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I didn't say it in my notes, but it took me literally an hour just to figure out the controls to go up even a single window row. I encourage whoever judges this to try playing the game (use "rotated" controller settings mappings, with "left" as the first button going clockwise). For your own sanity, you'll have to map the left hand (Y1 through Y4 mapping to L, U, R, D in order) and the right hand (X1 through X4 in the same manner) and try going up the building. Go on, don't be shy, just one or two rows, that's all I ask...
You'll be flailing limbs everywhere and your progress will be glacially slow. The secret is to have one set of limbs down and the other up, if that makes any sense at all. Getting into a pattern is very annoying, and keeping any speed is inhumane as you have to hold opposite buttons for exactly 10 frames and *immediately* switch to holding the opposite combination of buttons without losing a frame if you want to keep going at maximum speed. Oh, and that window that's closed right above you that you have to go around? You'll need to hold left, but on *both* sticks at the same time. It was something along the lines of left hand left and up, right hand left and down, and frame advance - it was so many keys at the same time that my keyboard got angry with me and I had to start doing creative keyboard mappings to be able to hold all 5 buttons down at the same time. The insanity drove me to trying to use a script, as no combination of autohold or autofire did what I needed.
To be honest, most of the time the input will be up on one hand and down on the other alternating every few groups, but you'll see lots of stutter-stepping going on to manipulate luck. For such a simple tower climbing game it took an insane number of rerecords, or perhaps I'm just ham-handed. :)
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electricslide wrote:
It doesn't seem to me that it would take that long.
You have no idea how many minutes it can take on just a single turn until you've tried it. (It might not be literal minutes, but trust me, on the harder difficulty levels it seems like the computer is trying to take every bit of its allotted time). I would consider getting to the credits to be a different category; this run is akin to "fastest win" and the other is more of an any%. However, if this run is rejected based on the existing vault rules, and a new run was created which reached the credits, I assume it would have a higher chance of making it through the gauntlet of judging based on the existing description of the Vault tier. I suspect it would be a far more boring run, though...
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c-square wrote:
Jigwally, can you explain why you didn't choose Level 4?
Speaking out of turn, but when you do that, you can expect the computer to take a very, very, very long time to make moves. It's downright obnoxious. Still, if it is possible to trick the computer into the same stupid moves that might be interesting (it'd just be a very boring movie).
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This movie synchronizes on a real console! (using a 1.5ms frame window)
Link to video
I did some additional testing on the real console and confirmed that there is no way to make the computer think faster after it is the computer's move; all you can do is optimize the cursor movement and placement of your own pieces ahead of time to influence what the AI does.
I had a (somewhat depressing) conversation on IRC in #tasvideos where everyone seemed to be of the opinion that, because this is a board game, it is somehow ineligible to be published regardless of the tier. Now, I'm classically a bit of an inclusionist but really, having a prejudice against a well-played game simply because of its genera seems wrong to me.
Let me say this: Othello is one of the very few games I owned as a kid and I've perhaps played it more than most people did simply by virtue of limited access to other titles. When I see the AI in this game so artfully manipulated into making bad moves, with such little computer time spent thinking, I come away impressed. To not publish this run on the basis of prejudiced rules that pre-date the creation of the Vault tier strikes me as wrong at every level.
Sure, there are probably only a handful of other people on the whole planet that sank a large amount of time into this game and would be impressed by what the author accomplished, but why deny them the opportunity? If the run is deemed unentertaining (a potentially likely view by those who never had to suffer at the hands of this cruel AI) and the run is subsequently only in consideration for the Vault tier, what would be the harm in publishing it? For that matter, why *not* publish Chessmaster in the Vault tier?
I'll go back to my corner and try to be stoic about whatever happens next but I personally feel we do a disservice every time we reject a Vaultable movie that may appeal to a small group of people who might have nostalgia for it.
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I'm somewhat surprised by the nearly negative reaction in most comments. If this had drug on for 5 minutes, this would clearly be a no vote, but the length is definitely appropriate for this kind of game. Furthermore, while the rerecord is a bit odd it's not unheard of to do a lot of testing and know exactly what you need to do when you make the final movie, especially if it's being driven by an external script; I see nothing in the movie that looks particularly unoptimal to imply that the TAS was created in a sloppy way.
