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I think it's just better to stop "1-upping" ourselves, because let's face it, it's not going to keep happening. At some point in time, we're just not going to be able to keep doing it. How long do you intend to wait to find something new? A year? Two? Three? At some point we have to face the fact that we're just not going to be able to do it. dwangoAC & Co has admitted as much. So let's just break the ice and stop doing it. I honestly think we're beyond the point where we can keep doing it. Takeovers just aren't as cool as they once were. So let's get it out of the way and just keep delivering fun content, regardless of whether we "1-up" ourselves or not. Skipping a GDQ would probably make a large majority unhappy anyway.
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I have the impression that the viewers (at least those more in the know) are more critical of TASes in the stream than regular speedruns. They are more ready to give leniency to human speedrunners and allow for mistakes and somewhat boring segments, but are much more critical of TASes and expect a lot more entertainment and "value". They want TASes that make them laugh, they want TASes that impress, that do something impressive, rather than just looking like a regular speedrun that they have already been watching for days. The run being tool-assisted needs to be blatantly obvious, rather than subtle. TASes that absolutely break the game (eg. Megaman) look more impressive than TASes where the tool-assistance is more hidden and would need to be explained (such as random drops in Castlevania). The TASes would likewise be preferably relatively short. I have the feeling that viewers are ready to watch a 2-hour regular speedrun, but if a TAS goes for more than 5 minutes they get bored. I might be completely wrong here, but that's the impression I have. Perhaps a mix of the two? First show like three short TASes that just break the game (as in are complete glitchfests, rather than taking over the console) and are quite short (5 minutes absolute maximum), and then perhaps a longer one (maybe 15 minutes at most).
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I feel like at this point a TAS block is a shoe in to get into the events if people are willing to put something together, but we don't always have to shoot for the stars. You don't have to always worry about topping yourself. Maybe we go from total control madness where we're pushing skype through an SNES one year to a string of TASes suitable for the awful block the next. Maybe we spend all of our time and resources developing a cool secret idea to show one year, and we spend all of our time and resources developing cool commentary for regular runs the next. When I saw snake come out of SMW, I was blown away. The next year, The choco mountain race did the job, then it was brain age. This year was cool, it showed some awesome tech and really great planning with the three consoles working together. But besides the snake "main event", it's been the smaller stuff that I keyed in on. This time there wasn't really any smaller stuff. I mean, Gradius is fine, but that doesn't really carry. I don't think you have to go all the way open, because surprise is fun. I don't think you have to go all the way secret, because sometimes you need help. I don't think you have to show only published tases, I don't think you have to do only special tases just for gdq. Not always and forever, in any case. Let's just show some fun runs next time, the time after that we can do something interesting with tech. Anyway, dwango, you did an amazing job. It can be completely thankless to waste hours and days and weeks and months practicing to go up there for 30 minutes and do the best you can and get crapped on for it. I can relate. Thank you for having done this.
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Actually, I really like the idea of a TASblock inside the Awful block. It'd be a change, the expectations would be in the right place, and some games are so bad that you can't really speedrun them without tools. (Cheetahmen 2 is the most obvious, as that requires a bunch of luck manipulation to even have a chance of completing the game. However, it cares a lot about uninitialized memory, which is fairly hard to deal with in a console verification.) Note that only the AGDQs, not the SGDQs, have an awful block.
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Awful block would a nice change of pace!
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So ace was found in pokemon stadium? I'm hype already if that's ok?
Bobthefloater
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Warp wrote:
I have the impression that the viewers (at least those more in the know) are more critical of TASes in the stream than regular speedruns. They are more ready to give leniency to human speedrunners and allow for mistakes and somewhat boring segments, but are much more critical of TASes and expect a lot more entertainment and "value". They want TASes that make them laugh, they want TASes that impress, that do something impressive, rather than just looking like a regular speedrun that they have already been watching for days. The run being tool-assisted needs to be blatantly obvious, rather than subtle. TASes that absolutely break the game (eg. Megaman) look more impressive than TASes where the tool-assistance is more hidden and would need to be explained (such as random drops in Castlevania). The TASes would likewise be preferably relatively short. I have the feeling that viewers are ready to watch a 2-hour regular speedrun, but if a TAS goes for more than 5 minutes they get bored. I might be completely wrong here, but that's the impression I have. Perhaps a mix of the two? First show like three short TASes that just break the game (as in are complete glitchfests, rather than taking over the console) and are quite short (5 minutes absolute maximum), and then perhaps a longer one (maybe 15 minutes at most).
