Posts for rhebus


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Bisqwit wrote:
In the olden days, I would have published this movie without a corresponding AVI file. So as to have it as "you know it's done and there" but not to showcase it as something to watch. But these days are no longer.
Isn't the modern equivalent Gruefood Delight?
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p4wn3r wrote:
Actually, it's not clear for me that there are other factors. :P I think you should continue ^^
If (b+c)(b+d)/b divides evenly, then 2 positive integers exist x and y such that b = xy, (b+c)/x divides evenly and (b+d)/y divides evenly. Neither (b+c)/x nor (b+d)/y can be 1 because b+c>x and b+d>y; therefore a+b+c+d = [(b+c)/x][(b+d)/y] is a composite number.
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Now if we were talking in-game time, which is highly competed (and thus you have absolute reference), then it would make sense. But options screen doesn't count towards those.
We haven't decided what the metric for success is yet, but pure in-game time has been ruled out on grounds of opening the door to incredibly boring luck manipulation abuse. (You can shuffle the RNG without wasting in-game time, so you could endlessly shuffle each action until it's totally optimal.)
Is there a list of options that can't be set in-game that are relevant to TASing, together with their descriptions?
http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Options has a complete list, with each one labelled "Can/Cannot be set in-game". I'm quite keen to see TASes setting "fruit". It has no value for TASing besides entertainment, but it's part of the flavour of NH that you can specify an arbitrary food-item (and even collect different kinds in bones levels). If you don't set it, it defaults to "slime mold". Here are some silly ideas for fruit names. I especially like "1-up mushroom", "booger", "strip of bacon" and "sand hamwich". Speed-related options (depending on speed metric) include autopickup, autodig, autoquiver, pickup_types, confirm, menustyle, extmenu, mail. I don't think much advantage is gotten by setting them ingame, because if you know NH well enough to know what the option means, you can recognise when it's in effect without needing to be told.
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ais523 wrote:
I disagree with allowing custom configuration before the game starts that doesn't count towards a time limit; it would be different from every other TAS out there, every other game that wants to change options changes them in-game and takes the time penalty.
Other games don't allow you to edit the configuration before you start; the ONLY way to change options is through an in-game option screen. With the rule of "game begins from poweron", it therefore follows that changing options must be done in gametime. Since NH has always been based on media with persistent storage, there's nothing to stop defaults.nh having the desired options at time of poweron. There are some options which would not help a TAS but which would make it more entertaining: showexp, boulder, {cat,dog,horse}name, fruit. It would be a shame to throw these options out by making them too costly to implement in a TAS.
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Kerio wrote:
How about we just measure CPU time? Consistant, fits nicely to a turn-based game like NetHack, wouldn't penalize multiletter commands too much.
It measures something which isn't the main goal. Also, you have to decide if you're measuring I/O (reading/writing level files to disk, redrawing the screen) or just pure CPU time. I still don't see what the problem with counting keypresses is. Ascending with minimal keypresses is closest to "real" time in terms of a player of NetHack; when you play NetHack the speed of the computer is not the rate-determining step, it's the speed you can think and the speed you can input commands. There are actually remarkably few situations where you need to type something in NetHack; and when you do, it's for a very good reason (wishing, genocide, castle tune, Elbereth) so I don't think that this will be too much of a deterrent to using such commands. If my preferred option doesn't get support, my second choice would be ais523's suggestion of minimal turns, and minimal realtime (total wall-clock time) within that number of turns. Another question: I have heard from the Duke Nukem thread that JPC-RR doesn't like playing movies if your hdd contents are different. As a result, do we need to agree on a standard defaults.nh file, or even a whole standard NH distribution? Would not matching byte-for-byte cause desyncs or would it just be awkward? A standard defaults.nh file could also prevent players using the ugly and difficult-to-follow extmenu to save keypresses on a minimal-keypress run.
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ais523 wrote:
If you do this, remember to use the algorithm DOS NetHack uses, rather than one of the many others NetHack can use. It uses DGJPP's standard library random number generator, but happily it turns out to use exactly the same algorithm as the one in NetHack's sys/share/random.c (even the code is almost identical). My own RNG-search version of NetHack is modified to use that copy.
I've already been through the DJGPP source and confirmed that my tool's output matches the output of nh343dos using DJGPP's gdb. Now it's just a matter of mocking up all the rn*() functions, mkobj(), makemon(), and so on.
