Инструментальные спидраны: Теория и практика идеального прохождения игр

Preprogrammed sequence of controller inputs used to perform tasks in video games

A tool assisted speedrun or tool assisted superplay (TAS; /t//æ//s/) is generally defined as a speedrun or playthrough composed of precise inputs recorded with tools such as video game emulators. Tool assisted speedruns are generally created with the goal of creating theoretically perfect playthroughs. This includes but is not limited to the fastest possible route to complete a game and/or showcasing new ways to optimize existing world records. Tool assisted speedrunning concerns itself with research into the theoretical limits of the games and their respective competitive categories. The fastest categories are those without any restrictions and often involve a level of gameplay impractical or even impossible for a human player, while those made according to 'real time attack' rules serve to research limits doable by human players. During development of a TAS, its creator (i. e. TASer) has full control over the game's framerate, which when brought down to a still allows frame by frame movement to record a sequence of fully precise inputs. Other tools they are equipped with include savestates and branches, rewriting recorded inputs, splicing together best sequences, as well as macros and scripts to perform automated actions. These tools give TAS creators the ability to perform with precision and accuracy beyond what a human player can do. Tool assisted speedruns are produced with an emphasis on entertainment value — such as including tricks and stunts that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult to incorporate. However, some authors may choose to lose time in order to produce a more entertaining movie since the fastest route to the intended goal may not be the most exciting. Because the vast majority of TAS playthroughs are considered humanly impossible, tool assisted speedruns also serve as a type of proof of concept to demonstrate that a certain way of running the game is possible, however not without some kind of tool assistance, at least at the time of discovery.

The term was coined during the early days of Doom speedrunning, during which the first of these runs were made (although they were sometimes also referred to as "built demos"). When Andy "Aurican" Kempling released a modified version of the Doom source code that made it possible to record demos in slow motion and in several sessions, it was possible for the first players to start recording tool assisted demos. A couple of months afterwards, in June 1999, Finnish Esko Koskimaa, Swedish Peo Sjöblom and Israeli Yonatan Donner opened the first site to share these demos, "Tools Assisted Speedruns". Like many other tool assisted speedrun communities, the maintainers of the site stressed the fact that their demos were for entertainment purposes rather than skill competitions, although the attempt to attain the fastest time possible with tools itself became a competition as well. The site became a success, updating usually several times a week with demos recorded by its maintainers and submitted by its readers. After a short while, when version 2.03 of Lee Killough's Marine's Best Friend Doom source port was released (based on the Boom source port), it became even easier for people to record these demos, adding the functionality of re recording without having to replay the demo until it reached the point where the player wanted to continue. The site was active until August 10, 2001, when Jonathan Donner posted a news message stating that their site would be an archive from now on, and pointing towards The Doomed Speed Demos Archive, a site mainly for non assisted speedruns, of which the author agreed to take over the posting of tool assisted speedruns. Although popularity dwindled since then, built demos have still been submitted as late as November 2005, and are usually made with PrBoom.

In 2003, a video of a Japanese player named Morimoto completing the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 in 11 minutes and performing stunts started floating around the Internet. The video proved to be controversial, as not many people knew about tool assisted speedruns at the time, especially for the NES. As the video was not clearly labelled as such, many people felt they had been cheated when they found out it was done using an emulator. The video, however, inspired Joel "Bisqwit" Yliluoma to start a website called NESvideos, which was dedicated to tool assisted speedruns for the NES. At first it hosted videos only for the NES, but as the community grew, its members added the features required for tool assisted speedrunning into emulators for other systems. The name of the site was later changed to TASVideos. As of May 2020, TASVideos is the largest English language web community that produces and hosts tool assisted speedruns; the site holds 4,161 complete speedruns, of which 2,213 are the fastest of their kind. Tool assisted speedruns have been made for some notable ROM hacks as well as for published games. In 2014, a speedrunning robot, TASBot, was developed, capable of performing TAS runs via direct controller input. A joke personification of tool assisted speedruns, called TAS san (TASさん, lit. Mr. TAS), has become popular among Japanese Internet users. Tool assisted speedruns uploaded to sites like Nico Nico Douga, YouTube, or TASVideos may be described as a new world record by TAS san, who is said to have the superhuman memory and reflexes needed to execute such a speedrun in real time.

