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Alright, I'll justify one of the No votes then.
To me, someone who generally doesn't enjoy fighting games, this pretty much looks the same as most of your other recent runs. There's nothing new in terms of execution compared to them, something which has been a problem even since the old Mortal Kombat runs, but at least the Mortal Kombat runs have enough characters/variety/glitches to always seem fresh. Some game-specific glitches, usually a hard crash that leads to a reset, some standard 2P action, showing off infinites... It just doesn't really appeal to me, and I'd assume most of those "unexplained" No votes feel the same way I do.
On top of that, I've never liked the pacing in these runs. Infinites are shown for far longer than they need to be: 5 seconds or 3-4 "rotations" is more than enough to show them off. The run should be an escalating showcase of crazier and crazier things, it shouldn't just be whatever you want at whatever time. The 2P stuff... I would honestly just remove the "normal" fights entirely. They just serve to lengthen the run with something that only fighting game fans would enjoy. I've never found them entertaining, personally. If a 2P fight is necessary to show off some ridiculous stuff, like in the Mortal Kombat runs, then yeah one or two can be thrown in, but the rest just seem like filler.
These kinds of runs are perfect for a specialized YouTube channel where everyone who subscribes is going to have the same knowledge/interest/opinion, but submitting here means they're subject to what the general audience thinks. As a whole, we're not exactly a fighting game savvy audience. We can't appreciate some of the things in the run, and because of that we can't appreciate the run as a whole. We're going in expecting an MK-style playaround where the game just completely falls apart, but all we get is just fights and occasional glitches, same as a lot of the other recent fighting game playarounds.
So no, I didn't find this entertaining. I haven't found a lot of these recent fighting game playarounds entertaining, in fact. I've always refused to vote because I always felt like these runs just weren't for me, which is absolutely true, but since you've been requesting explanations and lowkey insulting the site and userbase, I figured it was about time to break my silence.
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Arc wrote:
Wha? The least-broken category follows the same rules as the currently published movie, which has a 9.1 overall rating. And I'm going to submit it in about a week. Then the new, third-category movie that uses all of the minor gamebreaking glitches is going to be significantly different from this movie. Way shorter than the 43 minutes we were talking about earlier. The route will be totally different.
But is the end goal different? Or are the same things being done, just with a different route/glitches? If we simplify the categories down to what they achieve, this is what we'd end up getting as far as I can tell:
1. "any% using extremely game-breaking glitches"
2. "any% using somewhat game-breaking glitches" (new "all crystals")
3. "any% using minorly game-breaking glitches" ("least-broken category")
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but given all the information I've gathered in this thread so far, this is how I'm seeing it right now. As far as I'm concerned, one of the latter two needs a different goal. We've discussed this with the recent Wonderboy controversy: Routes are not categories. If two runs achieve the same goal with different routes/glitches, then they're competing, not cooperating.
I suggested 100% because not only is it a guaranteed acceptable category based on site rules, but it would also actually show off some significant extra portions of the game. A 100% run with the new glitches would be an insane watch, a worthy addition to the site alongside the other runs, and safe to submit and accept. Even if it was reversed, with a glitchless 100% and a more glitched "all crystals" run, it would still work really well with content and variety.
Again, if I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me.
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Just one question on my end: How viable is this in real time? Could an RTA runner use this exact strategy and duplicate the run with ease or is this a TAS-only 3 minute wait?
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All this category discussion's making my head spin, but I guess the plan checks out on my end. I would prefer a more robust category than just "glitchless" as the third category though, something like "glitchless 100%" or whatever the equivalent would be for this game, so it would actually have some significant difference.
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MAME-rr is just as bad as FBA-rr from what I've heard, it has a lot of problems with desyncing and generally doesn't seem stable to use. We also don't accept it on the site, though that's a minor concern.
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FBA-rr is absolute garbage, one of the worst emulators we still currently support, and that's sadly because we haven't had access to anything better until very recently.
We're looking into a couple alternatives: There's a custom branch of FBA-Shuffle that looks incredibly promising, and I would highly recommend trying it out. We need people to test it, anyway, so this could be a perfect opportunity to do so. The other (and far more likely) alternative is FBA officially implementing rerecording tools: It's currently in closed beta and only available to select testers, but it should be coming relatively soon.
Either way, welcome to the site!
EDIT: Regardless of whether or not anything works for you (though hopefully it does), I would recommend posting your findings in the Metal Slug X thread.
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No good TAS is done in a single sitting, but it's still all done in one single input file. If you load your input file, turn on Read+Write mode and load a savestate, it will load that savestate in recording mode, and you can continue TASing from there. This is standard with every re-recording emulator.
So basically, load the input file that starts from power on in Read+Write, pause near the end of the input, save state then load state, and continue TASing away.
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Arc wrote:
(Where my judges at?)
