I kinda understand that tool might be something that automates some things during the speedrun but what I never got is to what extent it is meant that things are automated. Further, if some parts are, but we don’t know which are and which are not, how can we even assess the difficulty on the player’s behalf?
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The point of a TAS is to find the theoretical perfect way to play a game as quickly as possible. They do this by playing the game a single frame at a time, inserting button presses at the optimal frame, going back and changing what they did if something else would be optimal, with the goal of learning the fastest possible way to do it. Humans can then aspire to get as close to that as possible.
Generally Tool Assisted Speedrun are speedrun that are entirely automated. Meaning all inputs have been preprogrammed into a software that will do them at the right time.
This allow for very specific timing to be always correct. As all your inputs are happenning at the exact frame you want them to happen.
In short no one is playing the game when you watch a TAS. Some player(s) made the lists of what inputs need to be happen when and gave this to the software, but no human is touching buttons.
A TAS uses functions like savestates and frame advance (usually via emulator) in order to create a sequence of inputs that represents the theoretical fastest possible time a game can be completed from start to finish. Creating a TAS can take a very long time and involve many people, like a complicated math problem or programming project.
A run is either TAS or it’s not. A “partial TAS” is just cheating unless some tool is explicitly allowed by the category. I’m not aware of anything like that in modern speedrunning.
My son is a team lead in qa. He did a resi 4 t.a.s. he said it’s a frame by frame perfect run.
TAS is when someone to use a tool to allow a person to input precise movements for every moment. Sometimes there are frame perfect inputs done in TAS that are very hard or impossible to pull off by humans, as they might require multiple frame perfect inputs in a second, or the inputs themselves require humans to hold a controller in a specific way.
A tool assisted speedrun is usually completely “automated” using pre-recorded inputs. In games with randomness, where the same sequence of inputs might lead to different game states, a tool assisted speedrun will usually also control that by running the game in an emulator to ensure that the inputs lead to predictable results. The point isn’t to showcase player skill like a normal speedrun, but to showcase understanding of a game’s mechanics and code, or to try and find upper limits on what is even possible in a game without having to worry about human limitations.
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