Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
turska wrote:
If doing DTC bi-yearly, perhaps the Midsummer Night's Dream Team Contest could have a shorter time and a less time-consuming game choice to compensate - two 8-10 week competitions every year would result in a competition being active for 16-20 weeks of the year, which sounds a bit excessive.
Personally, I was thinking of picking something simpler and shorter to TAS, and only giving 4 weeks for DTC6.
I've also been toying with a more radical idea, of where you put together your dream team, and you have to TAS multiple games with your team. The winning team would be the team who completed all the games, with the lowest cumulative time across them. This would entail larger teams, to investigate multiple games in parallel, and perhaps give a better division of labor.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
FCEUX has a known bug where it undercounts rerecords made from traditional savestates, so non-TASEditor movies have lower rerecord counts than they should have. There are some svn versions that fix this, but I'm not sure if that fix made it to any release version.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warepire wrote:
AMD Athlon64 4000+ ClawHammer core. (Yes, that old)
Unfortunately that lacks SSE3, but we can definitely optimize for it.
Are you running 64 bit Windows?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/2/2010
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Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Nach wrote:
Warepire wrote:
AMD Athlon64 4000+ ClawHammer core. (Yes, that old)
Unfortunately that lacks SSE3, but we can definitely optimize for it.
Are you running 64 bit Windows?
Yes, I am however getting a new PC in time for summer (need it for Hourglass development). So that would just be a lot of wasted effort to optimize for this outdated piece of tech.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warepire wrote:
So that would just be a lot of wasted effort to optimize for this outdated piece of tech.
I wouldn't do it solely for you.
What I'm thinking is that our emulators are generally 32 bit, and thus not taking advantage of what newer computers and OSs have to offer. For those on the lower end (which isn't just you), can also benefit from builds targeting specific CPUs.
We'd have to figure out what people are using, but generating half a dozen optimized builds for some older CPUs can be worthwhile, and won't be too much additional effort.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Am I understanding correctly that only three teams used TAS Editor?
It is mindblowing to me that anyone would choose not to use it when it is available. I understand that people who've been doing this for a long time might be less comfortable with the interface, but it seems like there must be some other huge advantage to doing it the traditional way to make comfort outweigh what seems like the enormous advantage in convenience.
I'd really like to hear more about the moment-to-moment process of doing it without. There are two verbs in particular that were fundamental to my process that I'm not even sure are possible without TASEditor:
* Using "auto-restore last position" to quickly check all possibilities for an input. A very common use, for instance, pick a point definitely after a ladder grab but still on the ladder, look at the y position, then quickly draw and delete A's and U's around the grab point to see which combinations resulted in maximizing that y value, and then choosing the one with the most favorable velocity cycle.
In my understanding of doing this the traditional way, you would have to a) make a save state before the grab, b) let the movie play for some number of frames that you have to remember/write down, c) reload the save state and enter in the combination of A's and U's you want to try first, then let it play the same number of frames and compare Y values, d) repeat c), remembering which combinations you've tried and not repeating them, and also keeping track of the current best, perhaps in another save slot, but probably not in three or four save slots, because you just don't have enough, so to choose between several that are identical but for the velocity cycle, you'd have to write them all down outside the emulator.
The difference in effort here seems absolutely staggering, and I feel like I would have quit in the first week if I'd had to go through something that painful as frequently as I used "auto-restore last position" in TAS Editor.
* Just moving around in the movie to check things. Tags were invaluable, as were the scroll-between-tags commands, as was rightmouse+scrollwheel for scrubbing through the movie frame by frame, backwards and forwards. The mental and organizational overhead to do basic movement through the movie seems easily an order of magnitude greater without TAS Editor.
So, what am I missing? TASers don't strike me as the types to do things the hard way for no reason, so I feel like there must be advantages I'm not seeing, or tools I don't know about, and I would like to have my ignorance rectified!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Joined: 11/3/2004
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turska wrote:
Interestingly, the #1 and #2 movies had the fewest rerecords out of the submissions; and the bottom two had the most. They may not be accurate, but it's a surprising coincidence.
I can say with confidence our rerecord count isn't accurate and is lower than what it really was. We made many iterations as part of our process, probably starting from a fresh movie. And not all our effort was counted (just depended on who checked in what). And since we don't really care about the rerecord count, no effort was made to keep an accurate log
Joined: 8/14/2009
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Personman wrote:
Am I understanding correctly that only three teams used TAS Editor?
A minimum of three teams that I knew of. Two of them (teams 5 and 11) submitted .fm3 files, team 3 had MESHUGGAH at least, and thelegendarymudkip in above post bumps the count up to four.
I can't say for sure whether any of the other teams used TASeditor or not. My assumptions are that teams 1 and 4 didn't, and I have no idea about team 10.
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.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Mothrayas wrote:
I have no idea about team 10.
We were using it extensively, so add us to the pile. The submission files were just exported to FM2 for convenience's sake.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
It also won't work with traditional TASing. Basically you need to know the route in advance. I tried to create maps with auto stitcher, but failed at it.
The biggest advantage of non-linear TASing is that the user don't have to memorize input, for example the TASer wants to add a shot after doing some crazy precise platform jumping the TASer can simply add a B press and test it for every frame, without worrying about the other inputs.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
What!? I can't beleive i missed that stage 4 boss trick! Still, my team was awesome and I am looking forward to the next dtc. I do hope we can use any snesmulator, though.
Am I understanding correctly that only three teams used TAS Editor?
It is mindblowing to me that anyone would choose not to use it when it is available. I understand that people who've been doing this for a long time might be less comfortable with the interface, but it seems like there must be some other huge advantage to doing it the traditional way to make comfort outweigh what seems like the enormous advantage in convenience.
legendarymudkip already explained how we did it in team TTT. I can add that in the first team I was on (team 9), hegyak used it.
I experimented some with it, but noticed I was just not nearly as productive recording new material as with old-school save-state TASing. I've used that method for like 10 years now, so I have quite some experience with it, and learning a completely new method (branches? tags? where are my savestates? hotkeys?) takes time.
For changing earlier material, when an improvement was found, it was obvious that TASeditor was easier. But mudkip handled that for our team, so I was never forced to deal with it.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
How was the comparison video made?
The ghost video was created using a set of lua scripts - one script to record for each movie ghost files that contain frame times, position, sprite data etc. every frame, and another script to play back the ghost files and render the ghosts on screen. Then I dumped the video using the playback script on the winning movie.
The side by side video was created with some Avisynth usage to stitch the videos of every submission together, one level at a time.
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.
Joined: 12/8/2012
Posts: 706
Location: Missouri, USA
Hey guys, I made full atlas maps of Metal Force for our team during the competition and was wondering if they would be useful to post in a wiki article for this game?
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
ars4326 wrote:
Alright! Here's all of the maps I made:
Stuff like this should go on our Game Resources page.
Can you send me an archive which contains all PNGs? I'll upload it to the server, so our editors can display it.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
