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The input really needs to be cleaned up and tightened. You're losing several seconds that could easily be saved by just figuring out exactly when the first possible frame to do things is. The input in menus is pretty much all random mashing, losing frames everywhere. The main strategy used in 9-ball rounds can be tightened up by about 10 frames every time just by utilizing diagonals more and shooting faster. Cutscenes can be skipped with the C button, which isn't always used. Input in 8-ball rounds looks noticeably suboptimal and likely could be optimized by several seconds even using the same strategies, which I doubt is optimal in and of itself. That part's not even your fault, pool is complicated to optimize and is usually botted instead of being done by hand.
User movie #71008889489639367
I tweaked your input up through the first couple shots of the second match, and it's about 6 seconds faster. I imagine that doing this to the entire submission could bring it down to sub-9 minutes. Laziness should never be an excuse in TASing, the entire point is that you have all the time in the world to optimize your run, an infinite number of tries to ensure that everything is as fast as possible. You need to use that time and those infinite tries to the best of your ability.
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GamesFan2000 wrote:
I'm a little bit confused about the judging situation regarding this TAS. This was claimed almost immediately by one of the senior judges, but then it reverted to being unclaimed a couple days ago, and now adelikat has claimed it. No pressure, but what happened?
It's nothing malicious or hostile, we just ended up having a lot of other submissions come in since then, so I decided I'd rather focus on keeping the workbench moving than dedicate all of my time to a difficult judgement. I'm flattered at being called a senior though c: maybe we should make that a reality
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So, we had a discussion about this in staff chat and came to a few interesting conclusions regarding the game.
Much like Decathlon, the "end state" of the game (the 1st place trophy) happens no matter what you do. The game is essentially designed to be multiplayer, so if you're playing single player, you're always going to come in first, since you're the only contestant. Under our rules:
If a game shows the same ending screen regardless of success or failure, reaching it is not considered successful completion.
This means that the "all failures" run shouldn't count as "fastest completion" for this game, as the trophy screen is guaranteed no matter what happens in the actual gameplay, so we need to define a different point of completion for this game to justify having an any% run. For Decathlon, this was maximum score, in that there could only BE maximum score as a point of completion for Decathlon.
California Games has something else, though: The predefined high scores give a basic goal for the game, one that can be reached in a fastest time. As far as I'm concerned at least, this is fine for any%. "Completion" shouldn't necessarily mean having to max out the score unless that is the only possible goal for the game. There's an art in figuring out how to get the bare minimum as well, finding the right combinations of scored points to surpass the pre-defined total and "end your run" in the fastest time possible, which also sets it apart from a run that focuses on maximum score. The only event that has to be run out no matter what is Footbag, and as far as I can tell from watching the run and reading the submission text, it's likely that a maximum score version of this event would have a different "points route", so to speak.
The scores are also not saved, which in a way means that every time you turn on the game, you regain the goal to beat the high scores, as opposed to it being a one-time goal that leads into an infinite time "improve yourself" goal. Had the game included a battery save for high scores, it would be more believable that maximum score is the only intended goal as opposed to being the maximum achievable goal.
Whether or not maximum score would obsolete this or be published alongside it is still up for debate (it would likely take a max score submission to decide that definitively), but I do think this run can definitely be published as fastest completion either way, as it completes the single quantifiable objective set out by the game ("beat these high scores") in the fastest possible time.
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Help. Please don't give negative comments on this. I am depressed. srsly
I'm trying to help. No offense, but your submission text reads like a troll post, even more so now with this most recent addition. It tells us nothing about the run when we need to understand exactly what it is to be able to judge it. You can't just say things like "Are you blind? Watch the run!" and "BizHawk sucks!" and expect us to have all the information we need.
