Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Samsara wrote:
Since I was asked about this and it is growing increasingly relevant by the day: The earliest point to end input, and the point where all runs will be compared, is entering the door after the final boss.
Samsara wrote:
REAL ACTUAL TEAM NAMES: 8. R30hedron, FatRatKnight, Invariel, Mittenz - "[final boss music begins to play]"
The final boss door, you say? But what if we are the final boss? Ah, right. Some other team just needs to beat us and enter the door to win the competition. And beat all the other teams as well. But someone must beat us for us not to be in 1st. Also, while exploring Ghoul Patrol, I've discovered the high score name entry shows up when you get a Game Over, but it's completely skipped when you reach the credits. I feel cheated -- We don't even get the name entry when we defeat the final boss! How is anyone supposed to know what we'll do when this contest ends?
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
One week left for submissions! Someone please remind me next Monday* that I am in fact still doing this! *so that i can correctly close the contest on tuesday, of course
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Final stretch, y'all. 23 more hours to get submissions in. EDIT: Again, incomplete submissions are fine just for stage comparison purposes. If your team does not intend to submit at all, I'd like to know that before the deadline as well.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Mittenz
He/Him
Active player (415)
Joined: 6/21/2017
Posts: 41
Samsara wrote:
One week left for submissions! Someone please remind me next Monday* that I am in fact still doing this! *so that i can correctly close the contest on tuesday, of course
^Doing that thing you told us to do
Post subject: Submissions closed!
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Time, y'all! Submissions are now closed. Be patient while I wring out the data...
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
We teams have been pretty quiet during the closing hours of this contest. I mean, we should be posting movies of runs that forget frame advance and save states were a thing, especially where there's nowhere near enough time to analyze the sloppy gameplay to tweak the winning movie. Or talk about tricks and mechanics that don't even exist in this game. Geez, everyone! You should have put all your points into Strength for the lengthy boss fights! EDIT: If this all happened on TASVideos Discord, and not on this board, then disregard this thought. I wasn't there for all that cool stuff. Whatever the results, congratulations to the winning team. If we win, then I'd be really egotistical to congratulate myself, but I'm so going to congratulate them winning team regardless!
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Your DTC10 champions are... Team 6 - g0goTBC, cyberpotato, WarHippy, lapogne36!
Final Results: 1st Place: Team 6 - 14:13.41 2nd Place: Team 8 - 14:29.67 3rd Place: Team 7 (Team 7) - 14:37.34 4th Place: Team 4 (The Galaxy Brains) - 16:35.28 5th Place: Team 3 (The Trans-Atlantic TASers) - DNF (2-BOSS) 6th Place: Team 1 (TAS to the MAX!) - DNF (2-BOSS) 7th Place: Team 2 (FEIJOADA) - did not submit Last Place: Team 5 (DENT) - submitted a rickroll Stage Comparisons by Level: Stage Comparisons by Total Framecount: "START" is the first frame of allowed movement on 1-1, "FINAL" is the frame the character disappears on the final door, each other framecount is the first full frame of black on the fadeout after each stage. EDIT: Small clarification on 1-2 in the individual level sheet - Team 1's victim routing in 1-1 was vastly different than any other team so I couldn't accurately compare their 1-2 time to the rest... And also I just forgot to look slightly more to the left when doing the colors <_< I intend to take a deeper dive on every submission and put together some notes, but I wanted to get the results up first since notes + bigger deep dives would take me forever. Thanks to everyone for participating, and congratulations to everyone for crushing it on such a complex game! If there's anything to take away from these results for DTC11: Sign up late and don't give your team a name! Feel free to discuss the game, your work on it, and definitely organize a space for people to freely work on the final site submission together... And make sure I'm invited, dangit! I wanna work for that free co-authorship credit!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Re: HOLY H*CK, RESULTS
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Samsara wrote:
If there's anything to take away from these results for DTC11: Sign up late and don't give your team a name!
Saving frames on name entry is a TASing standard, you know! Team 6, it would appear you've done very well. Take this win for yourselves and know you've beaten an old DTC champion. Someone will want my script, though I'm not too much in a mood (sleepy) to type a whole lot. I did end up using this contest to see where my interests were these days. There were some highs and lows during this time, though I've found that I don't feel fully ready to return to TASing. Hey, I've put in a fair amount of effort, my teammates will definitely say I've helped to push out what we did. I'll be around to assist on explaining what we did find, but first, I need to be less sleepy. I haven't looked at the winning run yet, though I suspect I'll find what I would call Dash Mode acceleration abuse, BackSlides, and UpJumps. There was zero attempt at boss behavior manipulation in my team's TAS, by the way.
