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When the Vault was implemented, we went back and unrejected a lot of movies. However, we decided not to touch cancelled runs. Those were the author's wishes, and I would prefer to honor that. If they want to uncancel, that's fine, but it will be their choice.
Grassini is trying to encourage authors to uncancel their movies and see them judged under the new rules. I see nothing wrong with that.
For what it is worth, I'd prefer to see runs uncancelled and then rejected if need be, a verdict helps the community (setting precedents and refining rules). Plus, should rules change there's the option of unrejecting (we don't uncancel).
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IF you exploit Nintendo's VC bugs (which btw are not relevant here, this is an easy to emulate NES game that both emulators emulate flawlessly), then I see that as exploiting an emulator bug. Just because it is an official emulator doesn't mean it isn't an emulator bug. And those aren't (and shouldn't) be allowed here.
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How is wrapping the game in Nintendo's virtual console and artificially forcing the game to run at 50hz more "official"?
Everything I can tell about this rom is that this IS the official version, and is a real nes game in every way. And likely what they would have released originally for NES, if it weren't cost considerations.
Am I in the minority here that VC submissions are bad? You have a double layer of emulation there. Just because it is Nintendo's emulator doesn't mean you aren't emulating an emulator.
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I'd like to hear about any vba version that emulates these games correctly.
And also any feedback about mGBA, as that is an emulator I'm hopeful about adding to BizHawk
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grassini wrote:
The no sports game rules is only for games where nothing meaningful can be done to speedup the process of finishing the game.
Note exactly, but close. It was to avoid triviality. And to make sure the vault movies have meaningful technical achievement as you mentioned. In most cases the triviality is indeed due to some uncontrollable timer or some such.
And to specifically mention a genre was to avoid as much subjectivity as possible. A rule like "must not be trivial" creates a subjective situation that will be as hotly debated and argued, similarly to entertainment value with moons.
If this is a non-trivial technical achievement with no entertainment value, maybe the rules can be adjusted. Then again, if it is so non-trivial, does it not have entertainment value?
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turska wrote:
Interestingly, the #1 and #2 movies had the fewest rerecords out of the submissions; and the bottom two had the most. They may not be accurate, but it's a surprising coincidence.
I can say with confidence our rerecord count isn't accurate and is lower than what it really was. We made many iterations as part of our process, probably starting from a fresh movie. And not all our effort was counted (just depended on who checked in what). And since we don't really care about the rerecord count, no effort was made to keep an accurate log
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The Brookman wrote:
and I would love to use the most accurate and up to date emulator to do that.
Well that is bsnes (which lsnes and bizhawk both use). It is slow, but it is insanely accurate to the real SNES. And snes9x is very much not accurate to the real SNES.
bsnes is greatly preferred, if you can suffer through low FPS, or get better hardware.
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1) He said 25fps BEFORE recording a movie, movie recording (with the bsnes core) has even more overhead to ensure sync stability. I don't think sub-25fps is a reasonable TASing experience.
2) That's a suspiciously low fps even for your computer specs (which are bad). What kind of fps do you get with for example, NES Super Mario Bros?
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This was resolved in another thread, but I thought I'd re-post here for anyone who reads this.
The bus is specifically with the bsnes performance core and rewind. By default, the performance core is used when you are casually playing and will switch to compatibility for movie recording. You can force it to compatibility in snes -> options.
This is isn't a priority to fix either, the performance core is only in there because of how painfully slow the compatibility core is, better is to finish porting snes9x as our speedy core option.
This is the only known combination where rewind is crashy. Of course things like N64 with very large savestates will be laggy and problematic, and you can crash your emulator by using the in memory rewind option and too large a buffer.
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Warp wrote:
Somehow that principle seems wrong. After all, the original purpose for the vault tier (or one of its original purposes) was the change in policy that "every game deserves a TAS, regardless of entertainment value". Rejecting board games by default seems to go contrary to this idea.
