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I decided to give this TAS a watch. The more varied use of moves and combos definitely helped increase the initial entertainment of the run, but unfortunately, it still grew stale for me relatively quickly, and I found myself not wanting to watch any more by the midpoint. I also found myself a little confused at a few points - occasionally the player's attacks wouldn't connect and there didn't seem to be any reason why. Some of the non-parried/blocked attacks also fell into this category for me.
This definitely feels like a playaround rather than a speedrun, but it outstays its welcome for me and doesn't offer anything too extraordinary. I voted No for this reason.
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Recently, Rank 5 TASes of Papa's games were allowed onto the site, and part of the reasoning as to why was because of their overwhelming popularity as a category to run within the RTA community. Rank 3 and Rank 10 categories for these games also exist through the Papa Louie Category Extensions leaderboard, and while not as popular to run, still remain more popular than Any% (with one exception for Rank 10). Would these categories also be acceptable on the site, or are they too unpopular and obscure to override the fact they don't beat the game?
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Spikestuff wrote:
Uh. What's the difference compared to this movie?
A quick look at the encode suggests that this is an improvement over the published movie, but that input hasn't been truncated and lasts throughout the entire credits, making it show a slower time.
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I've just noticed that this submission seems to have been done on Mupen64 1.0.9. Is there a reason this TAS wasn't done on a newer version of the emulator?
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For some reason, PCem only seems to respond to mouse inputs from the player every second frame. (e.g. mouse button inputs won't be registered if performed on odd-numbered frames, and mouse movement will only be detected if it carries over to an even-numbered frame). At PCem's default framerate, this equates to a mouse input rate of 50Hz, while keyboard inputs can be performed at 100Hz. If PCem st-2 is emulated at say, 200fps, then the mouse input rate will instead be 100Hz. It may be best to run PCem at at least double the framerate of your game (or otherwise wait for a fix) if you're planning on making a TAS.
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HappyLee wrote:
But a lot of the increase comes from low quality submissions / less-known/low quality games.
[...] We don't necessarily need low quality submissions, or TASes from unofficial games that very few people cares.
I've been a member of TASVideos for a good few years now. I haven't made many submissions, but I've always been working on TASes, many of which I've hoped to submit to the site one day.
The old rules of TASVideos, the ones that more strictly dictated game choice and goal choice, were a major point of stress for me. I didn't just need to worry about making my work optimal, I had to have this big cloud hanging over me that all my work might just get thrown out immediately if it didn't meet a requirement for being interesting or popular enough.
Changing this ruleset has made my life far more relaxing. I don't work less hard on optimisation because I'm a perfectionist who cares about the quality of my work, but I don't have to stress about whether Phonics Racing Adventure will be entertaining enough to whichever random group of people on the forum happen to watch it. I can decide which projects I work on purely based on what I want to make, and not what TASVideos rules coerce me to make.
I want to point out that many of the rule changes that have taken place over the last few years have been workshopped with the community, such as the recent decision to remove entertainment requirements from Alternative branches. These decisions have been made because the community at large has agreed with them, and you have chosen not to participate in their discussion before now. I don't think there's anything wrong with (respectfully) voicing your disapproval, but I think it would've been better to do it at those moments instead of turning up now and demanding the past 2 years of changes be reverted.
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GamesFan2000 wrote:
For Super Mario 64, that problem does have a simple solution: add a site rule where any major RTA categories for a game is eligible so long as they are significantly distinct from other categories; 16 Star would be my conservative example of how this rule should be applied.
In the most recent news post, Samsara said this:
Samsara wrote:
Going forward, Alternative will expand to include many speed-based branches, regardless of their entertainment level. This is far more in line with our original vision for PG. Creativity no longer requires an audience, meaning you can create a run of the exact branch you want to see and we will showcase it the same as any other run.
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Dimon12321 wrote:
Sync verified.
Thanks! I ran back the movie file myself and there were no issues there.
