UPDATE (05/24/2026): For anyone reading this post several weeks later, I've updated the information about the four single game TAS tools to reflect the work done on them since this post was made.
In typical Samsara fashion, something that should have taken me less than a year and that I hoped to have taken less than a year has, in fact, taken nearly two. But hey, progress reports are back, and if I've learned anything, it's to not give a timeframe for the next one!
This one's a bit shorter compared to the "girl needs an editor" lengths I normally go to, but I promise next time I'll return to form, and by "form" I mean "girl needs an editor". EDIT: Hi, girl needed an editor, and I'm an editor, but I'm also girl. This turned out long again. Haha, oops, whoops.
In this post:
- Four (4) new single game TAS tools are now supported with parsers, for Ocarina of Time (GZ), Celeste (CelesteTAS), UFO 50 (CoffeeTools), and Dustforce (Dustmod)!
- CelesteTAS is officially approved for site submission! Also GZ but Memory announced that before I was able to make this post!!!
- BizHawk 2.11.1 gets re-announced because I feel bad pushing down the earlier news post about it!!!
- A fun new place to find and discuss site updates!
- The great PC merge is upon us!
- There's more changes (positive) to single game TAS tool acceptance!
- Finally, individual levels will be coming to TASVideos... eventually!
Remember last Winter 2021 when we started
a thread about potentially supporting single game TAS tools? It may have taken five years for that to start coming to fruition but we now support four of these tools! These first three are all fully supported and approved for site submissions. Disregard that Memory announced one of them earlier today! Most of this news post was written before she did that and I don't want to change it!!!:
We already have a GZ publication and a CoffeeTools submission. Check them out if you haven't already!:
[7027] N64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time "100%, no Stale Reference Manipulation" by PancakeTurtle & Migu in 3:07:26.833
#10466: synabler's PC UFO 50: Mortol in 13:06.842
The last one has parser support and is able to receive and host Userfiles, but we still need to take a couple more steps before we approve it. We're working on it!
* Dusted is a TAStudio-like replay editor for Dustmod's input file format, though Dustmod itself also provides in-game TAS tools to Dustforce DX.
** The link takes you to the UFO 50 Mod Loader, which has a built-in mod downloader and manager where you can find the latest version of CoffeeTools.
Huge, massive thanks to
InputEvelution for implementing CelesteTAS support,
ikuyo for implementing OoT Practice ROM and CoffeeTools support as well as helping with Dustmod,
CasualPokePlayer for figuring out and implementing Dustmod support,
synabler for thoroughly documenting and testing CoffeeTools, and
fsvgm777 for the incredible amount of work she put into figuring out how to publish the Practice ROM! She imported a Nintendo 64 for it. Have you ever imported a Nintendo 64 to help support a TAS file format? I didn't think so.
For disclosure, the reason we're not currently accepting CoffeeTools for submissions is simply that we're waiting on a new update. UFO 50 updates fairly frequently and recently received a major update that the CoffeeTools devs are updating the tool to support. Once CoffeeTools is updated and tested, we will be ready to approve submissions for it.
Dustmod is a bit of a different story, in that due to the way the tool works, we need to figure out and document the encoding process for it. This shouldn't take long though. The only barrier left after that, as far as I'm aware, is documenting everything on an
Wiki: EmulatorResources page. Once that's done, we should be able to approve it.
In short, both tools will be supported for site submission soon. Hell yeah.
Remember last Progress Report when I announced that BizHawk 2.10 was about to drop? Well, this is like that, except this time I'm the second person to announce that the update to BizHawk 2.11 has already dropped! Take a gander at the following text that I definitely wrote and was all me and definitely wasn't feos in the last news post that I stole this from:
BizHawk 2.11.1 has been released!
BizHawk 2.11.1 features a new experimental core: PPSSPP for PlayStation Portable (
not approved for submissions).
It also contains a huge number of fixes, improvements, and updates to other cores and aspects of BizHawk.
Downloads:
https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.11.1
Full Changelog:
https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/ReleaseHistory#Bizhawk2111
Wow. feos sure wrote all of the above, didn't I? I mean I sure wrote all of the above, didn't feos? I mean
Remember last Right Now when I talked about a brand new thread at time of writing? I don't, so to remind myself, we now have a dedicated
Site Updates Directory that lists the plans we have for the site and the threads dedicated to those plans! Everything listed in the OP has at least been discussed by staff internally as something we want to implement or change, and will eventually receive a discussion thread once we get more of an idea on how to proceed. Keep an eye on that directory if you're interested in the future of the site: At least one or two of those un-threaded ideas will be getting threads sooner than you may think! Especially if you're thinking it'll take months, like usual for us!
