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The SNES has a pseudo hi-res mode, where the screen is doubled in resolution and the screen output is dithered in order to simulate transparency. KDL3 uses this in some rooms for some transparent foreground effects. The bsnes core emulates this by doubling the emulator window resolution, so that there is no loss of pixel information.
If you don't want the window to change, enable SNES -> Always Double-Size Framebuffer. The screen will always be at double size if this is selected.
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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grassini wrote:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/gameboy-color/spawn_
spawn game for game boy color
shitty game only has four stage,3 difficulties,hard mode has secret ending but the game just gets slower with harder mode.
There's a topic about this game here. It's been attempted twice - both stranded in the second stage out of sheer repetitiveness (even though the first stage looks pretty nice when TASed).
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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Let it be clear that this submission was rejected purely and only because of technical reasons, that made it literally impossible to be published on the site. If a movie cannot be played back, then we cannot verify it or encode it, and therefore we cannot publish it.
Otherwise, I'm sure this run would easily get a star, several awards, and whatever other ways we could feature it. Alas, it is not to be.
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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Thanks for your reply! Your RTA record run has been very helpful to me so far for routing, planning etc. (as have lilfatkid, and some others)
I did try for Invis with the Spookys in the first stage, but wasn't able to get it without losing several frames to getting the right RNG for it, so I opted to see if I could get one in a later stage. In hindsight, it probably would be worth it anyway to save time somewhere, but it's hard to tell where the optimal location for that would be without getting a TAS through the whole game first. I may save this for a second iteration of the TAS. EDIT: I tried to go for the Invis again in the first stage, but wasn't able to get it in a reasonable timeframe at all, so I'm leaving it as it is for now.
Regarding LifeVirus, I did a test on that fight, and a TAS won't be needing Invis for anything there. The laser can be jumped over with strict timing (and positioning MegaMan outside the initial sphere) while still continuously attacking it with swords without delay. It won't be necessary for the shield either, since LifeVirus is invincible while the shield is up, so I won't need to be touching the shield either. More likely, Invis would be used somewhere in a stage where I would do a lot of damage boosts otherwise.
That screw trick looks pretty helpful indeed, thanks for sharing.
Now, here's another WIP, with stage 3 done:
Link to videoPharaohMan.PIE
I found a trick where MegaMan sometimes can jump on the first frame after ending a BodyBurn in the air. It's a bit situational, but one interesting application I've found of it is that it's possible to get the WideSwrd in stage 4 without having to kill yourself (or getting AirShoes). Depending on how much time it takes to do this, I might grab it and use it for later boss battles (it takes more time to set it in-stage than it would save against BombMan), or possibly even remove getting the Sword chip out of the run entirely. WideSwrd does a bit more damage compared to Sword (30 damage vs 25 damage), so it would save a few hits against some bosses.
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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WIP 2:
Link to videoColorMan.PIE
I manipulated two M-Cannon chip drops in the first stage, and they (as well as two starter chips, Cannon and ShokWave) are used here to speed up the bossfight. The chip menu is automatically opened between every stage, which is helpful because it means I don't have to spend time opening the menu in-stage for these chips, and this way it only takes less than a third of a second to set them all. Otherwise, some of these chips might not even have been worth the time to set them.
I really like the way the boss battle looks here, using uncharged shots, charged shots, and the four chips mentioned above all to dismantle ColorMan.EXE quickly and seamlessly.
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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Guernsey wrote:
Can your hardware or an old emulator can affect your rerecording quality?
Old emulators have less rerecording or TASing tools than newer ones, which means you would have a chance of missing out on things that could be very useful (like debuggers, hex editors, movie editing suites, etc.). However, in principle, you need only frame advance, savestates, RAM Watch, and RAM searching tools to make an optimized TAS.
Depending on the emulator, an older version may also be more prone to desyncs, may feature inaccurate emulation, or may not be accepted at all on TASVideos. In general, it's recommended to use more recent versions of emulators when possible.
