I am concerned about would it be partly judged for leniency. Where it hasn't reached the exciting part, or long unentertaining setup just to setup something cool. Imagine smb3 without whistles. (ignoring DCPM workaround) you have to sit through 6 worlds without new content just to see cool stuff. Why should the other parts affect the viewing experience of the real playground - the main focus the author wants to show off?
Couldn't "start from SRAM" or even "start from now" be used for movies like that?
I think as long as it plays better than you would expect a speedrunner to play in real time, it should be okay.
This could be hard to figure out. For acceptance for publication, we consider the movie rejectably sloppy if in a lot of places we can easily save a lot of time. For Playground, I'm thinking of "there should be no obviously visible sloppy play", and as long as it looks clean, it's fine.
I agree. That's kind of what I was getting at because I also thought about games that people haven't done speedruns of. I think as long as you look at the TAS and don't think "come on, even I could do better than that", then I think it's fine.
I just got a thought. If there's no restriction, does it mean it would make more sense of me to upload my incomplete WIPs as playground rather than userfiles?
Must have a goal
Technically all my uploads have a goal. To either showcase that 1 trick that looked interesting, or for me to backup my progress in case my computer dies (ie. it reaches this arbitrary point in the game, fastest time, because I was tired and had to go to bed so I saved). Is there something I'm not understanding here?
Edit: I just realized late
Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
I know this might sound silly, but that should probably be elaborated. I really hope there won't be some weird drama down the line where someone argues passionately that copying someone elses run should be accepted because it broke a rule on proper attribution or someone making/editing a game so that it immediately ends just to get a WR of it. It might sound "obvious", but the past several years made me realize it really isn't.
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jlun2 wrote:
Technically all my uploads have a goal. To either showcase that 1 trick that looked interesting, or for me to backup my progress in case my computer dies (ie. it reaches this arbitrary point in the game, fastest time, because I was tired and had to go to bed so I saved).
"Posting the WIP as a backup" is not an in-game goal. I guess we should add the "in-game" part.
jlun2 wrote:
Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
I know this might sound silly, but that should probably be elaborated. I really hope there won't be some weird drama down the line where someone argues passionately that copying someone elses run should be accepted because it broke a rule on proper attribution or someone making/editing a game so that it immediately ends just to get a WR of it. It might sound "obvious", but the past several years made me realize it really isn't.
Good catch! Authorship is one of the rules we don't want to be violated. If you've edited someone else's work, you should put the original author first, unless the part you've borrowed was relatively small.
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.
[*]Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
This is a tricky one. Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs? Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
Since "must reproduce" and "must have a goal" and "do not plagiarize" are also Movie Rules, it seems to me that Playground needs a division between "hard movie rules" that you cannot break, and "soft movie rules" that can be broken for the playground.
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I think "must be reproducable" will always be a strict rule. Or else no one can verify it.
And why would you use not bizhawk?
For wording, i would say just in the playground section, list the rules that do to apply to playground, then list the rules that replaced.
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Radiant wrote:
feos wrote:
[*]Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
This is a tricky one. Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs? Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
As I mentioned above, we want authorship to be managed properly so nobody if affected in a bad way. About the rest, I don't see why not.
Radiant wrote:
Since "must reproduce" and "must have a goal" and "do not plagiarize" are also Movie Rules, it seems to me that Playground needs a division between "hard movie rules" that you cannot break, and "soft movie rules" that can be broken for the playground.
This is about wording. We'd say "here's a list of hard rules, but other movie rules can be broken in this section of the site".
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.
This is a tricky one. Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs? Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
As I mentioned above, we want authorship to be managed properly so nobody if affected in a bad way. About the rest, I don't see why not.
An issue I have is that the overwhelming majority of romhacks are of really poor quality, and that on sites like romhacking.net it's hard to find anything good because the quality romhacks are drowned out by the bad ones. I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
The same applies to indie self-published Windows games.
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Radiant wrote:
Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs?
