Thanks for seemingly calming down a bit!
It is indeed very reasonable to want to not be bombarded with questions that have already been answered in an organized fashion! If that was your fear all along, I think I understand where you were coming from a lot better, though I dare say you didn't exactly make yourself clear at first ;)
I really don't think that will end up being the case, and I especially think that if you do start to feel like you are being bothered a lot in an avoidable way, and you politely point it out, the people in question are mature and few enough that they will stop.
I think we can all move forward in a friendly way in which everyone's contributions are valued!
Also, BBCode is enabled by default for me in the Quick Reply box, at least.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
There is nothing wrong with asking the TASers to learn the basics and try to be more involved with the m2k2 community before starting the game itself.
The thing wrong with it is that you are making people feel antagonized and demeaned. This is not acceptable no matter what.
The other thing wrong with it is that there is literally no bad outcome for you if they do things the way they want.
The other other thing wrong with it is that creating a rift between communities based on a nonsense preconception of how a TAS should be approached can only result in a worse final product. Constructive collaboration is a good thing! And it never involves insisting that other people do things your way!
EDIT: No one has refused to look at those resources, as far as I'm aware. I would be shocked if they don't. You're shifting the goalposts rather drastically here. There's a big difference between "six months of research could never possibly be enough" and "we just want you to look at our website!"
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Please stop intentionally and directly degrading the efforts of others and claiming some kind of moral high ground about how TASes "should" or "must" be undertaken.
The worst possible result for you here is a published TAS you don't like, which, presumably, should be easily obsoletable. This result is pretty unlikely - the site voters & judges are not known for being lenient towards sloppy work these days, and the TASers in question are unlikely to attempt to submit anything known to be significantly sloppy in the first place. But even if this dire scenario came to pass, the total harm done would be far less than you have already done in this thread.
What matters in this community is not the quality of one individual movie at one point in time. What matters is the spirit of collaboration and camaraderie that keeps talented TASers motivated to pour hours of loving effort into their work. By demeaning and condescending to those TASers, you not only directly lessen their satisfaction with the community and the project, but also that of everyone else reading the thread.
This kind of thing is a significant detractor to potential new talent considering making the considerable sacrifice that is becoming a TASer. Why would you want to put in that kind of effort and time if it's going to be constantly torn apart by people who proclaim themselves better than you?
Please just stop.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
I like this version significantly better than the other, and it follows the 'plays on hardest difficulty' site rule.
Awesome run :D Not being familiar with the game, at first I thought there must be some kind of ridiculous corruption of the score counter going on, but nope - that's just how absurd combos work!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Easily worth the wait, this is one of the best submission texts I've ever read.
And one of the best TASes I've ever watched.
I hope this is starred, and well-remembered during awards season.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
I think maybe we want two different things, a (rigorously defined) category definition and a (helpful to humans) route description. It's not clear which one ought to be in the title, though.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
We should be trying to minimize input length.
If this leads to a boring movie for some people, we can have a separate encode, or those people can learn how to use their video player's "fast forward" (or "stop") feature.
Watching a boss flail around and kill itself for three minutes is quite entertaining to me. If it were an hour, I wouldn't watch the whole thing, but the fact that it existed would be so hilarious that I would be even more entertained, and I'd probably watch ten minutes of it by skimming through.
This isn't an argument for accepting the "early" input end based on entertainment — it's a counterargument to people saying we shouldn't because it's not entertaining. I don't think a subjective issue like this should be decided on entertainment grounds; I think we should find out what the shortest input is, and then make room for alternate versions/encodes if there's a major entertainment issue (like we do with camhacked sonic runs, for instance).
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
I don't mind making more branches when both runs are entertaining and have a good reason to exist, but I think Warp's assertion that it's obvious when a run crosses the line into ACE is wrong. The SMB3 run currently on the bench is a great example of a point somewhere along the spectrum, and there are countless other possible ways that a run might sorta kinda end up executing user input, but not in the distinct, obvious way that, say, the original Pokémon Yellow Total Control run did.
I think that branch creation should be decided on a game by game basis by the run authors and the viewers. I am fine with a vague site precedent for non-ACE branches, for games for which that is well defined. But I think I agree with andypanther that the fastest completion should be the any%.
