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HappyLee wrote:
OK, so I CHOOSE to start timing at the start of World 8, so my SMB TAS can be sub 3 minutes. Can you grant me my choice? Why not?
Any timing method we accept has to be either represented within the game itself (e.g. in-game time), or built upon community consensus. Starting timing from World 8 would be a choice made by you alone in contradiction to everyone else in the TAS and speedrunning scene, so naturally we couldn't grant it (and obviously bad faith timing methods would be rejected anyways).
HappyLee wrote:
I'm not saying "everyone will do this", but some will, and I don't want to see some title putting "RTA Timing" while others stick to TAS timing. TAS should use TAS timing.
I don't see why massive TAS communities like Celeste should be forced to list their runs with a timing method they don't use or optimize for just because it makes someone else unhappy. The goodwill we gain as a site by embracing common alternate timing methods far outweighs what we gain by sticking to our roots. Additionally, TASVideos is not an authority on TASing. Only using TAS timing will not stop people making TASes using other timing methods or listing them as such on YouTube or other sites - it just means they're less likely to submit their work here, which I see as a loss.
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feos wrote:
YoshiRulz wrote:
There's a huge gap between how much annotated game code currently exists and how much would be useful to TASers, and I imagined that TASVideos would be a good place to keep that centralised and public.
What can possibly make tasvideos a good place to host full decomp of a game?
Echoing this. I'm not clear on the legal ramifications that could exist for us doing so in the first place, but it's especially risky with AI decomps, since they may well include illegally obtained source code (Nintendo gigaleak, Game Freak teraleak etc.) as training data.
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I notice that adjusting for framerate differences, the second stage seems to be slightly slower than the NES publication for this game, as well as Donkey Kong-e, but is tied with the Classic NES Series movie. I couldn't find any details as to why in your previous submission notes - what's the cause of the variation?
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Samsara wrote:
[*]IL Submissions: Is it feasible to use the current submission system? Do we even want to do that? How would we need to change it to accommodate ILs?
I would concur with what DigitalDuck, Memory and Dimon have said in the thread - ILs need to be handled through separate queues. Throwing every full-game submission on the site into the same assembly line is enough of a challenge to deal with as it stands. What does get more complicated is whether there should be one big IL queue, IL queues broken down per game, or both. I'm not completely sure of the answer myself, particularly as it really depends on what we end up deciding on regarding IL moderation.
Riokaii wrote:
One other aspect of this regarding quality, judging etc. is that some IL's are frankly.... uninteresting/trivially simplistic in TAS. the "filler episodes" of a fullgame run so to speak, that highlighting them individually seems somewhat silly. Playing a song is interesting, playing 1 chord is uhh... kinda mundane.
To me, I see a full-game run as more akin to an album or soundtrack, and an IL as more akin to a song on that album. And while it's true that some ILs in some games are going to be less interesting or easier to TAS...so are some entire games! I don't think we should try and set rules and standards about how interesting or difficult an IL needs to be to warrant publication - we already removed our entertainment and triviality requirements for that reason. We should instead try to make things as accessible if not more so.
I have similar feelings about Spike's suggestion that some ILs are deserving of publications and some ILs are more deserving of Playground, but I also want to address the suggestion of a "mega IL community submission" there. While in theory I believe this is a good idea - and one that can obsolete the need for per-level submissions - I think there are several challenges that make it more of a hindrance: IL compilations are bound to get updated far less often than ILs themselves (if at all), some games work better under a compilation framework than others, everyone in the community needs to be happy having their names together on the same product, etc.
Samsara wrote:
[*]IL Publication: How would encodes be handled? Would IL submitters even want encodes? Would it be too much work to encode every run that comes in, when ILs have the possibility to update several times a day in active communities?
[...]
IL Publication:
Encodes are not automatically provided to approved ILs, and are not required for approval as long as an input file is provided. Authors can opt in to having encodes made for them.
IL encodes made by us would go to a dedicated TASVideosChannel for ILs.
TASVideos may make backup encodes upon request, prioritizing author/community encodes as long as they are up.
