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Hear me out here: What if there didn't have to be a common, universal ruleset? We're never going to be able to come up with one, likely not even one that works for 50%, 25%, or even 10% of all games, so what if we just encouraged the authors to work with us directly on these kinds of submissions with a much more basic set of guidelines (if any at all) as opposed to one that tries to handle every submission by itself?
We can work with the author to:
1. Define the goal of their run and verify that it would be a good fit for the site
2. Define the minimum amount of cheating necessary for that goal
3. Design reproduction steps to make it work for everyone
In this case, the goal of the run is a single, complete game run including NG+ content from a fresh character state, which to me would fit the site really well as both a watchable 100% run and an interesting challenge run that tackles postgame content far, far earlier than intended. The minimum amount of cheating, in theory, would just be finding and setting an NG+ flag that allows this to happen, which shouldn't need more than a single cheat/RAM poke for reproduction. Of course, that may not actually be the case, but we would actively be working to figure it out.
I really think the only universal guideline should be "Get it approved in advance", and then we can figure things out from there case-by-case. At most, I would add "Cheats that benefit the player cannot be used", but even then I feel like that's something that might not work in some cases.
I'm starting to feel like our "rules must be universal" mindset is much more of a problem than a solution to problem, but that's a different and much deeper discussion for a later date.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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feos wrote:
Overall I'm still not sure what your primary goal is with your movie, because you want it to mix up several different concepts. It can't be full completion if it skips initial completion of the game (it's not full if there's only a half). And it can't be NG+ because it builds on an illegitimate foundation.
This is a special case.
1. Full completion for this game requires the game to be beaten beforehand, which unlocks content that can only be accessed in NG+ (a significant amount of content as well, it's basically a third of the overall game). The second playthrough would in fact be a full playthrough, but it would also be playing all of this extra content.
2. The idea with this movie would be that the first playthrough is skipped entirely, which is significant because it makes the character much weaker in the second playthrough, as everything from the original playthrough carries over into NG+, most notably things like equipment and stat gains from defeating bosses.
This is essentially the full game experience from a completely unintended fresh slate, making it much harder (as the new NG+ content is intended for NG+ characters and not fresh ones) and more impressive of a movie overall. I think we need to discuss things like this potentially being allowable and what we would need to change for that to happen. I feel like there's a place on the site for runs like these as long as we find a way to "verify" them, and I don't think it would necessary have to lead to a destructive precedent like "hey we allow cheats now" if we implement it correctly.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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To anyone that's seen the previous movie (especially the Meh voters, should they wish to reveal themselves), can you watch the new encode and provide some feedback on the entertainment level and whether or not it's improved?
Also, more entertainment feedback in general would be lovely, thanks in advance, you're great.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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EvaTheWingdale wrote:
What happens when I submit a TAS and it doesn't appear in Submissions?
Where does it go?
This happened exactly when I submitted a Super Mario World NES TAS for beating World 1 as fast as possible.
Looks like it was uploaded to userfiles, unless you actually mean you tried making a submission and it didn't work, in which case it would have told you what you did wrong.
I'd highly recommend not formally submitting this, by the way, as we do not accept incomplete movies. Keep it to userfiles until you finish the game (userfiles are not judged, so no need to worry about rejections), then make a formal submission once it's done.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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[4314] GC Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door by Malleoz in 1:47:09.03
I feel like this game's long overdue for a Star. Several of the previous TASes have won awards, this one just won TAS of the Year over some stiff competition, and it's a great showcase of just how much a game can be broken more and more over time, being less than half of the original run's 5 hour length. They're all consistently highly rated as well, meaning the audience has always found them to be high quality and definitely entertaining, even from the very beginning.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Aight, y'all, we're in desperate need of some feedback here. It looks like a solid game despite being unreleased, though I find it quite repetitive (but maybe that's because it's essentially a Dragster clone and I spent way too much time on Dragster back in the day). Would likely be a Meh vote from me, but what do y'all think?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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It isn't a PAL thing. As far as I've seen, 50FPS is the best approximation for the Vectrex's "framerate" (modern Vectrex homebrew is optimized for 50FPS). VectrexHawk runs every Vectrex game (yes, I tested every single one) at 50FPS, at least, regardless of region (most games are tagged World or USA/Europe anyway), so at the very least it's a more accurate framerate than the 60FPS listed everywhere else.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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EZGames69 wrote:
It appears the time in the submission is wrong, the site seems to think the console runs at 60fps but it’s supposed to be 50fps.
