Mz pretty much summary the good way who i am As a sotn (big) fan, i do defend that video, it hold many good tricks, and deserve some talk, not speaking of this been the first psx submition (witch is a micro revolution in tas world, i believe)

I just watched this on youtube and... I'm kind of disappointed. The boss fights have been optimized to the point that, literally, if you blink you will miss them, but the walking/dashing/flying around the castle has not. The result is a very low action to length ratio.

I'm sad that the first real PSX TAS thread has so much pointless bickering. Why does it even matter again? Can't we just enjoy a good video instead of worrying about the fine print? Whatever, I voted awesome/awesome, because this is awesome.

Acheron86 wrote [quote="Acheron86"]Can't we just enjoy a good video instead of worrying about the fine print?[/quote] Thats already happened, can't be bothered. P

[quote="Rick"][quote="Cardboard"]This run steals men's souls and make them its slaves ([/quote] Perhaps the same could be said of all TASes![/quote] Your words are as empty as your TASes! (I don't expect to go on).

The general problem with restrictions on a TAS is obsoletion. The criteria must be defined very accurately because TASes involve bending everything to its limit and the same would go for any restrictions (e.g. if the restriction is defined as "must collect the soul orbs from all bosses" then skipping the bossfight itself would be valid if the orb can be obtained in another way, if the goal is to defeat a boss would it be valid to glitch the game into giving the boss 0 HP and having him die instantly? Would it be valid to glitch into a screen that sets the internal flag for "boss is defeated"?). A restriction like "natural route" is too arbitrary IMO. What would that entail? Do you have to reach certain checkpoints in order? Do you have to follow a certain sequence of screens? Do you just have to get all the intended items, in any order? Banning specific glitches is stupid too, what if someone finds a new glitch that can do the same things as the old ones or does something similar but different? Would you alter the category? As for a glitchless SotN run, I think most people wouldn't want to see that. Castlevania isn't terribly interesting to watch by itself, a large part of the entertainment in the current runs comes from seeing just how much the game can be broken. Noone would want e.g. boss fights that have the normal duration because they aren't a threat to a TASer anyway. A big part of a TAS's entertainment is the feeling of "holy shit, you can do that?". What would a glitchless run of SOTN show? Backdashing back and forth through the entire castle, occassionally killing a boss in splitseconds and watching long, badly written cutscenes? Maybe the occassional puzzle solution that someone who finished the game would know anyway? After all a glitchless run wouldn't be allowed to do things differently from how a human player would...

Actually Alucard would only be backdashing until wolf dash/bat dash became options, then it'd be interesting by sheer virtue of "whoa look how fast he goes." Anyway I agree a straight-up glitchless run would be less interesting. If someone decides to do this they need to put additional criteria like "only uses weapon X" or "only uses special attack Y" or something. And I don't see that kind of run actually being done/being published as anything besides a demonstration.

On a side note about "collect all souls after defeat boss" Its fun you talk of this because in sotn, theres at least one relic, that a boss is holding, and you can get it without actually fighting him The game is made in a way that if you enter by the door in the boss room, you load the boss If you enter the boss room from another connected adjacent room, in that case, the ceilling, it will not load the boss, but will consider your in the "beated boss" sequence, since only the real door actually load the fight It will let you get the relic like you would have beat him, since you can leave the room after beating the boss without taking the item Botom line yeah, its just a matter to define whats allowed or not, obviously in that case skiping the boss fight and getting directly relic will save time

Mz pretty much summary the good way who i am As a sotn (big) fan, i do defend that video, it hold many good tricks, and deserve some talk, not speaking of this been the first psx submition (witch is a micro revolution in tas world, i believe)

That explains it. It was just very strange in my mind to have an outside source defending a video more than the author. A curiosity, if you will.

But speedruns shouldn't be (and aren't) the only thing that we publish here. Movies with the goal of entertainment by means other than massive speed should also be publishable, and we don't have a good obsoletion strategy for those. I'm not so certain that obsoletion is even warranted for such cases.

Agreed, and I don't understand why there is such resistance to the idea of "playaround" TASes. Then again I haven't been here for years and years, maybe this idea has been hashed and rehashed and the community decided that playarounds can go to youtube instead. In any case, I usually enjoy watching videos with "speed/entertainment tradeoffs" more than the ones that just blow through things without thought or care about how boring the methods used might be. Certainly beating a game as fast as technically possible is impressive, but that doesn't make it more impressive than beating it as amazingly as possible. (See the published Smash Bros. run vs. the speed ones if you feel that could never possibly be the case.)

I'm sad that the first real PSX TAS thread has so much pointless bickering. Why does it even matter again?

It's kind of funny, really. Almost a poetic initiation into the world of TAS. Really, getting all huffy and argumentative over something inconsequential like a TAS serves as a distraction from real-world issues. Isn't the core of a hobby based on distracting yourself, and allowing yourself to care about something that doesn't have a grand, worldly impact? Pretty much, the petty arguments keep the forum interesting. It reminds me of Slashdot, where the mock rage flows like chocolate in Wonka's river. It serves to entertain in an indirect and obscure way. Righteous indignation seems to be an addictive form of entertainment.

There's some truth in that, but I'd still like to see it not take up more than half the thread. Oh shit I'm doing it right now, durhhh.

