Posts for Samsara

Post subject: Publications Currently on Hold
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
You may be aware there's been a lull in publications over the past few days, and unfortunately that's going to continue for the time being. We rely on the Internet Archive as our repository for publication encodes, and it's currently down after the recent data breach and DDoS attacks. As such, we're unable to publish anything until it's back up and stable again. The situation has also notably impacted judging as well, meaning it will also take longer to judge runs. Hopefully this should all be resolved soon. We'll give an update as soon as we're ready to start working normally again. Just so this post isn't all doom and gloom, here's a nice light note to end on: TASBot and TASVideos recently presented a block of TASes at Disaster Relief Done Quick 2024! The VOD, featuring brand new live commentary for our currently published runs of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Castlevania, and Donkey Kong Country, as well as premiering a brand new run of Gimmick!, is available to watch below: Link to video Also, if you want something to tide you over until publications resume, I'd highly recommend reading our previous news post, which is so long that we'll most likely be publishing again by the time you're done.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Thank you kindly! Updated the old any% to be obsoleted by this movie instead of the 100%.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
The content thievery and license violating is one thing, but for me it's this:
Samsara wrote:
Probably because he's attempting to register with @tasvideos.org email addresses.
This, coming from someone who was openly stealing and misattributing TASes, scans to me as attempted staff impersonation, and I'm not going to tolerate that coming from anyone, let alone someone who clearly isn't above falsifying his presence on things he isn't a part of.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I just realized I should've uploaded userfiles. User movie #638632286005200543 - The most complete WIP I have, based on the RTA record at the time it was made. Very out of date. User movie #638632287955980290 - The teleport mentioned in the last post. User movie #638632291759086795 - The endless attacking nightmare mentioned in the last post. User movie #638632293192965722 - A RAM Watch file containing some information important to the glitching. Don't ask me what they're for, my brain's scrambled enough as it is ._. User movie #638632293877370651 - A Lua script that displays character EXP and inventories to easily follow the effects of the glitch.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Quick update just in case anyone still cares about this guy: He's tried registering to the site five times over the past couple days, and has been unable to get through. Probably because he's attempting to register with @tasvideos.org email addresses. In short, if he ever manages to put in a real email address, he's getting permabanned immediately.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I apologize for the long wait on judging this. I've had a lot going on in my personal life over the past year and it prevented me from being able to make any progress on the systems and protocols needed to support this run and others like it. Hopefully we shouldn't have any more years-long delays on any submissions going forward.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Progress Report: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Well, hey, it's been a year since the last one of these, so at the very least it's still annual. Of course, that also means there's a lot to get through... In this post:
  • BizHawk 2.10 has a release candidate!
  • Windows 95 runs are now accepted!
  • Content and sensitivity warnings have been added!
  • A very important thread regarding the future of TASVideos!
  • New sync verification system and a call for new Reviewers!
  • Oh also other staff, a call for other staff as well ._.
  • Revamped Alternative and Playground classes!
  • New Events class!
  • And one last quick thing from your third favorite admin!
Major thanks to dwangoAC for helping with information and wording, particularly in the Events section! There's a whole lot of major site stuff to get into, but I'd like to start with some smaller things first so they don't get buried:
Wake up, babes. New BizHawk just pre-dropped: https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.10-rc1 This release candidate for BizHawk 2.10 contains a fully functional 3DS core (Encore), as well as new cores for the Fairchild Channel F (ChannelFHawk), the Commodore Amiga (PUAE), and the Atari 2600 (Stella). On top of these new cores, there were many updates to the current cores, most notably a major update and reimplementation of the Genesis Plus GX core. Note that this is not the official 2.10 release, but just the first release candidate, so please help us check for regressions, especially in TAStudio and the rest of the TASing workflow, and in Lua. Remember: if it's not reported then it won't be fixed! Report bugs on the BizHawk Github or on Discord, TASVideos, or Reddit. As this is not an official release, we are not currently accepting any submissions using it. The new cores are not supported by the site yet, and the updated cores will likely not sync on previous versions. We will be making a separate announcement post once 2.10 is officially released to formally announce support for the new cores.
As a notable update to last year's acceptance of Windows XP TASes using PCem and libTAS, we now have a setup for Windows 95 games, and as such they are now accepted! Like Windows XP, only TASVideos releases of PCem are allowed. These releases are marked st to indicate single-threading, a modification required for determinism that isn't available in the original PCem. Please see our movie rules for libTAS submissions, as well as our rules for PCem. For more information, including help on how to set up the environment, we have a Guide on TASing Windows games in PCem+libTAS.
I'd like to highlight a recently added quality of life feature to the site: Content and sensitivity warnings. Due to the nature of TASing and the devil may care attitude of older games, we've had a number of people point out that a good number of publications should have photo- and phono-sensitivity warnings on them, to alert users of the presence of flashing lights and sudden loud noises. Separate to that, with advancements in TASing starting to reach more platforms with less market regulation, we also have a number of runs that require content warnings, as they contain dark, disturbing, or otherwise potentially triggering content. We were, and still are, noting these in publication descriptions, but we've just added proper warning icons for these movies to make it more clear: - We use this yellow icon for photo- and phono-sensitivity warnings... - ...and this red icon for content warnings. We're still in the process of flagging movies, so if you see a run that should be tagged with a warning, let us know!