It seems like the SNES Family Feud would be good, as it is quite short (6-7 mins. with plenty of opportunities to cut the ruun short), very obviously abusing glitches and very entertaining.
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EEssentia wrote:
I think it's just better to stop "1-upping" ourselves, because let's face it, it's not going to keep happening. At some point in time, we're just not going to be able to keep doing it. How long do you intend to wait to find something new? A year? Two? Three? At some point we have to face the fact that we're just not going to be able to do it. dwangoAC & Co has admitted as much. So let's just break the ice and stop doing it. I honestly think we're beyond the point where we can keep doing it. Takeovers just aren't as cool as they once were. So let's get it out of the way and just keep delivering fun content, regardless of whether we "1-up" ourselves or not. Skipping a GDQ would probably make a large majority unhappy anyway.
I agree. Also it seems it becomes less and less "speedrun/superplay" and more "finding security exploits" as it gets more and more elaborate. People mentioned the aweful game idea, which sounds nice, but not sure how much entertainment can be squeezed out of them.
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Gruefood Delight might be a good hunting ground for "awful block" TASes, but I don't know if we want to endorse work that we ourselves have rejected. (Also a lot of GD is very high quality, and was rejected for technical reasons, arbitrary goal choice, or for just being boring if they were submitted in the pre-vault era.)
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A bit late to the party, but here goes. To put in context, I regularly watched dwangoAC's Twitch streams prior to the TAS block with the various WIPs. I also watched the TAS block live, immediately followed by listening to a VOD of the French restream. Positives: - Super-impressive ACE demos. - Good selection of TASes overall. - Learning about new ACE techniques in Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past not published on TASVideos. - Great commentary from RealMyop and Synael in the French restream. Neutral: - Galaga and the interactive coloring segments felt tacked on, but they gave some variety. - Nothing special was showcased about the NES Classic Edition over a regular NES despite having exclusive content in both the menus and games. (For example, I discovered recently that in Kirby's Adventure, using the Crash ability causes a massive post-processing effect.) - There was no camera on the controllers display board so it made the contraption practically pointless. - Too much content too quickly. There was no downtime to appreciate the technical achievement showcased while it was happening. Even in the French restream where the trick was revealed early on, the consequence was that they only talked about it over the Super Mario 64 run. - Out-of-context GDQMonitor references. Negatives: - Throughout the entire block, the game audio was barely audible. Kind of a huge problem when you're trying to showcase that the NESes are streaming it. - The SNES streaming framerate was not good enough to showcase a TAS in my opinion, especially for Super Mario 64 and Portal which have very quick movements and frame-perfect techniques. - Except for the audience reaction, there was no obvious way to know if the Skype footage was really live since James Chen never went near the couch, which made cross-referencing camera angles impossible to viewers. - The English commentary was pretty bad in my opinion, to the point where I think it would have been better if nobody would have talked after explaining the NES Classic Edition's technical limitations. Suggestions for future GDQs: - Maybe it would be better to have dwangoAC handle the technical aspect exclusively, and a completely different one to focus on the presentation and commentary preparation exclusively. That way, I don't think dwangoAC would be overwhelmed. - It seemed there were a lot of uncertainties until the last minute. Freezing the content of the presentation a few weeks in advance may have allowed a more polished one. Ideas that don't make it can always be re-used in following GDQs. - Creativity is the limit for ACE demos. It may be a good idea to seek out people in the demoscene to help fuel it if it ever becomes a problem. - Quality over quantity. Overall, I had a blast! Good job to everyone involved! I hope you will find my criticisms constructive, and I'm looking forward to the next event. :)
