HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ crtified

For further context, try yourself playing NES Tetris at Level 18 speed - the slowest starting speed used in high-level competition.

It looks very easy when they do it. Almost relaxed and lazy. I'll leave it up to you to find out exactly how easy it is, or isn't. :)

And the speed escalates a great deal from there!

⬐ c22

This is cool. Towards the end he shows how using all the fingers of his hand to play the piano creates a similar "rolling" motion. I consider the ease of this "inward stroke" motion when I'm creating passwords I will have to enter often and I do find it saves me some time (and I suspect reduces opportunities for shoulder surfing).

⬐ chriscjcj

Uh-oh... you just made your password easier to guess. ;-)

⬐ Waterluvian

Love the piano example. It’s very cool to see well-established techniques from one discipline transferred to another.

It’s interesting to see that the controller itself is a major limitation rather than human ability or game challenge.

⬐ totetsu

Hyper tapping needs 12 taps a second? that's crazy. I just tried on https://skill-test.net/tap-speed-test .. at 8.8 clicks/s on my trackpad I feel my veins popping.

⬐ aendruk

The technique appears to be thrumming on the back of the controller such that when you hover a stationary finger over a button, the button presses the finger.

⬐ simlevesque

It is, indeed

At the same time it is much more than that. It's the culmination of over 40 years of development in button mashing technique. It's a way of pressing buttons fast that is applicable to any game or action which demand quick button presses.

But the most amazing this is that while it is overwhelmingly powerful in a way that completely removes any doubt about which fundamental technique to use: "das", "hypertapping", now "rolling"; there is now a cambian explosion of ways to hold the controler.

Each rolling player has their own way of using their body to implement their thoughts. I can't wait to know what the future holds, what will be the next answer to: what's the optimal way to input?

⬐ lloeki

The video mentions a certain amount of pressure, so I suspect it's about keeping the button right above the trigger point, and the jolts from the rolling makes the trigger happen, with the applied pressure allowing the button springiness to jump back above the trigger point between the rolling taps.

It does look like a drum roll: https://youtu.be/zJBcPRyBd8U?t=68

⬐ simlevesque

I would argue that it's not just a drum roll. It's more clever. It's as if someone tried to do a drum roll by hitting the bottom of the drum instead of the top.

To me it feels like it's more complex than just using techniques used elsewhere and applying them to Tetris.

⬐ w00ptenshi

This video goes into more detail about the history of the technique and proves you both right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

⬐ an_aparallel

looks like a variation of a crab scratch used in turntablism - which requires a suitably lubricated (with teflon wd-40) fader rail.

Pretty damn awesome :)

⬐ aliqot

You can also use graphite if you want bounce at the end of the flick.

⬐ taneq

Oh wow, a core memory unlocked. Way way back in the day, I remember seeing some of the older kids playing Hyper Olympics by sliding an empty drink bottle back and forth over the 'run' buttons which was apparently faster than just pressing them.

⬐ makz

In fact this has long been an electric bass playing technique https://youtu.be/MFT-k-U1Yic

⬐ simple10

Wow. I had no idea Tetris was still a big competitive sport. Makes me want to dig out my old NES and give it the technique a try.

⬐ simlevesque

aGameScout is a pillar of the community.

⬐ Agent766

The classic tetris scene has been crazy lately. Rolling (the name of the new strategy) allows players to easily play past the "kill"screen of level 29. Classic tetris matches are becoming endurance matches and we're seeing new records broken left and right of highest score and highest level in both PAL and NTSC versions. For Classic Tetris World Championships they're considering adding a second killscreen by editing the rom to limit the length of matches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hcZ1tNwvlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2r0fIQ3RI4

⬐ dmix

What's the difference between the PAL tetris and North America one?

⬐ keyle

PAL vs. NTSC differences I suppose?

   NTSC has a frame rate of 30 frames per second (FPS) at an aspect ratio of 720x480, PAL uses a frame rate of 25 FPS and 720x576.

⬐ toast0

Just FYI, PAL and NTSC are field based, not frame based. PAL is 50 fields per second, and NTSC is 60; a field is either the odd or even lines of the display. So that's 525i/50 or 480i/60

The NES always sends the shorter type of fields, so for NTSC you actually get a little over 60fps with the same 240 lines every fields; it's not standard NTSC timings, it's 240p60; same deal with PAL. The SNES and Genesis could optionally output interlaced video, but only a handful of games did.

