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jimsfriend wrote:
I tried turning off my virus protector thingy, but that didn't help.
What's the name of your "virus protector thingy". Does it mention anything about a firewall? Do you use Windows XP?
See what happens if you open http://irc.freenode.net:8000/ in your browser.
If it takes about a minute to load, and then you see
NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...
NOTICE AUTH :*** Checking ident
NOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname
NOTICE AUTH :*** No identd (auth) response
ERROR :Closing Link: 127.0.0.1 (Connection Timed Out)
the problem is probably something with the way you have your windows or IRC program configured.
If it says "The Page cannot be displayed..." or "the connection was refused...", you should call your campus tech support, and ask them for help.
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jimsfriend wrote:
I'm lost. Don't know what to do, help didn't help.
The first thing to do is try using a different port
This is accomplished by adding a :(portnumber) at the end of the /server command
for instance
/server irc.freenode.net:8000
What school are you at? We might be able to look up their internet policies.
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JSmith wrote:
Some statements which you may or may not assign meaning to in context of the current discussion, and which have no logical structure aside from that which you impose while reading and processing them:
Replying with an equal mix of relevance and facetiousness as what I percieved:
JSmith wrote:
It is easy to measure the value of a library by adding up the values of all its books plus the building the books are in.
Which, of course, tells you exactly how useful it is to the community it is in.
JSmith wrote:
The Chicago White Socks once sold thir pride.
How many libraries did it go for?
JSmith wrote:
You cannot prove by logic that God doesn't exist.
Nor that he does
JSmith wrote:
The four best-accepted accounts of the life of Jesus began circulating in written form while there were still living witnesses of the events.
Also true of the eight worst-accepted accounts of the life of Jesus
JSmith wrote:
Those accounts passed the strictest standards of authenticity available at the time they were written.
Which were nowhere near the standards of authenticity we have today.
JSmith wrote:
If "..." is an intelligent post, we should set loose some spambots on this topic.
The implication was that the choice to say nothing was the most intelligent course of action in regards to this thread. But the other people who chose such didn't post, so "..." is the most intelligent post in this thread.
JSmith wrote:
Even though you can believe whatever you want, that doesn't make it true.
Even if I believe really, really hard?
JSmith wrote:
If I have the opinion that nobody's opinions are valid, then my opinion is most certainly not valid.
But what if you have the opinion that nobody's opinions are valid except for your own?
JSmith wrote:
EDIT:And to delete a post, hit the X by the "EDIT" button.
The X only appears until someone has replied to your post.
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Not all opinions are equally valid.
For instance, if I were of the opinion that it is safer to mow the lawn barefoot because the vast majority of lawnmower injuries happen to people who were wearing shoes, that would not be a very valid opinion.
Another example of a less valid opinion would be if I said "The pride of a professional football team is worth more than thirty libraries."
The worth of neither thing can be measured, and yet...
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AKA wrote:
Truncated:
I can imagine voting Yes to an improved all-emerald run also. Just not this one.
I'm confused by this statement, do you mean that you spotted so many improvements that it wouldn't be worth publishing or is it because of the delays at the end of some of the earlier stages?
He listed his reasons
Truncated wrote:
- The wobbling is highly esthetically unpleasing.
- I didn't like the decision to delay finishing to get smaller bonuses. It gives the wrong impression of how fast you really finished the level, as well as looking stupid.
- I think input length only should be minimized as long as it doesn't delay the completion of the game. Use as much input as needed, but not less.
- The bonus stages themselves are okay, but slowing down for the rings and taking less damage is not.
For my 2 cents about the issue of lower in-game time vs lower overall time, I would say that the Sonic 3 & Knuckles run, and Sonic 2 run, and Sonic 1 run establish a precedent for finishing the levels as fast as possible, no matter how long the score count takes.
To expand on that a bit:
A run which completes levels as fast as possible will always be more entertaining than a run which stops just short of the goal to decrease the amount of time spent tallying the score.
A speedrun which is not entertaining is basically worthless, no matter how fast it completes the game, or what level of playing ability is demonstrated. The "speed" in a speedrun is a means to an end, and that end is entertainment.
Choosing to sacrifice entertainment for a very small increase in speed would tend to indicate that you expect your finished run to be so boring that viewers cannot stand to watch it any longer than necessary to evaluate it. And if you seem to feel the run is not worth watching, why should you expect anyone else to?
If you still feel you absolutely must minimize the total time of the run rather than each individual level time, you should waste a few seconds, through the whole level, doing something entertaining before you reach the goal, rather than stopping just before it, and doing nothing (or worse, twitching) until the timer is what you want. This would satisfy most vocal opponents of waiting without compromising the goal.
