That was the primary focus of my DEF CON talk - there's a lot of opportunities for learning infosec / reverse engineering techniques using TAS tools. It's one of the main reasons I try my best to engage people and invite them in to helping out with TASBot content; we get the benefit of more resources and the people who help often learn a ton in the process.
It went into a green goal (regular goal is blue) which lets you skip the next level. Red goals (there is one earlier in the run) skip 2 levels instead. In Any% those levels can be skipped to make the run faster.
The highlight of a TASbot block isn't the TAS (that's cool too to see on the real hardware, sure) but how they proceed to demolish a game so thoroughly that other things happen. Like, say, breaking free of the game to play their created credits sequence. It's not quite Sk'hype but that's pretty cool even if it isn't quite via controller input alone.
Full disclosure: we had a lot of possible angles of attack for a true Arbitrary Code Execution but we had difficulties bringing it all together. We definitely destroyed any semblance of trust that replay files are legitimate, however. I'm still hopeful something will be discovered in time that will allow us to take total control of Super Monkey Ball.
It’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. I can’t really appreciate the TAS when levels are over before I see them. It’s like just showing me a completed Rubik’s cube and saying it was tough. The last few levels with the trick exhibitions were good though!
I really wish the GDQ submissions team had approved the category I submitted where we were going to play only a handful of levels (the most entertaining and unique ones) and spend the time to do proper commentary. Unfortunately, they opted to use the full run category and the original TAS authors weren't able to register in time. Frankly, it was nearly hard for *me* to tell what was going on and I probably watched the entire sequence a few dozen times.
Not the best TAS. It simply doesn't live up to the "highjacking a gameboy cartridge through the supergameboy plugged into a SNES via controller inputs" quality.
Kind of hard to be hype when the people on the couch seem to have a "too cool for TASes" demeanor. That's the impression I got, ~"...wow, you beat the level fast, imagine that." TASBot is usually a highlight of any GDQ for me, I hope they can come back better from this. Rather than saying (multiple times) IL commentary can't be provided, it would have been better to be prepared to use the time to instead give general information about the TAS. Just my hopefully constructive criticism, I think DwangoAC is otherwise a great presenter and hope to seeing MORE TASBot in future GDQ's!
imo the first tasbot was the best, where the bot actually physically pressed the buttons of a NES controller, the years after that they just showed recorded videos and hooked into the chat afterwards. this year they showed replays, which were started by human input and tasbot was just sitting there.
The commentary for the Super Monkey Ball segment was particularly difficult for me. I've seen a lot of feedback in the past about how people don't like to be patronized, but they also don't like to have everything on screen stated back to them either. It was hard for me to find the right balance given that some of the commentators were very quiet and the authors of the run didn't register before AGDQ 2018 registrations filled up. I think having the run authors on-site would have helped tremendously. Still, I have no regrets.
Honor to hear from you, dwangoAC. That's a bummer the authors weren't able to be there. Given the situation, you handled it very well - commentary is NOT easy, and I know it's easy for me or anyone else to give hindsighted feedback. TASBot truly is a highlight of the entire marathon for me (and I know many others) and a lot of my earlier comment was fueled by feeling the block wasn't getting the level of respect it should. I can only imagine a ton of work went into what we were presented. Can't wait to see you return.
I know it'd be silly, but I'd love to see a TAS v. RTA someday. To keep it fair(-ish), no TAS-only stuff, same route, same set of glitches planned, but the people doing the TAS still get to potentially get it perfect. Obviously the lone meatbag would lose, barring something incredible, but it'd be interesting to see just how much difference perfect execution makes, compared to an expert runner doing everything live.
if anyone wants to hear more explanation about what's going on and how it works you should watch the Super Monkey Ball 2 run from HRDQ 2017's TAS block, it's the second game played. A couple dudes talk about what's going on during that one.
Yeah, having the authors of the TAS *really* helped. I wish they could have made it to the event, there was no way I could do justice to what they had created.
The guy did explain it, he said thar those replays were modified by them and that they're tools available for everyone to use and create their own crazy replays like those last ones.
Keep in mind that Super Monkey Ball was just one of 5 different things we did. Have a look at ua-cam.com/video/kyD4190QljU/v-deo.html which has all of them in one place. Having said that, I had to organize something different this year because after last year there really wasn't anything more we could do on the technical side with NES/SNES. I instead opted to focus on entertainment as much as possible. There's things I'd like to tweak if I could but I'm happy with the overall results of what the team built.