DrD2k9
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Editor, Judge, Expert player (2211)
Joined: 8/21/2016
Posts: 1086
Location: US
I'm getting a desync in 1-3 trying to playback the winning run. Is anyone else seeing this? Specifically: just after saving the victim, I'm guessing the player is supposed to clip north through the wall, but he doesn't.
Emulator Coder, Judge, Experienced player (720)
Joined: 2/26/2020
Posts: 773
Location: California
DrD2k9 wrote:
I'm getting a desync in 1-3 trying to playback the winning run. Is anyone else seeing this? Specifically: just after saving the victim, I'm guessing the player is supposed to clip north through the wall, but he doesn't.
The movie syncs fine for me. You're using 2.6.2 with the BSNES core right?
DrD2k9
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Editor, Judge, Expert player (2211)
Joined: 8/21/2016
Posts: 1086
Location: US
CasualPokePlayer wrote:
DrD2k9 wrote:
I'm getting a desync in 1-3 trying to playback the winning run. Is anyone else seeing this? Specifically: just after saving the victim, I'm guessing the player is supposed to clip north through the wall, but he doesn't.
The movie syncs fine for me. You're using 2.6.2 with the BSNES core right?
Yep correct version of hawk and correct core. Currently testing 2nd place, I'll update this post if it works or not. EDIT: 2nd place run desynced in 3-4 for me. I found it odd that both would desync. I double checked everything I could think of including: player settings, core, cheats, etc. Nothing seemed out of place. I decided to completely close and re-open bizhawk and try again. After this restart, both runs synced fine. I have no idea what the original issue was that caused the desyncs and I can't find anything different looking at settings/etc. this time around. TL:DR Though I can't explain why they didn't before, both of the top runs now sync fine on my system. Congrats to the winners!
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5777
Location: Away
Team 8's 1-1 and Team 6's 2-2 and 4-1 blew my mind. The permasprint setup on 5-1 was wonderful as well; I didn't consider that method. That is some serious outside-the-box thinking, and a well-deserved win on that account alone. I'll post more in-depth thoughts and detailed comparisons of my own for all the runs sometime later this week—there's a LOT to discuss there for sure. Technique use was all over the place among the top three teams, and degree of optimization seemed to vary wildly between sections. Absolutely fascinating how different the runs ended up being. I'd like to once again thank Samsara for the amazing game choice. Who knew an obscure commercial flop would end up such a gem under TAS conditions?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Skilled player (1021)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 230
Congratulations to cyberpotato and lapogne36! They are the real champions here. This game got super complex real fast. So much work put into every submission here, and good job to everyone that finished! Thank you Samsara for hosting.
g0goTBC
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Experienced player (751)
Joined: 6/11/2018
Posts: 110
Gg everyone. huge respect to cyberpotato and lapogne would did the big majority of the work for our team. I loved watching all the different strats that were used by everyone, I can't wait for the comparison encode, it's gonna be a great showcase with all the strats together.
Banjo-Tooie runner, DTC 8, 9, 10, and 11 winner, but more importantly, "When's GR?" Current projects: Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge - 100% (50 minutes) Mario Party 1 - All Boards (est: 4-6 hours) Mario Party 3 - All Minigames (est: 40-50 minutes, not sure) "Ooooh, I saved some more subpixels. Look at those sweet subpixels. You can't look at them, because they're subpixels, but they look so good." - The8bitbeast "It's as if I knew what was going to happen. It's as if I had the plan written in front of me and I was reading it. I mean, I do have it in front of me, but I'm not reading it." -garagedooropener
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
A game of a decent length. Each level is mostly self-contained... ... but the player's inventory and saved victims carry over. Routing is mostly to the individual level, but needs to account that. Just enough physics, and fairly interesting glitches to go with it. The competition actually had some closely competitive teams with wildly different routes and techniques, and a pretty significant optimization gap when looking at a slower team, indicating the game wasn't remotely trivial. I'd say the choice for this contest was spot on. It's nice to know that I haven't lost all my cool habits being part of the top three, though respect for Mittenz for keeping up with me toward the end. Invariel had given some useful analysis as well. R30hedron feels bad about being intimidated by all the "mad scientist death robot physics" we were into at that point, but don't worry, it's easy to feel it's impossible to catch up if you haven't followed from the start. Stay around and read all the interesting things we'll keep working on, we ain't stopping ya! I'm wondering if a contest can be held on a game with 100% self-contained levels. Alien Hominid had come close, except the RNG carries over. I had managed to get sync across pretty much my whole TAS when I carefully tweaked the RNG right in an earlier stage. The idea basically being that after an initial start-up period, have the teams provide the next stage every 2 weeks or something. It would make things a bit less silent over the course of the contest. Well, it's an idea.
