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IGT isn't for entertainment but to take things like score tally (or waiting for the opponent in your case) out of the equation. If the visible IGT isn't accurate, we can use a memory address like in Sonic.
Waiting during gameplay shouldn't be involved in a speedrun, and for all the time that one could spend just waiting, we prefer it to be minimized where possible. If Sonic was optimized for real-time, then you'd arrive to the end of the level and just wait for optimal moment to minimize the score tally. That removes the spirit of competition and meaning of gameplay optimization.
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Any progress?
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Any progress with this?
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
the hurdles in 110M hurdles don't behave consistenly for each race. I did try to optimize the handling of hurdles for the first race, but it doesn't matter since you have to wait for the opponent to finish anyway.
Why not aim for in-game time?
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 get this in 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 (hashes match):
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Looks like my logic was "4.9 vaultable" is not too different from "6.2 moons-only" to remain separated. Also not sure if it was already 4.9 back then.
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I have no idea why I set obsoletion... almost 6 years after they were published. 2335M looks like it's just a small addition to 100%, but in any case I'm completely clueless.
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It syncs indeed, but now I have further questions. Levels 1 and 3, as well as the last boss seem to be slower in this submission. Why? I think I calculated it correctly.
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These look suspicious indeed:
http://tasvideos.org/Movies-C3030N-C3035N-Vault.html
Precedents are explicitly worded if they happen, and even then we still review if they work in a new situation too. Either the case may be slightly different, or some policy may have changed, so relying on past decisions that don't line up with normal rules requires caution. If it's not explicit, it's likely just an error.
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P.JBoy wrote:
As a possible suggestion, I really enjoyed watching the previous TAS' DVD icon bouncing approach, especially if you can get it to work out for the fireball / missiles bits for example and make the game look trivialised as a result, strong superplay vibes :O
Anyways, I don't wanna be asking too much of you. The run is in an acceptable state as is, though I appreciate the effort you've gone through already to receive feedback and improve on the entertainment aspect.
2 toads can be doing it independently, and the projectiles can be manipulated to always almost touch the characters, without having to move away even once.
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Lobsterzelda wrote:
More specifically, is including the message that I do in the level worth the time? Or should I scrap that to do something else?
In case you didn't notice, at 9:22 in my encode of this submission, I spelled out "Lobsterzelda was here" on the screen using the movement of the toads' jets.
I couldn't manage to read that even after learning it's there. The movement is just too slow. Not sure what to do there tho, all I know is you can manipulate the projectiles, see the 1p run.
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Doesn't sync for me on 2.2.1, 2.4, 2.4.1, or 2.4.2.
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#4104: Rum's NES Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom in 11:05.92 was rejected since it used an easier game version and the audience preferred the harder one.
You can't skip anywhere with the bike/surfboard glitch, it either ends the level or rolls through open bus and arrives to the start of the ROM, where game end code is located. If a certain flag is set, it will "beat" the game, otherwise it will execute game over. It's really hard to manipulate what exact code is executed in the glitched state, because it's hard to predict it and there aren't many RAM addresses you can affect in that level. There's no ACE method known, at least yet.
Skipping those 2 levels is subjectively more entertaining too, because they're mostly autoscrollers, and there's not a lot you can do to be creative there after everything we've seen in the current run. It'd be basically the same thing, with little to no complex gameplay to optimize.
So my only complain is the snakes level.
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WarHippy wrote:
nor can I use RAM search or savestates for checking values or optimization
How do you TAS then?
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<RetroEdit> I do have a question: have you had any success with using GDB to debug GCC stuff in VS? Or have you generally just rebuilt through the VS compiler?
<zeromus> my recollection of any such experience would be entirely colored by the agony of it
<zeromus> i have struggled through projects using visualgdb. it was much like riding a bike through a jungle. before then, i struggled through projects with other GDBs. that was more akin to swimming through a desert. sometimes i've debugged stuff with printfs on linux directly. that's about like walking over a thousand miles of broken glass. and ive never used gdb itself in linux; even having done all of the above, I don't think I have the constitution for that.
<zeromus> a few times rather than use gdb for several minutes I have instead simply sat in a dark room for several days straight until I finally fully understood the problem, debugging it entirely in my head.
<zeromus> and I can neither confirm nor deny that you now inhabit around the fortieth iteration of the universe, after I destroyed the timelines in which bugs were created in the first place, which I would otherwise have to debug in gdb
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GoddessMaria has stepped down as a judge. Thank you for your continuous contribution, goddess!
We happen to have made a call for new judges recently, if anyone feels interest in helping us with the heavy-lifting.
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Memory wrote:
To me it's incongruent with previous judgments that have been made.
