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DarkKobold wrote:
I don't believe we should be making light of bans.
I am sending Kumquat this message.
Hi Kumquat,
While we can't specifically prevent XKeeper from participating, I will not give any credence to his participation while his ban persists. He is a banned user, and therefore not allowed to participate in any site activity.
However, that said, he knows quite well why he is banned. Additionally, unlike other troublesome users, he is not perma-banned. If he would grow up, sincerely apologize for his bullying behavior towards adelikat, he would most likely be unbanned. I doubt this will happen, he appears far too obstinate and prideful to apologize; however, I would like to be surprised. Last time I conversed with him, he appeared to have understood our position.
If you are curious yourself why he is banned, during his tenure here, he continually harped on the work done by site administrators, while providing nothing of positive value. Specifically, but not limited to, his derision towards adelikat's need for funding while providing no support, his consistent mocking of FCEUX bugs while, as a competent coder, providing no help to the source code maintained by volunteers, and his shitting on the workbench to prove some unnecessary point. This consistent, negative, and abusive attitude had gone too far.
Thank you for your understanding, I would like to see XKeeper return to the community as a positive force.
DarkKobold
This came up in the Dream Team Contest. And I wanted to clarify a situation that is overdue.
For the record, I'm much less concerned about his derision towards me, and more concerned about his derision to the rest of the community. His negative & abusive attitude is also to TASers, coders, and others who volunteer their time and hard work. I was sick of seeing him disrespect the entire community often in situations where everybody is enjoying themselves. I made the decision that silencing his forum posting was necessary as it was a drain on the users who make a positive contribution to the community.
The trigger for the ban at the time though was he was voting no on every submission. When confronted on the behavior he basically indicated that his motivations were for the fun of seeing people get upset. This is typical of Xkeeper, he makes it clear that he hates the community, and the site. He uses every opportunity to degrade TASVideos.
The ban was because I'm tired of seeing this behavior.
At the time, I banned him from the forums. He was not banned from IRC. I did ban him from the wiki (thus preventing submissions). Honestly, I was under the impression that I did not do that, but I did. Now that I am aware, I've restored that ability.
I should have communicated this ban to him and the community given that he was a long time active member of the community. Frankly, I was pretty pissed off at the time and very much distaste talking to him in general. But it was wrong of me to avoid the issue, and I apologize.
As for the dream team contest, I think it would be perfectly fine for him to participate, if that is what he chooses. And he is free to contribute submissions in the future.
As for my motivations, I browsed some xkeeper posts and here are some examples of behaviors that motivated my decision. It is by no means exhaustive because I'd rather not dig around in ~2000 posts.
Encoding discussion
Contributing nothing to the discussion other than laughing at the community
FCEUX bug report
Wow, a bug in an open source project that people donate their free time to. Rather than reporting an issue he would rather complain about how the coder "fucked up". Note: Xkeeper is a talented coder and is more than capable of trying to fix such bugs or at least look into what the cause might be. But it isn't his problem, it is someone else's problem and if they don't do it, then that means they are an idiot, incompetent, etc. It particularly angers me to see someone use something people created for free in their own time, and then show gratitude whatsoever, and then berate them when the code doesn't work the way he would like. It is hard to find good help with emulators, getting this kind of royal treatment doesn't help.
Site feature discussion
Of course any bug in the site is unacceptable, the site is mismanaged and the decisions are retarded. Was there a suggestion of what might be a better solution? A volunteer to help out with the coding? (again, xkeeper is more than capable of website coding & design) Or was it at least a polite comment? Of course not.
SMB PAL submission
Nothing particularly egregious here but a good example of what most xkeeper posts are like. His way of expressing disagreement is to berate those who disagree. Yes, I have no room to be disappointed because everything on the site ever is a run to the right game. Let's belittle the administrator, the content of the site, and community in general all at once.
SMB PAL submission
The usual berating of community members. Classy.
Tetris DS submission
Helpful
The site is going downhill
I could load this post up with these types of examples and across 6 years of posting. Apparently 6 years the site has been going down hill. And along with that is the usual berating of the community as a whole. Honestly this is the main reason for my decision. I've been hearing this attitude for too long, and frankly tired of it. This is more than enough time to accept how things are or do something else with your free time.
None of these posts in and of themselves is against the rules or ban worthy. I recognize that. As a whole, it is a constant stream of derision that is draining.