Alright, time for the big things. If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I'd like to think you have if you're reading this news post, you've most likely seen the huge influx of new submissions and new submitters over the past couple years. We broke our nearly two decade old submission record in 2022, and then in 2023 we broke our nearly one year old submission record again. I've said it before, I'll say it again here, and I'm going to say it many times more in the future: This is fantastic, I love it, I'm so happy to see the resurgence and growth of the site and even happier to have participated in and facilitated it directly. This is exactly what we wanted to see while we were developing the new site! Of course, there is a slight catch... It's a lot more than we were expecting. Something that we've realized recently, and unfortunately later than we should have, is that our current submission and publication system might not be sustainable with our growth path. The system worked great when we were receiving 300-400 submissions per year and only publishing about 70% of them, but now we're not only receiving double the number of submissions as before, but we're also publishing them at a higher percentage due to all of our recent rule changes. To quickly put it into perspective, here's a fun stat: We've published as many movies since the release of the new site as we have in the last six years of the old site. 1544 publications since January 1, 2022 at the time of writing, compared to 1559 publications covering 2016 to 2021, meaning that by the end of the year we will have effectively more than doubled our previous publication rate by year. If you want a second fun stat, we published more runs in 2023 alone (721) than we did in the final three years of the old site (712). If you want a third fun stat, not only did we have more submissions in 2023 (885) than in any other year, but we also published more runs that year (721) than we've had submissions in any other year. Needless to say, that's a lot more work than we've ever had to do before, and we're doing it with effectively the same number of staff members. We've made a lot of changes to make things easier, of course, but we realized that we're most likely going to have to go deeper in order to stay afloat. Therefore... TASVideos must die. That provocative statement, as well as the next four words in this sentence, links to a thread posted by ikuyo, and I highly recommend reading through it and posting your thoughts. To clarify, the site itself isn't going anywhere. We just need to make much bigger changes than we've been making, even if it means "killing" parts of ourself that we've been carrying since inception. I'd like to think that we've spent the past few years systematically killing the negative parts of the site, correcting our previous wrongs and re-opening doors that we had violently slammed in peoples' faces, but some of those negative aspects are still built so deeply into the core of the site that we've honestly overlooked them for way too long. That's the TASVideos that must die. Not the site itself, but the underlying core we've ignored until now. We're already planning on making some changes to the site based on feedback and discussion in and inspired by that thread, and to prove it, I'll announce a couple of them right now!
If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I'd like to think you have if you're reading this news post, you've most likely seen a new tag in the Submission Status column: Sync Verified. This, of course, means that the submission was verified to sync on a machine other than the author's, which is quite useful for the entire way TASing works. Verification is arguably the most important part of judging, and as such Judges were almost always required to run the input files for their claims. This was not always possible: Tech knowledge, hardware requirements, and in rare (read: Linux) cases game availability have been barriers to verification many times in the past for us, which would result in us needing to reach out to other staff or the community at large for help. Waiting to reach out never really got us anywhere fast, though, and as speedrunners we do enjoy things being fast, so we decided to build verification directly into the site. What this means is that we want Reviewers, and a lot of them! I had originally envisioned Reviewers as filling this exact role, making judging more accessible to people who are qualified in every way except "being able to run the input file", so now that there's a proper system put into place it means we can really ramp up the number of Reviewers. The only requirements are being able to run and verify input files and having a professional attitude, so if you're interested, please reach out to myself or feos, or just talk about your interest publicly and someone will pick it up and bring it to us.
That being said, of course, we would love to have more staff in general. With the manifesto thread, and yes I am going to link to it every time I mention it thank you very much, it's clear that while we can change a bunch of systems to make things work with our current staff, having more staff is objectively still a great idea. Changing the machine can only do so much when we don't have enough minds to properly interface with it. Rest assured, though, that once we perfect the mind/machine interface, we're hard pivoting to copters and immediately aiming for Cloudbase Academy. I'm going to let you all in on a little secret: Being staff isn't hard! I've gotten the feeling over the years that people are a little afraid of becoming staff due to what they perceive as a lot of hard work. The reality is that it's easy work! Of course, I can't say it isn't a lot of work because the manifesto exists and outright says there's a lot of work, but the more people that sign on to help us, the less work it is for everyone involved. In particular, we are (and have always been) in desperate need of Publishers. While encoding to site standards sounds complicated, we've effectively automated the publication process to a point where even complete newbies like myself can do it, so there really isn't a barrier to entry outside of being able to spare some PC usage and hard drive space. If you're interested in encoding for us, even if you don't currently know how to do it, please reach out to fsvgm777, or do the time-honored tradition of randomly bringing it up on Discord and we'll see it.
Three years ago, we completely revamped our old tier system. Instead of the old system of Vault for boring any% and 100% movies and Moons for everything deemed entertaining enough, we redefined Vault to become standard publications, where all "standard" categories go, and we redefined Moons into Alternative, which was for all non-standard categories that were deemed entertaining enough for publication. This, we thought, would remove the old entertainment bias from the site, since entertainment was no longer a factor for about 90% of the movies coming in. It did remove a lot of the bias, yes, but not as much as we thought. Perfectly good movies were still being rejected from Alternative. In response to that, we drafted and partially implemented Playground, a system designed to catch and showcase Alternative movies that slipped through the cracks due to low entertainment, lack of audience interest, or being a rule-breaking category to begin with. That way, we wouldn't have to discourage people from creating tech demos, things like "fastest crash" or "fastest game over" runs, as we could still put them on the site in some way. To be blunt, Playground didn't really work. We wanted to encourage creativity in TASing by giving creators room to do whatever they wanted, but what we ended up doing was inadvertently bringing back the entertainment bias and the old Vault/Moons divide. Entertaining non-standard runs were still published to Alternative, of course, but non-entertaining runs were just given a submission status and put into a different subforum. It took until last month, two and a half years after Playground was drafted, for us to show those runs on game pages. We completely dropped the ball on it. Part of that I think was due to lack of interest across... Everyone on the site, really. People weren't really interested in making runs specifically for PG, and as a result the staff weren't thinking much about it. We had plans and ambitions of course, but for the most part the runs that ended up there were just Alternative runs that didn't quite make the entertainment barrier, and the site infrastructure that would've needed to be added was just going to push dev work away from more critical site features and fixes. The manifesto got us talking about it, and we came to a fun conclusion: We should have talked about it WAY sooner. The answer to every perceived problem we had with PG was staring us in the face since the beginning, and we all somehow overlooked it: Why not just publish everything? It sounds insane, especially given my stats from earlier, so let me explain. The overarching problem a lot of people had with PG was that it didn't do a good job at showcasing runs on the site. We had the status, which was always meant to be a temporary implementation, but without a clear direction it ended up being permanent. Proper showcasing would involve PG runs being archived to the same degree as any other run. Easily accessible, searchable, manageable, award-eligible, able to be flipped to Alternative or even Standard if rules changed... We were hyperfocused on the idea that this needed to be a separate system, because they weren't meant to be publications, and that stopped us from realizing that literally everything we want is already in the publication system. We could have just done this with Alternative from the beginning. Instead of continuing to divide unique branches by entertainment, we could have just had all of them from the beginning without needing to do much different. After all, a lot of these unique branches still aim to finish a particular goal in the fastest possible time, right? While the actual goals may be more subjective than any% and 100%, there is still the objective underlying goal of "whatever you're doing, do it as fast as possible", and there really shouldn't be any barriers for that. 