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dan wrote:
I was not a fan of the dam shenanigans however.
Honestly, I wasn't either. That's why it got a derogatory name in the submission text. In v2, the cane of byrna is obtained after the book by transitioning south in the library, and it's really cool. Unfortunately, it's slower. With a heavy heart, I had to move byrna to Dam%.
EDIT: Happy birthday to the Super Famicom, Super Mario World, and Link to the Past
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grassini wrote:
if anything can be made to make it more easily understandable, it would be good, at least i wanted to know where link was, because having him invisible for long was really confusing, but i enjoyed the run as it is and gave it a yes vote
I was going to mention the hitboxes script, but I tested a cheat on a whim, and it's syncing just fine so far. Set address $4B in WRAM to 00 and Link will never go invisible during invisistairs. I haven't watched the whole encode, but the fact that it hasn't changed at all after the first instance is a good sign. I'll edit this later with the final sync status. Just kidding! I'll edit it now: desync around frame 29,000 when we fall to Hera 2F. I'll test a more nuanced version of this cheat that looks for the stair game submodes and only modifies the value then. Second edit later. Unless it desyncs immediately. EDIT2: Nope. A scripted change lasted longer, but still desynced. Apparently RNG was affected enough to produce 2 green rupees from the chest game instead of 100 rupees and the heart piece.jlun2 wrote:
While I don't have time to watch it right now, I'm really impressed on how you (and anyone else who helped) route this; the game dungeon is a giant map that links both light world and dark world (did I get those terms right?). How did anyone even approach routing this at start?
Honestly, the bulk of the work was done by the people mentioned at the end. You'll notice the overall routing is like 90% the same as Andy's world record run. Actually, I learned several things and came up with several improvements that I'm trying to get people to implement in future runs. Too bad no one runs this.
Our process was really just to make a fast version of the RTA route, but at every segment we looked at what we can do in a TAS in each room to get somewhere else. The more I thought about it, the more the overall direction of the RTA route just made too much sense. None of this was for lack of trying.
My favorite part was all the stuff that we did that looked small but ended up huge without us knowing as we continued. Getting the fire rod after Palace of Darkness was a couple hundred frames faster from a lazy test, which we were happy enough with. But without that route change, the method to get to Mothula would not have worked.
If anyone wants an idea of just how much route planning went into v3 alone, I recommend checking out the earlier drafts. I've added links to thempast in the submission.
As for the dungeon map, there are 2. Single- and multi-entrance. It's in the GBA version that I saw you're familiar with where these 2 maps are combined into one.
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Habreno wrote:
I am entirely with ais523 here. As this stands now this is basically almost unwatchable, which is a mighty shame since the technical aspects involved here are massive. Even reading the submission text pausing during the run to see, I still have absolutely no idea what is going on visually and how that is correlating to what is being said in the submission text.
As it stands now, this is a heavy no on entertainment because of just how glitched everything is, which is a mighty shame since from a technological aspect this is incredible. I may change my opinion if an alternate encode comes out.
Side note to judging: I have not yet voted in the poll.
I'm sorry the broken camera hurt the entertainment value for you, but thank you for not making negative implications about our efforts. I really wish I could help everyone see the run the way I see it, but I just can't. I know how to make a camera hack work. I know how to make Link visible when he's not. I know how to show all the hidden things happening behind the scenes. But the more I think about it, the more impossible it seems just because of how the game works.
Anyways, I added screenshots to the submission per request.
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TheKDX7 wrote:
This TAS was really amazingvto watch ! Yes vote.
And, is it possible to make us see what the suggested screenshot that are quoted in the submission look like ?
I'll add those to the submission tomorrow. For now, you can enjoy this quick shot of 18900:
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ais523 wrote:
This run could really benefit from an encode that shows information showing how the game fits together from the point of view of the glitches used in this TAS. I'm finding it hard to enjoy watching from the direct encode, and the reason is because there's basically no information visible that lets you see why the TAS does anything; it's basically "run around a bit in a room, now you're somewhere else, which may or may not be visible onscreen". In order to be able to follow the run, you'd need to show not only the view as the game shows it, but a map showing where Link currently is, and a picture of the collision that's loaded and that Link can collide with. The run just looks massively suboptimal when there's no information available as to what constraints the run is facing that determine where Link can and can't go; the run gives the appearance of being able to go anywhere and yet sometimes going around in circles instead, and although I know that's not what's actually happening, I can't see what is.
I'm not currently voting; although I'd vote for No based on the present misleadingness of the encode, this seems like a fixable problem and I couldn't change my vote once it was cast. So consider my vote a No up until the point where this sort of issue is fixed.
