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While watching online, I found this slot (well, all of the TAS-related slots actually) to be somewhat interesting, to see if anyone was able to do the stated glitches within 4 hours to beat the game; it sounded rather unreasonable and I was wondering whether the winning submission was just something that played the game normally without glitches. Turns out someone did manage to make a movie using that campfire glitch (or whatever it's called), so congrats to whoever did that (I hope the results are posted soon). EmoArbiter managed to get within a few seconds of the winning submission, but the real surprise to me is that Tompa's TAS didn't beat either of them (unless Tompa was restricted to the same 4 hours as everyone else?). My schedule didn't allow me to participate today but while looking briefly over the guides I somehow missed that the game was deliberately coded to be broken, glitches were previously known and documented, and their use encouraged with instructions. I only learned this information after coming back to this thread an hour later. To be honest, because I missed this information, it gave me a better impression of the game and a prospective TAS at the time than it does now.
Tompa
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Editor, Expert player (2214)
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Just to clarify: Tompa = Adelikat, Masterjun and Mothrayas. And yes, we had the same 4 hours. Without having the time to understand and optimise the stick drops, we were forced to go with what we had at the time, in order to at least have a submittable file in the end. Other than that, we lost lots of time in the end by not knowing that the coffee made you run faster. So RIP.
Post subject: pwn adventure z enemy overlay script
Editor, Player (69)
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If someone wants to run this, maybe this overlay will help with route planning by showing enemy item drop info. Shows both what the enemy will drop and what is actually dropped. Enemy RNG can be advanced by killing enemies, so route planning would need to figure out which enemies should be killed. This RNG loops every 16 kills. paz_enemy.lua edit: updated script to support more drop types, work with bird emu, fix bug in RNG calculation that resulted in bad values half of the time, remove overlays from NPCs edit 2: forgot something, also it still didn't work, fixed bug and works on bird version again edit 3: just want to point out, that if a drop says it is going to happen (example, sticks) but it doesn't, it just means that the quantity was zero. once quantity lookup is detected it will show you this info. edit 4: quantity to be dropped information added edit 5: added render offset loop, more prescience
true on twitch - lsnes windows builds 20230425 - the date this site is buried
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IMO, it would have been a nice game choice without all the stuff about glitching to the end (however 4 hours was a little bit short in that case). Out of curiosity, am I the only one who submits a movie using the "normal" route ?
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
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Masterjun wrote:
It turns out that watching a not self-explaining, completely new game isn't all that fun.
Most casual viewers have never seen before at least 90% of the games being speedrun. To them it probably makes no difference.
Noxxa
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Warp wrote:
Masterjun wrote:
It turns out that watching a not self-explaining, completely new game isn't all that fun.
Most casual viewers have never seen before at least 90% of the games being speedrun. To them it probably makes no difference.
The vast majority of games for GDQ events are selected such that either:
  • The game or franchise is well enough known that the majority of viewers will have at least a passing familiarity with it (Zelda, Pokémon, GTA, etc., and well known platforming franchises like Mario, Metroid, Mega Man)
  • The game is a good watch even for people who haven't seen the game before. With many genres e.g. racing games, platform games or other action games, it is almost always easy to tell what's going on even if you haven't seen the game before, or at least be impressed by some of the feats or tricks you are seeing.
This game was neither. Keep in mind that literally nobody except the TASers and the two RTA runners had even seen the game before. That's an audience of a few dozen people at best who could understand it, while the other 160k of Twitch viewers and GDQ audience has no idea what's going on.
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.
Editor, Expert player (2328)
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Are the results going to be posted?
Techokami
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So I wasn't able to get to the TASVideos site in time to even obtain the .zip file (yay real life!), and just as quickly as it went up, the link was wiped from the site. Anyone got a mirror of it?
