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I've started working on an any% run. Expect completition in a week or two; if I haven't submitted by then, please come and slap me silly. I'm not using the save glitch because that'd be no fun. This is an unsorted list of random notes.
*The optimal order for the three major northern level clusters seems to be Miragia/Oasis -> Pyramids -> Crystalus/CotD. This is because Miragia appereance is nonrandom and massive delays will occur due to it if any other route is used.
*Each jump costs you approximately three frames of horizontal travel. Using the pogo stick counts as jumping.
*Delaying entering the level, and shooting the handgun are the only methods of manipulating luck that I've found.
*In Crystalus, a shortcut that allows skipping the green keystone is used.
*Entering a door that's not on a surface transports you out of boundaries, completing the level instantly. This saves gobs of time in CotD.
*JPC-RR is slow. Don't forget to use savestates properly, kids!
*Riding the Bounder is faster than running on a flat surface. Unfortunately, manipulating luck in order to make the balls behave nicely is often impossible - I've only managed to perfectly manipulate one on the first level.
*The Hard difficulty greatly lowers maximum jump height; when in doubt, use IPT.
*The Keen Wiki is a very useful resource.
*The pyramids have tons of mandatory backtracking and very little room for maneuvering; they will look extremely ugly unless radical findings happen. Manipulation snail poop in the Pyramid of Darkness will be true suffering.
*Running down slopes is faster. Running up slopes is slower. Both IPT and normal jumps have the 3-frame penalty, so use IPT whenever possible to minimize the amount of jumps you need to traverse slopes.
Edit: now with 120% more notes!
*Doing unnecessary jumps to collect extra ammo most likely won't be worth the 3-frame penalty.
*If you're sliding down really short dancing poles, jumping off at the earliest possible opportunity is usually a bad idea.
*Falling off cliffs is slower than jumping off them in every way imaginable; never do it unless extraordinary circumstances prevent jumping (an example of this would be the narrow corridor with Killer Thingies on the roof in the Pyramid of Darkness)
*Sprites are often extremely misleading. Floor spikes and Killer Roof Thingies have much larger hitboxes than their spritee would suggest while Blue Birds can be railed in every way imaginable.
*Blue Flaming Bastards can't touch you - only their flames can. With luck manipulation, this often means you can walk right through them.
*Poop Snails can seldom be bypassed without losing time. That's terrible.
*TODO: KeenTricks
*The keenmodding.org forums are an useful resource.
*The ETA might seem short. Rest assured, this does not mean the quality will be lacking; NEETdom allows me to work on the run ~10 hours per day.
*http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/File:Ck4lv??.png
*http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_4_Bugs
*Keen is a terrible role model for children. It's inconceiveable that indignities like this could happen in America.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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There is nothing they can take from us — the ideal we hold in our hearts is not bound by the cruel fate of all that is.
Man may fall and have its existence erased, but what is precious to us has already become eternal.
To erase us is an exercise in futility, for even if we are made invisible, that which is beyond the finite can never be subject to the torment of our mortal coil.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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Joined: 6/17/2008
Posts: 146
Redoing the downloadable encodes. I'll be gone for a while, but they should be up before monday kicks in.
Also, YouTube killed my family so someone else is going to have to do that.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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nitsuja wrote:
But, it looks like they got chopped up into shorter lines which are often onscreen for a very short amount of time. I have a little trouble reading them now, too. The problem is that reading time doesn't divide evenly. For example, it might take 4 seconds to read a sentence, but 3 seconds to read 1/2 of that sentence, so splitting it into 2 parts makes each part too hard to read in time unless extra total time is allocated.
I wasn't going to complain about the subtitle editing, because it probably took a lot of effort to go through all of them and make so many individual edits and timing adjustments, and it was well-done for the most part, and finding a significant amount of extra time to move subtitles into would have been impossible in many cases. But now that I am basically complaining anyway, I'll add that a few of the subtitles also had the wording changed enough to remove the humor they originally had and/or make the resulting comment say something weird. Very few, though. Also, certain subtitles were originally timed to match up with and replace the contents of an in-game dialog box or were timed to avoid overlapping with dialog boxes, but now that they were (understandably) moved away to the top of the screen, those subtitles lost their reason for having the timing they do, and simply appear to go away too fast. Again, though, not very many of them were like that.