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. Naturally, this change leaves a couple roadblocks that needed to be discussed. First, notice that I said many speed-based branches, as opposed to all. This means there's still a degree of quality control on what is now accepted. While we will be much more lenient than before, there's still a difference between making a TAS of a niche challenge you've always wanted to see done and making a TAS where you put nine pieces of chewed up gum on your face and sing the "I'm Just Me" song and hop around on one foot. In other words, don't try and game the system by making up hyperspecific new branches to try and guarantee a publication. Count Longardeaux would not stand for that. Second, PG accounts for rule-breaking runs, so what happens to those? The simple answer is that... Well, we still have PG, don't we? We have a system that labels runs and places them on game pages, so we can still use that for runs that still don't end up making it to Alternative for technical reasons. For now, this will also include individual level (or IL) runs: We want to officially support these in some way, but they explicitly require new site infrastructure and a clear vision of implementation, and that will take some time. Third, I need to briefly discuss playarounds. Playarounds will not be affected by this expansion, as they are not speed-based runs. The entire concept of a playaround would be made redundant if we were to stop judging them on their entertainment level, so they must still be deemed entertaining by our audience to be accepted. Finally, and most importantly, encodes. This was the biggest PG roadblock for me, the fact that opening a new category that allowed effectively any reasonably optimized TAS of any kind to be submitted and showcased meant that there needed to be a way to control the potential impact on the publishing team. The solution here is as simple as it is groundbreaking for us: Publication encodes will not be immediately required. This means we can still publish the runs on TASVideos itself, giving them publication entries and allowing for all of the fun features attached, but we don't increase the load on the publication team by outright requiring them to encode every new Alternative run. Standard runs are prioritized as they are the vast majority of our submissions and publications, so there may be times where the publishing team is unable to spare the time for an official Alternative encode. In these cases, published Alternative runs will have temporary encodes attached so that they are still easily watchable. An official encode can still be made at any time. Because I feel as though that was a lot of explanation, and because I like summarizing, here's a brief summary of how the new system works by class:
  • Standard is staying the same, containing common objective branches such as any% and 100%. Runs will still be published and officially encoded as normal.
  • Alternative is now accepting any and all speed-based branches that aren't standard publications. Outside of playaround runs, entertainment is no longer considered a barrier to publication. Runs will receive publication entries, but official encodes may be deferred.
  • Playground will still catch all quality runs that are currently considered unsuitable for Alternative, usually for technical reasons. Runs will not be published, but they will be listed on game pages.
  • Events will...
Oh, right. I should talk about that last one, shouldn't I?
If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I can't believe the rule of three is still in effect for this bit, you've most likely seen Triforce% sitting at the very top, and also by "recently" I mean "two years, it's been two years, oh my god it's been two years". It has taken us quite a long time and more than a few conversations across both the community at large and internally as staff, but we've finally come up with a solution for it, and you're not gonna believe what it is. That's right: For the immediate second time in this post, we realized that we were hyperfocusing on implementing a new solution when we could have easily used what we currently have. We have implemented a new Events class that will contain submissions that were created for live events such as GDQ. You can probably tell this revelation came hot on the heels of Playground, as it is literally the exact same solution: We wanted live event runs to be treated the same as any other publication while not technically being official publications, and because of that we consistently overlooked the fact that we could have just published them anyway under different rules. Now, that being said, this is admittedly not a perfect solution, in that it's not quite everything we wanted or promised, but the important thing is that it's both something we can do immediately while also being big enough of a step forward to not feel like a half-measure. We made that mistake before with PG, and I'd like to avoid repeating that mistake in the future. Since Events will be using the standard submission system, a few rules will need to be followed:
  • Event runs are technical showcases or transformative displays of published runs that would otherwise be unpublishable as they are.
  • Event runs can be submitted by anyone, but all parties involved with the presentation must be properly attributed and any objections raised at any time must be taken into account.
  • Events that showcase multiple runs must be split by run and submitted individually.
  • Videos of the event must be provided.
  • If a proper input file cannot be provided for technical reasons, a dummy input file must be provided that matches the game and console.
  • The event itself must have some degree of common sense notability.
For that first point, we are mainly looking to prevent publication redundancy. Published runs are often shown at live events as console verification demonstrations or for live commentary. In cases like these, since we already have flags for console verification and commentary, we would prefer to just add those flags to the current publications instead of going through the process of creating an effective duplicate Event entry. However, if a published run was shown in a transformative or unique way that we don't already account for, that would definitely warrant a separate Event class publication. That being said, we could definitely add an Event flag on top of the commentary/verification flags, just so all published runs shown at events can be easily categorized. For the second point, the main thing we're asking here is due diligence. Due to things like technical aspects and language barriers, it's not realistic for us to restrict event submissions to only those who are directly involved, so we will allow event submissions from anyone. Still, submitters must attempt to seek permission from those who are involved, must properly attribute everyone involved, and should not attempt to take credit if they are not directly involved themselves. The third point is just a site limitation for now, and is one of the reasons I said this wasn't a perfect solution: We currently can't catalog multiple games to a submission. Our current multi-game publications use a single game entry that covers all of the games simultaneously. If we were to accept full events that use multiple games, each event would need to have its own singular game entry, and that both adds redundancy and complicates organization. Separating multi-game events means we can properly catalog each game, allowing event runs to show up in their respective game's entry. The fourth point is a given, so to explain the fifth point: In cases where an event run's actual input file was strictly created for the event and cannot be reproduced outside of that environment, such as runs that rely on multiple pieces of hardware or runs that rely on live human input, a dummy input file must be provided as a way of complying with the submission system. This input file must match the game and console, but does not have to accurately reflect what was shown in the video, as this input file will not be judged. Finally, to explain "common sense notability": This is just a fancy way of saying "don't try and game the system by inventing events". TASing is a niche hobby, and events that showcase it are even more niche in turn. Because of this, requiring a certain objective level of notability would be wrong of us to do. However, it's still reasonable for us to have a small foundation based off of common sense, where we can "reject" events that were clearly made for the sole purpose of exploiting what looks like a loophole. We're still figuring out the logistics of showcasing events that do not contain any runs, such as talks or panels, but we intend to have a spot for those as well. Feel free to share ideas on how we can handle these!