Entertainment 8.7 Technical 8.2 This is definitly the best Castlevania game on the site, and I think it should take one of the GBA special stars

It's kind of funny, really. Almost a poetic initiation into the world of TAS. Really, getting all huffy and argumentative over something inconsequential like a TAS serves as a distraction from real-world issues. Isn't the core of a hobby based on distracting yourself, and allowing yourself to care about something that doesn't have a grand, worldly impact? Pretty much, the petty arguments keep the forum interesting. It reminds me of Slashdot, where the mock rage flows like chocolate in Wonka's river. It serves to entertain in an indirect and obscure way. Righteous indignation seems to be an addictive form of entertainment.

Haha... Poetic indeed! What a candid, insightful, and quite hilarious perspective. I didn't even realize it until now, but I find this entirely true. While the driving force behind me coming back here is the possibility of a new TAS that I can relate to, I tend to fall back to lurking in the forums. And I have to admit, I do get a chuckle out of the entire seriousness of it all sometimes. I see a community of perfectionists even more anal than myself. Of course, we all have our own idea of perfection, but mainly I'm going to give a +1 to the idea of a semi-glitch-less run in favor of entertainment (which is obviously subjective) over speed, mostly from a nostalgic perspective. I personally find the 100%-style TASs the most entertaining. Specifically, I like to see the game beaten extremely quickly and strategically, while still being confined to the way a human would play a game to completion, not to see how much it can be broken. I'm sure I'm in a minority here, but I know I'm not the only one here to think this. There needs to be a community dedicated to glamorized or nostalgia-focused TASing, LOL.

This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [1246] PSX Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by zggzdydp in 20:18.63

First PSX TAS published movie :D PCSX-RR Powaaaa! Now who is next to get submited ? a 3D game ? :)

First PSX TAS published movie :D PCSX-RR Powaaaa! Now who is next to get submited ? a 3D game ? :)

Chocobo World!

That was certainly impressive. I loved how you took out the two first bosses simultaneously with four swipes.

So were taking PSX movies now?

The MKV was recorded at 320x240? Is this really the correct choice for this game? For it looks too blurry in my opinion. Blurriness that is not caused by too low bitrate, but because it was scaled to a different resolution using something like a bicubic filter. Or is the blur caused by improper scaling (perhaps double scaling, first to 640x480 and then back to 320x240) performed by the emulator? In that case, the problem should be fixed before attempting more encodes. I think in the future, AVI/MKV for PSX TASes should be made in whatever resolution is the most commonly used one with that particular game. Chrono Cross, for instance, uses 512x480 (IIRC) for status screens, 256x240 for FMVs, 640x480 on the BIOS logo screen (not due to the game), and 320x240 for everything else (with 640x240, 320x480 etc. occasionally appearing for 1 frame duration). I made the AVIs on 320x240, because it is the most common resolution in that game, and those AVIs are crisp with each pixel of the AVI clearly matching the same pixel in the original imagery, barring bitrate-deprived codec-induced blur.

Adelikat contacted me about mz's encode (from page 4) and said it was good and that only the subtitles and a logo at the beginning were missing. So I cut the video in pieces to add them and put it all together afterwards to store them in the mkv file published. 320x240 seems to be the game's resolution (see the screens from in the submission text), they're quite sharp. Dunno why that's not the case for the mkv.

This game uses 256x240 for in-game, 368x240 for menus and 512x240 for title screen and others. The obvious choice for capturing would be 320x240 since it is at 256x240 (stretched to 4:3 on a real TV) most of the time.

Or is the blur caused by improper scaling (perhaps double scaling, first to 640x480 and then back to 320x240) performed by the emulator?

Something like that. It was recorded at 640x480 (if you record it at 320x240 it misses some pixels from the other screens) and then scaled down with VirtualDub's filter "2:1 reduction (high quality)". There are three causes for the blur: firstly, DirectDraw on XP automatically blurs the screen if it has to upscale the video resolution (this can be disabled on Vista, I've read; or if you use "system" memory instead of the video card memory, but this way can't be captured); secondly, VirtualDub's filter; and thirdly (and the main cause), the video codec. With that said, I never thought my encode could be used for publication, since I made it with rather low settings just for Mr. Kelly R. Flewin's idea. This is what I think the video should ideally look like (256x240 scaled to 320x240 by the emulator):

I'm just a casual watcher who doesn't ever post here but I had to say... 1. I am so glad we can finally TAS PSX. I don't know why it took so long, I guess the emulators weren't good enough until now, but I'm looking forward to more. Especially glad this game was first.. when I thought of PSX games that have to be TASed, this was always the first game that came to mind. In fact the only other post I ever made I am pretty sure I mentioned hoping this game gets done. 2. Without it being a source of argument, I hope more versions are done. We did a zillion versions of super metroid and the like, and I found every single one of them entertaining, including all-items and non-glitched versions. Since you get pretty nice speedy movement options right at the start of SOTN (better than Samus' for example) I bet a 100% would not be too long at all, even without warping through walls etc. 3. Really nice job on the run and the encode's pretty nice too. I saw some old youtube attempts at this game, probably by someone else, and this just blows them all away. Thank you~

a question thou, why did you not skipp the text?.. when you have seen it once you can skipp it /tested it myself