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Miloslav Ciz 2023-03-12 22:18:22 +01:00
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@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ TAS does NOT allow hacking the game in other ways than what's possible to achiev
TAS runs coexist alongside RTA (non-TAS) runs as separate categories that are beneficial to each other: RTA runners come up with speedrunning techniques that TAS programmers can perfectly execute and vice versa, TAS runners many times discover new techniques and ideas for RTA runners (for example the insane discovery of groundbreaking noseboost when TAS was introduced to Trackmania). In fact RTA and TAS runners are many times the very same people. Of course if you submit a TAS run in RTA category, you'll be seen as a cheater.
Creating a TAS is not an easy task, it requires great knowledge of the game (many times including its code) and its speedrunning, as well as a lot of patience and often collaboration with other TASers. TASes are made *offline* (not in real time), i.e. hours of work are required to program minutes or even seconds of the actual run. Many paths need to be planned and checked. Compared to RTAs, the focus switches from mechanical skills towards skillful mathematical analysis and planning. Besides this some technological prerequisites are necessary: the actual tools to assist with creation of the TAS. For many new [proprietary](proprietary.md) games it is extremely difficult to develop the necessary tools as their source code isn't available, their assembly is obscured and littered with "anti-cheating" malware. The situation is better with old games that are played in [emulators](emulator.md) such as [DOS](dos.md) games or games for consoles like [GameBoy](gameboy.md) -- emulators can give us a complete control over the environment, they allow to save and load the whole emulator state at any instant, we may slow the time down arbitrarily, rewind and script the inputs however we wish (an advanced technique includes e.g. [bruteforcing](brute_force.md): exhaustively checking all possible combinations of inputs over the following few frames to see which one produces the best time save). In games that don't have TAS tools people at least try to do the next best thing with segmented speedruns.
Creating a TAS is not an easy task, it requires great knowledge of the game (many times including its code) and its speedrunning, as well as a lot of patience and often collaboration with other TASers. TASes are made *offline* (not in real time), i.e. hours of work are required to program minutes or even seconds of the actual run. Many paths need to be planned and checked. Compared to RTAs, the focus switches from mechanical skills towards skillful mathematical analysis and planning. Besides this some technological prerequisites are necessary: the actual tools to assist with creation of the TAS. For many new [proprietary](proprietary.md) games it is extremely difficult to develop the necessary tools as their source code isn't available, their assembly is obscured and littered with "anti-cheating" malware. Many "[modern](modern.md)" (even [FOSS](foss.md)) games are additionally badly programmed and e.g. lacking a [deterministic](determinism.md) physics, which makes precise TASing almost impossible (as the traditional precise crafting of inputs requires deterministic behavior). The situation is better with old games that are played in [emulators](emulator.md) such as [DOS](dos.md) games ([Doom](doom.md) etc.) or games for consoles like [GameBoy](gameboy.md) -- [emulators](emulator.md) can give us a complete control over the environment, they allow to save and load the whole emulator state at any instant, we may slow the time down arbitrarily, rewind and script the inputs however we wish (an advanced technique includes e.g. [bruteforcing](brute_force.md): exhaustively checking all possible combinations of inputs over the following few frames to see which one produces the best time save). In games that don't have TAS tools people at least try to do the next best thing with segmented speedruns.
There also exists a term *tool assisted superplay* which is the same principle as TAS but basically with the intention of just flexing, without the goal of finishing the game fast (e.g. playing a [Doom](doom.md) level against hundreds of enemies without taking a single hit).