This is true. The level of competition in university entry exams in Asia in insane in the early 21st century compared to the West.
This is actually both good and bad. Good because it selects some very good exam passers. And bad because it selects some very good exam passers.
A meta breaking glitch of a video game is a glitch that when discovered significantly breaks the meta.
In non-video game-game, it does sometimes happen that a meta is broken as well, but these events tend to be rarer and less dramatic than meta-breaking due to computer program glitches.
In PvP games, those glitches are generally forbidden by existing rules, and quickly patched after discovered.
In speedrunning however, they are either incorporated in the existing strategy, or may lead to the creation of a new run category for particularly significant glitches.
A non-tool-assisted speedrun.
Ciro Santilli views humans as biological robots, and therefore RTA videos can be thought of as probabilistic TAS with human achievable reflex constraints.
This aspect is especially highlighted in "speed run record evolution videos", which can be quite fun, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmS9e7kzgS4 Ocarina of Time - World Record History and Progression (Any% Speedrun, 1990s-2017) by retro (2017)
From a similar point of view, Ciro also sometimes watches/learns a bit about competitive PvP games from a "could a computer play this better than a human" point of view.
Ciro also likes to watch commented manual speedruns of games as a way of experiencing the game at a high level without spending too much time on it, often from Games Done Quick. Their format is good because it generally showcases one player focusing more on the gameplay, and three couch commentators to give context, that's a good setup.
It is a
To some extent, the ultimate achievement of a TAS is to achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) on a game, although this has been becoming rarer and rarer in newer consoles. The Nintendo 64 is the current interesting ACE discovery frontier as of 2020.
Post ACE, you then get into more subtle categories which tend to be more geometric clipping through wall glitches, but those can still be fun.
The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:
- Super Mario 64
- Super Mario 64 A press challenge
- 1-key any percent run:
- 2016 emulator run: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkOkJvLKxUY
- AGDQ 2018 commented TASBOT console verification: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvWOLT9G6tM
- Why we need one key: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/249969/in-mario-64-speedruns-why-are-the-keys-necessary/351595#351595
- related: Super Mario 64 reverse engineering project
- Super Mario World for the SNES arbitrary code execution
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPcV9uIY5i4 with in-game programmed Pong and Snake, 2014
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFh1CJOrTU Seth Bling does the credit warp manually in about 3 minutes, 2015. Later reduced to less than 1 minute: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf9i7MjViCE
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=voL3e0iqugo ACE was initially not forbidden in 11 exit rules, so Seth made an in-game manual ACE that programs an in-game accessible "exit stage now" functionality!!! This was later forbidden of course, but it was fun while it lasted.
- then he injected a Flappy Bird clone manually!!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0, 2016
- Ocarina of Time
- 2020 ACE via use after free including a non-TAS credit warp faster than the 2016 wrong glitch: www.polygon.com/2020/1/24/21080568/zelda-ocarina-of-time-arwing-spawn-video-speedrun-credits-ace-cheat-code ACE later reproduced in Majora's Mask, which has a similar game engine.
- 2016 Zelda Ocarina of Time wrong warp glitch:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gso4MuNSuV8 EZScape explains the glitch, 2016
- Zelda Majora's Mask debug menu
It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: Video 1. "Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)".
Ciro Santilli's TODO there:
- robotics simulation with control theory focus, and in particular with a model of uncertainty of measurements and commands. For example, imagine making a robot that plays golf, with the terrain fully known. And it is harder as you cannot control the arm with 100% precision.
Lists:
- trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/
- www.slant.co/topics/1933/~best-open-source-games
- libregamewiki.org/Main_Page
- www.reddit.com/r/opensourcegames/comments/197luuk/what_is_the_best_open_source_game_in_your_opinion/
- www.pcgamer.com/yall-know-about-these-huge-lists-of-free-open-source-game-clones-right/ is a list of lists
Why would anyone ever waste time playing a closed source game, when this will inevitably lead to endless hours of decompilation down the line when you want to:
Those who devote their time to the useless development of open source video games, before we even have decent open source development tooling, will, without a doubt, have their place in Heaven.
- tower defense
- www.edopedia.com/demo/pixeldefense possible source github.com/jesseakt/PixelDefense 2020-03 desperately lacks a fast forward button and enemy health bars
- platformer
- 2D platformer
- 3D platformer
- OpenClonk: Terraria-like 2D mining crafting game. Pretty well done. Not sure if you can have a super huge open world. The fact that the music stops completely so often is a bit saddening.
- Pingus: Lemmings clone. Very good!
- github.com/The-Powder-Toy/The-Powder-Toy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling-sand_game in C++. No Ubuntu 19.10 package it seems, but was easy to compile from source.
- roguelike
- Worms clone
- Hedgewars
- pokemon clone:
- Tuxemon. Worked on Ubuntu 21.10. 20ea4181e1c0db04934ee69951ea1836a3b1f642
- ARPG
- Diablo II clones:v1.12 download Worked well on Ubuntu 21.10.
- The Mana World: www.themanaworld.org/ Started somewhat as a loose The Secret of Mana clone, but they've added online play capabilities, effectively making it a MMORPG.Their user acquisition as of 2021 is really bad. Download is a wiki page, there are two client versions, etc. The .deb did not work out o box on Ubuntu 21.10 due to unmet dependencies:fails with:
sudo apt install ./manaplus_amd64.debso it won't be able to play without trying to compile and possibly minor ports since the deb does not packs dependencies. Some requests for a release with all dependencies prepacked:Their home page says it all:manaplus : Depends: libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4) but it is not installable Depends: libsdl-gfx1.2-4 (>= 2.0.22) but it is not installable Depends: manaplus-data (= 1.6.4.23-2) but 1.9.3.23-6 is to be installedSad.Server status: Online: 9 players
- Diablo II clones:
- Factorio clones:
- github.com/tobspr/shapez.io Also browser based.
This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.
Ciro Santilli has:
Ciro Santilli used it for the 2D version of his Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
One of the main children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch. Part of the Pokemon Mania of the 90s of course.
Ciro could not understand why Nintendo won't make a proper 3D MMORPG Pokemon with actually 3D Pokemon roaming the land, which is obviously what everyone wants. There are even fan games getting there!until this explaiend it beautifully Video 1. "The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)":
- pokemon-mmo-3d.com Interesting concept here, where when you deploy a Pokemon, you start controlling the Pokemon rather than the main character
- www.quora.com/Why-won-t-Nintendo-make-an-open-world-3D-Pokémon-RPG/answer/Ciro-Santilli
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact