Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
feos wrote:
I have no idea how anyone can read this as "NTSC-J may be judged more harshly".
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Currently, under the "Use the correct version of the game" section of the Movie Rules, there is a clause stating that English versions of games are preferred:
NTSC is usually preferred over PAL. USA versions, labelled (U), are preferred as a majority of our audience is English speaking, though any NTSC release can be used interchangeably. Using a PAL version of the game is allowed in some situations:
I have not been a fan of this clause for a while, but I was reminded of it again recently when McBobX expressed some confusion about whether or not he was able to TAS the Japanese version of Mega Man 7, and expressed some regret at not having done so for his recent submission. I feel that it would be for the best if the clause stating a preference for USA/English versions was removed, for the following reasons:
The clause is confusing to new users. It is not immediately clear from reading what consequence, if any, may apply to movie acceptance if someone uses a version other than NTSC-U, especially in the presence of more serious rules submissions must abide by. As in the above case, this can potentially mislead people into believing their submission will be judged more harshly if they don't TAS on English, introducing a level of ambiguity that goes against the goal of making the Movie Rules clear and easy to understand.
(As noted by Drakodan) The vast majority of RTA communities do not have any kind of policy mandating the use of a particular language in speedruns. The presence of such a rule on TASVideos is a bit unusual, and someone coming into TASing from outside this circle may not see much sense in it.
The majority of site users speaking English already means that the majority of submissions to the site are already likely to be in English. Even in the event that removing this rule did lead to a sudden increase in submissions of games in other languages, I feel that this is not likely to be a problem because...
A game that can be officially played in multiple languages is unlikely to be obscure enough for a judge to have a difficult time figuring out what's going on.
"People will do worse TASes in Japanese for a lazy obsoletion" is not going to be a problem when there is already a separate rule specifying that regional differences between text and cutscene lengths are discounted during judgement.
Now, OceanBagel has made the counterpoint on Discord that for movies with Alternative goals which are judged partially on entertainment, noting that English is preferred by viewers may be important. I don't think that someone making a TAS on a non-English version of the game is likely to be a dealbreaker for acceptance (especially when such submissions already regularly need judges to request more feedback), but I think the wording of this clause could still be improved if it were to remain. Perhaps if it was phrased differently, along the lines of "All NTSC versions are acceptable, but USA versions are preferred because such and such, here are the conditions under which PAL is acceptable", it would be clearer to users that they won't have their TAS rejected if they play on Japanese or another language. Being more specific about the relevance of language choice to movies with Alternative goals could also help somewhat.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
I voted Meh.
This was a bit more interesting to watch for me than most fighting game TASes, but this also came with some confusion. It was difficult to track what was going on sometimes, and also why certain choices were being made. Why wait here and not there? How exactly does the teleportation mechanic work, is there a good reason it wasn't being used in certain places? It just didn't quite come together for me as a viewer.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
What are the hashes of the game image?
My .rvz does not match those hashes. Instead it has a SHA1 of c9bace2b16a947547ac69769e10f024ca10130d3.
Something worth noting is that when you check the hash of a .rvz in Dolphin, it gives you the hash of the decompressed dump (as if it were a .iso). Using that I instead get a SHA1 of 630ac23987ad8c38a5bf72550dfdf840a20d4ca8, which is what is listed on redump.org.
I'm getting black screen in hawk.
This is most likely due to not having the SYSCONF language properly configured in Dolphin settings. As I understand it, Wii Party will refuse to start if an incompatible language is being used.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
I think it is worth considering how RTA speedrunning leaderboards treat difficulty options here. There are certainly some which exclusively compete on harder difficulties, yes, but equally, there are some that choose to allow any difficulty option, and may indeed typically run on Easy, even when the changes to gameplay are relatively minor (e.g. Half-Life 2).