Yes vote for entertainment - it may be a board game, but it's a board game in which the author has soundly abused the AI, which always makes me smile. I may, possibly, try to console-verify this game. No promises. :)
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Warp wrote:
Of course I don't know if the event organizers will accept just a "regular TAS" for the event. But if that's a concern, why not just ask them? Make a case that 1) it's actually the very idea of TASing, and 2) a cool-enough existing TAS that does crazy things ought to be awesome to watch all in itself.
I'll assume responsibility for what TASVideos pitched as ideas and Mike, the head organizer of AGDQ 2015, was the primary individual who accepted and denied runs. I created a potential participation thread as well as this pitch video for AGDQ 2015:
Link to video
Of the five ideas I pitched, two of them were more or less "normal" TAS's - a playaround TAS such as RBI Baseball (or some other playaround TAS) and Final Fantasy. The ideas that were accepted were the Mario Kart 64 modified course, a single playaround TAS, and a total control TAS with a 40 minute limit for all three runs, which meant that Final Fantasy was not accepted and there was very little time to surreptitiously add in another game without grossly overrunning our alloted time or otherwise irritating the organizers.
The initial plan was to use Family Feud as the playaround TAS which would have more or less been a normal TAS run but we ran into serious problems with synchronizing the run on real hardware that we were unable to overcome (this situation is one of the primary reasons I put out a disclaimer that we may opt to do exhibitions of runs that cannot be console verified on emulators). Around that time, p4plus2 came in with his SMB on SNES ROM and the idea to have that as the payload in a new shorter SMW exploit was born, at which point that run replaced the playaround block.
The end result of these events is we had three runs that were all entertaining but none of them are what I would consider to be "normal" runs. We have definitely put ourselves on the map as it were and we can probably pitch what would be described as more typical TAS content in the next pitch but it is ultimately up to Mike or other run coordinators to decide what makes it on the schedule. As was the case this year I do have some amount of freedom to make substitutions but there's only so far I can push it.
In summary, I will again endeavor to pitch a normal run in the next *GDQ event I organize but it is ultimately up to the head run selection organizer for that *GDQ to make the final decision on what gets in. When I next attempt to organize a *GDQ event I will again create a potential participation thread soliciting ideas and I encourage you to voice your opinions on what would make a good run at that time. Thanks for the feedback!
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EEssentia wrote:
Why can't we just "send" some "normal" TASers and show off some TASing or just playing back some TASes?
This is, in effect, what I've opened the door up to as of the second block at AGDQ 2015; I do wish I had used my time during that second block to say different things but I'm very glad I had the opportunity to say that we plan to do TAS's on emulators in the future alongside console-verified runs in order to open up the number of possibilities of things we can show. If I don't have to be there with hardware and presentation skills, then yes, it's definitely possible for someone else to go to the marathon to represent TASVideos. It's even fine if that person is a little less confident in their presentation abilities - you have to learn sometime, although I'd recommend said individuals consider joining Toastmasters or presenting in front of a local user group before jumping into the 100,000-plus live viewer crowd. (Also, wear asbestos or never read the chat log afterward because chat tends to say really, really unkind things about your spouse, but I digress.)
To rephrase, I don't have to be the sole representative of TASVideos or be the bottleneck, and in no way will I stop someone else from stepping up if they want to fill the role. I'd definitely appreciate it if said person talked to me about it, of course. :) There I go rambling again but yes, I think this is also completely feasible, especially if we decide to do our next console-verified exhibition at AGDQ in order to give ourselves more time and not stretch the development team as thin this year.
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EEssentia wrote:
Scepheo wrote:
Skipping SGDQ (at least this year) seems like the best idea, not only because organizing everything seems like quite the hassle already, but also to prevent the idea from getting stale. Having a full year in between would mean that there's twice the content to take your pick from and do something with, which would hopefully allow each presentation to feel new.
I disagree. Better to have smaller contents twice a year than a big once a year. Apparently GDQs themselves aren't getting stale, so why would TASes get stale?
