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So recently I've caught up on or started watching a couple of different shows, including The Owl House, Amphibia, Over the Garden Wall and Hilda. There's not really too much I can say about each individual show, but I've really enjoyed my time with them overall. I can safely say that I haven't been this much into animation for a long time.
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This game looks really hard, given by how slow you are and how little clearance you're given for each obstacle. The TAS looked quite well executed, nimbly maneuvering around all of the obstacles. I do wish there were more instances where you could visibly break the level design to skip obstacles. You often do have to wait for some hazard to pass you, instead of just going.
Voting yes because of more NESdev.
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The execution of the run looks excellent, but I am also not sure what separates the run from the existing branches. There's plenty of other movies that showcase Juste's crazy movement, which are also much less monotonous since it isn't the same room over and over. The damage stacking is also present in every other branch. I would personally lean against this obsoleting 2455M, as the Simon Boss Rush shows off more unique things from to the other branches compared to this one.
I'll admit I haven't done a very good job at keeping up with the changes to the site's rules, so my understanding may be way outdated, but if we want to limit the number of categories for a game, I honestly don't think this run shows enough unique things compared to the other runs. The technical quality of the run looked great, and it is really cool to see just how fast the Boss Rush can be beaten, but if we just have one, I'd honestly much rather keep the Simon run.
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I thought to collect some of my feedback to the site after a week of using it in a single post. Some of it probably deserves a github issue, most of it is dumb stuff that only I care about. A lot of it is old phpbb functionality I realized I was missing after it was gone. Also, I have some style-based nitpicks. I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this. Please move the post if it isn't.
First of all, the biggest complaint I have is that the site generally seems slower than before. While I can't measure the exact time difference to before, certain pages have a noticeable delay before clicking a link and the page actually materializing. This considerably affects browsing the site in my eyes, especially if you wanna click around. I particularly notice this with the forum overview and individual board overviews. Other pages, such as wiki pages, seem fine, so I assume it's because the site has to do a lot of work generating these pages. I wish I could offer some more concrete help about this. This is the only serious complaint I have.
(Edit: I should mention that I'm using Firefox. The site overall seems a lot more snappy on Chrome. If I disable CSS on Firefox, it also generally seems better. I can try getting some concrete numbers if desired.)
Edit 2: Recent updates made the site feel much more responsive. Good job! I no longer have complaints regarding the matter. I'll strike through points below that were addressed.
Other assorted nitpicks I want to moan about:
I tend to access the submissions through the workbench. The autogenerated workbench thread has everything I tend to care about for a submission, except the judging status. That is missing compared to before.
Banned Users should have some kind of indication on their profile and their posts that they're banned. Currently, it just says nothing, which is confusing.
It took me a while when using the forum initially to realize that signatures are highlighted with darker background. That looked pretty odd to me at first. Now that I've gotten used to it, it's less strange but still.
I'm not sure what the Reset button in the page select does that the "Back" button doesn't
The previous posts being visible in the "create reply" page was immensely useful. Currently, I always find myself opening a second tab with the current topic to have the previous posts visible. Alternatively, the quick reply box could be reimplemented.
It's kinda weird how when you preview a post, the preview shows up below the text box. If you edit your post, the old post shows up above the text box. It would probably be more intuitive if both show up in the same location, and clicking "Preview" on editing a post overwrites the previous view of the post. I would suggest to put it below the text box, since then you don't have to scroll to get to the text box when editing a post.
Move the Minor Edit checkbox to the "Post" button and make it checked by default.
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I'm thankful for the submission notes, because otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to understand a thing that's going on. That said, it was still pretty difficult for me to match the explanations in the submission notes against the on-screen gameplay because all of the text is in Japanese. This is where I think it would be very helpful to have subtitle commentary on top of the gameplay.
I'm amazed how many JRPGs have game end glitches of some sort, and the payoff in this one was pretty good as well. Voting yes for entertainment.
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The single segment world record is 5h06m18s, and using the same timing method, this TAS is 33m20s.
Now that is quite ridiculous.
Strange choice to turn Godzilla into a Famicom Wars-like. Can't say I entirely hate it though. It's obvious how much having control over the RNG breaks the game, so I'm voting yes.
