Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
RTA runs are missing the noise blocking your action in the last 2 levels. Is it related to running the game before?
Link to video
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
The game's author goes on the left in this room, which looks faster:
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Fortranm wrote:
unless the software in question is clearly utility in nature (aka not really a game)
What are examples when it's clear, and what makes it clear?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
It's been some time since we defended the triviality ban officially. And after the site's goals shifted towards becoming more contributor focused, both community and staff members started questioning what's so helpful about that ban, by today's standards as well as moving forward.
It's funny how it evolved from this post I made 10 years ago, into a clause in Vault rules, a triviality sport ban for Vault, and finally it became a whole Vault triviality ban. Thank me very much. TASes that havebeen matched by humans posed an interesting challenge, which we solved for the next 2 years.
So as always, the purpose of the ban was to protect the site from horrible death that's known to often be caused by cheap TASes. ...I mean, I don't really get what it was accomplishing (anymore). Maybe it was protecting the image of the site by showcasing less of boring content? Maybe it was protecting the staff from handling tons of low-hanging-fruit movies? One point I remember is you can't know for sure who the actual original author is when there's little to no rooms for optimization. Is there anything else?
So yeah, as long as people are interested in making those "trivial" TASes, there should be some way to have them on the site, because otherwise we'd be discouraging people from contributing, resulting in less cool content overall. If we can "tolerate" "silly" stuff, those same people will be one day interested in making high-level TASes too, we'll have a fuller knowledge base, a more active community, and more synergy.
However even if we completely remove the triviality ban, there are still some applications that we would have a hard time considering videogames at all. Does anyone want to TAS a Photoshop installation? Or a movie watching session? Or a Flash animation where you only need to hit one big button to see one videoclip? What about running emulator accuracy tests and demos?
As became apparent after Vault rules whose goal was maximum clarity, for any complex and unexpected phenomenon, there can't be future proof hard rules that will keep making sense, barring a few occasional tweaks. If initial human creativity was not explicitly limited by those rules, resulting works won't perfectly fit under them either, no matter how brilliant those rules will be (we've tried!).
But we can still have guidelines on what is most likely a videogame, and what is most likely not. For example, a videogame requires repeated player input to advance. It also has some kind of gameplay, usually posing a challenge, a way to lose and to win. What else?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
153 frame improvement, which also enters "TAS" and shows the high scores screen, because I thought having that as an extra movie only would not make too much sense:
https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638050766106272067
Changing startup time did help, but I wasn't patient enough to not delay a single hit and just keep trying different times. Turns out you can manipulate the counts just fine by delaying hits. Delays were only done on the second knockdown for hamburger and doughnut, and it's only by a few frames, so this should be good.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Dimon12321 wrote:
It doesn't affect me. I'm not interested neither in this game, nor in this "TAS". I just don't see the point in encoding and publishing it and I think you don't see it either.
For such a game, which is unique case for sure, all the judge has to do is note the time, make sure it matches the rules and make a decision. I'm sure in that case, which I hope will be the only one in the site's history, this is necessary and sufficient, like some Math theorems say.
Even though the site's trademark includes the recording and publishing of each accepted movie, recording 33 days of maximally repetitive gameplay doesn't make sense.
I'm not trying to persuade anybody to refuse to publish it, my opinion has never been worthy in 8 years of my presence. But my point is, that's not a good idea. After all, don't encoders have any others things to do?
The point of this run is that it was challenging to accomplish. Of course someone might have recorded it in realtime, but for a programmer it was more interesting to script it all in advance, and then to fix bugs in bizhawk and the site that made it not possible for this movie to be made and submitted. Encoding it will also be challenging, and probably judging too. That's the whole point - for the fun of it! And I'm speaking as someone who's not a fan of this whole idea lol. But as long as we have people eager to invest themselves into it, it's okay! It's not like we suddenly started removing entertaining runs from the site anyway.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Pankaj wrote:
May I request Something to the Judges ?
Please let me know(if possible) that how many lag frames were actually there in my run in each level ? (because my emulator doesn't show lagged frames in this game)
I am planning to TAS it again in future after completing my current TAS projects.
I posted a lua script in the judgment note. Save it as .lua file and drag'n'drop into your emulator.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Sorry, I am an inexperienced user in hexadecimals and adresses, could you explain it to me?
