If a new major category is implemented in some manner, I suggest that we at least consider creating another one as well, so we have three:
- Speedruns.
- "Superplays".
- Concept demos.
We basically already have those. Vault is for pure speedruns, Moons and Stars are for exceptionally entertaining speedruns as well as superplays, and this new tier would be for proof-of-concept runs that don't necessarily make [all] the speed or entertainment criteria, but remain interesting and/or important in what they achieve. I would reserve stuff like this for such tier:
— hacking the game like in the Pokemon Yellow run, perhaps a single run of any game susceptible for such abuse would be publishable;
— partially complete playthroughs that are better off that way; i.e. don't need the entire game done to make a point, nor wouldn't become more entertaining that way (AngerFist's MM1/2/3/4/5/6 run would qualify), as well as probably any multi-game run that does more than four games at a time;
— historical runs done on custom emulators that didn't end up accepted for submissions on the site due to technical problems (Bisqwit's Star Control II TAS being the first DOS submission would qualify);
— many or most noteworthy submissions that showcase specific methods of glitching a game or otherwise getting to its end only attainable through TASing, but failing to make it faster than other submissions and/or having questionable choice for the ending point of the game;
— submissions with unconventional restrictions that aim to showcase the possibility of finishing the game under such restrictions which wasn't deemed possible even under tool-assisted conditions (warpless walkathons and the like);
— perhaps demonstrations like this would be better suited for such tier as well.
Thoughts?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Warp, I sympathize with the purism with regards to keeping the "S" in "TAS" strict to speedruns, but you aren't going to get away from "superplay" any longer—if only because that's a broader concept that has historically been featured on this site in the form of playarounds and runs of autoscrolling games, and elsewhere as an umbrella term for top-level playthroughs with or without a definite goal. These days TAS is a general term for virtually anything tool-assisted, no matter whether you consider it to be the proper usage. With that in mind, the Pokemon Yellow "TAS" doesn't become any different, even though technically it's a tool-assisted hackrun ("TAH"?). Maybe it's time to just let go. But I do agree that such hackruns should be concept demos rather than be listed with speedruns. With tiered publication system there should be no problem with reinstating concept demos as a separate tier devoted to showcasing things that are genuinely different from both going for lowest completion time and playing around.
(But the correct answer to the topic quesion is "a miserable little pile of inputs", of course.)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Do I understand correctly that (analog) TVs actually adjust their own refresh rate to the TV signal that they receive (I'm assuming that within certain limits)? In other words, while standard NTSC TV broadcast uses 59.94 FPS, another video source (such as a console) could use a slightly different rate and the TV would simply adjust to it automatically?
Analog TVs are generally tolerant to sync timing to some 10% or so. For instance, I know some arcade PCBs output 54p signal; perhaps there were some that went even lower.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Perhaps it's time to change the author to "SM64 TAS Team" and list actual authors in submission and publication texts. It's not just an aesthetics issue; at this point it's pretty obvious the run is a genuine collective effort, so why not elaborate on the contribution of each of the players? Surely not every star was tried by 15 different people?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Moozooh, from what I'm aware of the votes in the recent Russian election were manipulated by allowing known Putin supporters to vote multiple times. This was done by traveling to different polling stations and showing I.D. with a special apple logo to the voting registerer.
Correct, that has been the case. However, evidently even if there were several million fake votes cast that way, and we had discounted those, Putin would still win with an absolute majority; i.e. over 50%, no second round. Arguably that is even more alarming than the fact of outright cheating. His grasp on the media is very well reflected by the ratio of anti-Putin votes in highly urbanized areas where people have inherently better access to information sources vs. rural and remote areas where such choice is technically limited to media sources run or supervised by the state. Even though the welfare in urban areas is inherently better—up to an order of magnitude in monetary terms! So what can possibly motivate people who have seen little—if any—tangible improvement in 12 years to vote for the same guy? They're afraid things will turn for the worse with the other candidates, as they never had a chance to prove otherwise.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
For me, the value is identical to ending the game:
- You want to get the machine to a specific state as fast as possible.
You want the game in a specific state, not the machine. And the state is "game is complete". Besides, the trick is trivial to execute, even in realtime.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
This problem has a simple solution; using digital signing. This would prove the identity of the person who submitted your vote was you, and it would be impossible for anyone to change the vote.
Well, that's cute! Unfortunately, this solution introduces more logistical problems than it solves as explained by Warp, but most importantly it doesn't alleviate the main problems with voting that happen outside the actual voting process; i.e. the part where you go into a booth or its digital alternative. It's only a small step in a very long and insecure chain that can be compromised at every point. For instance, here in Russia our dearest president Putin ordered to install webcams at every polling station to ensure "fair elections". Now, despite already being in power for over 12 years and all the while failing to fulfill all of his major promises and plunging the country even deeper into the abyss of corruption and social inequality, he still won. Why? Because the outcome of elections can be manipulated by an interested party in tons of less obvious ways than directly tampering with every personal vote. Let's name a few...