⬐ datpiff

>The SNES and Genesis could optionally output interlaced video, but only a handful of games did.

The only one I actually remember was split-screen Sonic 2

⬐ lloeki

NTSC being 60Hz and PAL being 50Hz, there is compensation implemented in code such as shorter autorepeat delay (16 to 12 frames) and rate (6 to 4 frames), as well as gravity drop speed past level 10 (-1 frame) to keep the gameplay sort of similar to casual players.

But then details matter at these insane player levels, NTSC is 1 row every 2 frames on levels 19 to 28 then 1 frame starting with 29, but PAL is 1 row every 1 frame ever since 19, so given that frames are not the same duration PAL is comparatively harder than NTSC starting with 19 but easier starting with 29 (... provided one can survive up to that).

So wall-clock PAL gravity ends up being 1.25x faster than NTSC (but with quicker DAS: 1.5x faster delay, 1.33x faster movement), then at 19+ is 1.67x faster, then at 29+ 0.8x "faster".

⬐ hinkley

A 'second kill screen' would be adding one more level of brick speed before reaching terminal velocity?

⬐ simlevesque

No. The killscreen was 29. They couldn't go past it. With rolling they can potentially go much further. To limit the length of games they decided to stop at level 49. Then recently the official kill screen decreased to 39. Any points after level 39 does not count.

Fans and players generally prefer having a lower killscreen, while keeping a high level of gameplay.

⬐ tetrisfan

CTWC is yearly, and is neat, but most of the community and talent is developed at the monthy tournaments called Classic Tetris Monthly. The guy in charge, Vandweller, doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves for fostering the communtiy. If you're curious, here is the twitch. https://m.twitch.tv/monthlytetris They also upload to YouTube under the same name.

CTM is where rolling was first demonstrated. Eric getting to glitched colours happened during CTM. They also had a level 49 line cap (now 39) prior to CTWC this year because they had a full 10 months of tournaments showing the necessity for it. CTWC did not heed their experience, unfortunately. Also the past three champions are frequent winners of CTM. Except Joseph, who used to be a big part of the scene, but he's off to try other things.

Anyways, I recommend CTM over CTWC as a starting point if you're reading this and are curious.

I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris competitive tech which is apparently "faster than hypertapping!" (I did not know even know what "hypertapping" was)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

⬐ tedunangst

For me, there's an open question whether games like Tetris should have such hacks. (Is it a bug that should be fixed?) Obviously reaction time is a factor in a game that continuously speeds up to increase difficulty, but should inhuman button mashing offer an advantage over auto repeat? You can't make Mario run 20x faster by hyper tapping the run key.

⬐ hypertele-Xii

You can make Mario 20x faster by tapping backwards longjump on stairs, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8

⬐ gaudat

That Yayayayayayayayayayahoo! has to be one of the best bugs turned features in history.

⬐ sdwr

Yah.. yah.. yahyayayayyyyyyahoo!

⬐ boomboomsubban

I can see why one would take issue with hypertapping, a method which seemed to require some inherent body ability to be capable of, but rolling is merely a more efficient method of human tapping. It's like asking if the fosbury flop should be allowed.

⬐ tedunangst

The high jump seems to be more deliberately a test of physical skill? Did the designers of Tetris set out to make a game that measures the rate at which you can push a button? A lot of games have no glitch speedrun categories.

⬐ boomboomsubban

If the designers wanted the game to end at level 29 they could have forced the game to end there. They didn't, instead programming a game that allows users to get continue indefinitely even if the designers themselves were unable to pass level 29.

Sure you could make a no hypertapping or rolling category for Tetris. Calling better techniques a glitch seems wrong, though speed runners often disagree on what exactly constitutes a "glitch" anyway.

⬐ p1necone

Comparing rolling to the Fosbury flop is basically a perfect analogy, bravo.

⬐ throwaway675309

What??? There's no issue with hyper tapping, hyper tapping is literally just being able to press the button faster than most people can, and disallowing it would be like disqualifying somebody who has more fast twitch muscle fiber in the 100m dash.

We're not created equal, welcome to literally every sport EVER.

⬐ boomboomsubban

Seeing why someone would take issue with something is not agreeing it's an issue. I understand why the Tetris community might have been unhappy that a strategy impossible for 90% (completely made up number, I have no idea how common the ability is) of people became the meta.