These are all fair points. Attending an additional marathon does require someone with hardware and presentation ability to be present, however, and that introduces some challenges. There are very few people with replay boards at the moment, and while I hope that changes I anticipate that for the time being I will remain he primary keeper of TASBot and the most visible representative (ambassador?) of TASVideos to the broader gaming community. Having said that, I have a wife and kids I care about greatly who were substantially neglected in the months leading up to AGDQ 2015 and I need to ensure I find the right balance. I can certainly reduce the amount of roles I fill and reduce the duration of time I spend at GDQ's, which will substantially help. That leaves only one remaining issue - I need some way to pay for the extra plane tickets, SGDQ registration, hotel, and meals that I'm currently avoiding by only going to AGDQ. On the plus side, SGDQ is statistically probable to be physically closer to me and is likely to be cheaper overall, and for some reason people are willing to help me offset travel costs (for the donors that helped me to get to AGDQ, I again say I am in your debt and thank you for your assistance). All that to say I would love to be able to attend at SGDQ this year and will do so if it is feasible, but it will be for a far shorter duration and with a less involved project.
EEssentia wrote:
It's nice to have a WOW-factor once in a while, but it doesn't have to be every time.
I think almost everyone is on the same page here - we really need to get back to basics, spend a bit more time explaining what we're doing and even show off savestates in an emulator first, and demonstrate to the realtime community how these tools can help them practice a run often without any sacrifices to the authenticity of the timing of a game, dependant on emulation accuracy. I'm sure we'll still have something at least somewhat interesting for a finale but I'm positive we can do a better job of just doing off plain-old TAS's without any requirement for console verification for once.
Thanks for the feedback all - keep it coming!
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Warp wrote:
I'm not a hardware expert and thus don't know what kind of work, and how much, it would entail, but perhaps the TASbot could be developed in the direction of being more reliable and less affected by external interference.
We made two major changes during the second block, which seemed to have substantial positive benefits - we put tinfoil between gaffer's tape and wrapped all of the controller cables with it, and the second thing we did is we set up everything on a real table rather than relying on the big metal cart that acted like a giant EMI-inducing antenna. We had no issues with interference in the second block, so I'm fairly convinced we can use the same or similar solutions going forward with better success. Additional ideas include placing shielding around the replay board itself, which is something we experimented with at one point while in the practice room surrounded by TV's. It turns out it wasn't needed and made it difficult to work with the smaller, older replay board but we'll be using some method like that eventually.
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Warp wrote:
keylie wrote:
I have however one small piece of criticism to say: I feel we should take time at the beginning to explain exactly what is a TAS and the basic concepts, so that we are sure that people who have never heard of it with it can understand what is going on.
That's actually a very good point. The presenters did indeed seem to just assume that all viewers know what a "TAS" is, or what the little robot is doing.
Explaining in detail may be boring to those who already know that stuff, but it's informative to those who don't.
I couldn't possibly agree more. The major problem was more that in both blocks of time we had we were rushed to the last minute dealing with technical issues (the first time we were simply not done yet, and the second time we shot ourselves in the foot and spent hours trying to figure out why it wasn't working anymore until we discovered that extra logging we had added to debug something else was causing corruption).
Both of these statements are various vague ways of saying that I failed to meet my own schedule which was to have absolutely all of the "framework" done by December 9th and the final, final payload complete by December 31st. That would have allowed us to have at least three solid days where absolutely nothing changed unless it had to, using the time to rehearse exactly what we needed to say, who was going to say it, and how we were going to set up and tear down like a well-tuned NASCAR pit crew.
Circumstances conspired against us with various delays, technical issues, and volunteer time constraints and what we ended up with was absolutely no margin whatsoever with all of us rushing just to have anything at all to show at the last minute. As a result, none of us even considered the smaller details such as how we planned on explaining to the audience what a TAS was. To be honest, our block was so compressed that we would have been hard-pressed to explain everything we needed to explain even if everything had gone smoothly.