Honestly, I think we should do a better job at emphasizing that TASVideos posting an encode on our own channel is an option and not a prerequisite for those submitting to our site. kierio has already mentioned a few communities that are reluctant to submit to us because users worry about having attention diverted from their own encodes elsewhere, and I think that even among our existing submitters there are some people who would have asked we link to their uploads if they knew that was allowed.
To talk about ILs specifically though, yes, I do like the suggestions being presented here. Whether or not the encode comes from the author (or whether it even gets an encode) should be up to them, and putting them on a secondary channel (and also following Riokaii's suggestion of waiting before encoding to prevent overloading staff with rapid improvements in a short timeframe) is probably a good way to go about things.
Samsara wrote:
[*]IL Moderation: Would managing ILs be too much extra work for us as staff? Could they be handled by community members? How do we determine eligibility for IL moderation?
[...]
IL Moderation:
Any staff member can "judge" and approve ILs.
There is no grace period for ILs, they can be approved as soon as they're submitted.
Community moderation is allowed for ILs: Each game can be assigned moderators, similar to SRC's moderation system, which would allow them to moderate ILs.
I think opening up the judging process of ILs to community leaders is a really good idea. Removing or dramatically shortening the 3-day grace period of full-game runs is also probably worthwhile, particularly given the more rapid rate at which ILs can be further optimised by other community members. I think this might also help address some of the uncertainty expressed by DigitalDuck as to how we ought to "define" ILs. I think trying to come up with an all-encompassing definition of ILs that specifies how finely they can or should be split up is inevitably going to run into problems with some game or another where it makes more sense to do something else, and so leaving these kinds of decisions up to community members on a per-game basis seems like the best solution, particularly where those communities are already well-established.
That being said, this does inevitably open the door to possible abuse of the system, where community moderators may enforce stricter guidelines about what kinds of categories, game versions, characters etc. are acceptable compared to what TASVideos does, and so I think it will be necessary to make sure things are being handled appropriately by those community moderators, or at least to present a clear line of contact through which users can report abuse to our core moderation team.
Samsara wrote:
[*]IL User Experience: How should ILs be displayed? How do we showcase them fairly in comparison to fullgame runs? How do we account for games that can only have ILs? How do we account for games that can't have ILs at all? Should every game have IL support by default even if there might not be distinct levels? Should ILs get submission and publication pages like fullgame runs? If not, how do we account for submission notes?
[...]
IL User Experience:
Any game with some way of identifying levels would get an IL table.
I think that part of the challenge with showcasing ILs fairly in comparison to full-game runs is that the way we present TASes is very different to SRC. While every game does have its own page from which publications and submissions can be viewed, what we really put more emphasis on currently is the per-platform publication lists, which is obviously not very helpful to ILs. Hosting ILs on game pages does make the most sense, but what we really need to do to avoid the challenges of "how do we account for exposure issues?" is give Games more priority on the navbar to better emphasise their importance.
Naturally there are going to be games where it doesn't make sense to have ILs - some games are only one level or one screen, after all - and it's difficult to know whether we ought to make the functionality opt-in or opt-out. Either way, we're going to have to manually correct hundreds if not thousands of games. Opt-in is perhaps better for the "community decides how ILs should be defined for each game" idea, though it will make getting word out about the new feature and how to use it more challenging.
I like the idea of using tables and sub-tables to showcase ILs and their different categories. I think that users should also be able to click on an IL to view the publication history for that specific level, and that this should be the primary way of showcasing work that has since been improved. I think that we should have submission pages (particularly for notes), but maybe not publication pages - writing up a description and screenshot for every level is asking a lot. Just linking to the necessary encodes and downloads should be sufficient.
Samsara wrote:
[*]IL Verification: Given the nature of ILs, can we justify changing the verification standards for them assuming they haven't already been changed universally before IL implementation? That is, could we accept them using savestates or provided save files without needing verification movies? Just for archival/historical purposes, could we go as far as not even requiring input files, assuming we'd still heavily prioritize the ones that have them?
[...]
IL Verification:
ILs can be approved with only a video, but will be marked as Unverified on the list. Unverified runs are hidden by default.
ILs are not required to have verification movies.
ILs are allowed to start from savestates.