Hardware does not matter, as long as it can run an emulator with the required rerecording tools. Running the emulator at full speed is a bonus, but not a requirement.
Edit: Codecs affect recording ability (not to be confused with rerecording ability, which is the ability to create TAS movies). To record lossless video files you need a lossless codec such as Lagarith or Camstudio, and to record video files with good size-to-quality ratios you need codecs such as x264vfw.
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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Rockman EXE WS is a WonderSwan Color game of the Rockman EXE/Mega Man Battle Network series. Unusually for that series, this game is a platformer (most MMBN games, including all of the main ones, are RPGs). This means MegaMan.EXE gets to jump, shoot and slide his way through a bunch of stages as if he is the main universe Mega Man.
Unlike the typical Mega Man setup, this game does not allow you to choose what order you beat each stage in. However, it does feature branching paths in most of the stages, each with their own bosses and upgrades. Thus, there is still some element of routing involved.
This game is designed for replayability, as the branching means you have to beat the game twice to visit all areas, and the game allows you to restart the story with all previous upgrades after clearing it. This is required for many items, and beating the game a second time with all alternate branches opens up a final stage with a new final boss, as well as allows you to acquire several more items (battle chips and style changes). A 100% run would have a lot to do. On the bright side, the game is rather short, so an any% TAS that just clears the game once will be fairly short as well.
The game has six stages, or seven on a second playthrough if all areas are cleared. The second, third, fourth and fifth stages all branch into two, allowing a choice of which boss to fight.
Stage 1: FireMan.EXE
Stage 2: ElecMan.EXE / ColorMan.EXE
Stage 3: MagicMan.EXE / PharaohMan.EXE
Stage 4: BombMan.EXE / SnakeMan.EXE
Stage 5: FireMan.EXE / ElecMan.EXE (again)
Stage 6: ProtoMan.EXE and Life Virus (you fight both, no branch here)
(Stage 7: Gospel - not seen in any%)
So far I'm following the route of real-time speedrunners, which is FireMan - ColorMan - PharaohMan - BombMan - FireMan - ProtoMan+Life Virus. Important in this route is getting the BodyBurn battle chip in PharaohMan's stage, which allows MegaMan to dash through enemies, dash in mid-air, and move faster than sliding speed. Also, getting the Sword chip in stage 3 to defeat some bosses faster.
Here's a WIP of Stage 1:
Link to videoRockman.PIE
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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xnamkcor wrote:
Is it just me, or does it look like the wireframe Sigma model is just a sprite with scaling and rotating added? The SNES seemed to at least do maths to render geometry.
They probably didn't want to emulate the Cx4 chip (which is used for the 3D geometry effects in SNES X2 and X3) for this version.
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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xnamkcor wrote:
Do either of the encodes flip the screen?
Yes.
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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To avoid copyright notices (this is not the same thing as copyright strikes) or resulting country locks or other inconveniences related to that, the encoder would remove the offending audio from the encode before uploading the video. This has been done with, for example, Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
I don't think TVC has ever had a copyright strike. Given its unmanned status, it might possibly have silently received such (if it is not configured to an e-mail that anyone reads), but even so it would still be unlikely. I can't think of any TVC video that has actually been reported and taken down completely, which is what would potentially cause a strike.
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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Jungon wrote:
... what's up with all these names in the credits? Explose Horneck? Frozen Buffalio? .... Vile is now Vava? What's going on there? =O
These are the Japanese names for the Mavericks. Almost all Mavericks (as in stage bosses) in the Mega Man X games have different names between Japanese and English versions. Only by X6 did they stop changing or translating the names for English games. Usually it's to make the names less weird in English, replacing altered or foreign words or animal names with proper English ones.
Vile likewise was renamed from VAVA for English audiences, for concerns that the name would make him too similar to the character he was inspired from, Boba Fett.
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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I found a few minor timesavers upon reviewing the movie, that I somehow missed the first time through. The first one is an 8 frame time saver in Compas Man jumping off a conveyor belt instead of sliding off one, saving 8 frames, but all of those frames are lost due to RNG shenanigans in various places by the time I get back to the R-Shadow miniboss fight.
