Hi all,
I'm planning on creating a Quest For Glory II TAS and I've encountered a situation where the game forces you to wait until nightfall to be able to access your room at the inn. Until then, there is absolutely nothing interesting you can do, resulting in 8 minutes of down time that would be completely boring in a run. I've gone to the extent of decompiling the source and pouring over the code, and I cannot find a playable way around the long wait.
Fortunately, there is a debug mode you can use to advance time ahead. Unfortunately, debug modes are forbidden by default on this site. So before I start making the run, I'm coming here to get preapproval to use the debug mode to skip the wait time at the inn. I feel this falls under the spirit of the rule, as it states:
These rules are not strict, but are motivated by the same concept as the guideline that says you should play on the hardest difficulty.
Using the debug mode to skip 8 minutes of dead-air will improve the entertainment value of the TAS incredibly while not impacting the game's difficulty. Also, it can be stated in the submission text that if anyone does find a way around the delay without using the debug mode, then that run would qualify to obsolete this one, even if it were longer in length.
Please let me know your thoughts on the matter.
I'm not familiar with the game, but would it be possible to slow down earlier on while still doing stuff in the run to slowly eat up those 8 minutes?
I would not support debug mode. Putting a timestamp in the encode at the end of the waiting period seems sufficient to me.
I'm also not familiar with it, but... how far into the game is it? If you can do this right after starting the game then maybe you could do it, wait, save the game, load the game and continue the TAS from there.
(And other TASes would also load that save file.)
IMO 8 minutes is completely within the limits of acceptability. If it were like an hour or something, then it would start becoming quite a lot.
I think that a level of "purity" of TASing ought to be preserved. If that means that at some point you just have to wait for 8 minutes, so be it.
I'm inclined to agree with Warp. 8 minutes are a long time, but I feel that having a "legit" run takes precedence here. While it's not quite the same, we've published runs with minutes worth of tape loading at the beginning before, when there would've been ways to avoid it.
Instead, there may be a notice for viewers informing them to skip ahead, or the encode may fast-forward during the section. Personally, I'm not familiar with the game either, but from the looks of it, it seems like you can move the character around, which, well, is better than nothing.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4089
Location: The Netherlands
c-square wrote:
These rules are not strict, but are motivated by the same concept as the guideline that says you should play on the hardest difficulty.
The very next line:
As such, you can use a code to unlock the hardest difficulty, although it's better to first ask on the forums if this is a good idea.
So, relaxing this rule is intended to be done to enable a higher difficulty where applicable. I don't think skipping a timed event counts as enabling a higher difficulty. In general I don't think it's a good idea to interfere with gameplay mid-game with a debug code like this. It does feel like it would undermine the run's legitimacy.
Also, I would like to have some more context here - for example, how long is the run going to be (so how much time is 8 minutes in relative terms), and how limited are you in your actions during these 8 minutes (is some playaround possible)?
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.
Also, I would like to have some more context here - for example, how long is the run going to be (so how much time is 8 minutes in relative terms), and how limited are you in your actions during these 8 minutes (is some playaround possible)?
I'm anticipating the run to be around five minutes without the waiting at the inn. Adding the 8 minutes wait results in the run growing to 13 minutes. Actions are extremely limited during the waiting period, since typing anything stops the game clock, and exiting the screen causes time loss as well. So all that's available is running around the room and moving the mouse pointer.
To give you an idea, here's mrprmiller's realtime run doing one of the two wait sequences.
Being the QFG admin guy speedrun.com and the SDA holder, the use of the debug mode for the purpose of skipping ahead was my suggestion. The reason is that it to optimize (from my experience) the transition, it is necessary to stand exactly in the transition doorway during the 8 or so minutes (and the character is also hidden behind a wall and can't be seen).
The nuts and bolts of this game are that we want to make this game entertaining, and quality, and qualify for moons at the same time, and that waiting section has us both a little worried. The rest of the game is extremely technical for a text-parser optimized because of the stat system, but that section... even Corey and Lori Cole aren't crazy about it, and they made it.
It was so rough with little to do (outside of a 100% run) that the devs of the AGDI remake of QFG2 incorporated a rest system to skip the entire thing.
The wait is like a really, really rough auto-scroller - like Gradius if there was no stars, enemies, items, bullets or bosses... and each stage was 8-9 minutes long. When you arrive it is a new day in the game. After talking to a character, time jumps forward, but you still have about 3-4 minutes of standing waiting for the day to progress past "sunset" to "the night is young." The game has the ability to speed up the timer, but that 3-4 minutes is what happens when you actually do speed up the in-game day/night timer to max.
At the start of the next day, there is a cutscene that will play at a certain area, followed by another encounter which advances the clock further... but then, there's another 5 minutes of waiting for the transition to happen. And because the transition to sleeping only happens in the doorway of the inn, you must be standing there to optimize the timer.
I don't think skipping a timed event counts as enabling a higher difficulty.
A valid point, to be sure... When I think about it like that, it's a lot like waiting for Shadow in Final Fantasy 3/6... except this can't be skipped. :/ You can wait for the last four seconds or so and he will show, but you can also skip it. But, imagine if the wait was 8 minutes long, and you had no choice but to stand in one spot to maximize frames and movements for the entire wait... and the character had to be behind a wall. (Did we mention that the character isn't visible while he waits for the night transition?)
It is a design "option" to the game, i.e., a player could technically stay outside of the Inn for the entire night and grind and grind away until morning (with enough potions and water and stamina and patience) and you could skip the Inn that way. Unfortunately, that would take somewhere in the range of 25 minutes to pull off. :/
Really, it's about entertainment and quality. :D And, also the fact that every person who watches this video and is familiar with this game skips ahead in the Raseir because they know this section is coming.
EDIT FURTHER:
I like the idea of speeding up the encode at that section to warp-speed to basically show but skip that section (or providing a PSA that says "skip ahead to X:YZ" and then "skip ahead to Z:YX" for the two waiting periods. The funny thing is that this would look about 99% identical to what we're suggesting with the debug mode for that actual technical details of the TAS. :)
I see no problem with having eight minutes of boredom in an otherwise interesting run, particularly where this matches the design intent of the game (because yes, the player is supposed to wait with no way to skip it).
I'd suggest having a secondary video (from the same input file) that cuts out these eight minutes, if it bothers people; but I don't think that using the debug mode is a solution here.
Looks there's a consensus to not use debug mode to skip the waiting. We'll keep the waiting in, and either add links in the encode to skip it, or speed up the video for the waiting parts.
Thanks for the input everyone!
Sounds good. :) Speeding up or adding skips to the encode didn't even enter into my mind; I've was too focused on my tears after years of waiting around in Raseir to think outside of the box.
This is cool. Thanks, squad!
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
you could try to do something stupid to make the passage of time less painful, like moving in some sort of pattern, making a step every second and completing the loop every 60 steps
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
you could try to do something stupid to make the passage of time less painful, like moving in some sort of pattern, making a step every second and completing the loop every 60 steps
