Chamale
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Player (182)
Joined: 10/20/2006
Posts: 1355
Location: Canada
Actually, I think the Gradius TASes are pretty interesting, not just the bosses. Sidescrollers make for good TASes, because of all the crazy tricks.
Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
Simple tas proof game. 1) Have important plot events required for progress be based solely on playtime. All frames squeezed out by TAS tricks wil be lost later waiting for the counter that says "okay, NOW item X is available" Will ROYALLY Piss off anyone who tries to TAS the game. Mere mortals will never know. 2) More clever variation of above. If the player is progressing too quickly, shuffle the required items around into places that take longer to get to. Move stuff back where it's supposed to when enough time has been wasted going after the items in the new locations. 3) if any glitch has been performed, make the final boss call you a cheater, insta kill you, and give you a game over with no continue. Furthermore, have it delete your save.
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Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
That sounds too much like just setting a minimum time for completion, which also messes up plain old speedrunning. And again, if you could somehow detect a glitch, why wouldn't you correct it right then and there so it wouldn't even be a glitch anymore? (Also, I will backup my save externally, ha ha!)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
It only messes up speedrunning if the delay is set too big. That said here are some ways to set the "TAS-er flag" which you used to make the game crash at the end 1) detect regular, rapid pulsing of inputs. pay particular attention to factors of 60 (or 50 for PAL games) Normal players do NOT tap directions and release 30 times per second to cause you to rrapid fire every frame. 2) detect L+R and U+D. normal players don't do that. 3) detect attacks/jumps made on first possible frame (when such things must be timed to work, and allow a few times for this one.) 4) player gets from point a to point be much faster than humanely possible (by zipping, using a warp glitch, etc) 5) detect sequence breaking (getting magnet beam before beating gutsman would qualify as a seqence break deserving of setting the TAS-er flag in megaman, for example) This only leaves luck manipulation and that is dealt with by tracking the 'lucky breaks" and if someone's luck is too good, set probability of good drops to 0% until the statistics catch up.
Joined: 5/2/2006
Posts: 1020
Location: Boulder, CO
You know that all this would do to a TAS community is force us to (instead of rapid-fireing 30 times a second) test out the threshold of how fast you can rapid fire without setting off the "tas flag" right? Also, you could jump on the second possable frame if it would prevent the game from detecting that it was a tas. I dont see that this would really change anything.
Has never colored a dinosaur.
Editor, Player (69)
Joined: 6/22/2005
Posts: 1050
Chamale wrote:
Level 5 is an exception, where it is possible to abuse temporary invincibility to go through a door.
That's easily dealt with: Don't have any temporary invincibility, even when the player gets hurt. For example, Wizards & Warriors X has the enemies "drain" you of life whenever they contact you. You can literally get killed by one enemy if it touches you for maybe one second continuously. You don't get knocked back or anything like that when you get hurt, either. Sure, this is horribly annoying for normal play, but it would prevent the damage boosts that are in quite a few TASes.
Current Projects: TAS: Wizards & Warriors III.
Chamale
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Player (182)
Joined: 10/20/2006
Posts: 1355
Location: Canada
With no temporary invincibility, if you get hit at all you're dead. Which encourages TASing because the game is otherwise so hard. Trying to make a TAS-proof game is like trying to not get killed with hundreds of people after you. No matter what, there's a way around it. If an item drop is at X time, the player will do whatever "spring cleaning" is necessary and pick up the item at the exact right time. One game, Castlevania 64, which is on my list of "Might get around to someday" games, has an item drop which happens at 2:00 am in the game's clock. One item sets in-game time to 6:00 pm. So exactly 8 hours (time goes fast) before reaching the location of the drop, I use the item. Ta-da!
Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 343
Twelvepack wrote:
You know that all this would do to a TAS community is force us to (instead of rapid-fireing 30 times a second) test out the threshold of how fast you can rapid fire without setting off the "tas flag" right? Also, you could jump on the second possable frame if it would prevent the game from detecting that it was a tas. I dont see that this would really change anything.
You misunderstand the check. it's not how FAST you rapidfire, but how REGULAR you rapid-fire that will set it off. if you fire at 15 times per second. or 10 times per second. or 5 times per second. that woudl set it off if you were able to sustain rapid fire at any rate with frame precision. ANY rapid fire that is in sync with the framerate would set it off. The way around it would be to put a randomizer into the rapid fire, which would make it useless for the usual TAS rapid fire tricks. hence using rapid fire to TAS is defeated. And as i said before put in checks to make sure stuff isn't done faster than intended to be possible, check sequence breaking, and check luck abuse. It's easily possible to put in a bit of stat tracking and start counteracting repeated lucky breaks. In an rpg. prevent random batle skipping by counting steps and making a battle start after X steps every single time. Save the state of the counter in the game save. Every 15 steps in a battle area, there WILL be a battle. And that battle WILL be determined in advance by another random seed and will always be the same and nothign doen by the party in the battel will be able to manipulate crits. The objective in making a game TAS-proof is to make it so TAS techniques provide no benefit over a normal speeedrun.
Joined: 2/16/2005
Posts: 462
Any game that integrates online features into the core game should be TAS-proof.
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upthorn
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Emulator Coder, Active player (392)
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 1802
asteron wrote:
Any game that integrates online features into the core game should be TAS-proof.
At least without a TASer made wrapper that intercepts the internet requests and feeds back predetermined data. Actually though, here's how you make a game TAS proof: 1) Allow the player to save game and reload a prior save anywhere, anytime 2) Only poll the input data once every 15 frames, so that any thing that's possible to do in TAS is doable in real time with only a mild amount of practice.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.