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It's kind of stunning this game is entirely controlled with the stylus. I couldn't tell at all from the prince's movement. However, it still seemed to make the game fairly loose and imprecise, in a way where it's hard to tell if it was your or the game's fault. I'm learning toward the latter. In general, the game seems to be a veritable slog due to the parkour mechanics, the many forced arena fights, and the unstable framerate. There doesn't really seem to be a lot you can do about that. All of this would probably be more tolerable if the overall length of the game was shorter.
Still, the speed tricks in the run were quite numerous and apparent, and they did help up to break up the gameplay a lot. The technical quality of the run seemed just fine, so I'm voting Yes overall. Good work!
I only wish they didn't bitcrush the audio in this game so much. Jesus christ.
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It's worth remembering that earlier, there was no minimum time for judging. It was only introduced after there were controversial judgements that were made immediately after a movie was submitted. Here's the thread where the minimum time was introduced.
Fundamentally, I don't really see what changed between then and now. Personally, I don't really lean too heavily one way or the other. On the one hand, we should be able to trust judges to take as long as they need to make a proper judgement call about a submission. On the other hand, it's not like the current three day delay really causes any problems in my eyes. I could really go either way.
Edit: After a bit of deliberation, I cast my vote behind keeping it as 3 days. I've not really heard many compelling arguments for removing the limit entirely, but several quite good reasons as to why there should be one. The question then only is where to set the limit. Since like I said, I don't think there really was any problem with the old limit, I think it should just be kept as is. Don't fix what isn't broke.
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I've taken the liberty of making a temp encode. If anyone more qualified wants to take a shot at it, I can take mine down.
Link to video
Hi and welcome to the site, fanTAStic!
For a first attempt, this run wasn't so bad. However, in my eyes, the problems outlined in the submission text pretty much disqualify the submission from publication immediately. Since you can in theory hang around forever to let more and more enemies spawn, there is no maximum kill count, which makes the run ill-defined in terms of goals in my eyes. Unfortunately, I don't think the category is publishable at all because of this. It'd be much better to just maximize the kill count as a secondary goal in a regular speed-focused run. You also definitely miss some enemies, for example at frame 27429 in the lower left corner. It's also somewhat unclear and inconsistent what counts as a kill in general and what doesn't. For example, you spend time destroying the lower two hives in the final boss, but not the upper two. I'm not sure why.
The run is probably better suited to the Discussion Thread. You can upload it to Userfiles if you want to share it with others.
The run also looked quite unoptimal in some places. For example, was it really necessary to turn around and drop down multiple times in the first level? You also miss a lot of shots in some boss fights, which loses time, since those shots do not contribute to lowering the boss's HP. During the first boss fight, while you were waiting for one of the turrets to open, you could've already hit the boss to lower its HP in advance. There's also Spread Gun optimization, which is incredibly powerful, but that's more difficult.
Overall, this was a good first TAS. The gameplay was overall very frantic due to having to kill every enemy, which was quite entertaining. The Waterfall level was an especially good example of that. I liked seeing that. However, there is still lots of work to be done in regards to optimization and planning. Keep at it!
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I should've watched the run earlier. Did you just clip out of bounds in the Papyrus fight?
I can safely say this was the strangest way I've ever seen anyone play Undertale. I appreciated the long and detailed submission comments, since they significantly helped explain what was going on. The setup for getting the punch card was ridiculous, and I got increasingly astounded by the run the longer I kept watching. Overall, on entertainment, I'm voting an emphatic yes. There was also something incredibly funny to me about you going "nah screw this lmao" in the middle of New Home and going back to the Geno route. There were also tons of other little tricks and entertaining strategies that kept me excited.
While the Z count is very high, the deviation the limitation causes from the standard route is significant. In my eyes, the run is unique and entertaining enough to be published. My only concern is that since the run is subject to being optimized from lowering the Z count, there is a chance that an improvement could come at a significant cost of entertainment and time, like waiting literal hours to save a Z press, as actually happens in SM64. Where do you draw the line to say that a Z press improvement is not worth the entertainment loss?
Still, great work. I seriously enjoyed watching the run.
