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ShgofcTAS wrote:
edit: i would do a v4 of this TAS but how it is already up for the veredict im letting the 6:39 be the final version. ill respect the judge's time
Okay, but what if the Judge's time was spent on a v4 WIP? User movie #639025346045970593
Mostly the same input from the submission but I implemented and optimized some of the bigger things I noticed when watching. This is a little over 4 seconds faster so far up to the start of Be Prepared. I would've completed it but I couldn't get the end to resync and I don't really feel like figuring out the geyser manipulation at the moment. I can maybe see about finishing it up within the week unless you or someone else does so first.
Something I would recommend though is listening to Tompa's advice and spending a bit more time on optimization. I noticed some time losses going from version to version earlier, with the Elephant Graveyard hyenas being the most noticeable. Remember that a TAS is something you can spend infinite time and retries on, there shouldn't be any avoidable time losses or regressions when making new versions of a run. What I do is I have the original version open in a separate emulator window so I can directly compare frame counts while I'm working to see how much time I'm gaining or losing in each section. Tools like TAStudio help here by making it easier to visualize and compare input at a glance.
I will say though that outside of what I fixed above, the rest of the run looks fine to me. Frames can definitely be saved throughout, but for a first publication (both for you as the author and for the hack/category itself) this is definitely good enough already. As long as the last three levels aren't slower than previous versions, the final v4 file should be acceptable.
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JD wrote:
I'm done here. Do whatever you want.
Alright, done.
JD has been banned for one year. Protip for anyone reading this: If you're going to try and argue that your behavior isn't toxic, don't directly quote one of the most toxic people in the history of the site as if you were defending them, and especially don't do it as a response to the Admin that said user had targeted offsite with disturbing, bigoted harassment.
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JD wrote:
Samsara wrote:
Your post history, which seems to be made up almost entirely of the same impatient demands, criticisms, and backseating that you showed in our PMs
When I ask something, I expect a response. And yet, hardly anyone responds to any of my questions. No shit I'd get impatient. And honestly, the fact you believe I wouldn't get impatient due to not having my questions answered in a timely manner is kinda concerning.
Echoing the previous "We're hobbyists running this site in our spare time" posts, but also... This is literally a website where games are played and replayed one sixtieth of a second at a time over the course of potentially several months or even years, and yet it's kinda concerning that I would expect a regular visitor here to be patient about things?
JD wrote:
Samsara wrote:
accusing me of "misleading people" into thinking there are absolutely no requirements for Editor
You literally said as much in the above quote. You can't say that ppl are required to meet behavioral expectations and that there are no requirements whatsoever (in the exact same post, no less) and expect ppl not to be misled.
Personally, I don't think "Don't be actively antagonistic to staff at every possible opportunity" needs to be stated in any set of guidelines for any kind of establishment, let alone a website that you are actively trying to contribute to in a way that may require working directly with staff. I'd like to think that's obvious, but if you really think basic decency needs to be outright stated as a requirement to become an Editor then I suppose I can just ignore the fact that the Site Rules specifically say that uncivilized and disruptive behavior is not allowed and edit in the clarification.
Speaking of that site rule, I think we as staff are in full agreement that you haven't exactly been civil in your time here. First warning, officially. Watch your attitude from now on.
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Sorry, didn't see this while writing my previous post.
JD wrote:
Now that that's been dealt with, I've a question about an experience I had.
Earlier this year, I PM'd Memory asking for the Editor role, per this quote:
Samsara wrote:
There are no requirements to become an Editor, simply ask and you'll get the role.
What I expected to be a simple Yes reply ended up devolving into a back-and-forth that resulted in Memory rejecting my application. The conversation made me convinced I must have done something wrong, but to this day I don't know what that something wrong was.
(And for the record, I do not want the Editor role at this point in time.)
Since you decided to make this public, I'll go over the details of what happened publicly as well.
Memory initially asked you why you wanted the role, which is a completely fair question to ask. Instead of answering, though, you treated it like a personal attack and shot back at her, saying how it doesn't matter and that you should have already had the role. After this back-and-forth continued, in which Memory simply wanted to know your reasoning for wanting the role and you outright refusing to tell her, she told you that you don't meet the behavioral standards that we expect from site contributors, because you were entirely unable to cooperate with a completely reasonable question that we would ask anyone who wants the role. Your immediate response to this was to take your anger to me, demanding that I edit my post and accusing me of "misleading people" into thinking there are absolutely no requirements for Editor, despite the fact that barely a couple lines earlier in the post I explicitly said there are behavioral expectations that should be met:
Samsara wrote:
Contributors are expected to be active and helpful members of the community, not misusing their privileges.
If that's the way you interact with site administration, taking simple questions as personal attacks and arguing with us because we aren't doing things the way you like them, then I have to say I fully agree with Memory's assessment. You haven't shown that you can cooperate in a way that we would expect out of any site contributor, and in fact I would go as far as to say that you would be an active hindrance to the site if that behavior carried over into your contributions. Your post history, which seems to be made up almost entirely of the same impatient demands, criticisms, and backseating that you showed in our PMs, confirms that we made the right choice in turning you down for the moment. You need to be able to work with staff, and you've very much proven you're currently unwilling to do so.
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Regarding the Kaan situation, I have one final, overwritten set of comments to make:
Kaan did not originally meet the conditions of my offer, instead choosing to continue his manipulation narrative by claiming he was afraid that his friends would get hurt and that he couldn't reveal his identity until he was promised that they would be safe. I decided to play along, knowing that sticking to the terms of the offer and banning him would only cause him to come back and start claiming that I was actually going to hunt down those friends.