Are you competing with Meerkov's run? Because by all metrics, his is faster than yours overall (trimmed down to final input needed to reach credits, this run is something like 12:28.xx). If your run is 100%, then why are you comparing it to Meerkov's any% run in the first place? They'd be separate categories, not meant to be directly compared. You say that there's something he didn't do during the final boss that you did: What exactly is it? Both runs reach the credits, so I wouldn't have any idea what the difference is that somehow makes his run illegitimate in your eyes.
Seriously, we need any kind of information at all. The more you can give, the better.
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So how exactly is this different to Meerkov's run? Is it meant to obsolete it or is it a different category? Could you update your submission text to actually be helpful and informative instead of just rambling and hurling insults around for no reason?
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Samsara wrote:
I'll toss a thread or two into Sites later on so it doesn't all have to be contained within this submission
I'm going to be doing this shortly, so I think the submission still being on the workbench has kinda run its course. Feel free to keep talking about the run/a future Mario Paint submission in here (it'll just be moved to Grue), but I will at least be making a feedback thread for the site-related things. Thanks for all the feedback so far!
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No need to resubmit, the input file can be replaced (I'll do it once I verify that it still completes the game as intended). For future submissions, credits don't need to be included in the input file (publishers will include the credits in the encode), so just trim down to the final input needed to reach them.
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How we categorize runs/glitches is going to be entirely different from how an individual RTA community categorizes them. The Oracle community is going to have their own way of seeing things for the Oracle games specifically, while we're categorizing on a highly generalized scale in order to fit as many games as possible under a single ruleset.
Pit walking is a complete non-issue here: It's just pressing opposite directions every frame to stay on the border between two pits. There's no memory corruption at all, and I'd even argue that there isn't even a glitch, just a TAS-only exploit of how the game treats pits. It's certainly not intentional and I wouldn't want to see it in a "glitchless" run, but given that it can't be used RTA without a modified controller or a macro, it shouldn't be worried about at all. Thus, for your purpose, you should only really be worried about the text warping, which... Yeah, if you didn't do that in your RTA, you're probably just doing what we'd probably consider to be a "glitchless" route, but you'd have to check how RTA handles it to be sure of exactly what it is and what you'd have to do for it to qualify for however they categorize their runs. For TAS purposes, a run that only uses one of the tricks, no matter which one it is, would just be an arbitrary and suboptimal run. If you're already using one sequence-breaking trick, there's no reason to not be using the other whenever it saves time.
As for whether or not text warping is memory corruption/out-of-bounds, it'd be way better to ask the RTA community about that as they'd know the ins-and-outs of how the glitch actually works and what's actually happening with it. That would in turn help us categorize it more accurately under our specific ruleset.
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Hate to say it after 3 attempts at submitting this game, but I found a pretty significant new trick while judging this: User movie #70649600500999896
Given how much damage is taken over the course of the run, utilizing this should save a pretty significant amount of time. I feel like this should've been caught sooner: There's a moment in the run where damage is taken while jumping, which doesn't trigger the animation either, and that's what led me into looking for other ways to cancel it.
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Queen of Feedback Asking here, asking for feedback once again. This is a pretty cute and nicely paced run that I could see getting Moons, but there hasn't been much audience feedback on it at all, so I'd love to have a fair chunk more before I'm confident deciding the tier.
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Since low% can be an acceptable Moons branch, I'd really like some feedback on whether or not it's worth publishing. MMZ4 is pretty underrepresented on the site, but does the lack of upgrades differentiate this run enough from the published run?
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Lots to respond to here... Let's break it down.
MARIO PAINT:dart193 wrote:
I am not at all in this meme, so all that I replied earlier actually holds true: Mario Paint is a pretty great "game" and seeing actually good looking pictures was actually enjoyable. As I stated, however, the movie is a bit too long for its value since we are colouring dinosaurs. If we would, say, colour various Nintendo characters, that would add significant entertainment due to variety, possibly cancelling boredom of TAS longevity.
The only issue I see with drawing Nintendo characters is that it runs the risk of being too similar to Brain Age, though I still get your point. More variety in drawing without overstaying its welcome by doing too much. More on that note...