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bkDJ wrote:
upthorn wrote:
bobxp wrote:
Shield actions and Hyper Sonic's burst in whatever the hell direction you want are practically priceless in a speedrun, assisted or not. Tails and Knuckles runs would, therefore, be a lot more boring.
At least, if you play them normally.
Theres a lot of fun physics breaking to be done with the S3K.
And then Super Tails has some awesome benefits once you get him.
Isn't super tails just normal tails with fast shoes and invincibility, but HYPER tails the upgrade that gives you the kill birds?
Super tails can only be got with all 7 super emeralds. There is no hyper tails.
And I wonder if sonic+tails would ever let you benefit from tails carrying sonic. probably not.
No. Tails flies very slowly. However, there are certain places where having tails can make things go a bit faster. Like those pull-up machines in Mushroom Hill zone.
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Yeah, i guess you're right, the variable frame length isn't really that useful. I had forgotten (and somehow skimmed past the place on the GM2 page that says it) that we were going to be compressing the file anyway.
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bobxp wrote:
Shield actions and Hyper Sonic's burst in whatever the hell direction you want are practically priceless in a speedrun, assisted or not. Tails and Knuckles runs would, therefore, be a lot more boring.
At least, if you play them normally.
Theres a lot of fun physics breaking to be done with the S3K.
And then Super Tails has some awesome benefits once you get him.
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HiddenGamer wrote:
when I say something can't come from nothing I'm talking about everything else except God.
This is circular logic used to justify why your answer can be the only correct one.
"Something can't come from nothing."
"I'm talking about everything else except God."
If you say "God was always there", why can't I say "The universe and everything we were made from was always there."?
The statements are logically equivalent. Everything that exists can be explained without requiring the existence of God. Of course, everything that exists can be explained by the existence of God, but the "God created the universe" hypothesis is more complex than "the universe was not created", because it introduces a "middle man", as it were.
Occam's razor tells us that the least complex possibility is more often true, due to the path of least resistance.
Now, Occam's razor can be called into question, but my point remains that people who do not accept God's existence as undeniable truth are not doing so because they lack the faculties of logic and reason.
Furthermore, the matter of God has no meaning unless you take it on faith. The fact that you feel it necessary to prove the existence of God would generally indicate that you are lacking in faith.
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IdeaMagnate wrote:
A button configuration dialog is necessary. Some games act differently depending on which controllers are detected. It's not a good idea to depend on the user never accidentally pressing x, y, z or mode to determine a potentially important factor in gameplay. Additionally, Gens needs explicit controller configuration information in Controller_x_Type, so this would generally mean looking through the whole frame chunk to find that information for each controller.
No, no, I wasn't advocating removal of the byte for controller types, I was just advocating that we don't use the code for explicitly inactive controllers unless that control port is set to "empty" (not currently possible in gens).
IdeaMagnate wrote:
This would also result in more complex frame chunk reading code. This is a bad thing because the frame count can realistically top 200K frames. The code for this chunk should be as highly optimized as possible.
I think this may be based on your misunderstanding of my proposal.
The way I have the code for reading the input data set up is a fairly simple 8 iteration for loop. I can show you the code later if you want, but I find it unlikely to cause any sort of slow down regardless of the number of frames. Unless we're doing a file-seek to frame offset for every frame, which seems rather silly, to me -- it should only be done when loading states, as input data is sequential.
IdeaMagnate wrote:
BTW, please be sure to bring up any proposals for significant changes here for discussion before putting them on the wiki. The purpose of the wiki page is to record what's already been agreed on.
I was planning on using footnotes like bisqwit, truncated, and nitsuja have been doing.
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Since I don't have wiki editing permissions, I'll put my suggestions for proposals for the GM2 format here.
the GM2 Page wrote:
FRAME DATA
0x00 = inactive
0x01 = 3-button
0x02 = 6-button
0x03 = Mega Mouse
0x04 = Sega Menacer
0x05 = TeeVGolf
0x06 = Batter Up!
0x07 = Sega Master System controller
Note: Only bytes for active controllers are stored. If a movie has two 6-button controllers (2 bytes each) and one 3-button controller (1 byte each), each frame will occupy 5 bytes.
I have a suggestion.
Rather than explicitly stating that a controller is inactive, we could record all 8 controllers dynamically, by adding a byte at the beginning each frame stating whether each controller has that frameinput:
Frame format
1 Byte: Controllers recorded bitwise booleans
0x01 = Controller 1
0x02 = Controller 2
0x04 = Controller 1B
0x08 = Controller 1C
0x10 = Controller 1D
0x20 = Controller 2B
0x40 = Controller 2C
0x80 = Controller 2B
1 = recorded, 0 = not recorded
then the actual controller information.