Since this is literally the thread about concerns over our moderation, I want to put it on record that we only have a problem with Kaan, here. Kaan's friends didn't sexually harass two staff members, Kaan's friends didn't spend literal years trying to get Spikestuff fired from multiple community positions, Kaan's friends didn't create 10 alt accounts all in the name of trying to dismantle this site. Kaan did all of that himself. In all honesty, I feel bad for these friends. He's absolutely lying to them about us, absolutely twisting the narrative to be completely in his favor by hiding all of his unhinged behavior and projecting his spite onto us. There's no way he actually cares about these friends, he's straight up using them as ammunition against us in order to make himself look better. It genuinely sickens me a bit that he chose the moment that he did to return and push his false narrative again, with us putting out a public apology for our past behavior. He saw us in what he perceived to be a moment of weakness and decided to try going for the kill.
And for what? Because we made him apologize for, and I repeat, sexually harassing two staff members? He's been on this puppetmaster grind for five years now. Five! Years! Five years of being so obsessed with himself and his reputation that he couldn't even muster up the courage to take a single hint of accountability over, and I repeat, sexually harassing two staff members. Five years of spreading lies and, most likely, manipulating other people into thinking that we actually are some kind of collective of rabid wolves that ban people on sight for merely disagreeing with us, coming from a guy we didn't ban for two full years after it was revealed that he, and I repeat, sexually harassed two staff members. Five years of, presumably, telling his friends that they should be terrified of us because of how we treat him and how we'd treat them in turn, coming from a guy who literally just got another co-authored publication within the last week.
If you do happen to be one of his friends reading this, and you were affected by all of his lies and are actually scared of us, you really don't have any reason to be. We're not the kinds of people who, say, go around stalking people in other communities running years long hate campaigns against them out of spite. We wouldn't, for example, DM staff in other communities trying to get them to take action against anyone we don't like, or join related Discord servers for little reason other than to complain about hate we receive that we feel is unjust. That'd be ridiculous. I don't think we've ever done that sort of thing in site history, even at our worst, and if we ever did then we can add it onto the apology thread and double down even further on changing for the better going forward, because we're not cowards about accountability.
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Added the Star, thanks for reporting.
Archive link is currently down, seemingly got taken down shortly after publication but we have no idea what exactly happened to it yet. Currently working on getting it fixed or replaced, sorry for any inconvenience it's causing. EDIT: Was just in the process of being reuploaded, works now.
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I took a look at this hack myself a few months back after TasGrau's original submission, mainly just for fun/experimentation and no focus on optimization whatsoever but I did stumble upon a couple extra things that will help push this run lower. Video below, only goes up through Simba's Destiny:
Link to video
Input file: User movie #638913381703742704
First few stages are nearly identical so the most notable things are the different routes in Hakuna Matata and Simba's Destiny. In Hakuna, I go under the stage after the first waterfall section (which I had tried and failed to skip, losing time), which looks like it saves a few seconds over the route taken in this submission. I also take a different route in Simba's Destiny, though I went about it in entirely the wrong way at the time and later improved it significantly:
Link to video
I'd highly recommend looking into these further, feels like at least 20 seconds could be saved with solid optimization and potentially even faster routes that I missed.
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Otaku, or whoever you are even though you're definitely Otaku, I have an offer for you:
Given who you are, or who we're convinced you are, you have to understand that it's not at all easy for us to trust you here. The burden of trust shouldn't be on us, the staff team who is literally being open about having made mistakes in the past with how we treat other users. The burden of trust is on you, the "anonymous reaper" who came here with an anti-TASVideos agenda and tried to start an uprising. You said it yourself in your PMs with Memory, trust goes both ways, and we are already trusting you to the best of our ability given the way you've attacked us in the past. The fact that I, of all people, have now decided to play along and push all of that to the side to hear you out should be more than enough proof of trust from us.
My offer is as follows: I've asked the staff not to ban your next alt on sight. You're allowed to re-register one more time. I'd like you to PM me on this account without any other action taken on the site. No posting here, no PMing Memory or anyone else involved in this thread. Just me. All I ask is that this initial PM contains the proof of who you are. Proof comes in the form of the name of your main and the e-mail address attached to it, which is needed to confirm your identity. No stalling, no excuses, no goalpost moving, please just provide me the proof you have publicly promised to give. In exchange, should you actually provide this proof, I promise I will engage with you calmly, civilly, and professionally for the entire duration of the ensuing conversation, regardless of who you are or whatever history we have. I can't promise that the conversation will go exactly as you want it to, but I will hear you out completely. If you feel like I'm acting out of line at any point in this conversation, you have my advance permission to post it here in its entirety as a public callout of my behavior.
Allow me to be blunt: As much as I, as a TASer, appreciate how slowly you're playing this game, I'm tired of it dragging on for so long. All of us, yourself included, have better things to do with our lives. We've already given you three chances to tell us who you are (on Reaper, on whatever alt you PMed Memory with after Reaper was banned, and earlier today). This, at least for me, is your last chance. If you try to stall again by not giving me your promised proof in that first PM, or if your next action on this site is anything other than that PM, then your ban will officially be considered permanent, with no chance of it ever being revoked.
The offer is open until it has been taken or until your own actions have caused it to be revoked. No time limit otherwise. I will do everything in my power to ensure that no other resolution (premature/accidental banning, honest mistakes over the terms, etc) is reached prior to this. Note that I may not be able to respond immediately due to my personal life, though I should always be able to respond within 24 hours.
UPDATE (December 9th, 2025, 5:01 PM PST): Contact was established early yesterday, though it hasn't progressed into today as of yet.
