17 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
17 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
# Tool Assisted Speedrun
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Tool assisted speedrun (TAS) is a category of [game](game.md) [speedruns](speedrun.md) in which help of tools and play techniques that would normally be considered [cheating](cheat.md) (such as [scripting](script.md) and time manipulation) is allowed. This makes it possible to create flawless, perfect or near-perfect runs which can serve as a theoretical upper limit for what is achievable by humans -- and of course TAS runs are pretty [fun](fun.md) to watch. The normal, non-TAS runs are called RTA (real time attack). For example the current (2022) RTA world record of Super Mario Bros is 4.58.881 while the TAS record is 4.41.27.
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{ Watching a TAS is kind of like watching the [God](god.md) play the game. I personally like to watch Trackmania TASes, some are really unbelievable. Also note that [SAF](saf.md) games have TAS support. ~drummyfish }
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There is a website with videos of game TASes: https://tasvideos.org/.
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TAS does NOT allow hacking the game in other ways than what's possible to achieve by simply playing the game, i.e. it is not possible to hex edit the game's code before running it or manipulate its RAM content at run time. The goal of TAS is merely to find, as best as we can, the series of game inputs that will lead to completing the game as fast as possible. For this the game pretty much needs to be [deterministic](determinism.md), i.e. the same sequence of inputs must always reproduce the same run when replayed later.
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TAS runs coexist alongside RTA 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.
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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.
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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).
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Some idiots are against TASes for various reasons, mostly out of fear that TASers will use the tools to cheat in RTAs or that TASes will make the human runners obsolete etc. That's all bullshit of course, as can e.g. be seen in the case of [Trackmania](trackmania.md) -- in 2021 TAS tools started to appear for Trackmania and many people feared it would kill the game's competition, however after the release of the tools no such disaster happened, TAS became hugely popular and now everyone loves it, human competition happily continues, plus the development of the tools actually helped uncover many cheaters among the top players (such as Riolu who was forced to leave the scene, this caused a nice drama in the community). |