Most of those would be things I want to see in Playground. My personal goal with it is to widen the spectrum of what can be done with a game and as a result advancing the knowledge of that game by explicitly allowing any possible approach to it.
Non-approved emulators is a bit dicey, though. That'd probably be something we have to figure out case-by-case. Obviously, the site has to be able to parse the input file to begin with, so that really cuts down on the number of non-approved emulators we can even accept at all. I feel like any relatively known build of an emulator should be fine here, interim builds of BizHawk and Dolphin and such, but I worry about people specifically hacking their own new builds, or using older releases of emulators like ZSNES and Mupen that contain known exploits. While I trust the community to not abuse these sorts of things, it's definitely safer for everyone to set ground rules here.
We'll talk further about this. Right now, let's just say that only official interim builds are allowed in terms of newly accepted emulators.
Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
Since "must reproduce" and "must have a goal" and "do not plagiarize" are also Movie Rules, it seems to me that Playground needs a division between "hard movie rules" that you cannot break, and "soft movie rules" that can be broken for the playground.
This is an incredibly valid point to make. There definitely are hard rules like plagiarism and misattribution that shouldn't be broken by any submission, whether intended for publication or for Playground, and we definitely need to make that explicit when we update the movie rules and submission guidelines. If those updates aren't clear enough when everything goes live, let me know and I'll fix them.
An issue I have is that the overwhelming majority of romhacks are of really poor quality, and that on sites like romhacking.net it's hard to find anything good because the quality romhacks are drowned out by the bad ones. I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
The same applies to indie self-published Windows games.
Another fair point, though I'm not worried about Playground becoming "unusable" since we actually have a site we can easily update now. However, in the same way that a Playground goal can't be completely meaningless, I do think there should at least be some sort of small merit to the game or hack as well. I don't want it to be anywhere close to as strict as current Moons, though. I'm not sure we can define an exact set of rules for it, and even if we could, I wouldn't want to anyway. Playground's going to be community curated, there's generally going to be a solid consensus about what things have merit and what things need more work.
Context is also going to be important here. I'd be opposed to someone resyncing a published run to a purely cosmetic romhack, but I wouldn't be opposed to someone creating a new goal for the game using a purely cosmetic romhack. I might be opposed to someone slapping together an asset flip in Unity and TASing it for a quick meme, but I wouldn't be opposed to someone finding a terrible Unity asset flip and completely breaking it with TAS precision.
Figuring this out is going to be a long and steady process. Not necessarily difficult, certainly not impossible, but it will take a bit of time to figure things out, and I think we're going to have to do it live instead of trying to pre-empt it.
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Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I feel we need to consider the concept of unpublication in regards to the Playground.
Currently, we don't unpublish any currently published runs. Instead we try (or hope) to obsolete them with a new run that corrects the reason that a run was erroneously published to begin with.
Should we consider having the ability to outright unpublish/delete runs from the Playground if a situation arises where something shouldn't have been allowed in there to begin with? If so, would this be part of the community curation our would it need to be main site staff?
Hopefully there's never a situation where something would need removed, but it's worth considering--just in case.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
I feel we need to consider the concept of unpublication in regards to the Playground.
Currently, we don't unpublish any currently published runs. Instead we try (or hope) to obsolete them with a new run that corrects the reason that a run was erroneously published to begin with.
Should we consider having the ability to outright unpublish/delete runs from the Playground if a situation arises where something shouldn't have been allowed in there to begin with? If so, would this be part of the community curation our would it need to be main site staff?
Hopefully there's never a situation where something would need removed, but it's worth considering--just in case.
Did you read the OP? Playground is not a publication class, it's a submission status.
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.
Yes. I had read the OP.
I guess i just misunderstood how things would be curated in the Playground. If anyone can set a submission status to be a Playground run, how is the list curated?
Without some means of "rejecting" or removing runs that shouldn't be present, the list has no effective limits.
I'm just trying to understand how this will be handled.