1. Manipulation of pre-election information. Works several ways:
— having stake in media groups, thus having a direct say in what can or can't be told, and how it should be told. This takes advantage of people who, due to their habits, intelligence, and other factors, can't or aren't willing to take their political information from various unaffiliated or differently affiliated sources (read: most everybody aged 50+);
— having stake in telecom groups, thus having a degree of control over the geographical reach of unaffiliated or wrongly-affiliated media groups;
— various forms of general propaganda that may include anything from covering up important facts straight to outright lies;
— making friends with popular non-politicians and soft-bribing them into testimonials in favor of the interested party;
— rallying up meetings using huge numbers of affiliated attendants to create an illusion of universal support, even if the attendants themselves have little useful to say. "If so many people love this guy, he must be the better choice!"
2. Filtering opponents out and otherwise manipulating them. Again, works in several ways, but mainly for multi-party systems:
— manipulation of money, thus rendering unaffiliated candidates who aren't already wealthy unable to run promotional campaigns in order to attain the required number of support signatures;
— bureaucratic impediment for independent candidates that may be as simple as dragging the admission approval process out until past the deadline (for instance, nitpicking to make the candidate waste their time doing the major part of the paperwork anew, or other forms of paperwork manipulation);
— direct or indirect bribery (believe it or not, many people are in politics for the money and the power it provides; who cares if this power is employed in a different place or a different form?);
— constructing a dummy opponent designed to "join forces" (directly or otherwise) with the interested party after it's fulfilled their mission, or simply lose at some point, taking a percentage of voters from other candidates.
3. Manipulation of voting decision (usually done in favor of the current party in power). The least important thing these days, and oftentimes initiated by people possessing some kind of executive power but not directly affiliated with the interested party (i.e. not benefiting from the outcome directly, but having some kind of general agenda aligned with it, such as those CEOs in Las Vegas):
— various forms of workplace coercion, very effective on employees afraid to lose their current jobs (old, improperly educated, inefficient, poor, etc.), where a cost of one personal vote isn't worth the trouble; even more effective if the workplace is run by the state. Said trouble doesn't have to be the explicit "you'll be fired", a simple "you'll be very unwelcome" or "working conditions will worsen" usually suffices since nobody wants to deal with problems or a hostile atmosphere at one's workplace, and even if you choose to sue your way through you'll likely have to leave anyway;
— military service coercion, very hard to monitor and easy to do in virtually any country;
— general coercion in poorly monitored rural regions where residents' human rights are essentially ignored and any opposition can be dealt with or prevented using intimidation;
— bribery, even as simple as offering short-term benefits for those voting for the interested party.
4. Manipulation of post-election information. In many countries, only the Central Election Committee has the access to the voting data, and thus it can't be freely audited. At the same time, every registered citizen's demographic data and things such as their health status can be accessed. Works in these ways:
— perusing the names of non-attendants to cast votes for the interested party—they don't even have to be dead souls, just sick or lonely people, for instance;
— counting the existing votes wrong, or announcing the wrong number (risky, but if you can ensure that no unwanted people have the ability to check it, who cares).
I'm absolutely sure there are other ways to manipulate the outcome (I can't be smart enough to have come up with everything on the spot), but this is enough to show how insignificant and inconsequential are the digital signatures and all that. Now, of course not all of them would fly in the US, but many will and surely have. Actually, even if neither candidate employs any outright manipulative tactics per se, you should note that these people are hellishly wealthy. The amount of money they've chosen to pay to the media could have worked in their favor had it been spent to further their announced political goals, yet they chose against it. Why?
Warp wrote:
That would be quite illegal here. (Both firing people for such a reason, and perhaps even making that threat.)
Doesn't have to be a threat. In fact, the reason for mass layoffs at some enterprises might even be legitimate from the business standpoint. Changes in economy incurred by changes in political courses, or lack thereof, may force a reassignment of company budgets. If the only way for said company to survive is to lay off some employees, that's what it'll inevitably do. Keep in mind we don't know if the fired employees actually voted for Obama; they might as well haven't voted at all.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Star Fox seems to have a lag frame, every other frame. I know Star Fox has lag, but not this bad.
It's not lag, it's the game running at 30 fps. This is intended behavior, since it's a very resource-intensive 3D game. And when it lags—which it also does a lot—it dips way below 30 fps.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Well, it seems to be that bsnes core's inaccuracy remains fairly stable at a couple frames per ten minutes, while Snes9x 1.51 fails much more prominently in this case.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Either bsnes really has an elusive bug somewhere, or... the only alternative possibility I can think of is that the timing crystals in all systems involved in the capturing have slight differences due to their inherently analog nature. Something like production inaccuracy and temperature effects adding over time.
