Joined: 8/1/2006
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Also, when BLJing, the TAS normally presses A every other frame. However, the 0-star TAS pauses as it releases A, so it only moves 1 frame's distance between jumps. This lets it get an extra jump, and therefore a bit of extra speed, before it runs out of staircase. And the extra speed lets it pass through the DDD entrance without triggering it.
Trying 127.0.0.1... telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
Patashu
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To all people hoping a minimum A button presses TAS will ever come out: Get annihilated. Link to video Pannekoek2012 finds a glitch that takes 11 hours and saves 1 A button press.
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Well that doesn't discourage a TAS surely, considering that clearly proves that these movies are in fact being made. Notice how he didn't say "This glitch would take 11 hours to set up, so no way in hell am I gonna TAS that". If you look at his channel, you see we have a lot of body parts. So all we need now is a Frankenstein to sew them all together. Granted it would be long, but hopefully any encode would simply skip all the boring sections such that that video has done, giving us a vid which is only 2-3 hours long.
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there is also another star that is incredibly long: The red coins one on the same level. Very incredible!
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Flip wrote:
Well that doesn't discourage a TAS surely, considering that clearly proves that these movies are in fact being made. Notice how he didn't say "This glitch would take 11 hours to set up, so no way in hell am I gonna TAS that". If you look at his channel, you see we have a lot of body parts. So all we need now is a Frankenstein to sew them all together. Granted it would be long, but hopefully any encode would simply skip all the boring sections such that that video has done, giving us a vid which is only 2-3 hours long.
1. That would most likely cause people who are watching the encode (and not the input file) to vote "Yes" despite I'm pretty sure they only found 1/10th of the movie entertaining. 2. Cutting out boring parts and only looking at the fun parts seems rather unfair for judging a TAS.
Joined: 12/29/2007
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This sounds like a situation from earlier with the SMB1 lowest score TAS. Sure, it's very entertaining to see how to avoid all those points, and it's fine when you can cut out the 60-second+ wait at the flagpole. But when you have make it into a full uncut movie, watching Mario wait and dance around over and over repeatedly can get boring. Am I saying that a minimal A-button TAS would inevitably be rejected on this site if submitted? No, of course not. But the fact that improvements are constantly being found much faster than in other TASes, and that some of them (more than this one) result in the movie's length being extended by several hours, make it not too likely to be published or even submitted in the first place.
BigBoct
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Trading speed for entertainment is an accepted practice here. Considering that the 1 press strategy takes abou 2 minutes, and the no-press takes 660 minutes, I think using the 1-press strategy would be perfectly acceptable in a TASVideos submission.
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^But that would defeat the entire purpose of the category if it should exist, which is explicitly to find the minimum number of A presses necessary to collect all the stars. It would be like the "small only" Super Mario World TAS using something other than small Mario for an exit, even if the strategy for that exit somehow took hours to set up as small Mario.
BigBoct
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I remember back when ISM and Mister were TASing the "Super Mario World VIP and WALLMIX" romhacks. Apparently a popular category among the Japanese runners was "all exits, Almost Capeless and Almost Yoshiless," where the cape and Yoshi were used only where no other way had been found to complete an exit. I see no reason why a similar concept would not work as applied to the "minimum A presses" category of SM64, once the rate of finding improvements had slowed down a bit. The publication description can always be used to indicate where something can be done better, but in the interest of making the movie more publishable, was not done that way.
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Patashu
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boct1584 wrote:
I see no reason why a similar concept would not work as applied to the "minimum A presses" category of SM64, once the rate of finding improvements had slowed down a bit. The publication description can always be used to indicate where something can be done better, but in the interest of making the movie more publishable, was not done that way.
Main problem is that almost all of the most interesting minimum A button press strategies have as a byproduct of their interestingness incredibly long real time (all the cloning-requiring solutions for example). It would also be arbitrary - how 'long' or 'boring' does it have to get before you start deciding not to save A presses?
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ALAKTORN
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an A presses run is never going to be published on the site, give it up; pannenkoek has made a YT playlist for all the records, watch that if you’re interested
Buddybenj
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Patashu wrote:
boct1584 wrote:
I see no reason why a similar concept would not work as applied to the "minimum A presses" category of SM64, once the rate of finding improvements had slowed down a bit. The publication description can always be used to indicate where something can be done better, but in the interest of making the movie more publishable, was not done that way.
Main problem is that almost all of the most interesting minimum A button press strategies have as a byproduct of their interestingness incredibly long real time (all the cloning-requiring solutions for example). It would also be arbitrary - how 'long' or 'boring' does it have to get before you start deciding not to save A presses?