There may also be an upcoming directory thread for ongoing projects (like that whole wiki restructuring thing that I need to get back to working on ._.), but I only thought of that as I'm writing this news post so if that does happen, you can claim to your friends that you knew it was coming.
Remember last Shortly Before Posting when I added this section into the middle of the post and forgot to do the "Remember last X" running gag with it so I had to move it to the end so the pacing would still work?
As discussed and concluded in
Thread #27057: PC platform merge proposal, we have gone ahead and merged three formerly distinct platforms together. All future DOOM, Windows, and Linux submissions and publications will now be listed under the PC platform. This includes the three PC game tools listed above, as well as any PC game-specific tool supported in the future. Details on why this was done are available in the aforementioned thread, but I can personally sum up my thoughts as "Wow! That's more convenient!!!"
Only existing Windows runs were affected automatically by the change, as the Windows system code was the one updated to PC. Existing Linux and DOOM publications and submissions are still listed as Linux and DOOM, and currently need to be updated manually, though we are looking for a way to automate the process quickly, easily, and without flooding the Updates channel on Discord.
Remember last The Day After I Wrote Every Other Part Of This Post when more stuff happened?
Actually, remember last The Section About Dustmod when I talked about us revisiting our open source requirement for new emulators and TAS tools? Hopefully not, because I rewrote it and took it out, but rest assured that I did in fact previously talk about it. Anyway,
we're now doing that! Not just that, but we've also come up with a proposition for a new list of requirements that we'd like some feedback on. It's less strict!
With Dustmod specifically, the issue is not just that it's a closed source tool, but that the developers of Dustforce DX specifically asked that it stays that way since it's partially built using Dustforce DX's source code under their guidance, or at least that's how I as an outsider understand it. Regardless, it means that an open source version of the tool can't exist, but also that the tool is effectively developer-endorsed. Thus, we've come to the consensus that it's perfectly acceptable as-is. Even if we were to fully keep the open source requirement, we'd continue to make the exception for Dustmod and likely any other tool operating under similar circumstances.
If you have any comments or questions on this new list, including the proposed removal of the open source requirement, please post them in the thread. We want these requirements to be as refined as possible, as they primarily affect outside communities that may be looking for us to open the door to them. The more feedback we get, the easier it will be for everyone.
Remember last I Need To Stop Updating This Post With More Things Because This Bit Gets Less Funny With Each New Iteration?
Last, but arguably most importantly, TASVideos is now actively planning on implementing a long-requested feature: Individual levels!
In the past, any discussion about how to implement individual levels has generally gone the exact same way every time: "We want to do this, but we don't know how, and we can't think of a system that works with the way we currently operate."
We're changing that:
Thread #27315: Individual Level Support - Ideas and Discussion
One of the biggest motivators is that since we're more actively reaching out to and accepting of other TAS communities, we need to be able to support them in every way we can. A good number of these communities prioritize ILs over everything else, and some communities such as Trackmania are exclusively IL-based due to the way their tools work. Without IL support, we have no way of supporting them. With no way of supporting them, they rightfully have no reason to want to work with us. Without them wanting to work with us, y'all don't get to easily see some of the
sickest TASes out there.
On that note, an awesome bonus of IL support means custom level support! No longer would a custom level or ROM hack have to qualify for a new game entry to be showcased: They'd happily co-exist with base game ILs.
This system, whatever it ends up being, is going to require a lot of discussion and refinement before we're comfortable implementing it. ILs are going to open the door to a LOT of new content and a LOT of communities that may have always wanted to be here but never felt welcome. We want this to be perfect, or as close to it as possible, before we go ahead with it, so please give your feedback in the linked thread. If you're part of another community that would benefit from this, let them know as well and have other members pitch in. The people we want to hear from most are the people that would actively benefit from this.
At the very least, I can confidently say that ILs are something that WILL be implemented. I don't know when, I don't know how long it'll take, I don't know how much we'll need to add or change in order to do so, but this WILL happen someday.
Whew, this doubled in size over just the past day. So much for slightly shorter than usual. I'm hoping to get back to doing these a little more regularly, but I'm the last person you should trust when it comes to things like "accurately predicting timeframes", "timeliness", and "this is a funny time for me to bring up my long-running bit of being a chronomancer". See you next time! No timeframe! I told you not to trust me!!!