The most notable area of timesave in this movie compared to the existing publication is in the final race, which ends input several seconds earlier, making even more effective and entertaining usage of the inertia technique. This does mean that they finish the race in 8th place instead of 1st, but seeing as this still results in a "win" by the game, I don't think there should be any issues regarding whether this movie meets its goal. Another great improvement from Technickle.
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I don't know what your own experiences with kids has been like, but speaking for myself, they are not any more likely to read descriptions for information before watching a video than adults, are more likely to overestimate what kind of content they can handle, and are also interested in watching speedruns.
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DJ_Incendration wrote:
The content warning is enough to draw sensitive viewers away from the video.
Unless I missed it somewhere, there's no content warning in the encode itself. A lot of YouTube viewers might not bother reading the description before they watch the video (especially when the warning is all the way at the bottom).
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feos wrote:
I have no idea how anyone can read this as "NTSC-J may be judged more harshly".
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.
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Currently, under the "Use the correct version of the game" section of the Movie Rules, there is a clause stating that English versions of games are preferred:
NTSC is usually preferred over PAL. USA versions, labelled (U), are preferred as a majority of our audience is English speaking, though any NTSC release can be used interchangeably. Using a PAL version of the game is allowed in some situations:
I have not been a fan of this clause for a while, but I was reminded of it again recently when McBobX expressed some confusion about whether or not he was able to TAS the Japanese version of Mega Man 7, and expressed some regret at not having done so for his recent submission. I feel that it would be for the best if the clause stating a preference for USA/English versions was removed, for the following reasons:
The clause is confusing to new users. It is not immediately clear from reading what consequence, if any, may apply to movie acceptance if someone uses a version other than NTSC-U, especially in the presence of more serious rules submissions must abide by. As in the above case, this can potentially mislead people into believing their submission will be judged more harshly if they don't TAS on English, introducing a level of ambiguity that goes against the goal of making the Movie Rules clear and easy to understand.
(As noted by Drakodan) The vast majority of RTA communities do not have any kind of policy mandating the use of a particular language in speedruns. The presence of such a rule on TASVideos is a bit unusual, and someone coming into TASing from outside this circle may not see much sense in it.
The majority of site users speaking English already means that the majority of submissions to the site are already likely to be in English. Even in the event that removing this rule did lead to a sudden increase in submissions of games in other languages, I feel that this is not likely to be a problem because...
A game that can be officially played in multiple languages is unlikely to be obscure enough for a judge to have a difficult time figuring out what's going on.
"People will do worse TASes in Japanese for a lazy obsoletion" is not going to be a problem when there is already a separate rule specifying that regional differences between text and cutscene lengths are discounted during judgement.
Now, OceanBagel has made the counterpoint on Discord that for movies with Alternative goals which are judged partially on entertainment, noting that English is preferred by viewers may be important. I don't think that someone making a TAS on a non-English version of the game is likely to be a dealbreaker for acceptance (especially when such submissions already regularly need judges to request more feedback), but I think the wording of this clause could still be improved if it were to remain. Perhaps if it was phrased differently, along the lines of "All NTSC versions are acceptable, but USA versions are preferred because such and such, here are the conditions under which PAL is acceptable", it would be clearer to users that they won't have their TAS rejected if they play on Japanese or another language. Being more specific about the relevance of language choice to movies with Alternative goals could also help somewhat.
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I voted Meh.
This was a bit more interesting to watch for me than most fighting game TASes, but this also came with some confusion. It was difficult to track what was going on sometimes, and also why certain choices were being made. Why wait here and not there? How exactly does the teleportation mechanic work, is there a good reason it wasn't being used in certain places? It just didn't quite come together for me as a viewer.
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What are the hashes of the game image?
My .rvz does not match those hashes. Instead it has a SHA1 of c9bace2b16a947547ac69769e10f024ca10130d3.
Something worth noting is that when you check the hash of a .rvz in Dolphin, it gives you the hash of the decompressed dump (as if it were a .iso). Using that I instead get a SHA1 of 630ac23987ad8c38a5bf72550dfdf840a20d4ca8, which is what is listed on redump.org.
I'm getting black screen in hawk.
