Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Regarding naming on the wiki page, I dislike the idea of using obscure acronyms. I mean "TTP"? Come on! (Yes, we all know that TTP stands for "The TTP Project".)
I also think we should stick to in-game/manual naming as much as possible. Although I agree with the suggestion we should say spike(s) and spinner(s) instead of spike(s) and spikes (spinning).
Edit:
To allow abbreviated naming, I think an obvious letter and a dash can be used. So b-teleporter instead of blue teleporter would be fine.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
There's something useful that can help.
Can someone go play ahead for say the next 5 levels, and grab decent PNGs of each of them? This way we have clean screenshots to work with, that level thinkers can start fresh with, and draw on as needed.
For screenshots, use 8 bit PNG to save the most space. This will certainly help loading times when we have a bunch on a page.
If using Image Magick:
convert original.png png8:modified.png
This will vastly reduce the color space. Then use your favorite image compressor to get it a bit lower.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Here's an image of all the things that can kill you.
Someone want to break that up into separate images so we can use them on the wiki page in a nice manner?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Regarding naming on the wiki page, I dislike the idea of using obscure acronyms. I mean "TTP"? Come on! (Yes, we all know that TTP stands for "The TTP Project".)
Yep.
Also, "teal"? I thought it was more of an aquamarine :P
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Radiant wrote:
Also, "teal"? I thought it was more of an aquamarine :P
I myself just thought it was close enough to green, and it referred to it as such.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Um, so I still think that this should be faster for level 02...
I think the only potential issue is fuel, but in this route you cover less ground as mentioned, and you end up falling down that long column on the right rather than flying up it. Plus if necessary you could use the yellow teleporter twice to pick up the other tank, if that doesn't use up enough time that you run into the worm.
Also, is it not possible/not faster to touch down on the conveyor belts that actually are travelling the same direction as you, and only fly over the ones travelling the other direction? Even if it's not actually faster it could be considered as a way to save a little bit of fuel. And similarly, even though it's a bit slower to run, for long horizontal stretches like the top it may be worthwhile to touch down if that can save you a detour to pick up more fuel. Even if my route ends up slower, you could also experiment to see if it's possible to save enough fuel on your route to need only one tank.
EDIT: So I just played through the level at full speed. Even with my human inefficiency, I easily made it to the yellow teleporter before the worm reached it, and even without picking up the second tank I only barely did not have enough fuel to reach the exit on one tank, though that was with walking along the top and the conveyors to save fuel. I wouldn't be surprised if taking a quick jump through the yellow teleporter would save more time overall.
I did try this route first - it's necessary to get the second tank, and by the time you get near the exit the worm is perfectly getting in the way of the last 5 gems, and you can go around but it costs time. It's about a 0.7 s difference between the video I posted.
Thanks for fleshing out the page a lot Svimmer, although I think some of the things should probably be discussed before being posted. I think there should be a way to streamline this planning process a little better but I'm not sure how. Here are the files I'm using in the image:
I'm sorry it's such a long post (I guess I'm a relatively fast typer with time on my hands :) ) I bring up lots of things in this post that, once settled, won't have to be brought up again.
Thanks for giving feedback on the stuff I did, although it might be even better if it was underneath the pertinent items in the RP so I didn't have to scan the thread entries, although I certainly will do that.
slamo wrote:
I think some of the things should probably be discussed before being posted.
I was thinking that even if someone posts something not everyone agrees with, because the RP is under heavy construction right now, does it really matter? I mean because I personally hope lots of opinions will be expressed about all such points, which as I envision means having a discussion going on under many entries, so it will not look finished for a long time.
Otherwise, do you suggest the discussion should take place here? I'm thinking that would further clutter up this page. Also, I think we can assume that each editor will use their common sense and judgment about how to express things. Secondly I for one trust that most entries into the RP will not even be contended as such, given there's a lot of things that are "self-evident" or "universally useful" or something.
Thirdly, currently we're likely to be the only people using the RP for a long time.
Do you guys think it would be a good idea to make it possible for people to assume responsibility for sections of the RP? I mean, if after a while there seems to be no more new viewpoints on the naming conventions, say, it will be difficult for people to sort of "step up" and go make the changes, cause it's unclear who's supposed to do that. So I'm suggesting you can write your name under a section if you feel you're ready to try to take every opinion expressed under that title into account and make the section better accordingly.
I hope I'm not being anal about this, but I haven't ever really cooperated in something like this with other people before (and we even come from somewhat different albeit always western cultural backgrounds) and I'm not sure what the norms are or if there are any. So anyway, I'll check up on everything that's been said about that names list and create a new draft after a couple of days, if that sounds reasonable.