Otacon464 They could just fucking put it at the end instead. Most of the donations pertain to the previous run anyway, just move the cut from the beginning of setup to the end of setup and there you go, simple. Also, they obviously do have at least one person *hired* to cut individual runs out of the stream, and it doesn't take that long to make one cut in a video.
the traditional tasbot input method, where it pretends to be a controller, can't work for the GameCube. or indeed any disc based console. loading times are slightly nondeterministic because of the physics of spinning a piece of shiny plastic real fast, so just playing back a bunch of buttons can't work. they got around it for this game by recording replay files on an emulator and playing them back on console
I'm sorry to hear that you were disappointed. Was there nothing out of the 5 appearances we had at GDQ (as shown at ua-cam.com/video/kyD4190QljU/v-deo.html over on the TASVideos channel) that appealed to you? What kind of content would you like us to work on for next year instead?
Spongyoshi! There's no way we can please everyone because so many people have different tastes and ideas on what a perfect TASBot segment should contain but knowing what people want to see in general is still quite helpful.
Spongyoshi! I'll be doing a stream at twitch.tv/dwangoAC today where I will go through each of the AGDQ 2018 TASBot / TAS content segments with additional explanation and I will likely be posting a highlight on UA-cam. Hopefully that will help. Thanks for the feedback!
How come anytime i watch videos of speedruns theres always 10 minutes of bullshit i have to skip through to see what the video advertises in the title?
The original plan was to use an actual bot with generous timings to drive the entire thing automatically but the hardware needed more time to bake and we kind of want to save that for when we do experiments with swapping the disc drive with solid state storage to see if we can get deterministic behavior. As it was, I kind of liked being able to advance the content at a pace of my own choosing as it allowed me to easily choose to repeat a couple of segments.
This is definitely completely legit (well, the levels up through the end of Master were, anyway). They were all made in Dolphin and a perfect human could do them in realtime on a console. They were replay files both for time (because it was faster than watching the zoom out animation) and to demonstrate TAS-level play on a physical console. Still, it's not ideal; I am hopeful we will create a way to force some games to be deterministic enough to do this properly with controller input instead.
Still, doesn't a TAS usually have full control the entire time? I get that it's not the guy running the game, but he's still just selecting and watching pre-recording videos. Even if the demos are from a TAS execution, it still seems like an unusual way of doing it.
He actually explained why they did it this way. As a disc based system, trying to run it on the original hardware normally doesn't work very well, since the way the disc is spun and read introduces some non-deterministic elements. The choices were either run it from replay files on the original hardware or run it via an emulator, and they chose the former.
10:23 explanation 10:49 gameplay
Protip: don't store replays as delta of player position unless you want this to happen
90% of the commentary is him saying "there's no time for commentary!"
Jabro the other 8% is ‘that’s not how you normally do that’ and final 2% is ‘let’s watch that again’
that's how you know it's a good TAS
I laughed pretty hard during all the physics breaking ones. I need more of that.
Always love TASes, good to see they came back this year
Infosec meets speed running, right here. "Sorry, we've now proven that you can't trust, and never could trust, replays."
That was the primary focus of my DEF CON talk - there's a lot of opportunities for learning infosec / reverse engineering techniques using TAS tools. It's one of the main reasons I try my best to engage people and invite them in to helping out with TASBot content; we get the benefit of more resources and the people who help often learn a ton in the process.
16:00 what happend to level 47?
It went into a green goal (regular goal is blue) which lets you skip the next level. Red goals (there is one earlier in the run) skip 2 levels instead. In Any% those levels can be skipped to make the run faster.
TASbot has the fastest completion time ever! 0.00
The highlight of a TASbot block isn't the TAS (that's cool too to see on the real hardware, sure) but how they proceed to demolish a game so thoroughly that other things happen. Like, say, breaking free of the game to play their created credits sequence. It's not quite Sk'hype but that's pretty cool even if it isn't quite via controller input alone.
Full disclosure: we had a lot of possible angles of attack for a true Arbitrary Code Execution but we had difficulties bringing it all together. We definitely destroyed any semblance of trust that replay files are legitimate, however. I'm still hopeful something will be discovered in time that will allow us to take total control of Super Monkey Ball.
Should have been called: Tasbot vs commentary.
It’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. I can’t really appreciate the TAS when levels are over before I see them. It’s like just showing me a completed Rubik’s cube and saying it was tough. The last few levels with the trick exhibitions were good though!
I really wish the GDQ submissions team had approved the category I submitted where we were going to play only a handful of levels (the most entertaining and unique ones) and spend the time to do proper commentary. Unfortunately, they opted to use the full run category and the original TAS authors weren't able to register in time. Frankly, it was nearly hard for *me* to tell what was going on and I probably watched the entire sequence a few dozen times.
Man I loooooved this game when it first came out. It was an awesome multi player game.
TAS Block is always quality content. Cheers to those guys
Not the best TAS. It simply doesn't live up to the "highjacking a gameboy cartridge through the supergameboy plugged into a SNES via controller inputs" quality.
Which TAS was that?