I wouldn't have banned it, but I would understand if they decided to have separate categories for hypertapping and "regular" play. Rolling seems to have fixed the problem.

⬐ stormbrew

The real issue with hypertapping isn't that "not everyone can do it," really. It's the question of if it crosses the line into being inherently injurious to the player in the medium or even short term, in which case the advantage doesn't come from either natural or learned skill but a willingness to ruin your hands for silly game points.

Generally speaking regulated sports tend to draw lines here too, though obviously some draw them fairly far into the injury territory. Most of those are explicitly fighting sports though.

⬐ Ekaros

Gymnastics is also good example. Some routines are just banned, because there is possibility of damage or too high risks. And it is quite fair as long as it is clear upfront and everyone follows the same rules.

⬐ otherme123

That regulations are more in the line "we don't want participants to die or get crippled on live TV". Because gimnastics are absolutely insane for your body, the number of people who end up with totally destroyed knees, shoulders, ankles... before their 30's is horrifying.

⬐ otherme123

At least two of the best Starcraft 2 players, Maru and Byun, are having serious wrist issues. SC2 doesn't involve tricks like the ones mentioned in the article, and still actions per minute (APM) matter a lot and people get hurt. I've never heard anyone proposing regulations over APM.

OTOH, almost every sport hurts at pro level, and I think it's safe to say that all pro sports are unhealthy, except a few of them. E.g. Federer has serious issues with his knees, has had more injuries than an average 60 year old man.

⬐ None

None

⬐ stormbrew

I don't disagree that most sports are bad for the body at pro levels, but even so generally speaking they usually have implicit or explicit rules against deliberate short term damage to help you win.

The most obvious is really that while the case for rules against performance enhancing drugs is usually that they just give an unfair advantage, if you look at what's actually banned and what's not, and how natural advantages are treated, it seems pretty clear that most banned substances are also the most harmful, while others skate under regulation. Esports hasn't even reckoned with this yet afaik, even at pro levels. We'll see where we're at in 10-20 years as it mainstreams.

As you point out in the other branch, that's kind of motivated largely by PR concerns. People are mostly ok with basically anyone ruining their body slowly for a job (unless it's their own), but they balk at rapid injury. My point is really just that hypertapping potentially gets very close to this line, and that's a big part of why there was a drive to find a replacement technique or even ban it from competitive use.

Anyways, there's a lot more research into how to do high APMs with a keyboard and mouse ergonomically than there is with an NES controller, which also has a hard and shallow throw compared to either of those and a very unergonomic shape to begin with. There's a lot of reasons they aren't obviously comparable to each other when talking about the RSIs they can cause.

⬐ yayachiken

The competitive scene is probably also influenced from the speedrun community. And the speedrun community has really worked out the kinks in their ruleset, as in most games, you need to find the sweet-spot of allowing hacks and innovative techniques to break the game, but not too much that it becomes uninteresting.

For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it.

Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that.

On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.

⬐ LocalH

That’s like asking if Guitar Hero should have tapping, where you bring your strumming hand up to press fret buttons. Speed techniques that work with unmodified hardware and game code should almost always be allowed.

⬐ dcow

I dont think you’re abstractly asking a silly question. People do debate whether in-game emergent behavior that leverages obviously unintended game mechanics is allowable all the time. But the analog for Tetris here would be something like “if you press input so fast it overflows some counter and gives you free rows”. That’s not what this is. There is no “hack”. This is skill.

⬐ stormbrew

Aside from "what is too much" questions, skipping DAS in the nes version of Tetris by tapping is something almost anyone who plays the game will do if they play it long enough and isn't at all unintended behavior. It just makes sense for certain situations.

And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.

⬐ aaron695

None

⬐ GoldenRacer

I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player.

If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?

As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?

Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.

⬐ drexlspivey

This video has been posted here 3 times (one by me) with no votes/comments

⬐ dreamoffire

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes it rains

⬐ lern_too_spel

This Polygon story explains what hypertapping is and what rolling is. There is no need to go deep in the Reddit comments to find out.

⬐ woojoo666

I still recommend watching the video though. It's like the Polygon article but more audiovisual, and shows what hypertapping and rolling actually look like, and the development of rolling

⬐ userbinator

I'm not at all a gamer, but can type decently fast and see much similarity between the "rolling" technique and using all 10 fingers on the keyboard --- e.g. 120WPM is a rate of 10 keys per second, which is extremely difficult to do even with a single finger on one key, but spreading the energy across all the fingers makes it much easier to achieve those speeds. Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.