While I think requiring input files for new submissions makes sense, we are introducing a feature to our site that already has an incredibly extensive history. I think it makes sense to try and represent that history on our site in some way, particularly the per-IL publication histories (we don't want to send the message that the decades of IL work done off-site is meaningless). And that might not always have a publicly available input file! Even for users who are still active now, it's inevitable they might have lost something in the years since from changing PCs, online storage, discords, etc. Having some kind of tag or symbol that says "unverified" or something might be a good way to compromise for these older runs.
ikuyo wrote:
There's a much larger conversation to be had about SaveRAM since it interacts with full game runs as well, and I want to reach a solution that reaches a good compromise between allowing people to make movies in the context they would be most comfortable with and making sure runtime environment is as reliable as possible. It is, in my opinion, the single largest issue to solve for our current methodologies, and I wonder if any attempt to make it work will allow our system to survive.
Agreed. Our system of requiring verification movies for absolutely everything is already a bit of a strain for games and categories that require tens of hours of play (or even more) to set everything up optimally, and the introduction of ILs is only going to put further pressure on the current ruleset forcing everyone to jump through these hoops. A more nuanced way of denoting what checks a particular IL or movie has passed along the lines of what Memory suggested is probably a compromise worth trying to begin with, with further adjustments being made overtime as deemed appropriate. Overall though, I think we do have to start accepting provided save files in these situations, and possibly also savestates (though those inevitably leave more room for tampering).
While we are already working on implementing alternative timing methods, I think it's also worth emphasizing that those are pretty crucial to us sufficiently serving the needs of the community with regard to ILs. How timing gets defined for ILs, even between different kinds of ILs in the same game, could also be left up to community members.
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HappyLee wrote:
I remember TASVideos has way more active users 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. But right now, there are way less active users and posts, and people mention that we're losing judges.
You are only seeing the forums. Forums have seen a massive decrease in activity internet-wide, not just on TASVideos. Most of our user activity is instead represented on Discord. It makes sense that the site would appear to be less active given that you're not exposed to that side of the community.
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HappyLee wrote:
It seems to me, the TASVideos community has lost a lot of influence and active users compared to 10 years ago. The number of submissions increased, but the average quality hasn't.
It's kind of sad to see, because speedrunning seems to have got way more influence over the 10 years, but TASing hasn't.
TASVideos lost its influence over the TASing scene at large long before we started breaking down those harsh standards. On the contrary, the culture of the old site - do highly technical TASes of popular, entertaining games that fit well into the rules or be ridiculed out of the community - is exactly what caused TASVideos to lose its influence. TASing communities instead mainly grew as an extension of their RTA speedrun counterparts, and the slowly dying TASVideos was viewed by the masses as an archaic relic of the past, worth little attention at best and active ridicule and scorn at worst, much like SDA.
TASVideos has only been able to begin to challenge this reputation, invite more activity from these highly respected communities, and ensure its survival by breaking from its past. The TASing scene is not what it was 10 years ago, and there is no going back.
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On the note about a hypothetical National Diploma TAS in the submission text:
The recent Switch rereleases of FireRed and LeafGreen notably use newly built ROMs, which give the player access to the event items necessary to catch Lugia, Ho-Oh and Deoxys after entering the Hall of Fame. This opens up a potentially submittable avenue for a national diploma generation 3 TAS, as these new versions would enable Ruby and Sapphire to meet their respective requirements.
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Currently, TASVideos distinguishes PC games based on their target operating system (Windows, Linux, DOS, etc.). The reasons for these distinctions are largely historical. Initially, we labelled games by their platform because games on different consoles with the same name would often be entirely different experiences made by completely different teams (particularly pre-2000s). Then, when the first rerecording tools for PC games came around (JPC-rr and Hourglass), they could only target specific operating systems (DOS and Windows respectively). Due to their limitations and distinct eras of usage, these ended up becoming different platforms, setting a precedent that has continued since.