And if I've missed something in the various pages of posts or discord discussions that answered this already, please forgive my lack of memory for everything that has occurred in these discussions and just point me to the answer instead of questioning whether or not I've been paying attention simply because i misunderstood one aspect of the entire concept.
I am curious how it would work in the site. Is that fleshed out at all? As in how would I submit this? Instead of "Submit a Movie" would that maybe be split to a "Submit for Publication" and a "Submit to Playground" button? Then essentially the same flow as a normal submission?
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Radiant wrote:
I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
It's meant to be a part of game based navigation. Why would it become unusable? We'd just link hacks of a game as separate game pages.
DrD2k9 wrote:
I guess i just misunderstood how things would be curated in the Playground. If anyone can set a submission status to be a Playground run, how is the list curated?
Without some means of "rejecting" or removing runs that shouldn't be present, the list has no effective limits.
Post-moderation, like on speedrun.com. TASers of a game could get some kind of "game mod" priv so they could reject a submission from playground if it breaks playground rules. Judges too obviously.
CoolHandMike wrote:
As in how would I submit this? Instead of "Submit a Movie" would that maybe be split to a "Submit for Publication" and a "Submit to Playground" button? Then essentially the same flow as a normal submission?
2 buttons would probably be ideal. If you submit for pub, it's judged as usual, and can be sent to playground if it breaks regular movie rules but not playground rules. If you submit to playground, it's post-moderated.
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.
I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
It's meant to be a part of game based navigation. Why would it become unusable? We'd just link hacks of a game as separate game pages.
Well, suppose I'm interested in NES Legend of Zelda; then it's likely I'm also interested in good romhacks of TLOZ. I'd expect good romhacks to be visible or linked from the TLOZ main page (or maybe from a "category:TLOZ" superpage), but this doesn't work if there's a ton of bad romhacks also linked.
For example, it's already the case that if I search the site for "Super Mario", the result is a list of ten romhacks but none of the SMB/SMW games are listed. So I'd say it's a valid concern that realistically, allowing any and all romhacks in playground will make it hard for people to find what they're actually looking for.
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Radiant wrote:
Well, suppose I'm interested in NES Legend of Zelda; then it's likely I'm also interested in good romhacks of TLOZ. I'd expect good romhacks to be visible or linked from the TLOZ main page (or maybe from a "category:TLOZ" superpage), but this doesn't work if there's a ton of bad romhacks also linked.
For example, it's already the case that if I search the site for "Super Mario", the result is a list of ten romhacks but none of the SMB/SMW games are listed. So I'd say it's a valid concern that realistically, allowing any and all romhacks in playground will make it hard for people to find what they're actually looking for.
Good rom hacks should just get properly published imo. If we're too strict, we should be less strict as long as the hack and the run are great.
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.
Good rom hacks should just get properly published imo. If we're too strict, we should be less strict as long as the hack and the run are great.
But feos, that's precisely my point: should hacks be allowed in the playground if "the hack and the run are great", or should ALL hacks be allowed in the playground?
I do not think the site has been too strict in 2020-2021 about which romhacks were allowed.
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Radiant wrote:
But feos, that's precisely my point: should hacks be allowed in the playground if "the hack and the run are great", or should ALL hacks be allowed in the playground?
I do not think the site has been too strict in 2020-2021 about which romhacks were allowed.
I said it should just be properly published, to Moons, if the hack and the run are great. There's no need to keep those in Playground.
I personally don't see a big problem in allowing all hacks to Playground as long as the movie is good, but I also think we should just let the game community decide which hacks to allow, because it will be subjective anyway if there is a borderline, so let's rely on subjectivity of people who care.
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.
It's meant to be a part of game based navigation. Why would it become unusable? We'd just link hacks of a game as separate game pages.
I thought we only created new Games on first publication of a game, at least since c. 2012 when every submission was given a Game (which is most of why we still have Games like this with no published runs). Do we want to elevate Playground area Games to the same status as published Games? Like you said, it would facilitate game-based navigation. But should we worry about a large number of ROMhacks for e.g. SMB clogging up the Game list (or at least the NES list)?
