you seem to be fixated on AC, which is relatively irrelevant
Probably because I'm in that "can ascend sometimes" bracket; AC is more important than HP in normal runs pretty much the whole game, since it reduces the damage you take from attacks as well as preventing you getting hit.
Probably because I use E only rarely.
So:
How many points is Demogorgon worth? I wonder if it's possible to hit MAXINT score before turn 2000. Probably not.
Anyway, doing something normally 'unwise' on the penultimate move (if it doesn't make the turn counter advance) would be interesting, at least if it dumped like NAO games did. Angering a god (and surviving) to get the "I believe it not!" message on the high altar would make for a good screenshot at least.
If it were even remotely possible I'd suggest ascending with one or more woodchuck pets; however I do not think it is.
Oh! I know what you can do to be entertaining. Manipulate one of the dungeon levels to generate looking like a word. (Probably use a MMap scroll on it.)
Something I recommend for entertainment:
Make every prompt and action display clearly for at least 1 frame.
People who watch movies frame by frame, trying to follow what's going on, will thank you for doing that.
I mean, if you're expending time doing some gimmicks, you might as well make it worth watching. Otherwise, you're better off writing fanfiction than making a TAS.
Something I recommend for entertainment:
Make every prompt and action display clearly for at least 1 frame.
People who watch movies frame by frame, trying to follow what's going on, will thank you for doing that.
I mean, if you're expending time doing some gimmicks, you might as well make it worth watching. Otherwise, you're better off writing fanfiction than making a TAS.
I agree with that. I was thinking about submitting two movie files, one "as fast as possible" for people who like to not know what's going on, one slowed down so you could actually see what's happening. Ilari was thinking about hacking JPC-RR to do screen redraws in the middle of frames to allow a hacked encode that showed what was going on at the subframe level, which comes to much the same thing. There'll definitely be some way to watch something played at humanly plausible speeds but with TAS strategy and luck manip, though.
you seem to be fixated on AC, which is relatively irrelevant
Probably because I'm in that "can ascend sometimes" bracket; AC is more important than HP in normal runs pretty much the whole game, since it reduces the damage you take from attacks as well as preventing you getting hit.
Probably because I use E only rarely.
So:
How many points is Demogorgon worth? I wonder if it's possible to hit MAXINT score before turn 2000. Probably not.
Demogorgon is insignificant in this. UncleBob/berry (who came up with the infinite carry capacity glitch) also came up with a way to get maximum score without wasting time, though, although it would happen after turn 2000, and possibly require an annoying amount of hexing. There are actually quite a lot of things you can do that don't cost a turn, and some of them reduce score; we can easily go over MAXINT before turn 2000, and reduce the score at the altar. (Staying below would mess up the infinite carry capacity glitch, but messing it up in zero time at the last moment just before offering the Amulet wouldn't hurt anything, as you can offer the Amulet in zero time even if completely overloaded.)
Anyway, doing something normally 'unwise' on the penultimate move (if it doesn't make the turn counter advance) would be interesting, at least if it dumped like NAO games did. Angering a god (and surviving) to get the "I believe it not!" message on the high altar would make for a good screenshot at least.
The official version of NetHack doesn't have a dumplog feature (although the version shipped with Debian does, strangely; it's one of its few changes from the official version). Thanks to the magic of TAS tools, though, I could easily create an official-looking dumplog for the game (in fact, a plain ttyrec would probably be enough).
If it were even remotely possible I'd suggest ascending with one or more woodchuck pets; however I do not think it is.
It may be (cursed figurine autotransformation + lots of luck manip), but I think it depends on the turn/action correspondence on the last turn.
Oh! I know what you can do to be entertaining. Manipulate one of the dungeon levels to generate looking like a word. (Probably use a MMap scroll on it.)
Is that even possible? I can't think of any dungeon generation algorithms that would produce anything looking even approximately like a word, apart from maybe the "caverns" scheme, which would still only be a relatively poor approximation, and require probably years of luck manipulation. Making monsters line up to form a word makes more sense, although it's been done in realtime before now; however, we'll have to collect everything needed to do that anyway apart from appropriate statues, and it would only be a few turns out of the way to collect the statues.