Long as this update post already is, there is one last thing I need to talk about for my own sake, and I apologize in advance for ending this post on a down note. For the past year or so, I've been unable to keep up with the site as much as I'd like to, as I've had to spend more and more time taking care of a family member. The situation has worsened significantly over the past few months, often leaving me completely drained of energy and unable to put anything towards TASVideos, and as such I'd like to apologize for my recent long term absence as well as continuing to have a reduced presence on the site for the foreseeable future. I say this mainly in regards to all of the promises I've made and projects I've started over the past year that I haven't been around to progress or keep. My time away from the site has caused me to forget most of them in some form, whether it's forgetting what still needs to be done or completely forgetting what they are in the first place. Now, I still intend to keep those promises and finish those projects, but I do have to shamefully admit they will take time and motivation that I do not always, or even often, have. If I can defer them to other staff members, I will, but anything that directly involves me is likely going to have to wait a bit longer. I know I was spearheading wiki reorganization, and I know I was supposed to help out with CelesteTAS support and verification, but past that I can't bring anything to mind, so please feel free to message me reminders and/or resurrect one of my hundreds of unfinished discussion/proposal threads in order to get the balls rolling again on them. Other staff are also available to talk to if I'm not around, too, but given that I managed to find the time and energy to write this entire post, I'd like to think I should be around more often than before. In short, I'm not going anywhere. Eternity lies ahead of me, and I haven't drunk my fill.
Hopefully there won't be another full year before the next progress report. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions, or reach out on Discord for faster and much less easily findable answers!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I did some thread shuffling and merging to make this a more visible place to suggest movies for warnings. Carry on with helping to make the site more accessible for our community c:
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Link to video EDIT: replaced with an unrestricted video ._.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
KingKappa wrote:
Does this mean the Japanese version is not accepted for TASes, or is it because it hasn’t been used in a submitted TAS yet?
It's the latter. Game information, including specific versions, isn't required for submissions, that's something we catalog ourselves when relevant submissions come in. Actually, we get asked this a lot, so I might as well ask a question in turn: Is there a way we can communicate this better to new submitters? I added a few lines to our submission instructions page but if there's anything else we can do to clarify it then I'd be happy to make the changes.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Wait, we need to talk about playarounds
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I know I said in the OP that I wasn't really looking to discuss specifics, but I had a thought earlier and I think it needs to be addressed: Playarounds. In theory, without any entertainment requirements whatsoever, every single publishable game could have a playaround run. While I don't usually like saying "there's a chance we could get flooded so let's nip it in the bud early", I'm wondering if it's actually viable to remove what is essentially the sole factor of curation on the playaround branch, i.e runs that are inherently created to be pure entertainment showcases. Is this actually going to be a problem for us? Are we actually going to have people try and sneak Desert Bus playarounds through? Is it still worth curating things in that regard or would that defeat the purpose of the proposal? How would playarounds be obsoleted? Would it even be worth doing so? I'm honestly on the fence about all of this, since there isn't really a clean way of handling it. Removing playaround curation kinda ruins the point of the branch, as theoretically any run of any game can be published regardless of entertainment, but keeping curation ruins the point of the proposal, as we would still be judging runs on entertainment. That being said, however, I think a middle ground approach works well: I don't think we can completely remove playaround curation, but we don't have to keep the standards as high as they are currently, i.e caring less about obsoletions and comparisons. For example, I wouldn't see an issue with un-obsoleting Pokemon "Pi day" and having it alongside Pokemon "actually 5 other games", as even though they use the same setup method, they are completely different approaches to the playaround itself, but I'd be more hesitant with a theoretical third branch of something like "Tau day" or "actually 5 different other games". In other words, we don't have to limit playarounds to a single branch per game, but we'd still make sure they're all sufficiently different enough from each other. Obsoletions can still happen if two playarounds are similar enough to be compared, but we would no longer compare ALL of a game's playarounds to each other and leave just one published. As for "any game could have a playaround now", I don't really think there's a middle ground approach. For our sanity, I think we need to keep some form of entertainment curation there, because as I mentioned earlier the entire point of the playaround branch is ruined if it isn't curated that way. If our objective is to encourage creativity, telling people they no longer need to be creative in playarounds is absolutely the wrong way of going about it. Technically, any game COULD still have a playaround, there's still just a bar to reach. I wouldn't mind if we as a community could lower that bar a bit, of course, but I think it should still be there in order for playarounds to mean something. Does this actually work, though? Is there a better compromise solution, or should we just not try to compromise at all here?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I'm guessing all of the RNG is in the minigames (at least the ones that can be cleared early), since I didn't really see any other instances across the entire run where better randomness could have saved time at all. Even then, it doesn't feel like there would be a lot left to save over what's already here, and I'd imagine the effort needed to really check that would be too much to ask of anyone, let alone someone who's still learning. Anyway, this was very well done, especially for a first TAS! It might not be the most complex game in the world but you still managed to do a lot with it, including something I've never seen done in a TAS before: Making Will Ferrell moonwalk in and out of traffic.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
scrimpeh wrote:
This is actually a pretty good TAS, I suppose.
IIIIIIIIII SUPPOSE! HEY! I was actually thinking about going back and redoing this run, inspired by the minimum presses Rhythm Heaven submissions. Pretty much the entire back half of the run was done in a rush the week before April Fools Day so there are parts that aren't as good as I could make them, and a lot of the earlier songs could use some more work, but as a megafan of the series I'd love to see more representation for it on the site.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
I'd like to present our first of likely many major proposals, based on ikuyo's "TASVideos must die" manifesto. If you haven't read that thread yet, please do so!
