All Photos
It was a classic case of emulator (TBJ) vs. console (Demo). Demo kept with Karen, striving to get the perfect RNG, while TBJ expanded the category, adding a run for each of the five eligible bachelorettes. The board settled down as both got what they agreed were best times in their category, and the game remained quiet until I submitted my first run in August 2017.
I was in Seattle at the time, trying to get my foot in the door of one of the software giants. In my spare time, I did anything I could to practice and improve the necessary skills, and interest in algorithms for a complex real world brought me to speedrunning.
I started tearing apart games that had stumped me as a child. I worked with Winslinator to predict RNG in Treasure Cove and built an algorithm to predict item placement in Gizmos and Gadgets. Harvest Moon 64 wasn't the first game I tried to break, but it was the first time I met resistance- I mean competition.
Out of the five options, I chose Elli because it was the hardest algorithm. In addition to gathering items to raise affection and to build a kitchen, you have to buy a chicken because her favorite item is eggs, along with the typhoon of RNG that comes with it. The standing record from the Demo/TBJ era was just under an hour and a half. My first submission was a 1:32, but by September 2017, I'd knocked it down to 1:24. It breathed some new life into the game, and Demo started streaming again. He retaliated with a 1:22, 1:21, then a 1:19 on Oct 25. It was my turn to stream attempts, and I finally got the 1:18 on February 15. The next day, Demo held a marathon stream to beat my time, and got a 1:17 less than 12 hours after my submission.
I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here, so let me step back a couple of months. When Demo started streaming again, the whole community came out of hibernation to show up to his streams, and he would encourage anyone watching to try some attempts of their own. By the fall and winter of 2017, it seemed like everyone was going after a marriage attempt of their favorite girl. "Who is best girl?" is somewhat of a meme with us, and it felt like *someone* was streaming every day. However, the times can only improve so much, and with all the loose ends getting tied off, we started looking for something a bit more challenging.
At some point during this time- I don't remember exactly how or when- someone brought up the idea of collecting all the photos. These are collectible items earned from reaching certain milestones or accomplishing certain tasks, most within a time limit. Very few of the strategies and speed tech we now use existed back then, and then there's the party photo, whose requirements weren't known with any certainty. If it was a challenge we were looking for, this was it. The only proof on concept was a completion by Mr Weables from 2014. As far as we were aware, nobody had even attempted it since then. Demo reached out to him to get a copy of his notes, and we all put our heads together to see how we could beat it.
We had to clear the slate of rumors and start from scratch, using a cheat engine to physically test each possible requirement one at a time. There were plenty of claimed requirements, but every fan guide had different information based on rumors from different sources. It felt like there was as much speculation about the requirements for the final photo as there were for obtaining the Legendary Pokemon. Even after the complete list was checked, there were still requirements for the final photo that nobody knew existed, but we didn't know that yet.
My first attempt failed because typhoons kept me from shipping enough milk to get the cow photo. The second failed when I missed Ann on the farm. She is particularly easy to miss, because she can show up any time during the day, and if you aren't expecting her or don't see her, you don't get another chance at her photo. I didn't see her when I left the house in the morning, but she arrived later when I wasn't looking for her anymore, and I completely missed it.
In January 2017 Demo attempted another All Photos run that flopped when a typhoon blew away his chickens. Each time we failed, we learned a little bit more, and it was only a matter of time before someone would get it. These All Photos attempts drew the attention of Seifersan5. He was primarily a Harvest Moon: Back to Nature runner, but he was also interested in the longer runs. At the time, he was working on Back to Nature's 98% category, a 13-15 hour run that got a boost of popularity when the Friends of Mineral Town 98% run was featured in EZScape's "Theoretical Longest Speedruns" video. Like me, Seifer used an N64 emulator. He participated in our discussion of strategy before and after attempts, but he had yet to do a run of his own.
There were a couple of huge breakthroughs during this time, including the Blue Mist Glitch that TBJ discovered on a video posted by a Japanese Youtuber. Seifer, on the other hand, made a huge discovery for the marriage runs that changed all of them forever.
As a relatively newer member to the Harvest Moon 64 community, Seifer was a new set of eyes looking at older routes with all the new All Photos knowledge. He came up with a theory for a much easier, but also much riskier way to get the requirements for a kitchen. Normally, we spend the first few months gifting a girl to raise her affection and chopping stumps for lumber while we wait for her to be available. However, Seifer theorized that it would be faster to sleep straight through to an event that gives 1000 gold per day after a short cutscene, then sleeping straight through to the dog race near the end of the first year and using the money to bet on the a race and buy lumber as a prize. It worked especially well for Karen in particular, because a glitch allows her affection to be maxed at any time, so all the requirements are met. It was a radical strategy, but when put into action, had a lot of potential and could inject new possibilities to the other NPC marriage runs. The bad news is that the route depends entirely on lucky dog race RNG at the end of an hour long run.
