Posts for Pokota

Pokota
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Question. Why do we care? We neither have nor claim to have exclusivity over tool-assisted superplays. To my knowledge, SDA neither has nor claims to have exclusivity over high-quality archives of live-play superplays.
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Pokota
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Alyosha wrote:
Yeah that game turns off the screen a lot, so it will appear to run fast.
I noticed something similar with the Zelda Oracles games. Why does turning off the screen cause this?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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You seem to be missing one very important point. The staff won't overlook it if he does it again.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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DrD2k9 wrote:
Pokota wrote:
The purpose of removing arbitrary selections is to prevent playing at 199% if 200% is a valid, developer-supported option
But why should we prevent 199% simply because it's not the default or fastest setting? It's still a developer supported option While it typically makes characters move faster, increasing in-game speed settings also sometimes makes movement harder to optimize due to the balance between input processing and character movement within the game. It's therefore possible that the difference between 199% and 200% may actually make it harder to move the character efficiently at 200% and thus allow for the game to be completed in a shorter time using the 199% setting. In such cases, why should 199% be disallowed simply because it's not the maximum or default setting?
If you (the reader, not just you DrD2k9) can successfully make the argument for any game Q that arbitrary supported nonmaximum speed X is better for the TAS than maximum supported speed Y or default speed W, then an exception can be made for game Q. But the argument has to be made first. The rule exists as a baseline.
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Pokota
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You should be able to fix the unecm'd files through the DiscoHawk utility (which comes with BizHawk). I know I had to do this with the PS1 games I have.
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Pokota
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Game Resources / DS / Pokemon Gen 4 wrote:
The purpose of this page is to document all known tricks of the Pokemon generation 4 games on Nintendo DS, which include Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, Heartgold, and Soulsilver.
Seems the precedent itself has already been set and so it's just a question of naming.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Giving each title its own page would cloud the issue for Generation 3 due to how that generation was released, and as has been noted most glitches are consistent across the same generation. Splitting the forum threads across titles would make more sense, since 90% of what would change between a FireRed game and a Ruby game is the planning, rather than the mechanics. E: Looking on it the proposals are the same, just with a question of how the pages are actually named, plus a question of how FRLG are handled.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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The purpose of removing arbitrary selections is to prevent playing at 199% if 200% is a valid, developer-supported option (Example: the aforementioned Jetpack TAS - at the maximum speed that the game supports, the game is casually unplayable on modern systems since it's effectively a no-speed-cap setting) Let's say that there's an upper bound of 200% speed that the developers tested at. If they give discrete X% step options in a listed menu, then the only arbitrary speeds would be anything less than 200%. Let's now suppose that instead of discrete step options, it's a slider. If the slider doesn't go above 200%, then that's all well and good - 200% is still the limit. But if the slider goes to 201% with a warning that "unexpected results may occur", then that 201% is an arbitrary selection outside of valid, developer-supported options. 200% would still be the limit.
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Pokota
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feos wrote:
To answer your megapost, it seems I should make it "and don't belong to point 1 or 2". If a game explicitly tells you to set whatever value you want, any value is supported. If it tells you to set up to 125% and beyond that you're on your own and no guarantees are made, it's not explicitly supported.
Space Quest is covered by this expansion. I believe CDMan is as well (as long as it doesn't warn you when passing a certain threshold that unexpected effects might happen)
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Pokota
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Okay so I've been trying to see if it's possible to beat this game both without taking damage and without letting any civilians (meaning, any non-combatants) get killed. This is mostly for my own amusement, but also to see if it can be done (henceforth this condition will be called "Royal" in the thread, in honor of Kyle - the player character - being the Crown Prince or something). Doing this for sections 1-1 and 1-2 is possible even in a non-TAS environment. However, the red guard on the right is giving me trouble - there doesn't seem to be enough room on the following screen to dodge his punch (landing exactly as far as I can gets me punched off of the edge of the cliff on the next screen), and he won't move away from the bridge without shooting (which either hits me or kills the civilian). E: It might be possible if I use the hoverbomb (I'll need the beebomb on the very next screen for a door), but I still need to be on the right side of the left guard (plus then I'd be down a bomb) Note: Aside from the above screen, it's plausible to pull off Royal 1-3 realtime, however the purple guard who holds the beebombs needs to be shot as soon as you enter the screen, and then shot again before he has a chance to punch you. The first part is practicable, the second is luck-based (or can be done by killing him before he fires, which the timing on that is tighter) and so a Royal 1-3 is TAS-only without some sort of luck setup. (which given this is TASvideos shouldn't be seen as an obstacle) E2: Uploaded BK2 files for 1-1 and 1-2. Both can be improved, both generally and from a TASing standpoint (1-1 was done entirely realtime, 1-2 was only TASed for tight timings and was otherwise only re-recorded in broad strokes), but the movies should give a clearer picture of what I mean. E3: Apparently Beebombs can be used as shields. And doing that gives me exactly enough explosives to finish the section. 1-4 has also been finished. As always, these are only TASed enough to reach the objective and are by no means optimized (the fact that you have a window of opportunity to shoot a guard after he comes out of sidling but before he fires is proof enough that Royal is trivial in a TAS environment as well as of the fact that these movies are very much not optimized)