Creating a tool assisted speedrun is the process of finding the optimal set of inputs to fulfill a given criterion — usually completing a game as fast as possible. No limits are imposed on the tools used for this search, but the result has to be a set of timed key presses that, when played back on the actual console, achieves the target criterion. The basic method used to construct such a set of inputs is to record one's input while playing the game on an emulator, all the while saving and loading the emulator's state repeatedly to test out various possibilities and only keep the best result. To make this more precise, the game is slowed down. Initially, it was common to slow down to some low fraction (e. g. 5%) of normal speed. However, due to advances in the field, it is now expected that the game is paused during recording, with emulation advanced one frame at a time to eliminate any mistakes made due to the urgency. The use of savestates also facilitates another common technique, luck manipulation, which is the practice of exploiting the game's use of player input in its pseudo random number generation to make favorable outcomes happen. Using a savestate from before some event, it is possible to experiment with small input variations until the event has the desired outcome. Depending on the game and event, this can be a very time consuming process, at times requiring much backtracking, and can as such take up a large portion of the total time spent making a tool assisted speedrun. Examples of luck manipulation include making the ideal piece drop next in Tetris, or getting a rare item drop the first time one kills an enemy in an action game. A rarely used tool is brute force searching for ideal inputs by making a computer play the game, trying all possible inputs. In theory, this process could find the ideal set of inputs for any game, but since the space of all possible inputs grows exponentially with the length of the sequence, this is only viable for optimizing very small portions of the speed run. Instead, a heuristic algorithm can be used. Although such an approach does not guarantee a perfect solution, it can prove very effective for solving simple puzzle games. Another rarely used technique is disassembling the game executable. By exposing the game logic, this enables the player to manipulate luck without trial and error, or reveal obscure bugs in the game engine. A more common, related technique, is to monitor the memory addresses responsible for certain effects to learn when or how they change. Memory watching is supported by most emulators used on TASVideos. org. All these techniques involve direct interaction with the game state in ways not possible without emulation, but the final result, the set of inputs that makes up the speedrun, does not depend on such manipulation of the state of the emulated machine. The tool use in tool assisted speedrunning is therefore different from the sort of state manipulation that tools like Gameshark provide, since such manipulation would not be expressible as a sequence of timed inputs.

Tool assisted speedrunning relies on the same series of inputs being played back at different times always giving the same results. In a manner of speaking, the emulation must be deterministic with regard to the saved inputs (e. g. random seeds must not change from run to run). Otherwise, a speedrun that was optimal on one playback might not even complete it on a second playback. This loss of synchronization, or "desync", occurs when the state of the emulated machine at a particular time index no longer corresponds with that which existed at the same point in the movie's production. Desyncs can also be caused by incomplete savestates, which cause the emulated machine to be restored in a state different from that which existed when it was saved. Desyncs can also occur when a user attempts to match inputs from an input file downloaded from TASVideos and fail to match the correct enemy reactions due to bad AI or RNG. Problems with emulation, such as nondeterminism and incomplete savestates, are often only discovered under the precise frame by frame conditions of tool assisted speedrunning. Emulator developers often do not give speedrunning issues high priority because they have little effect on regular gameplay; consequentially the community has forked several emulators to make them suitable for the task. These include Snes9X improvement, Gens rerecording, VBA rerecording and Mupen rerecording. If a forked emulator is used to produce a TAS, playback on the normal, unmodified version of the emulator will usually result in a desync. Emulators that currently feature the tools necessary to create tool assisted speedruns include the Arcade emulator MAME (MAMEUI's option to record an uncompressed AVI slows down a game), the NES emulator FCEUX, the Super NES emulator Snes9x, the Genesis emulator Gens, the Game Boy Advance emulator VisualBoyAdvance, the Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64, the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin, the Nintendo DS emulator DeSmuME, the Sega Saturn emulator Yabause, the PlayStation emulator PSXjin, and several others for these and other platforms. In 2012, an all in one emulator, BizHawk, was released on TASVideos. org. Due to the success of some of the cores built into the emulator, the website's team opted to phase out the use of some older emulators, like FCEUX, Mupen64 rr and PSXjin, towards the end of the year.

Tool assisted speedruns are timed in a distinct category from unassisted runs, for reasons of fairness. In unassisted runs, a difficult path is often avoided in favor of a safer, but slower one, in order to avoid risks such as dying and having to start over, failing a trick and wasting more time, or failing a setup for a difficult trick. Depending on the game, tool assisted speedruns can surpass their unassisted counterparts by a few seconds to entire hours (with the major sources of time differences including TAS only routes or tricks as well incremental advantages gained from frame by frame precision that add up over time). For an example of a highly optimized real time run, the fastest TAS of the NTSC version of Super Mario Bros. currently stands at 4:57 (4:54.032 using standard unassisted timing), while the fastest unassisted run stands at 4:58 (4:54.631 using standard unassisted timing; by Niftski).