Demo started running this new route, streaming Karen marriage attempts nearly every night. It was brutal- the run consisted of 20 to 30 minutes of getting up and going back to sleep before the dog race RNG makes or breaks the run. Not only did he need odds of 6x or more to earn enough medals for the lumber, but he had to bet on that dog, and the dog had to win. Most runs were lost after thirty minutes when a much higher ranked 2x or 3x dog won. He finally got it on February 9, dropping his PB from forty minutes to just over thirty. Three days later, he finished in 29:47, the first sub-30 time.
The very next month, Demo completed the first (modern) complete All Photos run on March 10 in a race between the two of us. I missed the final photo because only nine people showed up to my party, but Demo got them all, beating Mr Weables standing record of nine and a half hours by only five minutes.
I didn't complete an All Photos run until the end of March. I was on pace for the WR, but as was becoming the standard for All Photos runs, I was thwarted by a game mechanic I wasn't aware existed- a completed house extension returned my animals to their default locations. The chicken was warped into the coop and died of starvation because I had no idea this had happened. I woke up to a chicken funeral two days before the final evaluation. DezertPenguin8, another prominent streamer, helped me get through the disaster. It was the first time I got all the photos, but it was a bit of a stale victory after losing thirty minutes and the WR to a slip-up in the last five minutes of a nine hour run.
Seifer got the first sub-8 two days after my race with Demo. He'd been grinding the run for a couple of days before he finally got it, but there was something a bit off about it. Part of it was that his completion rate for All Photos was a perfect 100%, something nobody else was even close to. He was already the kind of runner that caused us to add a bunch of new, very specific rules, because he would try to incorporate loopholes. It's the speedrunner mentality to push the envelope, and he did come up with some killer strategies, but it much more often skirted the edges of cheating.
A keyboard gave him more control and faster menuing speed already, but it was only a matter of time before he tried to use a turbo controller or bind the A button to a scroll wheel to get frame perfect NPC spams. Even more disconcerting was that each of his runs improved by close to an hour, and they were all uploaded videos instead of streams. Personally, I thought he'd set the emulation speed to 110% or spliced a perfect RNG run.
Demo was the one that found solid evidence. By comparing Seifer's run to a console run, he found that his unpause time on the farm was nearly a full second faster. It doesn't seem like much, but it adds up over the course of nine hours. This would be the second time we've called him out *after* he's completed this nine hour run. The first time, we asked him to do future runs with a specific set of emulator settings that TBJ had worked out a long time before. Seifer showed these settings in the beginning of his run- to make sure it was legit this time- but the load times were still stacked in his favor. In general, we all felt that Seifer had the ability, but this particular run only won by a margin that would not have been a WR time if the load times were the same as console.
Demo created a group chat on discord and invited everyone else on the All Photos leaderboard to discuss what to do about it. Seifer already felt like an outsider, so how could we bring up the pause loading difference without making it seem like we were ganging up on him? There didn't seem to be a correct way to address it without causing a lot of backlash.
One idea was to correct the time based on pauses, but this created even more problems. The run isn't linear so a time can't extrapolated based on a smaller portion. Someone would have to sit through and count each pause and screen transition for every single submission. The problem became more complicated when Dezert found other examples of small time saves the emulator had over a console run, and there was no way to know everything that was affected.
The entire debacle led to the emulator ruling. Any Harvest Moon 64 runs completed on an emulator were going to be hidden on the leaderboards, and it was soon adopted across the all of the Harvest Moon games. Seifer fought against it, pulling his submission and asking for any other solution, but he couldn't come up with anything that could satisfy the concerns for the future of the Harvest moon community. I think once Demo stopped trying to sympathize, he really felt alone, and eventually left.
There were a couple of huge breakthroughs during this time, including the Blue Mist Glitch that TBJ discovered on a video posted by a Japanese Youtuber. Seifer, on the other hand, made a huge discovery for the marriage runs that changed all of them forever.
As a relatively newer member to the Harvest Moon 64 community, Seifer was a new set of eyes looking at older routes with all the new All Photos knowledge. He came up with a theory for a much easier, but also much riskier way to get the requirements for a kitchen. Normally, we spend the first few months gifting a girl to raise her affection and chopping stumps for lumber while we wait for her to be available. However, Seifer theorized that it would be faster to sleep straight through to an event that gives 1000 gold per day after a short cutscene, then sleeping straight through to the dog race near the end of the first year and using the money to bet on the a race and buy lumber as a prize. It worked especially well for Karen in particular, because a glitch allows her affection to be maxed at any time, so all the requirements are met. It was a radical strategy, but when put into action, had a lot of potential and could inject new possibilities to the other NPC marriage runs. The bad news is that the route depends entirely on lucky dog race RNG at the end of an hour long run.
