BigBoct
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scrimpeh wrote:
I don't understand the exact situation or what has happened to the game as of late. Can someone give me the cliff notes, please?
A glitch has been found which allows you to underflow your ammo count from 0 to a very large number. Lots of disagreement about whether it should be used in low% runs that collect the proper items to do so.
Previous Name: boct1584
creaothceann
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_underflow (note that subtracting an integer is essentially the same as adding the integer's complement, so it's still an overflow)
Memory
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Invariel wrote:
I fully understand that some people consider this a cheat for low%, but I contend that in any other game's community, this would be a major find with incredible speed implications, and there wouldn't be any contention whatsoever, because managing ammunition isn't the most important part of the game, even though it is a large part of low%'s routing.
I contend that in most other game's community this would be a sign to abandon low% entirely. A lot of communities have stopped caring about low%'s in their games because after a certain point they become so broken that low% becomes hard to define and/or too similar to any% to keep as a separate category. They'd use this glitch but it is very unlikely they'd keep low%.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
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Anty-Lemon wrote:
scrimpeh wrote:
I don't understand the exact situation or what has happened to the game as of late. Can someone give me the cliff notes, please?
As far as low% is concerned, 13% now has 5 separate routes rather than 1, due to the discovery of an ammo overflow at Draygon. The 4 new routes get an extra PB tank in order to use a Crystal Flash in the Draygon fight, plus one of either Speedbooster, Ice, XRay, or a third PB tank. It's been proposed that two low% TASes be published, one being the fastest route w/overflow and the other being the overflow-less Charge-Speed, but it has been controversial, as the last few pages can attest to
I see. Thank you and boct1584 for explaining. Well... I have no stake in the matter, so I will just sit by idly and wait until you guys figured all of this out. At any rate, I'm looking forward to a new low%.
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Noxxa
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I agree with TheMG2, we don't need to make a "war" situation out of this, and we don't need to turn this into a them-vs.-us debate where the TASVideos and Super Metroid communities start strawmanning each other and their viewpoints. Besides being unnecessary and offensive, it's also flat out wrong. Let people have their opinions without attaching labels to them, please. As far as I'm concerned, the Super Metroid community can determine whether they consider the overflow glitch a major glitch or not for the purposes of low% or any% no-major-glitch runs. Then we can probably go along with that, and in any case we'll see about it if/when runs that use or don't use these glitches are submitted here.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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creaothceann wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_underflow (note that subtracting an integer is essentially the same as adding the integer's complement, so it's still an overflow)
When you're adding the complement, you expect it to overflow, which produces the mathematically correct result (the complement is designed to work as a subtraction after an overflow). This is a case in which doing so unexpectedly doesn't overflow, so it's distinct from the case of adding something and getting an overflow. I've seen the term "negative overflow" used for a situation like this one, as it's more like an overflow than an underflow in terms of what mathematically causes it, but on the other hand it adjusts the value in the other direction and thus is the opposite of a typical overflow.
Samsara
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Schmeman wrote:
As far as I know, Low% All Bosses, doesn't use any memory corruption or anything of the like, but instead just uses out of room strategies in order to skip key items that would otherwise be unskipable (such as bombs), and to reach rooms that would otherwise be unreachable without ice or speed (such as the room behind Botwoon).
