Thanks a lot! That is all very helpful information.
I believe this is something that is important for us to decide on because PC/Windows TASing is still immature in terms of both the tools and acceptance standards (as reflected in the recent-ish Doom TAS debate), so we need to be prepared for cases where the difference is as significant as here.
When thinking about opportunities we shouldn't ignore the reasons for their existence. Maybe they're acceptable reasons; maybe they aren't. It's a pretty foul can of worms that we will have to reopen every time a PC game with complex physics is TASed unless we establish some agreeable standards or at least guidelines beforehand. In real-life this is reflected by things like doping scandals in sports, where the lack of non-controversial standards and control methods has led to annual disqualifications, accusations, and shady wins (remember the sudden rise of asthmatic Olympic winners in 2000s, who used medication that could potentially increase performance of their healthier competitors?).
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Also, a bit of a tangent, but are there any plans for a new Elma Done Quick?
Madness, our local tas wr table updater just uploaded a trailer for the tas version of EDQ (Which would be the non bubgpop non funny stretchbug category opposite of the one featured in my previous video).
I have not heard much talk about the full version and don't expect it for a year or two.
Link to video
You can see the full tas wr table over on our forums http://mopolauta.moposite.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8639
Another update from the TAS elma scene!
bene and Zweq teamed up and played Labyrinth pro for a year with a target time of under 2 minutes. The replay was a surprise for the Finnish Elma Meeting that just happened last week and was shown there.
The time we ended up with was 1:55,48. The old record was 2:06,05 and can be seen here http://www.recsource.tv/r/nfeqgusbdjLink to video
For example in warm up the best known non bugpop tas time without changing fps is 13,94 while it is 13,81 using 1000 fps for the first few seconds and 30 fps for the rest of the level.
The secret project for the Finnish elma meeting 2018 was revealing the newest tricks and TAS of warm up. We did this in the form of a world record progression video for warm up mixing cheated, tool assisted and live runs.
The best TAS without changing fps mid run is now 12.99. The time should be improvable by a bit. We stopped playing after getting 12.99 because it was the target. It's almost a second faster than the previous record of 13.94. No one is playing fps change TAS these days and the TAS record with fps change was 13.45.
There are also some bonus TASes of other levels during the end credits.
Link to video
We did this in the form of a world record progression video for warm up mixing cheated, tool assisted and live runs.
The video was a bit on the longer side, but it was interesting to see all four major style decisions—stumping vs. stretching at the apple, front vs. rear wheel at the flower—constantly changing between different the records without a conclusive statement as to which one was faster. Even the very last 13:88 clip used pretty much the same style as the 14:33 from 2000, and not the one from the 12:99 TAS.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Also, a bit of a tangent, but are there any plans for a new Elma Done Quick?
A couple of years later but finally there are news about this. After more than a decade since the last video it's happening again. The world premiere is planned for 15th July at 10pm Finnish time.
Also, a bit of a tangent, but are there any plans for a new Elma Done Quick?
A couple of years later but finally there are news about this. After more than a decade since the last video it's happening again. The world premiere is planned for 15th July at 10pm Finnish time.
Omg, that's awesome! Can't wait.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Also, a bit of a tangent, but are there any plans for a new Elma Done Quick?
A couple of years later but finally there are news about this. After more than a decade since the last video it's happening again. The world premiere is planned for 15th July at 10pm Finnish time.
Omg, that's awesome! Can't wait.
I can highly recommend this beautiful piece of TAS to make the wait easier. This is limpsy05, a level made as a joke and supposed to be impossible, finished (Start at 8:17):
Link to video
The community has grown and learned a lot in the years since the last EDQ. This limpsy05 replay, although being a couple of years old, is in my opinion the peak of everything though. Two of the best players in the world get together to try out new tooling and at the same time achieve something impossible.
If you know the game enough to enjoy this video you can look forward to the premiere that will be on the same channel compiling all the individual level records of the original levels to a single video :bear:
The reason this is unique is because the community does not enforce showing video of a run being performed and a single person is responsible for keeping the table updated and verifying runs. A lot of the individual level records being shown have never before been seen in public.