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upthorn wrote:
ais523 wrote:
In that case, mightn't "fewest keystrokes" work as a goal? Similar to "minimum actions", but easier to count. (It does have the problem of typing something like "n1000k" to walk into a wall 1000 times, though.)
Well, it could, but it is a little bit less analagous to time in a game that is rather incongruous with the concept of frames.
But it has the advantage of being clearly defined and easy to count. Is "n1000k" one action or a thousand? Is using the travel (_) command one action? Is paying for 5 items 1 action or 5? Does it depend on whether you took itemized billing? I suppose one definition is that an action is anything you can do from the standard playing mode (the mode in which hjkl will move you, z will zap a wand etc). By this definition all of the above are single actions. This is still harder to count than simple keystrokes, and I don't think it will result in particularly different results. Perhaps we should consider banning repeated commands (n1000k) to prevent luck manipulation from becoming trivial. PS I'm working on a tool to simulate and explore the RNG, to indicate what the results of mkobj(), makemon(), etc would be if executed using any upcoming RNG values. Hopefully this should make it easier to farm necessary items without having to go to the trouble of repeated savestate abuse.
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ais523 wrote:
Would it be worth starting a game on the least optimal date/moon combination - a new moon on Friday 13 - in order to "play at hardest difficulty"? (If allowing an arbitrary start time, you'd probably want a neutral moon phase to reduce the amount of text that you have to skip through.)
Hardest is new moon, friday 13th, at midnight. Easiest is full moon, day, not friday 13th.
...normally could be faster than a c!oGL due to the smaller amount of text that's displayed.
I don't like this view towards text minimisation, especially since the text a) tells you what's going on, and b) provides much of the flavour of NetHack. I had a thought about another goal: minimal RNG calls. Complete NetHack with as few RNG calls as possible. This means you want a short in-game time (because the RNG is called for things like room noises) and also a short real time (because extended RNG manipulation is punished). However it also means most of the effort would be spent skipping through places with lots of monsters as fast as possible (valley, castle). It also means you don't have to care about minimising text; indeed, you could try to put a few YAFMs into the run for entertainment. I don't know if this is a better idea than shortest realtime, so I'd be willing to hear your ideas. EDIT: Another thought: shortest input (ie fewest keypresses). It may yet be the case that the text doesn't actually take that much time compared to generating dungeon layout etc. I imagine it will depend on whether you use JPC-RR's "Emulate I/O delay" option, but I don't know for sure.
It's also possible that hallucinating is the fastest method to manipulate luck, which wouldn't work well in conjunction with blindness.
My view of RNG manipulation for NH is not to ask "how can I shuffle the RNG to get what I want?" but rather "how can I use the numbers that the RNG has lined up in the best way?". The same call to Rand() will result in different outcomes for rn2(3), rn2(2), rnl(5), or rnz(100), and you have so many concurrent goals in NH that the very next number to come out of the generator should surely be useful for *one* of those goals. It might even be sensible to write a program to outline the upcoming RNG rolls and show what values they give for various rn*(N) function calls, so you can scan and identify which action would benefit most from those rolls. (Of course some desired actions, such as getting a death drop, would require the results of several rolls in succession: one to hit the monster, one for damage, one for death drop probability, one for item class, one for item type, possibly one for enchantment.)
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ais523 wrote:
Wishing is actually probably inefficient. Compare the difficulty of luck-manipulating a low-probability wand of wishing, plus the time spent to type in the desired wish, to the difficulty of luck-manipulating the item you would have wished for. (Admittedly, there are some things that can be wished for but not otherwise generated at random; it's not obvious that a TAS would have much use for them, though, as they're mostly good defensive items.)
The Eye of the Aethiopica. Branchport and fast energy regen are both very good for a TAS. Can't think of anything else that you'd want to wish for that you couldn't get more easily by other means though. It seems to me that the easiest way to acquire the loot you want is by manipulating death drops, generating a big shop on every level (and robbing it, probably), and polypiling.
Derakon wrote:
EDIT: actually, come to think, wouldn't an optimal run's dungeon navigation consist in large part of digging downwards to descend and drinking potions to ascend? I haven't played NetHack all that much but I'm pretty sure there aren't any faster up/down movement methods.