Three years ago, we held a long discussion about our old Vault system, where we had originally intended to expand it past any% and 100% runs, but we ended up completely revamping the old tiered system of publications as a result. One of the major things that prompted the tier revamp was the staff, particularly the Judges, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the process of judging a run's entertainment value. Prior to the revamp, we had effectively divided the entire site into "runs deemed worth watching" and "runs nobody should watch because they're boring", which by itself wasn't a good look, but combined with the fact that it complicated judging, especially for runs that received little to no feedback to begin with, it meant we could only ever come off as a bunch of elitists that judged peoples' efforts based on nothing more than the games they chose, and we would punish them for it. This sentiment was growing across the community as well: People didn't really want there to be a clear entertainment divide anymore. Not long after the tier revamp, we started drafting what would become known as Playground, which aimed to catch any and every quality run that didn't qualify under the new Standard/Alternative system. If a run didn't qualify as a Standard category, and wasn't deemed entertaining enough to become an Alternative category, it would instead go to Playground, where it would still have a notable place on the site, but it wouldn't undergo the usual publication process. Now, tell me if that system sounds familiar. If you're thinking "Wait, didn't you all just re-introduce the entertainment divide?", you're correct! We absolutely hecked it! We were so cauight up in the idea of PG needing to be its own thing that we completely overlooked the fact that all we really did was shift the goalposts again, I believe. Entertainment used to determine if the run was published at all, then it was used to determine whether your run was categorized as watchable or not, and now it's still used to determine whether or not your creativity is watchable or not. Sure, we made improvements to the older systems, but they're clearly not working, as there have still been problems with even the current system. So how do we fix that, exactly? The answer is simple: Instead of shifting the goalposts, we take them away entirely. We're proposing the elimination of entertainment as a judgement metric by combining Playground into Alternative. A brief explanation for how we want this to work: Any run that is currently in Playground or that could go to Playground, i.e a wide majority of non-standard categories, would instead be published to Alternative regardless of audience feedback or perceived entertainment level. There are still some types of runs that would remain in the current Playground, mainly individual level (IL) runs and runs that we cannot sync and thus cannot publish, but in the future we will eventually be able to account for those runs on the site in some way. In other words, there will still be some curation, but only on technical levels and only out of current necessity. Now, if you've read ikuyo's thread, you might be wondering how publishing more runs is going to help us keep up with the growing submission influx. Judging is definitely going to be easier, as we no longer need to wait for feedback that might never come and determine whether or not it's "good enough", but the publishing team is going to have to keep up with more runs. We have a solution for that as well, and it might sound a little insane given our 20 year history: Deferring encodes. That is, runs will still get a publication entry, but they may not immediately get an official encode on the YouTube channel. There will most likely be a temporary encode from the author or another user in its place until the publication/encoding team is able to get around to creating an official one. This likely won't be noticeable in lower traffic times, as all accepted runs will be getting encoded and published as normal. In high traffic times, this means the Publishers will simply shift focus to standard categories, as they're much more frequently submitted, but that focus will not prevent any Alternative run from being published and showcased on the site itself. One hidden, but INCREDIBLY MAJOR benefit to adopting this system is that we barely have to add any new site infrastructure for it. Playground implementation was scarce for as long as it was because we never had a concrete, agreed-upon plan for how to implement it. Combining it with Alternative, however, means that we can just use the current publication system, which already has pretty much everything anyone could want out of a showcase system. One thing we would definitely add though is a couple of front page modules dedicated to the expanded Alternative class: We're thinking of having the most recently published Alt runs and a set of random runs, much in the same way we have a box for random Star movies.
All that being said, however, we want to know what you think about this proposal. Does it work as is? Does anything need to be changed? Are there any further suggestions on what we can do or how we can organize things? For a quick summary/recap:
  • Entertainment will no longer be used as a judgement metric across the entire site
  • Current and future Playground runs and branches will be merged into Alternative
  • The combined category will continue to be known as Alternative
  • Playground will still exist as a way to catch runs that still do not qualify, though this will be for technical reasons
  • Alternative runs may not immediately receive encodes, but they will be published nonetheless, likely with temp encodes
One thing I'd like to ask is to not discuss what categories go where, yet, i.e questions like "How are you going to handle ILs?". That is absolutely a discussion we will have in the future (especially ILs, I really want ILs, I really want Trackmania ILs please holy hell watch some Trackmania TASes if you haven't already they are incredible), but for now I'd like to specifically keep this discussion focused on the actual merging of Playground into Alternative. There will be other plans, other proposals, other things we're going to do, but right now this is not only a pretty big oversight that needs fixing, but an oversight that we can fix pretty much the moment it's agreed upon. I haven't had a lot of free time lately (and I'm deeply sorry about that), but I'll try and check in on this thread as often as I can. Other staff will definitely be around, though.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Thank you so much for posting this. In all honesty, we've needed to have this discussion as a site for a while. I may not be able to be as active as I used to be given how my personal life is going, but I'll do everything in my power to be around for this going forward.
ikuyo wrote:
As such, this is my statement: * I believe Tool Assisted Superplays, Tool Assisted Speedruns, Tool Assisted Demonstrations and other related forms to be creative work of different kinds with unique and different goals. They turn the interactivity element of video games as a medium and build a new medium on top.
Absolutely agreed. A lot of the reason that feos and I in particular worked to get Playground drafted and implemented was to be able to help showcase... Quite literally, anything that comes to us. I'm of the belief that no category is pointless, no TAS is a waste of time, and that there will always be someone interested in the product. It doesn't even have to be a final product! Even a WIP can inspire someone to work!
ikuyo wrote:
* I believe TAS work is worthy of celebration, archival, preservation, curation, and discussion. * I believe TASVideos as a community should strive to archive TAS work and celebrate its history, development and the communities' accomplishments.
100%, and this has always been my goal for TASVideos, even before I became an admin. You mentioned earlier that the scene is different now, and that it took us way too long to adapt, and that's the absolute truth. I wish we could have done something sooner, but... Without getting into detail, there was a major factor holding us back that is no longer around to do so. That's why it took us until 2022 to revamp the site and start adapting to the modern world of speedrunning. Just... We're not quite there yet. Not for lack of trying, but I think we could be doing better with that. We would need a more solid direction and a lot of community support, though.
ikuyo wrote:
* I believe TASVideos should offer an introduction to TASing as a whole, as well as resources for those interested to both gain insight on what the craft is and how it is performed. I believe this to be fundamental for the future of the craft.
