Just one thing to add. I heard a rumor that if Jubilex is generated with an "oLS, it will be used, hence letting you kill him twice, even though he's incapable of putting on items or picking them up.
Just a rumor, though, I haven't seen it myself.
The thought occurred to me that, if you're dedicated to only having seeds possible normally (after the current version was released), you could still use the entire seedspace thanks to the eventual overflow.
Doesn't work.
* The size of entire state space is 31*2^992 (roughly 1.3*10^300). So it practically never overflows.
* There are multiple cycles. Any nontrivial cycle (there's trivial cycle of 31 states) is likely enormously long.
* There's no guarantee different seeds are on the same cycle (if there are multiple nontrivial cycles).
* Even if two seeds are on the same cycle, the distance between them is likely huge.
Does nethack use a different function call than that it uses for seed for those calculations of day-of-week, moon phase, and time-of-day? Looks like no... but seems is not is, thank Hamlet.
31*2^992? Explain, please?
Something strange like if the system keeps track of year/month/day and time-since-epoch in parallel, rather than deriving the former?
I have no idea what happens to DOS if it overflows past year 2038. That's unlikely to be a particularly sensible mode of operation, though... (And we found a pretty good seed anyway, and are unlikely to redo the initial seed now.)
Meanwhile, dwangoAC and I have been making some progress on the run. We've left Gehennom and wrote a bunch of spellbooks back at our low-RNG-jitter stash on level 16, and then went up to the Oracle level, to generate the last two spellbooks we needed (both of which are still currently inside statues that we're carrying around with us, as we don't need the corresponding spells yet, and we need a source of rocks for a glitch later on), and did an infinite carry capacity glitch (by repeatedly stoning, stone-to-fleshing, and taming a water nymph obtained from one of the Oracle fountains; details are on the game resources page). The main issue at the moment is that a side-effect of the glitch left us at almost -300 alignment, which clearly needs to be fixed (in the long term because of the Quest, in the short term because it prevents us using artifacts). As buying our way to a god's favour doesn't work within the first 5000 times, we'll have to go kill a bunch of monsters instead; I'll probably do it at the Castle, so people can have the excitement of watching us clear a really crowded level, unless anyone has a better idea. (And I'll abuse the carry cap glitch at the same time; we only really need it to carry cursed potions of gain level later, but that's no reason not to abuse it for other things too.)
would it be quicker to get a Helm of opposite alignment and steal from/damage some shops? or it might be fun to get a harem of foocubus and chat them up
That's possible, but at least five times slower, probably much more because it's harder to repeat. (Shop-related alignment changes go one point at a time; kills typically go five points at a time, except in a few circumstances that aren't relevant here, and can't easily be made relevant.) Foocubi likewise only go one point at a time.
foocubus can begin an encounter of its own volition right, if it does that does it still use up your turn? If it doesn't and you can do multiple encounters per turn then with an unreasonable amount of luck manipulation and a room full of foocubus it seems like you could gain alignment quickly.
I hadn't thought of that, so I looked into it: there's a d100 turn cooldown on that foocubus ability, and due to terrain layout you'd thus, even using a huge number of foocubi, be limited to gaining 8 points a turn, as you have to wait for the monster turns to come around. (Probably slightly less, as luck-manipulating constant 1% chances while surrounded would be very tricky due to the lack of a wall.)
Compare that to the two kills a turn that can typically be gained with a relatively fast polymorph form, and you get 10 points a turn, minus timings you need to move around rather than attack. (Three is also possible, but would take amounts of manipulation that I don't want to do in non-time-critical parts of the run as it'd just force us to waste the turns elsewhere instead; four is possible in air elemental form, but we'll be using that so much lategame that I want to avoid using it until I have to, to make things less repetitive.) Thus, I think the two approaches would be similar in gametime speed, but I suspect killing things is both faster in realtime, and less repetitive to watch. (Besides, what's an RPG run without the occasional mass slaughter of monsters?)
the d100 only comes up if you get a good result, if you get a level drain with Drain resistance nothing happens and you can be seduced the next turn. You still have a ton of stuff that you would need to manipulate like the 1 in 25 cancel chance, and getting them to seduce you as often as possible.
But the big advantage I would think is that you could do other stuff as you waited for the monsters, like wish, practice mapping, or manipulate inventory.
not that there is anything wrong with killing monsters, but it's going to take you awhile to get the alignment you need and even mass slaughter might get boring ( unlikely I know ).
Looking into it, multiple foocubus encounters a turn will be completely impractical, simply because we'd have to manipulate all of them giving the right random numbers at once. The chances of that would be incredibly remote if we were trying to do that at any sort of sensible speed. (Generally speaking, we can discard random results to change future results only on our own actions.)
that's what I figured, for each turn you would need to manipulate about 5 different things for each foocubus, but I think it's interesting in theory.
I'm guessing you can't get your final alignment point during the monsters turn rather then having to kill something.
Even if we could, it wouldn't matter. We can't get permission to enter the quest until the end of turn 2000 action 1 (on Neferet's turn), so we may as well use that action itself to gain alignment. Arranging a monster to gain us alignment, acting before Neferet, would simply leave us with a blank action on 2000:1 which we couldn't use for anything.
New WIP encode, people! WIP by me and dwangoAC, encode by Ilari: http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110519.mkv (full speed, you can't see much but luck manipulation delays here), http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110519-special.mkv (one frame every time anything happens, with timings arranged to make it a constant 30fps; this version is probably much easier to follow, especially with slowdown). This encode charts much of the slaughter of the Castle, which is how we decided to fix the alignment issue. (We've since slaughtered the other barracks too, but that isn't in the encode.)