UPDATE (December 12th, 2025, 2:45 PM PST): I still have yet to receive a second response. I had expected this to be done by now, and it's barely even started. I'm going to be a lot more busy over the latter half of the month, so I will most likely have to pass this off to another Moderator or Admin if this continues to be delayed. NEXT DAY EDIT: I've done so. Still no response in any fashion.
UPDATE (December 17th, 2025, 2:43 PM PST): Response received yesterday.
UPDATE (December 20th, 2025, 10:XX AM PST): For transparency, I'm providing a more detailed version of the above updates below the divider.
UPDATE (December 9th, 2025, 5:01 PM PST): Contact was established early yesterday, with no proof of identity. I've decided to be kind and let this slide. It has been 24 hours since I responded, and I have not received a reply back. The user has logged in and read the message, so I should get a response soon.
UPDATE (December 12th, 2025, 2:45 PM PST): I still have yet to receive a second response. How frustrating. I'm beginning to think this isn't OtakuTAS after all. As much as it sounds like him, it's also starting to sound a lot like kaan55. Regardless of who it is, I had expected this to be done by now, and it's barely even started. I'm going to be a lot more busy over the latter half of the month, so I will most likely have to pass this off to another Moderator or Admin if this continues to be delayed. I'll send a follow-up PM, it really shouldn't take this long to give two pieces of proof. Might as well just ask outright if they're kaan55, too. NEXT DAY EDIT: Still no response, and something urgent came up in my life. The first follow-up PM wasn't read, and I'm not exactly happy with the accusation anyway, so I'm just going to delete it and resend it. I'll pass this over to Memory as well since I doubt I'll have the time or energy to spend on this situation.
UPDATE (December 17th, 2025, 2:43 PM PST): Finally a response came in last night. It's kaan55, confirmed. Fantastic. I'm just going to stay uninvolved and report it to Memory, who wasn't contacted at all despite me explicitly asking him to contact her instead of me.
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For anyone reading this thread and wondering why this random new account is acting so hostile and getting banned, this post explains who we're fully convinced they're an alt of and why they were banned in the first place.
At this point though, after this ninth attempt to re-register and continue arguing a point that has not even been provided, I can't say it matters whether or not this person actually is OtakuTAS or not. They are, of course, but even if they weren't, this behavior is unacceptable. Their original attempt at this on their first of nine alts was little more than a failed attempt at a call to arms, presenting little more than recollections of events so vague that even the ones that weren't made up still sounded fake. They lied in this thread about being in the process of writing their proof PM when the Reaper account was banned, they had at least a full hour to respond and had posted several more times in the apology thread during that period of time. One of the other nine alts had also managed to get through and send a PM, but it too provided no proof whatsoever. Over the last couple hours in PMs, they continually refused to provide the proof they said they were willing to give, constantly moving the goalposts by saying things needed to be "civil" first. Wasting our time, effectively. Reminder, this is coming from the guy who invented a fake stalker ex-girlfriend and impersonated a staff member because he was upset that he didn't get to snipe a TAS made by a disabled, suffering trans woman.
And again, even if it isn't OtakuTAS (it is though), the moderation we did here was in response to what we deemed to be bad faith behavior coming from anyone, even though it is nearly identical to OtakuTAS's behavior. Zero substance, nothing but vague personal attacks (primarily against trans staff members to boot), time-wasting and goalpost-moving when actually called on to provide something they promised... It feels like they're just sowing discord for the sake of making the rest of the community think that things are far worse than they actually are, and that's not something we can tolerate. Hopefully this scans the same way to everyone else as it does to me. If it doesn't, well, this is quite literally the thread to discuss that!
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In regards to the moderation-related posts, we've set up a separate thread to handle them, as we would like for this thread to stay on the topic of our old content curation practices.
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Recently, TASVideos put out a mission statement detailing the new direction we have been, and will continue to be, taking the site. The statement also serves as a public apology for everyone that we had pushed away from the site while still following our old standards and practices. The apology is specifically meant to be for those that were pushed away by our content standards, specifically our older, much harsher standards. The thread for the apology is supposed to serve a dual purpose as a topic of discussion and as a resource that we can point others to when they have questions about us. However, the intent of the apology has been frequently mistaken to be an apology for our moderation. As a result, we've had to split posts out of that thread on more than one occasion in order to keep it on track with the original intent. We felt the best course of action here was to actually create a space for our moderation to be discussed.
All we ask is that the discussion remains in good faith. The reason we have had to moderate the other thread so heavily is not because we were trying to silence criticism, that has never been nor will ever be our intention, it's because we felt that the criticism was presented as bad faith attacks on our characters as TASVideos staff. You are free to criticize our actions as much as you like, but attacking us as people is still very much not okay in any context. Should specific incidents be cited, a moderator or staff member may step in and provide further explanation and context for the actions we took and the behavior we showed at the time. Such explanations are not intended to be implicit defenses or justifications for our actions, and should not be treated as such in turn.
In short, as long as you present your criticisms, arguments, and suggestions calmly and civilly in accordance to our site conduct rules, we will listen to and address them appropriately.
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Hey, pal! Hey, buddy! I see you've recently and vastly improved your TAS skill!
Really quite incredible jump in quality from this submission, I'd say! Looks equivalent to the work that would've been done by... I dunno, 14 TASers or so? I think I'm going to go ahead and promote you directly to Expert Player because of this! But only if you replace "pert" with "TASVideos".
Plagiarism of any kind is not welcome here. Get out.
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Nice work, especially on the better boss fights!
I'm surprised there are actually frame rules on some of the bosses, I must not have run into them when I was working on this a few years back. Either that or I completely forgot about them since they work differently to the rest of the game. I'm definitely not surprised to see that even with global timers, this game still makes a habit of being one or two frames away from working optimally. I spent a few hours looking for further improvements, but I couldn't find anything.