It's not fair in the slightest to say it "looks massively suboptimal", especially when I made sure the submission text covered anything and everything that would be useful for the audience to know. It's a lot, yes, but that's what you're going to get for a complex run. Plenty of runs do things that aren't understandable just by watching. Part of reviewing a TAS for the quality of its optimization is doing research on how the game works. The onus is on the author to explain things of course. I did my part, so you should do yours.
Anyone who wants to try can make an encode that shows collision by modifying this script to run in BizHawk, but that will slow bizhawk to 10 fps by itself.
Edit: For the record, EZGames had asked me about the possibility an encode with a camera hack, but the answer was that it isn't feasible. So much depends on the camera being where it is, especially lag. It can't be done with a simple script; every screen would need manual tinkering to make sure everything else stays synched. Some parts would not even be possible to correct, with the best example being the eyegores in the Thieves' Town segment. They move based on where it looks like you are rather than where actually you and also call RNG.
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EZGames69 wrote:
Hi, I was wondering if you had an encode or a video you could provide for this run.
if not, I'd be happy to make one for you. I love this game so much.
Tompa said he's working on a lazy encode. I think it's just taking a while.
Scratch that.
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Cool new glitch that doesn't seem useful at all. Yet. Movie here. Doesn't make it into the TAS, sadly. Which, by the way, is almost done. Submission later this month. Hopefully this week.
https://gfycat.com/ExcitableTornBoar
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klmz wrote:
thatguy wrote:
You mention that a side-effect of the glitching is to corrupt the in-game timer. So I'm just wondering - what is the official in-game time for this TAS?
5281:46:20. If the in-game timer weren't corruptible, it would be 00:03:22.
Wow. Can the game timer even go that high naturally? If you left the game running for 5281 hours, would it actually hit that? Or can it only go that high because of the corrupting?
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klmz wrote:
fmp wrote:
Without the glitch, aren't any% and 100% just the same thing here?
So there coud only be "duplication-glitched any% vs official (only in the sense of which friends to save) any%/100%". However, as the friend-duplication glitch is not applicable in most levels, an optimized "all friends" movie will vastly resemble this submission.
In that case, I don't think there's any need for a separate branch.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
SmashManiac wrote:
One thing that I'm wondering though is whether an any%/100% category split should be done here, or maybe have the door open for a glitchless category instead. I'm honestly torn on this one.
I'm wondering the same thing, as saving every friend could be considered as a form of full completion. See this line from the Movie Rules:
If a progress counter is filled by collecting a set of items or fulfilling a set of flags, all individual components of this set must be collected or fulfilled. Collecting or fulfilling the same component multiple times to inflate the progress counter is not counted towards full completion.
So the question is: should this submission obsolete the current movie or be published as a new branch?
Without the glitch, aren't any% and 100% just the same thing here?
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Warp wrote:
It might also happen with some particular game, especially an older one, that running it on a PC (real or emulated) that's too fast might make it glitch in some manner, or otherwise change its behavior in such a manner as to allow a faster completion.
Due to the nature of old computers, I honestly think they should be considered consoles here. The way things developed and evolved in that era was just so different from PCs of the modern era. If you built a real machine that ran DOS but just did it with the speed of a modern computer, I would consider that akin to building an overclocked SNES.
In short, I agree with what you're saying, but I think this opinion should be its own topic and not effect a different ruling here.
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creaothceann wrote:
Warp wrote:
my concern is that with some games, running it at a ridiculously low framerate might enable some glitches that aren't otherwise
Just like TASing frame-by-frame...
This is fundamentally different. You're quoting Warp, who likes the divine gaming god argument, if I remember correctly. When you're TASing frame-by-frame, you're like some superpowerful being that's literally slowing the passage of time to play the game with extreme precision. To an outside observer, the game behaves as normal. When framerate is lowered on the machine itself, it's not the deity slowing time, it's just the computer. And an outside observer will notice that the game is operating at a different pace.
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Wow it's been over a month. Still hard at work everyday with Yuzu and sometimes Tompa. Here's a teaser.
Ignore the rerecord count. I started a new movie and used a savestate. Also, our true progress is about 22,000 frames ahead of this, but I wanted to leave some surprises.
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Warp wrote:
fmp wrote:
There are already plenty of runs that have slowed-down encodes so that viewers can have a slightly better idea of what's going on. I see no reason why a 60 fps encode couldn't be made of a game that was played slow as molasses.
I think there's still a confusion here.
Wow I'm dumb. That was added as an afterthought when rereading my post, but I probably should have read it one more time.
I still think the concern is covered by the process. An unwatchably slow run will probably have a good chance at rejection. It certainly wouldn't go in moons. It also comes to mind now that a 1fps run is just inherently less impressive from a perspective of precision.
