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I'm not staff, but I posted in here!
I stand by everything I've said!
Considering the incident, I think it would be foolish to migrate to Discord and drop IRC support. Most of the posts I made here were asking people to give proper reasons why Discord server maintenance would be worth it.
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Dacicus wrote:
The Posts since last visit option on the forum does not work for me. It leads to a page saying No posts since last visit. This is obviously incorrect, since the main forum page says that the last post in Workbench was 1 hour ago, and I last logged into the forum more than 1 hour ago.
Just for reference, we now have a Latest Posts page, in case the last visit doesn't work again.
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Ah, so the 5 minute run only restricted itself to avoid the escape key, since this was the only way to trigger the gamestate manipulation. I think now that there's a different way to trigger it, it calls into question whether it should be allowed by itself or not.
I personally prefer the default category (branchless) to avoid the glitch, because it feels memory-corruption'esque. It doesn't seem like what viewers would expect. The other runs all still physically reach the locations of the crewmates and the end location, albeit with weird teleportations and going through screens, but those features are themselves part of the game.
It feels like a category with restrictions like in this run can quickly become a second game end glitch visually. I'm not the one to decide where to put the distinction between game end glitch branch and default branch, but my opinion is that the gamestate manipulation falls into the game end glitch area.
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So, I'm not quite sure what's going on here, the submission text is all over the place with versions and patches and what glitches were actually used and which ones are patched.
From what I gathered, this submission uses the glitch that advances the game-state like in the current game end glitch movie [2611] Windows VVVVVV "game end glitch" by Masterjun in 00:45.33, but in a less powerful way because it's somewhat patched now?
Then an argument could be made that this submission shouldn't obsolete the current run of the default category, since the current one avoids using that glitch (as it would be the game end glitch run otherwise). In that case it feels like this run is an inferior version of the published game end glitch run.
But as I said I didn't quite get everything from the submission text, so maybe the author can explain where this run fits in between the existing branches.
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I approve.
Now I'm not a staff member, but I experienced several instances where I requested a simple thing, or suggested a fix, or even made a poll about an issue. When they got to Nach it was always either a "make a thread about it" and then an answer saying the whole system needs to be reworked for it.
But it usually never got to Nach in the first place. Frustrating is the correct term.
That was 7 years ago, and it seems like the behavior hasn't changed.
So I'm glad changes happen. Things are worth discussing again.
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The top and bottom offset comes from a console quirk.
Here is a quote from a hardware register page:
Note that many games will set their vertical scroll values to -1 rather than 0.
This is bacause the SNES loads OBJ data for each scanline during the previous
scanline. The very first line, though, wouldn't have any OBJ data loaded! So
the SNES doesn't actually output scanline 0, although it does everything to
render it. These games want the first line of their tilemap to be the first
line output, so they set their VOFS registers in this manner. Note that an
interlace screen needs -2 rather than -1 to properly correct for the missing
line 0 (and an emulator would need to add 2 instead of 1 to account for this).
In other words, if your game doesn't account for this offset, you will miss the first scanline and have an extra one on the bottom.
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The borders in Final Fantasy IV are not an emulator glitch or emulator display decision.
They are intended and deliberately set by the game. The game makes use of the Window hardware registers in the range $2123 to $212F.
I suppose you can debug the game and check where the values are set. One example is $15:C968 where $2126 is set to 0x01 (left border), and 5 bytes later $2127 is set to 0xFE (right border), but there are more places.
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(This post is meant only for reference why things are as they are, not as a criticism to the feedback. Good feedback everyone :D)
It's important to note how a lot of the pages of the site are Wiki pages, meaning the pages you see are being rendered from the Wiki source code, even the Front Page. The new lines and groups of %'s force a line break.
These source codes are imported directly into the demo site, and the whitespace in the source code will remain how it looked best on the old site.
Of course, Wiki source code can and will be adjusted, but this can only start once the old site doesn't depend on them anymore (i.e. when the old site is replaced).
Once that happens, even if text or images are bigger, there can be quite a lot of whitespace improvement by restructuring content!
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Arcorann wrote:
I saw the timezone issue mentioned on the tracker, but I'd like to point out also that I can't distinguish Australia/Sydney and Australia/Brisbane in the current list; both are currently listed as "(UTC+10:00) Australian Eastern Standard Time", but Australia/Sydney has DST and Australia/Brisbane doesn't.
According to these 2 pages, both of them are listed as UTC+10:00. I believe it will use the correct day light saving time if you set it.