However, with an increasing number of modern PC games able to be TASed (particularly thanks to libTAS), these distinctions no longer make as much sense, for a variety of reasons:
Multi-OS game releases are almost always designed to be identical, using the same code and assets across all versions
Several game engines (GameMaker, Unity, etc.) allow games to easily be ported between platforms, meaning that in many cases, “Windows” games are being run in a Linux executable through libTAS without any kind of emulation
Newer releases of emulators like DOSBox-X and PCem can run multiple OSes without distinction, preventing the platform from getting automatically detected by our parsers and requiring manual entry and/or correction
Some TAS tools (e.g. CelesteTAS) target games that are available on both Windows and Linux. We have no good way to decide which OS label should get chosen in such cases, and creating a uniqueplatform for every situation like this is not a sustainable solution
What we want to know is: How do folks feel about merging some of these platforms together into a single “PC” label, and which ones should we merge? At the most basic level, we want to merge Windows and Linux together, but there are other systems it might make sense to include (macOS, DOS, Flash, DOOM) that we feel require some further discussion from the community.
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Hello, and welcome to another issue of Load State! I’m InputEvelution, local TAS enjoyer, and I’ll be guest writing this time as we go over some of last month’s publications. Apologies for the delay, and I hope it’ll be worth the wait!
November was an especially packed month on the site, with a total of 59 movies from 40 authors - 42 of which came just in the latter half with an average of almost 3 publications per day! This time, I’d like to put a spotlight on the specialisation of TASing - namely, the way that new TASes often correspond to broader trends across their author’s previous work. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
ThunderAxe31 returned to GBA Pac-Man World for the third time with another set of improvements and optimisations, as well as a brand new movie in the form of [6846] GBA Pac-Man World "maximum kills, all items" by ThunderAxe31 in 38:04.693. This category showcases some really interesting routing and movement not seen in the any% and 100% publications, and is easily worth a watch for those already familiar with the game.
Toms made his publication debut with [6801] NES Escalator by Toms in 00:20.483, a short Super Mario Bros. ROM hack that nonetheless opens up new optimisation considerations with its core gimmick. SMB1 is a common first choice for new submitters, and to produce high quality work on the first try is no easy feat. Please give him a warm welcome!
In other Super Mario Bros. content, we have [6812] NES fullmoon. by fella8 in 07:07.962 from fella8, another TASer who made his start in SMB1 ROM hacks with Celeste Mario’s Zip and Dash! This improves upon the previous movie by HappyLee, while also showcasing extra levels not previously seen on the site.
Rxser, most well known for his work on countless Flash puzzle and escape room games, changes things up a bit with [6803] Flash Don't Look Back by Rxser in 04:20.900, a platformer with a surprising amount of RNG manipulation work behind it. Be sure to give it a watch!
[6804] DS Crash Boom Bang! by PeteThePlayer in 15:40.660 is PeteThePlayer’s debut movie, having first started with the game as an RTA runner. They display an incredible degree of mastery and understanding of the game’s RNG systems, ultimately beating the game in under half the time of its RTA world record. Make sure to check it out!
slamo, a veteran DOS TASer with more than 25 published movies for the platform under their belt, returns for the release of BizHawk 2.11 with two more submissions. Of these, [6806] DOS Epic Pinball "Crash and Burn" by slamo in 02:17.288 features a lot of impressive resource management to complete multiple objectives at once within the game’s limitations, as well as an incredibly entertaining strategy towards the end.
EZGames69 is a frequent collaborator with other TASers on projects spanning various genres and platforms, this time collaborating with RetroEdit on [6808] Genesis Spider-Man "Easy" by EZGames69 & RetroEdit in 04:10.339. Together they break open the game in a variety of interesting ways, some of which were only recently made possible thanks to improved emulation quality.
Speaking of collaboration, Avouca and passere once again joined forces to produce [6819] PSX Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider "all levels" by Avouca & passere in 50:12.956, showcasing various amusing glitches, skips, and manipulation of AI throughout to comedic effect befitting for a TAS of a Looney Tunes game. passere also has a video commentary for those interested in learning more.
zapkt made their site debut with [6810] Flash Super Karoshi by zapkt in 07:10.814, a puzzle-platform game with non-conventional solutions that lends itself well to a TAS. An increasing number of newer TASers have been making their start with Flash and Linux games, something I’d attribute to their popularity among newer generations of players. Welcome to the site!
Uroboros returned from a long TASing hiatus to bring more Resident Evil content with [6811] GC Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X by Uroboros in 1:39:23.000. Welcome back! This run features a lot of careful optimisation and tricks that aren’t necessarily obvious to those not familiar with the games, so I highly recommend looking at the submission notes for more details on the work that went into this.