Two of the best players in the world get together to try out new tooling and at the same time achieve something impossible.
Can you give a breakdown of the tooling used these days? I think it shouldn't be a big problem in principle to have Elma TASes accepted here.
Two tools are mainly used. The most recent one is "okesl" which is a completely home made program based on reverse engineered physics. So way back, someone reverse engineered all the physics to have their level editor be able to play levels and this circled around privately and finally reached someone that made a collection of cheat tools.
The other tool is an edit from the person that made elma online. And this is a bit more shrouded in mystery but it's a small change to the dll that enables online play.
Okesl is by far superior of the two in terms of sophistication but the minute fps difference compared to regular play makes the other one way better for practicing live world records. The difference is how the game behaves at small <1 fps differences between frames and doesn't matter at all for regular play or at higher framerates but it being different for a low fps run changes everything
How we tune the game now is to limit the physics fps to some value and the intricate details of this changes everything. We don't set it to constantly be 30fps and it's just limited to 30fps and fluctuates around 30fps.
The creator of okesl made a tool that could be used to verify runs using the recorded inputs and reverse engineered physics. And the most important thing to verify would be that we don't allow changing physics fps in the middle of the run. All modern cheat tools allow changing the fps at any time, and technically it could happen in a real run as well, but due to how differently the game plays at various frame rates the most sensible option, to keep competitive, would be to disallow changing fps in the middle of a run. It's just not fun to compete when allowing changing fps in the middle of the run.
So being accepted here is a bit strange, If you have the same rules that are for any other game it just causes bugged mayhem that no one likes playing or watching, like the video I showed a few years ago. And enforcing a different set of rules requires specific tools to verify the runs. Also we have some additional rules to work around the division by zero problem that "are good enough" but they just don't work for tasvideos rules :)
And at this time we are somewhere in between everything. We don't use the created tooling to verify runs and players can change physics fps as they please but it's not fun to play so no one does anything.
The impressive stuff we have, like limpsy05, is just players not abusing possibility to change physics fps at any time. If you allow and use that you can finish the level in under 10 seconds with an hour of effort compared to this magic that took months of work.
Well right now tasvideos is on its way to allowing more types of runs. Specifically Showcase type submissions and this could possibly qualify. I personally would love for that type of crazy tool driven gameplay to be accepted.
Maybe someone that knows more of that process could comment on this?
Well right now tasvideos is on its way to allowing more types of runs. Specifically Showcase type submissions and this could possibly qualify. I personally would love for that type of crazy tool driven gameplay to be accepted.
Maybe someone that knows more of that process could comment on this?
The problem we have now is that there is a division by the distance of the wheel and the center of the bike and if this approaches 0 things go crazy. If this is allowed in play (Especially along changing physics fps) any video is finding the fastest way to make this happen and the rest is just brute force to find physics fps that works to finish the level (One frame per apple and one frame to get the flower after getting the bug). Making everything finishable in less than a couple of seconds easily, even without brute forcing, you can after getting the bug just do anything you want without much effort, it just takes a few hours to do stuff and it's a couple of seconds longer video.
So in the community we have this home made div 0 check along with the not in use physics frame rate check to make it competetive and nice. The div 0 thing is the hardest problem to solve for this, it's mostly just someone looking at the run and giving it thumbs up or down based on how they feel today.
What Mike said is correct; the site has been moving toward accepting more content, and this includes having more categories with restrictions and rulesets popularly accepted in the relevant communities. So if the dominant ruleset for TAS stuff in the Elma community is "no divide-by-zero error", then it shouldn't be a problem to have that as a category here.
The only think I'm not certain about is running individual and custom levels because the site isn't designed for that at the moment, so you can only potentially submit a full game run. But that would already be cool enough.
Combining the Elma community tools with our tools could break the game wide open. Piano roll input editor in particular would be a complete game-changer.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