Weirdly... I think this is one of the most difficult things on the list. Of course, I want the same thing, and I agree it's absolutely vital, but from experience I know that TASing is hard to teach, while paradoxically being easy to learn. I think there's just this mentality among newer TASers that what we do is a lot harder than it actually is. I'm sure a lot of that mentality comes from our tech standards, but I think the entertainment factor has also contributed to it in a major way. Ultimately, the most popular runs are the ones that need the most technical knowledge to be able to do. For one thing, TASBot popularized ACE by showcasing bigger and even more complex runs every GDQ, and I think a lot of people just assume that's what all TASing is by default, but even highly regarded non-ACE runs have such insane levels of technicality to them. Super Mario World and all the Sonic games on Genesis having entire suites of Lua scripts, Pokemon games being dissected and practically automated through botting, SM64 gaining more and more new tools outside of the emulator... I'll be honest, if I hadn't gotten into TASing early, there's a very good chance I'd think it was too difficult to get into. I'd like to just take this line and stress that I'm not blaming any of those things for implying that TASing is harder than it actually is. Especially for TASBot, they've all been exceptional promotion for the hobby and have pretty much only done good. If anything, I think TASVideos not knowing how to teach TASing is more to "blame" than anything else. The reality is, you don't need the fancy tools like Lua scripting and disassembly. You don't even really need RAM watch. Hell, I've seen deeply optimized TASes done without even using frame advance or slowdown, just rerecords. The beauty of TASing is that every TASer finds what works for them and they can excel in it. And yet, the problem is that you can't teach a person how to do something themselves. I've been asked where to begin with TASing and my answer has always been to just mess around, free of any constraints, but that's ultimately the most dismissive answer that can be given even though it's correct. We have resources that explain the tools, but we don't have anything that really explains the mindset of TASing, which is by far the most important part. I've tried writing about that before and it never comes out right. This has been a problem for a while. I really want to see it fixed, I just need ideas.
ikuyo wrote:
* I believe TASVideos can and should connect different TASing communities together.
Once again, this has been a goal of mine for TASVideos. As much as I dislike Discordification breaking up and sheltering communities, it would be wrong of me to just ignore it and continue trying to treat TASVideos as THE ONLY place for TASing. I'm pretty sure there are multiple communities spawned from TASVideos that have grown bigger than TASVideos, and we could be doing better about guiding people over to them. I've said it before, but what I want TASVideos to be is...
  1. Above all else, an archive and showcase of TASes and TASing resources, and a place where creators are comfortable letting us do so
  2. A hub or jumping off point for people to find and join individual game communities if they so wish
  3. A safe and welcoming community in and of itself for TASers, speedrunners, fans of TASing and speedrunning, and members the ROM/emulation scene in general
We're getting there, but it's very clear we still have a long way to go, even just to fix the lingering negative perception we have amongst the overall speedrunning community.
ikuyo wrote:
* And most important to this discussion, I believe all of these goals, most of them concordant with the site's original mission, can be best accomplished without the submission and publication system currently in place. As such, I believe TASVideos should no longer have its submission or publication process.
I... think it's finally time for me to talk about that. This is something I've been very quietly supporting and occasionally pushing for in private channels, so I've got a lot to say about it. I'll start here. All emphasis is mine:
ikuyo wrote:
As the site breaks off the binds it was born with, it finds itself more and more accepting of work. After all, that is what we want. But as we expand the rulesets and make our best effort to engage with more and more work, we find the simple truth that creativity is not to be bound. Longer and longer, as a judge, the rules feel less like what we work with and more what we work around, or, in increasingly more often cases, what we have to fight against. As the artform evolves, specializes and expands, our rulesets and guidelines feel ever less useful, ever more constraining, ever more obsolete. And we know this. Judges have never had to discuss more rulesets and changes than now. And as you would expect, different staff members have different views on what those guidelines should be, which is completely ok but also means arriving at consensus can take very long. Furthermore, thanks to the work we have already done, we have naturally been rewarded with exactly what we wanted: more and more submissions. 2023 was the single largest year in TASVideos history measured by number of submissions. 2024 so far is on pace to surpass it. The higher load on work, even if it wasn't work that particularly challenges the boundaries of our rules, has been welcome by a relatively small staff of volunteers, all of us just doing our best to help while dealing with jobs and lives and other interests. Absences are felt, burnout can be very real. We tried to enforce systems to keep us on track and contributing actively and it only made things worse.
With all that we've done lately, there's no way our current system is going to be sustainable long term. I'd even argue it hasn't been sustainable for a couple years now, we've just had an absolutely incredible staff team that have all been working overtime to keep everything afloat. It's only going to get harder to stay above water as we keep going with rule revamps and more allowances, too. Just to remind everyone, our first submission record was set the year that submissions were opened, back in 2004. We had over 500 submissions that year, and up until recently it was the only time we had broken 500. The year we switched to the new site, 2022, we immediately shattered that record by nearly 100 submissions, breaking 600 for the first time. In 2023, we obliterated THAT record by almost 250 submissions. We got close to 900 submissions last year. Thankfully, submission volume has slowed down in 2024, but we're still far above our historical average. If we assume 2022's total of 639 submissions to be a low average going forward, then that average still outweighs every single year of the old site's operation, and the more we make things accessible, the higher that average is going to get from year to year. We're not going to be able to keep up with that. We already can't. TASVideos is, and most likely always will be, nonprofit. This is a hobby that we all do in our free time. Everyone has lives outside of the site. Hell, I'm writing this at 3AM because it's the only time I really have to myself lately. I've been increasingly tied up in my personal life over the past year or so, and the amount of stress I've felt from being one of the top representatives of the site while knowing I don't have the free time to be around as much as I think I should be has been immensely difficult to deal with. ...And that's just me. We have a decent number of staff members that also have their own personal lives to take care of. Paying jobs, families to take care of, self-care and other hobbies, health issues at times... Oh, and on top of that, we've historically always been understaffed, particularly in publishing. We've even lessened the requirements to become staff and we still don't see people applying. Pretty much all of the recent appointees have been people we've directly reached out to. For the site to be sustainable as it currently is, I honestly think we need double the Judges and at least three times the Publishers we have now. We currently have three Admins just to make sure that there isn't a single point of failure like there used to be, and... Well, look at my signature at the time I'm posting this, or better yet, look two paragraphs up. That being said... Hiring enough staff to be sustainable isn't always going to work, because even with enough staff to handle everything right now, we're still growing. Eventually, we're going to reach a point where we can't have enough staff to handle things with our current standards. This is because it isn't just submission volume that's increasing, it's also publication volume. We're getting more submissions and we're also publishing more of what we get. Just for some statistics:
  • In 2023, we received 885 submissions, and published 712 of them, for an 80% publication rate. It was had 74% in 2022, 70% in 2021, 70% again in 2020, and 60% in 2019.
  • We published more movies in 2023 than we did in 2019, 2020, and 2021... Combined. 701 total in those three years, 11 shy of 2023 by itself.
  • We had more publications in 2023 than we had submissions in any other year.
Samsara wrote:
Oh, and on top of that, we've historically always been understaffed, particularly in publishing.