If the controller has no input during that frame, its recorded flag will be set to 0.
Example (3 button controllers for simplicity)
03 F7 FD 02 FD 13 FD FD 7F
would produce the following input
Frame 1: p1 Right, p2 Left
Frame 2: p2 Left
Frame 3: p1 Left, p2 Left, p5 Start
The advantage of this is that it wouldn't necessitate some sort of configuration dialog on the creation of a new movie, asking which controllers to record.
The other advantage is that a player could use the high numbered controllers for occassional input without multiplying the total filesize.
The disadvantages, then, are that framesize is increased from 1-16 bytes to 2-17 bytes (doubling size of single player 3 button controller input), and necessitates at least a single-byte read between each frame, if not simply byte-by-byte input reading.
Of course, the current plan of a variable number of bytes per controller already suggests a slight preference for byte-by-byte read-ins...
the GM2 Page wrote:
TEXT-ONLY FRAME CHUNK
frame data [is], in the following format:
frame number (ignored by Gens)
colon
buttons pressed, comma-separated
Button presses are stored in 2 characters. The first indicates which button was pressed. Valid characters are u,d,l,r,a,c,b,s,x,y,z,m. The second indicates which controller the buttons was pressed on. This must be an ASCII character 1-8.
I suggest instead either the following;
Button presses are stored as comma separated strings, 1 character for player, 1-12 characters for buttons pressed
(Both the following are valid frames)
42:1DR,2UA,5UDLRABCSXYZM
Hexed this in:1CMLB,2
This is slightly more work from a programming perspective (although it's pretty easy to implement with some StrChr and StrRChr), but it would simplify editing an order of magnitude further than just having an ASCII based format simplifies it over the current system.
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Reposting because it looks like it got missed when Bobxp posted (increasing the last page number) about 5 seconds after.
bobxp wrote:
I'm going to skip the third Giant Ring in MHZ2, because it requires using a pulley machine to get to which would just waste time. That way, I'll still be able to get Hyper Sonic by the end of MHZ.
Actually it doesn't
(I made that vid last night to demo the route for all the giant rings, and was going to edit it into the post with the maps, but this seems better)
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bobxp wrote:
I'm going to skip the third Giant Ring in MHZ2, because it requires using a pulley machine to get to which would just waste time. That way, I'll still be able to get Hyper Sonic by the end of MHZ.
Actually it doesn't
(I made that vid last night to demo the route for all the giant rings, and was going to edit it into the post with the maps, but this seems better)
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bkDJ wrote:
upthorn wrote:
bobxp wrote:
upthorn wrote:
I note that there are 8 giant rings accessible as sonic in Mushroom Hill zone 1+2, with no death required to get all of them in one go
Wow!! That really helps! Do you have a map of both acts of MHZ? I only know of 3 Giant Rings in that zone.
I don't have a map, but I could probably mark their locations down on the TSC maps pretty quickly.
Edit:
Mushroom Hill 1Mushroom Hill 2
The rings that are crossed out can only be accessed with knuckles.
uh, did you miss one that I had circled in my picture? for act 1? or is there just an extra life tv in there?
It's either an Extra Life, or it's empty. There's definitely not a giant ring there. I've checked many times (thinking I'd found a new giant ring, only then to remember that this was the one place that looked like it had one, but didn't.
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bobxp wrote:
upthorn wrote:
I note that there are 8 giant rings accessible as sonic in Mushroom Hill zone 1+2, with no death required to get all of them in one go
Wow!! That really helps! Do you have a map of both acts of MHZ? I only know of 3 Giant Rings in that zone.
I don't have a map, but I could probably mark their locations down on the TSC maps pretty quickly.
Edit:
Mushroom Hill 1Mushroom Hill 2
The rings that are crossed out can only be accessed with knuckles.
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AKA wrote:
upthorn wrote:
There's a lot of waiting during stages and hitting left-right-left-right for single frames doesn't make it fun to watch.
Then what should I have done?
In places where you have to wait for a platform to come down, it means you could have spent more time killing enemies/collecting rings before getting to the platform; it will move whether you're at the position or not
In places where you're on a moving platform and just hit left-right-left-right to pass the time, try moving to the edge, or moving in time with the bgm. Or not doing anything. Sonic's bored animation is more entertaining than Sonic spastically twitching.
AKA wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Also, I'm not sure that the ring collections were optimal. There are some cases where he skips rings that look easy to get, and then has to slow down significantly towards the end of the act to finish the 50.
Please enlighten me on this, I don't ever remember needing to significantly slow down for any rings. I've already answered in the submission why I delay at the end of stages.
The one that really struck me was at the end of marble zone 2.
