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Since this topic was bumped, I guess I can ask again after a year. Aren't there any opinions on the idea I posted above? It would be nice to get some reactions on that... I still think it's a good idea. Bisqwit said he wanted ideas, and wanted changes... and while he somewhat responded, he didn't say whether or not he thought it was a good idea.
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DarkKobold wrote:
The submission could get rejected, the author could start a thread and get permission the correct way, and then the rules are followed and everyone is happy.
Rejected and then resubmit? Seems rather random. Aren't the ones who judge these movies also the ones who are able to give permission? It seems a rather slow and arbitrary process to go through the whole forum thread process, especially since you can't be sure if any of the ones deciding things is even watching these threads. With a submission you can be sure they will take note of it (eventually), and you will get (and they also) an idea what the general audience thinks of it.
I'd say, change the rules, then the rules are followed and everyone is happy.
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Raiscan wrote:
If noone follows the rules (this one in particular) all sorts of crappy hack TASes could be submitted. You don't want that... do you?
Well, we don't want any crappy TASes submitted, and yet we still get those. The point is, every submission might turn out not to be crappy. Submissions of 'real' games, can be just as crappy as submissions of hacks.
Lets be honest, rejecting this because it's a hacked game is not a good reason at all. If this movie would be totally awesome, and everyone loved it to death, it would get accepted, just like the other TASes of hacked games that have been accepted.
There is no official "this hack has been approved for TASing"-stamp or anything. If you make a topic about a hacked game, only people interested in the hack might reply, and it might seem like a good idea to TAS. Even if someone who is able to give special permission for a hack replies and allows it, there is no knowing if the submission will be accepted, even if it was "approved". It all comes down to if people like the game (hack), the gameplay and the quality.
The concept of "special permission" is stupid imo. We might miss out on some great entertainment, just because some hack hasn't been accepted, while it might turn out to be perfect for a TAS. I don't really see the difference between 'normal' games and hacks... it all comes down to what makes an entertaining TAS.
Just imagine if Super Demo World was submitted for the first time, but didn't get special permission beforehand. Everyone loved the TAS, but it should be rejected because it didn't get permission?
Edit: Btw, this was a general comment on hacks, not on this TAS... I didn't watch this TAS.
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FreshFeeling wrote:
I wonder if Mega Man 4 or 5 could benefit as much from similar boss death positioning and 32-pixel hole slides.
Boss death positioning was already accounted for in the previous TAS of this game, and for previous TASes at megaman 4 and megaman 5. It's not always the same though, for instance, at megaman 3 it's good to position the boss in the center, since the end of the level is triggered by all the boss parts flying off-screen. At megaman 5 it's best to position him close to a corner, it's his death triggers the end of the level, and him being at the corner avoids lag when his parts move across the screen.
As for the hole slides... that only works in megaman 3.
Btw, both improvements for megaman 4 and megaman 5 are being worked on.
Hmm, this guy is bashing my Mega Man 5! Saying he hopes it doesn't become "another Mega Man 5". I found this particularly funny when watching the recent Mega Man 9 trailer:
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I fully agree with P.JBoy. Especially since the topic was created with Super Metroid as an example, which... if it were ever needed to have a sixth (!) published movie category for Super Metroid, it certainly wouldn't be "Takes damage only where necessary".
We already have two tags "Takes damage to save time" and "Takes no damage", and they are doing fine.
Warp wrote:
Not taking damage is acceptable only when it doesn't make the run slower.
I'd phrase this slightly different. Not taking damage is acceptable only if it is more entertaining than a the version that takes damage. In this case, only the movie that doesn't take damage should be published (if taking damage saves lots of time in quite a few places, then obviously this is more entertaining). I think Warp's phrase is too strict, because of for instance Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu. That entire movie would have only been about 20 frames faster with taking damage... but it would be a lot less entertaining, since it loses a lot of the sense of perfection of the movie.
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Finally an improvement worth mentioning. Quite a big improvement on my normal mode record (142.603.360 to 186.113.862: http://ccgi.gdward.plus.com/cgi-bin/tetris/highscores.php
Watch the replay here.