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I've had some time to rest and think about AGDQ, and I would like to share my experience. We weren't fully prepared when I arrived on Saturday, but due to the complex nature of this year's TAS Block we had scheduled a tech practice for that evening. So after driving for 7+ hours straight through blizzard conditions I arrived and immediately started working on stuff, including writing code and testing TASes on console. We had a number of unexpected problems that prevented us from testing everything that evening, despite staying up past midnight trying to get things working. We ended up giving up on that practice and planning to just get things ready throughout the week. Very early in the week the dwangoAC left to visit family. He also ended up getting sick and becoming rather incapacitated, and put me in charge to make decisions. We still had a lot left to do, and every day that week I worked for anywhere between 5 and 8 hours trying to finish everything. I was accompanied by MediaMagnet who helped with stuff as much as he could, mostly keeping me sane (which I greatly appreciate). I spent only a small amount of time that week going site seeing, but by then I was extremely sleep deprived and I found myself unable to stay awake in the museums, basically feeling like a zombie on what should have been a pleasureful vacation. I had little time to enjoy the event, and most of that time was when I took a break to have a meal and got to watch the stream for a few minutes. There was a lot of work left to be done, and if I didn't do it it wasn't going to get done. dwangoAC agreed to let me completely run tech so that he could rest and focus on the commentary, and by the end of the week I was very comfortable with what we had to show and I felt ready to present, at least tech-wise. dwangoAC didn't return until late in the week, but he was feeling better and ready to do stuff. This whole time I had assumed he had commentary under control and that we would be prepared for that. At this point we were well aware that we would be doing a Skype call, so I assumed he had someone prepared to be on the receiving end of that call, possibly with a short questionnaire or script we could use. Instead what I saw were several people being brought in on Friday night who barely knew the games, weren't knowledgeable about the tricks used in the specific TASes we would be showing, or just had no clue what was going on. We had no prepared commentary and only did one sort-of practice with most of the people who would be involved in the room for the first time. This was not a good place to be ~18 hours before we we were to go on stage. Then to make matters worse people were swapped out after that practice resulting in us being even more unprepared. Considering all of that, the commentary went as expected: not great. Not awful, but I think it could have been a lot better. What bothers me is that we had the time and resources to coordinate people to help. We could have been looking for people to help before the event or even during the event. We could have been having them practice all week long like other runners do. But in the end we acquired people at the last minute, and the resulting commentary reflects that. The skype call was also almost a problem as well. We had no prepared questions, and in the end decided to just "wing it". And then the person we picked to initially receive the call was nowhere to be found until ~15 minutes before we went on stage. While we were waiting for Lost Levels to finish I was rushing around trying to prepare someone else to take the call as a backup plan. It all worked out in the end, but it was rather stressful right up until the moment we went on. At the beginning of 2016 I started working on TASLink in an effort to make robust hardware that we could use at these live events to avoid annoying problems we have had every year, including parts breaking, or generally being unprepared for the event in terms of cables or visualization. I spent the better part of the year improving it and helping make it do everything we wanted. But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware. We ended up having a number of the same problems we have had in the past, including parts breaking and having to fix them, and the hardware was largely untested and we had to work around annoying bugs that we didn't have time to fix in the week we were there. It hurt to have had put all that time and money into building solid hardware only to go to an event I cared about and not use it at the last minute. And then at the end of this event I felt like the team was largely uncredited for all of the hard work we put in. As an example, take a look at the original version of the Ars Technica article, which mentions no one on the team except dwangoAC: https://web.archive.org/web/20170115174952/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super-mario-64-and-portal-running-on-an-snes/ dwangoAC had talked to Kyle Orland earlier in the week, so I know he was prepared to write the article, but somehow everyone on the team except dwangoAC was left out of it. Of course the article was later revised to include more team member's names, but that didn't happen until 6 days later. https://web.archive.org/web/20170121011321/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super-mario-64-and-portal-running-on-an-snes/ By that point the majority of the readers had already seen the article and would not be looking at it again, so it feels like a waste to have had updated it except maybe for historical reasons. Overall I did not enjoy myself at the event. It was all work and no play mixed with sleep deprivation. This past year has worn me down much further than is healthy, and I am exhausted because of it. I have decided I will no longer be working on hardware including TASLink, I have stepped away from the TASBot community, and I have no plans to help out at another GDQ event. Looking back at the time I spent over the past year doing all of this, it wasn't worth it.