The issue you quoted was posted before the fix showing the names of the timezones. Both of those were literally listed as "(UTC+10:00) Australian Eastern Standard Time" before. You had to randomly guess which one corresponds to the proper timezone, so you couldn't just "set it".
It was fixed with this commit and you can now distinguish timezone names.
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For now, I'd ask everyone to hold your feedback of the style of Forum Posts. It wasn't included in this update but already looks quite different.
Hopefully it's in the next one. There will be another post here when it's ready.
Edit: New post styles are now live.
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To copy multiple frames you hold right-click along the frames you want to copy, and then copy them in the menu that pops up.
There is no visual feedback for the selected frames.
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Very nice.
Here some feedback about the graphical design I want to share after browsing the new site.
- Main link color is "already clicked"-color. The purple link color is basically internet standard for already clicked, main theme color should definitely be a different one.
- Recover lost contrast between boxes and background. The old site had a lot of outline boxes to make areas more visible.
- The Featured Movie on the front page should be above the News block when the site width is small. It's not a news site, it's a movie content site.
- Buttons (=clickable) should be visibly different from the title bars (=unclickable) or things like the Featured area on the front page. They currently look the same.
- Some buttons bring you to a different page, and some buttons don't. If they don't provide the browser link hint, they should be visibly different (examples on the Submissions page, and the Submit Movie page).
- Missing "last post" area next to the subforums on the main forum page.
- Where are the icons in the forum? New post icons, locked threads, forum logo?
- "Watch this topic" should not be a magnifying glass icon, which is the icon for zooming in.
- Change to relative post times (4 hours ago), not absolute ones (2021-09-01 14:42:16) in the post preview boxes, and use both when seeing the post.
- Recover page selection when inside a subforum. This is not only more convenient but also shows visually how active the forum is -> makes it much easier to find threads among other ones.
- Show page number selection closer to the page controls, instead of on opposite sides.
- Separate signatures more visibly from the post and glue them to the bottom, otherwise it looks like they're part of a post..
- Include the post time more visibly to the post. Currently you can't tell if it belongs to the top or bottom post. Same with the PM and Quote buttons.
- Center profile pictures if the username is centered
- It really isn't necessary to show the number of posts in a thread "Showing 101 - 125 of 270". It just distracts from seeing what page you're on.
- The biggest thing (biggest font, center presence) on a submission page is its status and then the staff member nickname with a noticable color. It should be the author and game name.
- In the Submissions list, having to click on the game name to get to a submission is weird. It feels like it should send you to the game page.
- Don't show hours in the time display for movies under an hour.
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There was a response!
<feoss> Nach: are the decade awards icons ever going to appear in their usual places?
<feoss> http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22550
<Nach> feoss: As I mentioned yes. As I also mentioned, the award system has zero understanding of a per decade award, so the system we need a complete overhaul just for this
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For reference, on our Snes9x Emulator Resources page we have links to the source and windows binaries of older snes9x version, even Snes9x 1.43 v9 which this submission seems to use.
Also, Snes9x and Avi dumping works on Ubuntu+Wine at least, so the binary can be used as-is.
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FractalFusion wrote:
To see how to get the solution, note that x,y,z are at most 48. This is because if any of them are 49, then the most that xyz can be is 49*25*26= 49*5*2*65 (less than 22*3*5*72*11 = 49*5*2*66), and higher numbers would result in even lower xyz (the numbers would be further apart which decreases the product).
I'd like to add the information that this can also be used in the same way to calculate a lower bound of numbers being at least 21, since with 20 the maximum product would be 20*40*40 = 32000 < 32340.
Of course, that's very useless in this case, because with the upper bound of 48, you're already only left with three product options, all of which include integers lying in the interval [21,44].
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Dimon12321 wrote:
If you simply upscale a native resolution in 4 times, it won't usually match YouTube patterns.
Don't worry, YouTube will adjust it for you. No need to do it yourself.
Dacicus wrote:
Don't some codecs have restrictions on the resolution values, such as requiring them to be multiples of two or four?
Good point, I changed the aspect ratio width calculation to round to the nearest multiple of two, required by the yuv420p pixel format. Everything else assumes the base width and height to be even.
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In the spirit of the ongoing contest, you might want to wait until it's over to share new stuff.
It's more fun if the teams have to fully research on their own. Sometimes it even leads to taking wrong routes discovering new stuff because everything has to be considered.
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This is a guide for how to quickly create a watchable file from BizHawk. This watchable file is what we call an encode and is usually in the format .mp4 or .mkv.
