Totally impressive.
Using Swellow is not the fastest route for Emerald? Is it because of the double battles so the main battle Pokemon would better be able to learn Surf?
I think there's a few factors - skipping more of the fights, and having to faint an extra Pokemon, both make it less worth picking up another unnecessary Pokemon; luck manipulation differences probably play a factor too (IIRC luck manipulation runs differently in this version so rare events like encountering an ideal Taillow or manipulating a King's Rock from Pickup are probably out of the question). Double battles come into it a little bit too.
Basically, whether you like the Vault or not depends on whether you primarily make TASes or just watch other people's. If you painstakingly create a technically excellent TAS of an obscure NES game with little entertainment value and see it banished to the Vault, it can be very disheartening. Conversely, if you have never made a TAS in your life, you almost certainly don't want to watch such a TAS and hence would prefer it to tucked away somewhere harmless - where those who wanted to watch it could do so, but where it wouldn't trouble you if you didn't go looking for it.
Now, imagine you are a newcomer to the site and have never heard of TASing before. You are instructed to watch a few stars and you will have your mind blown most probably, and your interest will be piqued. You might go searching for movies of the NES games you played when you were a kid, and stumble across "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?" which, under the new system, is categorised with a bunch of very entertaining movies. (Remember at the moment when you search for movies by system, the Vault publications are not listed by default, so currently this scenario wouldn't happen.)
For a person dipping his toe in the TAS waters, early exposure to WITICS could kill off all interest that person has. We HAVE to think of our audience over and above ourselves, and that includes giving newcomers the best possible impression of TASing that we can. Remember, those people will become TASers themselves. Without that, TASing will have a bleak long-term future.
Oh, and by the way, I'm not saying that making boring TASes is a waste of time - far from it, as the puzzle solving aspects that come with making any TAS can still be entertaining. But that does not automatically make a movie interesting to watch, just because it was fun to make.
Haven't read the whole thread but I think the Vault is a very good thing and allows for publications that make it that just never would have otherwise.
If only you could remove the stigma associated with the Vault...
Sorry dunnius, I did not mean to insult your efforts and I appreciate the technical excellence of this movie. My entertainment standards are higher than most, probably because I have never made a TAS before and therefore do not truly appreciate how hard TASing is.
Are people finding this entertaining on its own, or mostly because its such a large improvement to the previous movie, which was quite a dull?
Edit: I'm mostly the latter.
I haven't seen the previous movie, and, hearing that this one is a vast improvement entertainment-wise, I don't really want to, because this one was pretty middling.
Basically, the problem is Hydlide itself. You can't polish a turd. In particular, Hydlide's bizarre game mechanics (before Zelda and Dragon Quest standardised the action-adventure and RPG genres) mean that a TAS doesn't look very optimised, at least to the uninformed, even when it is. Looking optimised, and doing crazy things that would be impossible in real time, is what makes a TAS entertaining. Here a guy wanders round a bit, sometimes at below top speed, and occasionally runs round in circles to grind or even manipulate the next map. It gives the feel that the game is being played by a monkey randomly mashing buttons, rather than a superhumanly skilled player.
If the RNG is really that cruel, then a hard-mode run may just be too difficult to optimise. It would be interesting to see battles won in record time with actual strategy, rather than the usual "make everything a cakewalk with critical hits and misses" fare that these sort of games normally lead to.
This should be accepted, but a hard mode run would obsolete it regardless of frame count, IMO.
Is this triple payload thing going to be any more visually impressive or is it just going to be more technically complicated? Technical complications for the hell of it seem a tad pointless..
It is worth noticing that time is not quite the same as the other spacetime dimensions for one reason - you can not travel backwards in time (in special relativity anyway). This is the property that conserves the uniqueness of the time axis within the spacetime it sits in. Otherwise you could pick any axis and label it time, much like you can rotate your paper however you want and still draw x- and y-axes on it.
count me in the crowd for removing the 1h18m and the 28m and having this obsolete them both (shortly followed by a yet-to-be-made run obsoleting this one)
having a unique 'warp glitch' category at this point is like showcasing a bowl of lucky charms with one of the dozen marshmallow types removed
If you believe that this run should be obsoleted by the one Chamale's working on, shouldn't this one be rejected due to a large known improvement?
