0:53

2015-08-04 07:25:42 pm

very nice.

2015-08-09 09:16:46 pm

getting there...

I just watched the run. It is safe to say that my time is over. The route is nearly unintelligible from the one I once knew. At least with miles's runs I was able to pick out a couple tricks he missed to speed things up (he actually incorporated 2 of them). This run, on the other hand, is God damned perfection. Aside from some super tough tricks, which required more than one attempt, the execution is near flawless.

T3, I would love to hear a further explanation of your lost time. Outside of the obvious (bad pb maze, dbj bars, and the phazon shafts) nothing really stood out to me.

T3

2015-08-14 12:05:49 am

Quote from Caveberry:

Outside of the obvious (bad pb maze, dbj bars, and the phazon shafts) nothing really stood out to me.

you thought this exact same thing after watching sparky's 1:01 and miles' 0:56 and my 0:55 and my 0:54. this is the exact same thought that occurs after every single run. you could go back and watch one of those runs right now and take note of the mistakes you see and then reach the exact same conclusion. this is an incredibly shortsighted way of analysing a run's potential. what's not being taken into consideration is the fact that there's hidden potential everywhere in every room for every single action. for example, you could watch a ~1 minute long section of sparky's 1:01, reach the conclusion that there were maybe a few seconds of visible error and then upon comparing that exact same section to my 0:53 find that he actually loses 15-20 seconds.

it's very difficult to spot improvement from simply watching a run. all you really have to go off of is what you're seeing vs what you already know, and if you don't see any mistakes then you just assume that what you saw must have been optimal. this game is way too complex though. every single movement has the potential of being optimized. there are always better strats, better routes, new finds, understandings being made etc. the game is only progressing. so, while you could go through the run and map out individual mistakes, it's not really necessary because you're missing a whole slew of stuff that isn't even visible/isn't even known right now. the analysis i posted only considers tangible literal improvements but there are obviously way more than that. for this reason making these assertions of the lowest time possible is incredibly ignorant when you completely fail to take into consideration everything that isn't even known (not to mention the amount of time you're contending with...).

basically, there's improvement everywhere even if you aren't aware of it -right now-.

[quote=Caveberry]Outside of the obvious (bad pb maze, dbj bars, and the phazon shafts) nothing really stood out to me. [/quote]
you thought this exact same thing after watching sparky's 1:01 and miles' 0:56 and my 0:55 and my 0:54. this is the exact same thought that occurs after every single run. you could go back and watch one of those runs right now and take note of the mistakes you see and then reach the exact same conclusion. this is an incredibly shortsighted way of analysing a run's potential. what's not being taken into consideration is the fact that there's hidden potential everywhere in every room for every single action. for example, you could watch a ~1 minute long section of sparky's 1:01, reach the conclusion that there were maybe a few seconds of visible error and then upon comparing that exact same section to my 0:53 find that he actually loses 15-20 seconds.

it's very difficult to spot improvement from simply watching a run. all you really have to go off of is what you're seeing vs what you already know, and if you don't see any mistakes then you just assume that what you saw must have been optimal. this game is way too complex though. every single movement has the potential of being optimized. there are always better strats, better routes, new finds, understandings being made etc. the game is only progressing. so, while you could go through the run and map out individual mistakes, it's not really necessary because you're missing a whole slew of stuff that isn't even visible/isn't even known right now. the analysis i posted only considers tangible literal improvements but there are obviously way more than that. for this reason making these assertions of the lowest time possible is incredibly ignorant when you completely fail to take into consideration everything that isn't even known (not to mention the amount of time you're contending with...).

basically, there's improvement everywhere even if you aren't aware of it -right now-.

