Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Zero padding puts movies in better alphabetical order. As in, the same movie + category but one is obsoleted. That alone makes it worth it. I think 5 is unnecessary, as it will be decades before that is an issue.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
I think 5 is unnecessary, as it will be decades before that is an issue.
I think you need to rethink that. "Decades?"
We'd need to put out less than 400 movies a year for it to be decades.
Let us not be short sighted, we can be smarter than the guys who designed time_t and IPv4.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
Less than 400. So how many did we publish this year?
I'm not worried about past performance, so much as future. We have a lot more potential for growth now.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I think Nach is saying our publishing rate has increased recently. However, it would still have to be an absolutely huge rate increase for us to have to worry about this any time soon.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Personally, I think that if we measured the digits in hexadecimal we won't have to worry for the 5 digit problem for six and a half times longer. Don't worry I am absolutely kidding
How about this: If we ever get movie publication #4999, the next published movie will jump to #50000 and start from there forward. That way the files will sort ok, and we won't be running out of numbers anytime soon.
(Yeah, half-kidding here. Maybe. Although the idea is interesting.)
So I guess next would be categories. While some movies have categories that don't exist I think most can fit into these options.
100percent/all____/100/100p: I prefer "all___" (e.g. allitems, allquests, alltemples, etc) with 100percent being an okay alternate. 100 and 100p are too unclear 100% uses a character that could mess with some systems.
glitched/____glitch: I prefer just calling these runs glitched.
2players: Should it be only movies where 2player is slower or every 2player movie?
lowglitch/no____: for when a run avoids a game-breaking glitch. For "no_____" the _____ is the name for the glitch (e.g "nobackwardslongjump" "nocardglitch" (hint)) I prefer just "lowglitch" personally.
warpless: self explanatory
lowpercent/lowitems: I think this just applies to the metroid series.
anypercent: only if needed. Again, I think this only applies to metroid
playaround: I think this one is already official
Sub optimal character runs or games where you choose characters should have the character name (e.g. luigi, peach, alucard, julius, grant, sypha, etc).
I think that covers all the big ones. I know there are individual movies that aren't covered, but this should be a good list to cover most eventualities.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
How about this: If we ever get movie publication #4999, the next published movie will jump to #50000 and start from there forward. That way the files will sort ok, and we won't be running out of numbers anytime soon.
(Yeah, half-kidding here. Maybe. Although the idea is interesting.)
Or jump from 4999 to 0x5000. In other words, jump to #20480 and encode in hexadecimal from there on. Should buy us 4x the current age of the site until we need to switch to 5 digits. (Actually, it won't, since the rate of submissions has increased.)
edit: does anyone know how many submissions per, say, week, we get on average these past 3 months?
2players: Should it be only movies where 2player is slower or every 2player movie?
I suppose it would be informative to use the category even if the 2-player run is the "main" run (ie. the fastest one). This especially so if a category name is included in all file names. (Of course this raises the question of whether it would be necessary to somehow indicate that this is the "main" TAS of the game even though it uses 2 playable characters...)
Another dilemma: What if there are two different runs of the game, both using 2 playable characters but with different goals (eg. any% and 100%)?
Btw, the "2 players" has always been a problematic term because it's a bit ambiguous. Generally speaking it means that two controller inputs are used to control two independent playable characters (one controller for each character), as if there were two people playing the game (even if there's only one author). This is different from a run having 2 authors (who might be controlling the one and only playable character at different points in the run) and also from the game having 2 playable characters but still being a 1-player game (iow. the characters are played in alternation by one player with one controller). The same goes for other amounts of playable characters, of course.
But I suppose "2player" is unambiguous enough for the file name, especially since it should be short. (We wouldn't want the category to be something like "oneauthorcontrolstwoplayablecharacterssimultaneouslyusingtwocontrollers").
warpless: self explanatory
*snif* :..(
anypercent: only if needed. Again, I think this only applies to metroid
"any%" is also more or less synonymous with the "main" TAS of the game (ie. usually the fastest one). In other words, it means "just get to the end as fast as possible, disregarding any other goals" (in other words, things like collecting items are completely secondary and don't matter, as long as the run is as fast as possible).
If all file names should contain a category name, then we should think what it should be in the case of the "main" run, if not "any%".
When looking through the site, I found that there is a case where movie numbers don't quite indicate the obsoletion chain. Historical movies (those made before the site) often have higher movie numbers than the movies that obsolete them.
Because of this, I think the movie number shouldn't be used for sorting purposes. It should definitely be included in the file name so one can easily find a movie file given a movie ID, but it shouldn't be used for sorting.
Version number to point out the obsoletion chain would be neat instead, but then we have things like this to break the scheme again.
Maybe a hybrid solution should be used: in the rare cases where a movie number decrease with an obsoletion, and only in those cases, a v1/v2/v3 numbering should be included. In all the other cases, movie number only is ok.
I also agree on the 5 digits padding.
