Posts for xebra

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I once maxed out the score on this game and it took me like 3 weeks of straight playing, around, oh, 3-4 hours a day, I'd guess. Even if you were 100 times faster than I was when I was a kid, that would be a like 40 minutes long! I'd probably still watch it, though. Strangely, the score maxes out at 99,999,999,990. (You should make a TAS just to see if I'm making this up!)
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I think I may have mentioned to Upthorn on IRC that Marat Fayzullin has open source emulators for all of the various chips found in an SMS, as well as a library for handling SMS ROMs. He also used his own code to actually make a full blown SMS emulator (which is not open source.) I don't know how accurate his emulators are, but they may be worth looking into. Meka is nice but I seem to recall Upthorn saying the source code was a mess. Plus, the interface is a bit over the top. (It's sexy but not practical for tassers.) Interesting quote from Marat's website:
Because MG source code is highly portable, it runs on many different platforms, from Apple Macintosh to Sony PlayStation (see MasterGear Ports section below). While the source code is not available to the general public, I do share it with people every now and then, when they ask nicely and if I like their projects.
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Often an accusation leveled at us tassers is that anyone could do what we do if they just had the time or inclination. Perhaps for even a majority of the movies on the site, this is true, but there are a few contributors who set the bar so high with standards so exacting that when you try to imitate their performance, you find out how difficult it really is to make a good movie. Bisqwit, Nitsuja, aqfaq, FractalFusion and others who combine intimate knowledge of the inner workings of games to create their own tools and models are perfect examples of this. Among the human-only players, Phil especially continually surprised us and stood out as an exemplar of skill. Anyone who has tried to improve the games he has touched can only agree. For me, The Legend of Zelda specifically comes to mind. Almost all of the people that have seen Phil's run probably don't really understand how insanely difficult and frustrating that game truly is. My own limited foray into LoZ:2Q certainly opened my eyes to what a monumental undertaking Phil's run was, and cemented it in my mind as the finest run on the site.
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CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
God Playing There is a place where the word "impossible" does not exist. (Yeah, and you happen to be standing in it.)
I really like the "Perfectness: has no default..." line in that video. That's some hardcore quality Engrish, or whatever you call it when Europeans say nonsensical things in English :) .
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OgreSlayeR wrote:
if we ever have a real SMS emu with rerecording
Haha, good one :) .
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It's ... not a hack.
Post subject: Re: Making a TAS-proof game
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curtmack wrote:
- Don't make pseudo-random AIs. Enemies should not jump out of the player's way on cue. Bosses should go for the throat and nothing less. If that makes them predictable, fine; it should still impede a TASer's progress.
What about getting really close to monsters to hit them more often and stuff like that. There's no way you can take away a tasser's advantage of being able to try to do really dangerous stuff over and over again, unless you remove action from the game entirely.
- Find a way to make an RNG that is based only remotely on player entropy. For example, the frame at which you collect the Seed of Infernal Bliss could be stored in memory and used as a variable in the RNG from that point forward. The number of times a certain boss used a certain attack, the number of steps a generic monster took before it was slaughtered, the number of sprites onscreen at frame 1337 of level 6... make luck-manipulation hell incarnate for the TASer.
This assumption is also incorrect. It doesn't matter how random and unpredictable the RNG is, luck manipulation will never be hell. BisqBot will own a human player every single time. The only way to get around this is to remove randomness from the game entirely.
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But even your game with no sequence breaks and perfect programming would be tassable. There would be earliest moments at which you could perform certain actions, and no normal player could reasonably perform every action at its earliest moment. Ways to get around this:
  • Implement something akin to the SMB 21-frame rule, so that the player has several seconds within which to perform an action such that the next part of the sequence will always start at the same time no matter when that action is performed within that several second period. (Retarded, by the way.)
  • Nethack.
I mean, realistically, no, you can't make a TAS-proof game that isn't one of the obvious exceptions we've already discussed.
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ToeJam and Earl!!!
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WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS RUN!?
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Haha, it's just the same thing over and over again, but it never gets old. I could probably watch those two guys beat people with trashcans and brass knuckles for hours. Great vid, and I actually like it when characters randomly disappear for no discernible reason.
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Also, should we make another thread for YTMNDs, or can those go in here?
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Not knowing of this thread's existence is not a valid defense for BREAKING THE LAW.
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Also, if this thread isn't in the top 10 or 20 in the offtopic forum, make sure you search for this thread if you have a crappy video to post.
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I like how she literally climbs out of her chair on her hands and knees and rolls over on the ground, as if thinking it would look like she was knocked out by the force of the ... whatever that was. I hesitate to call it a blow.
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Are you sure you weren't making a sanditch?
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The sound is emulated very poorly. It's not annoying at all on the original console :) .
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I'm not sure what Gimpshop is, unless you are asking how to do it in any software in general. In general there is a color assigned to transparency. There should be a menu option somewhere that allows you to pick the transparent color. Then, if you want a transparent pixel, simply color it with that color. It's also very easy in Paint.NET, simply draw whatever the heck you want with transparency wherever you want it and save it as a GIF. That may work in other software, too.
Post subject: I hate VBA
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[02:50:39] <Brushy> hey xebs [02:50:45] <xebra> hello [02:50:56] <Brushy> wussup? [02:51:01] <xebra> i'm pissed off vba blows [02:51:14] <Brushy> ? [02:54:53] <Upthorn> in what way does VBA blow? [02:59:20] <xebra> it blows because it is supposedly bulletproof [02:59:29] <xebra> yet i cannot continue a movie from a savestate UNLESS I HAVE THE ORIGINAL MOVIE [03:01:04] <xebra> the movie which is supposedly embedded in the savestate [03:01:11] <xebra> which i have to have another copy of somewhere [03:01:13] <xebra> because it's bulletproof [03:02:33] <xebra> whoever programmed in that "feature" is a fucking genius
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I made three recordings of Wonder Boy in Monster Land and they all shattered the SDA record ... unfortunately they all desynchronized quite early. Does anyone know an SMS emulator that can record movies other than FreezeSMS? As far as I know Gens+, MEKA, and Kega Fusion can't. I tried emulating it in VBA with DrSMS but it was too choppy.
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Nothing much to say except great vid.
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Well, how you determine randomness isn't really important. If your RNG is predictable, it allows a human to plan things out farther in advance, but if it's not, there's still no getting around the benefit of being able to try out hundreds (millions with a bot) of combinations of input to get better results. By definition, if you want a game to be untassable, it has to have no randomness and require no unusual amount of skill to control the in game actions. The only things that come to mind are a exceptionally strong game engines. Certainly Hydra, for example, can't be tassed (barring some bizarre and esoteric bug), though NES Chess Master and even something like Crafty (on a fast enough time control) is.
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I know a good doctor.
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I always liked yah, kiddo. Don't stay a stranger.
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Your style is impetuous, your defense is impregnable.