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stevenqbeatz wrote:
Wow, interesting! If you do have some old notes lying around somewhere that says which items could be glitched into other items, that would be helpful info for future testing.
I went ahead and updated the submission text with a new section based on my old notes. They're pretty outdated and wouldn't be of any help (a lot of them were based on an assumption I later disproved), but it was still fun going back through them and reliving my old research process. Made a bunch of other additions and minor changes/corrections to the text as well while I was at it.
Seems like we're all good to call this final, officially. The input file can be replaced and judged, now.
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kierio04 wrote:
Samsara wrote:
We'd likely also want to implement an SRC-style leaderboard system instead of the current obsoletion system because that just makes more sense for ILs, especially for games that might be hotly contested.
This stuck out to me quite a lot when I first read it, and there's several things I want to talk about just in this one sentence. I'm going to overanalyse this on purpose, and I don't believe you meant everything I'll be assuming, but I want to do so in order to make sure you understand why I'm pointing it out.
First, having leaderboards tends to bring out the wrong mindset in newer TASers, as they can come to believe that TASing is all about getting cheap improvements, and having the most number-ones, rather than working together to achieve the most optimised times. In the most extreme cases, this self-centered thinking can lead to gatekeeping, hoarding, and elitism.
Second, your line of thinking may come from the fact that a vast majority of publications are made by a single author, and thus those TASing ILs would be doing so by themselves, with the aim to achieve the best time on their own. When you have a community of lots of active TASers, it's a large waste of time and effort to only keep your improvements to yourself, and so it absolutely still makes sense to have an equivalent of a publication history for ILs.
Okay, yeah, I was absolutely approaching this from the wrong angle. That part about most publications coming from a single author is dead on, I was very much thinking about this as people working on their own instead of being full-on community efforts. Leaderboards really only make sense from an individual perspective.
Just to harp on this a bit more, we've talked about leaderboard implementation for TASVideos as a whole in the past, and the idea always gets universally dismantled and rejected. Leaderboards really only make sense from an RTA perspective. I've thought for a while that TAS leaderboards could potentially be viable as a way of incentivizing people to start TASing and submitting here without feeling like they need to be the best in order to be seen, and admittedly that still sounds like a good idea to me in theory (and is why I was thinking about it for ILs since we'd already be handling them in a different way from the rest of our runs), but even there it really wouldn't work out in practice.
Leaderboards can't work in general TASing because we don't have a skill floor, or at least ours is much, much lower than RTA. Almost anyone can pick up TASing and start producing records. As much as the publication and obsoletion system can often feel like gatekeeping, the truth is that there's no logical reason why any TAS of a game should have slower gameplay than any previous one in that category. I think I was caught up in the idea that not everyone wants to be the best, some people just want to try their hand at something and have fun with it, and to me ILs have always felt like the perfect avenue for having fun with TASing, so it felt sort of natural to combine the two in my head. We get a good few newcomers submitting non-record TASes because they assume we work like SRC, and I think that's stuck with me a bit too much. I'm always looking for ways to make TASing and TASVideos more accessible to newcomers, but that doesn't mean I'm good at locking in on the right ways to do so.
...What we really should be working on is more collaborative approaches like community-based TASing, but that's a different topic.
Samsara wrote:
Publication would need to be talked about, as the potential volume of IL submissions could flood the YouTube channel in a nasty way.
This problem of scale is actually exactly the issue I'm stuck on with thinking about designs for an IL framework. One solution I came up with is to perhaps have a second YouTube channel specifically for IL TASes. This would not only prevent a flood of videos on the main channel, but also serve a different audience who are interested in shorter-length TAS videos.
While that would solve the TVC flooding, it wouldn't solve the workload problem. The solutions I would be leaning towards would involve lessening our workload as much as possible while still giving communities everything they would want.
Granted, I don't think publication should be a concern until we figure out the earlier steps, first. For all we know at the moment, we could end up figuring out a brand new system for publication altogether. That is, actually, a small part of why I suggested leaderboards, but I think it's safe to fully drop that idea altogether at this point.
Samsara wrote:
I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
I don't really know how to answer this, as I personally don't see any issue with TVC encodes. However, what I've seen is that people want to keep their upload on YouTube as the central one, and don't see the point of there being a second one for a completely unrelated audience. I went over this in more detail in this reply to moozooh, so I'd recommend you read that (if you haven't already). Lastly, I don't think there's any explicit opinions that TVC is the selling point of TASVideos, so you don't need to worry about that. The general point I'm trying to get across is that there are a lot of people out there saying "why bother with TASVideos" and TVC uploads are just one of many gripes.
I... am not sure what we can do about this, really. TVC is not meant to be a benefit to outside communities. We started encoding runs because it was much easier for people in our community to watch them that way, and TVC was just a natural extension of that philosophy. These "gripes" people seem to have are... pretty much entirely valid. There isn't a point to having us mirror a run if they don't want it, and we understand that: Whenever someone asks for their publication encode to be hosted on their channel, we honor that request, and we don't mirror it.
Samsara wrote:
All that being said... Being invited to talk to outside communities would be amazing! That alone would bypass pretty much every single reservation I have about trying to make amends with people, just on the virtue of knowing that we're welcome there and that said community is interested in talking to us or working with us.
I get where you're coming from, but I believe TASVideos is beginning to reach the point where this opportunity is going away. Many communities now have no awareness that TASVideos exists so the issue comes less from them not wanting to interact with TASVideos, but not knowing it's even a possibility. Even beyond that, if they find out it is a possibility, because they've never interacted with it, they don't have the drive to reach out, talk with staff, and figure out how rules can be modified to incorporate their community. As I said in this reply to Bigbass, the only community which is truly alienated from TASVideos is Super Mario 64. All others I feel are a byproduct of lack of involvement with TASVideos, and not places you should be worrying about reaching out to with open arms. If you don't reach out to these communities, it's entirely likely you may never have them reaching out to you.