To correct the core issues described here, my plan for next year is to do less, better. For the sake of ensuring we have a better run (and for the sake of my family), I need to shed some of the extra duties I took on this year and focus only on organizing the team toward our goals, rehearsing with the final payload, and presenting the resulting runs at AGDQ with clarity, humor, and optimism. That means I'll be pushing harder to have other volunteers take on things like organizing prizes, sorting out donation incentives, creating the actual payload, debugging the daatapath / logic analyzer work, tracking any changes needed for emulation accuracy, managing changes to the replay board, creating any TAS movie files, and creating the final console payload if we do another ACE exhibition.
We have a lot more flexibility this year - we have now firmly cemented ourselves as being worth watching at AGDQ (some press outlets have even billed our block as the highlight of the entire marathon!) and after discussions with Mike, the head organizer, we will likely be allowed more time in the next marathon we choose to attend. We still need to decide if we want to continue our "tradition" of skipping SGDQ and focusing on AGDQ only, but either way we should assume that we will have a block of time and get started on development earlier to give us more time at the end for fine tuning. If we can do those things, I'm positive I can spend the time to clearly convey what TASing is and how we use emulators to create perfect playback, what the controller interface board (TASBot) is, what console verification is, and what an arbitrary code execution exploit is in a clear, concise, and entertaining manner.
That was a *far* longer answer than you probably wanted to read (and far longer than I originally planned to type :) but I think all of the elements I described above are important to meet the goal of better clarity. Thoughts?
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Just to throw it out there, yes, the issues we ran into at the marathon were largely due to electro-magnetic interference, and most of that was caused by using the metal rolling cart that was shaped vaguely like a rooftop antenna and performed about as well as one as far as I could tell from how awful it was when we were around it. We realized something was amiss when we started testing with our equipment on the cart and even in the hotel room we were getting desyncs - moving everything to a desk helped, and wrapping the controller cables in tinfoil (placed between gaffer's tape) made an even bigger improvement.
A lot of our problems stem from the fact that we're pushing *far* more data across the cables than they were ever designed to handle, and the lack of any kind of retransmission method means that if we have even a single bit wrong the whole thing usually unravels. What we're doing in the TASBot block / console verification arena is a far cry from the typical methods of using an emulator and savestates to create the perfect emulator-based movie. But, I'm now rambling, so I'll be quiet now. :)
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Hi puppy610,
As the representative of TASVideos at AGDQ 2014 and 2015 (and as the representative of TASBot in general), I'd like to make a few suggestions. First, your aim appears to be honorable - you seem to earnestly want to repeat the success of AGDQ but do it for only TAS runs, and you seem to honestly want to benefit charity based on the content of the site you have now. Having said that, your approach so far has been met with a fair bit of resistance because you are not asking people for permission to use their content and you have shown a repeated pattern of rushing into things without taking the time to do proper research and engage with the TASVideos community.
I highly encourage you to put a hold on your plans for three months. The reason for this is that everyone just came off of AGDQ and another event so soon would not be well attended. It will also give you time to consider what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you are doing it, and whose content you are doing it with. This leads me to my next suggestion - please take some time to become familiar with the TASVideos community members and build up a rapport with them. Help contribute to an existing TAS, possibly by looking at existing Work-In-Progress and user movie uploads and looking for runs where you might be able to assist them with luck manipulation or something else helpful. Once you have proven that you are a valuable asset to the community, ask individual content creators for permission to use their runs.
Then, and only then, should you attempt to organize a marathon. If you do not heed my advice and instead choose to recklessly push forward with setting up your marathon without proper planning, expect substantial backlash from people who do not understand your goals and are upset at your usage of their content.
I do wish you the best of luck with your endeavors and I hope you are able to step back and take a deep breath before you do something that could further alienate you from the rest of the community.
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ALAKTORN wrote:
Nach wrote:
IRC log:
<AnotherGamer> So can someone tell me what's up with the part in the first bot segment where the chat is flooded with repetitive crap
The replay board has a 32-frame buffer. When the end of the Pokemon Red glitch movie was reached, the bot looped back to the first frame in the buffer and kept replaying those 32 frames repeatedly. This was avoided the second time by padding the end of the movie and chaining everything together using bash magic (thanks to some suggestions from ais523).
ALAKTORN wrote:
Also how did the camera hijack work?