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Long overdue upgrade, and probably the most important step forward the site has taken in years. I wasn't really able to contribute much of anything to it, so I can only express my utmost congratulations and gratitude for the hard work and dedication everyone put in it. Hats off from me.
The best part is that now, we have a site that keeps getting improved, unlike the fossil that was the old code and phpbb.
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I spent so much of the formative years of my online life on phpBB-based boards. This was probably the last one I knew of that was still active. Rest in pepperinos, old friend.
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I got curious about how well machine translation works, so I decided to try out machine translating [4521] NES Final Fantasy II "game end glitch" by naruko in 04:38.87. The submission notes have handmade translations by xxezrabxxx. The results of translating the text with Google Translate are here.
My personal impression is that while the general topic of each section is clear, it is very hard to follow the text because Google tends to mangle the sentences in a way that is unnatural to an English speaker. Some unclear vocab, where Google has to guess, doesn't help matters. It is obvious that the hand-crafted translation by xxezrabxxx is much better, and makes it significantly easier to follow the text.
Having the text translated for you by someone else is contingent on someone being there to do it.
I would definitely suggest having a thread on the forum or a page on the site where notable submission texts can go instead. That way, there is no "best" text, where being best is largely determined by your ability to produce good English language writing.
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I feel like awarding submission texts would be biased towards people fluent in English.
Maybe not much more so than the site itself being English language anyway. Perhaps there could be another way to highlight good and effortful submission notes.
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It feels like we should have a rerecording-capable simulator for the PICO-8 itself by now. Oh well. I've been waiting for a TAS of Celeste Classic, and I really appreciated watching this. Very good work throughout. It seemed like all of the obstacles were more like suggestions.
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I didn't see this coming at all. What a fantastic run. I'm so glad to see the despawn glitch used to its maximum potential, and in so many different places. The planning also looked really good, and making Kraken and Carbon Dog OHKO themselves was also really cool.
Absolute yes vote.
As for a screenshot suggestion, I think talking to Frank from outside the Arcade would be an excellent choice.
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My personal thoughts, without much reflection behind them:
I geeeeenerally don't think A/V dumping needs to be a hard requirement anymore. Of course, it's always a huge bonus, but unlike back in the day, people actually have the ability to screen record at an acceptable resolution and bitrate now. It still takes some powerful hardware, and doesn't lead to optimal results, but for most people watching, it will be good enough.
What's much more important to me is determinism, and the ability for people to play back movie files on their own system without too much hassle. I'm in particular concerned about future proofing and bit rot. A TAS is not much good if the last person who was able to get it to sync successfully left the site 5 years ago.
I would also want to warn against being too enthusiastic about accepting new formats before they're ready. While it gets movies on the site faster, which is a good thing, it will create much more problems down the line. See famtasia, yabause, mupen, pcsx, dega, and the whole assortment of other junk emulators we got rid of, and the legacy of hard to deal-with movies they leave behind.
There's also this earlier thread. The thoughts in my post in it still apply.
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Figure this game should get a thread
Link to video
Any% No Major Glitches TAS in 28:59.37 by Constructive Cynicism
Not much info to go on in the video. The Uumuu kill is pretty swag tho
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For the record, I could see the category have some merit, since there's a few scroll glitches that would be unique to Trevor.
On the other hand, that is because the other characters have faster methods to deal with those sections anyway.
H8 to be harsh, but I'd be against publishing this movie for the category alone.
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...Why are subweapons never used in the second phase death fight anyway?
Alright, the movie generally looks much better now. Most of the sections now look quite smoothly executed, and the boss fights looked good.
However, there are still mistakes. Since the run seems to be based of Sanhaim-Grim's old run, it does not display updated knowledge for stage 1. In particular, you should pick up the holy water to kill the boss in the stage faster. Check out the current Grant U WIP for the fastest known approach to Stage 1. You can also manipulate zombies to not spawn in your way with RNG.
There's also some other minor mistakes. In BLK-4-0B (around frame 26845), you could throw a cross while landing on the ground to kill the red skeleton, so you don't have to jump over it.
In the final room of 5-0B, you could take the damage boost differently, which by my calculations should save around 50 frames. You also don't need to whip the armor knight in the autoscroller room, instead you can just use a second cross.
Overall, the run is much more polished, but there's still work to be done. Do keep it up.