Kind of hard to be hype when the people on the couch seem to have a "too cool for TASes" demeanor. That's the impression I got, ~"...wow, you beat the level fast, imagine that." TASBot is usually a highlight of any GDQ for me, I hope they can come back better from this. Rather than saying (multiple times) IL commentary can't be provided, it would have been better to be prepared to use the time to instead give general information about the TAS. Just my hopefully constructive criticism, I think DwangoAC is otherwise a great presenter and hope to seeing MORE TASBot in future GDQ's!
imo the first tasbot was the best, where the bot actually physically pressed the buttons of a NES controller, the years after that they just showed recorded videos and hooked into the chat afterwards. this year they showed replays, which were started by human input and tasbot was just sitting there.
jan409 All TASes are replays, I don't understand what you mean.
The recent ones have been amazing from a computer science perspective. Like the TASBot running Skype on a SNES for video and NES for audio.
The commentary for the Super Monkey Ball segment was particularly difficult for me. I've seen a lot of feedback in the past about how people don't like to be patronized, but they also don't like to have everything on screen stated back to them either. It was hard for me to find the right balance given that some of the commentators were very quiet and the authors of the run didn't register before AGDQ 2018 registrations filled up. I think having the run authors on-site would have helped tremendously. Still, I have no regrets.
Honor to hear from you, dwangoAC. That's a bummer the authors weren't able to be there. Given the situation, you handled it very well - commentary is NOT easy, and I know it's easy for me or anyone else to give hindsighted feedback. TASBot truly is a highlight of the entire marathon for me (and I know many others) and a lot of my earlier comment was fueled by feeling the block wasn't getting the level of respect it should. I can only imagine a ton of work went into what we were presented. Can't wait to see you return.
My favorite speedrunner TAS.
I'm confused about all the missing levels. Can somebody explain why so many were missing? Is it an error with the replay system?
Took the warp gates, makes them unnecessary since in a normal run they'd get skipped.
Lucrayzor Oh, okay. Thank you for that!
I know it'd be silly, but I'd love to see a TAS v. RTA someday. To keep it fair(-ish), no TAS-only stuff, same route, same set of glitches planned, but the people doing the TAS still get to potentially get it perfect. Obviously the lone meatbag would lose, barring something incredible, but it'd be interesting to see just how much difference perfect execution makes, compared to an expert runner doing everything live.
Ok... the donation reading I could defend but putting ads as part of the content?
I know it's for a good cause but dangit that's blech.
childhood me just had her mind blown
how come the timer never started?
I waited half of the run for the run to start -.-
if anyone wants to hear more explanation about what's going on and how it works you should watch the Super Monkey Ball 2 run from HRDQ 2017's TAS block, it's the second game played. A couple dudes talk about what's going on during that one.
Yeah, having the authors of the TAS *really* helped. I wish they could have made it to the event, there was no way I could do justice to what they had created.
Don't stop for time Kappa they aren't timing it at all.
Why does the spinning of polycarbonate frisbees have to be so inconsistent and unpredictable
I knew I recognized his voice! It's Big Jon on the mic
I was watching this while sleep deprived and it was so trippy
9:17
oooh yeaah agdq 2018 boys!
22:28 Is this a Krazyman50 reference?
Entertaining to watch
I tried doing the Master 4 Trick but I got glitched inside that red carpet.
And then beat it with 47:47 left
Where do I find the repo for this monkeyball reverse engineering?
*When you expected an actual speedrun but it's just watching replays*
Do you know what a TAS is?
What happened to floor 47?
God you go through the videos so quickly there is no time for commentary
Jebus. I suppose I should have expected no less since Super Mario World was converted to Snake - but this still impressed me!
Im bothered by the timer stopping
Packed couch full of amazing people
All hail our robot overlords~~!!
TAS BABY
Tasbot odyssey? Possible with custom controllers
maybe cut the ads out of the videos when you're putting them on youtube? seems super skeezy to just leave them in.
I wish they explained what the hell was happening in those final levels, but pretty cool to see nonetheless
The guy did explain it, he said thar those replays were modified by them and that they're tools available for everyone to use and create their own crazy replays like those last ones.
The timer isn’t on : (
Who the fuck takes the time to master these approaches?
This video is over half not-the-run.
Spiked Vegeta isn’t announcer anymore...? 😕
Ricky Sanchez he was at one point i believe they take shifts so it’s easier on them
Where's ex floor 3 and ex floor 4
Omfg at 22:09 when the goal post popped up my stomach turned and I almost threw up.
“Motion sickness when playing a video game..ha!”