The camera has a serial interface that is documented online, and Vulajin was kind enough to make a Python stub library for interpreting the commands up, down, left, right, in, and out as received by Twitch chat. At least, that was the idea. We had some cabling issues and you may notice from the movie of the second TASBot presentation that things were a bit more sketchy than we would have liked all around, but either way you can find more information in the GitHub repository linked from the ArsTechnica article; I'm at the airport on the way home at the moment and can't easily look it up but it should be fairly easy to find.
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Raiscan wrote:
Of course, I agree. But it seems a shame to cut runs short, a waste to show long-ish runs in their entirety, and a lot of setup time to run lots of little runs in succession. I think showing some of the cool runs like the quad runs is something that would be good to show. That and of course a happy balance of other super glitchy stuff / concepts like this year, and some of the most popular runs on the site.
I spoke with CoolMatty and he hinted at a fairly lengthy possible block of time, although I later talked to Mike (the head organizer for AGDQ) and he implied that the most we would likely be able to get would likely be an hour and a half of TAS-related material. All of us involved this year generally agree that we should do more normal runs, and perhaps runs entirely without console verification being done in an emulator with really excellent commentary. I still want to have some kind of mind-blowing run again like we did this year but I can't wear as many hats next time - the sacrifices my family had to make were too great and telling my son that I couldn't play two-player Portal 2 with him because I was busy working on a video game seemed both ironic and sad at the same time. Since we know we are more or less guaranteed a spot we'll be able to take a bit more time to prepare and hopefully it will be a bit less time away from the family next time. But, I'm ranting on accident now - I'm seriously tired. :)
So, in summary, yes - I agree with this. Thanks for the feedback!
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Nach wrote:
Also, with this new system, only a single multitap was used instead of two.
Sort of - we did not use the I/O select pin and did not use any MultiTap modes (because the SGB can't support them correctly for our purposes and it isn't something that can be easily changed on the fly). Instead, we use the D0 and D1 pins to give us two controllers per port, i.e. 1-1 = P1D0, 1-2 = P1D1, 2-1 = P2D0, 2-2 = P2D1.
Derakon wrote:
In AGDQ-related news, albeit not TASBot-related news, the SMB3 runner managed to pull off the wrong-warp glitch in the spare minutes he had after finishing the warpless run. First time I've seen that done in realtime, and he got it on his first try.
I made it into the stream room for the first time (other than for the TASBot block :) a little ways into the SMB3 run and that blew my mind. Then Kaizo Mario blew it a little bit more. Good stuff.
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It is official, there could be a Pokemon Plays Twitch, part 2:
https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/bid/2890
It's a $30k goal. That's a tall order, but I think it can happen. And I think we can make it even more awesome.
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Spikestuff wrote:
The fact that this also uses the Apple to connect to the internet too, just kinda makes it blow for a Total Control.
Take note, I didn't get a chance to say it, but as you might expect from me (the President of the North Bay Linux User's Group over at http://nblug.org), I'm not running OS X on that Apple product. I run Linux Mint, and the entire toolchain from lsnes through the IRC interface through the Python script to the replay board ran in Linux.
Also, take note that I agree with the general sentiment - this total control effort was very much designed to blow people's minds at AGDQ; it was not designed to be the fastest at anything. The inputs for the Pokemon Red movie were very conservative, to the point of adding nearly a minute to the movie; this had to do with the 56/57 frame clock skew. This could have been tightened up at the risk of going insane trying to synchronize between the emulator and the real console so the input is effectively always pressing buttons for two frames to ensure we never miss a button press and the same movie up to Stage 2 payload will sync. And even then, I still had to modify the dumped .r16m file by 7 frames to counteract emulation inaccuracies. This is in no way a fastest of anything and should not be submitted as a normal run, but I have no opposition to it being considered a playaround.
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My favorite links so far:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/01/pokemon-plays-twitch-how-a-robot-got-irc-running-on-an-unmodified-snes/
And to see how crazy Twitch chat became during our segment:
http://mrozekma.com/agdq-twitch-rate.png
Also, I should thank my wife asassyknitter and my entire family for their support. I spent many late nights away from my wife and kids doing everything from creating the Pokemon Red TAS to console verification to creating emote graphics and I'm very thankful for their patience. I'm taking a break for the day but I'll be back on later this week. Thank you everyone for the kind words and support - it really helps! :)
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I am going to rest now. It has been a very, very long road getting here. As noted, not everything worked, but I'd like to think that I made it look like it succeeded more or less completely. We may yet have an opportunity to do what we really wanted to do, so stay tuned.