Actually, what is the current consensus on what to do with Game pages with only submissions, userfiles, or a Game Resources page but no publications?
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CoolKirby wrote:
I thought we only created new Games on first publication of a game, at least since c. 2012 when every submission was given a Game (which is most of why we still have Games like this with no published runs). Do we want to elevate Playground area Games to the same status as published Games? Like you said, it would facilitate game-based navigation. But should we worry about a large number of ROMhacks for e.g. SMB clogging up the Game list (or at least the NES list)?
Actually, what is the current consensus on what to do with Game pages with only submissions, userfiles, or a Game Resources page but no publications?
Game based navigation will only be fully usable if we collect whatever we have for a given game on its page. If it's just a userfile, it makes sense to link it for posterity, so other people could easily find it in the same hub with all other games.
"Too many games" is easily solved if we have a bunch of nested tabs (or some other equally handy UI): Company -> Device -> Letter -> Games for that letter.
SRC's game based navigation is unusable because you have to infinitely hit "load more" to actually see all the games for the platform and find your game there. The only usable option there is search. We want both approaches to be easy to use. If we finally get expandable spoilers, we can just hide hacks for some game and show them on demand.
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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adelikat brought up a very important problem with hacks. There's no guarantee against patch files containing copyrighted material, so we can't host them on tasvideos. And if the hack is so damn obscure that it only exists in a single place and even that place is a patched ROM already, not a patch file, there are potential legal problems in supporting such hacks, or problems with ability to replay them if the link goes down.
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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Thoughts about optimality.
If submissions that fail to beat a published movie are just sent to playground, there's zero incentive to make better movies, and it can be flooded with low effort stuff that's basically the same. Even tho I don't see the need for obsoletion in playground, I think we should only send there movies that are better than whatever already exists in playground. If it's slower than that or a published movie of the same goal, it doesn't allow us to showcase any niche goals better, and it's better to just reject.
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.
Thoughts about optimality.
If submissions that fail to beat a published movie are just sent to playground, there's zero incentive to make better movies, and it can be flooded with low effort stuff that's basically the same. Even tho I don't see the need for obsoletion in playground, I think we should only send there movies that are better than whatever already exists in playground. If it's slower than that or a published movie of the same goal, it doesn't allow us to showcase any niche goals better, and it's better to just reject.
I mostly agree with this. There's no reason to have 10 different people with Playground runs of the same category doing roughly the same thing. I'd rather see the Playground be more a variety of unique content for a given game than soething that ammounts to little more than a congested leaderboard of similar runs having slightly different times.
However, if two runs that would otherwise be in the same niche category for a game manage to achieve that goal using significantly differing methods (or the slower of the two contains an interesting techinique that isn't seen in other runs in the Playground), it may be wise to keep both runs in order to archive the differing/interesting techniques.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
I mostly agree with this. There's no reason to have 10 different people with Playground runs of the same category doing roughly the same thing. I'd rather see the Playground be more a variety of unique content for a given game than soething that ammounts to little more than a congested leaderboard of similar runs having slightly different times.
So should we reject previous, beaten runs from PG when new ones appear?
DrD2k9 wrote:
However, if two runs that would otherwise be in the same niche category for a game manage to achieve that goal using significantly differing methods (or the slower of the two contains an interesting techinique that isn't seen in other runs in the Playground), it may be wise to keep both runs in order to archive the differing/interesting techniques.
That sounds non-trivial to resolve in practice. Comparing every new run to every old run in that category looking for differences, is going to get exhausting very quickly.
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.
Was reading a github issue when found this. Don't like the name "Playground".
My usual minority opinion is playground, where children can play with various toys are kinda different than what this demo tier supposed to embrace. Isn't there any synonyms or just an area inside a playground that fits better, anything like sandbox?
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
