Although, if we are going to be further discussing and making changes to the site, perhaps these responses should be shunted into a new thread, so that this submission is not further derailed.
Done.
I also think I'm going to look for all discussions about TASVideos.org development soon, and index them all in a sticky thread (kind of like here).
You can also use IRC without installing anything if you go here: http://webchat.freenode.net/. Type "HappyLee" as your name and #tasvideos as the channel.
Also, a vote in favor of level 4. As much as I love Metal Slug 3, the only notable difference level 8 is going to bring is 5+ surplus minutes of repetitive shooting at bosses. Which is something I, and possibly many others, could do without.
Don't forget that tool-assisted scandashes are going to look very disorienting, close to incomprehensible, due to rapid angle changes and moving sideways.
Wiimote's cursor's positioning speed is capped by the game's framerate, while GC's thumbstick has a maximum movement speed. Of course, this alone doesn't make the Wii version preferable.
Ok, wow, for someone who doesn't care about Super Metroid nor find it entertaining at all, Comicalflop sure is the most vocal person. Some more instances of such behavior and I'm going to start suspecting him of being jealous of people who actually do like the game. :D
Let me set one thing straight, the apparent "lack of interest" towards low% as a category does not stem from the category being unentertaining and unsuitable for the site. There is one huge underlying reason that covers not only this but other effects that everyone who has observed the development of TASes for the last few years can see.
Low% is and has always been one of the least popular categories for TASers to make movies on. Every experienced SM player out there would try to complete at least a draft version of an any% TAS first, the only notable exception being JXQ. Reasons for this are numerous, all of them obvious enough. Low%, while a common goal in many games, remains a niche category, so it either comes last in the priority of TAS-making, or is attempted by people who specifically want to make a low% movie.
Since the popularization of memory watch that made optimization and new trick discovery quite a bit easier, the game has enjoyed an influx of new promising players that have or have not made it to the publication in the end. In fact, there haven't been many games on the site that ever had so many experts actively working on them (counting both actual movie-making and research).
As a result, new any% movies and WIPs were produced in such ridiculous amounts (considering it's a long and complex game) they essentially made the audience jaded. Obviously, when you have a dozen of people researching the game for years, certain outlines are bound to take place and eventually solidify, making the possible improvements less and less noticeable, especially to the inexperienced eye. It's not helping that some segments, particularly the first and the last few minutes of most runs, are virtually identical. You want a proof of the audience being jaded? Easy, just look at the amount and quality of feedback the first post-Terimakasih TASes got, and the amount they've been getting in the last year or so. Not only did it drop to about 1/3 of its initial amount, most of these 1/3 are more-or-less hardcore Metroid fans (and Comicalflop, who watches every TAS to discover that he dislikes it even more — which to me is dubious behavior because I take for granted that if I dislike one TAS of a given game, I'm not going to watch another; just don't be a victim about it).
Anyway, my point is that the category is fine — and has always been. It didn't become less entertaining or technically sound. Quite the opposite. It's just that people are tired of Super Metroid. The thread is nearly dead despite quite a few surprising discoveries posted every few weeks or so. About once a year I reread Michael Flatley's 100% thread or the discussions about Saturn's RBO teasers — the document of milestone discoveries and incredible enthusiasm shared about the whole project by dozens of people, including those who have never been Metroid fans. This enthusiasm is long gone, and, oddly enough, it's the TASers themselves that made it so.
As one of the examples of the overwhelming irony that fell upon this submission's fate, Spoofer worked really hard to make this run — the low% — as close to the published any% as possible, because fastest time was his natural goal. The same thing made it less interesting to watch and less valuable as a category. This isn't going to be published, that much is already clear, so we can just drop this discussion and appreciate the run for what it is — a good job by a very talented TASer.
IIRC, the major reason 14% was not reinstated wasn't because it was an unsuitable category, but because Saturn's run didn't qualify due to a number of criteria that had little to do with 14% as a category.