Therein lies the problem, though. We've traditionally been seen as elitists, gatekeepers, people trying to control what TASing is and what TASers need to do. Reaching out to communities, to me, feels like it could very easily be seen as us doing that once again. Even if it's specifically reaching out to say "Hey, we love what you do, how can we change ourselves to accommodate you?", that could possibly come off the wrong way to a community that wouldn't otherwise be interested in us. That's not to say I don't think we should try at all, of course, because we definitely should, but I still personally believe it'd be better for us to do it more gradually, or for us to set it up in a way where our outreach is being done through people like yourself who have active ties to both those communities and us.
Something I should absolutely go on record with: My hesitance is almost certainly all me recognizing that my own reputation in regards to TASVideos has been far from the best due to my past behavior, and that I shouldn't be the one trying to reach out to a significant number of communities based on the ways I've personally interacted with them in the past. Out of everything I've said in this thread regarding TASVideos and how we treat things, this is by far the most "personal opinion, not official".
Samsara wrote:
We absolutely are working towards that, but it requires those communities to work with us. We need to understand their TAS tool and replay format, and we need to make sure that we're providing everything that they would need or want from us as a host.
At the very least, I think working with communities to try and make tools and files compatible would not be seen as overstepping. This also ties in with the community ambassador thing I talk about later, because that's exactly how you can stay in touch with these things.
The community ambassador thing is 100% the answer to this issue. I really need to embrace that concept more. Actually, on that note, I think that's really what I meant when I said I'd love to be invited to talk to communities: I wasn't necessarily saying that communities need to hear of us and explicitly reach out to us themselves, I wanted what I said to be more along the lines of people who are active both here and in an outside community mediating and seeing if they're willing to talk to us, passing along the message to us if they are. We're definitely always up for it over here, even if some of us (read: Samsara) don't have as much time as they would like to have for that.
...Also, not really related to the response but just to be clear about it here, I think active collaboration should be the bare minimum for us to support a new tool. Trying to implement something entirely on our own would be outright disrespectful. We've been working on that with the Celeste community for a while, now, and I want that level of communication to be a standard for us for everything else we want to support as well.
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stevenqbeatz wrote:
I don't know if you have anything else up your sleeve, but I really don't see anything else that could be done to improve this.
(...)
Unless there is something else huge discovered, I'd say this is actually done (even tho we've said this a million times already ahaha). I'm sure I'll watch it a bunch more times just to make sure. Awesome job :)
I watched through it a few more times and the only major improvement I could possibly see happening is one you mentioned earlier in the thread, which is item glitching in a Blue Candle. My old notes actually had a theory on how to get one, but with how optimized the mansion route is now, the detour that theory would require far exceeds the time it would save: You'd need to grab the Flashlight from the East Wing, which as that video shows is close to a full minute of detour, where the extra Blue Candle would only save about 20-30 seconds in the current route. Of course, there could be a faster way of getting it, but I don't want to tempt myself into looking for it until this submission gets processed. What I will tempt myself into, though, is writing up a piece on my old notes, because that sounds fun and I also want to make sure everything I jotted down is public info, if only because it's interesting and insane: Heck, the reason that video exists in the first place is because I came up with a crazy route that would have glitched in not just that theoretical Blue Candle, but also all four of the final battle items. I'm completely positive that route's impossible now, though.
I'm definitely happy to call this done as well. With AmaizumiUni's approval, we can finally have this replaced and processed. I already rewrote the submission text in advance, and I can have a new encode ready at any time.
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Just to be clear in advance, my answers here only accurately reflect my own thoughts and views on the situation. I'm aware of how it's all going to sound with my current administrative position, but none of this is intended to be taken as TASVideos' full and official opinion at this moment. Even when I say "we" as if I'm speaking for staff as a whole, I'm just presenting my interpretation of how we all feel. I could be wrong!
kierio04 wrote:
1. Does the TASVideos audience only like or care about TASes with flashier tricks vs. raw optimisation? Furthermore, where there are dead/boring periods in a TAS, is it expected for you to keep the audience entertained at the cost of time? Put simply, do you still value entertainment more than speed?
In the past, yeah, TASVideos was cultivating an audience that only wanted big, flashy runs with lots of entertainment value, but that's something we've explicitly been trying to move away from in recent years. Nowadays, especially with TAS and RTA being more tightly intertwined, I'd say we as staff don't really value either speed or entertainment more than the other. They work very nicely together, of course, but it's no longer a strict necessity to focus on both at the same time. You can just aim for one and it'll fly with us.
There's always going to be people that want to see the flashy stuff, of course, and I'm not going to try and change them. but I don't want those people to reflect us. Fixing that sort of perception is going to be difficult, though, especially when there's a decade and a half of it to correct.
2. Is TASVideos and the TASVideos audience only interested in a TAS which leads to ending screens or credits, rather than alternative game-modes? Especially those which are more popular or central to how the game is played? Why does TASVideos not have a framework for IL TASes yet? Additionally, why is there not a more serious effort to do so, seeing as it leaves many games out?
We've definitely opened the doors to allowing more alternative game modes over the past few years, although I get the feeling that even the first part of this question is directed specifically at ILs so I'll just get into that.
Implementing things on TASVideos is, essentially, a two step process: Step one is figuring out a plan for implementation, step two is developing it. ILs, in particular, have a really difficult step one. It's something we've discussed before, it's something I've been personally thinking about a lot since I also want IL support, the only problem is that TASVideos is currently not built for them.