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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mindnomad found an improvement in 8-6 that will save at least 100 frames. I'm setting to delayed until we get a new version out (which shouldn't take too long since the game is very hex friendly).
Apologies if someone has already made a publishable encode already.
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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jimsfriend wrote:
Tasvideos.org wrote:
Note: Because of abuse that has happened, lurkers can't vote anymore.
Is this needed? I don't know how frequently greifers come to this website and try to vandalize things, so maybe this is a really easy yes from the admin, but maybe it isn't.
It indeed needed. Plain and simple. There was a time when this minimum post count was not in place. We had daily abuses. We were bombarded DAILY by fake accounts. I'm not talking some lurker abusing his account privileges. I'm talking uses making 20+ accounts in a day to vote on their troll submissions. We had more than 1 submission that had something like 18 yes, 5 meh, 2 no and every single vote could be traced to the submitter. These were not isolated incidents nor were they a single person.
Does the difference between 5 posts and 1 post and no posts really deter that many greifers, or do they just downvote and dig in theg arbage on youtube now and not bother with coming here?
Maybe 5 posts isn't a big deterrent for one troller but to someone making 20+ accounts, that's 100 posts. That definitely a deterrent. Frankly, I'm not too concerned about the lurker who votes "badly", I'm interested in the people doing everything they can to abuse a system.
Another issue is that by requiring posts, a person making 5 quick posts in order to "abuse" the system now has an IP trail that clicking a radio dial would not.
Most importantly, when we instituted the minimum post requirement again, these issues STOPPED.
So let's suppose the post requirement is no longer a deterrent to greifers, maybe it has some beneficial value anyway by forcing new users who want to participate to make a few posts - ....stuff
The minimum post requirement isn't about getting people to post that otherwise wouldn't. Frankly, I'm not even concerned with that. I would LIKE people to post and participate, and doing so is helpful to the submission. But it is up to the user. I'd rather have a silent vote than no vote at all.
It probably even says something to that effect in the rules or guidelines or whatever.
Indeed it does
But when I go to the workbench, and vote on a run, there is nothing there encouraging me to explain why I voted the way I did, so if I didn't read every topic on the entire forum and the rules and guidelines and judging guidelines (because I'm a judge and I would do that), I wouldn't know that my posts are more important than my vote since the first thing I see when entering the topic is Vote:.
Fair enough. That's worth considering.
Onto my last thought: unknown lurkers are prevented from voting due to past abuses that weren't even theirs.
That's life, dude.
He's Deign, ....blah blah stuff
Are you equating preventing voting abuse with taking submission voting super seriously? Or are you suggesting Deign be disciplined for his joking post? Or are you suggesting there are people getting disciplined unfairly due to their voting, if so where?
I honestly don't know where you are going with this. But it seems very tenuous regardless.
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jimsfriend wrote:
Deign voted no. I doubt anybody really cares. He's Deign, he stated his irrelevant reason, we move on.
But Deign didn't actually vote no. I can see your confusion though given there is precisely 1 (silent) no vote. But that was not him.
I probably have a lot to say about your post but it is a lot to digest, more than I have time to at this moment.
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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JXQ wrote:
I think to say this "isn't optimized at all" is completely incorrect. There were some clever ways of getting some of these items (Super Missile in Tourian using X-Ray to keep speed echoes and fall through the intended exit, for example). I think the technical quality of this run is quite good. Not as technically good as cpadolf's recently submitted any% run, but better than either of hoandjzj's first submitted any% runs for this game, and I don't recall any noticeable mistakes.
I also think that voting for non-publication based on the author believing another TASer could do this better is a bad reason.
Indeed. Aside from the obvious elitism issues of going down that road, I also don't like an environment where one feels the need to hide improvement possibilities for fear of rejection.
The technical quality should be based on the perception from watching the run, not on text comments by the author (of which English is not their first language).
Indeed.
Also, we have this submission now, but we should wait until an undetermined point when a better one will be submitted? It seems like in times past, that has been called out as a problem by all but the hardcore runners of those games. Ocarina of Time is the example that comes to mind
It is also a problem from a site management standpoint. In a case like this game, this is a very long TAS of a very complicated game. If we are demanding a perfect movie right from the start then we close the door on a lot of potentially awesome content for the site. A perfect movie of a game like this might be years from now, and in the meantime we would nothing. Also given the huge amount of work that is, we can't guarantee someone will devote the necessary time in the first place.
