Posts for slo_bro

Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I've never been more happy to be at the butt end of a massive joke :) I went into the thread thinking it was probably a joke, but the serious discussion that had been going on for a week convinced me that it probably wasn't. Good job, guys! I've been punk'd big time by two April Fools jokes this year. I have never contributed anything more productive than "if I was a TASer I'd run Kirby's Pinball Land" (and a little money and torrenting in the distant past, stuff I wish I could still do now), but I would be very unhappy to see TASvideos go.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I really hope TASvideos does not shut down. Even if it is in fact true that TAS inputs would not work on a console, still TAS are amazing and truly entertaining. All the creators of the amazing videos on this site deserve to have a place to show off their work. TAS do not undermine the rest of the speedrunning community, they enhance it. Many console speedrunners look to TAS both for strategies and for an amazing time to try to come close to.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Warp's probably right :) My ISP's not on that list, lucky me. Anyway, I'm happy to say that I'm seeding again. Right now only 2 of btfriend's 6 files are actually uploading, but that's about par for the course for my connection. But for over a week there, everytime I checked nothing was seeding. Thanks much to those that helped. edit: Oh, I finally saw Nitrodon's first question. Yeah, while I couldn't get uploads to work I did see a very low but nonzero upload speed once on a file I was downloading at the time.
Post subject: having trouble seeding again ...
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
For at least the past week, probably longer, I haven't been able to get anything to upload on Bittorrent. Downloads work fine. Otherwise my internet connection seems to be working fine. The files show up as "seeding" but the upload speed never changes from 0. I've tried it both with btfriend.py and with a set list of files to seed. I haven't tried seeding files that originate elsewhere ... guess I should try that just to troubleshoot. I'm just wondering if there's anything that happened on the site's end that might cause this. I am guessing that the problem is probably on my end. I did begin using a new router and Xbox Live at about the time this problem started.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
*claps* I am not worthy.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Here's my first two-all-red-Tetris game, but of course it's just in normal mode. http://ccgi.gdward.plus.com/cgi-bin/tetris/index.php?replay=4686 One all-red Tetris in death mode would obviously be a lot more impressive than two in normal mode. I can see that one in death mode would take a huge amount of strategy (and speed of course :P )
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
The skill and speed necessary to play that way ... just wow. Anybody that can survive two minutes in Death Mode is WAY beyond me. After watching your videos to learn how, I got myself an all-red Tetris in normal (not death) mode, but I bet anybody can do that.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I just discovered this Tetris game today (thanks to DK64MASTER). I'll sure never break the top 50, but I'm going to have a lot of fun with this. I am not a Tetris expert or Tetris master, but in my opinion the closer the tetrads get to totally random the better. IMHO, if you knew for a fact that you were going to get a red line piece as one of your next 13 pieces, that would take a lot of the fun out of going for tetrises. edit: Does anyone know of any videos that are not near the top of the scoreboard that would be a good watch? I'd be interested to see them.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I just wonder how many man-hours have gone into this project, including all the time people have spent looking for shortcuts over the years, planning the route, and of course GuanoBowl's time. [/newb saying something obvious]
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Using that link, I discovered that someone's TAS of a complete game lasts 10 seconds ;)
Post subject: How big is your ...
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
... AVI folder? I've got a 29.7gb folder that's almost exclusively AVIs from this site. I sure haven't watched them all, but I watch them fairly frequently. But I bet my ROM collection is the smallest of anybody on this site ... I only have two of them :(
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
The beginning of the boss fight looks like Soulrivers totally misses a chance to hit Aghanim, but as far as anyone knows there is no way to hit him at that point. Maybe if the boss fight was entered some slightly different way, but not any way anyone knows.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Congrats on this :D BTW, as far as I know we all have Glitcher to thank for originally discovering that the final boss can be beaten in this way, this early in the game.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I'm seeing unusually high numbers both for seeds and downloaders. Dark Fulgore's SNES Killer Instinct is reporting 76 downloaders. For several days btfriend.py has been sharing the same six videos, and only rarely have any of them actually been being downloaded from my computer. Hopefully this just means that no videos are in dire need of seeds right now. (3/27/2007) Looks like btfriend.py is working fluidly today. In fact, right now six videos are being shared from my PC.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Well, here's the message I found in the log today: http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l239/slo_bro/shutdown.jpg
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\bittorrent\btfriend.py", line 261, in <module>
    CheckSharing()
  File "C:\bittorrent\btfriend.py", line 230, in CheckSharing
    response = LoadBittorrentTrackerData()
  File "C:\bittorrent\btfriend.py", line 62, in LoadBittorrentTrackerData
    return bdecode(urlopen(TRACKER + '/scrape').read())
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 121, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url,data)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 374, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 392, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 353, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\bittorrent\BitTorrent\zurllib.py", line 33, in http_open
    fp = HTTPHandler.http_open(self,req)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1101, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1076, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error (10060, 'Operation timed out')>