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micro500 wrote:
At the beginning of 2016 I started working on TASLink in an effort to make robust hardware that we could use at these live events to avoid annoying problems we have had every year, including parts breaking, or generally being unprepared for the event in terms of cables or visualization. I spent the better part of the year improving it and helping make it do everything we wanted. But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware. We ended up having a number of the same problems we have had in the past, including parts breaking and having to fix them, and the hardware was largely untested and we had to work around annoying bugs that we didn't have time to fix in the week we were there. It hurt to have had put all that time and money into building solid hardware only to go to an event I cared about and not use it at the last minute. Overall I did not enjoy myself at the event. It was all work and no play mixed with sleep deprivation. This past year has worn me down much further than is healthy, and I am exhausted because of it. I have decided I will no longer be working on hardware including TASLink, I have stepped away from the TASBot community, and I have no plans to help out at another GDQ event.
This is a real shame. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was looking forward to TASLink to bring some rejuvenation and standardization to console testing, not to mention ease of use. Well, thank you for your hard work and time up to now. Hope you can find something fulfilling to do with your talents.
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micro500 wrote:
And then at the end of this event I felt like the team was largely uncredited for all of the hard work we put in.
Hey, at least you were mentioned at all, had credits in the actual event, ...
micro500 wrote:
Looking back at the time I spent over the past year doing all of this, it wasn't worth it.
I felt the same about it for the first AGDQ. A lot of time burned into it, the satisfaction of getting things working well near right up until go time... then being ignored about certain specifics, being kept out of the loop, having the event displayed so poorly, needing to explain to people live what is going on because even the basics weren't explained, ...and my name isn't even said once. This continued on into further events. Not the same but some similarities and shared root causes, surely. There is far more going into this event than what there was three years ago. You described the last minute efforts taken. Many of us who have had impossibly large projects with looming deadlines can relate. I understand the feelings you hold now, particularly if you were doing this solely or primarily for the sake of the TASBot project. For what it's worth, I wanted to contribute / help out this year, and hopefully, possibly reduce some of this burden, but I was snubbed. I know many were involved but from what I've heard things seemed pretty compartmentalized. So while some of the burden was spread around, the secrecy and your silence helped to self-impose some of that burden. I say this not to blame, but to clarify some other failings I saw as an outsider this year. As for TASBot, was this project your primary goal? I continued work on robots never just for TASBot's sake. My goals were personal improvement and console preservation. If your goal is more than TASBot then I'd still like to talk with you about some of these in the future.
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I greatly appreciate the candid and honest feedback in the last few posts. It was obvious to me the day I got back from AGDQ 2017 how badly I handled certain things and I was quite emotionally distraught at the time. It's hard sitting here to find the right words, but I'll do my best - I want the TASVideos community to know that I am sorry for my past actions and the pain and discomfort I caused and I take responsibility for the outcome. I've already taken some initial steps to correct what I can. I've made a commitment to better myself as a husband, father, and leader through ongoing weekly counseling. I've opted to change how some things have been structured, such as moving all development in the open here and to #TASBot on Freenode IRC (I was uncomfortable for most of the last year trying to hide what we were working on, dodging questions and generally being evasive and I won't go back to that). Finally, I'm committed to fixing the content, commentary, and attribution problems that are largely on my shoulders but that will take some work and practice; I'm hoping that Californithon will be a lower-stress way to accomplish that goal without a massive time commitment. I am in the same boat as micro500 - the last 18 months have been one tiring event after another and speaking on behalf of everyone who was involved we are frankly exhausted. I will not organize another large GDQ event in the next year, although on the other hand I do not want to step out entirely and lose the skills I've learned so far. I may skip AGDQ 2018 entirely but attend SGDQ 2017 due to it being cheaper and smaller in scope (probably just showing precise speedrun techniques between runs). I also plan to stream on Twitch for a limited amount of time per week to practice commentary and improve other skills I am still weak in. There's a long journey ahead of me on the road of reconciliation and self-improvement I'm taking and I'm sure I'll make more mistakes along the way but it's a journey worth taking. I'm still somewhat unsure what to say, so I'll just say thank you again for the opportunity to be part of these projects in the past and here's to whatever lies next.
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
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micro500 wrote:
Then to make matters worse people were swapped out after that practice resulting in us being even more unprepared.
But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware.
It baffles me seeing that kind of thing happening with all kinds of projects over and over, and I have never understood why people do that. For example back in the mid-90's a friend of mine was a coder in a demo group, and they had been developing for months a demo for some demo party. At the last minute (like about the same day, or the previous day before their demo were to be shown) for whatever strange reason they decided to suddenly not only change the music used in the demo, but also the music player code. From what he told me, the previous music was just fine, and it had been working for months. But because reasons, they decided to change it at the last minute. It backfired spectacularly, when the player code bugged out during the live showing, causing it to not play properly.
