Something I am curious about with regard to TASes of modern consoles (ones that take in RTC values for RNG seeding): to what extent are we allowed to control the clock time on resets?
I would imagine that the default practice would be to just have the clock move along with the real time counter, but I can think of scenarios in several games where it would be faster to change the clock to a different value entirely, even if you had to do it manually on a physical console. How would a TAS incorporate that? Would we be allowed to arbitrarily change the clock upon power on/off, even though in real time one needs to manually adjust it on the system of the console?
I guess this is part of a broader discussion on whether or not clock time should be considered input or whatnot...
Joined: 1/16/2008
Posts: 358
Location: The Netherlands
Ideally the emulator would allow to choose a boot-time for the console and every frame that time advances like it would on a real console.
For Dolphin, recently I requested the configuration of boot-time: https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/9269#change-728406
Next step is to make that time part of the TAS replay file, but I did not request this (yet) :X
Something I am curious about with regard to TASes of modern consoles (ones that take in RTC values for RNG seeding): to what extent are we allowed to control the clock time on resets?
I would imagine that the default practice would be to just have the clock move along with the real time counter, but I can think of scenarios in several games where it would be faster to change the clock to a different value entirely, even if you had to do it manually on a physical console. How would a TAS incorporate that? Would we be allowed to arbitrarily change the clock upon power on/off, even though in real time one needs to manually adjust it on the system of the console?
I guess this is part of a broader discussion on whether or not clock time should be considered input or whatnot...
Well, I know for the DS, changing the clock would be restarting the console, going to the settings then change it, but it seems Desmume doesn't register that change correctly. I'm not sure how other consoles would be though.
This actually does have 1 game I'm aware needs it; Nanashi No Game Me for DS, where for 100% there's optional items that can only be found in certain hours, but without changing the clock it would result in over an hour of waiting doing nothing.
This actually does have 1 game I'm aware needs it; Nanashi No Game Me for DS, where for 100% there's optional items that can only be found in certain hours, but without changing the clock it would result in over an hour of waiting doing nothing.
Yeah, this is basically the kind of scenario I was imagining. A TAS should be able to manipulate such things, as a manual speedrunner could as well, but I'm not sure that the change should be allowed to be instantaneous. Instead, maybe we should have some method of running the DS system program and "menuing the clock?" I'm not sure how to approach this.
Yeah, this is basically the kind of scenario I was imagining. A TAS should be able to manipulate such things, as a manual speedrunner could as well, but I'm not sure that the change should be allowed to be instantaneous. Instead, maybe we should have some method of running the DS system program and "menuing the clock?" I'm not sure how to approach this.
I support using the menu from the system program, but I'm not sure if that applies for all consoles (as in do they all have this feature).
I think we can give an affordance in instantaneous clock changes. It's just not entertaining watching system menus be tased. There is no creativity or challenge there.
I think we can give an affordance in instantaneous clock changes. It's just not entertaining watching system menus be tased. There is no creativity or challenge there.
I'm not sure what other games consider seconds, but iirc the DS Pokemon RNG does, so that would affect encounters due to the bit of time "saved" from instant clock change (not sure if a TAS would ever need to change system clock for pokemon however).