A hard movie may be more impressive for some of those games, but if someone in the speedrunning community chooses to make a TAS, it's not unlikely that they'll choose something in line with what the RTA community does if it's faster. It would be a big shame if those TASes were rejected from the site merely due to not using the highest difficulty setting.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
This conversation, as well as the one surrounding difficulty modes in the "Suggestions for changes to movie rules", bother me somewhat. It feels like the underlying problem at hand is "These movies would be bad and boring, therefore we shouldn't allow them" - not based on the poor entertainment of any actual submission per se, but merely that of imagined submissions.
I feel like the argument that PvP games are "incomplete" or otherwise shouldn't fit into the definition of a video game on the site is a strange one. Yes, a TASer is not going to be playing against an opponent, but defining a video game based on how a TASer might "play" it rather than how most people would play it seems very strange to me. Not all VS games and gamemodes that require multiple players even explicitly lack a goal with 1 player - if there's some endpoint in the level, or set of collectibles a player needs to obtain to win, that is still something that can be optimised. These kinds of situations seem to be missing from the conversation.
Really, the worst case scenario I can imagine with PvP-only games is fighting games, where you can just beat up your opponent in endless combos with no resistance...but if I'm being completely honest, that is just what most fighting game TASes already look like to me. Yeah, technically the CPU is putting up a fight, but TAS play reduces that resistance to samey, boring nothingness. I suspect many causal viewers wouldn't even notice the difference.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
.bk2 movie: User movie #638561133860455748
.dtm movie (oddly this seems to be 8 frames longer in duration??): User movie #638567315518273591
Instructions are listed in their respective user files descriptions, though it's less readable than I expected (new lines don't seem to get saved).
Edit by feos: Fixed links.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
feos wrote:
It used to sync for others, is it at least known why it fails in your case?
Wii Party seeds its main RNG value using the console's TB register, which increments every 12 CPU cycles. It seems that Dolphin 5,0-16793 and its corresponding BizHawk Dolphin Core build don't land on the same TB value for some reason (at least in my TAS), leading to different outcomes and causing a desync.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
I've started work on a TAS using BizHawk Dolphin Core, but it is starting to look like it might not be able to sync on regular Dolphin. To be clear, the TAS syncs absolutely fine on the BizHawk build - just not on the corresponding official Dolphin build. Would this be acceptable to submit to the site?
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
When dumping video and audio for Wii, the framerate will be about double what it should be (120fps instead of 60fps), but otherwise looks fine. I haven't checked GC.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Attempting to save or load states via Lua scripting on the latest version of Dolphin Core seems to cause BizHawk to freeze up, at least for Wii. Saving and loading states by any other means seems to work fine.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Winslinator wrote:
I think there are two routing improvements to be had here. The first actually involves finishing off Donkey Kong Jr. with Modern Easy. This is because once you've earned 5 stars in all four modes for one of the base games, you're awarded an extra 5 stars. And since this TAS already completed three of the Donkey Kong Jr. game modes, that means getting 1000 points in Donkey Kong Jr. Modern Easy effectively awards 10 stars!
Are you sure about this? Checking the save file for my recent playthrough of Game & Watch Gallery 3, I have a total of 100 stars, whereas I should have 105 if this was the case (I got 5 on all modes for Mario Bros). Additionally, this would mean the max stars achievable is 175 instead of 150, which doesn't line up with what I've seen online. (It also makes putting a "Congratulations" screen at 150 rather than 175 a bit strange...)
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
I've watched the first half hour of this TAS. This is a weird one for me. On the one hand, this is quite different to a lot of the other Undertale TASes I've seen published on the site. It's showcasing a whole lot of weird things for the purpose of showcasing them, which I like! On the other hand, a lot of the stuff getting shown off does start to feel old and same-y after a while, and the constant cacophony of overlapping music becomes frustrating to listen to after a while. Apparently this TAS was originally made with additional graphics and music mods in mind, which may well contribute to the entertainment value. I don't know if that would be acceptable on TASVideos, but seeing as this submission already has a modified save file, it seems worth thinking about.