Edit: It's not the fastest game ever. I stopped manually locking at about 8-9 million. Normally I do this ~10-15 million. I could keep doing this a lot longer, but I generally manage to get a lot more tetrisses if I stop doing it after about that score... and after 10 million, you really start noticing that tetrisses add a lot. Especially at the end of the movie, the score rises very fast, so it's hard to tell what score I could possibly get. I can definately get over 200 million if I manage to survive a little longer, and maybe even more if I get a bit better.
(Btw, there are a quite a few people who are a lot better at tetris than I am, it's just that they aren't playing this particular tetris game)
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DK64_MASTER wrote:
AKA wrote:
With one exception save warps cost time.
<Baxter> DK64_MASTER that run you linked in the topic used save warps... you can't really compare it
FYI, he used save-warps where it was slower because he wanted to provide a save point for a segmented speedrun for sda.
So yes, while I can't compare the two, because of the route, I can say with absolute certainty that groobo's run is faster.
Not entirely sure, but the menu also seemed to cost less time in groobo's run. Either way, I very much disagree with your absolute certainty. Save waring saved a lot. I'd say this submission has a slightly higher quality (probably because of groobo's goal to make it look like it could be played normally).
Either way, of as stated before, this run could be optimized... this is however not what really bothered me. Things that did bother me a lot were for instance the method of dying after getting the Master Sword. It would have been so much quicker if damage had been gotten in some other place, and Link only needed to drop down once. This has nothing to do with problems with the emulator... just mere planning. There was also a place during the cucco collection where it seemed Link walked to far, and had to walk back for a cucco... Either I missed the reason why this was done, or it was a terrible mistake.
Don't know if I'm gonna vote on this submission, since I wouldn't know what to vote at this point, but the optimization wasn't really the issue for me, and I disagree with DK64's example of the other run.
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I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to vote no. It sure is an improvement over the currently published movie, but the movie missed too many timesavers and optimization.
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Don't really know if I'm the one to argue for it, since I also think two movies any% and 100% is enough. The 120 star run shows everything, and more than is shown in a 70 star run. So it might indeed not be very logical.
Either way, I was arguing against Warp saying that it's not well known what consitutes a glitch... Completing some stars might also be considered glitching, since they are obtained faster than (or in a way they weren't) meant to be. My only point was that this isn't a good argument, since there is one particular glitch which enables you to skip the levels. It is clear what this glitch is and how it works, and this would be the only thing banned.
Also, I never said I was in favor of someone actually making a 70 star run... I think some pasting of the 70 fastest stars from the 120 star run will show exactly the same. I only said before that 70 stars would be the least arbitrary number after 0 and 120 stars... and that 16 would be even more arbitrary.
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Warp wrote:
The definition of "glitch" is rather arbitrary itself. A "glitchless" run would require this definition, and it would be heavily a matter of opinion what constitutes a glitch.
No... BLJ is the only glitch that needs to be banned. It is perfectly clear what counts as BLJ.
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I only am in favor of runs with objectives that make some kind of sense, so I agree with mmbossman. 0 star makes sense, 120 stars with whatever glitches makes sense, and 70 stars completely without BLJ makes sense. Every other star number or restriction would be arbitrary.
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Great job on actually finishing it! Setting up all 6 emulators to even watch this TAS I find quite annoying... having to do this every time you want to work on your TAS is just cruel. I'm not even talking about having to consider that everything you press affects all games. I seriously have no idea how it is possible to do this using only 1 savestate (consider this as both a compliment and a point of critique).
Knowing that all levels are completed with the same input makes it kinda fun. There were also some other things I spotted which looked nice, such as avoiding needles at that megaman 3 bossfight. I'm sure I missed a lot of stuff though, so it would be great if an AVI were to be encoded for easier viewing. I'm interested in watching it a few times more, and focussing mostly on one game at a time, but I don't think I want to do that on the emulators.
Although you could see that the movement was correlated (if one had to move left, others had to wait, if one shoots, others also or have to stop on a ladder), but you cannot really say it looked like it all came from one input (the quadrun also suffered from this, but this run certainly isn't any better on this aspect).
The run does suffer a lot from the things which were the reason why we decided to do four megaman runs, and not six:
- Some megamans running while others slide doesn't make the movements more correlated.
-It's even harder to follow than the quadrun since the movies are alligned in 3x2, instead of 2x2. The top left and bottom right movies are very far from one another, and it's hard to follow them both (even if you were to only focus on these two movies).
