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SmashManiac, did you know that the main point of TASing is superhuman play? Superhuman play only has value when it happens within main gameplay contents of a given game. You can't call something a TAS if it does absolutely perfect menuing in a platform game, but plays the actual platform content sloppily. Of course menuing should be reasonably optimized, but the main point of a platform game TAS is superplay applied to platform contents of the game.
The goal of this movie is imposing limitations that make TAS contents of this movie highly entertaining. Superplay is being applied exactly where it belongs: primary gameplay content of the game.
Then, the ending is reached properly. The game has been beaten. All the challenge this game has to offer has been completed at supehuman level.
It happens so that what we do, actions not expected by the developers (which is another critical point of TASing), cause the ending routine we don't have control on to glitch out. Despite of being fully beaten, the ending absolutely can't process further. It tries to process, and has all the needed flags set, but some tiny logical flaw made reaching the very end of the ending fundamentally impossible without hacking.
You say we should declare this movie not entertaining, not having superplay, not reaching the intended gameplay end, not triggering the ending routine? The rules demand that the movie is completed:
Your movie should begin from the console power-on and end when the last decisive action has been delivered. There are no specific rules for an exact endpoint but it must adhere to the following rules:
It must beat the game.
Single-level movies that don't finish the game are rejected.
Where applicable, the movie must reach an ending screen that positively signifies a game is finished successfully. Reaching a game-over screen is not considered beating the game. If a game shows the same ending screen regardless of success or failure, reaching it is not considered successful completion.
Reaching an easter egg that by itself ends the game is not considered beating the game.
It must be able to reach the credits or end screen without requiring any further interaction; all input must come solely from the input file (e.g. configuring the emulator to autofire after the end of playback is not allowed). An exception has been allowed for Rygar.
Please read those closely if you're unsure of TASVideos goals regarding game completion. If you disagree with some of the above rules or if you think they haven't been met, speak up.
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.
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That's a sane option as well. It's just rare to have caps in Linux files.
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.
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Level passwords are only allowed when they unlock something not normally available, or harder. Obtaining the password and then restarting from it doesn't preserve the game state, so you're not exactly resuming where you left if you use it. Granting yourself just more resources by using a password is the kind of unfair advantage that we disallow, unless it's a part of some highly entertaining and difficult goal that could justify it, but that's extremely rare.
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.
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We don't use "game end glitch" if save corruption is involved in the primary game breaking glitch used in the movie. We use "save glitch" then. So right here, it's accurate to call it GEG.
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.
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How much time will be lost if FPS is set to 60?
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.
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Вспомнил что яжмод! Вырезал в отдельноую тему.
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.
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I thought of another tweak.
The whole thing is still called libTAS. The executable is called libtas, so you don't need symbolic links or caps, and it's never confusing what you're calling or naming. And libTAS.so would be the injected library. Caps are no problem with it because you don't load or call it manually.
This means, only a single confusing part has to change: linTAS -> 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.
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I love your icon, and I admit that I also like the current name. The only problem I had was typing caps in the terminal. Which can be resolved by installing a symbolic link or something.
And yeah, everyone views libTAS as the app name I think, even tho the current executional is named differently. Since Linux is case sensitive, the app could be called libTAS, and the .so file - libtas.so.
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.
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It's up to you, but I was planning to give some advices in the rejection message.
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.
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Tried last level. Saved 108 frames on a 22-second segment.
Movie.
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.
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Does it even desync within segments?
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.
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Yes, as long as the whole chain starts from a non-save-anchored movie.
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.
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.
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To throw something on the table...
Environment a PC game runs within should be legitimate
While IBM PC architecture was open and allowed to use infinite variety of compatible hardware and software components, the games weren't designed to support this infinite variety. Each game usually targets some known specifications and can potentially work on a few deviations of those. Other specifications may be totally incompatible with a given game, and on some variations it can glitch out and not be fully playable.
Means of improving the game's appearance, sound, and alike, without affecting the gameplay, are allowed. This may include in-game options, console commands, launch arguments, in-game codes, environment hardware and software tweaks, etc.
In-game settings and environment parameters that are explicitly supported as modes are allowed. This means there are limited non-arbitrary options the game was designed to work with, for example a few speed variants. Explicit support can be proven by in-game options, official PC spec recommendations, release notes, source code logic and comments, etc. Burden of proof is on the TAS author here. If this information is completely unavailable for a given game, use the environment specs that were common and popular in this game's era.
In-game settings and environment parameters that have arbitrary nature and don't belong to point 1 should be left at default values. Deviations from those are disallowed from Vault. For example, if the game allows to set arbitrary speed factor (even limited to some range), picking arbitrary values can only belong to side branches, not to fastest completion (and%) or full completion (100%).
If arbitrary tweaks don't belong to primary branches, we'd need some branch label they could use, as well as some movie class describing them. While branches can address the specific parameter that was arbitrarily picked, for example "CPU overclock", generalizing all the tweaks under one movie class isn't simple. The thing we want to say is "Abuses unintended environment", "Uses arbitrary environment", but these sound weird.
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.
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feos wrote:
This branch can be considered full completion. In this game, you have to resque the family members to beat it, and you also have a single type of upgrade you can get. Each of these gets awarded to you upon beating the bosses. Using the glitch present in the any% movie also means it is a vaultable goal (not that this movie is going to be vaulted, just documenting the bookkeeping info).
