First, you'll never really know if your copy (or original disk) is unmodified. Second, copy protected games can only be played using .ipf-images, which cannot be read in a deterministic way. Either that, or the copy protection needs to be removed, and hacked images are not allowed on this site.
Hmm, so there's no reliable workaround for the copy protection other than forcefully removing it? Bummer. :(
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I said it before and I say it again: we're just one tiny step away from making Amiga TASes.
There is a great open-source emulator with most basic TAS capabilities (savestates/slowdown/movie support) already built in. There is a game library of several thousands of titles, with many of them being excellent games. The system itself is superior even to SNES when it comes to visuals, sound and processing power.
…What are we waiting for? :)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Well it's certainly nice and may be worth watching, but Maxim is so overpowered. :\ Every boss fight will look basically the same. Check out Truncated's Alien Soldier WIP (for Genesis), it suffers from the same illness basically.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
If the creative solutions to a couple of stars is the main justification to publication, then why not make a movie that just does those stars? Perhaps a playaround that just shows off crazy shortcuts and ideas that didn't get an opportunity to be shown off in the 120 stars run?
Would that, per any chance, make it less arbitrary? If such a movie was submitted instead of this, would it have been accepted? Somehow I think not (to both questions).
Regarding my own opinion on this particular run, I don't like it (nor the game, in general). It has a few interesting moments, but if watching a 120-star run is already a pain for me for the most part, watching CCC is even worse in that respect, so I haven't watched it till the end. I appreciate the effort, though; it's not an often chance to see a player who makes complex TASes just because he wants to, disregarding the audience reception.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Other than being required, there can also be a way to link the screenshot from the publication to submission message automatically. Personally, I don't care about that, but some people might do.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
About the Castle Crush bug, all I know is that when I watched your initial movie demonstrating the glitch, the emulator started doing strange things like requiring I restart it before I could load any savestates, and when I turned on debug mode to investigate, the emulator crashed from illegal overwriting of its own memory when you did the glitch. And when the emulation bug allowing that (wrong instruction call) was fixed, trying to reproduce the glitch froze the game instead. This doesn't mean it's impossible to reproduce the same effect on a console without freezing the game, and if you have gotten it to work in other emulators it is most likely legitimate, but something fishy was going on in the emulation when playing the original demonstration SMV.
May it be something similar to Space/time beam in Super Metroid, i.e., a hardware glitch?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I haven't seen the runs for this game (nor the game, itself, for this matter) before.
Also, could someone explain me the reason for inconsistencies in jumping/attacking? I've failed to see a general pattern between those actions, it seemed almost as if you alternated between jumpkicks and sword thrusts at your own discretion. Do they provide the same movement speed?
Also, why do you run into wall for a few frames at the beginning of a stage around frame 14000?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Jesus. This game sucks more ass than Arne_the_great could have possibly imagined. It has suckiness in every one of its aspects, except maybe for music which was just so-so.
The TAS is okayish, though, so it's a yes vote.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
It was rather repetitive near the start (where there's a lot of warp barrels. I hate those), but got progressively more awesome near the end. Moreso, the last bunch of levels starting with Castle Crush were so awesome they could put any other DKC movie to shame! I'm most pleasantly surprised how the normally long and boring Castle Crush has become the most entertaining stage in the entire game.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Just thought about another thing. There's more lag on Snes9x 1.51 (as it's supposed to be), it will add a couple of seconds to the final time. So no, sub-40 I hardly believe in.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
He needs to improve it by 58 realtime seconds for that… I'm not saying it's impossible, but it won't be easy in the least. I can see about 40-45 seconds saved by various stuff we've discovered, but 58 — I wouldn't count on that, personally.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I'm glad you're taking the time to speak on everybody's behalf and trying to impose your dislike for mupen and pass it off as what the other 2,00ish members feel.
Dude, learn to read or something.
The reason there's not much response is partly because of the emulator. I can understand all those people who don't even want to have anything with Mupen, it's sometimes annoying to even think about using it.
I hope you're going to tell me Mupen is actually okay and it's generally agreed that it's a stable and easy to use emulator. Otherwise your righteous outburst™ bears no relevance whatsoever.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Maybe you should post a better WIP then? The reason there's not much response is partly because of the emulator. I can understand all those people who don't even want to have anything with Mupen, it's sometimes annoying to even think about using it. Maybe you should encode the movie and upload it to googlevideos/youtube?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. I'm not sure any of them would be useful, but it's still better to have some input, I guess?