Now, I am a bit torn about the "but it's not really the same game anymore" argument. This is fundamentally true. One can imagine a game where it is easier to hijack the display routines and create your own facsimile of the game's credits, without actually calling the credits routine. By inspecting the screen, you couldn't tell the difference — but have you really beaten the game?
In the end, though, I think I come down on the side of goals being predefined conditions on memory states, which we as players choose based on our human understanding of the intended end of the game, but which, as soon as we choose them, become abstract, objective mathematical conditions. If achieving the chosen conditions involves entirely ripping apart and rewriting the game, that's fine — in fact, it's pretty damn cool.
That said, there's no reason that we can't let our knowledge of ACE capabilities inform our goal choices, to, for instance, define them in ways that allow calling the credits routine but not drawing something that looks like the credits yourself.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
This run is really nice! And I'm glad to be introduced to this neat little game.
I'm also glad that you seem to be taking people's criticisms of some of the movement well, and are willing to do the work required to test them out. Sometimes we come off as a little harsh, but it's all in the spirit of collaboratively destroying the game :)
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
If input would be identical, i see no reason to do more. Anyone who really cares can recreate it themselves from the input file pretty easily.
Pathing this seems like an interesting puzzle, yes vote.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
This is a pretty cool idea!
Keep in mind, though, you're asking people to do a quite a bit of work to create an entry, so if you want to see a decent turnout, you should be prepared to do a lot of work yourself - researching and crafting worthwhile parameters for the runs that will result in interesting & varied results; whatever infrastructure you need for publicizing the results and gathering votes; being timely with updates and clear with rules & formatting; etc.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
I think it's nice when new users introduce themselves here. TASing is a demanding, time consuming, and often fairly solitary pursuit. The feeling of contributing to a community of people who care about your work is a big part of how some people are motivated to actually complete TASes, and a warm welcome in an introduction post is a great way to start that process.
On the other hand, if the first thing we do is make a new user feel like they have made a mistake or are unwelcome, we stand to lose out on a productive contributor, and that's sad for everyone involved. Even if the user's first post doesn't seem very promising, it's worth our time to welcome them anyway - we have many amazing TASers who arrived here young & inexperienced once upon a time.
If you really think site policy on this should be improved, then as thatguy suggested, the Sites subforum (or maybe irc) is the appropriate place to bring it up. I'd kindly ask you not to do it in threads like this one :)
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Welcome aboard, Baka94! I think it is fine for you to mention your speedgaming group and works in progress here, as long as you're not spamming it repeatedly or aggressively trying to recruit people.
Have you tried out TASing on the platforms you're interested in yet? I would recommend downloading the tools and just playing around a bit, setting yourself small goals or doing little research projects in the game or games you care about, before you jump in to trying to make a complete TAS. But everyone learns differently, so don't listen to me if you don't want to!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Can someone explain how the RNG display at the bottom works? Are the line heights simply values that are always cycled through in that order? What does the color coding mean?
Thanks! I am excited to watch this with a full understanding of how the manipulation is working, I really appreciate all the work pirohiko did to make the HUD.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Grincevent:
That's really neat that you had the same thought! :D
This might be tractable for individual levels of platformers. I might try to play around with SMB or SMB3 level 1 later...
Scepheo:
Oh, I see! Sorry for misunderstanding. It is nice to have an existing tool for trying this out, I suppose!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Spikestuff:
I'm pretty confused about how that N?K video has anything to do with this topic. I think that it doesn't?
Since I guess there is some confusion about what I meant by 'indefinitely', I will attempt to elaborate:
1. Write down a sequence of button inputs (like the first n frames, maybe all of them, of any current TAS).
2. Load a ROM, start recording, feed inputs from your sequence into the emulator, wrapping back to the beginning when you hit the end.
3. If the game is eventually completed, stop recording. You have now demonstrated that it can be beaten with a cycle length of n.
Scepheo:
Adelikat's infinite mario TAS is definitely playing around in the same space as this, and may have subconsciously influenced my thinking about it. Not quite the same, though, since it has a complete playthrough in each loop, designed to account for the small variations, and never terminates. But it is very cool!
alden:
So, it looks like your Rampage run has a period of 6? Would it still work with a period of 2, just autofiring A the whole time?
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