We had roughly 10 active Judges and 4 active Publishers in 2023. 10 Judges splitting up 885 submissions, 4 Publishers splitting up 712 publications. 10 Judges scrutinizing everything that comes in to see if it's up to our optimization standards, tech standards, and current movie rules, and 4 Publishers processing the 80% of acceptances up to our current encoding standards. The thing is, Judging and Publishing aren't necessarily difficult. I've done both, and I'm a complete heckin' idiot and frickin' moron! The problem is that they can be very time-consuming. A Judge or Publisher being inactive already means that everyone else has to work more, but even active ones can get hard stuck on complicated submissions, requiring other people to step in and away from what they're working on, slowing down multiple people with technically 0 loss in actual staff activity. We've genuinely had submissions that no staff could handle, leading to us needing to reach out to the community for help. Not every run is over a month long like Desert Bus or a sync nightmare like (INSERT HIGH PROFILE GAMECUBE GAME HERE), obviously, but the number of runs like that coming in is increasing over time as we refine our rules and start accepting more and more complicated systems as they become available to us. For example, Flash has been a pretty popular platform as of late, which is lovely! It also means that our majority Windows-using staff all need to set up Linux VMs in order to process those libTAS submissions, and not all of us are able to do that, meaning more work goes to the people who can. So... Where does that leave me? It leaves me precisely... here:
ikuyo wrote:
Now, if you ask me "What should TASVideos look like if it were to abandon its submission pipeline and rules" the answer is... I don't know. I have some ideas, for sure. I think archival of movie files and knowledge bases for both the general TASing process and specific games would definitely be part of that, and these elements already exist in the currently standing TASVideos site. But I can't say for certain, and even if I did, I don't think figuring such a thing out should be my work alone. More than ever, we need people, and people are there. We ought to listen to you, to what you think the best way to achieve the site's goals is, and how we can work towards that goal.
I've spent the last four years helping TASVideos to get to the point it's currently at, both in terms of spearheading major changes to submissions and encouraging discussions about various other aspects of the site. Everything I've done here has been with the intent of helping the site progress. I don't think I've completely succeeded, but I'm damn proud of the work I've done and even prouder of what the site has become thanks in part to my work. This, above all else, is going to be the hardest discussion the site has ever had. I, too, have no idea how to proceed from here, and I feel we're a very long way away from even starting to reach that point. TASVideos needs to change to be sustainable, but the way it needs to change involves fundamentally changing the site in a way that not everybody is going to be able to agree on. As easy as it may sound for us to drop our standards and make it easier on the staff, inevitably there's going to be culture shock as a result. Not just from us, but from the community at large. The site as a whole will have to adapt to a brand new way of doing things. We have to shift away from core principles we've all seen and followed religiously since the beginning, core principles that were never and should never have been challenged before... but they're core principles that were made for a smaller, more niche TASVideos. That's not us anymore, and that's definitely not what we're going to be with the direction we're heading. In theory, the easiest short term bandage is appointing more Judges and Publishers, but that requires people to be interested in stepping up, and given this entire thread is about the site's increasingly unsustainable workload... I don't exactly see anyone volunteering their time right now ._. I guess the best question to ask everyone right now is what can we do to change that? What things can we change, or what possible misconceptions can we clear up, that would make people more likely to volunteer to help us? Is it going to take that large, sweeping reform we'll eventually need, or is there something smaller we can do in the meantime? I'll give it some thought, myself, but the less brainpower that I use outside of my priority of taking care of my family, the better. As long as I'm above ground, though, I'm going to do everything I can to ensure TASVideos lives. It's a damn good thing the problem is "oh no, we're getting too big" instead of the opposite, which could have easily been the direction we went without everything we've done so far. This ain't RHDN, we're not giving up on this.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Very happy to see not only another SMT submission in general, but another SNES-era SMT submission with an incomprehensible but easy to perform glitched route. Nicely done!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
It's been almost a year since that last post and I'm proud to report that absolutely no progress has been made! Not for lack of trying, though, which is kind of the main problem. I feel like every single time I work on it, I stumble across some insane new aspect of these glitches that complicate the project further and further. Shortly after that last post, I accidentally figured out that teleportation was possible: Link to video This, naturally, gets thrown onto the pile of things that desperately need to be investigated further, right on top of the inventory editing part of the glitch that I've already been desperately investigating. By the way, that just got more complicated too: Link to video After some very non-mentally draining months of not working on this, I loaded it up today and not even 30 minutes later I accidentally stumbled across all of that nonsense. If you can somehow stomach looking at a badly coded block of text for 2 minutes, you'll see that the character inventories are being edited during the battle itself, which isn't something I've seen until now. Granted, I've also never seen 200 glitched party members that all need to attack, but I think that's somehow beside the point. I didn't even notice the in-battle inventory editing until I was recording the video, I just thought all of the attack selections were funny, and of course now that I've noticed it, it also gets to be added to the pile. I've been quietly feeling this for a while (unless you're someone I talk to regularly, in which case I have been extremely vocal about this), but I think this project might be completely beyond my skill level. An optimized TAS of the RTA record route would be fairly quick to knock out, but I feel like doing that would be nothing but wasted potential. It'd still be a glitchy 12-13 minute nightmare or something to that effect, but it'd be leaving so many alternate possibilities on the table as a result, and despite having hurled over 160000 rerecords at them (on just this file, easily 200k+ in total), I have yet to even disprove a single one. In fact, with teleportation and in-battle inventory editing, I've done nothing but add further possibilities and methods of achieving them. At this point, I think it's safe to say that I'm going to need help. I'm not exactly great at projects where I don't have any backup whatsoever, so continuing to slam my head against the wall here is going to ensure that all of that potential remains wasted. I'm going to promise something I'll never deliver, like usual start documenting everything that's been found and ideas I've thought up so far in hopes that the info can be useful to someone with the technical skill required to actually bring a solid TAS to light.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
KusogeMan wrote:
My concern is labeling what is not the fastest version of a run as the fastest version of a run, so i'll only comment the specific case if I see something that is confusing in the labeling.