Bisqwit wrote:
― In each branch, would need to be recorded also extra information about its significance: whether it should be featured by default in long listings, or to hide under some link.
Well, for example, in SDA's game lists, they give the priority to the shortest game completion (from beginning to end), which is reasonable. First of all, we'd have to decide how many prioritized movies should we feature this way — only the "any%'s" (fastest non-broken completion from beginning to end; with "broken" referring to runs like glitched Zeldas and all that stuff), or, say, both any%s and 100%s (="full game completion"), or something like any% and highest rated other movie for this game? It seems unwise to have more than two prioritized categories in any case, though. For games geared towards entertainment (autoscrollers, 1-on-1 fighting games), movie(s) with the highest entertainment rating should be prioritized. If we have such things as movie categories and ratings in the database, we should try to put them to good use whenever possible.
Bisqwit wrote:
― Possibly, UI-wise, implement different versions of same game's movie with tabs. But alas, tabs cannot display multiple items at once, so only one of them would be showcased at given time.
―― Hiding some movies behind tabs would mean that user's attempt to use browser's "search" function would fail to find movies that happen to be hidden under tabs. Also, it makes the tabular formatting of the movies page a lot more jigglywiggly, because each movie would now be in its own table (tabs cannot split a table). Inflation in the amount of HTML would also be experienced, leading to longer transmission times and longer rendering times (the 600 kB Movies-NES page already takes about 20 seconds to fully render).
Tabs are good, but, as you say, they can put noticeable burden on the page layout and hinder in-page searching. However, even though they most likely won't be usable to contain movie items in them, they can serve a similar purpose to ease navigation (like here, for example). It needs more thinking, but I'm sure a working solution will arise soon.
After all, it's not unreasonable to create separate pages for each game to break/redirect the HTML weigh from one page to several.
Bisqwit wrote:
― To track hacks based on a game, some relationship needs to be written in data between different games. Would it be movie<->movie? Would it be an some_kind_of_anchor<->multiple_movies type relationship? It presents a database design dilemma as well as a maintenance UI dilemma.
In my opinion, hacks should only relate to the game they've been spawned off as a subgroup of movies. I guess it's "some_kind_of_anchor<->multiple_movies" in your example, with anchor being the game's name or similar identifier — for games that are named differently for different regions.
Bisqwit wrote:
― How about variations of hacks? Would they be listed? Or just the most prominent movie of a hack? How would that be decided?
What do you mean by variation of hacks? If it's regarding the existance of multiple hacks for the same game, then each hack with movies published for it should be a subgroup related to that game and not other hacks. The rules of listing will most likely be same same as with the regular movies. In case each game gets its own page, I think it would be fine to list the movies of its hacks only on that page and nowhere else. I'm not entirely sure how to treat them in case of centralized movie listings, but I think it's what we're currently trying to avoid using, with this new layout paradigm.
Bisqwit wrote:
― Would there also be a link to documentation pages? How would that be indicated in the database?
This, too, needs either a specialized tab with links or a separate game-related page.
Bisqwit wrote:
―― Also publishers need to use the tool and verify at each movie they publish, whether it belongs to an existing movie group or creates a new one.
I assume the tool will be located on server's side and be interacted with by some kind of web interface? (Ajax'ed, as in case with wiki editing?)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Mighty awesome; I haven't noticed anything suspicious (though die throwing scenes looked a bit out of place, but I suppose there's nothing to be done with that). The speed you dealt with the dice palace encounters with was incredible, too bad you're still about two minutes behind Jackic.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
SMV file contains only the sequence of keypresses needed to reproduce the movie. There is no way to extract that information from AVI. Read Wikipedia or other open information sources.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
It seems controversial, I agree, but there's a difference between SMB3 autoscrolling stages and SMW autoscrolling stages. If anything, I'm being consistent in what I like in Mario speedruns.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
You seem to forget that TASes are not only about the amount of frames. There are sufficient reasons for both choices. Don't hurry assuming things if you don't know these reasons well enough.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