- Since two games are a lot shorter, these would be completed far too soon. You tried to solve this by doing only one stage, as a demo (and I certainly wouldn't advocate doing more stages)... but this brings up something else: the games aren't really completed (I know, they aren't supposed to, but it's still a fact). While this was done so that the movies could finish somewhat at the same time, there was unfortunately quite a time difference at the end of the movie between some games.
- Playing with 6 games instead of 4 also slows down the gameplay for more games, since they all affect one another, so if watching a particular movie, it will a slower than if it were part of a quadrun.
All in all I think it's great you finished this run, since you are a very capable TASer, and would probably be more productive without others slowing you down :P
As for the run itself, I think it needs an AVI, and it will be fun for people who are interested in it to watch it, and maybe even watch it a few times. I don't think the run needs to be published because it is an unfinished movie and the concept is not as novel as the quadrun......... still nice that it's there for people who are interested, good job!
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Alden wrote:
So, we are left with either: having a big ole debate about it; having someone (Bisqwit) just say this is the list; or having an automated method of polling people's opinions and spitting out a dynamic, informed list.
Alden wrote:
Agreed. So, a big debate it is!
Yeah, a big debate is probably better than popular vote. After all, it should be movies that are best suited for some kind of list to make the list, and not the most popular movies. A combination of people's lists gives no garantee that the resulting list will be good. Arguments that a certain movie is original and different from everything else already in the list could be a good argument to have it.
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Zowayix wrote:
About background input, etc., is there a menu or something in FCEU that enables it? If so, please tell me.
Something tells me you didn't try really hard to find it:
Zowayix wrote:
Also, how come you must use frame advance when TASing multiple games? Why will the movies desync when just playing at low speed?
Well, if you just play at a low speed, one movie might end up a few frames ahead of the other movie. This means that if you give input, it won't be at the same frames for all movies, which will make the movie desync if you play it back. I can't really tell you why the frame numbers don't stay the same at normal, or low speed. Someone else will have to answer that. For me, it's enough to know that they do, and only frame advance will garantee that the frame numbers stay the same (and I'm talking about pressing frame advance for each frame, and not holding it).
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Zowayix wrote:
How do you play multiple games at once with the same input in FCEU? How was it done for the Megaman 3/4/5/6 quadruple run?
Just wondering.
All newer releases of FCEU (0.98.16 and upward) have two features which are essential for TASing multiple games at the same time. They are:
1. Run in background
2. Background input
Run in background basically means that your emulator will still be running, even if it isn't the active window. So if you play a movie on the emulator, and, without pausing minimize the emulator windown, the movie will still keep going.
Background input means that, even though the emulator isn't the active window, all keys you press will still be valid, even for the minimized emulator window. For instance, if you have a movie running, while the screen is minimized, pressing pause will still pause the movie.
Combine these two things, and you can TAS multiple games at once. What you have to do is:
1. Open FCEU as many times as you want games to TAS.
2. Load for each FCEU the game you want to TAS.
3. Pause all games.
4. Go to "record movie..." for each FCEU, and press ok.
5. Enable run in background and background input.
6. TAS like normally.
When stopping, just stop all movies. If you want to resume TASing some other time, repeat the same steps, but instead of recording movies, just load the movies. If you haven't changed your savestates, you can use them... if you have changed them, you should make a new savestate for each game, at the EXACT same frame at each movie.
This will produce as many movies as games you TASed... however, each movie will have exactly the same input. So if you were to load one of these movies for another game you TASed, it will give the wrong rom checksum, but still stay in sync.
Do note that while TASing multiple games, you can't do other stuff in the meantime, like chat or something else that uses the keyboard. All keys you press will affect the emulators. If you really want to take a break, or have something important to do, you must turn of background input for ALL FCEU's you are working with.
Another point to make is that only frame advance really works to progress. If you just let the games play like normally, or even at a low speed, the frames of the different movies will desync, and you won't be producing the same movies then!
Hope this cleared some things up :)
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Moozooh wrote:
The reason why I don't think giving SMB a star makes sense is:
1) it's going to be checked among the first hits, anyway;
2) the TAS is only a couple seconds faster than the fastest unassisted run — hardly a WOWAWESOME thing. Tool-assistance is not very prominent there, at least not for a first-timer.