The second time saver is near the end of R-Shadow's stage, in the room with the two ball-and-chain enemies. I forgot about jumping off the platform next to the ladder (even though I did do this in a prior testrun), and saved 16 frames that way. As an added bonus, because of this time save, the RNG is significantly offset, and I could get the required large weapon refill from the final enemy with only 1 frame of delay, as opposed to the old run's 8 frames of delay in the other room. Overall, I saved 23 frames.
The new movie file is here, and the old one (for reference) is here.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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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feos wrote:
Add Pastvalue {0,0} at the top of the script.
To be precisely correct, add:
Language: Lua
Pastvalue = {0, 0}
Or alternatively, just add:
Language: Lua
Pastvalue = {}
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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Ah, I see. Looks like when Mosquitus is so far to the left, it is already "colliding" with the wall, thinking it's the floor, so it immediately proceeds as if it has landed on Zero. Interesting.
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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Any idea how that glitch works? Is it dependent on Zero's state or positioning when he's wall-jumping up firing the final shot?
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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Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 use the Cx4 expansion chip, which you need to obtain the firmware file for (CX4.ROM). So you need to get that file in order to play these games.
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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If the goal is to beat the game as fast as possible while using the Small Fire Mario trick, then it would be faster to warp to World 3, so you only enter one castle before World 8 instead of three.
Besides that, I doubt that this makes a worthwhile enough category for publication. It shows off one ages-old trick that's easy enough to do in real time, and that's about all it offers.
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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Warp wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
Even if splitting speed and entertainment runs is non-ambiguous or non-arbitrary, what is the purpose of splitting them? What benefit is there to putting, say, Super Metroid 100% on the other side of the site as Super Metroid RBO? Why does there need to be a split of this nature?
What is the current world-record tool-assisted speedrun of Super Metroid? Suppose I'm writing an article about speedruns for an online publication, and would like to mention that fact.
With so many Super Metroid runs, it can be a bit hard to find a definitive answer. Some clarity on this could be beneficial.
Given the concept of category names, it seems to me like this would not be hard to figure out. I doubt anyone is going to think the "world record" is going to be the longer time with an "RBO" label behind it, or something similar.
And it doesn't seem like something worth splitting the entire movie base over.
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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feos wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
feos wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
What is the speed-entertainment split for, then?
All the problems that post lists are resolved if we move from tiers to metacategories.
What is the purpose of a speed-entertainment split?
Ummm, are you in a loop? The point is (and has been from the start of the "Vault Tier Discussion" thread) fixing all those problems.
Are these problems fixed by removing the Vault and Moon tiers/distinctions, or are they fixed by introducing a split between speed runs and entertainment runs?
I understand there are several criticisms with the Vault and Moon tiers. Fine, let's say we merge the lot and erase the concept of tiers. Then what is the purpose of introducing a split to speed runs and entertainment runs? What does that achieve?
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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feos wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
These are all other ideas than a speed-entertainment split. What is the speed-entertainment split for, then?
Right, you've never read my response to you. Here it is: Post #421751. All the problems that post lists are resolved if we move from tiers to metacategories.
I see in that post plenty of criticism about the current Vault-Moon system, but I'm missing an answer to my question. What is the purpose of a speed-entertainment split?
feos wrote:
And I said unpromotion, because we don't showcase Moons any batter than before the tier system, we simply hide Vault.
It sounds like it makes sense, but the problems it causes are heavier than the benefits it brings.
Which, on a relative scale, promotes Moons. Once again, there is no absolute scale of promotion to compare with, so "unpromote Vault" and "promote Moons(/Stars)" are the exact same thing.
feos wrote:
I remind, that speed-entertainment split is not ambiguous or arbitrary: all "fastest possible" and "full completion" runs go to Coins, if their submissions are optimal, all the rest branches go to Moons, and published if they are optimal and entertaining. Stars are cherry-picked from both.