Do you have a bk2 that zips offscreen?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Fortranm wrote:
To me it seems like that movie really is glitchless based on the description, but does that fall under the Standard "No Major Skips" category when there are already acceptable any% and this "sketch glitch" movie? If not then un-obsoleting the "sketch glitch" movie and making it obsolete [549] SNES Final Fantasy VI by erokky in 4:05:52.87 seem like a good move especially when the latter is slower than even [1555] SNES Final Fantasy V & VI by neo_omegon in 3:52:15.97.
erokky's run also "Abuses programming errors" so it's not glitchless, and sketch glitch is not a major skip glitch. The obsoletion decision has been questioned from the start, and I think it's safe to revert it now, all things considered.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Watched it. Everything looks good.
Just a note: TV doesn't stretch the footage to 4:3, it just changes color at a rate that the console outputs pixels at. Which is defined by pixel clock of a given video mode. If pixel clock is slower than a certain frequency, pixels will be wide, and vice versa. 6.14 MHz pixel frequency is defined as a perfect match for square pixels, as formulated in the Rec. 601 standard, but it's for digitizing analog video, and not all TV sets were configured to meet it. But console developers were aware of the fact that TVs had 4:3 aspect ratio, so they designed consoles to more or less match the 4:3 TV frame.
Example: a 512x240 frame coming from PS1 has color frequency of 10.74 MHz, so color changes more often than in PS1's 320x240 mode (6.71 MHz), but on a TV they occupy the same area, pixels simply being denser (and narrower) in the former. TV can't stretch signal to a fixed width, because it doesn't know the width that's arriving. It only knows a scanline has ended and it needs to move to the next one, by noticing the HBlank signal at the end of that scanline.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
KAGE-008 wrote:
Issue 1: Input desync if File > Movie > Play Movie is used, shouldn't report 60fps all the time -- https://anonfiles.com/F3ncA1Fauf/Fantastic_Journey_ver_EAA-2_bk2
Issue 2: Audio gets desynced after dumping the avi file, this only happens on games that depend on a CHD file to be loaded (mostly PSX-based systems) -- https://anonfiles.com/jcoeA6F5u9/Night_Raid_V203J_20010226_17_00_bk2
Savestates don't work at all on Cave CV1000 games. Load the state and it'll freeze at the frame where the savestate was made, without crashing the emulator.
And sometimes loading a state can crash. I guess someone reported this already.
Yet another issue which luckily only happens with a few games: When you go into Service mode and exit from it, the emulator closes itself. Cannot play RayStorm nor Psychic Force because of this, since it always boots into Service mode (MAME does this too but at least it reloads the game without closing).
Another issue: Shikigami no Shiro (Taito G-NET machine which is PS1-based) suffers from input desyncs especially when there are lots of bullets on the screen. A waterbox solution would be ideal for situations like this.
Please test again, the new link is in the OP.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
slamo wrote:
I think in any case, the window at least needs to be resized to use this. This run clicks outside of the game window without resizing it, which is obviously not reproducible on an embedded or standalone player, and only works when fed as a mouse coordinate through libTAS.
It would be tricky to check if a Flash TAS doesn't click out of bounds. I don't know if FlashPlayer in libTAS allows that, but I feel ruffle itself shouldn't... somehow.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
sfiii3 was the game I tried CHD support on. I did install it in both hawk and actual MAME, and after installation, both emulators save nvram that's meant to store installed content. But while MAME ran it fine after emu reboot, after hawk restarting hawk I got initial message screen and then just black screen that wouldn't go away.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
EZGames69 wrote:
If it helps anyone, I got the movie to sync on a decrypted version of the game, not one that was encrypted then decrypted by myself.
the hashes for the rom I used are as follows:
MD5: FE21CBBD6229A31CDE2FA35452E94175
SHA1: 30DFCC26E94EB8BA787B560F0019589FC9254615
1782 is the last build that works for me due to their OpenGL upgrade in the next one, and the run desyncs on that build and on that ROM. I guess I'll have to judge by watching the encode.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
slamo wrote:
So, like the current Hedgehog Launch submission, this movie also uses mouse inputs outside the bounds of the intended game resolution (550x440) for several holes. Maybe this is possible if you resize the Flash Player standalone window, but we will first need to resolve whether we should allow this or not.
Personally, I think we need to limit the mouse to the native resolution of the game. While this input might be possible in the standalone player, the reality is that 99% of Flash games were intended to be played in a browser where the mouse cannot move outside the intended area. This capability can be exploited in many games, and the game's author often won't account for this happening.