Sup, dogg. Fair bit of warning that I haven't watched all of the VOD yet, so I may be a bit uninformed. Take this with a grain of salt.
I would personally allow it given what I know about it right now, but there are two caveats to this. One is that's just my personal opinion, and it shouldn't be treated as an official judgement, and the other is that I would still not recommend using it in this run until there's some more information about it from the RTA community. We're definitely going to need more information, most importantly the extent as to which this can be used to skip/break the game, because as far as I'm concerned that's the biggest factor involved in whether or not it should be used in the run.
Judging it right now, if all it does is skip those overworld encounters, then I feel like we could allow it, but if it breaks far more than that similar to the warp glitch run, then yeah it shouldn't be used at all. Either way, it's still much safer to not use it at all. We wouldn't reject the run for not using it.
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That would be a lot of effort for no real reward. It's clear just by watching the two runs that the improvement is in far, far more than just the text speed.
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When seeking to a specific frame past the current greenzone, TAStudio seems to only seek to the point in the window you click and not the actual frame:
Notice how I try to seek to frame 294, but it only seeks to 255, which is at the same position in the window after it scrolls up to where the current frame was. This means everything works as intended if Follow Cursor is off.
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jipjups wrote:
Thing is SMW is the only game I actually know how to TAS.
Nobody knows how to TAS any game until they pick it up and start TASing it.
The methodology is almost always the same. Learning something less complicated will give you the tools and mindset needed to tackle a harder project like SMW. I started on a game I knew pretty well and have since branched out to games I've never played or even heard of before I TASed them. A lot of our most prominent TASers have done the same thing.
We had a recent talk about what TASing is and we generally agreed that it's more of a mindset than a set of actual abilities. It's the patience to try and retry things over and over, it's the thought process where you try unexpected things in unexpected places to get unexpected results, it's the logical thinking of breaking a game down into tiny pieces and conquering each one completely and individually.
I wouldn't stop you from SMW in any form, just warning you that it might be really difficult to break into the scene by starting with it. Even after 6-ish years of making TASes (though only 2 years of making actually good TASes), I still wouldn't even consider myself mentally ready to take on a solid SMW run without preparing for a while first. It's a Herculean effort, sure, but it's not impossible. If you keep going that route, just remember there are always other options and there's always a huge group of people ready and willing to help you out.
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Yeah, the Grue handles anything that's rejected or cancelled.
Also, no worries or hard feelings on the submission. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, most first submissions (even those from prominent, established TASers) end up being fairly weak.
My first recommendation if you want to continue TASing is, well, maybe choose a less complicated game than SMW to start out with. The game has a ridiculous amount of speed tricks that need to be applied all throughout every frame of the run, and it's not something I would recommend for a first-time TASer. If you have your heart set on it, you might be spending a lot of time (and I mean upwards of months or even a year) learning everything before you're able to make an SMW run worthy of publication.
My second, and much easier, recommendation is just stick around the community! Support other runners, learn from what they do, maybe even join the IRC channel and chat with us if you want. We're mostly nice people. I only bite when people ask, for example.
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Random and I redid some parts of the run and saved a little over 16 seconds. I replaced the file and I'm in the process of making a new encode.
EDIT: New encode.
Link to video
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Simple. Our currently accepted version of FBA-rr is absolute garbage. Wait for re-recording to be implemented in the official FBA build, or try out FBA-Shuffle.
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Lack of interest, mainly. You even said so yourself with that last line. The PCE library isn't exactly well-suited for TASing, at least from what I've seen of it.
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Derakon wrote:
Looking good! I see the message-writing tradition is alive and well, too.
Expect a lot more of that on Green. I'm probably going to keep Flame/Chaser for a while (instead of keeping the published run's goal of every weapon/combination), so I'll get as much entertainment value as I can out of it.
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Niamek wrote:
EDIT: New problem:
steps:
=>Open TAStudio
-> Do a random movie
->At some point, click R so it's set to Hold
=>Click L on the piano anywhere after the movie (Like issue #534)
->CTRL+Z
Witness the loss of your movie... Well I exagerrated it. You can do the redo command and recollect your movie.
Easier repro steps for what I think is the same bug:
* Clone, insert, delete, etc any frame of a project
* CTRL+Z
This is the only problem I've run into so far and it's at least one that can be easily recovered from.
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I'm an idiot who had to restart from the very beginning, so technically all the videos I posted before are now out of date. Kind of a blessing in disguise, though, since I managed a few really neat strategies on the return trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqHCK8UNI9k
EDIT: Currently about 500 frames ahead of the published run, for the record.
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Link to video
An old friend of mine just put out an album after 7-8 years of making tracks. Real good stuff if you're into chill hip-hop instrumentals.
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Notice how I try to seek to frame 294, but it only seeks to 255, which is at the same position in the window after it scrolls up to where the current frame was. This means everything works as intended if Follow Cursor is off.
