3 ms·
That's why my submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843584 called it a "Tool Assisted Speedrun on NetH
by bhaak 8y ago
That's why my submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18843584 called it a "Tool Assisted Speedrun on NetHack with RNG Exploitation". :-)
I'm not sure about the exact terminology. Is an ascension by a bot (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unCQHAbGsAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unCQHAbGsAA) also as a TAS?
Although you are right that the group that tried to do a TAS for NetHack (not sure what's their status) chose the MS-DOS port of 3.4.3 for ease of manipulating the RNG in memory and so getting rid of the "hidden information" part.
Edit: also in a game like NetHack, there is potential for an automated tool to help the player. InterHack (https://taeb.github.io/interhack/ https://taeb.github.io/interhack/) was an interface layer for 3.4.3 that added lots of useful stuff, e.g. automatic price identification or wand id from engraving. Most of that has since been incorporated in vanilla NetHack or at least forks.
- Gaelan 8y agoTo be fair, most TASes have RNG exploitation, just of a different sort (they do things that cause the RNG to be polled so that they can get rid of "bad results" and force a desired result).
- chrchang523 8y agoThat's exactly what this bot does once the gamestate is known; it starts by repeatedly walking the character into a wall to consume bad RNG values so the good ones can be used for fountain wishes. The additional wrinkles are that (i) there are 2^32 possible initial gamestates given their start-of-game choices, and the server is remote, so they needed to figure out a way to determine the initial gamestate to enable RNG exploitation, and (ii) they had to express the bot logic in a more generic way that could handle (almost?) any initial state, rather than hardcoding for a specific initial state.