I can't get behind this category purely because of the usage of OoB. The appeal of the low% categories is that they achieve their low percentages without the usage of OoB glitches or massive skips. The routes show off interesting ways of dealing with each area when severely limited in terms of your movement ability and your arsenal. Adding "all bosses" ruins the point of low% way more than the overflow glitch would, considering you'd have to collect more items than necessary so you could actually deal with said bosses. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the first glitched run used OoB and got something like 6% item completion, so this proposed 12% run is twice the (currently known) minimum of what you could get with the same glitches. It just makes the "all bosses" modifier feel arbitrary as a sub-goal in the context of this site. When the 14% ice beam run was submitted, it was initially submitted as "glitchless", and I honestly think that's how the category should remain on the site, though I can get behind minor glitches that push the percentage down lower in unique ways instead of just x-raying yourself straight to Mother Brain.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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Hey guys, just wanted to post these here. The first 2 links are links to my first TASes of the hack Project Base, and the third is a TAS by WildAnaconda69 of No Damage, which is his first as well. I am mainly looking for feedback on what I can do better, and I'm sure he is at least a little bit. Hope you guys enjoy all 3! (Timing on the pb tases were incorrect on my part, started at first input + the 5 second buffer that would be between start game and start of control) Any%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qujnmWKbKOs 104% (PB's version of 100%): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rx0KZDFW5s No Damage: https://www.twitch.tv/wildanaconda69/v/48878192
Invariel
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I'm formally apologizing here for the us/them statement that I made above. It was rash and poorly thought out, and reflects badly on my opinion of everyone, and of the site. I can't say that it won't happen again, but I will try to prevent it from happening again. Regarding the conversation(s) at hand, however 13% comes to bear, I look forward to it. My personal opinion and preference is that such a run include the (negative) overflow glitch, because ammo management isn't something that I notice in a TAS unless the ammunition runs out. I certainly don't want to see new branches come out for each potential route that emerges (even if one of those branches overshadows the others), and I can understand wanting to keep overflow out of contention of these branches because it (likely) would be a much faster path than the other forms of 13% (which is probably a solid argument for calling it a major glitch - among other similar runs, it renders them completely useless). With all of that said, I am excited about all of the work that is done by the people in the Super Metroid speedrunning community. I may not agree with your branches, but I like your tree.
I am still the wizard that did it. "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata <scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
Samsara
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Regarding categories in general, there was some IRC discussion about it, and I think I can get behind something like this: 1. "any%" as the sole no major glitches (i.e, no OoB or GEG or GT Code or GTX1080ti or AMD Radeon SoundBlaster GPUVPN UNIVAC Atari 7200 or whatever) fastest completion run, likely being the most popular/watched run of the game that we have. 2. "game end glitch" as the fastest possible completion, which always gets a separate category since it can't directly compete with a more standard any% run. 3. "100%" as himself, co-starring Malcolm Jamal-Warner. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 4. "low%" as one of the two entertainment-based, routing-heavy runs that show off a ton of unique routes and strategies that you wouldn't normally see in any other run. This would still be a single category, most likely the non-overflow run that everyone seems to be getting behind. 5. "RBO" as the other of these two runs, though Total proposed a new heavily glitched route that I'd be quite fond of seeing. This could serve as the sort of glitch exhibition run where ridiculous, unexpected things are done in order to heavily break the game, as it stands now it kinda feels similar (but not TOO similar) to the low% run in terms of it being based on tight routing and interesting strategies and the site could really benefit from a heavily glitched run that doesn't just skip straight to the ending. I think that's how things should stay for now. As for my reasoning on the other two currently published runs: 6. I think I've made it clear that we don't need two low% runs published simultaneously, and it seems like more people are starting to agree with me on that. "low%" is a goal, and the 5-ish potential categories that were proposed are just routes; This is something Anty-Lemon stated beautifully earlier on in the discussion. It doesn't make sense for us as a site to publish alternate routes that reach the exact same goal choice, in much the same way as it wouldn't make sense to publish another Super Mario Bros any% run that uses different warp zones alongside the current run. There's a definitive fastest route, and that's what we want first and foremost, with the subgoal of it being the most entertaining run possible. 7. And on that same note, we get to the in-game time run, which I've been opposed to long before I even became active in the community. It made sense a long, long time ago, when speedrunning was far more of a niche thing and in-game timers were the norm, but a lot of recent things have permanently obsoleted it in my mind. The two most prominent to me are thus: It can be easily tricked with constant pausing for one thing, giving you a theoretically hours-long run that gives a ridiculously low IGT. There's also the matter of what I said in the previous paragraph, how it's just the any% run with a different route, not even that much different from the realtime any% run as far as I'm aware. We should be publishing goals as categories, not routes, so I think it's safe to say (with a lot of agreement from other people in both the TASing community and the SM community) that the next any% run is going to knock this category out of the site for good. That's about it, really. Perhaps in the future there will be another heavily unique category that we can publish alongside everything, but for the most part I'd like to keep it at those first five.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 11/26/2010
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I think all of that is very fair Samsara. Really liking the idea of RBO glitched now!!!