This is most likely due to not having the SYSCONF language properly configured in Dolphin settings. As I understand it, Wii Party will refuse to start if an incompatible language is being used.
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I think it is worth considering how RTA speedrunning leaderboards treat difficulty options here. There are certainly some which exclusively compete on harder difficulties, yes, but equally, there are some that choose to allow any difficulty option, and may indeed typically run on Easy, even when the changes to gameplay are relatively minor (e.g. Half-Life 2).
A hard movie may be more impressive for some of those games, but if someone in the speedrunning community chooses to make a TAS, it's not unlikely that they'll choose something in line with what the RTA community does if it's faster. It would be a big shame if those TASes were rejected from the site merely due to not using the highest difficulty setting.
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This conversation, as well as the one surrounding difficulty modes in the "Suggestions for changes to movie rules", bother me somewhat. It feels like the underlying problem at hand is "These movies would be bad and boring, therefore we shouldn't allow them" - not based on the poor entertainment of any actual submission per se, but merely that of imagined submissions.
I feel like the argument that PvP games are "incomplete" or otherwise shouldn't fit into the definition of a video game on the site is a strange one. Yes, a TASer is not going to be playing against an opponent, but defining a video game based on how a TASer might "play" it rather than how most people would play it seems very strange to me. Not all VS games and gamemodes that require multiple players even explicitly lack a goal with 1 player - if there's some endpoint in the level, or set of collectibles a player needs to obtain to win, that is still something that can be optimised. These kinds of situations seem to be missing from the conversation.
Really, the worst case scenario I can imagine with PvP-only games is fighting games, where you can just beat up your opponent in endless combos with no resistance...but if I'm being completely honest, that is just what most fighting game TASes already look like to me. Yeah, technically the CPU is putting up a fight, but TAS play reduces that resistance to samey, boring nothingness. I suspect many causal viewers wouldn't even notice the difference.
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.bk2 movie: User movie #638561133860455748
.dtm movie (oddly this seems to be 8 frames longer in duration??): User movie #638567315518273591
Instructions are listed in their respective user files descriptions, though it's less readable than I expected (new lines don't seem to get saved).
Edit by feos: Fixed links.
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feos wrote:
It used to sync for others, is it at least known why it fails in your case?
Wii Party seeds its main RNG value using the console's TB register, which increments every 12 CPU cycles. It seems that Dolphin 5,0-16793 and its corresponding BizHawk Dolphin Core build don't land on the same TB value for some reason (at least in my TAS), leading to different outcomes and causing a desync.
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I've started work on a TAS using BizHawk Dolphin Core, but it is starting to look like it might not be able to sync on regular Dolphin. To be clear, the TAS syncs absolutely fine on the BizHawk build - just not on the corresponding official Dolphin build. Would this be acceptable to submit to the site?
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When dumping video and audio for Wii, the framerate will be about double what it should be (120fps instead of 60fps), but otherwise looks fine. I haven't checked GC.
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Attempting to save or load states via Lua scripting on the latest version of Dolphin Core seems to cause BizHawk to freeze up, at least for Wii. Saving and loading states by any other means seems to work fine.
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Winslinator wrote:
I think there are two routing improvements to be had here. The first actually involves finishing off Donkey Kong Jr. with Modern Easy. This is because once you've earned 5 stars in all four modes for one of the base games, you're awarded an extra 5 stars. And since this TAS already completed three of the Donkey Kong Jr. game modes, that means getting 1000 points in Donkey Kong Jr. Modern Easy effectively awards 10 stars!
Are you sure about this? Checking the save file for my recent playthrough of Game & Watch Gallery 3, I have a total of 100 stars, whereas I should have 105 if this was the case (I got 5 on all modes for Mario Bros). Additionally, this would mean the max stars achievable is 175 instead of 150, which doesn't line up with what I've seen online. (It also makes putting a "Congratulations" screen at 150 rather than 175 a bit strange...)
I don't really know how to respond to "I don't see how this could possibly be a problem" other than to provide screenshots of the conversation I mentioned in my original post indicating that it is, in fact, a problem.