There are some platforms hanging above lava, and 6 rings in between them.
You slow down to collect those 6 rings, but there are 14 rings earlier in the level that you didn't get. If you hadn't had to collect those 6 rings, you could have cleared that area a couple of seconds faster.
AKA wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Also, since there's no Super Sonic, there's no need to collect all 6 emeralds as soon as possible. Some levels it may be more time consuming to collect rings than others.
I strongly disagree with this statement, these were in fact the best levels to collect 50 rings on. Getting all emeralds gives a different ending, an ending that not many have seen.
As long as you actually considered getting the emeralds on different levels, and discovered that there was no instance later on where finishing with 50 rings caused less of a delay than getting them where you did.
AKA wrote:
upthorn wrote:
Furthermore, I disagree with the decision to wait for up to 6 seconds at the end rather than spend extra time in the score tally. Adds to speed, yes, but at a horrible cost to entertainment.
Its all about consistency, the wait would have been a second longer had I not done that.
Yes, but it would have been 3-6 seconds less time of watching sonic twitch spastically. Spastic twitching never looks good.
Also, fast in game times are consistently more impressive than saving a second by waiting to lower the time bonus.
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Paused wrote:
Also it should be noted that Super Sonic can not be used after visiting the first Special Stage from Mushroom hill onwards. You have to unlock Hyper before you can transform in normal levels again.
Which is why I note that there are 8 giant rings accessible as sonic in Mushroom Hill zone 1+2, with no death required to get all of them in one go
This is enough to get hyper sonic on the first robotnik, even if you don't collect any other rings.
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AKA wrote:
Whats Hyper sonic?
Hyper Sonic is faster than Super Sonic by the same ratio as Super Sonic is faster than Sonic, he can jump higher than Super Sonic, again, by about the same amount that super sonic can jump higher than sonic.
And Hyper Sonic can jump once in mid-air. Aimed.
He can jump Up (like the electric shield, but a full second jump height.), Forward (Like the fire shield, but loses no altitude for a full jump height-distance), Backwards, or Down (Like the water shield, but faster, and none of that annoying bouncing)
Also, when hyper sonic double jumps, all enemies on screen are destroyed in a flash of white. Additionally, double-jumping will automatically enter any star rings above lamp posts. (Saving a couple of rings if you need to transform back quickly)
Additionally, Hyper Sonic is visibly different from Super Sonic, he cycles through all the colors of the chaos emeralds, has spikier hair, is surrounded by stars, and is trailed by up to 3 afterimages.
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bobxp wrote:
SprintGod found out you could do that. I only found out when I read the page on his S3&K run, which was only a few days ago.
I'm not going to hex edit it in, I'm going to start over, once this test run is finished. Launch Base 2 is killing me - SG completed it in 1:11, and I can't do it in 1:48 with Super Sonic. *sigh*
Don't go for the first giant ring. Sprintgod's route takes you right by 4 super ring monitors, and gathers 39 rings besides. if you follow his route, just stopping to grab one or two of those 10 ringers, you should be able to beat his time because of Super Sonic.
By the way, are you planning on collecting the super emeralds?
You really should. It's possible to do as sonic by the end of Mushroom Hill Zone, and it'd be annoying if the "Collects All Emeralds" run... didn't.
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I'm voting no. Not because the bonus stages are boring, but because the playthrough is not entertaining.
There's a lot of waiting during stages and hitting left-right-left-right for single frames doesn't make it fun to watch.
Also, I'm not sure that the ring collections were optimal. There are some cases where he skips rings that look easy to get, and then has to slow down significantly towards the end of the act to finish the 50.
Also, since there's no Super Sonic, there's no need to collect all 6 emeralds as soon as possible. Some levels it may be more time consuming to collect rings than others.
Furthermore, I disagree with the decision to wait for up to 6 seconds at the end rather than spend extra time in the score tally. Adds to speed, yes, but at a horrible cost to entertainment.
This looks like a practice run rather than a finished one.
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Here's a demo of the route I just made.
This isn't the route I used before, but it's probably faster.
(Note, this uses the S3K level select code to get to Hydrocity Zone act 1)
http://upthorn.mspencer.net/temp/HC1RouteS3K.gmv
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Hey. Just thought I'd let you know that you miss a giant ring in Hydrocity act 1.
Gamefaqs has a good guide which has the locations of every giant ring in S3&K, and instructions on getting to most of them.
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Savefile seems not to be working.
I have temporarily uploaded it to my own webspace, but it is hosted off of a friend's DSL, so if I get any bandwidth complaints I'll take it back down and look for other hosting.
http://upthorn.mspencer.net/9j_bugfix_Release.zip
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