A little bit weak in comparison to other years but it is still great
Keep in mind that Super Monkey Ball was just one of 5 different things we did. Have a look at ua-cam.com/video/kyD4190QljU/v-deo.html which has all of them in one place. Having said that, I had to organize something different this year because after last year there really wasn't anything more we could do on the technical side with NES/SNES. I instead opted to focus on entertainment as much as possible. There's things I'd like to tweak if I could but I'm happy with the overall results of what the team built.
dwangoAC woah dude,that's awesome
Really wish they explained a bit more.
23:38 Don't worry, the ball was the only one injured
There are so many impossible strategies in this tool assisted run
Back on 2009 i losed at level 50...
20:25 johnny joestar masters the spin
I heard big john, and I stayed.
Okay how the fuck does TASBot work
I need him
BigJon reading donations!
Omfg why can't you guys edit 10m out so I dont have to read the comments all the time. ):
Otacon464 They could just fucking put it at the end instead. Most of the donations pertain to the previous run anyway, just move the cut from the beginning of setup to the end of setup and there you go, simple.
Also, they obviously do have at least one person *hired* to cut individual runs out of the stream, and it doesn't take that long to make one cut in a video.
now we need a learning AI to do ALTTP randomizers
Didn't know this was a kill the animals run
TAS Bot replay speedrun 100% WR
Wait, if it's a TAS bot doing the speedrun, why does he need a controller? Am I the only one who noticed this?
the traditional tasbot input method, where it pretends to be a controller, can't work for the GameCube. or indeed any disc based console. loading times are slightly nondeterministic because of the physics of spinning a piece of shiny plastic real fast, so just playing back a bunch of buttons can't work.
they got around it for this game by recording replay files on an emulator and playing them back on console
I'm so disappointed in this year's TAS
I'm sorry to hear that you were disappointed. Was there nothing out of the 5 appearances we had at GDQ (as shown at ua-cam.com/video/kyD4190QljU/v-deo.html over on the TASVideos channel) that appealed to you? What kind of content would you like us to work on for next year instead?
Spongyoshi! There's no way we can please everyone because so many people have different tastes and ideas on what a perfect TASBot segment should contain but knowing what people want to see in general is still quite helpful.
Spongyoshi! I'll be doing a stream at twitch.tv/dwangoAC today where I will go through each of the AGDQ 2018 TASBot / TAS content segments with additional explanation and I will likely be posting a highlight on UA-cam. Hopefully that will help. Thanks for the feedback!
Spongyoshi! I intend to make a highlight of the main part of it, yes. Watch for an announcement from @MrTASBot on Twitter.
the donations dude sounds like bryan barbarin
Careful spoiler : TasBot didn't do shit
Shwag
SO NO COLOR A DINO!??!?!?!
Saw terras lvl is on beginner ive beat it on exspert mode its way easier
16:28 WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED?
I can't believe I'm saying this but... that's too fast.
"What happened"
"..."
How come anytime i watch videos of speedruns theres always 10 minutes of bullshit i have to skip through to see what the video advertises in the title?
Otacon464 gotcha. I appreciate the cause
Well the timer is stopped x)
Shchwagg
Do you know da Eggroll?
Can human do that? Lololololol
41.. 42.. 45..
graciousAnomaly oh okay that makes sense!
Not TASBot at all, this is just TAS runs. No Twitch integration, please never call that a TASBot ever again.
The original plan was to use an actual bot with generous timings to drive the entire thing automatically but the hardware needed more time to bake and we kind of want to save that for when we do experiments with swapping the disc drive with solid state storage to see if we can get deterministic behavior. As it was, I kind of liked being able to advance the content at a pace of my own choosing as it allowed me to easily choose to repeat a couple of segments.
dwangoAC That's fair
dwango ac is a bit awkward and it's so cute! very sexy too.
Woah a speed run 10 mins ago..
555666Subs
This is not a run.. Just watching bullshit replays
This is definitely completely legit (well, the levels up through the end of Master were, anyway). They were all made in Dolphin and a perfect human could do them in realtime on a console. They were replay files both for time (because it was faster than watching the zoom out animation) and to demonstrate TAS-level play on a physical console. Still, it's not ideal; I am hopeful we will create a way to force some games to be deterministic enough to do this properly with controller input instead.
This shouldn’t even count all he’s doing is just watching his best speed runs not even doing it live
Faze expert So, you don't know what TAS is? And that it is simply another speed run category?
Faze expert so you don’t know what TAS is. Got it
Faze expert Just delete your comment bro. Think before you spout shit you’re not sure about.
Still, doesn't a TAS usually have full control the entire time? I get that it's not the guy running the game, but he's still just selecting and watching pre-recording videos. Even if the demos are from a TAS execution, it still seems like an unusual way of doing it.
He actually explained why they did it this way. As a disc based system, trying to run it on the original hardware normally doesn't work very well, since the way the disc is spun and read introduces some non-deterministic elements. The choices were either run it from replay files on the original hardware or run it via an emulator, and they chose the former.
first