Demo started running this new route, streaming Karen marriage attempts nearly every night. It was brutal- the run consisted of 20 to 30 minutes of getting up and going back to sleep before the dog race RNG makes or breaks the run. Not only did he need odds of 6x or more to earn enough medals for the lumber, but he had to bet on that dog, and the dog had to win. Most runs were lost after thirty minutes when a much higher ranked 2x or 3x dog won. He finally got it on February 9, dropping his PB from forty minutes to just over thirty. Three days later, he finished in 29:47, the first sub-30 time.
The very next month, Demo completed the first (modern) complete All Photos run on March 10 in a race between the two of us. I missed the final photo because only nine people showed up to my party, but Demo got them all, beating Mr Weables standing record of nine and a half hours by only five minutes.
I didn't complete an All Photos run until the end of March. I was on pace for the WR, but as was becoming the standard for All Photos runs, I was thwarted by a game mechanic I wasn't aware existed- a completed house extension returned my animals to their default locations. The chicken was warped into the coop and died of starvation because I had no idea this had happened. I woke up to a chicken funeral two days before the final evaluation. DezertPenguin8, another prominent streamer, helped me get through the disaster. It was the first time I got all the photos, but it was a bit of a stale victory after losing thirty minutes and the WR to a slip-up in the last five minutes of a nine hour run.
Seifer got the first sub-8 two days after my race with Demo. He'd been grinding the run for a couple of days before he finally got it, but there was something a bit off about it. Part of it was that his completion rate for All Photos was a perfect 100%, something nobody else was even close to. He was already the kind of runner that caused us to add a bunch of new, very specific rules, because he would try to incorporate loopholes. It's the speedrunner mentality to push the envelope, and he did come up with some killer strategies, but it much more often skirted the edges of cheating.
A keyboard gave him more control and faster menuing speed already, but it was only a matter of time before he tried to use a turbo controller or bind the A button to a scroll wheel to get frame perfect NPC spams. Even more disconcerting was that each of his runs improved by close to an hour, and they were all uploaded videos instead of streams. Personally, I thought he'd set the emulation speed to 110% or spliced a perfect RNG run.
Demo was the one that found solid evidence. By comparing Seifer's run to a console run, he found that his unpause time on the farm was nearly a full second faster. It doesn't seem like much, but it adds up over the course of nine hours. This would be the second time we've called him out *after* he's completed this nine hour run. The first time, we asked him to do future runs with a specific set of emulator settings that TBJ had worked out a long time before. Seifer showed these settings in the beginning of his run- to make sure it was legit this time- but the load times were still stacked in his favor. In general, we all felt that Seifer had the ability, but this particular run only won by a margin that would not have been a WR time if the load times were the same as console.
Demo created a group chat on discord and invited everyone else on the All Photos leaderboard to discuss what to do about it. Seifer already felt like an outsider, so how could we bring up the pause loading difference without making it seem like we were ganging up on him? There didn't seem to be a correct way to address it without causing a lot of backlash.
One idea was to correct the time based on pauses, but this created even more problems. The run isn't linear so a time can't extrapolated based on a smaller portion. Someone would have to sit through and count each pause and screen transition for every single submission. The problem became more complicated when Dezert found other examples of small time saves the emulator had over a console run, and there was no way to know everything that was affected.
The entire debacle led to the emulator ruling. Any Harvest Moon 64 runs completed on an emulator were going to be hidden on the leaderboards, and it was soon adopted across the all of the Harvest Moon games. Seifer fought against it, pulling his submission and asking for any other solution, but he couldn't come up with anything that could satisfy the concerns for the future of the Harvest moon community. I think once Demo stopped trying to sympathize, he really felt alone, and eventually left.
At the time, I didn't own a console either, so I suffered the same fate. I could easily have made many of Seifer's arguments myself. I knew it meant all my runs would disappear from the leaderboard as well, but I also felt that the decision was for the best for the future of the community.
So I started over. I bought a capture card. I re-programmed my muscle memory, learned to work an N64 controller, and started streaming runs on console. Although we both suffered a similar loss, I think the biggest difference between us is how we chose to see it.
So I started over. I bought a capture card. I re-programmed my muscle memory, learned to work an N64 controller, and started streaming runs on console. Although we both suffered a similar loss, I think the biggest difference between us is how we chose to see it.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Comments
Post a Comment