Many of keylie’s submissions of Linux games go hand-in-hand with his development work on libTAS, and [6813] PC Axiom Verge by keylie in 20:48.996 was no exception. Improvements in game knowledge, optimisation and new tricks made possible by libTAS’s improved support for variable framerates combine to produce an incredibly entertaining movie, improving the previous iteration by nearly 4 minutes.
Tbone500 had their first TASVideos publication with [6815] GC Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 10 Chou Ketteiban: 2003 Memorial "Success" by Tbone500 in 49:03.317, having already made Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu content on their own YouTube channel for years prior. Extensive RNG manipulation is employed throughout to ensure that balls are batted directly into the fielders’ hands at every turn, winning 7 full baseball games in under an hour. Great work!
OmerAras55 had two TASes of Mario Forever: Community Edition published this month, utilising his existing knowledge of the game as an RTA runner to great effect. Of the two, [6854] PC Mario Forever: Community Edition "warpless" by OmerAras55 in 27:30.067 is my personal favourite due to its greater variety of content and pacing.
[6818] DS Disney's Kim Possible: Kimmunicator by SuperSqank in 19:51.437 is the latest in SuperSqank’s series of TASes of licensed 2000s handheld games, and I’m all here for it! As someone who grew up with a lot of shovelware from that time, I’m always interested to see the unique glitches and movement tech that can come out of these games sometimes, and this publication easily met my expectations.
KusogeMan has submitted a wide variety of fighting games to the site over the last few years, most of them for consoles. [6826] Arcade Art of Fighting 3: The Path of the Warrior by KusogeMan in 02:48.977 sees them return to the arcade with a movie full of intense, fast-paced action that’ll be sure to keep you engaged - all while using a character typically considered low-tier!
While most TASers stick to a specific series, genre or platform of specialisation, some deliberately choose to branch out as much as possible. Darkman425 is one of these players, managing to check DOS off the “All Platforms Challenge” checklist with [6822] DOS Best of ZZT "Royal Treasures" by Darkman425 in 00:50.794, in part thanks to BizHawk 2.11’s new DOSBox-X core.
Speaking of large-scale challenges, nymx has been on a long-running quest to TAS as many games featured in the Compute!’s Gazette magazine series as possible. [6838] C64 Give 'N' Take "maximum score" by nymx in 04:24.366 marks their 100th TAS in the series (amazing work!!), and features some very carefully researched strategy that you can read more about in the submission notes.
[6831] NES Binary Land by AmaizumiUni in 03:52.234 marks yet another TAS of a Japan-exclusive game by AmaizumiUni, bringing more attention to parts of the NES library that have typically gone overlooked by the English-speaking community. I really enjoyed watching this, and I hope to play Binary Land for myself at some point!
Danius, another newcomer for the site in November, knocked it out of the park with [6833] 3DS Shantae and the Pirate's Curse by Danius in 57:18.790, showcasing an impressive level of tech execution and luck manipulation throughout, especially coming from someone with no apparent previous speedrunning experience. Make sure to check this out!
NemoRuby is one of a few prominent TASers of NES Mega Man ROM hacks on the site from the past few years, this time delivering [6834] NES Rockman 3: Stalker Attack by NemoRuby in 25:11.627, an improvement of nearly 10 seconds with a new route and small optimisations throughout the run.
Stockiel is our last newcomer for November with [6840] DOS Sonic the Hedgehog by Stockiel in 01:57.280. While this fangame is reasonably short, I know from experience how difficult PCem and libTAS can be to work with sometimes, so to start off with such a challenging workflow is really commendable!
[6841] Flash Bad Piggies 2 by Mikewillplays in 03:29.167 sees Mikewillplays tackle yet another deeply interesting Flash game, showcasing a wide range of hilarious puzzle solutions that took me back to my memories playing the first game on a tablet. Excellent work!
DigitalDuck has built an extensive TAS and RTA speedrunning repertoire out of ZX Spectrum games, this month presenting [6847] ZXS Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier "100%" by DigitalDuck in 38:51.264. The wide range of items that need to be collected (175 in total), the size of the map, and the various glitches available combine together to make a very interesting route, one that particularly appealed to me as a fan of collectathons.
