Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I just thought of a new idea for a movie category, beating a game in the least amount of button presses.
Imagine tracking how many times a button was pressed down, and seeing how many presses are needed to beat Super Mario Bros. In each level, pressing right and B once is probably a given, but how many times do you have to press A? Each encode would have to display when a button is pressed, so people can see it.
Can SMB be beaten in less than 60 presses?
Thoughts?
Edit:
I take some of that back, SMB would only need Right+B once the entire game, leaving the rest of it to minimal jumps.
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.
I don't know about an actual movie category, but how about we start with a tool that counts button presses first? Just seeing some stats for existing videos would be interesting enough.
I think about this every now and again; the actual aesthetics of TAS-creation instead of just the end product. Surely the best possible TAS of a game would be the quickest, the most fun to watch and the most easily compressed movie file? :)
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Well, I guess you'll need to let go of right and press left and then right again on occasion. That's why I threw out 60.
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.
Presuming speed isn't a factor, and holding a button down forever counts as 1 press, I'll give this a go. I'll slap something together in SMB.
Edit: I made it to 4-2 with 49 button presses, but now I can't do the trick with the vine where you go in the pipe and get sent to the warp zone. Even when I get stuck in the wall and get taken to the extreme right edge of the screen, it doesn't work. Any suggestions?
I don't know about an actual movie category, but how about we start with a tool that counts button presses first? Just seeing some stats for existing videos would be interesting enough.
I always wanted to add button press statistics to the statistics page, but Bisqwit's database has no such info because nobody has made the tool to automatically produce that info.
It shouldn't be too difficult, though. Most recording formats are simple enough. It's more a question of someone actually going and doing it.
(Edit: Of course a "most button presses per movie length unit" statistic probably would be very skewed because many movies play with "useless" button presses just for fun (or because the author felt like it). OTOH, the "least button presses per movie length unit" would be interesting.)
I always thought that the "minimal" movie file only pressed buttons when they did some good, e.g. not holding down jump once you've passed the peak (or once you've held it down long enough to achieve maximal height), or not holding down after you've started a slide, etc (Obviously my examples aren't universal as there are situations where you'd want to do differently, depending on game mechanics and context).
I know I saw a thread in one of the forums about a Rampage TAS, which made the observations that a) if you waited long enough in each level, you got taken to the next, and this was sufficient to beat the game, and b) you had infinite continues. The resulting movie file was the largest I've ever heard of (something like 90MB?) and also had the best compression ratio.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It would have been a better file if he had just pressed start at the title screen and then stopped the movie. My Barney april fool's submission's file was stopped after pressing start for three frames at ~frame 120, which should have worked for that rampage run too.
Although not playing through the whole game, per se, the amount of button presses in Rampage would have beaten the game. Therefore it should be a legit movie.
(I think I lost the point I was trying to make. Sorry guys ^_^;)
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Any change in direction or intensity would be a new press? On the face of it that seems absurd, but given the precision of TASes and the fact that you almost never actually want a circular motion or a continuous change in intensity, I don't think it'd be a huge issue.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I know I saw a thread in one of the forums about a Rampage TAS
Here you go: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5400 (shameless self promotion!)
It's "only" a meg, not 90, but still... Kind of a different concept though -- it uses the fewest types of buttons, not fewest presses. I could probably reduce the number of presses a lot by writing a Lua script that was a bit smart than mashing turbo A :)
On the topic of fewest actual presses, I was actually pondering this the other day. By trying to eliminate all un-needed presses, you could get a decent comparison on how "complex" a TAS is in comparison to another, sort of an alternative to looking at rerecord count. Each presses essentially correlates with a "decision" by the author, and the more decisions made the more "complex" ... well not exactly but close enough :P
How would the analog stick in N64 runs work for this?
I would assume that you would count any change in magnitude, for example if you went from 0 to 50 for a few frames and then to 100 (not going anywhere in between) that would be counted as 2 presses... which is basically what Derakon wrote as I was writing this.
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
I think instead of counting how many times a button is pressed, make it simple by simply counting how many times the input changes. So you would try to make a movie with the fewest number of button changes, for example in Megaman you would switch weapons at the same frame where you had to jump, thus making only 1 change instead of 2.
For the N64 stick, just count how many times the stick position changed. So if you held it at one corner for 50 frames, then moved it to the opposite corner over one frame, and held it there for 50 frames, it would count as only 1 change, since the stick only moved once. If you moved it slower over many frames, it would count as more changes. Etc.
Joined: 4/8/2005
Posts: 1573
Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
Alter wrote:
I think every pressed frame should count, not only "new" presses.
I like that concept too. Actually, I like all of these.
Let's see...
MIP
Minimal Presses - That is what this topic is about.
MAP
Maximal Presses - Opposite to minimal presses. Hint: Use autofire. (To avoid infinitely long movies, a movie could be considered failed, if the total frame count exceeds the corresponding MIP movie.)
MIC
Minimal Changes - Count how many times the input changes. Lower value wins! (This was Blublu's idea.)
MAC
Maximal Changes - Count how many times the input changes. Higher value wins!
MII
Minimal Input - Count all active frames. Lower value wins! (I suppose this is what Alter suggested.)
MAI
Maximal Input - Count all active frames. Higher value wins! (Boring... because most games can be completed with 0 idle frames.)
PMI
Purist Minimal Input - All buttons per frame are taken into consideration, so that pressing two buttons on a frame costs more than pressing just one button. This is my personal favorite.
PMS
Not TAS related.
For experienced TASers, all of those challenges can be extended with these additional game modes:
AHN-LV6
"Auto-Hold Nightmare Level 6" - Press at least 6 buttons on every frame!
BCN
"Broken Controller Nightmare" - Only 1 button works at a time!
Oh, sorry, it's getting silly!
Don't forget about
Sticky Controller Syndrome
A pair of unrelated buttons is always pressed simultanously (so you can, for example, only attack to the left or something)