In other news, the strategy I was planning to use for Air doesn't work, but I think I've found an alternative. You can reduce the helplessness from hurtling to the rest of the turn (as opposed to the rest of the turn, plus 8 more turns, the usual length) by lifesaving; unfortunately, if this is done via a regular death, it'd set us back to natural form (2 actions per turn), and obviously air-E form and its 4 actions per turn would be better, as the spare turns could at least be used for walking. We can get one instadeath on Air by setting up food poisoning at the right moment before T:2000 (the timeout really is that long!), but only one, and I need to check whether it happens just before or just after the start of a turn (which will make a huge difference to the timing, due to the loss of the rest of the turn). Other potential strategies all involve becoming helpless via two different means at once, then cancelling one in order to simultaneously cancel the other (due to a glitch); being attacked while asleep (and not in the first turn of sleep) can reduce remaining the remaining helplessness timeout to 1 turn, but that seems to always cost 2 turns and is always useless; theoretically the fastest might be to reduce the helpless timeout to 0 by getting a nymph to steal a cloak while simultaneously helpless from hurtling and helpless from fainting from hunger and immediately after steal an unrelated item, but I'm not entirely sure if that's even possible to set up (I failed in wizmode, at least), and it relies a lot on the timing of all sorts of things; if it is possible to set up, it's probably only possible to set up once on the whole Plane.
Oh! I know what you can do to be entertaining. Manipulate one of the dungeon levels to generate looking like a word. (Probably use a MMap scroll on it.)
Is that even possible? I can't think of any dungeon generation algorithms that would produce anything looking even approximately like a word,
T A S should be easy enough. Branching corridor, corridor up to room on each side with corridor below room, winding corridor+room. Or, in maze,
Oh! I know what you can do to be entertaining. Manipulate one of the dungeon levels to generate looking like a word. (Probably use a MMap scroll on it.)
Is that even possible? I can't think of any dungeon generation algorithms that would produce anything looking even approximately like a word,
T A S should be easy enough. Branching corridor, corridor up to room on each side with corridor below room, winding corridor+room. Or, in maze,
That isn't a legal maze layout. NetHack's maze generation algorithm is rather restrictive.
How about making the letters separately? The point of those stairs being there is as a reminder that there is one level where you will be three locations at least (Vlad branch). I know narrow S is possible, and a T should be doable if just by lighting hijinks.
is uppercase A impossible? I suppose a narrow one wouldn't work either as pillars won't generate, but an umber hulk or woodchuck could fix that quick in a pinch.
Would a lowercase one, a la
.....#
####.#
.....#
.###.#.
.......
be valid to generate? (Dark spaces won't matter)
edit: Hmm, any benefit to getting the amulet-bearing monster (if you get one to take it off the High Priest) to nab a stack of C!oGL? Free evasion of mysterious force?
That pattern also has a pillar. The maze generator never generates a loop you can walk around, like the top of the capital A you drew earlier, or the bottom of that lowercase a.
That pattern also has a pillar. The maze generator never generates a loop you can walk around, like the top of the capital A you drew earlier, or the bottom of that lowercase a.
Use an Umber Hulk to remove a wall.
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
Another WIP encode is available (at http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack_tas_20110103.mkv encoded by Ilari; as usual, that account has a relatively small cap, so although the video is small it would be nice if someone rehosted it with more bandwidth). What I've done since the last one is to get hold of a magic lamp (used) and a magic marker (not yet used, and left pretty much where I found it), fixed god anger using a dead shopkeeper, started training detect monsters (so you all can see what's going on), then went back to the Valley, then to the top level of the Wizard of Yendor's tower, to gain the levels required for the Quest unlock. (It turns out there was no nearby seed that let us bring all five wraiths down nearby, so we get four of them, and one of them gets away. We might nab it later, or gain the 14th level via polyself rather than wraith; there are plenty of options.) We've saved prior to the first actual sequence break in the game (as opposed to "intended" routes through the game which are far too risky to do without, at the least, strategies designed specifically to survive them; the route through the Castle that we've taken so far can actually be done in realtime, but only with around a 1% success chance based on Maud's records). What I'm going to try to do is use the master mind flayer's ranged attack, which doesn't require line of sight (unlike pretty much every attack in the game), to wake the Wizard of Yendor from outside his tower, then rely on the cheating AI to take him through the nearby impenetrable wall to fight us. (This can be done in realtime, but it's a bit random; I'll see if I can figure out how to do it quickly.)
(It turns out there was no nearby seed that let us bring all five wraiths down nearby, so we get four of them, and one of them gets away. We might nab it later, or gain the 14th level via polyself rather than wraith; there are plenty of options.)
I thought that wraiths can still leave corpses on graveyard levels such as the Valley, it's just 1/3 as likely. You can kill and eat that last wraith in the valley for the 14th level.
I did another encode (emit frame on cursor warp-back or if no frame has been emitted in 20ms and display at 30fps). This encode seems to capture all the texts in the game (but the timing is completely distorted).