For the last movie on this list, we have [6848] DS Newer Super Mario Bros. DS "warps" by Glitchman24 in 26:05.220. Glitchman24 has a history of TASing the New Super Mario Bros. games, but this is their first solo submission to the site, improving upon the previous movie while also making sure to keep things interesting during the autoscroller levels.
That’s all for Load State this time! Thanks for joining me for my guest appearance - I hope I was able to fill ikuyo’s shoes on this one. See you next month!
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Hi eien, I'm going through this submission currently and I noticed that all three segments of the City track are slower than the RTA world record for this game (https://www.speedrun.com/nfs1/runs/y82340wy ), each by about 1 to 3 seconds, despite both using the same car and the same gamemode. Are there any differences between this and the RTA run I need to know about that would contribute to the TAS being slower?
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I noticed an oversight I made when TASing the tutorial yesterday and was able to save 1 frame - here's the replacement movie file: User file #638975639875114527
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Hi OmerAras55. I have attempted to get your movie to sync on libTAS 1,4,6 and 1.4.7, but with no success. Can you please verify whether you can get your submission to sync on either of those versions? Note that we are unable to accept submissions that only sync on interim builds of libTAS.
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Hi Blazingmo. I have a few questions about this submission that I'd like you to address:
- Why does the duration of LRG laps vary between different tracks?
- I noticed that the IL record for Jump Parade uses LRG on all 3 laps. Why is it not done on lap 1 in this submission?
- After the 5th cup there was a "Challenge Completed" notification you had to progress through before starting the next cup. Could this have been avoided with a different verification movie?
Overall this submission looks like quite a big improvement over your previous work. Good job!
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(This is my personal opinion, and not necessarily representative of TASVideos Staff)
After thinking some more about this submission, I think I agree with RetroEdit about having this accepted on the site as a TAS of Ocarina of Time, and not just as a run of a practice ROM. I had previously been unsure about what I felt the best course of action of how to publish this submission was, because of the changed RNG seeding behaviour that others have mentioned. However, I feel like TASVideos already has a similar situation on its hands with libTAS and its handling of lag.
libTAS is designed to run software as if it were running on a "perfect" computer with no lag whatsoever, a necessary step to ensure consistent load times. Furthermore, the framerate can be controlled at will, allowing performance conditions to change arbitrarily. There is no guarantee that the results in libTAS could ever be exactly recreated on a real computer, but we accept this fact. Other tools like PCem and DOSBox-X instead attempt to emulate real hardware conditions, and as such games are fully vulnerable to lag, which then needs to be managed and manipulated by the TASer.
In a case where the same Windows game is playable in both environments, you run into a similar problem: how do you compare submissions made on these different tools? Runs on libTAS are sure to be faster than the alternative, making it an "easy" option that isn't necessarily as technically impressive. On the other hand, you don't want to force every future submitter to run the game in a slower environment just because one person did previously - that could just lead to improvements never getting submitted or never getting made.
I feel that the practice ROM can be viewed in a similar vein to libTAS here. The results aren't necessarily exactly recreatable on a real game, and getting ideal RNG is a lot more trivial than it would be otherwise. While this makes comparing runs on this tool to those on an emulator more difficult, particularly when dealing with obsoletion, I don't think it should prevent them from being published under the same banner. And while it is true the game has been modified to achieve this, to my recollection there are Flash games that have been accepted onto the site that were modified in order to make them work in ruffle, or to make them sync more consistently. While it's true these games don't really have alternative avenues for TASing like OoT does, I think that our existing familiarity with emulators may be causing some bias here. Inaccurate emulation that is designed to be deterministic isn't necessarily an obvious choice over real hardware that is forced to be deterministic.
In any case, OoT TASes will likely continue to be made in gz regardless, so I feel the least we can do is try to make the site hospitable to submitters. This is the first submission TASVideos has received of a 100% OoT TAS - ideally it won't be the last.
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Personal preference. I'm not a big fan of TASes that use out of bounds mouse movement to achieve things that wouldn't be possible in a normal window, to me it feels a little bit cheap and uninteresting, so I choose to intentionally avoid those kinds of strategies in the TASes I make.