I searched on google and couldn't find any evidence that FlashPlayer provided any standardized way to switch to proper fullscreen, embedded or standalone. Yes you can randomly resize standalone FlashPlayer window, and even go windowed fullscreen. But for embedded flash content, you only had a programmatic way to enable proper fullscreen in your game, and a few external-hackery options to do it in your browser. Resizing the embedded window looks even more hacky. Fullscreen is kinda more relevant here, because it can often result in mismatch between game aspect ratio and screen aspect ratio, exposing offscreen contents and giving interactive access to them. And none of that looks like an intended feature of the platform, unless someone can find an official proof that it is.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Where enemy_round_ko is the number of times the enemy has been KOd in that round. You can see there is indeed a random element to it, with the minimum for the first KO being 4 (I think they're rounding up) and the minimum for the second KO being 7. I think the audience animations are random so this should be manipulatable.
This matches zallard1's notes in the description:
The strategies are the same, however the referee counts now matter. The first count can range anywhere from 4-6, and the 2nd count can be anywhere from 7-9.
My fight counts were 5-7 for Moe, 5-7 for Dave, and 4-9 for Papi. This means I got the 5th best possible time loss from ref counts out of 13 possible combinations, which is slightly above average luck.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
CasualPokePlayer ported MAME as a Waterbox core!!!
See the first post for link and info.
Audio and crashes should be fixed now.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
NO WAY TO MANIPULATE COUNTDOWN DUE TO EARIER INFORMATION ON RUFFLE
What does this mean?
Link to video
zallard1's RTA is 00:00.67 seconds quicker than you overall, if we only count time from the starting gong to the last hit of each fight. For some fights he was able to get lower countdown, so his 2 last fights are quicker than yours. I converted your run's framerate to 30 to do this comparison:
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
ikuyo wrote:
I've just finished a TAS of The Lost Strawberry but I have a kind of important question:
The game has a very weird artstyle which is not helped by the honestly hideous color palette it uses by default. I can change the palette from the PICO-8 pause menu, but doing so would obviously be slower for no gameplay benefit so I choose not to do it. However, I'm bothered by the fact that the game is hard to follow (and at times hard to look at) in its default palette.
I have yet to test if the TAS will sync if starting from a previous visit to the pause Menu done solely to adjust the palette, then reset. Could this be discussed with the publishers in case of a potential publication?
IMO it's very kind when a few frames are spent on making the game look or sound more appealing. It makes it easier to fully enjoy both the game and the movie. But yeah if we have to, a better palette movie can be a secondary publication file and a secondary encode.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Full completion requirements such as completing levels, collecting items, or incrementing a progress counter must be met through gameplay means only. Requirements may not be bypassed through heavy glitching or memory/save corruption.
Glitches and memory corruption may still be used as long as they do not directly affect requirements.
I'd leave it at maximum normally obtainable percentage.
Additionally, that screen disappears after beating the game, since the counter resets to 0%. Would resetting the game before going to the final boss to show it off be fine?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
feos wrote:
If you're suffering from some emotion that always comes back and spoils everything, there's always some counter-intuitive notion that makes you go "oh shit, how was I so dumb for so long?! that's how it's supposed to work! hell yeah!".
[...]
For every "unbearable" thought that bounces you around, for every "realistic" thought that pulls you deeper into negativity, it's possible to put your reactions to them on pause, like in emulation, and to examine them. Facing the idea that "the gremlin" gives you, without reacting to it, is very hard. But the thing is, facing it is meant to be hard, so you'd be afraid of seeing that problem in its entirety. If you think you can't bear experiencing some negative emotion or thought in its entirety, you'll keep being bounced and pulled around by its tip. But if you get ready and actually pause yourself in that "unbearable" state, accepting the negative parts of reality but not reacting to them, you'll find out that fear of that state is false, and that fear is the only real problem, blocking your path forward.
So I kept working on this for 2.5 years, and I have a more coherent strategy now. It's useless to try to deal with some horrible feeling or emotion in its entirety, because nothing will happen. And to deal with it otherwise, one needs to unlearn 3 things that don't help:
Denial/suppression
Fighting
Submission
After unlearning these 3 visceral ways to react to horror, do the following. Figure out which parts the feeling of horror consists of. Try to imagine a situation that could cause that horror for someone. It's like solving a psycho-moral puzzle that created a ghost that haunts some place and freaks people out. It can only be solved through empathy and emotional understanding. Horrible things happen because of lack of that.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
Dimon12321 wrote:
Some games for Nintendo 3DS let you buy in-game stuff for Play Coins, some of which may simplify game completion. The emulator, Citra, lets you set any amount of coins. Is it considered the same as using in-game cheat codes?
Sounds similar to Arcade coins, though rules on their usage vary per class.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Site Admin, Skilled player
(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11270
Location: RU
It worked!
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