For example, the version of Samurai Shodown II in [3739] Arcade Samurai Shodown II by NhatNM in 11:36.43 is near identical to the version in [2709] PSX Samurai Shodown II by NhatNM in 17:10.02. When I discussed it with you, you suggested that the fact that they were different platforms was enough to not warrant obsoletion.
Meanwhile here we have two games with differing rules, and yet we must only pick one or the other. These two games are far more different from each other than that previous example. This is why I feel there is a bias present. It makes little sense to me otherwise.
I can review those 2 movies closely, comparing every round by speed. The only difference the author mentioned explicitly was lag, and both are in Vault, so we'll see if there's actually any difference in gameplay.
Meanwhile I can reject this run for sub-optimality and set the other one to Delayed until the comparison is done.
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Memory wrote:
They both explicitly aim for ingame time. It's just one aims to manipulate the ingame time in a specific method that the other one bans.
Reminds me of this submission that I had to reject. Glitching in-game time to artificially be lower is like glitching the completion counter in full completion movies. Aiming for in-game time is meant to make speedrunning that game more fair. For example in Sonic we discard the tally, because if we counted it, people would simply find the "perfect" balance between actual level times and tally times, removing the need to optimize the levels further and further. In situations when in-game time doesn't help to have fair optimization competition, it doesn't make sense to rely on.
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Memory wrote:
One thing that hasn't really been brought up as far as I know is that just because the minimum amount of effort to create an optimal submission is considered low, that doesn't mean it is the maximum amount of effort one could put in. Take the recent Zool run. The author put additional effort into ensuring that the time was as fast as possible, even botting it. It just so happened that that was all there was left.
If people did like proper analysis of these so called "trivial" games, they might find something new. They might not. But I think there's value and meaning in that for sure.
Research has been put into that movie because the game was already complex enough to be considered non-trivial, so once again, it successfully encouraged competition, which in turn led to those crazy results. I don't understand reasons not to appreciate competition for leading to all the improvements that people keep finding. Of course our whole take on competition is special, as we encourage team work, openness, sharing techniques and developments. But since no movie is absolutely perfect, there's always room for an educated, instrumented "doubt". And since you never know if you'll even find those improvements, finding them also becomes a game on its own!
And yes, if we considered a game trivial, and then someone found a way to make TASing it challenging again, it becomes acceptable, as the rule says.
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Challenger wrote:
Also, how TMNT 4: Turtles in Time TAS is going? Your last wip posted was 3 years ago.
I'm curious too.
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Last race is also good. The weak spot of your previous TG2 movies was the start-up, where I easily optimized gear shifts and gained speed sooner, but here it finally looks optimal. The questionable turn where you drive on the grass is necessary not to crash later. Nitro usage I didn't test, because it would be a part of a full-blown new TAS attempt, since it's probably the hardest part of routing.
If no one feels like testing other levels for a week, I'd consider this worth submitting.
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Builds from 5.0-11231 until 5.0-13180 have audio/video desync in AVI dumps, first frame will be missing. If the first frame repeats, all its duplicates will also be missing. It can't be fixed on user end. Use older or newer versions.
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Memory wrote:
My view is partially derived from a distaste of certain biases in regards to sports games, some of them codified into the rules. They are treated as same-y simply due to sharing the same basic rules as the sports they are derived from. From a technical perspective they can be quite different from each other. It seems weird to me to apply this standard to sports games and not other similar games. In a way, isn't the goal of many platformers to head right? What about Tetris variants? It's just odd to me to single out sports games.
I don't think it's random bias, but rather a concern that similar sports games provide similar TAS technicality and similar viewer experience, much like versions of the same game that are too similar to have as branches.
I've read the discussion that led to this rule, and it doesn't look like there can be an easy borderline that everyone could fully agree on, or a clear comprehensible solution that everyone would love. Games vary in how different they can be, for a human and for a TAS, so we just need to understand the spirit of the rule, and it'd be easier to apply.
Mothrayas wrote:
Which game obsoletes which is decided by which game makes a more technically impressive run. - This is certainly arguable, I suppose. I wrote it like this to make it still sound in line with the Vault mentality (tech over entertainment, trying to be reasonably objective), as "whichever game is better" is a very subjective as well as vague question.
I think technicality can be compared by whether or not the same TAS techniques are required for both games, or one allows to showcase some unique aspects. From having tested both 1-on-1's, technicality looks very similar.
Again, it's obvious here that the rules of those games aren't identical, but I still feel there's way too much similarity between them, as explained. Lumping them together may not feel perfect, but if we need to find a clear cut, it's in how this rule's intention compares to intentions of similar rules.
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