For now a few quick responses:
Nach wrote:
I dislike the idea of using obscure acronyms.
I see what you mean. I think it might depend on how used one is to working with acronyms how easily one can remember them. Or maybe it's an effect of having come up with them that makes them easier to remember. However, I thought view might come up, I'll suggest names like "R-tele" or simply "R-teleporter" in the next draft.
About staying with in-game and manual naming... We already seem to be using a lot of names that are completely different from the manual. E.g. hardly anyone has used "tiles" for "blocks". The ball-type enemy is called "Steel Ball". Also, I don't get the feeling the manual is so profoundly thought-out, it for example has a mistake where it describes what ice does (seems a mistake to me, maybe not).
Ultimately, I'm not sure if it actually has any value to necessarily agree on one right way of expressing things. I'm starting to think it's better to rename the whole section: "Possible Abbreviations" or something that's meant to be helpful, not restrictive. Only in some cases could there be actual confusion, as with those Spikes and Spinners you mentioned, so I think I'll revamp the section heavily in a couple of days.
Also, Nach, I created a ToDo section now in the RP. I know it's probably not going to take whoever long to do the things you suggested should be done regarding making a fresh, uniformly formatted set of .png's of the next levels, but maybe you should make the whole task of creating all of those .png's into a task in that section and then someone can "sign it off" or take upon them half of it or something and everyone will know it's being taken care of. I wonder if this seems as good an idea to others?
slamo wrote:
I did try this route first - it's necessary to get the second tank...
This is exactly why it will be good when we've established the system for working on this run, so here it was difficult for Mojo to tell if this had already been tested, but we'll figure out how everything should proceed. In fact, maybe someone will create a section in the RP that describes the process (just a first draft for discussion)?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Thanks creaothceann, I'll post them on the site.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Svimmer wrote:
Do you guys think it would be a good idea to make it possible for people to assume responsibility for sections of the RP?
Contribute what you can and we'll work it out. Although if someone wants to take it upon themselves to do a large job, alert the others, so there's no overlap of work.
Svimmer wrote:
I'll suggest names like "R-tele" or simply "R-teleporter" in the next draft.
The latter is fine.
Svimmer wrote:
About staying with in-game and manual naming... We already seem to be using a lot of names that are completely different from the manual. E.g. hardly anyone has used "tiles" for "blocks".
Tiles is used in the level editor, because it's tiles!
Block is used in the official documentation.
Svimmer wrote:
The ball-type enemy is called "Steel Ball".
It's also referred to as a Marble. Either is fine.
Svimmer wrote:
Also, I don't get the feeling the manual is so profoundly thought-out, it for example has a mistake where it describes what ice does (seems a mistake to me, maybe not).
But it's official. It's better to use an official term instead of each of us making up our own.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Nach wrote:
Thanks creaothceann, I'll post them on the site.
In case you guys didn't notice, they're all up.
Edit:
I extracted all the levels, so you can view each one in the level editor.
When viewed in the editor, all the false walls are made visible, and the name of the level also appears below. This way you can also jump to a level directly to play with it, instead of skipping till you get there like a madman.
Can I trouble you guys to get nice PNGs of the false wall levels? Thanks.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Thanks dude, that's a big help.
About the page, I just don't want people stepping on other people's feet when it comes to posting on it, although I guess that's just a result of it being built up so quickly. When the dust settles it can be neatened up.
I will do some research tomorrow when I have some time to fill in the blanks on the wiki. There's probably some constant acceleration the jetpack dude flies at (velocity graphs would be neat?) which will answer a lot of questions, and I'll check out enemy speeds as well. And crank out level 3 hopefully.
I did try this route first - it's necessary to get the second tank, and by the time you get near the exit the worm is perfectly getting in the way of the last 5 gems, and you can go around but it costs time. It's about a 0.7 s difference between the video I posted.
Hm, unfortunate but it makes sense. How about running on the conveyors that are travelling the same direction you are? It feels a bit faster than Jetpacking when doing it over long distances, but that could be an unfounded belief, and on top of that I'm not sure about in short bursts.
How about running on the conveyors that are travelling the same direction you are? It feels a bit faster than Jetpacking when doing it over long distances, but that could be an unfounded belief, and on top of that I'm not sure about in short bursts.
Not faster in long run: 60 sp/f (running) vs. 64 sp/f (jetpacking). But in short bursts, situation could be different since there is no acceleration for running.
I did some peeking on speed and acceleration data. Found all sorts of odd stuff like:
* Horizontal acceleration in air depends on your horizontal speed.