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:RSAA3VQFHKFZ7EP7HXD7MYXPD4THRWEN&dn=nethack-tas-dwangoac%2cais523-wip-20101230-special.mkv&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce
Size is about 1.3MB, length is 97 seconds (for 21.8s of realtime)
(It turns out there was no nearby seed that let us bring all five wraiths down nearby, so we get four of them, and one of them gets away. We might nab it later, or gain the 14th level via polyself rather than wraith; there are plenty of options.)
I thought that wraiths can still leave corpses on graveyard levels such as the Valley, it's just 1/3 as likely. You can kill and eat that last wraith in the valley for the 14th level.
We did kill and eat them on a graveyard level. The issue is manipulating a corpse at the same time as manipulating misses from all the wraiths surrounding us; diving to a level with a maze layout made it much harder for the wraiths to hit us. This bit annoys me a bit as it's a little sloppy, but it seemed better to take a "good enough" result rather than waiting over a second for a perfect seed...
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
ais523 wrote:
Another WIP encode is available (at http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack_tas_20110103.mkv encoded by Ilari; as usual, that account has a relatively small cap, so although the video is small it would be nice if someone rehosted it with more bandwidth).
I was able to follow the last encode fine watching it frame by frame You murderer!
How do you eat the brain of a ghost?
I'm not sure, but the game lets us, and it saves time, so we do.
Meanwhile, I think I've discovered yet another new glitch, this time in command repeat. Try this in debug mode (it works outside debug mode too, but is rather harder to set up for the test): wish for two amulets of life saving and a wand of death, put on one of the amulets, zap the wand at yourself; as expected, it takes a turn, and you die (with the amulet resurrecting yourself), and you get the usual "You survived that attempt on your life" message. Now, put the other amulet on, and this time, instead of zapping the wand at yourself, use command repeat to zap it at yourself three times (i.e. 3zw. with vi-keys controls, or n3zw. with numpad controls, where w is the letter of the wand). You end up dying and resurrecting from the amulet, but you only get half the usual cutscene; the lifesaving doesn't take a turn like it normally does, and the zap doesn't take an action, like it normally does. This seems a pretty useful discovery, as it's possible to cancel out both the time penalty for lifesaving and the action before to do something in no time at all, which would be pretty amazing, although it can only be used in situations where we need to die anyway (because otherwise, the time saved is cancelled out by the time lost putting on the amulet). Some notes about the glitch: it isn't compatible with using life saving to cancel out the time penalty of something else (as doing so overwrites the command repeat variable), so it's probably useful once in the run at most (for safe-teleds deathwarps, which AFAICT are useful only on the plane of Water, and only once); and I'm still not sure I fully understand it, because although I have a basic idea of what's causing it (http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Source:End.c#line428 and the line after are the culprits), I'm not sure of the exact details, and haven't managed to reproduce it with more complicated deaths than the very trivial suicide explained above. Still, I'm hopeful.
(Incidentally, the other half of the lifesaving "cutscene" - the "you survived that attempt on your life" message, can indeed happen, at the end of an entirely unrelated helpfulness; I've seen it happen in someone else's unassisted game, but nobody was sure what had caused it at the time.)
so you found a glitch that lets you kill yourself faster
That definitely needs to be a run goal.
"Abuses game code to die quicker"
Well, we're just resurrecting an action before we died, which is obviously a useful thing to do. Annoyingly, it seems to be incompatible with the "throw" action; it /is/ compatible with the "cast spell" action, though, which means it's still likely useful on Water. I just need to figure out exactly how all the timings work out there...
I haven't made any progress on the "serious" run for a while (dwangoAC and I both had busy periods at work). Luckily, one of the busy periods for me ends today, so hopefully there should be progress soon, once I've caught up on various other non-work things.
Also, I'm wondering- once you finish the run, I can't think of any technical barriers preventing a human player from duplicating it. It is worth producing a minimum-turn run somehow though.
Does nethack save the RNG state when you save?
No. In theory this could be used for luck manipulation, but saving upsets lots of other things too, such as remaining movement energy (NetHack's equivalent of a subpixel). The major issue with doing the run realtime would be pressing direction keys into walls thousands of times in a row without miscounting.
On the other hand, I frequently test bits of the run by just copy-pasting input into my terminal, which is a lot more reliable, and actually a plausible way to TAS when I'm not online and so can't ssh into dwangoAC's emulator. So doing that would make sense.
It won't be possible for a while, though, without changing the computer clock. Due to the way NetHack's difficulty settings work, based on the current date and time and the phase of the moon, it won't actually be possible to play at highest difficulty for years, so the TAS is set quite a way into the future.