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I originally tried using Basic Bot as a PRNG playbot but Basic Bot isn't built for doing that for the unbounded duration that a playbot would need - specifically, Basic Bot requires you to define an upper bound on duration. It was explained to me that it's intended for use as a brute force attack against a game's PRNG.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I... never knew that the OG Ghosts 'n Goblins content made it into arrange mode. Cool.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I like watching runs of Randomizers, but the inherent appeal for me in this is watching the player react to how the world has changed and (for randomizers based on exploration-centered games) listening to them try and follow the logic. A TAS of a randomized game of Link to the Past would probably not hold my interest (despite it being the most common one I watch) for the simple fact that I'm not hearing the player think their way through what the logic could be. With that said, a randomized game cranked up to the most insane settings and then demolished with ease - perhaps SMW with All Exits and limited memory corruption (sorry, stun glitch), or Link to the Past set to Entrance Insanity All Dungeons Insane Difficulty Swordless OHKO with all the enemizer shuffles maxed out - would be a good experiment. (SMW would be easier for unfamiliar viewers to follow, while LttP would be an example of how crazy randomizer runs can get)
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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I never paid close attention to the Best Time when I had this all those years ago. Is Best Time as shown in-game difficulty-specific (meaning you'd see different times on different difficulties) or difficulty-agnostic (meaning the time shown is across all difficulties)? Because if it's difficulty-agnostic, it's totally possible on Agent since you aren't required to bust the bunkers.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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If FMV Skipping isn't expressly disallowed by the TASVideos judging team, it should be used. 1) It's faster 2) turning the junon cannon cutscene into a bunch of cubes flying out of the floor amuses me to no end. We do things that RTA runners can't do anyway, why exclude something that they simply won't?
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Pokota
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DOS - Mega Man 7 OSV - 28 - Station3.mid
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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You'll need to convert functions over to BizHawk. You'll need to convert the memory read functions - BizHawk doesn't alias read16 to readword because it supports systems with more than one word size (and thus must be agnostic about it). Also it looks like you've got a bunch of gui drawing functions that'll need to be converted.
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Pokota
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@Reeve: Can that be done on PSX, or is that a PC-exclusive skip?
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Pokota
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Maybe just 1-4 instead of 1-5, that way you can't vote with a neutral opinion.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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The cartridge type for the header fix versions is changed from MBC1+RAM+BATTERY to MBC3+TIMER+RAM+BATTERY, and the checksums are updated. The dumps are given the SGB extension but otherwise follow DMG rules (which makes sense given SGB is just DMG run through SNES)
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Pokota
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Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Love the premise, it's just that twenty minutes of the same music with the catch routine superimposed on top of it just isn't entertaining.
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Pokota
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And all those reasons were addressed in the thread. They were discussed. They were drawn. They were quartered. The very thing you're hung up on - that the emulator was abandoned and no continuance was requested? I was among the first to raise an objection on those very grounds. E: And if you're referring to the post by Samsara... how would you have reacted if the post had been directed at you instead of Moth?
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Pokota
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p4wn3r, since you've used the Ocarina of Time 100% TAS as your third strike against the judging system, let me paraphrase the submission thread that you arbitrarily didn't post in.
  • We reached out to homerfunky because we were already ready to make special exception for it. The reason why is because it obsoleted a run that had been eclipsed in RTA for quite some time. The judging requirement for speedruns is that the movie must beat all known records, which the extant movie no longer did.
  • Emulator Accuracy was not a factor for that movie, as it does not rely on emulator inaccuracies. Nor was the difference between the abandoned and accepted emulators significant for Ocarina of Time.
  • Our encoding team was pushing for the abandonment of Mupen64-rr due to sync and avi dumping issues, which to my understanding was the primary reason for the abandonment of Mupen64-rr. As there was a volunteer encoder for this movie who stepped forward before submission, that made it a non-factor towards the decision.
Warp: That's a very good point.
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Didn't that just get pushed out today? Or am I misreading the release history?
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?
Pokota
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Presumably 007 difficulty with everything maxed out would be "dodge all the things and take three hours fighting anything you 100% need to kill"
Adventures in Lua When did I get a vest?