Arc wrote:
I believe that the SNES Test Program discussion is relevant to this submission. This type of submission is what I was trying to anticipate in that thread. The question is what exactly is the game here? Do you accept Mario Paint as a "video game" (not talking about the Gnat Attack mini-game)? If yes (because it was published) then what exactly is the gameplay? It's an art program. Is the Mario Paint software being used as a resource to play a different game? I took a pro-creativity position in the SNES Test Program thread, and now that there is a relevant submission it seems that sentiment has shifted to the pro-creativity position.
The difference between SNES Test Program and Mario Paint is that there's actually something to do with Mario Paint, there's an actual tool set that can be used for creative purposes. I didn't necessarily disagree with your stance itself in that discussion, I was mostly disagreeing with what you were defending. If it was possible to do anything creative with SNES Test Program, then there could have been a chance at publication for it, but the toolset provided within the limits of the "game" was so lacking that there wasn't even a minuscule amount of room for creative freedom in it. Mario Paint gives a much, much larger toolset for that, so it's understandable that we'd be considering it in this case as there's so much potential with it. MORE on that note...
greysondn wrote:
I am still listening for guidance on what specifically the community would like to see in a run of Mario Paint. It may be of help to everyone here listening - judges and runner both - if the community would make moves to make that information clear to all of us, as we all seem to be moving to understand it for different reasons. (Yes, even just "do the meme!" gives some insight here.)
Absolutely this. Everyone interested in seeing Mario Paint published, please pitch in with what you'd like to see in a future submission!
feos wrote:
If routine waits can be reduced, I think yes.
WarHippy wrote:
I like the idea of accepting Mario Paint as a play around. This particular run would just have to be shorter, in my opinion. At about the 14 minute mark i started to get bored and skipped towards the end of the video.
Pacing does seem to be one of the bigger issues with the game, yeah. I feel like an ideal playaround for Mario Paint, depending on what gets done in it, would be around the 15-20 minute mark, with a decent amount of the features mixed in. I loved the inclusion of the music maker, that definitely has to be in a new run in my opinion. Drawing and animation too, definitely, and some playing around at the title screen since there's so much to do there.
PLAYAROUND ENDINGS:feos wrote:
I think whatever makes the audience feel entertained and happy is good.
I feel this can be done similarly to our rules on looping games, actually: We have the actual game ending as a preferred end point, as it generally seems like the audience wants that to be the case from prior discussions, but in cases where it destroys the pacing of a playaround by either dragging on too long or going through sections of a game that just can't be made entertaining, we can define a different endpoint. A game over, perhaps, just something that signifies that the run is over. The firsttwo Pokemon Yellow ACE runs never reached the game's ending after all, I believe the audience can define things other than the game's actual ending as a legitimate endpoint for a playaround.
dart193 wrote:
For a normal TAS, S usually stands for speedrun, but playarounds are done for entertainment, where S stands for superplay. While they are generally still do whatever they do as fast as possible, the goal is not to get to the ending as fast as possible but to instead play the game in an unexpected way of some kind. Taking NES River City Ransom playaround, there are at least a few moments when characters deliberately do nothing at all and waste time just because this adds to the entertainment. As such, you can kinda throw speed out of formulae for playarounds. But if you do so, you can probably throw away the ending too since, if we are not going for the ending as fast as possible, we might as well not go for the ending at all.
I would like to note however that doing playaround of the game that does not have ending does not means that the TAS should not have one. This TAS has one, unexpectedly. And I found it extremely fitting, since the TAS ends with credits. Who cares if they are not real credits? The TAS has an ending of sorts.
Yeah, this is exactly my stance, though I do feel like there needs to be some groundwork for exactly what playarounds can be acceptable if we do in fact decide that the game's ending doesn't have to be the only acceptable endpoint: "Freeruns" are kind of a big thing in Mario communities, SM64 definitely comes to mind due to the wide variety of movement available (both intentional and Mario's-ass-based), but they tend to only be single-level affairs and I don't feel like those can be publishable under our current system. I feel like for now, we'd have to require some minimum amount of gameplay for an acceptable playaround. It'd differ from game to game, like basically every other rule on this site, but I feel like a general rule can be something like "multiple levels" as opposed to just a couple minute, single-level thing.