Editor, Experienced player (847)
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There's a lot to points to make, even being part of the winning team: - The RNG was fixed in the worst way possible, something I think the makers of the game didn't realise. It transformed from 'random' to 'you didn't figure out the perfect route RTAers had months to make, lol have fun losing 20 seconds'. The routing for sticks had to be perfect, something which was borderline impossible in 4 hours. - Even if you did manage to figure out RNG, the half-cryptic instructions given were so detrimential we'd have been better off with nothing. Even the wording worked against us: the beginner route was faster than the documented ACE route intended to finish the game, and there was absolutely no way to figure out a fast exploit in 4 hours. The informations we were given were more like curses, and runners more skilled than us who would have definitely finished were fully sabotaged because of this (two notable examples are link_7777, who spent time on the ACE route for 2 hours before we understood it was slower, something we couldn't have figured out, and BrunoVisnadi's team, who managed to figure out the game and even had the time to wrote a lua script for it, got destroyed because their TAS was based on a random chest, where they found out the chest had random drops 30 mins before the end of the run.) - If you still managed to make heads or tails or this, don't forget you need perfect knowledge of the game! Finding out the location of the sniper rifle is no easy feat, and on top of that, if you found it, there was a faster route for it (getting it from a random chest.) Got that! No problem, just remember to buy the obscure speed up item, the coffee, which pretty much required perfect routeplanning prior to that to buy it. The only way we managed to make it as the winning team was basically to cram as much people as possible into our team and pray. I figured this out early, suggested it to arandomgameTASer, and we picked solo people who were working on the campfire route. This led to a rather large finish team: arandomgameTASer, brunovalads, brunovisaldi, deogenerate, kaizoboy, mugg, true and xy2_; with brunovalads, brunovisnadi and kaizoman joining later on when their plan didn't work. Our plan was this: two people worked on separate TASes, while all others researched the game. We found many useful tricks this way: the axe glitch (which cut in half the recovery time for the axe), the coffee, the route, the sniper rifle, where to campfire exactly, and the behavior of the final boss, where we discovered to manipulate him to try and spawn fatzombies which explode in his face. Even then, it was frantic. Our two TASers, mugg and arandomgameTASer, submitted two tases which are probably the fastest out of all, and it was at the near-deadline. If an RPG choice happens again, three simple suggestions: 1. In the case of an RTA vs TAS race, don't screw with RNG to make it easier for anyone. If the game requires heavy RNG, buff the element requiring RNG for less RNG. For example, buff campfires (10 sticks instead of 20) or make a certain type of enemy have fixed drops would have been the obivious choice, as sticks are tedious to collect. As of now, the RNG was made in the runners favor, without knowing it would completely and utterly destroy TASers. 2. Please don't document the glitches. As of this, it has lead to an utter trainwreck of information, and it confused and scared much more people than anything. I understand this was made in order to compete with the RTA runners, but it was done very, very badly. 3. Give accurate time. Speed TASing doens't have to be in 4-5 hours, it can be a little longer. Something like 8 hours would have been perfect, including the change of documentation: it would have given teams incentive to route more instead of frantically trying to TAS instead of figuring out the route, and would have been a good opportunity for everyone to find tricks. I would have liked to say that the race was exciting for everyone, and that it was active, friendly and welcoming, but I simply can't do that; it turns out TASing an glitchy RPG in 4 hours with a prebuilt half-route isn't exciting for anyone but big, organised teams. It was a good race for us, and a complete, brutal and silent murder of the will to TAS for everyone else.
ALAKTORN
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Former player
Joined: 10/19/2009
Posts: 2527
Location: Italy
You guys keep talking about how it was unfair to TASers and it should’ve been easier to TAS… yet the race was won by a TAS. Are you people serious? If you don’t give an advantage to RTA runners, they’ll obviously have no way of beating a TAS. What’s the point in the race, then? I’m seriously laughing at all these posts.
Editor, Experienced player (847)
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ALAKTORN wrote:
You guys keep talking about how it was unfair to TASers and it should’ve been easier to TAS… yet the race was won by a TAS. Are you people serious? If you don’t give an advantage to RTA runners, they’ll obviously have no way of beating a TAS. What’s the point in the race, then? I’m seriously laughing at all these posts.
Yes, the race was won by our TAS. The game was not hard to TAS, however, it was frustating to TAS, and in a speed setting no less. The reason we hold these races is I think first and foremost to introduce TASing to new people while still letting veterans have fun; yet, newcomers got demolished by the complex setup of the game, veterans got demolished by the cryptic information given and the complexity of the game. Remember that this was a speed TAS in 4 hours. Figuring out the route with all the dead along with the RNG which was a farce to TASers (it's so mocking to TASers there's a point where I can only say try the game and see how bad it is) was impossible.
Banned User
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How about next time (if a new race is ever organized again) you use an existing game, but set a particular special goal for the run (for which there obviously would not exist any prior TAS)?
Editor, Player (44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1029
I guess my problem with this is that because the competition was biased so that a TAS and realtime run could be reasonably comparable, it meant putting so many restrictions on the TASes that it wasn't really like TASing any more (and in particular, the TAS failed to exhibit any sort of TAS-like behaviour).
Invariel
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Warp wrote:
How about next time (if a new race is ever organized again) you use an existingpopular game, but set a particular special goal for the run (for which there obviously would not exist any prior TAS)?
Is what I think you meant to say.
I am still the wizard that did it. "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata <scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
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The problem there is that it gives a huge advantage to people who have TASed the game before. If it's popular, there will be some.
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Invariel wrote:
Warp wrote:
How about next time (if a new race is ever organized again) you use an existingpopular game, but set a particular special goal for the run (for which there obviously would not exist any prior TAS)?
Is what I think you meant to say.
Existing popular game, yes. (I was thinking about something like Megaman, Super Metroid, or the like.)
ais523 wrote:
The problem there is that it gives a huge advantage to people who have TASed the game before. If it's popular, there will be some.
OTOH there would also be very proficient unassisted speedrunners of the game as well. (Like here, they could have a home field advantage in the form of having more time to practice said goal.)
Invariel
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Now look at ais523's response to that point. And there's also the matter of needing to find a game that's publicly available so that AGDQ doesn't get into trouble, and the host of legal issues surrounding that, and you will quickly see why dwangoAC searches for games that /can/ be played at the marathon.