C:\aa>goto gruu

C:\aa>c:\Python25\python.exe C:\bittorrent\btfriend.py
But as you can see, the code you wrote for me kept the program working. So I don't need any more help. thanks again (I'm glad I have something worthwhile to do with all my web connection's downtime)
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I should have said "feasible" rather than "possible" in my first post :S http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mario+kart+tas&search=Search I see at least three tool-assisted videos of different Mario Kart games.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Yeah, I should wait until PS1-running is viable before I start talking about running PS2 games :S
Post subject: Single-level TAS videos
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I just ran a search on YouTube for "Mario Kart TAS" looking for individual tracks, and I found a very small number of videos. So I know that somebody is making what I am talking about ... Is there any good place to go for TAS videos of single Mario Kart tracks, or single levels of other games? Some day I'd LOVE to see TAS videos of katamari levels, but I have no idea how many years it will be before these are possible.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Thanks! Everything started up. I'll post again in a day or two; I bet I'll be able to report that it's still working. edit: 24 hours, still running, looks like the new code did the trick. I can scroll back and look at about 2 hours worth of btfriend.py activity; if I ever see a message from when the program shuts down I'll post what it says.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Correct, that's what happens. Yeah, I bet there is a message, I just haven't seen it. edit: I don't even know how to run a DOS window that does not disappear when the program shuts down. If I did that, then the next time btfriend stops I could at least see what message I recieve.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
There's no output message. One minute there are two Python windows running (bittorrent and btfriend) and the next minute there's only one (bittorrent). edit: Woops, I suppose there is an output message, it just disappears before I can read it. I doubt it will help but here's what my batch file looks like: c: cd aa start C:\bittorrent\btlaunchmany.py . --max_uploads 6 --max_upload_rate 200 start C:\bittorrent\btfriend.py My Bittorrent source code is version 4.0.0 I thought it a little strange that my Windows XP "Add or Remove Programs" window shows I have three different Python-related things installed: Python 2.2 pywin32 extensions (build 203) Python 2.2.3 Python 2.5 I doubt that would have to do with btfriend stopping, but who knows. edit: That code you offered me, would that keep restarting btfriend.py whenever it stops? If someone could write a line of code like that for DOS that would be extremely helpful!
Post subject: btfriend.py question
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
Is it normal that bitfriend.py almost never keeps going for more than a day at a time? I keep having to restart it. Any suggestions? My guess is it's a problem with my internet connection, since bitfriend quits any time the internet is not connected. edit: woops, I mean btfriend.py :S ... Well, if anyone can help with this I'd appreciate it. Or maybe it's just normal that btfriend has to be restarted every once in a while (I doubt it). I only use the computer an average of once a day, so I'd estimate that as it is I am sharing TAS files 20-30% of the time.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
I'm willing to admit that to me, downloading a large number of emulators, downloading a large number of roms, and learning how to load a video and capture it to an .avi in each and every emulator sounds like a big commitment. I am guessing that this means that my site idea won't work. Sorry for wasting everybody's time. I do hold you guys' work and the whole TAS making enterprise in high regard - I really like some of the ones I have downloaded. But I guess I'm not the right guy to start a website of this kind. edit: Woot! Looking over this site again, I just figured out that there actually is a way that I can help the TAS community a little bit once I have broadband. For a fairly large number of hours a week, I can become a seed for the torrent files :)
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
So for me to convert videos into .avis, wouldn't that require me to have both the emulators and the roms? I think that's a bigger commitment than I'm willing to make. Are there other possible solutions? Could I just offer on my site video files that require emulators to play? Or, hope beyond hope, is it possible that someone here would be interested in teaming up with me and converting all the files? I know that would be asking A LOT considering that mine would be a totally unproven website.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/17/2006
Posts: 34
If I start any site I still want to be willing to accept no-savestate no-slowdown content along with TAS. If that's a bad idea then I won't. Stuff like the Omega battle in Final Fantasy V or Kefka in FFVI (and yes, I definitely would accept runs on Japanese roms). I think all these could be covered in the "from a savestate" theme, if you guys think that would be a good idea. Should I have a strict limit on video length, like under 30 minutes or something (to make it easier on me and my limited time/resources)? I really need to know, would it be feasible for me to expect all runners who contribute to convert their videos to something like an .avi that I can handle? If I did that, should I also require a copy of the original video? Forgive me if I totally have no idea what I'm talking about, I probably don't. I have no idea what percentage of runners actually convert their runs to video files that don't require an emulator to watch. Unless if somebody tells me not to, if I start a site I will definitely display a link to this site's "what's a TAS" page prominently on my homepage. And by the way, I have confirmation from archive.org that they will store any content I come up with. If anybody wants to start a game video site, or if anybody just wants to store their videos on the web, I highly recommend www.archive.org. I think that both this site and SDA use that site.