Playing a single episode or individual game to completion, or all episodes or games, is considered game completion. Playing multiple, but not all, episodes or games is not considered completion.
In this glitch, you start playing one game, and then switch to playing another game. That is not considered completion, because the first game is not completed.
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We've been discussing this submission for a while among staff and agreed that this branch deserves another chance. And since there is an improvement (is that correct?), feel free to submit it!
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.
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.
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I didn't find this entertaining so I voted No.
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.
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Flagged "100 CDs" in the end.
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RetroEdit wrote:
I will do an exhaustive search for late menu/map/screen transition presses and get back to you on that.
Edit 2020-09-11: Still working on this, by the way.
How is it going?
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It's super hard to even see the character. Is there any better place?
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This eh?
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Anyone has a screenshot suggestion for this iteration?
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It's a bit paradoxical, because picking harder difficulty is meant to make your play more impressive, and as a result, hopefully more entertaining. But there's no way a 10-15 minute fight would look more impressive/entertaining and keep the audience more focused compared to a regular fight.
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Yeah I don't want you to rush :)
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This makes it clear that the overall quality of the movie is indeed higher, it's not just taking some damage to only save some frames there.
If Riyan isn't planning to finish their movie soon, I feel like accepting this submission and then obsoleting it with one that's faster or equal in all levels, barring the timer that causes unavoidable loss. But if Riyan's movie is finished and submitted soon, I'll have to reject this movie in favor of the new one.
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I'm not saying those differences are absolutely insignificant in their nature. They would be significant if we were talking about Moons branches, which is exactly the place for superhuman play to shine, where lots of things are meant to be subjective and entertain people.
But for Vault, it has to be clear and absolute. If different routing in some levels is now considered a different game, then how many prototypes will need to be published as separate "games" because they happen to fit such a loose definition? Also where do we even draw the line and tell the users "okay yeah now this is actually too similar to be considered two different games"?
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RetroEdit wrote:
Is this problem exclusive to prototypes? I can imagine a situation where different official releases are in contention because one plays differently than the other.
In fact, I know games where major bugs were patched between releases (Donkey Kong Country SNES comes to mind, though it's not a Vault game).
However, I also think this may be a side-issue, since one response to this is that "prototypes are always treated as inferior, while different releases of a game can have more nuance".
Yeah prototypes are unofficial games, and as I said they weren't meant to be played by regular gamers. Other unofficial games were released for regular gamers even though they were crappy, but they were equally crappy for everyone. When picking a released version, we have these guidelines:
http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html#GeneralNotesRetroEdit wrote:
I'm still not entirely satisfied why both the prototype and the official can't coexist in this specific instance. It seems to me the gameplay differences are significant enough that the individual level strategies would require different navigation, even though the level layouts happen to be the same. It's not just "Pinocchio slowed down".
You can't call them different games if you can switch between them depending on whether you're holding diagonals or not, and the only difference is speed. If it's the same game, then it can only have one fastest completion branch in Vault. Otherwise any arbitrary routing option could be called "different enough" within any given game, and argued that all of those should be separate Vault branches.
RetroEdit wrote:
Ignoring diagonal movement, character agility, and the relative level speeds seems to me a somewhat subjective choice. After all, the rules don't say level layout trumps everything, any other differences between games can be ignored. If "inherent" means level layouts, the rules should say that. I personally think you can have inherent differences while still having the same level layouts.
Inherent means it's not optional. If all you could do in the prototype is moving diagonally, and in the release it's anything but diagonal, that's inherent difference.
RetroEdit wrote:
A far more objective criteria in my mind would to compare how the relative tactics can be transposed from one game to the other. If it's just a matter of adding blank space between inputs, than the differences are trivial. If however, it actually requires different navigation, then considering them separate may be better. For instance: dodging enemies is clearly different, and I also think Pinocchio is able to jump farther and therefore navigate around the platforms in different arrangements. I would imagine there are very few levels if any where the movement could just be slowed down and exactly copied and be optimal for both games.
It's not objective by definition, because it depends on what the TASer may or may not discover and pull off. Right now they look like different routing is required, even though it's not by design, but rather by an oversight that has been patched. If tomorrow someone discovers a way to move diagonally in Otto at the same speed as in Pinocchio, then the TAS strats will be similar. If it can change over time depending on luck and skill, it's not objective.
RetroEdit wrote:
I'm curious if we would treat Pinocchio and Ottifanten as cross-obsoleting if they had been separately released.
Yes!
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Level config is a list of objects to spawn in a level when the camera reaches the next position. You don't need to count slots to spawn objects, they just occupy the lowest free slot. It's a pointer because it points to the current ROM location to read object descriptors from.
What the actual object counter does it iterates through objects from min slot to max, and on the next frame from max to min, to make their sprites blink when there's too many of them.
Challenger wrote:
Yeah I forgot to explain better what I was saying, because during years, I considered 2p warps TAS as any%.
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We discussed it some more with adelikat and here's the result.
We have to closely follow the movie rules especially when dealing with Vault content, because Vault is meant to be free from any subjectivity, and the speed records there are meant to be as legitimate and clear as possible.
So any decision that we make about this movie should align with movie rules, and if we need to decide something that doesn't align with them, then we should check if the rules themselves have to be improved. Because it's impossible to write the rules that are 100% future proof and perfect, even though it still doesn't make sense to challenge the rules upon every submission that breaks them.
The current rule for prototype versions bans this game entirely, because there is an official release. Even though there is a published movie using prototype, it doesn't mean it's allowed for all the future ones. If we enforce the current rule, then this movie gets rejected, and the released version has to be TASed.