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Warp wrote:
micro500 wrote:
Then to make matters worse people were swapped out after that practice resulting in us being even more unprepared.
But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware.
It baffles me seeing that kind of thing happening with all kinds of projects over and over, and I have never understood why people do that.
In this case, circumstances forced our hand. We burned through months of time trying desperately to get something, anything at all working for DKC or DKC2 before we shifted gears to LttP. We theorized that the TASLink board would be fast enough to do video but weren't able to test it as early as we would have liked, and we discovered that while it would work we knew that the Papilio Pro powering the TASLink design would have a much smaller buffer than the PSoC5 based board design originally proposed by true and ultimately designed by total (this device still lacks a proper name, more on that below). I also pushed to do stereo audio (which in hindsight may not have been worth the effort) which meant we needed 3 devices but we only had two TASLink boards ready to test at any one place prior to the event. We made the decision to switch hardware in November or thereabouts which given our total timeline is justifiably "last minute". We definitely ran into some quirks with the new hardware when we brought everything together at the event. There were issues with the boards not resetting properly, issues with consoles not turning on if an unpowered or uninitialized board was connected to a console, major problems with MicroUSB connectors popping off, and several other minor annoyances. In other words, all of the things we hoped to avoid plagued us again at this event and made it not fun at all, especially for micro500. I was utterly incapable of helping with many of the issues and made poor time management decisions with the things I could have helped with which only exacerbated the problem. Ultimately, this AGDQ was just as frustrating as the past GDQ's on the hardware front and all of that pain could have been avoided if we had picked an easier goal that allowed us to stick with the tried-and-true TASLink board. So where do we go from here on that front? I can't fault micro500 at all for wanting to step away from developing hardware. The legacy of his work will live on as he built absolutely amazing NES and SNES cables that are durable enough for event travel as well as really high quality visualization displays built into actual controllers. The TASLink board is not a bad design but suffers from using an older and somewhat expensive FPGA with some buffer size limitations and diminishing support from the manufacturer. The Cypress PSoC design is cheaper in all regards - the boards are not constructed as well and require a bit more soldering but are a compelling option (you can buy 8 of them for the cost of one Papilio so if you don't reinforce it and it breaks you can just grab another one for $10). Regardless of the direction we go in, I'd like to make the hardware open-source with all code checked in to a publicly accessible git repo. I have no plans to lead an effort to start or continue development of any particular board but I do know I want this to be a community project rather than having everything falling on one person's shoulders. This is perhaps not the thread to discuss this further so I'll leave it at that as I've digressed enough already but thank you to everyone who had a hand in developing hardware over the years. The TASBot blocks at GDQ events literally could not have happened without it.
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
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What saddens me so much is that after DEVELOPING all imaginable kinds of neat tools and workflows, everything was ruined by some bloodless bad luck completely.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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I have waited a while to let my thoughts settle and let themselves be composed, because I don't want to hurt feelings or say something I will regret later. Here, in long form, are my thoughts about TASVideos' presence at *GDQ over the last couple of years, and my hopes going forward. TAS Block at *GDQ, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly It is my honest opinion that TASVideos has overstayed its welcome at *GDQ. Having transitioned away from showing the site's runs and into doing cool things with computers, I feel that the TASVideos envoys have stopped demonstrating what makes TASVideos cool and instead started doing something else entirely. The phrase “technological showcase” has been used, I feel that is an accurate description of what the TAS block has become. The Good I have always hoped that TASVideos’ role at GDQ events has been to raise awareness of TASing as a hobby, and to encourage people to try it out. Talking with people after watching the TAS blocks has generally resulted in people thinking that it is interesting, and I have definitely had people ask me about TASing; I answer them as effectively as I can, but they start from such a position of ignorance that it is frustrating to think that the TAS block is hurting more than it helps. The Bad Due to the limited time granted to the TAS block team, there is not much time for explanation of what TASing is about, little time to explain what tools are used (partially due to not being able to secure commentary), and no time to describe the tricks that are being applied in order