This will come up again as an answer to other questions, so I'll start hammering it in now: A lot of the issues people have with TASVideos are matters of perspective. There's the perspective of staff members, the perspective of community members, and the perspective of those looking in from outside. From that last perspective, people think it should be very easy for us to do something, or to support something, and if we don't then they assume we're completely against it. It tends to be the same from the community, though the community is much more aware of what we've been doing lately and how our processes go. From a staff perspective, though, something that SOUNDS easy to others is often a huge headache for us. ILs sound easy to support, but if we tried with our current systems and standards, we'd be absolutely clowned on for it, and rightfully so.
Our current standards require runs to start from a power-on state: We don't normally allow savestates, only making very rare exceptions for runs that are otherwise impossible without them, such as the recently improved Super Mario Land "hard mode" TAS. Imagine a list of IL publications that are all timed from power-on. That'd be silly, wouldn't it? Yet, that's the core of the site. That's how everything on the site is timed and verified. Times are parsed automatically from framecount, and nearly all of our verification simply comes from seeing that the input file starts from a known legitimate state. This straight up does not work for ILs, meaning we'd have to, at the very least, come up with an entirely new set of rules and standards for ILs, draft a new verification workflow so we don't have to do anything silly like require power-on/SaveRAM starts, and then write an entirely separate submission system that supports those changes and whatever else ILs may need. During this process, we'd need to talk with communities for games that specialize in ILs to see how they want us to support things. We'd likely also want to implement an SRC-style leaderboard system instead of the current obsoletion system because that just makes more sense for ILs, especially for games that might be hotly contested. Publication would need to be talked about, as the potential volume of IL submissions could flood the YouTube channel in a nasty way. Even after all of that... We're extremely limited on site development. TASVideos isn't a paying job, it's fully nonprofit and every aspect of the site is something that is maintained in the staff's free time, site development being the most notable thing in this situation. Even if we come up with a full plan, we would need time (or, ideally, extra help) to get it all implemented and working correctly.
Again, we WANT to support ILs, but it's not as simple as it sounds. It's not that we haven't tried, it's not that we don't want to put in the effort or that we're avoiding it. For me, at least, it's just that I don't know where to begin with it. That outside perspective thing I mentioned earlier also plays a lot into that hesitance, which I'll bring up again in the later questions that ask about it in more detail.
3. For TASes where speed is not a concern (i.e. where obsoletion has nothing to do with time), why are times included in publications and YouTube uploads? does this not confuse people into thinking all the superplays are meant to be speedruns?
Honestly, I don't know if it confuses people! I haven't personally heard any confusion over it. Heck, this is the first time I've even considered that as a possibility. I guess we don't actually have a reason to include the times on playarounds, other than it just happens automatically.
4. Assuming an established community already exists, where popular community figures or central channels would have the means to reach more users, what do you see as the benefit in allowing the TASVideosChannel to mirror TASes on YouTube?
I don't have a good answer for this, because I don't really see TVC as being that kind of benefit. The benefits I see TASVideos giving to outside communities don't revolve around the YouTube channel at all, because said benefits are fairly minor at best. We can ensure runs will stay up and watchable in high quality, and we can ensure consistent, daily activity along with that, but otherwise TVC is really just an easy access point to watch runs that people give us.
I have a few questions of my own in response to this, actually: What benefits would an established community want TVC to give them? Do people see us as trying to push TVC as a benefit? If so, what's giving off that impression and how can we change it?
5. Will there be work done to connect with larger games' communities which have never associated with TASVideos and don't see "the point" of it (either due to bad reputation or not knowing it even exists)?
6. Will there be more work done to fully eliminate the negative reputation TASVideos built up years ago which, due to larger games' communities splintering and never interacting with it, are unaware of the changes that have undergone recently? Additionally, would you address common hesitations or doubts, such as; strict timing standards, unfair emulator restrictions, being viewed as being an overly authoritative site for all TASes, or gatekeeping what can and can't be published?
I'll answer these together since they have pretty much the same answer for me: The reason we seemingly haven't done much work on this is because of the bad reputation we still have around the gaming sphere. We're not quiet out of apathy, we're quiet mainly out of guilt.
A lot of our negative reputation comes from, as you said, us being viewed as overly authoritative and gatekeeping. We've worked past a lot of that, and we're continuing to work past it, but when you know for a fact that people see you in that way, it makes reaching out to people a lot harder as a result. If we look for people speaking ill of us and try to correct the record, that can easily be seen in a number of negative ways. We could come off as intentionally seeking things out and stubbornly starting fights, we could be seen as desperately trying to get people to come back and like us again, we could be seen as trying to force other communities to do things our way again. I don't think we can afford that, and I wouldn't want to try my hand even if I thought we could.
I don't want TASVideos to be considered the ONLY TAS community, because it definitely isn't and DEFINITELY shouldn't be. I don't want to come off like I think people NEED to be here or that they NEED to listen to absolutely everything we say. What I want is for TASVideos to be a database, a resource center, an archive and a complete source of information for the hobby, and also we have thousands of runs and a close community of people that you can talk to if you want. This is also why I don't see TVC as being a benefit by itself: I want TASVideos as a whole to be the benefit, in the same way that SRC is for the RTA community.
We've been pretty forward about addressing our mistakes and changing them, though since all of it has been localized to TASVideos (and often buried in forum posts in an age where forums are close to obsolete and in Discord conversations where you'd specifically have to join us and look to be able to find them) I'm not surprised that it's not reaching outside communities. That being said, though, I think that's actually a good thing for now. I want us to keep improving before we really go back out there in the world and try to make a name for ourselves again. I don't want to go around singing our virtues as long as the general perception of us is still that we're elitist gatekeepers. The best thing I think we can do right now is just let things play out naturally. Of course, I'd be very, very happy to see people in our community helping to fix the bridges we burned, but I can't in good conscience ask for that outright, because it would make our improvement arc seem disingenuous.
