Plain 0xFF everywhere is more a common pattern among emulators for simple deterministic uninit RAM. It's better than using plain 0x00s, which some games might end up seeing as valid savedata (while that wouldn't happen with 0xFFs). Actual cartridges before they're ever opened would just have junk in SRAM, "random with patterns." Some emulators might try to mimic more realistic uninit SRAM, but many just don't bother and use 0xFFs everywhere (which is "safer" anyways).
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Default bootup states in emulators are always allowed.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Previously, open platform (PC, C64, etc.) and homebrew submissions could be rejected if the game wasn't findable through e.g. a public database or web search. This was the notability requirement, and it still applies to ROM hacks. But now, I don't see anything in the current Rules barring PC or homebrew games from publication that are only available through an unlisted link. Such as Doge's Adventure, which can't be found on Google and nowadays may only be downloadable from an Archive.org backup of the author's link. I have a userfile beating the game that I would like to submit, if it wouldn't be rejected outright for this reason.
Are games with findability or notability issues acceptable today?
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Standalone games don't have the availability requirement that hacks have. We can't host hacks due to legal uncertainty, but we can refer to them if they consist of only patch files, and we even link those patches. With homebrews though, we judge them independently of third partiea based only on movie quality. If some download exists and is legal to link, we'll use that.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I've been messing around with Prince of Persia: Special Edition on Adobe Flash and I ended up finding a "game end glitch". However, I'm not so certain if I make a TAS using this glitch if it will be allowed or not. The same glitch does happen in an actual Adobe Flash Player I believe.
Link to video
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Rxser wrote:
I've been messing around with Prince of Persia: Special Edition on Adobe Flash and I ended up finding a "game end glitch". However, I'm not so certain if I make a TAS using this glitch if it will be allowed or not. The same glitch does happen in an actual Adobe Flash Player I believe.
Link to video
Does it provably work in Adobe Flash Player and in Ruffle+libTAS?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I've been messing around with Prince of Persia: Special Edition on Adobe Flash and I ended up finding a "game end glitch". However, I'm not so certain if I make a TAS using this glitch if it will be allowed or not. The same glitch does happen in an actual Adobe Flash Player I believe.
Link to video
Does it provably work in Adobe Flash Player and in Ruffle+libTAS?
I've been messing around with Prince of Persia: Special Edition on Adobe Flash and I ended up finding a "game end glitch". However, I'm not so certain if I make a TAS using this glitch if it will be allowed or not. The same glitch does happen in an actual Adobe Flash Player I believe.
Link to video
Does it provably work in Adobe Flash Player and in Ruffle+libTAS?
It works in libTAS too
Personally, I think this trick is amazing and would love to see it published. Nevertheless, I'd still like to see a non-glitched solution. No matter how broken it may be, it's still a nice homage to the OG Prince of Persia games.
I've been messing around with Prince of Persia: Special Edition on Adobe Flash and I ended up finding a "game end glitch". However, I'm not so certain if I make a TAS using this glitch if it will be allowed or not. The same glitch does happen in an actual Adobe Flash Player I believe.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
There have been some legitimacy concerns about this in the chat, because it feels like abusing debug functionality of the environment... like running a console game using a developer kit variant of the console, with the only difference here being AFP having this functionality out of the box. Using the "Forward" menu command can also just skip ahead, but it's clearly not a gameplay mechanic. Sure some games outright disable menu commands, though I haven't checked whether they still obey the hotkeys (and finding info on AFP hotkeys is super hard).
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I would argue too this is not so much a "glitch," if we want to publish it, it should not be labeled as "game end glitch" (nor any other glitch labels).
(reposting from Discord)
It's important to remember flash player was originally intended just for movies. "Play" (forward/back/etc) are all intended as part of that movie flow. The difference with flash games is they hacked gameplay interactions with that movie format.
So with this, flash games are actually split into "movie clips" (literally called MovieClip) which typically loop waiting for some condition (or something along these lines), clicking these buttons means you're forcing the ""movie"" to go between different clips, instead of using the actual gameplay metric normally used to go between clips.
Recently, Rank 5 TASes of Papa's games were allowed onto the site, and part of the reasoning as to why was because of their overwhelming popularity as a category to run within the RTA community. Rank 3 and Rank 10 categories for these games also exist through the Papa Louie Category Extensions leaderboard, and while not as popular to run, still remain more popular than Any% (with one exception for Rank 10). Would these categories also be acceptable on the site, or are they too unpopular and obscure to override the fact they don't beat the game?
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
InputEvelution wrote:
Would these categories also be acceptable on the site, or are they too unpopular and obscure to override the fact they don't beat the game?
They only don't beat the game if the game never ever loops in any way. But aren't ranks, or maybe days, loops? We allow one loop as the earliest end point for games without and ending, and it's only obsoleted by either maxed out content, or maxed out difficulty, or a kill screen, and each of those goals counts as "any%".