Even if splitting speed and entertainment runs is non-ambiguous or non-arbitrary, what is the purpose of splitting them? What benefit is there to putting, say, Super Metroid 100% on the other side of the site as Super Metroid RBO? Why does there need to be a split of this nature?
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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feos wrote:
That might sound solid, but there are cases when a researcher helped to move the TAS to an entirely new level of optimization. We want to encourage researchers, because research is mandatory for a really good run, but very few people have the skill to dive into game internals and develop scripts based on that.
Maybe quantify their productivity in some other way. For example, it may be possible to keep track of statistics for game resource/article edit counts, uploads of scripts or other relevant files, etc. But I think player points should be for the actual TASers only. Otherwise the term gets diluted too much.
feos wrote:
Just to address, Stars were supposed to remain, as were all the flags, one of which is newcomer rec. There can also be a list of best rated movies. So you still get 3 ways to promote good runs. Right now all of these can be used, but the rest of the system doesn't promote Moons any better than they were or could be promoted, instead it just unpromotes vault.
These are all other ideas than a speed-entertainment split. What is the speed-entertainment split for, then?
And by "unpromoting" Vault runs, that does promote Moon runs relatively compared to Vault movies, which is precisely the point. There's no difference between promoting one or unpromoting the other, as there is no absolute rate of "promotion".
Warp wrote:
I think the searching functionality of the site would benefit greatly from improvement. Results should somehow be sorted by how much it matches the search terms and relevance.
For example, if I search for "super mario bros", I would expect runs of the first NES SMB to pop up at the beginning of the results, but instead the first hit is in position 6, the first one being "FDS Super Mario Bros. 2" and the second "Super Mario All-Stars: Super Mario Bros. 2" for no apparent reason.
If I search for "mario land", the first hit is "GB Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3". And if I search for "super mario world", the first hit is "GBA Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World". And if I search for "mega man", the first result is "Wii Mega Man 10". And so on and so forth.
I don't know how the search could be improved, but it would be nice if it were.
Below the site search results are Google-based search results, which generally are better about this. We may want to highlight the Google results more, as the site-based search results are, while reasonably robust, often just not as good for direct matches, as you noted.
Warp wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
I would scrap Tech ratings.
I think it would be a shame to throw away thousands of ratings.
I don't. As I said, I think Tech ratings are useless.
Maybe they can be merged with Entertainment rating (with significant bias towards Entertainment, the much more important rating stat imo), but on their own, I don't think they need to exist. The current ratings as a whole won't go away, of course.
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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Samsara made a topic about features for a potential site redesign, considering it was a topic recently discussed on IRC. Which is fine, but I think it is missing the absolute most crucial point about any redesign idea - how to make it happen.
What we really need are:
• Web coding manpower. We don't have a lot of people doing site coding right now. Writing a whole new site would be a massive amount of work, and we simply currently don't have the workforce for such a project currently. We are going to need to get it from somewhere.
• Ideas about what architecture to run such a site on. TASVideos currently uses a large aging PHP-based codebase which has just about reached its limits in extensibility and maintainability. For a new site, we may want, or need, to consider alternative options. A (web) programming language better suited to making large (web) coding projects such as TASVideos with a sane architecture and codebase that is less likely to devolve into a mess that hardly anybody can maintain a decade later.
This leads me to an experimental idea which adelikat has thrown out a few times when this subject was brought up. Right now we don't know if it is even possible (and I lost some of the specifics), but the basic idea was to create a web application/site in C# and deploying it on a Linux server using Mono. However, so far, nobody (who had a Linux rig to do such tests on, and was asked) has been able to test out the basic idea yet. The advantage here is that not only is adelikat well familiar with C#, which is a well-usable language for large projects of this level, but it would also facilitate getting other coders on the project well, such as other coders from the BizHawk development team. This all depends on the viability of the idea, of course, and if anyone can pull it off even as just a basic "Hello world"-style test.
I'm not saying at all that this is the definite way to go forward. If anybody has an alternative viable idea, that certainly could be considered as well.
Thoughts, anyone?