All that being said... Being invited to talk to outside communities would be amazing! That alone would bypass pretty much every single reservation I have about trying to make amends with people, just on the virtue of knowing that we're welcome there and that said community is interested in talking to us or working with us.
If there are specific things that people outside of TASVideos would like us to address, whether it be a set of great questions like this or if they're seeking an explanation or even an apology for something we've done in the past, please let us know about it. Let me know in particular: I'm definitely on the front lines of "Man, we really fricked it in the past, huh? I want us to take accountability for that".
7. Is TASVideos working towards accepting TASes of games with their own built-in tools? e.g. accepting PC games without having to go through alternate means such as libTAS, or accepting file formats that can only apply to a single game?
This, too, ties into the reputation and outreach thing: We absolutely are working towards that, but it requires those communities to work with us. We need to understand their TAS tool and replay format, and we need to make sure that we're providing everything that they would need or want from us as a host.
I make it a point to say this every time single game TAS tools come up, sorry if you've heard it a thousand times before: The reason we don't currently accept these tools is simply because the site won't recognize them, and for the site to recognize them, someone needs to develop a parser for the replay format. Thus, that developer needs to understand the replay format, which means either we need the tool developer themselves to help us write the parser, or we need to work closely with them in order to write that parser. This means we need to be in good standing with that community, something which is not exactly common, especially if that community is convinced we want nothing to do with them because we're unable to support their community replay format.
8. Would TASVideos ever accept retroactive submissions to fill in missing record histories for splintered communities that have refrained from submitting TASes, or been left out due to not meeting standards as described above?
Admittedly, I may be parsing this question in an unintended way, but I absolutely love how I'm reading it and I want to talk about that even if it's not the intention. First off, yes, we are actively revisiting old submissions and rejudging them based on how much our standards are changed. We balance this alongside judging current submissions, so it may not too quick, but we will eventually get to everything. What helps with rejected submissions is having them pointed out to us.
The way I'm reading the rest of this question is whether or not we would consider accepting a certain category's entire record history at once, which would include obsoleted submissions, just so we could have the entire record history on the site... And I would absolutely love that. That is exactly in line with my personal vision for TASVideos. We're already a record history for runs that we've received personally, it makes total sense for us to... "import", for lack of a better word, entire record histories for categories that hadn't had any showcase on TASVideos prior. I've actually flirted with similar ideas in the past, particularly with "sniped" submissions, i.e submissions that were improved while they were still on the workbench, occasionally even after they were accepted and ready to be published.
The main issue I can see with this, though, is workload. Any game with a large community separated from us (Super Mario 64 comes to mind, and I still can't apologize enough to them for the things we did that made it that way ._.) is bound to have quite the backlog of record histories, and... With us only having four active Publishers that need to keep up with hundreds of yearly publications, the thought of overworking them is a constant worry of mine. I'd want to come up with a solution that doesn't hurt them, and by extension the rest of TASVideos, while not sacrificing the original idea in any way.
...Perspectives, again. Publishing is such a well-oiled machine despite being so understaffed that it's easy to overlook just how much they're working.
Before posting this here, I discussed a few ideas of my own to make the site more open to established communities:
A. Games with enough TASers that they have an established community are allowed one (or multiple) representatives in an official TASVideos position, to vouch for and accommodate the needs of their community.
Oh, I like this idea a lot! We've had ideas for more generalized staff-level positions in the past, this sounds like a wonderful way of opening those talks back up and seeing what we can do with it. I do think it slightly runs the risk of us asking people to do things on "our terms", though I'd wager that risk is counteracted entirely by them being directly able to influence and control "our terms" by literally being a part of the "our".
B. You could have game-specific submission->publication->encoding workflows, thereby lifting the weight off the more general staff (basically, TASVideos could make space for the communities, and the communities would have some amount of control over how they use that space)
This is also something we've discussed! It runs into the same issue of needing to talk to individual communities to find out what they want, and then needing to develop it, but it's not exactly out of the realm of possibility entirely. It may just take some time if we ever decide to go that path.
Actually, and again I'd like to stress this is a personal thought and not an indication of anything official, we wouldn't have to turn to site dev at all for encoding... Assuming we can come to a consensus with the game's community over encode quality, if people are willing to help out in that way then we could pretty much start doing that as soon as there's a majority staff/community agreement on it. Could still take some time to discuss, of course.
C. GameResources pages have the option to redirect to an external wiki, should one exist (e.g. Super Mario 64 would redirect to Ukikipedia)
I don't think there's actually any rule in place that prevents people from doing that, and if there is then there honestly shouldn't be. The only barrier I can think of is just needing the ability to edit game resources pages, which all published authors and editors have, and we're pretty lenient with giving out the Editor role.
D. I've also been thinking of potential designs for an IL framework, since that directly affects so many games (my own game included), and I would love to see that worked out
Save those ideas! We're absolutely going to have a bigger discussion on IL implementation in the future. I can't promise it'll be soon, but as long as I'm around, I can absolutely promise it will happen. My heart sings for Trackmania TASes.
To get this out of the way, I am aware that a lot of potential features are bottlenecked by site development. I get that! After this many years though, I haven't seen this sentiment change, especially for more major things (for example, ILs), so I really want to help push the planning process.