MrSpEeDrUn

Edit history:

MrSpEeDrUn: 2015-08-16 09:11:03 am

MrSpEeDrUn: 2015-08-16 09:10:04 am

2015-08-16 09:09:41 am

MP2 also a bit MP1 speedrunning

^thats basically the message i was trying to tell for the past 4 years (and no, i wasn't the only one). After itsp made his TAS it became pretty obvious. And yes, what T3 said is absolutely correct. There's always gonna be people who don't know whats going on. The question is just, how difficult, how optimized, how fast and how low can a human go? Maybe we will never know, but i think it would always go lower, it'd just take more and more time to drop each minute. the limit would probably be the most talented person playing for 70 years or more straight, always working on his strats, always having a huge community thinking of which strat would be reliable for that unique person and then we would have the result probably. I would really wonder if there would be a point where every second would be the breaking point for a run to end. but i think we are still way off of that, not even the frigate escape seems to result in almost the same time every time. I don't even know why you improve so much by playing a lot its kind of weird if you think about it, but it seems to work and as long as that does, we are probably not gonna get to an end to this.

^thats basically the message i was trying to tell for the past 4 years (and no, i wasn't the only one). After itsp made his TAS it became pretty obvious. And yes, what T3 said is absolutely correct. There's always gonna be people who don't know whats going on. The question is just, how difficult, how optimized, how fast and how low can a human go? Maybe we will never know, but i think it would always go lower, it'd just take more and more time to drop each minute. the limit would probably  be the most talented person playing for 70 years or more straight, always working on his strats, always having a huge community thinking of which strat would be reliable for that unique person and then we would have the result probably. I would really wonder if there would be a point where every second would be the breaking point for a run to end. but i think we are still way off of that, not even the frigate escape seems to result in almost the same time every time. I don't even know why you improve so much by playing a lot its kind of weird if you think about it, but it seems to work and as long as that does, we are probably not gonna get to an end to this.

Daryoshi

Edit history:

Daryoshi: 2015-08-16 10:38:22 am

2015-08-16 10:37:31 am

loving low%

Quote:

I don't even know why you improve so much by playing a lot its kind of weird if you think about it, but it seems to work and as long as that does, we are probably not gonna get to an end to this.

I think this is an interesting point: Since movement is so crazily complex, theoretical/ practical improvements don't cease to come to an end. I have quite little knowledge about speedrunning other games or speedrunning in general but it seems like Metroid Prime stands out as one of the most interesting in terms of development of the best run still being beatable by another minute and another minute (considering any% is less than one and a half hour RTA) and this within some years or even months! In other games it may make 100x more sense to make an estimation of what would be "perfect" (the simpler (=/= easier!) the movement and the lower the "estimated" possibility of new sequence breaks being found, the more accurate an estimation can be for a "perfect run", e.g. Super Mario Bros. is the complete opposite to Metroid Prime when it comes to "perfect runs" (you can see that there's basically just that one option that must be the fastest VS. no idea if that might probably be optimized down to the frame. I'm NOT saying speedrunning linear games such as Super Mario Bros. is any less hard (or more hard) than any 3D game, it's just harder to make predictions for the future of speedrunning a game such as a perfect time for games that are anywhere near as complex in movement as Metroid Prime.

[quote]I don't even know why you improve so much by playing a lot its kind of weird if you think about it, but it seems to work and as long as that does, we are probably not gonna get to an end to this.[/quote]

I think this is an interesting point: Since movement is so crazily complex, theoretical/ practical improvements don't cease to come to an end. I have quite little knowledge about speedrunning other games or speedrunning in general but it seems like Metroid Prime stands out as one of the most interesting in terms of development of the best run still being beatable by another minute and another minute (considering any% is less than one and a half hour RTA) and this within some years or even months! In other games it may make 100x more sense to make an estimation of what would be "perfect" (the simpler (=/= easier!) the movement and the lower the "estimated" possibility of new sequence breaks being found, the more accurate an estimation can be for a "perfect run", e.g. Super Mario Bros. is the complete opposite to Metroid Prime when it comes to "perfect runs" (you can see that there's basically just that one option that must be the fastest VS. no idea if that might probably be optimized down to the frame. I'm NOT saying speedrunning linear games such as Super Mario Bros. is any less hard (or more hard) than any 3D game, it's just harder to make predictions for the future of speedrunning a game such as a perfect time for games that are anywhere near as complex in movement as Metroid Prime.