And yeah, the "ending" should definitely be made clear. The TASer has full artistic control of the playaround, there are definitely ways of pacing it so that it "ends" in some way. One of my favorite playaround moments is actually a death: Genisto dies in a Toad House in this run, and it works beautifully as a moment of pure entertainment, but it'd also work beautifully as an entertaining way of game overing and thus "ending" the run. My stance here is that the TASer chooses to go out on their own terms no matter what those terms are: It could end in an entirely intentional game over, or a softlock, or a hard crash, or the game's ending, or anything else as long as the viewer is aware that they have seen the run end.
SUBMISSION/PUBLICATION FEEDBACK:feos wrote:
I think we agreed that it's safe now to allow some kind of rating for submissions too, since the question now is "is it entertaining?" rather than "should we accept it?" Back when we'd just reject anything a lot people had voted No on, there was too much pressure and people just voted all 10s to get something published. The only problem is we don't know if it's feasible on the current site.
This is definitely something to get the community involved with, then, since it affects them directly while only affecting us indirectly through them. I know the original submission rating test went over poorly, but I feel like a lot of that reason was because it was introduced suddenly and nobody really knew what to make of it, so the extremes were essentially used as "yes" and "no" whenever people weren't just complaining about the change (not saying they were wrong in complaining due to how sudden it was, of course).
I'll toss a thread or two into Sites later on so it doesn't all have to be contained within this submission, though I'd definitely appreciate if anyone else had anything to say about these topics in the meantime!
dart193 wrote:
To be honest, I find it hard to properly divide my opinion of a given publication into Entertainment rating and Technical rating. This might hold true for other people as well, which might create movies with very high reception and very low rating at the same time.
Many people believe that Tech Rating is antiquated and shouldn't be used anymore, myself included. Determining the technical quality of a movie is literally my job, so to me all movies meet a minimum standard of tech quality just by being published in the first place. I honestly don't see the need to open it up further to the public, especially with how subjective it ends up being for a rating that's meant to be entirely objective with actual criteria behind it. It just ends up being kind of a mess overall.
OTHER:greysondn wrote:
I really don't know if I should feel good or bad about causing this much conversation. Or if I should be going away and just letting this happen instead of saying what I can.
Good! Feel very good about it. These are conversations I've wanted to have for a while, it's lovely to finally have an opportunity. It's likely that the site will end up better for it. c:
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The problem here is that I have no idea if it's acceptable if I don't know what it is or what it aims for. If this is intended to be a legitimate submission, I'm going to need information about it, not just a jokey branch name and nothing in the submission text. Pardon me for copy-pasting this over from your other submission.
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McBobX wrote:
It is supposed to be a joke, but if it is acceptable, it is no longer a joke, haha. Did I make sense?
The problem here is that I have no idea if it's acceptable if I don't know what it is or what it aims for. If this is intended to be a legitimate submission, I'm going to need information about it, not just a jokey branch name and nothing in the submission text. Pardon me while I copy-paste this over to your other submission.
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Now that AFD is long gone, can I get an actual explanation of what this run is meant to be? Pardon me for copy-pasting this from the other MMZ run you submitted.
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Now that AFD is long gone, can I get an actual explanation of what this run is meant to be? Pardon me while I copy-paste this to the other MMZ run you submitted.
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Legit submission and Moons branch, y'all know what that means: The Queen of Feedback Asking is gonna need to Ask for some Feedback on this one! Pardon me while I copy-paste this into a few other threads and definitely not regret my decision to claim nearly 30 runs at once.
Feedback looks good so far here, I'd just like more to be certain of how the audience feels before I dive in and analyze it myself.
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