took such a strange route through the village.
I don't know if I'd watch 11 hours of this game myself (judging by my inability to get through [1835] PSX Final Fantasy VIII by DarkKobold in 8:08:32.98 without fast forwarding I'd say the odds are slim :) but hopefully you can find some glitches or other sequence breaks to bring the time down. As long as you don't tire of optimizing battles I'm sure you'll be able to make an enjoyable run that you can be proud of.
Can you please upload your next movie file WIP to userstorage? I think I may like to follow along. Keep up the great work!
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EgixBacon wrote:
...you could have chosen, like, any other Coleco game.
Er, it's the other way around, I chose Zaxxon first and ended up using the ColecoVision port because it had the ability to start on the hardest difficulty. The regrettable sound in this port is a far cry from the arcade original.
I suspect anyone who actually played this game understands the difficulty of lining up shots - compare this run to let's plays and you'll notice how many bullets they have to fire just to figure out where they are in the 3D space and you'll see what I mean. This run definitely isn't for everyone, though, and I'm not offended by the feedback. Thanks for your thoughts!
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TehBerral wrote:
I wonder if the "Hardest difficulty" part should be removed from the run title. Seeing as using the hardest difficulty would be what the player would want to do anyway - especially given how short the game is.
I'm not opposed - I'll leave it up to the judge to decide. Thanks for the feedback!
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I keep hoping to see a run of stock Doom 2 with some of these techniques but this is definitely an awesome run. Yes vote from me.
While I agree the music volume was a bit higher than it probably should have been I enjoyed the soundtrack - I've always appreciated the difficulty in recreating songs purely in MIDI.
Great work!
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This game is oddly dirty with all that "Number 1, baby! That was Awesome! Let's do it again!" business... :)
I'm torn between Yes and Meh - on one hand, it's definitely repetitive and despite using different moves it generally looks the same in most battles but it does start to get more interesting toward the end. I'll re-watch and vote later. Good work either way!
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Summing up a few things from earlier responses:
The general compromise is to only use the off-screen technique when it is absolutely required and to do our very best to have the numbers embedded in the drawing. See micro500's script if you want to be spoiled further, but effectively we know it will be absolutely required for at least one panel (one with no response at all) and we'll use it for that purpose to describe the trick and also probably briefly touch on the thought that went into not using it elsewhere, which I really am OK with even though I've argued against the necessity in earlier posts.
Regarding my use of the phrase echo chamber, I'm more or less using it in the form described here which refers to an echo chamber as "An insular communication space that is of no interest to outsiders or refuses their input." I think this discussion will be of little to no interest to outsiders, hence my use of the term. At the same time I don't think this discussion is exactly refusing outside input, although I've certainly discovered that none of the GDQ viewers ever read our forums... :)
Finally, I'd like to apologize for being somewhat combative myself in the last couple of pages. It's clear I was in the minority and I've come to appreciate the points of view expressed by others. I came into the conversation with a severe bias that has shifted somewhat over the last few days as you can see from my posting history in this thread and I hope the proposed compromise described above appeases everyone. I do still hope we can continue the discussion of how to post GDQ event material on TASVideos in some form in the future but I think this particular discussion has come to a reasonably amicable close.
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Bisqwit wrote:
And here's my synced encode!
That is one very interesting encode! One quick question - why does the timer keep going at the end? Just curious. I'll link to this one as well. Thanks for taking this on, I'm curious how both your encode as well as the one from Mothrayas was created.
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Warp wrote:
The pictures are not all by themselves all that fun. It's what they (seemingly) are doing, ie. fooling the program. I honestly cannot understand why this is so hard to fathom. It's quite clear.
I guess where I differ is I could care less how fooling the OCR takes place as long as the result fools the OCR into thinking the answer was correct but others here care a lot how it takes place. I agree we should try our hardest on every image to embed the answer in the image itself and only resort to off-screen answers if we must, but again, the existing run does stuff off-screen and I cannot understand why that is so hard to fathom. It's quite clear. :)
Warp wrote:
dwangoAC wrote:
echo chamber
Btw, you keep repeating that expression. I'm curious to know what you think it means (because, and pardon the pun, I'm not sure it means what you think it means.)
When I say echo chamber I'm saying that people inside of TASVideos are the only ones who care about this debate - people from outside of TASVideos don't. We're arguing inside of our own isolated bubble about something that seriously, completely doesn't matter to anyone outside of TASVideos, hence my statement it's an echo chamber. But having said all that, I think we've all made our points and come to a compromise so it's effectively a non-issue at this point. Thanks for the lively debate!
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Samsara wrote:
To put my point more eloquently: It's not about the art, it's about the canvas.
I think this is more or less what I've been trying to say as well - the only thing that I've been going around and around about is that this particular combination of glitches should not be the focus of the run. The fact that we're using something that should only recognize numbers to draw full-on pictures is really cool, it's a canvas where one wouldn't expect to find one, and there is definitely value in that. I apologize if some of my comments in this thread weren't the most helpful in conveying this, and my thanks goes to Samsara for summing it up so well.
