I fail to see how a "serious" TAS cannot be made. You just have to use different strategies. How is that different from any other run?
All TASes made optimize to run as fast as possible in emulators, DESPITE emulators not being 100% correct. I can apply the same argument here.
Joined: 3/8/2012
Posts: 398
Location: Windfall Island
How about you just ask itspersonnal if he wants to make the TAS instead of trying to convince him that being accepted to TASVideos is the most important thing for a TAS to accomplish?
Save for the fact that you arbitrarily save several minutes from inaccurate load times, as well as changing room/enemy states because of premature loading, and some impossible OoB tricks because loading times are instant?
You seriously fail to realize how much loading times affect prime games. It changes the run completely.
Try to learn more about the game before arguing about it? <_<
Joined: 3/8/2012
Posts: 398
Location: Windfall Island
Do you even realize how long it would take to make a full TAS of Metroid Prime? You make it sound like a TAS is something that just appears out of nowhere. Are you going to build a house on crappy foundation? I don't think so. It's a HUGE time investment. If you want to see a TAS so bad, do it yourself.
FWIW, Dolphin does emulate disc read timing and seek timing - completely inaccurately, but there is a delay added when loading data from the emulated disc.
Has anyone actually tested changing this delay and checking if it has any effect on what you're talking about in MP? As far as I can remember, nobody reported any result related to this, so you're not even sure if that issue comes from disc delay or not.
If it does come from disc delay, then you need to figure out whether it comes from bad read speed emulation (doubtful - sequential read on a GC DVD is pretty fast, around ~10MB/s) or bad seek speed emulation. A good way to check that would be to trace all the DVD operations done during a MP room loading and computing the estimated time spent seeking vs. reading. Bonus points if you can patch IOS on a real Wii to give you the exact time spent in each DVD operation.
No developer is going to care about an issue if people spend years complaining loudly about it without at least trying to analyze and debug it.
Pierre "delroth" Bourdon <delroth>
Dolphin Emulator developer
I realize a TAS is a huge time investment, but of course, me not a TASer, I cannot comprehend exactly how much.
I do not have the patience - or currently - skills to make a TAS, so I am not going to do it. I am not going to force anyone to do it. But I am going to encourage someone to do it.
Everything is changing. Software. Hardware. Emulators. Games. And yet, companies keep pushing out new software and hardware, even knowing that it will be obsoleted soon. Yet, even knowing so, they push them out in iterations, iteratively making them better.
I can understand that people are unwilling to commit time to something if they are going to have to undo it later due to changes. I can understand that. I can also understand that unless people are willing to take a risk and making something--anything--things will never become done at all.
I really want people to feel that even if they invest a year in a TAS that is wildly outdated when it comes out, they should feel proud of their investment and the time they've invested in it. They have created a new production that, at the time it was started, took into account the state of the art techniques that existed at that time. Seen from a different perspective, it takes some years from when a new trick enters the pipeline to when it arrives on the other end.
Also, it doesn't need to be a full TAS. A short segment is fine. It doesn't have to use the latest and greatest tricks either. Simply anything at all would be nice.
But let's leave it at that. I don't want to upset anyone, and I don't to force anything upon anyone. I simply want to express my thoughts. That's all. I have uttermost respect for TASers around here and I want it to be mutual.
Can anyone try this to see if it matches the behavior on Dolphin??
Edit: And if it proves the behavior of Dolphin is legit, then can this argument end?
Joined: 3/8/2012
Posts: 398
Location: Windfall Island
I tested Rachel's build, load times were still too fast, loads on frigate atleast were non-existant.
When I get around to it, I'll do some more testing from OoB manually loading rooms and rebuilding dolphin with different load speeds and access times and see if I can get something close. Idk when I'll get around to it, I've been working on my TWW hack and the TWW TAS a bit recently.
According to this spec sheet the average seek time is specified to be 128ms and the data transfer speed maxing out at 25 Mbps. So even with the patch it's still about 2x as fast as spec'd
Is 4.0 good for TASing now? I may try some TAS on 4.0, since it should technically be the most accurate emulator, but from what I see, load times on it are insanely fast, and therefore inaccurate compared to a standard gamecube.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
1) Get on 4.0.1.
2) In case Rachel's build does not work the way we want, have a look at this: http://sourceforge.net/p/vice-emu/code/27731/tree/trunk/vice/src/drive/
It's the emulator Vice. According to Lioncash (coder at dolphin) it emulates specifically loading times. Maybe a large portion of its code can be used for dolphin? What do you say Omnipotententity?