Also, a lot could be said & debated on that particular subject, but that is beyond the scope of this submission thread. The summary is that I welcome solid movies that impress, but are improvable.
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Warp wrote:
Btw, did you really beat the current best SMB startup time while just doing a tutorial on it? That's all sorts of awesome. (Yes, I know the exact time of pressing start doesn't matter in the end, but it still was funny.)
Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. However, the title screen is under a 21 frame rule too, I guess HL played around with that for whatever reason. I was trying my best to avoid talking about a frame rule though, and that made it hard lol.
I didn't have a plan when doing that tas, and had never attempted to match or improve HL's movie before. Had I, that part could have went smoother at least. But honestly, I felt "winging" it was going to be more informative though. Because TASing is more about running to problems and finding a solution. I'd rather put those skills on display.
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Flygon wrote:
Don't worry, I'm not dumb enough to use it outside of this topic. If I did, then Grunt would have a fit.
do I need to rip this comment apart, or are you already aware?
Consider this a formal warning to stop sticking your tippie toes across the line. That's actually more annoying than just pushing across.
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I'm pretty sure is the Japanese PS2 version.
Which begs the question, HOW!?
I put this on googlecode some years ago. But it proved to have very poor syncability (none). Also it was a very dated version of pcsx2 so it became increasingly pointless to develop it. Mainly though, it didn't run GTA 3 or Vice City at all :( Thus I had little enthusiasm.
Bottom line, I really really want to TAS this game and I would love to see this guy's TAS submitted and published at TASVideos. I tried contacting him but got no reply :(
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arukAdo wrote:
The main issue youll have with this is language, if the runner is speaking english, youll have to sub it, so overall, I think another solution would be to do that by text instead video, for the same result. (aka the real submission text... or any pm)
I know that doesnt address your issue/idea, since you was whilling to make the audiance understand actually there is real people behind the scene and not just bots.
Yet theres is a flawed concept here, if it is bots that are beating the game(s), they cant generate themselves spontanously over the internet, someone must have wrote those bots programs, wich is pretty much the same in the end.
Anyway, im not so sure the audio proof is the real ultimate solution to this, since you guys are 2 presenting the show, maybe one of you could impersonate the runner (just to do the voice acting), that way you would have a guaranted interview for each review.
Regardless, such a video would be good for the community, show a "real" person and their personality. Given arukado speaks french and is an experienced TASer, maybe he is the logical choice? ^_^
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So I've made some TAS tutorial videos and added to existing ones to make a sort of TAS tutorial mini-series. I put the series on youtube and added them to this page.
This video tutorial series takes a beginner through the introductory stages of making a TAS and introduces techniques for optimizing and using advanced tools.
Now that I've managed to do the beginner videos (which are the hardest part and I've been putting off for some time now) I plan to keep adding to this series periodically with more concepts & tools and such.
I hope this help people more easily learn how to make Tool-assisted Movies for themselves, and hopefully teach the veterans a few tricks they may not have known.
Feedback is appreciated, especially from "newbies" who are trying to learn based on the videos.
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Hello scripture. What a coincidence, I just finished this tutorial video only minutes before you posted! It describes the basics of how to record a movie file and some simple tools you can use to create a tool-assisted speedruns.
Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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In an effort to increase security we've hooked up the site to a db of known "spam" proxies. This new functionality should prevent use of most proxy servers.
I don't expect that normal users should be interfered with by this new feature, but should you have an interruption of service due to this change, feel free to post or contact me.
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jlun2 wrote:
Brandon wrote:
I hope this run is improved on. adelikat and I both have this game, and we both have a NESBot, yet the old run desyncs as of right now. That's just sad. :(
Do the run desync at similiar points? If so, then it may be the emulator's fault, not the game. Or at least that's what I think.
Yes it desyncs in the same spot for both of us. Sadly it is about 90% into the run, and it looks easily avoidable. Looks like AnS "plays with death" with an enemy, and on the real console it isn't quite so successful :(
Movies of games that are not emulated well (have graphical or functional glitches that do not exist on the real console) should not be submitted.
This isn't an emulator, per se, but the lack of sound support is definitely an absence of functionality.
This run should not be considered until proper sound support is added. Perhaps it should be delayed until then?
This submission is pending in hopes of getting some feedback on this idea/issue.