My name is Forensics.
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Just to clarify for a previous series of posts: 14% for humans / 13% for TAS is known in the community as "low% no major glitches." Utilization of the out of bounds is considered by the community as a major glitch. 12% for humans / 11% for TAS is enough to defeat all of the bosses in the game if out of bounds is utilized. Thus, it is referred to as "low% all bosses" and provides its own unique viewing experience. Whether you acknowledge its differences as a category, and whether you acknowledge them positively, is a different story, but "low% all bosses" is performed with 2% less items because of Bombs and another item being skipped compared to inbounds low%. I would encourage people who are actively participating in this thread to educate themselves on categories, what they entail, et cetera before forming opinions. I hope that doesn't come off as condescending, because I truly would enjoy seeing more people educating themselves about the game, since there's so much that can be learned. There's a reason for the complexity, and it's not because Super Metroid is randomly a special snowflake amongst a sea of 2D platformers. Also, I and others were getting the vibe that certain people participating in the discussion have a predisposition towards treating the game negatively. I hope that isn't the case. I would enjoy seeing TASes of 13% with/without Drayflow, and 11% utilizing (what is believed or proven to be) the fastest branches, but I hope that people just TAS whatever category they want and not worry about publication. As an aside, I wish entertainment value didn't appear to have so much weight when considering publications, and this situation made me further realize that I'm not really sure why I ever cared as much as I did about whether something is published or not here. That's not meant to be an attack towards the website, just an observation.
Samsara
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Overfiendvip wrote:
I would encourage people who are actively participating in this thread to educate themselves on categories, what they entail, et cetera before forming opinions. I hope that doesn't come off as condescending, because I truly would enjoy seeing more people educating themselves about the game, since there's so much that can be learned. There's a reason for the complexity, and it's not because Super Metroid is randomly a special snowflake amongst a sea of 2D platformers.
I hope this doesn't come off as condescending either, but I have to say for the fifteenth time this week that your categories are not our categories, and any "education" done on your categories is specifically going to be for your community and not ours. Both communities have entirely different guidelines for categories: The SM community is absolutely allowed to be relaxed with what categories people run, since it's a community based around one particular game. We can't do that. What we allow as a published category weighs on every other published category in return. We need rules to limit categories because we're not just based around Super Metroid, we're based around anything and everything that can be TASed. At no point have we ever said that your categories are not legitimate categories. We've said they're not suitable for publication on our site. That's it. That's all this discussion has been about, because this discussion is happening on our site. As long as we can get over that hurdle, everything will be fine. The SM community is free to do and decide whatever it wants in regards to speedruns, TASes, categories, glitches, et cetera, but when it comes to submitting things to our site and discussing what's allowed on oursite, all I ask is that you give our rules at least half the amount of respect you give to Super Metroid itself.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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what
Here, my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/dekutony
Samsara
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But that's exactly what our side of the discussion has been all along. The first 100% Map Completion submission was one huge string of misunderstandings, where we were arguing that the category's not suitable for us and you were arguing that the category is suitable for you. The low% category discussion was the same thing, where we were arguing that we can't publish the same run twice and you were arguing that you guys treat them as different categories, and thus that's how we should do it as well. My concerns are for the site, not the game. That's what my concerns have been for all along. We understand how categories work for you guys, we understand what they mean and what you all decide for them. We understand how the game works, in fact I would argue that some of the people in our community are far more understanding of the game than some of the people in your community, even, and I mean that less as "we're better than you" and more "we have long-time members that have TASed the hell out of this game and know what's up". The thing that doesn't seem to be getting through is what categories actually mean in our respective communities, because there is a clear divide on what you guys treat