Skilled player (1021)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 230
Is anyone working on combining the improvements for a final submission to the site?
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
It's being slowly worked on in Team 8's Discord server. Pretty much every stage has to be redone from scratch and not everyone has the free time to put into it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Editor, Skilled player (1198)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
I'll give a status report: 1-1 : We're mostly following Team 8's route, but with a few minor tweaks early and somewhat larger changes later. We're planning on a perma-sprint setup late into the level off a bench while waiting on imps to handle a pair of victims. We have a short TAS that has dealt with these early minor tweaks, but that's about it. 1-2 : We use what we call the BackJump, where we can build speed (slowly) every time we land from a jump. We do this to get to 4+ speed to get the camera moving as fast as possible, then set up perma-sprint from that speed using the water to the north. This lets us collect a few more keys for free, as well as clip through an apparently hollow door to pick up an extra mortar. 1-3 : There was a brief mini-competition of sorts trying to optimize the snap out of this. I took a look at it myself and couldn't improve on what others did, so it looks fantastic. 1-4 : Team 6 had the right idea jumping out a window to the north. We have a partial TAS going through using that route, although it can stand to have a few others look. 1-B : We've disassembled enough parts of the code to understand the boss behavior! The boss acts based on HP thresholds and how many actions taken so far. We can abuse the game pause to slow down the rate the boss acts. We have two routes mapped out in the fight in case the theoretically faster one isn't viable. 2-1 : Some thought about perma-sprint setups here, but with so many doors, we'd lose it fairly early. It's still a bit before we have to hit the first door. Someone (me) tried to theorize some crazy zigzag route through many vertical walls, but it's determined we just can't go north fast enough at the horizontal speeds we'd be going. 2-2 : Apart from Team 6's lovely clips, we don't really have any particular analysis done here. One team did go with 2 victims, as victim #2 isn't that far away, and we don't need to waste time failing to save them with the boss right after. Whether that short jog is more than whatever is saved from speeding up a second victim in 2-1 is another question. 2-B : The boss is generally vulnerable the whole time, and moves with us, so no one bothered to do any special analysis. We're probably just going to center the boss on the death spot and manipulate the victims optimally. 3-1 : We did determine that something is very wrong with the pirate enemies around here, as it's capable of corrupting our inventory. There's been some analysis on how to get through effectively, but alas, that discussion is off on the general channel rather than the stage 3 channel, making it harder (for me) to track down. 3-2 : We have a full TAS here. Perma-sprint setup pretty much right from the start, where we begin the sprint north and bunny hop to the bridge to keep it. Because of camera, we'd have to optimize the setup or the keys right after to save any frames. 3-3 : We're planning an UpJump, then setting up perma-sprint while waiting on the camera on the victim. Other than that brief planning, we sort of left this alone. 3-4 : Basically, follow what Team 7 did, but faster. Nothing else comes to mind. 3-B : Well, it's another boss fight, where we don't have to worry about invincibility attacks, so I guess we just optimize the death position and victim grabs. 4-1 : Alas, I'm failing to remember a lot of what we did here. I recall a bit of talk about routing through it, but anyone else who feels better than me about it can chime in. 4-2 : We had another mini-competition to TAS this level, so we've got a nice run for this level. Turns out we can stand on the spikes, if we carefully manage our tile position correctly. I think we're pretty good on what to do for this level. 4-B : Most likely we'll take the fastest kill that gets around that annoying shield, and take the fastest victim manipulation we can. I don't know if we have good plans on centering the boss on the magic death spot, though. 5-1 : We have a TASed run here. Team 6 had the right idea about perma-sprint, but we decided it's faster to set it up right away. Perma-sprint is fast, but it can go a lot faster if you use the right input sequence. 5-B : Another boss, geez. Those jumps are really annoying, and the fight tends to lag as well. I'm guessing frequent pausing will be involved to adjust boss timings of these jumps. With the extra keys in 1-2, we're probably going to check our route to reduce the out-of-the-way keys on the way forward. As is said already, progress is a bit slow, but it does help to know what was done so far.
Banned User
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I'd love to see another comp!
Published TASes: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12 Please consider voting for me as Rookie TASer Of 2023 - Voting is in December 2023 My rule is quality TASes over quantity TASes... unless I'm bored.