Level teleport is faster (confused/cursed ?oT or #invoke Orb of Fate or levelport trap), but it's banned once you have the Amulet. Normally you would want to map out the whole dungeon before the ascension run, but this is less of an issue for a TAS. Wand/spell of digging is faster than pickaxe for descending. The fastest way to grab the amulet is to perform the ritual, *levelport* down and land bang in the high priest's temple, dispatch priest, grab amulet, c!oGL outta there. Normally during the ascension run you won't have enough c!oGL to ascend the whole dungeon, so you save them for levels which would take a while to navigate -- noteleport levels such as asmodeus, juiblex, medusa -- and use regular teleport or plain old boot leather to navigate the rest. During a TAS, however, I think it's very possible you'll be able to get tonnes more !oGL than normal; a lot of monsters get generated with !oGL and drink them before you get to them, while in a TAS you could ensure these !oGLs all fell into the right hands. Furthermore, there is a recipe for !oGL which requires a certain level of RNG manip but which could conceivably generate all the !oGL you need. glossary: ?oT = scroll of teleport, c!oGL = cursed potion of gain level
CX Gamer wrote:
I've read that the RNG is affected by the time passed since january 1st 1970, so should a tas start at that time?
A fair amount of the game depends on the time, the RNG seed is just one aspect. You also get a luck bonus at full moon; cockatrices are more dangerous at new moon; you get a luck penalty on Friday 13th; gremlins can steal instrinsics between 10pm and 6am; undead do double damage between midnight and 1am. This list is not exhaustive. If it were only about synchronising the RNG, I'd say that beginning at Jan 1st 1970 is a reasonable interpretation of the "game begins from power on" rule; but since there's so much else in the game which depends on time, and since you'd be inviting double damage undead by starting at midnight, I think it's best to let the TASer choose their own start time. Aside: perhaps in this thread we should refer to "RNG manip" so that the separate concept of "luck" is not confused?
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Thanks for this tutorial, I would never have got anywhere without it. Perhaps it could be stickied or wikied?
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Here's a 6480-turn no-bones ascension. That's a good bar to set for a TAS.
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moozooh wrote:
You don't have to edit the video file, you can change its framerate from the default 60 (or whatever it is for JPC) to, say, 2 — at 60 fps turn #2000 will happen a bit more than half a minute after the start. Or make it variable.
Some frames are more important than others, since one moment you might be spending 40 frames to wish for a "blessed fixed greased +5 gray dragon scale mail" and the next you'll spend 40 frames to levelport to the inner sanctum, kill the high priest, grab the amulet, and c!oGL out. But this sounds workable, if you can make the framerate variable.
for me, minimum turns glitched & non-glitched sound like good categories precisely because the game is turn-based. I don't know how much freedom exactly this game allows — there are other classic challenges to be attempted once at least one run is complete so we could see how it turned out.
The biggest restriction on turns is the Quest. You need an alignment of at least 20 (pious) to enter the Quest -- otherwise your leader will reject you -- but at the start of the game your alignment is *capped* at 10. The cap rises by 1 every 200 turns, so you can't enter the Quest before turn 2000. (You need to do the Quest to get the Bell of Opening to perform the Invocation to get the Amulet of Yendor to offer to your god on the Astral Plane.) There is plenty of info here. The fastest ascension I know of so far is 2185 turns, but this used a stuffed bones which I think is clearly unsatisfactory for a TAS. It does give some great ideas for a TAS such as being polymorphed into an air elemental for maximum speed from Quest to ascension. I think it's clear that a TAS should be faster than any non-tool-assisted non-bones ascension.
The fact that you can shuffle the RNG almost infinitely every frame in an in-game time-oriented run worries me, though, because that means, the author either has to settle with "good enough" results all the time (such thing works, but is rather wonky), or come up with arbitrary restrictions ("aims for minimum turns except when they take too long" may be a problem during judgment). Subtitles are a must in any case, of course.
Is it possible to shuffle the RNG without advancing the in-game clock? How? This would certainly introduce the worries you suggest; however I don't see a problem with having a small amount of subjectivity though; sacrificing in-game turns for less monotony is a clear case of speed/entertainment tradeoffs. And NetHack gives you so many ways to solve particular problems that it should be possible to find *some* way of achieving what you want without needing to shuffle the RNG too much. I think we can afford to wait and see how big a problem it is before deciding how to solve it.