We went ahead and just cleared the Fastest Completion flag from every movie because of this comment - With everything we've been doing to increase the scope of what's accepted, it was getting harder and harder to apply the flag consistently and accurately, especially in cases like these where we can have two entirely separate and equally valid fastest completion runs. Apart from that, if there's any confusion going forward, let us know and we'll fix it. It's been more than a few days without anything drastic happening, so I'm going to go ahead and push the separation policy through. To recap: All fighting game runs that begin from SRAM to use unlockable characters are to be published separately from fresh file runs that use only base characters. This is to ensure consistency with our universal policy of never having SRAM-anchored movies compete with fresh file movies. If a fresh file character is fastest completion, there will not be a separate published branch for a slower unlockable character. In the future, once we have more resources and willing volunteers, we may move to allowing any character to have a published run, but for now we can't afford the potential onslaught of allowing dozens of publications for a single game.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
We're going to be moving forward with the separation policy that the majority of the community voted for, but to everyone who voted against it or might still be on the fence, I'd just like to pose these questions again before we do so:
Samsara wrote:
Is there a breaking point? Is there something we are doing or have talked about doing that actually goes too far? Are we going to actively lose TASers and/or runs by sticking to separation?
I'll give it a few days before we go ahead and make it official, assuming nothing drastic comes up during that time.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
KusogeMan wrote:
Samsara, Coolhandmike do not TAS fighting games
#5027: Samsara's N64 Fighters Destiny in 01:44.43 #8426: CoolHandMike's Arcade Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters "Rescue Roll!, 2 players" in 03:09.36 #8848: CoolHandMike's Arcade Metamoqester "2 players" in 03:31.54 ...That being said, I don't even understand why this is an argument in the first place. I could be wrong, but I feel like it's meant to be an accusation of the community having a bias against fighting games because most people don't TAS them, but I think it's actually proving the opposite, in that the outliers are pushing for something that only benefits fighting games despite the fact that the majority of the community doesn't TAS them. TASVideos is a general purpose site, and we're running it that way because for our purposes it's the neatest, most efficient, and easiest way to do it for the most people involved. It's easier for staff to manage, it's easier for the current community to support, and it's easier for brand new members to understand and learn how to contribute to. As far as I'm concerned, the less opportunities there are for people to misinterpret our current general purpose ruleset, the better, and allowing some sort of special clause for a certain genre only is going to be one of those things that gets misinterpreted as one of the general purpose rules we've been promoting for years now. We've already had misinterpretations of the rules lead to massive public incidents before, and I can easily see it happening again here. I've more or less been in charge of the rules for a few years now. When I rewrote them, my philosophy at the time was to remove as much extraneous information as possible. The old rules prior to the rewrite had subcategories and examples for all of these weird little edge cases that may or may not have actually existed on the site, and most of them were just unnecessary, confusing, and ultimately served to do nothing more than restrict content in advance. That's what the "SRAM obsoletion for fighting games only" proposal feels like to me. It feels unnecessary, in that I can't see any particular benefit to us implementing it. It feels confusing, in that I feel it will only lead to people assuming we'd allow it for all genres and not just fighting games. Lastly, it ultimately serves to do nothing more than restrict content in advance, because that's quite literally what the proposal is: It's telling people that they're not allowed to TAS fighting games in a certain way. If there's a super overpowered unlockable character that can end rounds seconds faster than any other, that has to be the character you use, no questions asked, deal with it. Let me put that a different way. This would literally be restricting the only thing we have universally allowed since the site's inception: Clean save file speedruns from power-on. At best, I think that wildly goes against the current principles of the site and the direction we're taking it in, both as staff and as a community. At worst, it sets a precedent so dangerous that the entire site could fall into disrepair if we fail to implement it properly, and even if we do implement it properly, there's a good chance that people will miss it or misinterpret it anyway. Even if everyone gets it and understands it and accepts it, who's to say that another discussion like this won't happen again in the future with a different genre of game? What if the RPG TASing community wants their baseline runs to all be New Game+? All they'd have to do is point to fighting games and we wouldn't have an argument against it, because we've already allowed it in that one case so it wouldn't be reasonable to tell anyone else who wants it for their communities to hit the road. After years of me refusing to let the rules get more complicated and opening up so many discussion threads for us to be able to allow more on the site, I can't in good conscience sign off on a rule like this that actively goes against everything I've fought for. It's a rules complication and a special case, like the myriad flaws I found in the old rules. It's content restriction, like what I've fought against through threads like the one we're posting in right now. It doesn't match the wishes of the majority of the community, and I promised TASVideos that no major changes would go through without community support. At the end of the day, the way TASVideos is right now just can't support this. There's always a possibility that we shift to a different system down the line where genre-specific rules or even game-specific rules make more sense for us, but I don't see that happening any time soon just from pure logistics. It'd be nice, I'd even support that kind of shift in the future, but we'd need a lot more support and direct help for it to be feasible.
I guess one last quick point: I haven't really been active in this thread due to some major personal issues taking the majority of my day-to-day energy, but I want to stress something important for me. The reason I said I was on the fence is because I think both sides are valid, here. Both sides make sense to me from their individual perspectives and both sides have their pros and cons. Unfortunately, that means no matter what we do, it can't be done perfectly clean, and I'll be the first to admit that and to say I'm not exactly thrilled about it. I don't want anything I've said here to come across as "No, your point sucks and it's wrong and I hate it and it's dumb", because that's not what it is at all. It's simply "I absolutely see your point and even think it's valid in a lot of ways, but you need to see it from the site's perspective and understand why it's not feasible for us right now". I completely respect the disagreements, both what they are and having the courage to step forward and address them in the first place. Keeping a balance between what the overall community wants to see and what the TASers want to make is difficult, because there are always going to be cases like this where those things may not align or might even be in direct opposition of each other. I talked about how not wanting to restrict content meant that I disagreed with the proposal further since it inherently restricts content, but if us disagreeing with the proposal causes the TASers to leave the site, causing their runs to not be submitted in the first place, doesn't that mean we're still technically restricting content? Given how often we've cut out entire communities based on decisions we've made or standards we follow (Super Mario 64 and Celeste come to mind immediately), the last thing I want is for that to happen again, so I guess the best question I can ask right now is this: Is there a breaking point? Is there something we are doing or have talked about doing that actually goes too far? Are we going to actively lose TASers and/or runs by sticking to separation? I can absolutely understand and accept disappointment and disagreement, but I refuse to cause explicit divides anymore.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Version with the BIOS screen and trimmed input: User movie #638492501793591035 No input changes were needed other than the added wait to account for the BIOS.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2108)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
InputEvelution wrote:
That would be great, thank you so much for the offer!
Happy to help!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.