Hi.
I watch speed runs and tas for several years now but i'm new to this forum.
Recently the game Heroes of Newerth was updated to version 3, which introduced a new solo mode. Before this versio, HoN only proposed versus games, 3v3 or 5v5. This new mode is the 5v5 mode but playable with bots.
HoN is a MOBA, or DotA-like, and for those who never heard of it, it's a strategy game with an rts camera (third person). U control a single hero in a team, u have a base and towers to defend and u have to destroy the opponent's base to win.
A "kind of" speedrun is available on youtube of a 5 player team versus a 5 player team and the base is destroyed in 7 minutes, i think i can do it in 6 minutes on my own, and 3 to 4 minutes if we play 5 players versus 5 bots.
I was wondering if a speedrun or a tool assisted speedrun of a solo game (me+4 bots in a team vs a bot team) would be interesting enough to be submitted to this site.
Thanks for your interest in my question ;)
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
Non-tool-assisted speedruns are not accepted on the site, and to my current knowledge, there's no way to make a tool-assisted speedrun for any large, modern PC games. So...no, you can't submit anything for that game to this site (yet).
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
If i record a part of the inputs like i planned to do (especially in the menus, to buy the items, to make the early moves), isn't it considered as tool assisted? Or the entire run should be done with tools?
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
How do you plan to record the inputs? I doubt HoN has any form of acceptable input file format that can be saved to, much less one the site would accept.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
The inputs would be recorded via macro softwares, dunno yet which one, i used several when macroted on diablo and they worked well.
I didn't know that the tools had to be "accepted", i thought any tool helpfull would be accepted as long as u mention it :s
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
Fatality wrote:
The inputs would be recorded via macro softwares, dunno yet which one, i used several when macroted on diablo and they worked well.
Are those inputs deterministic? As in, can you save a certain string of input, that when played back, will always result to the game being played the exact same way?
Fatality wrote:
i thought any tool helpfull would be accepted as long as u mention it :s
Yes, you can use any tool you want to make your movie, but for submissions/publications, we do need an accepted result input file. A list of accepted input files is here.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Even if you manage to record and playback the input, you'd still have a very boring movie. Heroes of Newerth is a pretty bad candidate for a TAS since playing it optimally is very simple. Even if you pick a hero that relies a lot on RNG it's still going to be fairly boring to watch. Not to forget that the bots currently have extremely bad AI - you can pretty much kill them with autoattacks on level 1 and they'd just run back and forth on the spot.
Say if you were to make this movie after all, and say this would sync well (which it probably would), what would your concept be? Push throne/tree as fast as possible? Get to a certain number of kills as fast as possible? I cannot think of much more on the spot, but these seem to be very dull. Also, it's extremely simple to 1v5 the bots, so doing 5v5 would be kind of overkill.
However much I love to play HoN I fear it's not really TAS material. Mind you I've never even thought of the possibility, but still.
Ok well thanks for those answers, i won't do it. I might work on a more "usual" type of game.
Again, thanks for your time ;)
Actually, I really wish there were a solid way to TAS Dota 2 or HoN, because honestly, I feel like HoN or Dota 2 might make an interesting TAS if you could absolutely control all ten heroes at the same time. However, this would require a script and some of the most insane micromanagement you'd ever see. You'd effectively have two players scripting an entire team's movements together as opponents; let's be honest, the bots in either of these games are dumb, and only a human with the right tools can really make the types of plays pros could only dream of.
In all honesty, I feel like the only way to do this would absolutely have to be the highest skill cap heroes with the most absolutely difficult micromanagement kits; Meepo, Visage, Chen, Invoker, Enchantress, Io, Beastmaster... On top of that, you'd have to be stacking your teams to be able to disable frame-perfectly, which would get into extremely ridiculous situations regarding ganks, counter-ganks, picture-perfect crowd control effects, perfect blink timing and armlet toggling...
Looking specifically at micromanagement issues, even heroes such as Phantom Lancer can become significantly more deadly; you can micromanage your illusions to do many horrendous things at the same time. You could take your two (or three) Visage familiars or your three (or four) Meepo clones to scout, farm, gank, harass, or deny across the entire map simultaneously. While having players use wards for various reasons to include vision would still be a necessary evil, more vision than normally possible could be achieved with effective use of micromanagement of summoned units.
On top of that, manipulating RNG to be able to proc random/pseudo-random chances (as cheap and possibly boring as it may be) would definitely work to your advantage when deciding which items to buy or which heroes to pick; again, when a Phantom Lancer hits level 6, you could manipulate him to make his maximum number of illusions inside four seconds every time, and then send his phantoms off to farm in the jungle almost permanently with their near-constant manipulation of illusion spawning. On a lesser note, you could have anyone with natural crit automatically proc it every swing, or have a Sniper decimate someone in a fight by proccing headshot every shot. While I personally think this is a rather silly concept that would be extremely cheap... you might wind up using Chen or Enchantress to take control of one of those PL illusions to turn the tables on their own team; after all, a dominated/persuaded/enchanted PL illusion creates more illusions that are also controlled by the enemy hero as well.
The possibilities are endless, and I feel like the only way to truly do a Dota/HoN TAS justice would be to play as absolutely ridiculous as possible. The only way to make it that would be entertaining would be a full playaround, honestly, because setting some sort of arbitrary goal like victory or high kill count only makes it boring; you can only push so fast and embarrass your opponent so many ways, but both teams playing with absolute inhuman skill is a sight worth seeing.
Also, yes, I know I'm referring a lot to Dota (with Dota hero names and such), but I know that HoN, originally a Dota carbon copy, evolved into its own game with many unique heroes and items of its own. I also know that this kind of concept would be nearly impossible unless someone found a way of emulating HoN to include simultaneously controlling all ten player inputs.
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 1466
Location: Not playing Puyo Tetris
If I remember correctly, Source Engine games (DotA2 is one of them) can be used to make "TAS" like playthroughs. Though, DotA2 is more restrictive on things then HL2 is.
DotA2 does have cheats (Which would probably be necessary).
This will be a very helpful thing:
http://wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Host_timescale
No, I don't know much about running, just how to find stuff sometimes.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war.
The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
If I remember correctly, Source Engine games (DotA2 is one of them) can be used to make "TAS" like playthroughs. Though, DotA2 is more restrictive on things then HL2 is.
DotA2 does have cheats (Which would probably be necessary).
This will be a very helpful thing:
http://wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Host_timescale
No, I don't know much about running, just how to find stuff sometimes.
Hey, sometimes it's not what you know, but knowing how to find it. I'd say that's a much more useful skill than knowing everything. I know for fact that Dota 2 has a practice mode that allows you to enable cheats, give everyone specific items... It even allows you to create and completely control bots, both Radiant and Dire.
HoN retains attack damage randomness from Warcraft 3/DotA, right? That alone should cause endless desyncs for a macro recording unless there are in-game cheats or something of the sort to make the RNG a non-factor.
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 1466
Location: Not playing Puyo Tetris
DotA2 has replay (demo) recording built into the engine. So desyncs don't exist (if there's no major engine/game changes), but we are talking about a game that is constantly being updated/tweaked/changed.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war.
The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