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I love the idea of doing a nethack TAS. A realtime TAS doesn't strike me as very entertaining, because everything would fly past too quickly to understand what's going on. You'd basically want to view it frame-by-frame rather than in realtime :/ Therefore I think it would be good to slow the game down to watchable speed and go for some other goal; either that, or edit the encoded avi file heavily to make it watchable. Some classic aims in NetHack are: * Ingame time [ the main issue is there's a hard limit before you can have enough alignment to start the Quest, so you want to finish the game ASAP after this. ] * Lowest score - although I think the lowest score possible has been done, you could go for it as fast as possible. * Max conducts -- it should be possible to do all conducts? This has been done non-TASed with a stuffed bones, but with luck manipulation of enough /oW or =oSD this should be doable; also in a TAS there's no issue with doing the 2 ring no-hunger trick which is incredibly dull normally. The key issue though is to make it entertaining for people who don't know NetHack. A subtitle commentary might help with this.
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TASeditor wrote:
Ich bin nicht schneller als HappyLee. Ich übe noch TASing. Heute habe ich den TAS-Editor bei FCEUX mal genauer angesehen, aber ich werde ihn bei meinen nächsten TAS erst benutzen . I'm not faster than HappyLee. I still practice TASing. Today I've looking the TAS-editor on FCEUX closer, but I use it on my next TAS first.
Alles klar. Als du einen neuen Run angemeldet hast, glaubte ich, dass du einen Rekord brechen möchtet; ich habe dich mißverstanden. Wenn du deine TASen verbessern möchte, kannst du hier deine WIPs (laufende Arbeiten) teilen, dass die Leute hier dir helfen können. (ich hoffe, dass meine Deutch verständlich ist.) I understand now. When you announced a new run, I thought you wanted to break a record; I misunderstood you. If you want to improve your TASes, you can share your WIPs (work in progress) here, so that the people here can help you.
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What does a moon mean? I can't find anywhere obvious on the main site which explains moons, nor a list of all movies with a moon.
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Viel Glück beim Run. SMB ist einer der schwierigste Spiele zu verbessern, weil viele Leute schon oftmalig es geTASt haben. Du sagte, dass du schon in World 2 bist -- bist du schneller als HappyLee zu diesem Zeitpunkt? Good luck with your run. SMB is one of the hardest games to improve, because many people have already TASed it many times. You said that you're already in World 2 -- are you faster than HappyLee at this point? (also, is geTASt a word?)
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Amazing run so far! I especially like the Morton's castle ascent and Donut Plains 2b dragon coin key abuse.
Eye Of The Beholder wrote:
Edit: Finished watching the run and it's really awesome! Btw, why you stopped in the last level you did to make lives? Is 99 lives a goal in this run?
In that level (chocolate island 2) the exit pipe from that area changes destination depending on the time. He has to kill time until the timer shows 249 or he'll end up at the secret exit, not the normal exit.
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so do you have a solution for distinguishing the space station from the earth's equator?
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Warp wrote:
1) Assume that there's no physical limit (imposed by material strength, etc) to the size of the space station. To make the problem more difficult, let's build a space station which makes one full rotation in 24 hours, like Earth, and produces the same perceived gravity like that. Question: What would the radius of the space station have to be in order to achieve this (iow. it makes a full rotation in 24 hours and the perceived gravity at the outer edge is the same as on the surface of the Earth)?
1.6 Gm (gigametres)
2) In this situation, is there any way of determining whether you are in such a spacestation or on Earth?
Contrary to what you have said, a pendulum will NOT show rotation on a rotating space station, just as it will not show rotation at the earth's equator. A pendulum will rotate once per day at the poles, and slower at intermediate latitudes. This can be shown by a symmetry argument: how would the pendulum decide which direction to rotate in? There is nothing to show a preference for rotating left or right. Using this you can distinguish between [space station or close to earth's equator] and [sufficiently far from earth's equator], but not directly between earth's equator and the space station. A wheel mounted vertically will rotate once per day on the space station and at earth's equator, but will not rotate at all at the north pole. I would guess it rotates fractions of a complete rotation at other latitudes, similar to the pendulum but inverse. The other main difference I can think of is the difference in convergence points of gravitational field lines. On earth, field lines (or "down arrows") converge at the centre of the earth. On the space station, field lines ("up arrows") converge at the centre of the space station. You could put an upward-pointing laser in one corner of the room, place a large flat mirror perpendicular to it - so that the laser is reflected back along its original path - then place another upward-pointing laser in the opposite corner. If its reflection in the mirror goes towards the first laser, upwards arrows converge and you're on a space station. If its reflection in the mirror goes away from the first laser, upwards arrows diverge and you're on earth. This has the problem of accurately determining "up" using gravitational methods. Also if we have to consider local irregularities in earth's gravitation field, this method would not work, becuase locally the earth's field could be similar enough to a space station. Hmm. I'm stuck for now. Partial credit?