After this post was made, we had a community argument on what should be considered full completion in general, which resulted in this rules update:
http://tasvideos.org/diff.exe?page=MovieRules&rev=337&prev=335
A few days later I added this clause, commenting that if a full completion objective is not optional, then it's just a fastest completion objective:
http://tasvideos.org/diff.exe?page=MovieRules&rev=343&prev=342
I don't remember anymore if "all bosses" is defined in-game as an optional goal. If it isn't, and if beating all bosses is just an any% requirement imposed by the game, then we can only have this branch in Moons.
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.
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Rescuing them isn't optional in this game outside of glitches. Before the glitch was found, full completion definition for this game was non-existent. It can't magically appear from the fact that we can now glitch the friends.
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.
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I did a sloppy test on this 11-second segment (TASing in JPC-RR for the first time). You seem to be losing at least 72 frames there just to jumping and turning. Should I have avoided collecting any score items?
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Apparently DOS games TASes get good feedback on forums, get to Moons, and then no one cares about rating them aside from those who find them really boring. It would really help if the DOS crowd that likes the submissions also showed that they like the publications.
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.
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Is anyone planning to dig into what Alyosha asked about, or was it just asked out of curiosity and it's safe to accept this movie?
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.
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I have one more thing to point out.
As I said that we compromise accuracy to determinism if we have to, and we use available bad images if there's no good image in existence, with Hourglass and libTAS we also compromise authenticity of communication between the game and the environment.
This happens because those tools don't emulate the hardware, they intercept the API, they serve as translation layers between the game and the environment. While both the game and the environment may be 100% authentic and untouched, some parts of the environment just have to be faked when fed to the game to allow TAS tools in the first place.
The subject that spawned this discussion, OS time functions, have to be faked by libTAS when the game calls them, if we want TASability. Hourglass and libTAS allow the user to set time delta for a video frame, and the game uses this delta to decide how much the game should advance before the next frame is drawn. And they force this delta to be 100% consistent between frames, resulting in constant arbitrarily high or low framerate, which may not be possible for some games on vanilla OS. So apparently, libTAS and Hourglass force vsync at arbitrary framerates (way beyond what monitors are ever going to support).
It might feel shady to talk about accuracy and authenticity here, but the point is limiting this to cases when it's fundamentally unavoidable, and not extrapolating this to whatever we can possibly want to modify while we're at it. For example, we allow non-original C64 game images that are the only ones available, but we don't allow hacking them further to make the games work faster or something, even though we acknowledge they're already hacked.
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Это методом луа. А если плюсами, то так же плюсами читать файл и расставлять биты в gmv, ибо там бинарный формат (благо код открыт).
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.
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Ну так ты попробуй хотя бы. Все с чего-то начинают, тем более лучше всего учиться новой технологии когда тебе реально что-то от нее нужно. Погугли как из луа читать файл, как слать нажатия эмулю (у генса вменяемые луа доки), в ирке постпрашивай.
Вот если угробишь 2 недели и не получится абсолютно ничерта, тогда посморим. А то я уже себе на блокноте в реальном мире завел список интернетных дел, и один хрен еле разглебаю.
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Alyosha wrote:
I think part of the problem here is in dealing with different ideas of 'authenticity.' We don't really require emulators to be true to hardware, 'passably plausible' would be more accurate of what we require. This usually comes down to easy to identify and understand metrics. We don't overclock a NES CPU for example, this is something that is easy to understand and easy to check. Beyond that it if looks and sounds right it's given a pass. I haven't ever heard anyone say 'Hey that emulator is doing DMA instantaneously, that's not authentic!'
What you're describing was the situation of the past, mostly before major skip glitches became a norm. Lately with insanely precise memory corruption techniques that people are willing to verify on console and request emulator improvements accordingly - we do aim for accuracy of our emulators.
While in this thread I was trying to find cons to obsoleting older optimal movies with newer equally optimal but more accurate ones, we still agreed to highlight such console verified resyncs and host them alongside the original movie files. And while accuracy can't be objectively measured, we depend on it being as high as possible, this is reality already.
Alyosha wrote:
I don't think this gives much of a platform to build off of for 'authenticity' in PC games, where the dynamic nature of hardware is just part of the landscape.
My two cents would be to leave it up to the TASer and just make a judgement call as cases come up, probably based in large part on audience enjoyment.
Look at a similar case when inherent arbitrary nature of external data was decided to be disallowed from Vault.
Warp wrote:
If for some reason the game did not come with recommended specs (as might have been the case with many older games from the earlier 90's, and perhaps even some from later), one approach would be to research what was the most typical average gaming PC of the time of publication, and take that as a baseline. Of course even in this case there can be a lot of ambiguity (especially given that in the late 90's and early 2000's there were like 4 or 5 different major GPU manufacturers and at least 3 or 4 major CPU manufacturers, before only the current two on each industry were left), but some kind of baseline could probably still be reached.
Of course there can still be other major problematic situations, even when using "recommended specs" or equivalent. A game from the late 90's could, for example, work properly when using a 3dfx Voodoo card but bug out if using an ATI FireGL card. Should the run be allowed to emulate the latter to abuse some glitches that don't happen with the former?
The main decision we should make here is whether we agree that arbitrary PC architecture and setup should be limited to Moons or not.
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.
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Вот вы заморочились. Делаешь скрипт который читает из логфайла хока текст нажатий, потом посылает в тот же кадр луа нажатия генсу во время записи мувика. И все. Никаких соответствий, только один вечер покурить ман.
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.
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Link to video
I must say that this time, commentary was absolutely insane. Even more jaw-dropping than presented gameplay! Fantastic job guys, perfect execution!
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.
Movie.