as categories and what we treat as categories. That's where we're reaching a misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding is what's been fueling this fire for so long. We don't need to understand how the game works, you all need to understand how the site works, and the only way that can happen is if you all stick around and actually make an effort to understand the way that we personally run things. A category to us is a unique goal, something that shows off a wide variety of things that other runs don't show off. Our baseline criteria for a run is any% and 100%, because they're the most drastically different/unique categories for a game. Fastest completion, full completion. One shows off the game in full, the other speeds through with reckless abandon. When we have separate branches, they're there because the audience agrees that they should be published, and this is usually due to the amount of different content they provide. Playarounds are a really good example of this: They can show off a huge variety of glitches and weird quirks about the game that would never have been shown off in a fastest completion run. Things like "all bosses" are good examples as well, especially when any% runs end up skipping them to save time. And we have to limit these categories on our site because each one sets a precedent for the others. Each "glitchless any%" publication opens up a new avenue for another "glitchless any%" run of a different, more boring game, and that opens up complaints where we'll accept one but not another. We have to avoid extraneous publications as an all-around site, or else we'd have to accept every weird, esoteric category that comes our way because we allowed a couple strange ones to get through and people started complaining that we're being inconsistent. A category to you guys, and I mean no offense by this, is "let's come up with a new way to beat Super Metroid". And that's okay for your community, because you're a Super Metroid community, and finding new ways to beat Super Metroid is something that you guys do. You don't host thousands of runs for hundreds of games. That's where the difference comes in. You guys don't have to have rules on what you allow to be done there. You can have a speedrun record for Super Metroid "no hands, only feet" and no one would bat an eyelash at how esoteric of a goal it is, but we can't have things like that. When we discuss categories here, we discuss them on our terms, not yours, so telling us that we need to learn your terms is ultimately a pointless argument. Arguing that there's no difference between our categories and your categories is doing us a complete disservice as well, it almost shows that you see no point in learning how we do things while simultaneously asking us to learn about how you do things, when the latter is obvious and the former actually needs some more work put into it. Yes, I've been fairly harsh this entire thread, and I apologize for any offense anyone has taken from my words, but I just really need to get the point across that we operate differently than you all think we do, or even want us to from the looks of things. From my perspective (specifically mine, I'm not at all claiming to speak for the site in general), and this is admittedly an exaggerated and harsh perspective, you're all a bunch of starry-eyed fanboys who treat Super Metroid as a godlike video game, and any dissenters are just flat-out wrong no matter how they present their opinions. And it looks like from your perspective, we're the opposite: People so filled with hate for Super Metroid that we refuse to let it on our site, actively shutting down every Super Metroid-related avenue with harsh words and drawn-out arguments. Obviously, neither side is like that in reality, so how about we stop proving our misconstrued opinions of each other right and start learning to accept what the other side thinks? On those words: We won't automatically reject EVERY run that falls outside of the 5 categories I mentioned in a previous post, and that's been true since the beginning. But in return, we at least expect your community to understand what runs we wouldn't accept and more importantly why we wouldn't accept them. I'd love to lay this category business to rest, so hopefully we can all come to a mutual understanding sooner rather than later.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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AntyMew
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Can you *please* enlighten us how Samsara is being so rude? Because quite frankly I don't think she has a clue what you're talking about, and neither do I, for that matter
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AntyMew
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Uh... why are you responding to a PM here?
Just a Mew! 〜 It/She ΘΔ 〜
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TASvideos: where a discussion on low% branches spirals into a psychological discussion about respect, community, deertier, PMs, betrayals, and tl;dr posts. But seriously, someone just make/finish/submit a low% TAS and we'll judge it then. Geez.
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter - some loser
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