Overall, while I enjoy the idea of seeing more TASes in the vein of the SMW glitchfest, I don't think I could find myself wanting to watch the full 4 hours of this. Meh vote.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Masterjun wrote:
I'm not sure how much I can take this as a fact. But if this statement meant something like "Because a TASVideos judge said that the wasted frames were not entertaining, entire communities lost faith in the entire site", then I think this reaction is more dramatic than justified.
I don't know how many communities OceanBagel was talking about here. However, I did mention on Discord the day before his post that the Wii series speedrunning community had also lost some faith in TASVideos as a result of this judgement, so it's possible that's where the "multiple" comes from, in which case I can probably give some more context.
tendog was pretty active in the Wii series speedrunning community around this time, having submitted a Wii Sports Golf TAS to TASVideos only 3 months prior, so his next submission to TASVideos and the feedback it received ended up getting some attention there as well. The dissatisfaction with how things went was more related to the submission as a whole (the "rejected for being a demo" was probably a bigger point of frustration tbh), and was ultimately not the entire reason that the community came to lose interest in TASVideos. Negative feedback towards the Golf TAS mentioned prior, misunderstandings about how the "clean SRAM" and "must beat all known records" rules interacted, and the rejection later in 2019 of two Wii Party TASes - one for "being a minigame" despite not being a minigame - all helped contribute to feelings of hostility. The Deltarune TAS was simply one of many events over the course of 12 months that helped solidify that.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Did you discuss things with Blazingmo at all prior to posting this? You cite the submission as evidence that "people don't want to go through SRAM verification hassle" and say that "the author's never gonna feel the need to make a movie with SRAM enabled", but it seems to me that unless Blazingmo has actually told you this directly, you're just making assumptions about his interests and intentions. Many TASers choose to TAS with SRAM disabled because they find that a preferable category, or make new iterations of a TAS for small and big improvements over and over again. This is Blazingmo's second submission of this exact game, even.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Deciding how to vote wasn't hard - I always enjoy watching TASes of Wario Land 4, and this one was no exception. That said, I do feel like I might have enjoyed this a bit less than the other current publications. While it definitely shows off some routes that aren't in the others, the lack of zips did make everything feel a bit more same-y across the run, so it feels like it loses variety in the process of gaining some. That said, 3 out of the 4 published branches are just different difficulty options, whereas this aims to do something much more substantially different, which I like.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Samsara wrote:
Thank you for doing this! Also, if you want the Editor role so you can add these warnings yourself, let me know and it's yours.
That would be great, thank you so much for the offer!
alexheights1 wrote:
Auditory epilepsy is a real thing and can be caused by ZX Spectrum loading noise.
This brings up an interesting point - most discussions of epilepsy prior to this have focused on photosensitive epilepsy, but if static noise can also cause seizures that's potentially another issue to consider. Would it be possible for you to link to some more information about the condition in question? The results I get looking up auditory epilepsy mainly seem to focus on noise as a symptom rather than a trigger.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
Masterjun wrote:
In that case, why not just "savegame" or "saved game" like wikipedia calls it.
I'm gonna second this idea from Masterjun. "Savegame" is still a bit difficult to understand at a glance, and not particularly popularly used in speedrunning, but I've racked my brain for any kind of better term that covers all possibilities like this, and I can't come up with anything. At best you would use more specialised terms depending on the situation (some games may benefit from having some, but not all, things unlocked for instance), but I don't think that's what's being asked for here.
Editor, Experienced Forum User, Judge, Published Author, Player
(53)
Joined: 3/27/2018
Posts: 235
Location: Australia
I've been bringing up examples of movies that might warrant the addition of an epilepsy warning to their publication text for a while now, but I wanted somewhere more formal to post about it. fsvgm777 suggested that I make a forum thread to post further examples, which should hopefully give other people a better place to bring up examples as well. Starting off: I think that it might be worth adding a warning to SMS and GG Sonic 1, specifically in regards to the Sky Base section and GG's final boss.
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.