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feos wrote:
I think this bullet point can be removed.
Gladly!
PAL stuff was also added since, yeah, your writing was pretty concise there. I split out the C64/Famiclone/SMS stuff and put it under the "accurate to hardware" section just to make the "correct version" section a bit less bulky, did a little more re-organizing and rewriting as well to fit these changes.
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feos wrote:
Some exceptions are made to this, though these exceptions are usually explicit in the published run's judgement or publication text.
Not obvious what an exception may be made for. Also do we still make such exceptions? I think we prefer fixing the rule to match the agreed scenario.
This is pretty much direct from the current rules, and I have no idea how to fix it here. It might have to wait until we start doing explicit changes.
There are a few mentions of obsoletion in other chapters. I think it would be useful if everything related to obsoletion is grouped in one place (which is also why we grouped all Vault/Standard clauses together).
I honestly think it works better the way I have it. I already think the obsoletion section is wordy enough as it is in the draft, so compiling everything related to obsoletion there would just make it even bulkier. It should be a more generalized, succinct section to explain how the process works, while more specific cases can go under their respective sections in other parts of the rules. That is, if we're already talking about early access games in another part of the rules, it makes more sense to me to immediately explain how we're going to handle full release cases there, rather than redirect people to a separate section of the rules.
The recently bumped C64 thread reminded me that we should list things explicitly allowed to be run in PAL mode
Gonna call this a technical thing as well, and definitely not just because my eyes are glazing over trying to make heads or tails of it right now.
Rest of the suggestions should be implemented by now. Honestly, I'm getting antsy to move into rule changes already.
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Apart from in-game time and secondary playthroughs, these should all be accounted for already, they're just shuffled around to more appropriate sections. NMS and independent game modes are already there, SRAM and in-game codes are under "Movie must be complete", PC environment is under "Gameplay must be accurate to hardware", and I've just added 2nd quest and IGT stuff.
I'll frick around with obsoletion stuff for a bit. Thinking I might experiment with having a section at the end for things like that. EDIT: Obsoletion stuff rewritten and added, it's currently under the tech quality section.
EDIT 2:
feos wrote:
Alternately, you may end when the in-game difficulty (enemy speed, AI, etc.) stops increasing.
I don't mind to make this an alternative ending point, but I should clarify that currently it works as an extension of "all content". If you want, you can play even further after all content is completed, but not instead of completing it.
I've fixed this as well. The only stuff left from your second post should be the tech stuff we all need to discuss together.
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User movie #75515128403815194
Seems like you can also change the VBlankCount in Header.txt to correct the time? Not sure if this is functionally the same as what feos suggested, I've never worked with this core before now.
EDIT: Yeah, it seems functionally the same. Saving on final frame just sets VBlankCount to 19. I'll go ahead and replace the file. EDIT 2: Done.
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I'm just going to go on record and say that if "Publishers don't feel like dealing with it" is an actual open reason for not accepting these frameworks, then our publication standards need to be overhauled.
This is a discussion we've had a few times in the past as staff, and to me this actually feels like the biggest thing holding back custom TAS frameworks. The idea that a custom framework absolutely needs to have built-in lossless AVI capture for us to accept it is kind of an absurd thing to ask of people. With our publication standards as they are currently, the argument is really just a them or us situation regarding the heavy amounts of work that goes into our current quality standards for publication. Either we have to spend days or possibly weeks figuring out how to encode something to our insanely perfectionist standards, or we have to force every custom framework dev to implement features that are specifically only for us.
This should not be "someone has to work hard and I don't want it to be me", it should be "nobody has to work hard at all".
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feos wrote:
To match the point above, it needs to say "a killscreen".
As an extension of this, one is also allowed to play until difficulty stops increasing.
I feel this should be a new paragraph.
Individual game modes (level sets, episodes), including those unlocked using passwords, are also acceptable as separate branches.
The triviality clause! While there are some plans regarding it, we're gonna need it for rules that would boil down to it to get dropped.