I'm a bit confused, because this seems to be your thesis, then you proceed to give a very thorough and convincing argument of why it doesn't make sense to put board games into the vault. The following is almost 100% the exact logic chain we went through when deciding upon the no board games rule back when the vault rules were written:
That's not to say I advocate blindly accepting board game TASes either, and that's where the dilemma comes into play.
The problem with board games is enemy AI, and difficulty levels. Playing on the easiest difficulty feels completely wrong and unbefitting of tool-assisted speedrunning, which ought to emulate a perfect player crushing a computer game at its best. A computer AI on the easiest difficulty presents no challenge at all, so TASing it seems rather pointless.
Naturally TASing truly shows its power only if the computer AI is playing at its best. We would get to see how a "perfect player" would crush the AI player even at its strongest. That's the spirit of TAsing. The problem here is, of course, that at the strongest difficulty level the AI can often take a very long time to make a move (even minutes, if we are talking about more complex board games). This is not very watchable...
Then of course there's the whole discussion about what exactly constitutes game completion. After all, the vault is for "any%" and "100%" runs only... These categories usually fit poorly into a board game. Unless you consider playing one single game against the computer "any% completion" (but that would probably be stretching the definition quite a bit). It could perhaps suit games where there's some kind of "campaign mode" or such, with an actual goal and ending (eg. becoming a tournament/world champion).
This is well written, and people should read it!
I would also add that board games introduce a level of subjectivity into a tier designed to minimize subjectivity as much as possible. The logic currently is simple, if there's something arguable, we just ask their be entertainment value (and thus moon tier).
And lastly, the vault is about "speed records", with the assumption those have value. Beating up on an AI that is intentionally poor (to be easy), and doing basic moves (that any player can recreate) only with more precision is really trivial. Ideally the vault rules minimize the ability to make an extremely trivial TAS and have an easy publication route. (The bar is really low, but these types of TASes fall even below that).
I think the no board games rule is correct. And I think the correct thinking is a tier dedicated to them, feel free to discuss that.
The only thing I would point out there, is that this is a tier for un-entertaining board games.
If you do something interesting enough, it is moon-worthy and not in need of this tier.
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Warp wrote:
I don't see any problem in publishing this kind of TAS.
One question, though: Are there difficulty levels, and if so, was this played on the hardest?
This was done on the easiest difficulty. As with most board games in this era, the high levels take a really really long time to move. And generally the easiest level involves some randomness as that is a quick easy way to lower the AI's skill level. Thus, hardest difficulty means a very long movie of watching the computer think, and the easiest involves a trivial manipulation of the RNG to make the CPU make a horrible blunder.
See Battle Chess, and Chessmaster TASes and discussions as this is pretty much the same situation.
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Just post a fixed movie file, and a judge or admin can replace the submission file for you.
P.S. do we have anything other than meaningless non-gameplay events to talk about?
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On the topic of rerecords. I don't like that MrWint's movies count bot rerecords, and that the statistics page is skewed as a result. But then again, even the movie with the most manual rerecords of all time (SM64 120 stars) has a significant number of bot rerecords.
The real problem is the notion of a rerecord was a cute little stat back in the day that has only gotten more meaningless. For instance, you can't compare an editor created movie (such as FCEUX's TASEdtior) to a manual one. The numbers simply don't match in terms of reflecting the amount of effort. As more advance tools develop, I see the number only become more problematic not less.
So while I'm tempted to try to fix the rerecord count on this movie before publication, why bother? There's already so many movies that weren't fixed. And what does fixed even mean? At best we would be guessing on the number of non-bot rerecords. And does the bot's work not matter at all?
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I fixed the bug in question, BizHawk revision 8760 has the fix. Note: It may be some time before the next official release, but it is safe to assume there will be sync compatibility (for GB at least). Encoders/Publishers, if you need a copy of this build let me know.