^It's an RPG with relatively simple movement. Most rerecords will be in luck manipulation, with which a bot may have helped (and unless you are called MrWint bot rerecords don't count in the total). This sort of game can get away with a low rerecord density.
I really liked the route in this run. It's quite refreshing, if that makes any sense.
At this point, I'd say that we get rid of the 1hr20min run by primorial_soup. I know it was really influential in the history of Pokemon runs, but it's a pretty arbitrary category at this point. If people want a run that keeps the gameplay mostly intact, we have the FireRed run.
What, so are you saying reject this run too? Because despite the large time difference this run and Primorial Soup's are in the same category!
Yay, double post!
Some small queries:
1) Why aren't you getting critted in the rival battle to lose faster?
2) Why are you so concerned with Charmander's DVs? I have been following real-time speedrunners recently and none of them have mentioned it being needed for Brock Through Walls. Please don't tell me those nineteen million rerecords were for nothing...
3) Couldn't Nidoking level underflow faster by doing a fight by himself? I'm pretty sure a couple of Critical Hit Thrashes would be sufficient to down a level 3 Weedle.
The previous run used a memory corruption glitch to warp to the end. Can this walk through walls trick not be used to reach a place where you can perform that memory corruption glitch in order to reach the end earlier?
Yes it can, in fact RTAs already exist of this route that are faster than this TAS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGeQCOVd7T8&list=PLPm3JpvqIqB94uW8W58-NO2aQmM8Cpgdk
However, MrWint has specifically designed this as an "any%" run, which specifically forbids glitch warps achieved via memory corruption. Basically this new glitch is forcing us to rethink what categories are appropriate for this game.
EDIT: wow, (gre-)ninja'd by Zowayix.
^I think MrWint agrees with you to be honest. He does note in the submission that this run was made partially to challenge the game's current categorisation.
Well this is in a similar boat to FractalFusion's old Pokemon Gold run. It must be either lifted to moons or obsoleted, and the first option is the lesser of two evils.
I swear you said "I'm done with Pokemon for a while, I want to TAS something else" not too long ago...
The thing is, now that Brock Through Walls has been discovered, the "any%" and "no save corruption" categories are quite similar. There's basically nothing in here that isn't in the NSC category, and it's slower, so there isn't much point in having it.
Shame you can't manipulate the TM for Earthquake or something to appear on that glitched path, it would speed up the Agatha fight.
Does this movie have the lightning bolt just because of better entertainment than previous runs? A one frame improvement is significant in this game but not to the average viewer so I don't think it should have the lightning bolt IMHO.
Yeah, because of the bullshit frame rules in this game there are a lot of opportunities to entertain without losing time. HappyLee makes the most of them.
Heck, I'm still not sure why these don't get put in the Vault.
Because they're entertaining.
Be fair, entertainment is subjective. Triky's opinion is in the minority, but it is not wrong. Though I do think triky should go watch some vault movies and that will give him a taste of what is truly boring.
I'm downvoting because I don't think it should have obsoleted the previous run. Arbitrary Code Execution should always be a separate category. Always.
Yeah good point about ACE being a separate category, someone should change that as I believe that such a policy was made official some time after this movie was created.
A thought occurred to me while I was thinking about these two submissions:
http://tasvideos.org/4378S.htmlhttp://tasvideos.org/4388S.html
The first of these TASes is done by a newcomer to the site, the second by a very experienced and well-respected TASer. And they have had very different receptions.
For my part, I immediately watched Jigwally's movie and wrote on the discussion page that I thought it looked sloppy. A few days later I saw TASeditor had produced a faster version, and I immediately thought to myself "Oh, it's TASeditor, that'll be optimised". Without even watching it.
I've now watched them back to back and I honestly struggle to differentiate the runs in real time. I realised that I just perceived TASeditor's run as more accurate because of the name attached to it.
Even more surprising are the results to the "did you enjoy this movie" question. For jigwally's movie the reception was a strong lack of enjoyment, whereas for TASeditor's movie the reaction was pretty much split down the middle, so more people found TASeditor's movie entertaining despite the fact that it looks very similar and some of the people watching it had presumably seen pretty much the same movie a few days before (and the fact that the game is still horrible for TASing entertainment value).
There is clearly some bias going on here due to the reputation of the TASer. This is a problem for future movies as it may quash high-quality runs by newcomers and
let mistakes from skilled TASers slip through the net. How should we counter this bias?