As usual, I'm not entirely sure what I'll do next once alignment and luck are back to normal. We have several more glitches that need setting up, although we have everything we need for actual ascension now but the candles. (Everything beyond here is setting up things to make the ascension run go faster.) Much of what we'll be doing is filling levels with monsters, one way or another; there are a few creative ways to do that. We also need a huge number of cursed potions of gain level, and I'm still not sure about how to go about getting them (some other NetHack players I've been talking to pointed out that chain-wishing is the fastest method, but I don't want to do too much of that). One other thing we need in order to get really large numbers of monsters around quickly (which we'll need for Air, as we want to fill about 2/3 of the plane with monsters in a single turn) is the ability to polypile; we have a spellbook of polymorph but can't currently cast it. (I was wondering about using the cursed armour destruction bug to max out Intelligence, but don't have the items required to do it yet.)
What do you mean by "blinking"? It might be that what you're seeing is exactly what the WIP is; a lot of things happening very fast. For instance, we cast a spell over and over again in Vlad's Tower, which would necessarily change the screen between two views very quickly. (Ilari says it's a typical x264 encode with no unusual options, so it's unlikely to be a codec problem if you can watch other TASes on the sites, especially other encodes by Ilari.) Also, are you trying to watch the 30fps version, or the actual-time one?
Next time I encode the WIP, I'll use more conventional methods with codecs&containers for the special encode (mux in silent sountrack instead of using raw x264 output).
And the video codec is h.264 like in near all encodes on this site.
Edit: The 20110520 encode was done prior to this message, so it still uses the same encoding methods (which apparently can cause problems) as the 20110519 encode some had problems with.
lol @ Dracula
I like that money doubling trick, I'm guessing it causes some kind of inventory rollover glitch that lets you carry as much as you want.
it's pretty funny, a little bee going through the castle and instakilling everything.
Digging for Victory by eating the floor. Classic.
Though the video is wonky, as has been mentioned. I could watch it, kinda, it started fritzing out at about the castle.
Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player
(907)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
Greetings,
I've posted a new WIP encode which gets through to the end of the castle (EDIT: This now uses a new encode method and as before is best viewed in frame advance mode such as using mplayer and advancing with the . key):
http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110524-special.mkv
The full speed encode is also available (The encode is still less than a minute long, despite ais523 and myself working on it for months):
http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack-tas-dwangoac,ais523-wip-20110524.mkv
We've also been working on updating the turnbyturn.txt file in the nethack-tas-tools repository but that's not necessarily fit for consumption. It's going to be very, very long.
Some activity has happened since the encode, namely levelporting back to level 16 by using the orb, praying to irritate our god, and sacrificing a corpse to reset our luck (made possible by first irritating our deity). We've also force-bolted those 8 statues that our poor queen bee has been lugging around and through the help of a specialized luck manipulation script we've managed to get 433 rocks out of them. We may learn haste self next before leaving this level although we're not entirely sure where we should go next.
Enjoy,
A.C.
******
The slow-paced frame-by-frame encode work well on my side. So far I love this.
The glitch look pretty fun: Vampire dancing, somekind of hm, nympho/necro-petrification money-maker, then a queen bee with poor stat managing to fight a hord of soldier with 8 centaur statue on he backsack, just for show-off... what the hell?? :)
I don't know the about details, but I guess you haven't any problem with encombrance, so that may explain, why you didn't wish for a partly eaten cockatrice corpse.
The only action that I'm a bit disappoint is that you're dropping the quarterstaff in the shop, insthead of throwing it at the gridbug at the beggining. Hehe, but seriously this doesn't really matter, since I guess that every move at the start help to set up the rng.
Filling monster for sequence break? Make sense :)
For the potion, how about stealing a a large potion shop, then convert them in water(cancellation or swimming a bit in a pool) and do some alchemy(the wiki say that you can get a random alchemy with some luck, so you maybe you can convert all your potion in one dip), then curse them. I beleve that diluated potion should work as well. I know this method is a bit slow, but at least you doesn't increase the prayer timeout with wish.
Since you still have a lot of time to spend, how long it would it take to polypile lots of rock into valuable gems to max your score, despite the money-glitch already make the score crazy??? I was thinking that could drop some stack of rock and try to do some art like writing "TAS" in color.
An another fun idea could be to set up some bear trap or play some drum of earthquake, in order to write "TAS" (or wathever...) then drink a potion of hallucination, so the viewer can enjoy a coloreful christmas... (since if I'm aren't wrong, only the ^ symbols stay the same with different color). and maybe have a chance to fight/color a dinosaur because of the hallu, thought I'm unsure if there really any dinosaur in this game.
Hm, why not get the speed intrisic by praying at altar? In the wizdebug mode you can get speed intrisic from the gift of your god by praying at an altar with high luck and before turn 2000. Oh, despite you guys are just gonna to train escape skill for jumping?
Generate all the artifact is pretty impossible to do in a real game, that would be pretty cool to do. But since this need some wish abuse, I wonder how long this would extend the prayer timeout. How many turn, each wish extend the prayer timeout, ~minimum 50 turn?
...Or you could try to have some fun by trying to level teleport some unique monsterl(with a teleport-lelvel trap or teleport yourself with them grabbing you on a adjacent square), like the Medusa or several demon prince at one level and then get rid of them with something epic, like drowing, purple worm, slime, beating to death, etc..
Anyway that was just some throwable idea, but I'm looking foward for more progress!
edith: Ok I managed to find the nethack-tas-tools on Gitorious and readed completly both turnbyturn.txt and t2000timings.txt.... pure genious strategy, particuliary the one with the eggs. I'll stroke [ s][ /s] irrevalant question in this post.
I read turnbyturn.txt awhile back and was amused throughout. The amount of imaginative problem-solving, not to mention serious breakage, in this run is great. Keep it up. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.