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Foone wrote:
Now, 100% items (meaning every score-giving powerup) is not possible in a damageless run, but it should be possible.
Nope, there are unreachable flags in level 2 for a start.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Just going for highest possible score could be exciting! So you would collect every item and blast every enemy in reach, including those Acme signs you need perfect timing to shoot, except you want to touch Energizer bunnies for more points, and shoot colas and turkeys for more points. Collect the DUKE letters in order, and whatever else gets you an end-level bonus!
I disagree - it'd involve shooting out all the ice blocks which would be deathly boring. Shooting all cameras wouldn't be a thrill to watch either. And collecting DUKE restricts your route choice so you don't have interesting route optimisations available. How about "breaks every box open" for a 100%ish option? It's 100% achievable afaics, and would cause you to explore each level without being too boring and while allowing freedom to choose any route. The only problem is it's a somewhat arbitrary choice of goal. Perhaps this game isn't especially suited to a maximal category.
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This is great work. Looking forward to seeing this in the workbench!
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Kriole wrote:
While the few frames it saves in the pause-screen are negligible in comparison to the technical inaccuracy,
To try to put some numbers on this, I just had a go and I can save 63 frames just on the switch to flame demon/giant bat/succubus in the Graham fight in your 100% run. There are a few other opportunities for this scale of saving (chronomage for sky fish, valkyrie before legion, nightmare after legion), so while this probably isn't as big as technical accuracy savings, I wouldn't say it's negligible. I would guess the savings over the whole run might be 200-400 frames.
Kriole wrote:
it is still considered a mistake and no doubt is frowned upon.
The 100% souls run is still all of teh awesome. I would never have played AoS if I hadn't seen it. I actually prefer it in terms of entertainment over your new Any%, despite the technical improvements - it's nice to see more souls getting an outing. It would be crazy to frown upon a TAS just because improvements were found in it later. By the way, what's the difference between bone pillar and catoblepas in terms of movement? Bone pillar uses more MP I can see - does it let you cancel faster or change RNG faster or something?
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Hello, I've been on and off lurking since the days of nesvideos, so uhm hi! I've noticed something that might save time in the 100% soul run: L and R let you page-up or page-down in the soul and weapon menus. This would make switching souls (particularly during the Graham fight) a handful of frames faster. Also switching equipment may be faster too, I haven't looked to see how much filthy loot Soma ends up with in Kriole's run :) See here for an example of changing to the magic set on a character with all of the souls. Here is a frame-by-frame analysis: 41 S - and we're off! 52 A - enter soul menu 69 A - enter bullet souls 70 R - page down 73 R - page 76 > - right 77 v - down 79 R - page down 82 R - page down 85 R - page down 88 v - down 90 v - down 92 A - select flame demon 95 v - select guardian souls 98 A - enter guardian souls 99 R - page down 102 ^ - up 105 A - select giant bat 108 v - select enchant souls 111 A - enter enchant souls 112 R - page down 115 > - right 118 A - select succubus 121 B - out of soul menu 137 B - out of pause menu As you can see, when you scroll the menu, you generally have 2 empty frames before input will be recognised, while if you don't, you can get new input straight away. As a result, while flame demon and succubus are faster using R to page-down, giant bat is actually the same speed: [R..^..] takes 6 frames because of menu scrolling, while [v.v.v.] is three button presses but with no scrolling still takes 6 frames. I'm not sure why sometimes you can input on the immediate next frame (frame 77 above) and why sometimes you need to delay one frame (frame 79 or frame 92). I have also seen [R..R] (ie R, no input, no input, R) not recognised but [R..v] recognised in the same situation. There's some lag that I don't understand caused by this menu. I wonder if one or two frames can still be shaved off by reordering the menu commands. I hope this is helpful! EDIT: Uploaded the wrong video the first time.
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