I'd think the former, because this behavior seems consistent with other videos.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
What I mean is that the existence of money prevents resources from being distributed equally, because it's not profitable or because you can't take money from somewhere else, that's why politicians can't solve those major problems in society, even though they could be solved technically.
I'm willing to bet a lack of currency would cause more problems than it would solve, lol.
In a way, you're both right. Money was conceived as a simple way to quantify wealth in general and material reward for specialized labor in particular. The problem has risen when some of the world's cultures—European for the most part—have made it a point to possess and accumulate surplus wealth and elements of luxury consummation to consider themselves prosperous, even though this accumulation by itself doesn't solve any needs. The unhealthy addiction to material prosperity has been further strengthened by aspects of modern capitalism (in which, theoretically, everybody could achieve what only kings and warriors of the Antiquity were allowed to—little else, actually); conditioned by these aspects, people—us here, that is—don't generally like to part with what they have, and neither do nations as a whole, even though the amount of resources produced on Earth in total would be quite enough to end poverty worldwide. As a result, you get the paradoxical situation where nearly nobody likes that poverty exists at all, and there's everything available to remedy the situation, yet only a few people are willing to voluntarily step down their consummation habits in order to fight poverty, and the less people do it, the less other people want to, seeing how small the overall effect is.
This addiction to possession and material reward is our problem though; abolishing money until we solve it isn't going to help any.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Re: Super Metroid, it appears that Snes9x 1.52 is actually more accurate than Bizhawk. o_0 If you fastforward to the last minute or so you can clearly see how BH gets a couple frames behind by that point, while 1.52 remains spot-on with the console timing.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
This TAS is about as underwhelming as the game itself, truly a fitting tribute. Even Front Line is better, let alone Dark Castle. :)
Rather than doing the worst games, maybe it would make more sense to pay attention to the best ones?.. Then again A2600 is such a simple platform it has literally nothing interesting to offer to TASing aside from RNG manipulation. There's no lag, no variable movement speed, no groovy music. I'd be surprised to see an A2600 TAS actually worth the watching time, let alone making. An interesting quest indeed.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
First bonus stage: would the tally take less time if you end the stage with zero pins?
Hoverbike stage: is the scrolling speed for all segments (except the last one, obviously) equal? Does the stage end a fixed number of frames after you've crossed the finish line?
Rat Race stage: would doing a jump before falling off a ledge help build up downward acceleration?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Entertainment is subjective though. I'm far less impressed by something that isn't a portrayal of the original. It's like using a hacked version of a game that allows certain tricks to be performed that normally can't be done in the original. Seeing tricks performed based on known limitations is far more entertaining and impressive than bypassing limitations in order to perform them in my opinion.
There was no such option when the run was started. Carl has stated that pretty explicitly.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
By the way: I didn't know that Bizhawk actually has support for SNES, the Bizhawk page also doesn't tell about that.
Fixed.
I'm kind of bummed some of the greatest runs-to-be (like the aforementioned YI 100%) won't be (re)done on bsnes-based emulators in foreseeable future, but I guess that was unavoidable. Then again, with main body of research and optimization done once, subsequent improvements will be an order of magnitude simpler (see AoS 100%)—a matter of time before people attempt to do them.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Aside from very selected few, bullet hell shooters are, at large, very forgiving compared to certain shooter titles from 80s and 90s. Very few platformers require skill per se unless you're deliberately playing them in a hard way (i.e. speedrunning), and even then it mostly boils down to muscle memory rather than conscious keypresses. I'm surprised you didn't mention early FPS games, many of which were actually pretty damn hard regardless of your goals, or strategy games where quick and precise micromanagement can decide the end of most battles.
In virtually all cases what is referred to as skill in a video game is obtained through learning, observation, and repetition. To obtain skill you need to be very goal-oriented, learn from past mistakes, and drill everything you have problems with until everything predictable is accounted for. You also need to be observant to see how the game reacts to your actions and draw conclusions as to how you can manipulate it to your advantage.
With TASing, it's pretty much the same: learning, observation, and repetition will eventually lead you to optimal or near-optimal results in a largely similar manner. The only major difference is that when you're TASing you can treat any game as an infinitely rewindable turn-based puzzle that doesn't involve reaction time, so you have more opportunity to be observant and try different things over and over until you're satisfied.
I hope that answers your question.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Some news: the campaign has raised 51148$ by the time of posting, so 1.2.0 will now definitely be released and there are some nice stretch goals yet to consider. Time to rejoice and throw some more money at this. :P
Some things that will be added to the game as a result of power pledge drives and reaching stretch goals:
— about 40 new artifacts (jesus...);
— a new boss area;
— integrated tile support engine (NotEye);
— 29 or so new non-artifact items and some new monsters;
— 12 new corruptions.
An inhouse-developed tileset reached at 55000$ will be reused for ADOM II, so it'd be a nice thing to have and definitely welcome for beginners and those not hardcore enough for ASCII graphics. :P
Hoping for an Android port somewhere down the line...
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