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Warp, I see your main concern as something that is already taken care of by the existing judging process. If a run is absolutely unwatchable, it won't be published. Or maybe it will? There are already plenty of runs that have slowed-down encodes so that viewers can have a slightly better idea of what's going on. I see no reason why a 60 fps encode couldn't be made of a game that was played slow as molasses.
I can understand your concern that it goes against the spirit of TASing, but I said earlier that I think it's a problem with the game if it can't handle certain settings. And what do we usually do when something is the game's fault? We take advantage of it. I think this concern is just subjective though. There's not going to be a "correct" answer here. But for either case, I think future judgings and audience feedback will slowly veer the site towards its best solution.
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warmCabin wrote:
I'm curious if the community's "NG+" category would be accepted on this site. We've essentially created our own New Game Plus by allowing two, and only two cheat codes: unlock the Bubble Bowl, and unlock the Cruise Bubble. You still need to play the whole game and collect 75 spatulas, but you start off with all your powers already. It substantially changes up the game, even allowing you to skip two really slow boss fights.
I'm not sure how well it would be received here, but I personally think it'd be an interesting run for TASVideos. I think 100% IGC would be even better though, as I said earlier.
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I think this topic has some parallels with the decision on difficulty switches in #5928: MrWint's A2600 Barnstorming "no collisions" in 00:32.41. There's no way to reasonably argue that an FPS change is a form of input, but I still think there's an important ruling in here:
feos wrote:
And games are supposed to handle it the way they want.
The fact of the matter, especially with modern games, is that when something is to run on a wide spectrum of hardware, it needs to accommodate for that. When games don't do that because they were expected to run on a single refresh value, the implementation is faulty, or it wasn't future proofed for higher refresh rates, it becomes an inherent fault with the game; i.e., a glitch.
This is fundamentally different from other extra-game modifications because the game is obligated to read and interpret the properties of a monitor or graphics card simply as a part of being graphical software. That's just what it does. If it wants to display something, it absolutely needs to communicate with the display, directly or indirectly. That's the same way it is for input. If you want to exist on multiple platforms, you need to poll input in a way that works on the machine. Just like with video, this is generally done with drivers, but it's still something that needs to be done to even work as a game. On the other hand, accounting for hacked data is not a fundamental part of making a game. Yes, plenty of developers try to prevent this, it isn't required to make a game actually work. The argument that makes this analogy only really holds in a field of corn.
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Excellent response, feos, but I feel like your explication of the rules just validates my original opinion. In this case, the codes used don't hit any of the following points. The moves unlocked almost hit the "Unlock other similar means of playing the game in unusual way", but I think they're much better suited for the 200% category I mentioned (100% IGC on speedrun.com). The main reason the cheats are used is to unlock access to the final boss fight, which has a currently unskippable 75 spatula requirement. In my opinion, the spatula cheats are the only problem. The move cheats give access to interesting glitches much earlier than a cheatless run, so I think that on their own, they can be perfectly acceptable. Were there to be some way to glitch into the final boss fight, I think it would be interesting enough to warrant a run that starts with cheats, but that's not the case here. The way I see it, the use here is akin to just jumping straight to the final boss with a code, much like you can do in the awful GBA version of this game. As such, my vote remains "no".
I've seen the author's unoptimized full-game TASes in the past. FusionVaria, I'd love to see those come to fruition.
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Stop arguing about the letter of the law and start considering the spirit of it. The way I see it, cheat codes that only make the game faster are banned, because that's not entertaining. While we love seeing games done fast, we also want to be entertained with the run and its complexity and routing. In-game codes that make the run more entertaining (whether it be from making it harder or skipping the boring stuff) are the kind that are more acceptable.
In this run, the cheats only make the run faster. It skips right to the final boss. That's not an interesting run.
Voting "No" because this category isn't entertaining. This is a game that can do much better. I also feel like I'm perfectly in the audience of whom exactly this movie is for. I'm a speedrunner kinda who really enjoyed this game as a kid, but I've only invested into this game casually. I think I hit both main audiences for this run, even though I'm also sort of familiar with the RTA runs and their tech.
I'd much rather see 100% or 200%. 200% is a run that uses cheat codes to obtain every spatula and move from the start, but then goes and collects everything normally. I think it's a great example of a run where cheat codes improve the entertainment value of the run.
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Decided to give this a try, but, honestly, it's really not fun to TAS or watch back. The game just has too much text, even after the tutorials are done. Also, I'm really annoyed by the poor emulation of the game (mostly graphical but very blatant). I don't think I'll continue, but I'll post my WIP anyway: User movie #50568756314764533.
Even though I hadn't played this game in years, I kinda wish I went a bit further with just the TAS before deleting my 100% save file...
