There's been some progress with this idea recently.
Post #451802 and most of that thread.
For a live event, maybe a camera pointed at the screen and some basic image recognition would work for a bot to wait for loading times (assuming a permissive enough RNG)?
I don't know how much this is indicative to the actual usage and diffusion of the relative game versions, but it's still suggesting that are both not negligible in the cultural aspect.
It seems Nintendo sold 62M NES consoles, of which 53M were sold in Japan and US combined. (source)
"Special goal" as a term means nothing other than not something. If you want it to include everything that wastes time compared to vaultable goal, it's at least definable. If you just want it to contain everything that's not yet present in the existing tags (or some other variant), it's undefinable, and arbitrary in where you draw the line.
The latter would be more useful if it could be defined, because it would contain stuff other tags miss, but I dunno how realistic it would be.
Any halfway decent mathematician will tell you that a definition through negation is still a perfectly valid definition. The same should be true for this website; it's not enough to say, "This category is undefinable because the definition you've given me makes me uncomfortable."
I understand that it comes down to "Not (tag1 or tag2 or ... tagn)", so, in other words, "special goal" means "other"?
Regarding piracy protection, besides the "default" ones that Mothrayas mentioned, don't waste your time on this stuff if you value your time at all. Take the many days it would take to get something that even amateur pirates will break in a few hours and fix bugs or improve your game instead. The extra downloads brought by an improvement in quality will very much offset the losses to piracy. Also remember that pirates have friends too, who might end up getting a legit copy of your game. Why waste time to people who will not pay anyway?
If you need server code or resource transactions between players, that's a hole lot harder to get right and you might want to use existing services instead.
Managers and people without a clue want piracy protection, but it is not worth it.
The shading on the wall in the upper image looks exagerated. I also wonder why there are reflections on the red/white ball in the upper image while they aren't visible in the lower one.
How does monitor gamma influence the results?
I just popped my old copy of Final Fantasy that I bought brand new in 1990 in my Retron and it still has a valid save game!
I'm just impressed that a 26 year old game still have a working battery (remember, this was before the discovery of flash memory...).
The same isn't true for my 1986 Legend of Zelda, which lost its saved data, unfortunately.
Would automatically replacing each instance of the weapon switching keys (I guess L or R) by the corresponding menu presses (select, wait some frames, press left or right and select again) make a valid entry, or is it much complicated? If the RNG isn't influenced, wouldn't this be enough?
Hello!
This is actually work-related, but I have to make a list of features needed to support automated game playback, mostly for QA purpose (content validation, regression tests). I thought I could use some of your input on this.
What I've got so far:
- Be able to trigger events upon non-deterministic behaviour (ex.: waiting for a download to complete)
- Be able to record and play back inputs after these events
- Trigger screenshot captures at certain points, for content verification by a human
- Gather and report stats
- Set initial conditions (such as time or RNG seed)
... and that's about it.
If I can give my 2c on this, I think such a library should only provide the necessary hooks and an external communication API for other tools to bind to it.
Simply expose the memory, a few events (read/write, frame advance, etc.) and a communication layer (system socket, TCP, whatever) and then external TASing programs can plug in to any emulator implementing that API. A fake Bizhawk core could even be a simple client to this API and voilà, you already have a TASing tool ready for any emu linked to that lib.
I enjoyed the run (I'm a sucker for anything Super Metroid...), but I echo the feeling that this is not really different enough than the other published runs for casual viewers.
I wish this could be combined with a 100% run which would be a treat with the item/door transition skip LUA script.
Gruefood Delight, maybe?
PS: I know you (Nymx et al.) put a lot of work on this and it hurts to be criticized on something you are proud of, but try to understand that people here have seen a lot of speed runs, many have a lot of experience doing them and you should respect their opinion, no matter how harsh they may sound. This is a technical forum on the Internet, you cannot expect everyone to be "politically correct" when they voice their thoughts.
Ah, that explains it! I'm glad we've been sticking to lossless then; allowing any quality loss in our screenshots could be a slippery slope.
I can go ahead and compress the first 11 screenshots that ventuz posted (the first half) and either post the smallest file sizes I get here or replace them as soon as I finish (which probably won't be tonight).
I just want to chime in to say that using color quantization (ie.: pngquant) can really shrink down the size without any color difference if used correctly (that is, if you specify an equal or greater number of colors as parameters, up to 256). It simply looks for the most used colors in the picture, then dither extra colors (hence why it can be lossless if there are not unmapped colors) and convert the picture to a palette-based format.
It can really be used for GB/NES-era screenshots. SNES can go up to 511 colors, though, so not an option there.
For example, there are 18 colors in the GBC SpongeBob screenshot, so it can be converted without issue:
If the other runs don't sync on real hardware and this one does, they should be considered as if they were made using a buggy emulator*. There were precedents where that was enough to accept a slower movie, if I remember correctly...
I however don't think that this movie should obsolete these other runs, but it should be linked in the description of the current run as a reference. After all, the other runs are "theoretically" valid, under extremely unlikely initial hardware configurations. Or maybe under NES devkits, who knows?
I'd like a white mage "universal" run too, by the way...
* at least regarding initial hardware state
TASes are in a legal gray area, not sure it is a good idea to sell them for profit. As prizes for charity events, why not, but I'd avoid putting up a "TAS store" with probably copyrighted videos.
I lost my father in law to stomach cancer last year, one of the most underfunded cancer type and one of those with the worse survival chances.
I just sent you some BTC, hope this help.
If you stored some Lua or .net IL in the database, and that there are enough bindings to turn the game into something else, I'd say it is ACE. Code is code is code, whether it is CPU opcodes, VM bytecode or interpreted script.
Just putting or deleting data sounds more like memory manipulation, unless you hack your SQL interpreter to access stuff outside its jail (UPDATE val = 80 FROM ram WHERE address = 2753577)
Resulting image (2505 bytes)
Edit: SGB Wario Land II, 29 colors:
Original image (14470 bytes)
Resulting image (7308 bytes)