If we completely allow all prototype versions even when there's an official release, then it turns into a complete mess, because movies done on under-developed versions would be obsoleting official releases, and that compromises the environment that all of us were running those games in: we used official releases, and that's the most legitimate version, so TASing with official releases is the best approach. Prototypes differ from official releases in having more bugs that were intentionally fixed, no prototype was meant for regular use. Some prototypes have debug functionality available right away without codes, and it's obvious that we shouldn't use that in regular TASing.
If we partially allow prototyles, then it becomes impossible to draw a clear and reliable borderline that would also allow this movie to be published. We have the 50% gameplay cutoff rule, where if half of the levels (or something similar) is completely different between game versions, they can be considered different games and can have both versions in Vault. If the difference is optional (up to the player) and not inherent, then only the most optimal option is vaultable.
If we allow prototype for any% and release for full completion, then I can't come up with a future proof rule wording that would allow that, because it would mean that in some cases prototype and release are equal and inter-changeable, which we don't want.
If we make an exception for this submission, then how do we even make Vault rules predictable? "The movie must meet the rules unless we feel like making an exception, and no one can know in advance what we allow as an exception, so rely on pure luck!"
If we invent some clause about the prototype being "better", then it also turns into a mess due to subjectivity of what people may count as "better". How do you check in advance exactly if the prototype you're TASing is better? And then, if it's better, a whole bunch of prototypes may end up replacing official releases, which reduces the overall legitimacy of our content, because playing a prototype is exceptional in itself! It's like playing a broken cart where you can do things no one else can do. It's probably possible to showcase in a Moons-only branch, but we can't afford that in Vault.
Conclusion:
If we want Vault to represent equal competition for everyone, to have reliable and clear rules, we have to make them equally unpleasant in some cases. Unpleasant but fair. Like blind justice. No one wants this movie to be rejected, but I see no way to incorporate it into any future proof Vault policy, only into subjective exceptions. And that means it's not fair and predictable anymore.
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.
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Lobsterzelda wrote:
Much like in the 2P warps TAS, we start off by activating the checkpoint glitch in level 3. This time, however, we make it so that an object loads which has a corrupted function pointer. Thus, when the game tries to follow this pointer, the PC gets set to some invalid instruction left near the end of the ROM.
From here, the PC keeps executing invalid instructions that do nothing except advance to the next instruction. When the PC gets high enough, it jumps back to the beggining of the code in the ROM, which happens to be the start of the function that loads the end cutscene. As a result, the game ends, and Battletoads is beaten in a short 2 minutes without ever fighting the dark queen!
PC jumps to open bus, which is near the end of NES RAM, not ROM. Open bus means whatever was last on the data bus of the device repeats forever, and the CPU interprets that as code to execute. Most of the time there's nothing special, so it keeps rolling forward until it reaches ROM: $8000. At the beginning of ROM there's code that decides whether it should execute continue or game end, depending on a certain flag. That flag is player lives IIRC, and it gets corrupted by spawning an object with negative ID, so its attributes are written by index, which is now negative, corrupting memory above object slots.
Koorvex wrote:
In other hand we have a sample where is existence of overflowing object counter pointer (as Zlomus underline it in his notes, it is a possibility).
I should also explain that what Zlomus mentions as ObjectCounter is in fact level config pointer. Object counter is a different thing that only corrupts attibutes like the stick in level 4, most of the time it only corrupts sprites.
Regarding legality.
If you can make the PC jump to arbitrary locations, that should be used in any% if it makes it faster, possibly in a playaround too, but it's banned from other branches, because there ACE would be considered sub-optimal and arbitrarily limited. If you don't use techniques that allow PC to jump to arbitrary locations, then you can corrupt memory all you want in non-any% branches.
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.
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Lobsterzelda wrote:
Using a newly discovered trick, we can do the same initial glitch to make the game load objects from the wrong part of memory, and then make the PC jump to the first line of code that gets executed when you touch a warp portal (which normally advances you 2 levels forwards), which in turn ends level 3 and causes level 5 to start immediately.
Basically, I want to know if this glitch is too similar to what exists in the current any% TAS for it to be used in the 2P Warps TAS.
Can you make the PC jump to something arbitrary then?
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EZGames69 wrote:
So Strider 2 has a secret level you can unlock if you have a save file of the original Strider in the same memory card.
The game actually comes with disks of both Strider 1 and 2, and by completing a game on the Strider 1 disk and saving it into the memory card, you can have access to a prologue stage.
I don't know if bizhawk allows the user to load save data from other games or if this type of thing falls under sram anchoring. I also don't know if this type of case is a thing for any other PSX TAS on the site. Would something like this be allowed?
When depending on other images is an intended feature, and in this case it's almost the same game, and if it's the only way to unlock that stage, we may allow it for moons as a save anchored movie. Generate the save with the first game as a verification movie, then use that save on the second game with the actual movie. Moons only tho. Unless there's a cheat code to unlock it.
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Fast pace and cool graphics, lots of shooting, but little variety in gameplay IMO: it gets old after a couple levels, and the raft level makes it even more boring. Voting Meh.
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Depending on how much time it saves, the improvement can be called minor and hard to pull off, or it can compromise the speed record that the current run represents. If it's only a few seconds, we can publish as is.
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How much time will it save?
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This makes it clear that the overall quality of the movie is indeed higher, it's not just taking some damage to only save some frames there.
If Riyan isn't planning to finish their movie soon, I feel like accepting this submission and then obsoleting it with one that's faster or equal in all levels, barring the timer that causes unavoidable loss. But if Riyan's movie is finished and submitted soon, I'll have to reject this movie in favor of the new one.