Unofficial games. Bootlegs, homebrews, prototypes, etc. While I don't feel very strong about limiting them the way the current rules do, there should still be some discussion on what to do with them in the end. I don't even ask to copy the current rules over, just some general info that makes sense to you.
These should all be in, now.
Regarding converted ROMs, I'm not sure. We don't want to depend on 3rd party converters unless we can host them. There's also Thread #21609: #6624: Chamale's Wii MLB Power Pros 2008 "Success mode" in 21:34.17. But things that work on actual device would be fine most of the time.
Image integrity. Some games glitch out if you replace the disk with something else. While great for crazy showcase, That would need a special place to be designed to host such things (also planned).
As for that one game that asks you to insert arbitrary images, I feel it would be fair to allow inserting official games for the same system to make it easier for the player. But I'm not sure where this clause should be placed.
We talked about this on Discord, but to summarize it here: I'm skipping the heavy technical stuff for now, more or less. This may just be something we want to revisit once we get into actual changes, either that or leave them off the main rules page entirely.
We'll be revising score attack rules very soon, but for now it should be good to mention that infinite loop techniques are not allowed (ones that delay completion indefinitely to score more points).
Arcade continues are an infinite source of lives, and they make the game easier. We'll see what to do with them later, should be safe to append to the cheats clause for now.
Added both of these.
Obsoletion chapter is incredibly wordy right now, but we need at least some basic info about it mentioned somewhere.
Rules for systems: Should we have a subpages under MovieRules for each system?
Movie formats: Looks like it needs to be an automatic thing, also not sure where.
I like having system subpages, though I do feel they'll end up being a bunch of fairly empty pages. If that's what we want, we'll go with it, but it may be a little cleaner to just use a single subpage for systems. Movie formats, yeah, I have no idea what to do with that section either, but I know for a fact it shouldn't be in the rules. Maybe just another subpage?
I've been thinking the entire day about consolidating regulations about TAS environments. There's a ton of info all around the current rules, and also some info in various places of the draft.
We explicitly allow running a game in any config variant of the official and intended environment, unless it causes bugs that hinder gameplay, visuals, or audio. Important term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_architecture
For consoles and other devices with closed architecture, we don't allow deviations from official and intended environment. If it's a game released for PAL PlayStation, we run it in emulated PAL PlayStation, with all authentic config. But we allow better GBx modes unless it causes problems.
For open architecture, we're more open too. Emulating officially supported environment is also allowed of course. And deviations may be allowed depending on their effect on gameplay: improving framerate or audio-visuals is a good thing. Running incompatible hardware is not.
This would automatically resolve most of libTAS rules too.
I think this is in the same camp as heavy technical stuff to focus on later.
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I've gone ahead and implemented the above suggestions, and I've also done some further rewriting and re-organizing. The draft's gotten a bit bulkier, but it's still only 25% of the current rules, and once we start getting into actual changes it should deflate more as things are removed and reworked.
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Fortranm wrote:
I'm not sure if this falls under rule change or clarification more, but are the typical NG+ modes considered "individual game modes" mentioned for the Standard category?
NG+ can be considered an individual game mode, but I was more referring to title screen options, i.e Super Monkey Ball 2 having both Challenge Mode and Story Mode TASes as they are separate options, and thus considered individual game modes.
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Spikestuff wrote:
I want to be the only one dragged for it.
I'm not gonna let that happen, since I was also involved in these incidents. While I only had one alternate account and my involvement stopped in early 2017, I can't deny that I was heavily involved in these incidents starting and continuing for as long as they did, and like Spike, I apologize for both my actions and for enabling Spike's continued actions after I left the site. There's one important thing that's been missing from this conversation over the years, though, and that's how this all started in the first place. This all started with a user named Unknown394. He has many other names, as you will soon see, but I will be calling him Unknown throughout this explanation.
Unknown's run on TASvideos was fairly brief, but... "notable", shall we say. He submitted a couple SMB1 runs and moved into an NSMBWii hack. What he also moved into was alt accounts.Several of them.Noxxa sums up Unknown's alt activity in this post, banning the three known alts Unknown was using to manipulate the voting on his submissions. Past this moment, Unknown basically disappeared from the site altogether.
Why is this significant? Let me quote part of the OP:
BrunoVisnadi wrote:
Finally, Spikestuff made a rather interesting series of tweets on January 24th, 2017, the day when the accounts were created:
In this tweet, Spikestuff refers to an attack on a video with multiple accounts. He was mocking the author of the video in previous tweets.
Image
tghi 1-10 is Unknown, using an alt account.
Here, he refers to his other accounts: ''*Going through the other accounts.*''. The double * makes it obvious was saying he used other accounts to massively dislike that video.
Image
Super Mario CHANNEL is also Unknown. That statement about "going through the other accounts" was referring to Unknown.
Hemadeothertweetsmocking the author of the video he was mass disliking. In the last one I linked, he shows a print of one of the sockpuppets, AspireDesire, helping him in the discussion.
I Love SMB is Unknown's main account, I believe. SNES Donkey Kong 1, 2, 3 is Unknown. Mario Comedy Topic is Unknown. For transparency, that Japanese account mentioned in a few of those tweets was my alt, and not Spike's.
Unknown had about 20 alt accounts on YouTube altogether. Most of them have been removed, though some of them still remain. Unknown was using these accounts on YouTube for more than just gaming the system in the same way he did on TASvideos. Unknown was using them for harassment, directed heavily towards Spike. Spike's videos were mass downvoted and mass reported by these alts. One of these alts, now removed, was directly impersonating Spike. Several of these alts were re-uploading our published runs (you'll notice that this is once again a different alt), and these re-uploads would occasionally be low quality encodes with all attributions removed.
This was happening back before TASvideos had any effective moderation, so this behavior was not dealt with whatsoever. Unknown, to this day, is not banned from TASvideos, as you may have noticed from my linking of his profile. Spike and I hated that, and we felt like the only way of fighting back was, effectively, to fight fire with fire. I had already stepped down from staff and effectively left the site by January 2017, I was not in a good place mentally at the time, and so, to be blunt, I didn't give a damn about doing it. I didn't try to stop it. I kinda wanted that sort of vigilante chaos, honestly, as an expression of my frustrations with how the site used to operate. In doing so, I helped enable a years long period of darkness for the site, and I don't think I can apologize enough for it. I can only say this was started in better intentions than initially reported, but that is absolutely not an excuse for what happened. Nothing I just said is an excuse. I'm not trying to justify our actions at all, I just want to explain why they happened.
Mostly, I don't want Spike to take the burden of this alone, not just because I was there, but because I understand why it happened, and I genuinely don't think it was even done with malicious intent. I see it the same way I saw myself doing it: Intense, growing frustration over the TASvideos of the past not taking care of things in the right way, not moderating effectively, ignoring problems especially if they were happening outside of the site itself. In a way, I see it as passion for the site at heart, though horribly twisted into active malicious behavior. This behavior is long gone, now. Not just in Spike, not just in me, but also in TASvideos itself. TASvideos has moved forward with much more effective moderation and a much closer staff than before. The site has progressed to the point where situations like these will never happen again, and I can promise that, and you can hold me to that promise.
If you don't want to forgive Spike, then you shouldn't be forgiving me either, and we will accept that. The two of us have been working on actively improving ourselves for the past several years, and we will continue to do so going forward. As hard as it is to prove, I don't want anyone thinking that there's no guilt or regret for what we did. There is a lot of guilt, guilt that prevented either of us from wanting to face the truth until now, guilt we just wanted to forget about and hope that everyone else did too, but people don't forget easily, and running away only made the problem worse.
So, again, I'm sorry. We're sorry. Responsibility has been taken, healing can begin. If anyone wants to know more, I intend to be as open as I can about this with what I remember.
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The full draft has been re-organized and rewritten. I've added a basic summary to it based on ThunderAxe's post as well. Any further feedback is appreciated here! If we all think it's ready to go right now, then I can put it up now and open up this thread to actual rule changes.
There's one thing I'm still considering for the current draft: The idea of an FAQ section was brought up on Discord, and I think that'd be a great way of adding more information and clarification without further complication. Is this a good idea, and if so, what should be in it right now?
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I've finished my first pass at simplifying the rules, and I've created a separate page to reflect what the rules page will eventually look like. There are some notable omissions from that full draft - These were intentional, mainly because I felt they didn't fit in their current sections and wanted to re-organize everything before adding them back in to a new, easier-to-read set of sections. We're already at about 1/6 the length of the current rules, and some further organization should push it even lower even after adding everything back in.
The biggest omissions are the system-specific rules and the section on movie formats: I will not be adding these back into the rules, as I do not think they belong there. The overall rules should be applying to the majority of submissions coming in, and shouldn't be complicated by breaking down individual systems. I'm not entirely sure where they'll go just yet, though they'll most likely have their own pages.
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Very good questions! It's almost like I told you to post them here so I'd actually remember to put them in the updated rules!
ikuyo wrote:
What is the preferred update/patch number for Linux and DOS games? Is latest available preferred always? can we accept an earlier full release (v1.0+ or after launch date) if it produces faster movies?
Any release version is allowed, the only requirements are that the author explains why that version was chosen, and that we are actually able to access that version in order to verify it.
What is the stance of TASVideos about games tied to DRM (such as Steam or EGS) that might eventually be lost due to this DRM issue?
Currently there's no official stance except for "no DRM is preferred but not required". We've accepted Steam TASes already at least.
Are early access games and episodic games acceptable? For episodic games, does a movie released later that includes more episodes automatically obsolete a movie with less content?
My gut feeling here is that we should be able to accept them in their current forms, assuming they're "finished" enough to be able to reach an ending of some sort. Early access would definitely be obsoleted by full releases, and episodic games would vary depending on how they're presented: If all episodes are eventually released in a single game, we may prefer all episodes in one file, but if each episode is its own separate game, we'll have to take each episode individually.
This isn't an official site stance though, just my personal thoughts on how it should be. I'll make sure to run it by the rest of the staff when I put together the final draft of the rules.
For games with variable graphical settings that can affect performance (such as RE games or the Towerfall 1000fps movie), is there a preferred setting? Is it explicitly the responsibility of the runner to state the environment? (environment rules such as fps are set in libTAS atm, but it's not a bad idea to futureproof)
Answering this is entirely out of my league ._. I'll run it by the smart people on staff and make sure to account for it in the new rules. I wanna say the default graphical settings are always preferred just for consistency's sake, though.
@ThunderAxe: Nice work so far! Once I finish my own first draft/summary, I'll do an in-depth compare/contrast with yours.
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The general rationale I'm seeing in this thread is that this run looks too similar to a normal Genocide TAS: Would a minimum Z press TAS of a different ending be markedly different enough from its normal TAS to not gather that kind of feedback? If minimum Z Genocide really is as different as you say, I think that would be the preferred submission here.
The appeal of challenges like this lies in how much the restriction changes the resulting product. In the case of minimizing button presses, the best way of presenting that is with the maximum amount of content, in order to best showcase how many ways minimizing button presses presents a challenge by maximizing the number of situations where it needs to be done. A longer route like Genocide or TPE may present something more interesting to the audience at large, and keep in mind you do need to be appealing to the audience at large here. We're not all experts in the game, so a challenge run has to sort of speak for itself in order to show people how different it is.
Moons is still a bit rough as a concept on TASvideos. I don't feel quite right sitting here and suggesting how people should make their runs to fit our audience, but the site's in a pretty major state of flux right now so something could definitely change in the future. I'd just like to say whatever ends up happening, don't get discouraged by the result, as the site will eventually adapt to accommodate more things like this.
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New Progress Page: http://tasvideos.org/Samsara/MovieRulesRewrite/FullDraft.html
We already have severalothermassive changes going on at TASvideos, how about we add another?
If you've ever tried to submit a movie, you will have been directed to the Movie Rules page at several points, and you will have likely and correctly noticed that this page is an absolute mess. It's long, it's wordy, it's complicated, and yet somehow you're expected to read the whole thing and ensure your movie complies with everything there.
That's going to change.
My current goal for this rewrite is to get the rules in a much more simplified state, without changing the rules themselves just yet. This thread is meant for masochists you fine people to comb through the current movie rules and discuss what we currently have, providing feedback on how it could be explained better or simplified to make sense. If you have any opinion on the complexity of the current rules, feel free to chime in. We're looking for an overall community consensus on this, not just people who currently submit runs or intend to in the future.
I have to stress, though: Do not suggest actual rule changes yet! Rule changes will be a separate discussion altogether once this rewrite has finished, don't worry! Actual rule changes will become much easier after the rewrite, because... Yes, even the Judges have a hard time going through this nightmare of a page. I believe the reason things got so complicated is because we kept adding new rules without realizing that we already had rules to handle the things that we're adding rules for. If that sounds like it doesn't make sense, you're right! What it means though is that if we start implementing rule changes now, it will just continue to lead to complication, lengthening the rewrite process.
I've provided a couple helpful examples of the feedback I want and the feedback I don't currently want:
Feedback Samsara Wants wrote:
Example One: I don't think we need most of the "Use the Correct Version" section anymore. It's a lot of words to say "both (U) and (J) are acceptable and nearly interchangeable".
Example Two: The entire sports game section is just a jumbled mess of bullet points that could be condensed down to a good paragraph.
This is going to be a decently long process, but the more feedback there is, the faster it will go! Keep checking in on this thread and the progress page linked at the top of this post, I'll be updating them throughout this process until we finally have a readable set of rules live and ready to be actually understood for the first time!
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feos wrote:
So here's the thing I've been thinking of for a good while.
The current wording of the triviality clause, while it's still debatable if we want to keep it in the future at all, seems to cover a whole lot of things that exist as separate rules. For example, we removed the rule about educational games, because it was incredibly hard to figure out, and the goal of that rule was still to avoid triviality. Similarly, I feel we should get rid of the rule about "visual novels and games of a Choose Your Own Adventure story book variety", because we only want to reject those if it's trivial to speedrun them, and we already have a decent rule for that.
Opinions?
Removing the triviality clause altogether is a long term goal of mine, so I definitely support any and every step taken to get to that point. This change in particular makes a lot of sense, and it's yet another example of how our rules grew increasingly complicated over time to cover edge cases despite the fact that we already had rules that covered those edge cases. It happened before with looping games and us realizing that maxing out the difficulty is effectively just a difficulty choice, which has been up to the author for several years now, and I'm sure it'll continue happening as we keep looking through the rules.
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I also fully support this change, and as a non-senior level staff member I can confirm that all of the current staff were directly involved in making it happen.
TASvideos has effectively been running with Nach as a single point of failure for the last decade. Site progress has been bottlenecked by him being increasingly harder to reach over the past several years, and bottlenecked even further not only by his insistence that he be involved in every major change and that we cater to his demands, but also by him simply disagreeing with nearly every change we proposed, often leading to complicated compromises that only served to make maintaining the site more difficult over time. The situation behind the scenes has been much less than ideal under him, to say the least.
I acknowledge and respect that, without him, the site may not have continued nearly as long as it has, and I thank him for maintaining the site architecture for as long as he has as the only person with the technical knowledge to be able to do so. However, the age of that architecture has been showing for nearly as long as he's been maintaining it, and now we're finally at a point where we're on the verge of replacing it with something we can easily maintain and update ourselves.
There's going to be a lot of positive change as a result of this decision, and I can't wait to make it happen.
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nymx wrote:
Question for the Judge: Do the rules support a "dead end" situation like this?
I took a look at the run and had a brief talk with other staff and we're generally in agreement that the final input isn't needed here. It's a looping game with the final input leading to the next loop, it doesn't lead to an ending or credits or anything final, so it isn't necessary to include in the input file.
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There was a bit of discussion on Discord about this, and we realized it wasn't quite clear exactly how the MKV encode complicates subtitles, so here's a quick example/explanation:
For publications, subtitles need to be placed in a way that doesn't obscure anything relevant to the game or the TAS, i.e they can't cover the character or UI elements. MKV stretches out subtitles horizontally, pretty significantly in fact:
This is something you have to actively check during the encoding process, too: For our encoding package, we preview in VirtualDub, and the VirtualDub preview shows the subtitles as they pertain to the MP4 encode. You have to manually check whether or not the MKV subtitles line up in the way you want. This is often not the case, meaning you either have to find a new placement altogether or re-encode MKV with different placement, as shown in the first screenshot with Batman. This is something that new encoders generally find out the hard way, and something that even experienced encoders often overlook, requiring further re-encoding and more time wasted, slowing down publication for a team that's already understaffed and overworked as it is. And the thing is, this problem is inherent to the MKV encode. The YouTube HD stream is essentially just an upscaled version of the MP4 in terms of sub placements, so finding a good placement for MP4 means you've found a good placement for YouTube HD.
Dropping support for MKV would mean significantly streamlining the encoding process. TASvideos is trending towards accepting more movies and games as well, meaning in the future publishers will have to work even harder than they already do. No MKV means that encoding would take much less time (both in pure encode time and in prep time), and the overall process would become less daunting for new publishers, possibly enticing new people to help out. In my eyes, there is nothing bad about this change whatsoever, and I 100% support it.
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User movie #75249578091863469
I found something out while judging: I noticed walking upward on the overworld seems to lag in certain spots, so I tested a bit and found a different path that lags less. I don't know the game enough to be able to test further, though. AmaizumiUni, would you mind looking further into this yourself?
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Link to videoUser movie #75231347125624701
First disc complete. For those unaware, the fight in the video is a one minute timed battle
I'm debating on whether or not to downgrade this back to "test run" status. I made some minor routing mistakes, planned ahead for a lot of things that I ended up not needing at all, discovered new and faster methods of doing things, and I already have some ideas on how to save time in earlier sections that shouldn't actually be too hard to implement, assuming I can get them to work. With the game being mostly dialogue, redoing it from scratch isn't going to be too much of a problem, and I want to do it justice.
I'll see where I end up when I close in on the end of the run.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
This is going to be a decently long process, but the more feedback there is, the faster it will go! Keep checking in on this thread and the progress page linked at the top of this post, I'll be updating them throughout this process until we finally have a readable set of rules live and ready to be actually understood for the first time!
For publications, subtitles need to be placed in a way that doesn't obscure anything relevant to the game or the TAS, i.e they can't cover the character or UI elements. MKV stretches out subtitles horizontally, pretty significantly in fact:
This is something you have to actively check during the encoding process, too: For our encoding package, we preview in VirtualDub, and the VirtualDub preview shows the subtitles as they pertain to the MP4 encode. You have to manually check whether or not the MKV subtitles line up in the way you want. This is often not the case, meaning you either have to find a new placement altogether or re-encode MKV with different placement, as shown in the first screenshot with Batman. This is something that new encoders generally find out the hard way, and something that even experienced encoders often overlook, requiring further re-encoding and more time wasted, slowing down publication for a team that's already understaffed and overworked as it is. And the thing is, this problem is inherent to the MKV encode. The YouTube HD stream is essentially just an upscaled version of the MP4 in terms of sub placements, so finding a good placement for MP4 means you've found a good placement for YouTube HD.
Dropping support for MKV would mean significantly streamlining the encoding process. TASvideos is trending towards accepting more movies and games as well, meaning in the future publishers will have to work even harder than they already do. No MKV means that encoding would take much less time (both in pure encode time and in prep time), and the overall process would become less daunting for new publishers, possibly enticing new people to help out. In my eyes, there is nothing bad about this change whatsoever, and I 100% support it.