I am still the wizard that did it. "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata <scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
Alyosha
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On a bit of a side note here, I was wondering why quicknes ended up being the preferred BizHawk core? Was there something in particular or a lesson that was learned to improve emulation?
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Invariel wrote:
And there's also the matter of needing to find a game that's publicly available so that AGDQ doesn't get into trouble, and the host of legal issues surrounding that, and you will quickly see why dwangoAC searches for games that /can/ be played at the marathon.
Since using a popular existing (and copyrighted) game has legal issues, and using a custom game has entertainment issues, can the idea of a TAS competition be viable after all? Was this a somewhat failed experiment? Can it be made to work somehow? (There is also the practical problem that it may be unrealistic to have a completely new never-before-seen game made for every single GDQ event...)
Samsara
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Invariel wrote:
And there's also the matter of needing to find a game that's publicly available so that AGDQ doesn't get into trouble, and the host of legal issues surrounding that, and you will quickly see why dwangoAC searches for games that /can/ be played at the marathon.
This is the entire reason why I think criticizing the game choice is a little unfair. All licensed games are right out since we'd never in a million years get permission from Nintendo or whoever, so we'd have to turn to homebrew games, and then we'd still need to get in contact with the developers and get their permission to use the game for the event. This wouldn't be a problem for events hosted on the site, but for huge events like GDQs it's sadly limited to a small number of games. EDIT:
Warp wrote:
Since using a popular existing (and copyrighted) game has legal issues, and using a custom game has entertainment issues, can the idea of a TAS competition be viable after all? Was this a somewhat failed experiment? Can it be made to work somehow?
If we can keep finding games that fit the criteria, it's definitely viable. Streemerz went off without a hitch, and it's certainly not the only game out there that would work, though I think from now on we have to find and confirm something before we even propose the idea to GDQ. As I said, if it was contained to the site, there wouldn't be any rules in regards to legal distribution: Obviously we still can't distribute licensed games, but people can find them super easily on their own after we announce them.
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 Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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Warp wrote:
Invariel wrote:
And there's also the matter of needing to find a game that's publicly available so that AGDQ doesn't get into trouble, and the host of legal issues surrounding that, and you will quickly see why dwangoAC searches for games that /can/ be played at the marathon.
Since using a popular existing (and copyrighted) game has legal issues, and using a custom game has entertainment issues, can the idea of a TAS competition be viable after all? Was this a somewhat failed experiment? Can it be made to work somehow? (There is also the practical problem that it may be unrealistic to have a completely new never-before-seen game made for every single GDQ event...)
It has been made to work previous GDQ with Streeemerz. While the game itself was not brand new, most people did not see it coming. FWIW: I didn't participate this time when I learned the game was nonlinear because I didn't feel like routing.
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I'd point out that we shouldn't necessarily look to NES games or so here. There are plenty of high quality freeware DOS, Windows, and web based games that we would have no issue obtaining and TASing (some of them might require the creation of new tools before viability, but it would still satisfy other requirements).
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.
Player (13)
Joined: 6/17/2006
Posts: 506
I watched the VOD twice. The first time was the original, and the second time was the French restream in which keylie was doing an excellent commentary - even better than the English commentators in my opinion. I will not comment on the event from a viewer's perspective (I'm waiting for the obligatory feedback thread to do so), but it pretty much confirmed my suspicion that gathering game knowledge was the most important aspect of this competition. Seeing that the winner was a team of 6 people closely followed by the human player is also evidence of that. One big thing that surprised me is that I never realized during the competition that coffee gives a speed boost, despite seeing the item multiple times. I was so focused on gathering items that I just assumed what the items were doing without double-checking. Also, hearing from the game developer that there was an undisclosed infinite money glitch that I didn't find despite desperately searching for one kind of frustrated me, since the other big glitches were disclosed and it was the main reason that prevented me from completing my run in time. I also feel that hiding this information while revealing other big glitches was both inconsistent and unfair for everybody, since I could have found it since I was actively searching for one and won by pure luck. My initial opinion doesn't change from my last post. I disagree with everybody that said that this was a bad game choice. If the conditions of the competition were different, I believe it could have been really fun for everyone. The real issue in my opinion was the load of analysis work to perform which didn't allow enough time for routing and optimization. Looking forward to the next competition!
Former player
Joined: 7/14/2006
Posts: 51
Location: Mexico
Warp wrote:
How about next time (if a new race is ever organized again) you use an existing game, but set a particular special goal for the run (for which there obviously would not exist any prior TAS)?
Something like, pick some Megaman game and then: RTA: Normal speedrun of the game TAS: Kill all enemies on every stage while trying to go as fast as posible ?
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Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I'd rather take Warp's approach with something that was never done before as being the goal for everyone. If it was say Megaman, it might be, you must play the levels in a certain order, and you must not use Rush Jet, and you must collect the energy tanks in each level, and you must not collect any refills. That would make it a bit too "out there" to have been tried before. Although I think this style with Megaman is still too close to norm and can take too much advantage of existing knowledge to be viable.
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.