UchihaSasuke

2015-08-19 11:24:11 pm

my umbrella goes directly to Bankai

we also have games like F-Zero GX whose limits are impossible for humans. the game is just too fast after certain points (if you've watched a TAS, you'll know why).

mp1's grazy jumping movement is one thing that's going to be impossible to nail perfectly. there'll be always some way to improve it that it's not feasible for a human (same reason why the TASes seem to die)

TheMG2

2015-08-19 11:28:27 pm

no the reason tases die is because dolphin is kind of shit

UchihaSasuke

2015-08-20 02:13:47 am

my umbrella goes directly to Bankai

they'll eventually die to jump optimization anyway.

Hazel

2015-08-20 06:48:41 am

rocks, locks, and invisible blocks

I don't know about that, it's not hard so much as it is really time consuming. Obviously time consuming movement being the main kind of movement would make it take a while to complete, but I can't imagine having dropped it just because of that.

bartendorsparky

2015-08-23 11:27:33 am

always move fast

this is incredible, congratulations! back in the day i totally could've seen someone doing :59 (though obviously not me), but i never would've imagined :53. It's absolutely amazing what you, miles, and team have been able to do with this game.

on another note i'm very jealous of the spiderball-shaft climb in phazon mines. the nostalgia is real.

T3

2015-08-23 01:50:33 pm

damn thanks! it's not like your runs didn't provide the groundwork for all of this though...

Quote:

on another note i'm very jealous of the spiderball-shaft climb in phazon mines.

much better than doing 20+ aether jumps in a row, right? hopefully you didn't have too many horrible flashbacks...

Antidote

2015-08-23 09:03:55 pm

Quote from TheMG2:

no the reason tases die is because dolphin is kind of shit

That's kind of an unfair assessment, Dolphin is improving all the time, TAS for Gamecube/Wii only recently became possible and the Dolphin developers weren't even worried about that being an issue. No, they're more worried about getting the accuracy of the emulator fixed than they are about TAS, and that's NOT a fault of the developers.

Littlenino

2015-08-23 09:07:38 pm

Unfair it may be, but it's not wrong. Dolphin is pretty bad for TASing in its current state.

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2015-08-23 11:22:58 pm

2015-08-23 09:09:09 pm

Yes, only because that's not the developers primary concern. They've been working tirelessly cleaning up the codebase, fixing AX-HLE, Zelda-ucode-HLE, and a number of other issues, also one of the chief supporters of TAS development *died* this past year.

TheMG2

2015-08-23 09:12:47 pm

I understand that they may have other priorities and am aware of the dev's death.

Dolphin is still a fucking pain in the ass in the current state and is the primary reason that tases die.

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2015-08-23 09:15:26 pm

2015-08-23 09:14:57 pm

I concede your point, but you can be a bit less cavalier about it. Emulator development is never easy, and you may never have TAS on the level of systems like NES, SNES etc. It's also why TAS for the PS1 and PS2 are few and far between, they aren't easy systems to emulate to begin with.

Aruki

Edit history:

Aruki: 2015-08-23 11:21:32 pm

2015-08-23 09:15:38 pm

I definitely agree that the TASing functionality is.. not great, since I've personally tried using it and the frequency of desyncs makes it completely unusable. That said, I do kinda think saying the entire emulator is shit and completely ignoring all the other areas where it actually does a pretty damn good job is pretty unfair. And the TASing community getting into a habit of complaining about how awful Dolphin is is probably not going to want to make the developers want to work with you to make it better.

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2015-08-23 11:21:55 pm

2015-08-23 09:16:17 pm

Quote from Parax:

I definitely agree that the TASing functionality is.. not great, since I've personally tried using it and the frequency of desyncs makes it completely unusable. That said, I do kinda think saying the entire emulator is shit and completely ignoring all the other areas where it actually does a pretty damn good job is pretty unfair. And the TASing community getting into a habit of complaining about how awful Dolphin is is probably not going to want to make the developers want to work with you to make it better.

10000% this, well said parax.