However, with this particular submission the point becomes moot since it follows the same route as the any%, except finishes slower, and is thus not eligible for the "this movie is notably different from the others" clause. And since using Speed Booster also makes it slower than Ice beam… Yeah.
phpBB2 is very limited in regards to searching/filtering, so the best thing you can do is restrict the search to <system name> board and put <emulator name> in the search string together with whatever you're searching.
On the other hand, that's exactly a sufficient means to filter by tags.
At least I don't expect anyone to code additional functionality into it like Bisqwit has already done over these years. (I wonder, though, when will the time come to upgrade our forum software…)
Obviously I think it would be good to be able to have all our published TASes viewable in full on youtube. As long as credit is given, the concept of TAS is explained, and none of the TAS authors or encoders object to you putting them up on your account, I am for it.
FCEU and FCEUX are already mixed together and there seems to be no problem (also considering it's one of the most actively discussed emulator). Famtasia has only a few threads, all of which can be tagged, and they're all so old they will be buried deep in the topic list without being an eyesore. A subforum might be an interesting idea but I don't know how warranted it is.
Ok, not as much restructuring per se as it is optimization.
After having cleaned up some of the "orphan" topics in "Other games" and "Other emulators" I realized just how messy the board list is. These suggestions will hopefully help parsing it (both there and at the main forum page) at least visually.
1. Rename "<Emulator>" boards to "<System> emulator: <emulator1> (<emulator2>, <emulator3>)"
Example: "Gens" becomes "Genesis emulator: Gens".
Rationale: uniformity.
2. Merge all emulators of the same system into one board.
Example: "Snes9x" and "ZSNES" become "SNES Emulators: Snes9x, ZSNES, bsnes".
Rationale: some of these boards are effectively dead, while other might pop up in case we get alternative rerecording emulators for existing platforms. This will, at the very least, reduce the clutter. I can append relevant tags to all threads to help discern them in merged boards, like it is done with hacks in game boards.
y/n?
There are many different Tetris engines with different rotation rules, drops, acceleration, wallkicks, latencies, etc.. You'd be surprised how technical a seemingly simple game like this can be.
I think the converse needs to be spoken for.
Here we have judges spending their free time really thinking about a movie, and encoders using a lot of time and hard drive space, and effort to encode a movie, sometimes many times. Then they got to upload it and edit and all kinds of stuff, and in the end, we sometimes get "Hey? Why so fast?". It's ungrateful that people here are even fathoming using a term like "rushed publication". There will always be mistakes either way, but people helping out don't need to get their noses rubbed in it, which is what happens every time someone complains about a rush.
Nach, for the record, the "we donate our free time so that you bastards could enjoy it" type of argument is very cheap. The reason is that every single thing about this site, or any hobby in general, is taking our free time. Judging takes free time, but making movies does so as well, and even watching them — perhaps THE integral part of the site — takes free time. Now if you're going to convince everyone your free time is more valuable than anyone else's you just won't go very far with that. As much as we should appreciate what judges do, judges should appreciate the watchers and the movie makers. Not any less.
But if you want me to go deeper than that I can also point out that making and watching TASes existed before the institution of submission judgement, so here I unambiguously hint to you that using such an argument here can be seen as self-justification. I hope you won't use that argument in the future.
Think for a moment that this site wasn't made for the administration, but for the audience (and its members who come from, and remain, the audience) to enjoy. Naturally its goal should be constant improvement of the environment in accordance with most productive means of going through the "creation -> submission -> appraisal -> discussion -> publication -> improvement" chain. "Rushed publications", while they seem productive in the sense of speedy content delivery, undermine some of the aspects of the comfortable process of going through that chain. They just forcibly break it. It's not productive, and it's not polite.
Oh yeah, and certainly it shouldn't be harder for our judges and publishers to do some things slower. Don't you agree? If you don't agree I'll throw feces at you, I swear.
I'm able to run DoDonPachi DaiOuJou at 60 fps with a few speed optimizations enabled on my ancient single-core Athlon 64 3400+. It seems it really depends on a game.
