I did a playthrough of the Ocarina of Time randomizer with friends and it was a lot of fun. I can't imagine the amount of work it took to get online multiplayer working as well as it did.
How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do they deal with the linearity of Zelda games, where you NEED a certain item to succeed in a dungeon, before you can then get access to more items later? If I need the hookshot to pass the water temple, but it gives me the floating-light-boots, how am I supposed to beat the level?
As others have noted, the logic is designed as such that it's always possible. It's a graph theory problem, although I don't know if it's coded that way or just a giant pile of if/else. One interesting thing to note is that some of them have difficulty settings. Certain item dependency chains are more difficult than others, and the locations can be done such that it will always give you easy seeds or always give you…
Some are graph based, some aren't.
ALttP was a giant pile of if/else last time I checked the logic, which makes adding new modes a bit complex.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#63Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
Existing randomizers randomize things like enemy layout, chest contents, etc. An interesting different type of randomizer would be one which preserves everything like that, but adds better randomness (i.e., randomness independent of the emulator) to the game's own RNG. Currently, tool-assisted speedrunners and sometimes even live human speedrunners exploit the fact that a game's RNG is deterministic and predictable.…
I don't really see much point.
As far as making a tool-assisted run goes, a much better but deterministic randomizer wouldn't affect the process very much, and a non-deterministic one would make it basically impossible to play at all.
You'd prevent real-time RNG manipulation, but that's pretty uncommon to start with.
And you could just say "no RNG manipulation", you don't need to edit the game code.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Described in this way, it feels like a reasonable argument that humanity is like a paperclip-optimizing AI that just maybe just chooses random things to go deep on optimizing. We created a problem for ourselves that was fun -- games -- but once we'd beaten "games", the reward function kept running and now we're adversarially inventing new ways to "optimally" beat harder and harder versions of "games", ie new objectiv…
I was thinking of it like a mating display. Supposedly the goal of such a display is for the male animal to demonstrate its superior genes by wasting resources in a show of wealth, so it must purposely seek out something that is difficult or expensive to accomplish.
Heh. It's pretty amazing how much of life boils down to this.
I think the greatest form of it may be the act of saying "fuck you!" to every bell curve imaginable. Fuck bell curves, I'm going to do something else.
I really want to start a cult of bell curve hate.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#65Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
That head to head bingo format sounds really cool. Do you have any good example VODs?
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#66Why weren't these games properly randomized to begin with?
It’d probably mess with the storyline.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Existing randomizers randomize things like enemy layout, chest contents, etc. An interesting different type of randomizer would be one which preserves everything like that, but adds better randomness (i.e., randomness independent of the emulator) to the game's own RNG. Currently, tool-assisted speedrunners and sometimes even live human speedrunners exploit the fact that a game's RNG is deterministic and predictable.…
I don't really see much point. As far as making a tool-assisted run goes, a much better but deterministic randomizer wouldn't affect the process very much, and a non-deterministic one would make it basically impossible to play at all. You'd prevent real-time RNG manipulation, but that's pretty uncommon to start with. And you could just say "no RNG manipulation", you don't need to edit the game code.
It would change the end-product of TASing to be a bot instead of a fixed run. A fixed run would be impossible, like you say, and instead the goal would be to create a bot that could perform well across many runs.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#68Reminds me of an indie game called creeper world. The first version of this was released almost ten years ago as a flash game. It came with a random map generator (and all versions of that game have done that ever since). One genius twist was that the free version of the game had a map that refreshed daily. So for nearly three years, part of my morning routine was completing that map. That game had a lively community of people coming back every day to play that map. Sometimes it would be over in seconds, sometimes it would be near impossible. I eventually bought the game and later versions and that broke my routine. Also flash of course stopped being a thing.
It was a very simple game but something about it was just ridiculously engaging and addictive. v3 has a lot of user generated maps (5K+) as well as automatically generated ones and I've been playing this for close to a thousand hours according to Steam since it was released years ago. Judging from the forums and the continuous additions to the user generated maps, I'm not alone. V4 is close to completion and looks like another winner.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see much point. As far as making a tool-assisted run goes, a much better but deterministic randomizer wouldn't affect the process very much, and a non-deterministic one would make it basically impossible to play at all. You'd prevent real-time RNG manipulation, but that's pretty uncommon to start with. And you could just say "no RNG manipulation", you don't need to edit the game code.
It would change the end-product of TASing to be a bot instead of a fixed run. A fixed run would be impossible, like you say, and instead the goal would be to create a bot that could perform well across many runs.
That is something that is extremely different from a tool assisted speedrun, and I'm still not sure how it would benefit you to swap the RNG instead of making a bot on the original.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. And thus the idea of the Game Gen…
The idea of Game Genie is very much still a thing, most notably with Cheat Engine: https://www.cheatengine.org/
Which is more powerful than any game genie by a great amount, with its included debugging tools - really not just useful for games, but in general for all sorts of RE on Windows. Sadly only on Windows, I've always hoped that maybe they would add support for GDB stubs some time - there is a remote mode already, afaik.
It's also surprisingly all written in Pascal(or Free Pascal) which is actually a pretty pleasant language(even if not very popular anymore), if anyone's ever curious: https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine