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I'd just like to point out for future reference that the last seven seconds of this submission are purely for playaround purposes and are not necessary to beat the game. Since this is the author's choice, they will not be removed from the run.
User movie #637814301682454960
The above userfile is this run trimmed down to final necessary input, and as such that is the time that needs to be beaten for any future run of this game.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Radiant wrote:
Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs?
Most of those would be things I want to see in Playground. My personal goal with it is to widen the spectrum of what can be done with a game and as a result advancing the knowledge of that game by explicitly allowing any possible approach to it.
Non-approved emulators is a bit dicey, though. That'd probably be something we have to figure out case-by-case. Obviously, the site has to be able to parse the input file to begin with, so that really cuts down on the number of non-approved emulators we can even accept at all. I feel like any relatively known build of an emulator should be fine here, interim builds of BizHawk and Dolphin and such, but I worry about people specifically hacking their own new builds, or using older releases of emulators like ZSNES and Mupen that contain known exploits. While I trust the community to not abuse these sorts of things, it's definitely safer for everyone to set ground rules here.
We'll talk further about this. Right now, let's just say that only official interim builds are allowed in terms of newly accepted emulators.
Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
Since "must reproduce" and "must have a goal" and "do not plagiarize" are also Movie Rules, it seems to me that Playground needs a division between "hard movie rules" that you cannot break, and "soft movie rules" that can be broken for the playground.
This is an incredibly valid point to make. There definitely are hard rules like plagiarism and misattribution that shouldn't be broken by any submission, whether intended for publication or for Playground, and we definitely need to make that explicit when we update the movie rules and submission guidelines. If those updates aren't clear enough when everything goes live, let me know and I'll fix them.
An issue I have is that the overwhelming majority of romhacks are of really poor quality, and that on sites like romhacking.net it's hard to find anything good because the quality romhacks are drowned out by the bad ones. I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
The same applies to indie self-published Windows games.
Another fair point, though I'm not worried about Playground becoming "unusable" since we actually have a site we can easily update now. However, in the same way that a Playground goal can't be completely meaningless, I do think there should at least be some sort of small merit to the game or hack as well. I don't want it to be anywhere close to as strict as current Moons, though. I'm not sure we can define an exact set of rules for it, and even if we could, I wouldn't want to anyway. Playground's going to be community curated, there's generally going to be a solid consensus about what things have merit and what things need more work.
Context is also going to be important here. I'd be opposed to someone resyncing a published run to a purely cosmetic romhack, but I wouldn't be opposed to someone creating a new goal for the game using a purely cosmetic romhack. I might be opposed to someone slapping together an asset flip in Unity and TASing it for a quick meme, but I wouldn't be opposed to someone finding a terrible Unity asset flip and completely breaking it with TAS precision.
Figuring this out is going to be a long and steady process. Not necessarily difficult, certainly not impossible, but it will take a bit of time to figure things out, and I think we're going to have to do it live instead of trying to pre-empt it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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SRAM-anchored movies should require written verification/reproduction steps, in my opinion. I don't want to outright require verification movies, but there should always be a written set of reproduction steps so that anyone can create the needed SRAM state. This would be more for movies that are using intentionally hacked states, giving a careful record of exactly how the state was hacked, as it future-proofs the movie (provided files could go missing, emulators could be improved or obsoleted, etc) and ensures that the movie is still being presented in a "legitimate" way (all hacks and changes are accurately and openly represented).
I feel like this should actually apply to all submissions in general, now that I think about it. Maybe it's worth a different thread.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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To me, honestly, this fulfills "reach the most suitable endpoint the game allows". If the game could roll credits, it would. The fact that it can't is a natural consequence of the major skip glitch, and as such I see no problem with it. The detour to fix that would add several minutes to a run that's already pretty short to begin with, and... Really, if you think about it, the only thing that detour accomplishes is "Well, it's slightly more fitting with TASvideos rules now". I find that a completely unacceptable reason to force a change. We should almost never be giving authors tons of extra work just to appease our rules, we should be thinking about how to change our rules to better fit what TASers are submitting naturally.
The only time in which I would find it acceptable to recommend "fixing" an ending is in arbitrary code execution TASes, where it may only be a matter of mere frames to change a horribly corrupted ending that crashes into an ending that plays through perfectly fine, but that's kind of a different topic altogether.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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DrD2k9 wrote:
However, I don't want the Playground to introduce any additional stress to the main site staff (beyond it's initial creation) for normal daily function. Essentially, once created/implemented, I feel that the Playground should be completely user sustained (or perhaps via game-specific mods similar to speedrun.com), and the staff should not have to worry about that area of the site at all--except in extreme cases such as removing content that is already considered unacceptable on the site (ROM links, pornographgy, etc.).
That sentiment was also discussed on Discord, and I'll say that there isn't likely to be any additional stress on us. In fact, for me personally, I feel like a lot of my judging stress will be lifted by this implementation. It's a lot easier for me to look at something and say "Yeah, we can do something positive with this" than it is to look at something and try to figure out how to nicely reject it. Building new logic into the site for this would be an absolute breeze, since we'll likely just modify our current systems in order to account for it, so it isn't any increased stress on the site developers. Publishers wouldn't have any additional stress either since we wouldn't require publication quality encodes for everything that goes through.
The beauty of the new site and the direction of TASvideos itself is that we're always going to be looking for ways to make things easier for both the community at large and ourselves in turn. If something becomes a problem, we now have the ability to fix it easily, and we intend to do that no matter what the problem is. I'm seriously glad people care about us though, thank you for that!
chilsie wrote:
I like the idea of Playground, but I prefer the name “Showcases”. Playground seems like a more… casual term? idk exactly how to word it, but Showcases just comes across as a more fitting term, since this could be used for LOTADs and the like. I just wouldn’t be able to take something uploaded to a “playground” seriously compared to something clearly dedicated to showcases.
maybe I’m just nitpicky tho lol
Once again, there was a bit of discussion about this on Discord. I do like "Playground" as a name. I think it's a natural fit for the level of freedom and creativity that the category is going to allow, though as someone who heavily criticized the name and branding of Vault back in the day, I do understand that a name can have those kinds of implications. If there's enough of a sentiment for the name to change, we can change it, even if that sentiment comes after implementation.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Murder it.
Tech may have worked in the very early days of the community, when this was essentially just a niche hobby and everyone was more or less involved in every aspect, but as things grew it became more and more clear that people just come here because TASes are fun to watch. Evaluating the "tech rating" of a TAS is not something worth doing to most of the community these days, especially when the meaning of "technical quality" is far more subjective than even individual entertainment.
Evaluating a movie's tech rating is quite literally what I do for the site, too, even down to the original intent of what tech rating was supposed to be. Movies that forego these techniques will get rejected if using them is faster, no matter how simple or complex the game is otherwise, so in that case every single published movie has needed to meet a minimum standard of tech quality, which to me makes a community rating entirely redundant.
There's no inherent value to any tech rating either, in my opinion. What is a low tech rating from the community supposed to imply? Is it meant to imply that the Judge made a mistake? Is it meant to imply that the TASer didn't try hard enough? Is it meant to imply that the game itself is just bad? Any of those could be true for any TAS, but a simple 1-10 rating would never tell you that just by looking. On the opposite end, what is a high tech rating supposed to imply? Agreement with the Judge's decision to accept it? An indicator that the community recognizes a specific instance of hard work on a run? Or is it just a 10 because it's a game end glitch run and people are like "wow, how technical"? Again, any of these could apply to any TAS, and the truth wouldn't immediately be clear. Worst of all, what the hell is a middling 5 or a 6 rating supposed to represent? The "you tried" star?
tl;dr it bad, pls delete
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Hi there. Sorry to ask this, but could you please hold off on any further submissions for the time being? The staff have been overloaded with transferring over to the new site, and the Judges in particular have a large backlog of submissions to process because of it, so it'd be wonderful if you could be patient here and refrain from submitting further runs until our workload clears up more. Thank you in advance!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Ideally, yes, branches should represent unique goals, but there isn't going to be a completely perfect way of universally implementing that system. It isn't quite consistent in RTA either, even game-by-game, and with us needing to account for every possible game it's not going to be pretty to come up with rules to fit everything. We tried that before, and the result was a labyrinth where every turn led into an even bigger, worse labyrinth.
Most of the time, all it takes is one person to point out that something is amiss for us to notice it and figure out how to change it, so I think we can just sort of run on the "unique goals as branches" idea as a shell and figure things out on a case-by-case basis.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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I would honestly say ILs are very important to keep around, even the ones that may not be as optimized.
One of my biggest motivators for wanting an "anything goes" area of the site is the fact that I believe every single TAS has merit in some way or another. In this case, even slower runs might bring something brand new to the table, something that could possibly be reshaped into major improvements for publications. While I can't remember any specific examples off the top of my head, I actually remember seeing publications where one of the improvements ended up being re-implementing a strat used in a long-obsoleted run, just because there were new uses found for it. I wouldn't want that sort of thing to disappear by having active obsoletion in Playground. At the very least, even if a run brings nothing new to the technical side of the table, it could definitely provide some inspiration for entertainment choices.
Having ILs and not forcing a strict obsoletion structure also provides more of a welcoming space for those who may still be overwhelmed by the process of making a full, optimized run intended for publication. RTA glitch hunters can post IL strats they discover without needing to optimize, newer TASers can get their feet wet and get constructive feedback without the fear of rejection, it's honestly all a win/win to me.
New site maintenance is starting to slow down, so I'd like to get back to making this happen, especially since a good number of runs currently on the workbench would be perfectly suited for this and I really don't like the idea of rejecting them if we're close to agreeing on how to implement this. Does anyone else have any ideas, or are we generally in agreement on feos' Playground proposal?
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ais523 wrote:
Isn't the obvious thing to do here to time by when the game is beaten, rather than timing by last input? (As other people have mentioned, if you time by last input, the optimal thing to do is to simply not give any. But the autoplay is slower than playing it yourself, and we should pick a timing method that takes that into account.)
I could've sworn the file I submitted was the one that prioritized game completion over early input end. If it isn't, it's a really easy fix.
EDIT: I fixed this in the improvement. The input now ends at the earliest point that will finish the game as soon as possible, instead of the earliest input end that will finish the game at all. The game now ends 133 frames faster than the original submission.
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This movie was submitted with the branch name "any%", as this is the correct delineation for the category. I am aware that the currently published movie for this same category is published under the branch name "chest glitch". While it is not my decision what to do about this, should this movie be accepted for publication, I would strongly encourage the publisher to change the branch name of this category to "any%", and rename the branch that submission #4960 is published under to the common term for that category, "any% No OoB" or "No Out of Bounds". Barring this, I would highly encourage the publisher(s) to at least rename this branch to "Out of Bounds".
I personally agree with this (apart from using "any%" as a branch). As far as I can tell, there wasn't much of a discussion on the original changes to the branches, and it's not really consistent with how we branch other things. Unless there are any objections, I'd like to keep this category branchless, and rebranch the no OoB run to "inbounds". I'll give up to a week for discussion, unless there's a pretty clear opinion before that, because I really don't want to keep this run waiting any longer than it needs to.
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I forgot to mention this a week ago, but we will most likely not start going through with this until we've all settled into the new site, as the staff are primarily focusing on site changes. That, of course, doesn't mean you should all stop suggesting/discussing things! Now pardon me while I copy/paste this into other threads, changing the words slightly so it looks more like I'm not doing that.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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I forgot to mention this a week ago, but rule changes will most likely not start going through until we've all settled into the new site, as the staff are primarily focusing on site changes. That, of course, doesn't mean you should all stop suggesting/discussing things! Now pardon me while I copy/paste this into other threads, changing the words slightly so it looks more like I'm not doing that.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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I fully support changing the rules here, but that may take some time: We have been focusing really heavily on the recent launch of the new site, finding and ironing out a lot of bugs in order to ensure that everything continues running smoothly. Staff as a whole has been devoting most of their time to that.
When new site stuff has slowed down, I'm going right back to rule changes and working on a new system to objectively support many TASes like this. Until then, though, I'm absolutely willing to talk about this and clear up any misconceptions about the site rules and/or the possible (hopefully soon to be definite) acceptance of this category. Feel free to DM me on here or Discord.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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