⬐ CarVac

> Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.

Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers.

Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row.

And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.

⬐ bradwood

> it very evenly uses all the fingers.

This has to be a function of what is being typed, not the keyboard it's being typed on. I am assuming you mean English evenly uses all the fingers? Something like Polish, or Welsh, I'd expect to not be very "even" on a Dvorak keyboard.

⬐ zvr

... or code in a programming language.

⬐ Nadya

Dvorak does not evenly use all fingers - it is especially more right-hand dominant and that trait was actually why I hated it as a left-handed dominant person. The amount of finger travelling the right hand has to do for Dvorak is insane. Almost all improvements of typing speed in Dvorak are attributed to the learner finally learning how to type in the first place. The main draw to learning Dvorak should for the ergonomics - which are strictly inferior to Colemak. While Colemak is nearly as right-hand dominant it doesn't require nearly as much finger travel making it more ergonomic for left-hand dominant people as well.

Also - as someone who has learned both - I adamantly believe Dvorak is inferior to Colemak in almost every single way. From difficulty learning the layout to the ergonomics once learned to having to rebind or relearn hotkeys - especially common ones like cut/copy/paste. I only wish I had discovered Colemak prior to wasting time learning Dvorak all those many years ago.

Colemak heatmap: https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg

Qwerty & Dvorak heatmap: https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg

(And as Bradwood pointed out in the response below - definitely biased towards typing English and not other languages. So people who primarily type a language that is not English may have drastically different experiences.)

⬐ opan

I went from qwerty to dvorak after hitting a max speed of 160wpm in qwerty and I still found some ergonomic improvements in dvorak. Never hit the old speeds. You're right about the right hand bias, though. I traded my left hand pain from qwerty for worse right hand pain with dvorak. It lasted even after building an ergonomic keyboard, so I switched to the workman layout after that. Things are basically fine now. Workman actually does promise 50/50 hand usage, which is rather unique and not seen in other layouts, whether more or less efficient. This criterion made me choose it over the more extreme halmak layout. Also, I like the name "workman" and that the left side homerow spells "ash".

I never liked the idea of colemak being intentionally similar to qwerty and changing up fewer keys than dvorak. I thought this idea was limiting and gave people the easy way out. Workman applies a similar idea, which again annoyed me at first, but I'm pretty used to it now. I'd say it makes it more confusing to type qwerty on another keyboard as some keys are the same and muscle memory can get mixed up between the two. I don't type qwerty much at all, so maybe this would improve over time. With dvorak I think only a and m were the same for the letters, so it felt more like hitting a distinct switch.

Workman also avoids the issue in colemak that colemak mod-dh had to fix from what I understand. Of course these layouts are not all the same age, so one might learn their layout and become loyal to it before a better one is invented. Dvorak is quite old now, and colemak is at least older than workman.

I no longer remember dvorak at all. I think I used it for 18-24 months or so. I'll probably remember qwerty forever since I grew up on it, and I use workman daily so it's safe for now. I have used workman for at least a year and a half, maybe two and a half now.

I was curious as well and found this video explanation[1]. The idea is that tapping on the back of the controller pushes it up into the player’s thumb which is resting on the D-pad causing a button press.

[1] https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE

Do you ever stop to think about whether what you are doing is wrong?

I understand and am not surprised that there are businesses built on cheating (see Blizz vs. Glider), but it's pretty striking to me that you never even mention ethics or morality in your post.

I have been creating and hacking games for at least 20 years now. The hacking actually started when a friend who I shared one of my earliest games with (most likely a Breakout clone in Windows GDI / C++) hacked it with a memory editor to change his score. I was amazed at the time, both by his apparent ingenuity but also how easy it was to do myself in other games. 12+ years later you could still use a memory editor to desync RTS games (aoe2) or even over-write resources or XP (as in some SC2 custom games back in 2010).

But I've also played games competitively. I was probably very close to good enough to compete in cash tournaments in Unreal Tournament 2004. I remember ending up in a game with a cheater who bragged about his aim-bot's ability to compensate for high latency (up to 300ms). I was genuinely impressed but at the same time found it off-putting. I imagine what I felt was tiny sliver of what someone must feel after working their whole life at a professional sport only to lose out on an Olympic gold medal to someone who was later found to be using PEDs. And then take it a step further and imagine if Lance Armstrong gloated about how long and effectively he was able to keep his PED usage undetected.

