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I thought episode 4 was the hardest? The one with Eye Spy and the player-loses-his-mind plot?
Anyway, I would argue that Tyrian is a different game from Tyrian 2000, and that runs for both could exist side-by-side on the site.
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thatguy wrote:
The point of a branch name is to say "this movie attempts to beat the video game as fast as possible, with additional constraints given by the branch name". If there are no additional constraints (any%, in other words), then why is a branch name required?
I really like this definition, and I think we should write it down on the wiki pages.
I don't think we should make an exception for Metroid.
Very well.
feos wrote:
Seems that these 2 last posts break the "concensus", isn't it? And I'm not mentioning IRC discussions.
Not particularly; they only state that we shouldn't consider the Metroid community in our decisions, which is a good point. Regardless, it does make sense for us to have a clear and unambiguous definition of "any%" and apply that consistently (and I believe we already do, for 99% of the runs on the site).
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SNES Aladdin...
This movie is obsoleted by that one, even though the former movie is faster. The latter movie adds an additional constraint, i.e. "all red gems", and both are in Moon Tier. So rather than having 1240 obsolete 1130, I think it would be more suitable to have both exist side-by-side, and give 1240 the additional label "All gems" or "100%".
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Thanks. I appear to have missed one on my list, which is Densetsu no Stafy.
thatguy wrote:
Right, so as I understand it, the consensus has changed from "Movies should not be labelled glitched if they are the only branch" (which was I believe Radiant's original point) to "movies should NEVER be labelled glitched as glitched movies are just any% runs".
That is certainly something worth discussing. There appears to be a disagreement over what "any%" means; most people in this thread believe it means "the fastest run of the game, no limitations" whereas other people disagree, but have not given an alternative definition as far as I've found.
It's easy enough to search for "glitched" movies just by typing that word into the search box on the front page. We only have a handful of those, which suggests that most people indeed don't find this a useful label for a movie.
Of particular note here are the Metroid runs. In the Metroid speedrunning community, which predates the TasVideos site, the three standard runs are Any%, 100%, and Low%; where Any% allows the use of any glitches you can find. That means we should probably not call any Metroid runs "glitched" given that the Metroid community would call them "Any%". (never mind that paragraph)
We have 16 movies total out of over a thousand on the site. It seems that all of those could be renamed to "Any%" assuming we have agreement on the idea that "Any%" means "the fastest run of that game". A few of these have an unlabeled run which should be renamed "less glitched". In the case of Metroid II, it seems the "glitched" run should obsolete the "unnamed" run, which also uses glitches and which is in the vault. $.02
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feos wrote:
If anyone has such huge problems finding the fastest branch for some game, we can add a flag (linking to all current published branches for certain game, or to all fastest branches of all published games).
That seems to me as overkill. The current system is working perfectly fine, it's just that a small amount (less than 1%) of the runs in the database are using the wrong label by mistake. That is very easy to fix.
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feos wrote:
I personally disagree with removing "glitched" from branches that are faster than "any%"s, or if they are the only existing branches. This term has always been a great way to label the exclusive contents of the run, and to make it clearly distinguishable from other goals. It is a good tradition and it has practical value for all. While removing "glitched" not just serves some categorization purposes, but adds in much confusion to what was traditional.
Tags need to be consistently applied in order to be useful. Traditionally, "any%" has been used to mean "the fastest run of the game". This is a clear and objective definition, and it means it's not possible to have a run that is "glitched faster than any%".
What causes confusion here is that some runs use "any%" to mean "a run that looks good", and use "glitched" to mean "the fastest run of the game". But this conflicts with the fact that Moon Tier is supposed to be the collection for "a run that looks good". Only a small minority of games are tagged in this different way (i.e. the ten listed here, from thousands on the site), and I think it would be a good idea to clean this up.
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I had indeed overlooked the existence of the second Pokemon Blue movie. That said, I agree with Twelvepack; the movie linked in the first post is "Any%" and the other one should have an additional tag.
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adelikat wrote:
Vault rules say the categories are any% and 100%. The definition of any% in this case is THE FASTEST POSSIBLE COMPLETION TIME. Unfortunately, I have allowed the site to blur that simple definition of any% by having a "glitched" category that is faster than a "any%" category in some cases. I completely disagree with this categorization though. any% should be the fastest movie, then we should have a better naming of movies that forgo major skips/glitches.
The vault absolutely prefers the faster movie, not a (more ambiguous) movie that fails to do a time saving glitch.
Based on this post, it strikes me that when there is only one run for a particular game, then that run shouldn't be labeled "glitched". After all, there is no other run or branch to distinguish it from, and it should be more properly labeled "any%" (or, I suppose, it doesn't require a label at all since it's the only branch anyway). So I suggest that the following ten runs be relabeled.