Would a minimum A press run also aim for time? So lowest a presses but in the fastest time? If so than a minimum A press run would be really hard to make.
Projects: Interested in TASing N64 Mario Golf. GBA Mario Tennis: Power Tour is on hold.
Patashu
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Buddybenj wrote:
Would a minimum A press run also aim for time? So lowest a presses but in the fastest time? If so than a minimum A press run would be really hard to make.
Yes.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
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Challenges like this are the reason the site needs a demo tier.
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
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But this is all for a 100% low-A run. Surely a 70-star low-A run can be made while skipping all of the insanely long stars, right? Off the top of my head, I can only think of the Bowser levels taking a while to set up, because of all the Goomba ladders. Even still, there is such a thing as speed-entertainment tradeoff. For stages that you just cannot bypass, instead of taking 2 hours to set up enough steps for a jump, just do the jump already. It's less impressive, but it's a necessary tradeoff, so that the movie does not drag on (implying a non-skipping encode). Of course, this can all be debated once the run actually takes off.
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Depending on how few A button presses are required for the Bowser skip and 50 star door skip, minimal A press route might include them. Return of a 16 star route?
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Noxxa
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boct1584 wrote:
Trading speed for entertainment is an accepted practice here. Considering that the 1 press strategy takes abou 2 minutes, and the no-press takes 660 minutes, I think using the 1-press strategy would be perfectly acceptable in a TASVideos submission.
Espyo wrote:
Even still, there is such a thing as speed-entertainment tradeoff. For stages that you just cannot bypass, instead of taking 2 hours to set up enough steps for a jump, just do the jump already. It's less impressive, but it's a necessary tradeoff, so that the movie does not drag on (implying a non-skipping encode).
This is not a speed-entertainment tradeoff (doing it is in the interest of both speed and entertainment, so it's not a tradeoff for either). Instead, what you're doing is breaking the goal, as you're not really going for "minimum A presses" anymore if you start adding A presses not because it's necessary, but just because it's "more entertaining". If a movie doesn't meet its stated goal, it obviously won't be acceptable for the site. It's like creating a Super Metroid 100% run and deciding to skip a few items because that's "faster and more entertaining".
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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Hmm, I see that. Though I still think it's a tradeoff -- you're trading speed for entertainment. That's what "tradeoff" means, unless I'm wrong. But yeah, something as arbitrary as "minimum A presses except when it's too long"-run would be stupid. I guess we just wait for faster methods... But hey, what about skipping the longer stars altogether? That's still in the table, no?
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Noxxa
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Espyo wrote:
Hmm, I see that. Though I still think it's a tradeoff -- you're trading speed for entertainment. That's what "tradeoff" means, unless I'm wrong.
You're not trading speed for entertainment. Adding an additional press adds both speed and entertainment*. The tradeoff in this case is neither speed nor entertainment; it's the run's goal that's being traded off. *Entertainment here being based on how the run gets more boring if it's hours longer, so entertainment is directly correlated to speed in this case.
Espyo wrote:
But yeah, something as arbitrary as "minimum A presses except when it's too long"-run would be stupid. I guess we just wait for faster methods... But hey, what about skipping the longer stars altogether? That's still in the table, no?
How would that work? "Minimum A presses for maximum amount of stars except skip it when it's too long"? To me, it seems arbitrary to skip some stars, however way you do it.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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I think a 70 stars run would be enough to show many impressive strategies, since not respecting the goal in any way would be kinda bad.
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Mothrayas wrote:
How would that work? "Minimum A presses for maximum amount of stars except skip it when it's too long"? To me, it seems arbitrary to skip some stars, however way you do it.
Uh, crud, I didn't mean skip skip... All right, because BLJ is out of the picture, 70 stars are necessary. So, the 70 shortest stars are picked, and the remaining 50 are "skipped". That's what I meant.
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In a full TAS, how many A presses would it take to actually get to the levels themselves? You have to press the A button to get in some of them.
Patashu
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Stevmay09 wrote:
In a full TAS, how many A presses would it take to actually get to the levels themselves? You have to press the A button to get in some of them.
Pannenkoek2012 already has everything you could ever possibly want to know about minimum A presses covered: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmvvhlevqC2d6vis077yFHuLJHYtTtqe_ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ypRVVRyf4x-v8GqCSmKYnicrfKSIjao3Y1ZVl52RIyM/edit
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Patashu
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Nothing is impossible for Pannenkoek2012. Link to video
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ALAKTORN
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^makes me wonder why nobody tried to do that sooner