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A lot of these questions are interesting to me, so I'm going to post some thoughts on the matter. Keep in mind that these are my personal feelings and don't necessarily reflect the overall views of TASVideos staff.
1. There was definitely a time when this was the case, but I feel like speed/entertainment tradeoffs are far less popular than they used to be, outside of playarounds obviously. I think keeping the option open for those who want to do flashier tricks is definitely worthwhile, but no, I don't think I would ever expect a submission to include speed/entertainment tradeoffs rather than just focusing on raw optimisation.
2. Absolutely not, TASes of alternative gamemodes should always be something that can be submitted here. I think there are already a number of TASes for alternative gamemodes that don't end in credits on the site, such as [6539] GC Resident Evil 4 "The Mercenaries: Base, maximum score" (170900) by Ubercapitalist in 07:31.400 or [4969] PC Iconoclasts "Lethal Rush" by ikuyo in 10:23.987.
On the matter of ILs...the biggest problem here is that it requires a lot of changes to the site infrastructure. We don't have a way to list RTA-measured or in-game time on movies in addition to power-on time yet, being able to have a list of levels for a game and TAS records/categories for each one that can display on game pages etc. would take a lot of site development time, and ILs also complicate TASVideos' existing publication process. Encoding and publishing every TAS for every game becomes a much bigger problem when every category of every level can also be submitted. I would love to see TASVideos accommodate IL TASes better - but I understand that there are a lot of complications in the process that make this challenging to solve, and the site only has so many developers to support it with making these changes.
3. This is honestly a really good point, and one I hadn't thought about before. The most likely answer is probably "consistency", but yeah, I do see some value in not including times on superplays. I suppose knowing how long a watch you're in for is nice, but that doesn't really matter on sites like YouTube where most people will be watching it.
4. Even in cases where TASVideos doesn't have the widest audience for a particular game, I still see the YouTube channel as providing some additional reach. It also ensures that, should something happen to the original video or its channel, that it is always available to watch somewhere.
5. I'd like to see that happen! Obviously it can be a tough sell in these situations though.
6. I do think we could be doing more to alert communities of the ways in which TASVideos has improved. Hell, I've even seen some assumptions about how we "used to" operate that to my knowledge have never been true, such as not allowing aiming for in-game time over real-time. Of the common hesitations and doubts listed, it's hard to think of a true one size fits all solution to addressing these: "strict timing standards" and "unfair emulator restrictions" demand a bit more context to the specific situations they come up in, while the view of TASVideos as authoritative and gatekeepy is something we could still be doing more to dispel in general.
7. Short answer is yes. Long answer is that this is again somewhat limited by the pace of site development. I actually started trying to implement a parser on the site for a game-specific tool a couple months ago, but as I'm not used to doing much programming things have been really slow...hopefully I can start making some progress again soon though.
8. TASVideos has actually done this before, so this isn't a situation without precedent...but, the last time it happened was like 15 years ago, so I'm not sure where the site would stand now. It could definitely be nice, though I can't say I have strong feelings either way on this solution.
On the solutions offered:
A. I think that could be a good idea. Though, there is a question of exactly how one determines how big is "enough" for a community to get this kind of representation. Should there be an objective measurement used (monthly active TASers? Total members?), or should things be analysed on a case-by-case basis? Also keep in mind that TASVideos Staff are already a relatively small team, and we don't necessarily want our own voices to get drowned out by ambassadors from too many communities.
B. This is an idea worth considering, I think. Publishing staff will probably have more opinions on the matter though.
C. This is a really good idea, assuming the resources are publicly available and well protected against vandalism. As it stands a lot of our Game Resources pages are really prone to containing out-of-date information, so linking somewhere reliable that does have current info would be a great way to deal with that.
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Undercooked didn't know that Super Picross supported 2-player when they made the TAS, and upon learning it did, cancelled the submission. However, having learnt that 1-player would be acceptable as well, they eventually uncancelled.
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Joined: 3/27/2018
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Your link seems to be to a Windows build rather than a Linux build. Regardless, I haven't been able to get the TAS to sync on my end - the game won't boot in 1.4.5 for me, and on 1.4.6 it desyncs immediately. I'll leave this one to someone else.