Tool assisted runs are timed by input, i. e. from game power on to the last input necessary to reach the ending scene and/or the game credits. Any introductory cutscenes, game loading screens, and trailing dialogues after the last boss battle (if input is necessary to scroll through the text) are included in the final times. The times are exact (to the nearest frame), a level of precision that is usually not possible with unassisted runs because it cannot be determined from a recording when exactly the input ended. Speed Demos Archive and Twin Galaxies measure only the length of the gameplay proper, and begin timing when the player gains control of the character and ends timing when the player loses it. These differences in timing conventions can result in seemingly discrepant times between unassisted and tool assisted runs. For example, a Super Mario Bros. speedrun by Andrew Gardikis, a 4:58 by SDA timing, seems to be only 0.69 seconds slower than a TAS of 4 minutes and 57.31 seconds by HappyLee, but his run actually contains 5 minutes and 1 second of input starting from power on.

Because tool assisted speedruns often take more time to create than unassisted speedruns, discovery of a time saving trick may lead to a situation of the fastest unassisted speedrun being faster than its tool assisted counterpart. From August 13 to 21, 2007, the fastest unassisted speedrun of Pokémon Blue was 4 minutes faster than the best TAS due to a new trick that allowed walking through walls. On August 21, however, a TAS was submitted that was 20 minutes faster than the unassisted run. From January 12, 2020, the fastest unassisted speedrun of Donkey Kong Country was 810 milliseconds faster than the best TAS due to a new trick that allowed Diddy Kong to grab a DK barrel and then throw the DK barrel near a hidden barrel at the beginning of the last level, which skips the entire last level and level finish animation as well. Some games may produce beneficial glitches if the inserted cartridge is manipulated, which may not be reproduced on an emulator for a TAS. One of the most famous examples is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where lifting the side of the cartridge may allow the player to walk through solid walls. However, due to potential benefits for either kind of speedrunning, it is not uncommon for speedrunners of both types to collaborate. Unassisted speedrunners can provide their expertise on the subject and receive new points of reference in return. A number of unassisted speedrunners have also made complete TASes, and vice versa.

One of the most important differences between a tool assisted and unassisted run is the use of glitches in the game. Though glitch use is often prevalent in unassisted runs, tool assisted speedruns often make much heavier use of them. This may in part be because the majority of glitches are very difficult to exploit without frame precision and re recording. In some cases, a trick relies not only on precise timing but also on several variables in memory having a specific state, which would be nearly impossible to recreate in real time and without detailed knowledge of the game program.

These differences also lead to different expectations from tool assisted and unassisted speedruns. Taking damage when it can be avoided or it's not done intentionally may look sloppy in a tool assisted run, while being hit by the occasional hard to avoid enemy in a relatively long unassisted speedrun would not prevent the runner from holding their world record title. After the advent of frame advance, frame precise movement has also come to be expected, the lack of which may be characterized as sloppy play. Another difference is in the standards of use of waiting time in the speedrun: in situations where it is not possible to make the game move faster, and the player has to wait, such as in autoscrolling or any other areas of a game in which the runner does not have control over the speed, the runner is advised in TASVideos guidelines to do something entertaining for the viewers. An example of this is the gathering of 99 extra lives in the autoscrolling sections of the famous Super Mario Bros. 3 speedrun. In unassisted runs, players usually would not risk dying and having to start over to entertain the viewer. Runs that prove unentertaining may get rejected for publication, even if the run itself is technically optimized. A bad game choice may contribute to a lack of entertainment. In this context, a "bad game" may represent a goal choice that does not demonstrate the merits of tool assistance, so choosing a different goal may alleviate this issue. In other cases, such as the Excitebike TAS by Thomas Seufert, a previously unpopular game had achieved a notable entertainment boost due to massive improvements brought into play by increased tool assisted precision. When someone submits a finished movie file of their input data for publication on the TASvideos website, the audience will vote on if they find the movie entertaining or not. According to their website, movies that stick with their site rules and have an 80% Yes Vote rate is a sign to say that the audience is interested in the movie and is more likely to be accepted or replace the currently published movie and have the newer movie published on their website.

Some players have fraudulently recorded speedruns, either by creating montages of other speedrun or altering the playing time, posting them as TAS or RTA. Because tool assisted speedruns can account for all aspects of the game code, including its inner workings, and press buttons precisely and accurately, they can be used to help verify whether an unassisted speedrun record is legitimate. One of the best known cases is Billy Mitchell, who had his Donkey Kong and Pac Man Guinness records revoked in 2018, considering that he used an emulator, MAME in particular. In 2018, the world record for Dragster by Todd Rogers was removed from Twin Galaxies and Guinness records after an experiment showed that his 5.51 second time was impossible to achieve even with a TAS. Another fraudulent RTA case is from Badabun, where Tavo Betancourt streamed a Super Mario Bros. speedrun, finishing it at 05:12'120. Later, it was discovered that he was only pretending to play a series of speedruns from other YouTubers. The stream has been parodied by several YouTubers of the genre, including Kosmic, former world recorder holder for Super Mario Bros.