Site development has been a bottleneck for so long because there have been very different reasons for it over the years. I won't go into detail on the old site's issues, as a lot of them don't really apply to this situation, but I will say the closed source and the code complexity were major technical reasons for the lack of new features back then. On this current iteration of the site, though, the primary limitation is just not having enough people interested in development. The site code is open source now, everything was rebuilt from the ground up as a replacement to the old site and anyone can contribute at any time, but over the three and a half years it's been live, there's only ever been two active, dedicated site devs. Naturally, they have other obligations and realities that take precedence over our fun video game website. They're not the only two people working on site development, of course, but pretty much every other contributor also works on emulator development, primarily BizHawk, and that's their main focus.
I haven't seen much, if any, outside interest in site dev work. It's pretty much always been people who have had a consistent involvement with the site and the community. I would absolutely love to see more interest, and in a lot of ways I think it would even be required for bigger features like IL implementation, but that means having to reach outside of TASVideos, which if my thoughts on earlier questions are any indication, it's a bit of a catch-22 for me: I think we need these features for our community to grow, but I think our community needs to grow to give us the people we need to help us implement those features.
All this being said... I grew up with TASVideos, and as such I'm enthusiastic in seeing a future where its legacy remains untarnished. I would love for an opportunity to help work through issues such as the ones outlined above. I have ties to a considerable number of established TASing communities (through endeavours such as the Multi-Game TAS Competition), and have the means to make a difference, should an offer come up to do so. Simply put, this is also me expressing my interest in a potential ambassador-like role, to help aid this process, if it goes through!
Just posting this thread and opening up the discussion is a huge help for us, so thank you!
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User movie #638855183339004613
* Removes 2 random encounters and one reset by delaying the rope cancel until the first Blue Candle to take advantage of another step counter overflow. This brings back a trap encounter in the Inner Sanctuary that we can't move glitch over, but it's well worth it.
* Because we don't reset, we're still cycling through pre-emptive attacks when we fight an Evil Doll after warping back to the entrance, ending the battle instantly. Emi levels up twice off of this, fixing her damage output and removing the two extra rounds of attacks I had needed previously.
I haven't given it a second pass yet, going to do that later tonight or tomorrow.
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Location: Northern California
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Posts: 2875
Location: Northern California
I, um, may have come up with another substantial improvement idea. Currently investigating it.
EDIT: It is indeed possible to completely avoid every random encounter after the item glitch. "Rescuing" Akiko first means it's no longer necessary to Rope cancel before going to the Inner Sanctuary, meaning we can re-implement the RTA route from there up through the ice room, re-enabling encounters and character switching before warping back to the entrance and leaving us with just enough steps to get to the encounter cancelling in the Dungeon. Three random encounters and one reset removed, at the minor cost of not being able to move glitch over traps... And the major cost of significantly reducing Emi's damage output, meaning the final boss takes two more full rounds of attacks, losing a significant portion of the time gained.
Thankfully, not ALL of the time, but it turned over 20 seconds of timesave and a sub-9 in TAS time into just 7 seconds and a sub-9 only in RTA time. I have that 9:08 ready to go, but I'd really like to experiment with it more to see if I can find a way of getting some of that lost time back, even if it means re-introducing a random encounter or two.
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User movie #638853898958304202
Yes, somehow, that is the current final time of the run.
Quick, incomplete changelog from the previous most recent BK2:
* Swapped the Rope cancel order after the item/door glitches. I "rescue" Akiko first, then re-enable encounters/character switching by bouncing the Rope off of the rat right next to the Inner Sanctuary door instead of using the note. This gives much more step counter leeway.
* Implemented as many of AmaizumiUni's improvements as I could, particularly the much improved Dungeon and Lady Mamiya fight.
* Expanded upon the Dungeon improvement with a change I still can't believe worked: Keeping encounters disabled all the way through and overflowing the step counter, removing a reset and two random encounters
* The Lady Mamiya fight needed some slight tweaking due to the above change, as Akiko's damage output is lowered immensely, but it still ends in the exact same number of turns as AmaizumiUni's improvement, so barely any time was lost, if any at all.
* Fixed numerous oversights, mostly movement-related, one notable one being in the ice room by move glitching to the second Blue Candle instead of running all the way around.
Notes on a couple things that look like oversights or mistakes:
* AmaizumiUni opened the door to the dining hall before getting the Polaroid, which is faster, but I couldn't make the door glitch work afterward. This should be the only improvement of theirs that didn't make it into this new file.
* I moved Akiko one space too high before detouring for the Rope, but fixing this completely changes the position of the rat later on.
* There's an unintentional 5 frame wait after leaving the room with the Rope, however 5 frames are needed to manipulate the correct battle after the Rope cancel, so this doesn't lose any time.
* There needs to be one empty space between characters for the fastest Rope rescue. Firing it at someone directly next to you will cause it to fire through them, playing the full animation.
I think I'm completely out of ideas now. I'm shocked that there was still so much left, and that I was able to find it and implement it relatively quickly and easily. I'm personally happy to call this final if my co-authors are. Barring further ideas or improvements, I'll wait for them to give the go-ahead before re-encoding and re-writing the submission text, since it definitely needs to be fully rewritten now.
I'd like to convert this to FM2 since I believe both of them are more comfortable working in FCEUX, but I couldn't find an easy way of doing so. Granted, given how apt I am at overlooking things, I probably missed something really obvious. Worst case, I can take some time tomorrow and transcribe the inputs manually. Best case, there are actually no more improvements or ideas and I don't need to!
Really quite incredible jump in quality from this submission, I'd say! Looks equivalent to the work that would've been done by... I dunno, 14 TASers or so? I think I'm going to go ahead and promote you directly to Expert Player because of this! But only if you replace "pert" with "TASVideos".
Plagiarism of any kind is not welcome here. Get out.