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feos wrote:
adelikat wrote:
Vault rules say the categories are any% and 100%. The definition of any% in this case is THE FASTEST POSSIBLE COMPLETION TIME. Unfortunately, I have allowed the site to blur that simple definition of any% by having a "glitched" category that is faster than a "any%" category in some cases. I completely disagree with this categorization though. any% should be the fastest movie, then we should have a better naming of movies that forgo major skips/glitches.
Well for example, the standard run for Super Mario Bros involves warp zones. But we don't call this a "warp" run because that's the standard way of doing it; therefore, we call a run "no warps" if it doesn't do this.
So if the categorization of runs as "glitched" is not desirable, then it should be a simple matter to rename those to "any%" and name the corresponding less-glitched runs something like "no out-of-bounds" or "no teleporting".
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LTRP wrote:
That was the wrong word to use I guess. What I meant was that apparently there is a rule/guideline for only doing full S3&K, and not "Sonic 3" or "Sonic & Knuckles".
Yes. I'm asking where this alleged rule apparently exist, because I have not been able to find it. I would tentatively say that there is no such rule.
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Prion wrote:
Re: older stg-- Zanac?
Yes, that's it. Googling it, I find the following:
"Tyrian was clearly partially inspired by Compile's classic Zanac - in fact, that was part of the game's original sales pitch. A handful of sound (notably the "Secret Level" jingle) were taken more or less directly from Zanac, and some enemies seem to be lifted (or at least heavily inspired) by enemies from Zanac. Also, the power-ups appearing in Arcade Mode look and act similarly to those in Compile's later effort Gunhed/Blazing Lazers. The effect Tyrian uses to display your ship flying off at the end of a level is used in several Compile games, including both Zanac and Super Aleste.
A number of stages in Tyrian use the "turret-mass" minibosses seen in Zanac; this seems to be more prevalent in the early stages, particularly the "Asteroid" stages. Judging from some prototype screenshots that have since surfaced, these asteroid stages were among the first completed."
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Well, they're both shmups adhering to certain genre standards, but I'm not sure how they're otherwise identical. As I recall, there was an older shmup that was an inspiration for Tyrian, because they used some of the same songs as a homage.
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Warp wrote:
"Anything goes" does not mean "you can do whatever you want", such as hacking the ROM, using gamegenie codes, modify the emulator to work in a way that the console doesn't, start from a savestate, and so on.
Indeed it does not. However, if the vote in this thread is any indication, it does include allowing multiple valid hardware RAM states; and if I understand Feos correctly, that should imply that such movies are valid for (1) Vault tier if they're faster than any other run, and (2) Moon tier if people find them entertaining enough.
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feos wrote:
What if Vault keeps accepting "anything goes", including "preset RAM", and for Moons it must be decided case by case? Because if someone dislikes the abused possibility, there might always be a movie with more strict goals in Moons, if it deserves it. If not, be my guest in Vault, where "anything goes" and we can't demand from movies to be of what we like. Speed by any cost.
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So if I understand correctly, the main question is what should happen to a movie that is published in Moon tier and does not qualify for Vault tier, if after several months it turns out to get low ratings from viewers.
Because if a Vault or Moon movie gets high ratings it can simply be moved to Moon or Star respectively; and if a Star movie gets low ratings it can simply be moved to Moon.
Looking over the current Moon list, there are 18 movies that rank between 5.5 and 5.9 inclusive; there are four movies that rank between 5.0 and 5.4; and there are two movies that rank 4.9 and below.
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Vykan12 wrote:
On the other hand, I fear this sets a bad precedent if every movie on the site could theoretically be obsoleted by those clever enough to find the best initial hardware state for their TAS,
That's not actually the case, since the vast majority of games do initialize their hardware properly before reading from it.
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Spikestuff wrote:
so who's judging this before it goes crazy on yes and nos (without explaining why they felt that way... I mean it was a clear accept (by a bit) and then all these nos started appearing out of nowhere without explanation on why)?
Remember that the votes aren't for "should we accept this run", but rather "did you find this run entertaining enough for Moon or Star tier".
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Since the site is now steadily getting more runs in some of the newer categories, on this index page, I think it would be helpful if the line for "computer" was split into three lines for DOS, MSX, and Windows separately (they are three separate categories/tags in the database, after all); and several more categories now have enough movies that it makes sense to link to the stars and moons only, and have a second button for 'all' movies (the way is done for NES/SNES movies as well), e.g. the MSX, Arcade, and DOS categories.
Thank you for your time!
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hegyak wrote:
What would be the downside (aside from being difficult to verify on an actual console) of the TASer setting the initial RAM values to whatever they wanted?
For the overwhelming majority of games, this would either (1) make no difference whatsoever, or (2) only start the random number generator at a different value.
Actually an interesting test would be to take 100 runs from the site, reprogram BizHawk to start with the RAM filled with random numbers, and see if the movies still sync. I'd estimate that at least 95% of them still would.