I was the one who edited the subtitles and I agree with most of your complaints.
The original subtitles were fine, but I felt the presentation obscured the action too much.
Chopping them up was problematic since the script wasn't written with that kind of presentation in mind. To perfectly achieve the presentation I desired, I would've had to rewrite the whole script. Howewer, the result would no longer resemble what the author intended, so I settled for splitting the existing script and editing a handful of lines.
Problems I had with the original script include but aren't limited to:
Awkward sentence structure and wording
Weapon GETs and boss introductions
Awkward tense changes
Awkward usage of "here"
Unnecessarily long sentences (fixing this would require rewriting the script, which I wanted to avoid)
Bracket misuse
Using the fan translated names for some critters and descriptive names for others
Capitalizing "HP" but not "xp"
Referring to weapon levels as "level n" — I chose to capitalize Level as it was the least intrusive edit I could think of
I quickly noticed that I'd have to rewrite the whole script if I wanted to have it conform to my ideals, so I left most lines unedited.
I appreciate the effort put into the commentary subtitles, but I personally prefer walls of text to obstructive subtitles in an action-packed run such as this.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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4:4:4 10-bit has arrived. It provides vastly superior visual quality for content like this.
To play it back on Windows, use LAV Filters or mplayer2.
For other operating systems, use recent snapshots of ffmpeg and mplayer2.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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Posts: 146
Personman wrote:
Can I ask why the rule exists at all? Presumably a ban usually means 'Your forum posts are sufficiently destructive that we really want you to stop making them'. I don't really see what that has to do with the quality of a submitted TAS. Certainly it seems unlikely that a banned author would *want* to submit, given that they would be unable to respond to criticism and that they may bear some ill-will towards the community, but if they accept that they can't contribute by posting in the forums, but still want to contribute by submitting great runs, why turn them away?
A submission from a banned user would inevitably result in dozens of pages of complete and utter bullshit both in the submission thread and the resulting continuation in Sites/General. If banned authors want to submit a run, they can easily do so under a smurf and avert all of the drama unless they are utterly incapable of not wanking over their past deeds.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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Posts: 146
Language: monospace
00:00:00-00:00:38 – The intro.
00:00:39-00:00:57 – Drawing pictures.
00:00:57-00:01:45 – Setting name and birth date. Piano countdown.
00:01:46-00:02:57 – Playing the piano.
00:02:58-00:03:12 – The ending.
18 seconds of drawing pictures. This concept is already demonstrated better by the published run.
71 seconds of playing the piano.
91 seconds of fluff.
This run's fate rests upon the piano performance. Can the potential hope of this section outweigh the despair wrought by the rest of the run?
The winds of destiny are blowing through the piano, slamming the keys in an incohesive fashion. And as the final note is delivered, the crowd bursts into tears of pity. The performance's only hope for redemption has been crushed in a flurry of notes. As the funeral bells sing their lonely requiem, the omnipresent Grue dancingly descends upon the performance, tearing it apart in a manner that defies both space and time at superhuman speed and precision.
I think this run could greatly benefit from the usage of dirty SRAM to skip the mandatory age check and naming process in order to be able to proceed directly to the various minigames where the potential for separating itself from the published run is the greatest.
I call upon you, fellow Grammar Nazis! Let the bashing of my conciousness's pretentious products commence with neither remorse nor regret.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
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Posts: 146
I find no merit in this entertainment/speed tradeoff. Launching five rockets while wasting as much time as possible within that constraint seems like a very bizarre goal; there is little to no merit to be had from speedrunning this game, so an unrestricted playaround would seem to produce the most entertainment. The published run did not employ time constraints and the resulting masterpieces were much more interesting than this run's time-constrained repetitive math class doodles. This run also suffers from massive downtime compared to the published run.
There can be only one.
Unless an ally of the Seventh Reich conquers tasbrainagevideos.org
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Experienced player
(759)
Joined: 6/17/2008
Posts: 146
I fully support Nach as my Führer and wish to work hard to prove my worth as a pure Aryan. We must start preparations to establish the Seventh Reich.
May the Führer bring our race back to its days of glory and beyond!