"Arbitrary" amount of loops won't belong to Standard, but it feels fine in Alt until there's consensus that it's redundant to continue the trend of adding more and more goals based on different amounts of loops.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 10/18/2017
Posts: 171
Location: San Francisco
After completing the Kirby Mass Attack run (post details in Post #532568), I was trying to review the run before I could submit this movie file.
When I compared this run with the only RTA speedrun, I noticed some emulation differences in these runs, most notably the lag count. I found out that the Nintendo DS has more lag than the Wii U VC, but running on the Nintendo DSi mode results in the same lag as the DS (there are no significant differences when running this game on the DS and DSi mode). I do not know if the regional differences of this game were the factor of the difference of having more or less lag on this run.
I tried to review the Kirby: Canvas Course by enabling real BIOS on the Nintendo DS and disabling the skip firmware. However, I can't change the sync settings inside the movie file, meaning that this run desyncs when I try to put the firmware inside the folder. The final boss part of the Kirby: Canvas Course was mainly RNG based on the prior level movement, and likely the position of Kirby on the last phase of the final boss.
Planned runs:
Marble Madness (Arcade, Genesis J, GG/SMS)
Proposed:
Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis, GG/SMS, CD: regular, camera freeze)
Ecco: The Tides of Time (Genesis, GG/SMS, CD; normal mode)
Mario Kart DS (all cups, all missions)
In progress: Grand Poo World 3 (all exits hard mode)
I found out that the Nintendo DS has more lag than the Wii U VC
The Wii U VC is Nintendo's garbage DS emulator running on the Wii U. From Pokemon RTA circles, it's been tested and it's been found to be the least accurate when it comes to timing, even worse than DeSmuMe 0.9.11 (which is already fairly bad here).
Evan0512 wrote:
running on the Nintendo DSi mode results in the same lag as the DS
The game is not DSi enhanced, so it runs under DS compatibility mode on the DSi, so the DSi should not any kind of improvement in this regard.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
There's no policy for unclaiming.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
If a judge isn't being able to sync a movie, despite it being already sync verified, is that a good reason to unclaim the judging?
It could also simply be that a particular judge isn't willing to actively judge a run based off someone else's sync verification. Meaning they don't want to judge a run that they can't personally sync.
Joined: 10/18/2017
Posts: 171
Location: San Francisco
I wanted to check the updated submission because I have to make a minor revision on the run by removing 38 seconds of it. I started to work on the improvement run shortly after I first submitted the Kirby: Canvas Curse and uploaded the user file into the discussion of #9371: Evan0512's DS Kirby: Canvas Curse "glitchless" in 55:39.51. I created this movie from scratch and found improvements, but the sync settings were changed. I edited the submission info and replaced the encode after I improved my submission. I tried to put the improved run on the Discord server, the TAS feedback channel, but I heard no response.
Planned runs:
Marble Madness (Arcade, Genesis J, GG/SMS)
Proposed:
Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis, GG/SMS, CD: regular, camera freeze)
Ecco: The Tides of Time (Genesis, GG/SMS, CD; normal mode)
Mario Kart DS (all cups, all missions)
In progress: Grand Poo World 3 (all exits hard mode)
I'm going to share this WIP TAS here for feedback that I can continue even with using a save state (I used the save state for an already complete options menu so I wouldn't have to include switching the settings e.g 1.2 control style in the menu in the final time).
It is Perfect Dark Any% RTA for the Nintendo 64, this is on the PAL version due to a large PAL exclusive trick on Deep Sea.
I want to get this published onto tasvideos.org so I want to know if I'm going to have to start over to make it legal, I'd rather not have to redo around 16 hours or so of work.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8x-zD6uDv6t_imzaQE7uc3HdobCCynv/view
I'm going to share this WIP TAS here for feedback that I can continue even with using a save state (I used the save state for an already complete options menu so I wouldn't have to include switching the settings e.g 1.2 control style in the menu in the final time).
It is Perfect Dark Any% RTA for the Nintendo 64, this is on the PAL version due to a large PAL exclusive trick on Deep Sea.
I want to get this published onto tasvideos.org so I want to know if I'm going to have to start over to make it legal, I'd rather not have to redo around 16 hours or so of work.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8x-zD6uDv6t_imzaQE7uc3HdobCCynv/view
Based on Movie Rules https://tasvideos.org/MovieRules starting from a save state is typically not allowed. It sounds like you are only doing that to change options settings, which is not a special enough circumstance.
Since this is using Bizhawk and TAStudio which makes modification easy, it should not be that onerous to adjust inputs to include the options changes. There will probably be some inputs that need to be adjusted in level, but you do not have to redo the whole thing.
