Greetings,
As part of organizing
TASVideo's AGDQ 2015 submission I posted the idea of doing a speed TAS'ing race and decided to set up an initial competition. The concept is as follows:
Consider chess. Like a TAS, a grand master in an untimed match may take an extremely long time to think out what will happen next and rewind in their head to plan out a game. In a a speed chess scenario, the same grand master has only a limited amount of time to consider each move. Speed TAS'ing is like speed chess - the TAS'er has a limited amount of time to TAS a game, so efficiency with TAS tools is required. For this initial competition, the goal is to see how well this concept will actually play out with a shorter game, so here are the constraints:
- Anyone can participate; this is an open competition
- The game for this competition is NES Bible Adventures "Baby Moses" v1.2 (completion is reaching the releasing Baby Moses ending cutscene)
- The time limit (on the honor system) is 2 hours of TAS'ing time, starting from when you start researching or TAS'ing
- Any and all pre-existing content can be referenced but your input file must be unique
- All TAS's must be privately uploaded to movie storage no later than
2014-08-31 at 12:59 PM GMT extended to 2014-09-01 at 4:00 PM GMT (please PM me the link)
The 2 hour time limit should not include setting up the TAS'ing environment but should include any time spent researching the game. In the spirit of competition, please do not reference the submissions of others; ideally this would be happening concurrently with everyone competing at the same time but it's better to be flexible for this trial. The time limit is entirely on the honor system; to keep yourself honest, consider streaming on Twitch or simply starting a stopwatch program. Just like speed chess, complete perfection is not an expectation in this competition, so the challenge is figuring out how to manage your time to allow optimizing the movie as much as possible in the time allowed.
Edit: Please hold off on posting movie links or your completion time in this thread until after the deadline to prevent the introduction of bias - in a concurrent speed TAS'ing competition, no participant would know what the completion time of their competitor's TAS was until the competition was over, which is what I'm trying to emulate here. Instead, just upload your movie files as private WIP's and PM me the link. Once the deadline has passed I'll collect all of the submissions and share the results. Thanks!
Speed TAS away, and thanks for everyone's support!
Update: This initial competition is done and
the results are very interesting!
A.C.
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