Step 0
First, pause BizHawk, and then advance to where you want your encode to start.
If you made a movie file and want to record your encode from the very beginning, open your movie and then select File > Movie > Play from Beginning.
Step 1 (only once)
If you haven't done this before, click File > AVI/WAV > Config and Record AVI/WAV.
Select FFmpeg writer and click OK.
Step 2 (only once)
Now a window will appear saying you don't have FFmpeg yet. FFmpeg is the encoder tool compressing your movie file so it doesn't take up several GBs. So download it by clicking Download. It's around 14 MB so it shouldn't take long.
(If this window didn't appear you already downloaded it before. Just continue with the next step.)Step 3
In the window that appears, select[Custom] and enter a certain command into the Command: text field.
The command will be sent directly to FFmpeg and what you need to enter depends on how you want your video to look like.
You can enter this for a quick 4x upscale with good quality:
-vf scale=iw*4:ih*4 -crf 18 -sws_flags neighbor -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:a 384k -f mp4
Or if your video is on a TV console with a game that needs to be scaled to 4:3 (e.g. NES/SNES), you can use this:
-vf scale=floor(((ih*4)*(4/3)+1)/2)*2:(ih*4),setsar=0 -crf 18 -sws_flags neighbor -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:a 384k -f mp4
Here the iw*4 and ih*4 mean it will be upscaled x4 from the original resolution. You can replace the two 4's with a higher or lower integer if you want a higher or lower resolution.
Finally click OK.
Step 4
You will be asked where to save the encode. Just select a location and click Save.
Step 5
You are now recording an encode. You can unpause the emulator and advance to where you want to stop the encode. Here it doesn't matter if you slow down or fast forward, the resulting file will have the normal speed no matter what. (Note: Don't be surprised if you can't fast forward as much as you normally can, recording video takes extra processing power.)
Once you're at the point where you want to stop, click File > AVI/WAV > Stop AVI/WAV.
You're done.
That's it. You just created your encode. The next time you create an encode, you can click File > AVI/WAV > Record AVI/WAV (instead of Config and Record AVI/WAV) and go immediately to step 3.
Edit 2021-06-17: Resized large image embed.
Edit 2021-06-19: Added integer upscale options.
Edit 2021-06-22: Added setsar=0 to unset SAR. BizHawk sets it for some reason, making ffmpeg reverse every aspect ratio change from rescaling.
Edit 2023-02-14: Color reformatting.
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Step 2 (only once)
Now a window will appear saying you don't have FFmpeg yet. FFmpeg is the encoder tool compressing your movie file so it doesn't take up several GBs. So download it by clicking Download. It's around 14 MB so it shouldn't take long.
(If this window didn't appear you already downloaded it before. Just continue with the next step.)
Step 3
In the window that appears, select [Custom] and enter a certain command into the Command: text field.
The command will be sent directly to FFmpeg and what you need to enter depends on how you want your video to look like.
You can enter this for a quick 4x upscale with good quality:
-vf scale=iw*4:ih*4 -crf 18 -sws_flags neighbor -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:a 384k -f mp4
Or if your video is on a TV console with a game that needs to be scaled to 4:3 (e.g. NES/SNES), you can use this:
-vf scale=floor(((ih*4)*(4/3)+1)/2)*2:(ih*4),setsar=0 -crf 18 -sws_flags neighbor -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:a 384k -f mp4
Here the iw*4 and ih*4 mean it will be upscaled x4 from the original resolution. You can replace the two 4's with a higher or lower integer if you want a higher or lower resolution.
Finally click OK.
Step 4
You will be asked where to save the encode. Just select a location and click Save.
Step 5
You are now recording an encode. You can unpause the emulator and advance to where you want to stop the encode. Here it doesn't matter if you slow down or fast forward, the resulting file will have the normal speed no matter what. (Note: Don't be surprised if you can't fast forward as much as you normally can, recording video takes extra processing power.)
Once you're at the point where you want to stop, click File > AVI/WAV > Stop AVI/WAV.
You're done.
That's it. You just created your encode. The next time you create an encode, you can click File > AVI/WAV > Record AVI/WAV (instead of Config and Record AVI/WAV) and go immediately to step 3.
Edit 2021-06-17: Resized large image embed.
Edit 2021-06-19: Added integer upscale options.
Edit 2021-06-22: Added setsar=0 to unset SAR. BizHawk sets it for some reason, making ffmpeg reverse every aspect ratio change from rescaling.
Edit 2023-02-14: Color reformatting.