It may sound paradoxical but I follow a code of ethics when it comes to hacking. I never give myself a competitive edge in multiplayer games that take their competitions seriously. Furthermore I would never distribute or share my hacks even if I did. I treat hacking as an exercise and mostly now just write bots that "play fair" because it is still an interesting technical challenge. By "play fair", I mean they read pixels from the screen and send keyboard and mouse inputs back to the game. Same interface as a human - no direct memory reading or writing of any kind. Even Alphastar (Deepmind's SC2 AI) doesn't go that far since it uses the game's provided API. This has the added advantage of being virtually impossible to detect via software (especially with human-simulated input delays and randomness).

That's two of my perspectives: as a hacker and separately as a semi-competitive gamer. And I have a third perspective as a game developer. Because of my past experience, it was an incredibly easy decision to make everything I could server authority when I created my game Nebulous. Player's positions are lock-step synced with the server and the server even keeps track of the player's view so clients only receive data for objects nearby. This was actually a networking optimization with the added benefit of making things like your radar hack impossible. (There are certainly workarounds that I'm aware of in my game, but the idea is sound).

Nebulous has a competitive 1v1 mode (with an Elo-like leaderboard). I used to do monthly ladders with in-game rewards at the end of month but had to do away with the rewards due to the all the "social" hacking it encouraged (win trading, smurfing, and multiple accounts. Some players have literally hundreds of accounts). Sucks for everyone.

For a while, one of the things competitive players enjoyed about the game was the discovery of "lightning fingers" (coined by South Korean players) or extremely fast tapping to eject mass by using multiple fingers. Think finger-rolling in Tetris: https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE?t=80. Unfortunately you can imagine where that ended up going. Click macros became ubiquitous at the top of the ladder. There is nothing inherently wrong with a macro recording app (not sure if they still even require rooting). I wrote some hokey click-macro-detection algorithms but all you had to do was record your clicks while doing the technique successfully once for sufficiently long and replay that recording in segments. So I tried fighting fire with fire: I added an "auto click" feature with which you could hold the eject button down to eject mass at the server's tick rate (20hz), which is of course what the macros and very best legit clickers were able to accomplish. Unfortunately this really pissed off some legitimate players. It was a lose-lose situation.

Nowadays the biggest issue I face is publicly distributed bots (even available on Github!). These are even harder to detect.

I'm not sure if I really had a point with this post, but maybe I can provide unique perspective(s).

⬐ morjom

So for example you'd make "bots"/ autohotkey scripts (simplifying) to optimize your time while trying to stay within somesort of ethical limit?

⬐ grog454

Sort of, think image recognition based fish bots in WoW.

More recently in WoW classic I wrote a simple multi-boxing utility that let me play 5 characters at once using a combination of keystroke replication and repetition. Importantly I never used this in PVP. I used it in 5-man heroic dungeons (PVE) and eventually to see how far I could get in a 10 man raid (with 5 characters played by 1 person). Playing the game this way fundamentally changed the game, and it was probably the most fun I've had in any game ever.

I've never shared these hacks but regardless, public fish bots and multiboxing are/were common in wow and were always the least of Blizzards concerns. Look up "wow classic ban wave" for recent examples or the Blizzard vs. Glider suit I mentioned previously.

Maybe where I draw the line is that there are no victims with my hacks.

⬐ bruce343434

Could I send packets that say I'm looking in a certain direction and in that way make an actual frame by frame radar image?

⬐ grog454

That would possibly work for 3D first person games that do some kind of frustum culling of game data, which is an interesting idea. But Nebulous is a 2D top-down game so its not really applicable.

That said, I vaguely remember a similar sounding technique used in the Diablo 2 map hacks of yore. I think you could simulate your character moving around somehow (locally) to reveal the entire map. There were other techniques as well.

For something more along the lines of "An intermediate's guide to game hacking techniques" look up diablo 2 hack implementations. In my unprofessional opinion that is the most hacked multiplayer game of all time in terms of variety and creativity. Examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/24h8gh/how_were_peo...

Edit - oh just remembered a fun D2 anecdote: someone was able to memory-inject a keylogger on my machine and steal my password when I attempted to pick up an item he had dropped in the game. Not fun at the time!

⬐ kgwxd

Whoops, didn't mean to include a start time, can't edit it. Be kind, rewind.