to achieve the results that are demonstrated year after year. Furthermore, there is a lot of association of TASing with TASBot, which adds to the number of things which must be unlearned in order to properly teach people about TASing. The Ugly In addition to the association of TASing to TASBot, the movies created for *GDQ have moved further and further away from TASVideos’ stated goals (“to complete games with extremely high precision”; “t must beat the game”) and into the realm of proving that computers are, in fact, computers, leading to runs that are created for the sole purpose of being demonstrated at GDQ and similar events, but not publishable on TASVideos.org, which makes the presentation even less representative of the site. Another problem that has been raised in past years, and which has been highlighted frequently, is the deviation from another of the site’s movie rules: “The movie must be properly attributed.” While I recognize that this is something that dwangoAC has repeatedly commented that he is frustrated about dropping the ball about, it bears repeating that something representative of TASVideos, under the banner of the TASVideos name, should follow the rules of the site. Because the trend in recent years has been to move away from showcasing site runs and toward showcasing just how much the consoles are still computers, and not helping the cause of informing people about TASing, I would be very happy to see TASVideos distance itself from *GDQ events for a time. Finally, something that has irked me for the past two years about *GDQ events is the need to pull a team together to put together these technological showcases; I recognize how much time it takes to put together a decent TAS, let alone a good one, but the teams being asked to put something together are being asked to create something which, in the end, can’t be published on the site, and I am annoyed every time I see one of those threads go up, or someone complaining that not enough people are volunteering their time to work on such a non-representative piece of work. I cannot deny that the end results are incredible – Pokémon Plays Twitch was a delight; Brain Age was an absolute masterpiece; Skypetendo was very interesting to watch – but breaking out of the game to let a computer be a computer is not as interesting (to me) as doing something incredible within the game (Lord Tom’s takeover of Super Mario Bros. 3 to fake a terminal window and prompt, Masterjun’s takeover of Super Mario World to write Snake and Pong using Mario sprites) which demonstrate what can be done within the game and its limited resources to achieve great effect. I feel that TASVideos should withdraw from *GDQ events for a couple of years, to give people the opportunity to seek us out on their own, and if and when we return to *GDQ events, we should focus on accurately explaining what TASes are, as well as showcasing runs from the previous year instead of engaging in more esoteric pursuits.
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
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Invariel wrote:
I feel that TASVideos should withdraw from *GDQ events for a couple of years, to give people the opportunity to seek us out on their own, and if and when we return to *GDQ events, we should focus on accurately explaining what TASes are, as well as showcasing runs from the previous year instead of engaging in more esoteric pursuits.
Thank you for your feedback. The earliest I will return to organizing a GDQ event is SGDQ 2018. The content that link_7777 has submitted for SGDQ 2017 is more suitable for your goals and if the TAS explanation portion is accepted it should help fill in several gaps that have been widening over the last few GDQ events. I also feel that the recent Californithon runs (viewable here) were much more in-line with what the site needed for proper exposure of what kind of content to expect. I agree that GDQ needs a fairly long break from the types of work we were doing with large teams killing themselves to create over-the-top content; pretty much everyone involved was burned out and it was time for a break. I'm glad to have a bit of time to breathe, I have to say that much. :) Thanks again for your thoughts!
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
Joined: 3/11/2008
Posts: 583
Location: USA
It was a pretty blow-away [set of] demo[s], albeit not feeling very TAS-y… the Gradius revenge was neat and TAS-y, though. Loved the reveal that you'd used three consoles to cobble it together, though it felt a little…out-of-place. So…twothree main questions. How similar was what streamed video format to this? What video would the Nintendo side of the donation war have yielded? How much would video throughput increase by having the expansion port available, as shown in #5447: Masterjun's SNES Super Mario World "expansion game end glitch" in 00:41.75?
Joined: 6/14/2014
Posts: 47
I am kind of sad TASvideos withdraws from GDQs, but I totally understand it. Many people were confused about how TASes work, they imagine stuffs like auto-completion scripts, or don't measure the impact of the tools ... etc I hope you'll return someday :)
Noxxa
They/Them
Moderator, Expert player (4109)
Joined: 8/14/2009
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Location: The Netherlands
TASVideos did not withdraw from SGDQ (although dwangoAC personally did, for his own reasons). link_7777 submitted a SGDQ TAS Block, but it was rejected.
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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