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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First of all, mind, without actual coding manpower, or even ideas for coding infrastructure that people could potentially do work on, many of these ideas are going to be wishful thinking and not much is going to come from this topic. If we really want to get large changes enacted to the site, that is what we really should be considering or discussing. EDIT: Topic for that here.
That said, I'll give my take on a few things here.
1. More emphasis on publication ratings, for sure. Make it easier to rate movies, give people more of an incentive to rate, perhaps change what gets rated if we can find some things that work better than Entertainment/Tech Quality.
I would scrap Tech ratings. They are basically useless. Nobody has a clear idea on how to define it, everybody has a different definition or idea for it, and less experienced members have no good idea at all what to do with it.
Instead, replace it with just a single rating number where people can define how much they liked the run on their own terms.
It should be made much easier to rate. A single-click system à la IMDB would be ideal. Also possibly consider guest ratings, although that may lead to too much useless noise in the ratings.
There should also be some other incentives of rating. There's a top 50 table of raters, but it's out of the way and not really that visible. Maybe a better way of integrating rate counts into user profiles?
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I think this devalues the idea of "player points". If you did not actually participate in TASing a game, you should not be receiving player points.
Speaking of player points, while I like how they currently accumulate over a history of work (assuming it doesn't all get obsoleted), it may be more interesting to "rank" TASers based on active or present work, giving an added incentive for TASers to stay active in their TASing efforts. I have attempted to make such a ranking based only on publications from the past two years, but it might be worth to look more into this.
3. Submission voting changes. An idea I came up with very recently involves changing the question back to "Should this be published?" and giving a Yes/No answer, but upon selecting Yes or No you get different sub-options that provide a reason for your vote, something like a dropdown menu. This seems like a more efficient way of gathering better feedback on movies without requiring everyone to post their thoughts in the thread... But it's still probably a terrible idea in some way.
I think this needlessly complicates the vote system. I think it could be done better than it is now, but complicating the vote options beyond "yes/no/meh" may dissuade voters.
4. I suppose it's high time we really discuss what we want to do with the tiering system. Do we really want to keep tiers in a literal sense, where Vault is under Moons and Moons is under Stars, or should we discard that in favor of a more categorized system, such as Speed and Entertainment? Should we loosen the rules on what goes into Vault, allowing more diversity in there, or should we loosen the rules on what we can and can't accept as new branches in Moons? There's a lot to discuss here, though I would personally like to move away from Vault and "tiers" in some way, shape or form.
I am against any idea that splits the site into speed and entertainment regions. It ruins the original concept of the tier system, which was devised to let outstanding runs get more exposure, and only means you get two 'halves' of the site that would be more or less equal in the hierarchy, which means there is no point to splitting them in the first place.
On that note - tiers are, by definition, hierarchical structures, where tiers are above or below other tiers, not side-by-side. Any "tier" suggestion that breaks the hierarchy or tries to put them side by side is not a tier structure at all, and should not be referred to as such.
We can fill whole topics on alternative ideas than our current tier system, but I won't go too deep into this yet.
Now, for some other ideas:
I think that a big change for a new site structure should be a much greater emphasis on individual games. We do have individual game pages, but they're hard to find, are very beta, and don't really fit into our current site structure. A more per-game site structure with greater focus on franchises and such would make it easier for people to find games/movies they like. I don't think the site is ready to go full speedrun.com yet, but we can take a step in that direction.
Make game resources and other such wiki pages easier to edit. Right now you need to either ask a site admin for editor rights, or submit a movie and get it published (by which point one is often already past being interested in writing up a game resources page). Making game resources free for everyone like a conventional wiki (or at least for registered users) would make it much easier for many people to get involved with writing game resources and such for the site.
In general, it should be made easier or better incentivized for new members or guests to get involved with site content and contribution, no matter how minor. Every vote, every rating, and every piece of game information (save abuse) helps the site.
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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feos wrote:
And then URMOM
Okay, it's made clear now what direction this topic is going into in terms of maturity level. We're done here.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