* The acceleration of gravity is not the same for jumps and jetpack cutoff.
* If holding alt while running off ledge (no fuel), the game treats you as jumping instead of instantly resetting your velocity like falling off cliff.
* If jetpacking from standstill, there is no horizontal accelration the first frame, but if jetpacking from run, there is acceleration on the first frame (added to your existing speed).
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
hegyak wrote:
I think these are crappy images. But DOSBox made it happen. Here's levels 0 through 25.
They're tiny, but pretty good. Thank you.
I'll see about getting them up.
Edit:
It's up.
Extremely useful for the levels with false walls / blocks.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Thanks, will see about getting these up too.
Okay, it's all up thank you very much.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Awesome work going on here. With Ilari's acceleration/speed data I've added some graphs to the page. (Excel file here) Should be helpful with theoretical routes, I hope.
Not faster in long run: 60 sp/f (running) vs. 64 sp/f (jetpacking).
...wow, really? Doesn't running normally move you at 55 sp/f? The conveyor adding only 5 sp/f to that seems pretty strange, especially compared to how slowly you move when running opposite to a conveyor.
Not faster in long run: 60 sp/f (running) vs. 64 sp/f (jetpacking).
...wow, really? Doesn't running normally move you at 55 sp/f? The conveyor adding only 5 sp/f to that seems pretty strange, especially compared to how slowly you move when running opposite to a conveyor.
I just checked again. The figures (60sp/f and 25sp/f) are correct. Surprising for sure.
Level 3 (glitched sound):
Link to video
Watch as I come hilariously close to dying multiple times. I tried Nach's route but it wasn't faster, it was off by about 0.8 s.
Are the extra uses of the phaser for manipulation or for fun in this WIP?
Nach wrote:
Svimmer wrote:
Do you guys think it would be a good idea to make it possible for people to assume responsibility for sections of the RP?
Contribute what you can and we'll work it out. Although if someone wants to take it upon themselves to do a large job, alert the others, so there's no overlap of work.
I meant to assume responsibility for updating the section whenever suggestions/opinions have been posted in the section. I was mainly thinking about how to generalize the fact that probably I'm going to be the one for now to update the naming conventions (although I think the next version everyone is gonna be ok with).
Nach wrote:
Tiles is used in the level editor, because it's tiles!
Block is used in the official documentation.
I think what "block" means in the manual is the editor feature that allows mass populating/copying and things. Otherwise it talks about bricks and steel barriers and things.
The hintbook uses the terms interchangeably. In fact it even has an instance of "tile block". I'll just give both alternatives on the RP, but I'd like you to admit that it's not always 100% clear what the "official" term is.
Nach wrote:
It's better to use an official term instead of each of us making up our own.
I get it you agree that creating conventions (whatever it's based on) is an ok idea. However, what if the official word is a)difficult to tell what it actually is? or b) counter-intuitive? I feel like you're not giving me a lot of credit here. And I'm trying hard to avoid making it seem like I wanna impose my opinions on anyone, but aren't your opinions of the same weight? I know people can be used to expressing themselves differently, e.g. I know I'm always a bit wary about making statements that sound categorical.
slamo wrote:
When the dust settles [the RP] can be neatened up.
My thoughts exactly. That's why I thought it's better to post your ideas/create your vision than hold back, because if others don't like it, they'll express their view, no harm done.
Thanks for all the recent work everybody on capturing, posting etc. the pictures and miscellaneous. The graphs look awesome as well! I will spend some time on this today and see what I can get done.
Someone want to break that up into separate images so we can use them on the wiki page in a nice manner?I think the only potential issue is fuel, but in this route you cover less ground as mentioned, and you end up falling down that long column on the right rather than flying up it. Plus if necessary you could use the yellow teleporter twice to pick up the other tank, if that doesn't use up enough time that you run into the worm. Also, is it not possible/not faster to touch down on the conveyor belts that actually are travelling the same direction as you, and only fly over the ones travelling the other direction? Even if it's not actually faster it could be considered as a way to save a little bit of fuel. And similarly, even though it's a bit slower to run, for long horizontal stretches like the top it may be worthwhile to touch down if that can save you a detour to pick up more fuel. Even if my route ends up slower, you could also experiment to see if it's possible to save enough fuel on your route to need only one tank. EDIT: So I just played through the level at full speed. Even with my human inefficiency, I easily made it to the yellow teleporter before the worm reached it, and even without picking up the second tank I only barely did not have enough fuel to reach the exit on one tank, though that was with walking along the top and the conveyors to save fuel. I wouldn't be surprised if taking a quick jump through the yellow teleporter would save more time overall.