I do want to again thank Ilari, p4plus2, micro500, Masterjun, TheAxeMan, true, twm, Nach, Weatherton, Tompa, ais523, and a handful of other people I'm definitely forgetting. Without all of that help there is no way that what we did could have ever been possible. I know I put in countless late nights and put in a heck of a lot of work in the last few days and I know a lot of these guys did too, and they have my thanks.
But, as I was saying, I'm going to rest for a bit. I'll be back online sometime later this week. Thanks again!
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feos wrote:
The game starts out at a reasonable clip but within a couple of minutes the speed maxes out
Kind of sounds like difficulty stops increasing at that point. Though I can't find when exactly it happens. But after it's no longer any harder, ending input would be an artistic choice I guess, so can be arbitrary to some extant.
I effectively already created a movie that ends when the game gets to its hardest difficulty when measured by game speed but it got shot down, perhaps largely because I had cheated with the emulator and because I phrased it as fastest kill screen (which turns out to not be completely true if you back up far enough). I would love it if there were a reasonable goal choice that was shorter as well but I can't come up with anything better. Thanks for your thoughts!
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I had hoped months ago to have everything done by the 9th so there wouldn't be a mad scramble but various circumstances have made that dream not come true and I'm now in the mad scramble to finish everything but progress looks good:
- micro500 and Weatherton are solid on the MK64 run
- With a small firmware change from true I was able to get SNES reset working
- Resetting Pokemon Red to glitch the savegame now works 100% of the time
- Masterjun finished taking p4plus2's mystery game and doing good things with it
- The Pokemon Red total control preparations continue to march on with mild risk
- I've been able to make a PR contact to seed an interview / article on the TASBot block
- I've found a way to make the visualization boards function, albeit currently inverted
The highest risk remains the Pokemon Red total control payload. We have almost all of the individual pieces done but still need to integrate everything and it's going to be tight. If we *do* pull off getting the full payload working, I guarantee we will have people chatting about it! ;)
I fly to AGDQ 2015 on Saturday and we are still on for a 8:05 PM EST start on Sunday. If this is my final post before the event (which hopefully it won't be) here's hoping everything goes well!
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The submission deadline for prizes has come and gone but I'm aware of a couple of people who submitted prizes from TASVideos. My own submissions are:
https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/prize/788 - a really awesome Pikachu mask:
https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/prize/789 - A nifty Hyrule crest pouch:
I'm glad to be able to contribute these as prizes and I think the Pikachu mask will fit in well. In other news, I'm head-down on finalizing the payload for the total control segment of the run and I hope to be able to have something finalized in the next couple of days, although inevitably there will be tweaks until the last hour like there always are. :) Thanks again to everyone for the support!
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andypanther wrote:
I would really like to give it a yes, but I have to admit that it is too long. So it's a meh. But this should definitely be published :)
I regret that I must agree with this. I do wish there were a shorter goal choice but it was pretty clear that this is the only goal that would be accepted. In a lot of ways, this game is far faster and more entertaining than many a platformer of similar length but the fact that there are never any breaks and the game is procedurally generated means that it will likely be judged with a different measuring stick. Still, I'll take a Vault acceptance with a very happy heart.
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Spikestuff wrote:
Providing whatever the thing I'm meant to be providing.Link to video
Thanks for the encode! Can you please at least note that this is a TAS and who made it? There's been some confusion:
https://twitter.com/paulko64/status/548584061187670016
I love it when the author of a game gets involved. :)
https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/prize/789 - A nifty Hyrule crest pouch:
I'm glad to be able to contribute these as prizes and I think the Pikachu mask will fit in well. In other news, I'm head-down on finalizing the payload for the total control segment of the run and I hope to be able to have something finalized in the next couple of days, although inevitably there will be tweaks until the last hour like there always are. :) Thanks again to everyone for the support!