BizHawk is doing this as well (note Fps near the bottom):
The proper time should read as 04:31.04. I've delayed the submission until either a fixed file is provided or the site parser is updated to reflect the 50FPS that VectrexHawk runs at.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Sorry for the delay! I've replaced the file.
Two things for future reference:
1. Only Judges can replace submission files
2. It is much better to use our site Userfiles to upload improvements
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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We just pushed a rule change that no longer requires difficulty to be exhausted in looping/infinite games. This submission is now within the bounds of our rules, officially making it BurgerTime time once again.
Given the rule change, the borderling votes, and the amount of (burger)time since the original rejection, I'd like another round of feedback on it. I'll be providing my own shortly.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Mitjitsu wrote:
Memory needs to realize there's a difference between the movies someone's produced and what they think of them personally.
We'll work on that if you work on not defending pedophiles:
We'll also work on that if you work on not saying things like this in response to the Discord server adding pride avatars:
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Samsara wrote:
I asked this already in Discord but figured I'd ask again in a place I can easily check: I'm planning on running the next DTC. What would be a good general timeframe for everyone? June came up as an option for those who tend to be busy with school over the rest of the year, but I was also thinking of running it over December/January to take advantage of the holidays, which will also be appropriate when I announce that everyone's working in Hourglass to improve Hyper Princess Pitch.
We're in January right now, somehow 2020 wasn't the last year of human history despite feeling like it, and after some discussion on Discord I figured I'd bump this thread and ask again about a potential timeframe for DTC10.
June is still looking like the most likely option for a start time (meaning signups would start sometime in May), though if there's a large amount of feedback on earlier/later then I can adjust for the timeframe that allows the most people to participate easily. Any thoughts, dreamers? Contestants are called dreamers now, by the way. You may say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Samsara wrote:
I may not actually get around to doing this until August or September, but it's definitely happening now that BizHawk 1.11.0 is released. Life is good. Let's make this happen.
Happy August or September of 2015, everyone! I've started a test run!
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PracticalTAS wrote:
Hi, I have a few questions about a potential future submission for Super Smash Bros Melee. The submission would be for completion of every character's Target Test stage.
1) Almost half of Melee's 25 characters must be unlocked, sometimes requiring up to several hours of playtime. Could a valid DTM submission be started with a non-empty memory card that has unlocked all characters?
The SSB64 run does this, so it's acceptable as long as there is a verification file for it. Given the nature of Melee and character unlocking, though, the nature of such a file can be discussed further. I highly recommend talking to Mothrayas about it personally, that would be the easiest path of figuring out the best balance between being site-acceptable and leaving your Gamecube on overnight to unlock Mewtwo.
2) Several characters take advantage of a glitch that is activated by playing through part of the first level of a different game mode. The total time spent playing through this level is larger than the time saved by the glitch, but Target Test is a collection of 25 individual levels which are individually timed using the in-game timer. Could a submission primarily targeting minimum in-game time (with a secondary goal of minimizing submission length in total frames) be accepted?
In-game time is acceptable, though it is explicitly a Moons goal. Tiering shouldn't be a problem with Melee, though, so no worries there.
3) Similarly, 5 of the 25 characters depend on RNG for their individual level world record times, and RNG would similarly be needed to minimize the time spent menuing (as the fastest possible way for the player to select any character is with random select - random select is closer to the character selection cursor's starting point than every character is). If a strategy forces a tradeoff between minimum in-game time and minimum submission length (say if iterating the RNG seed to get to a seed that enables the optimal in-game time costs more frames than the optimal in-game time saves over a strategy that doesn't depend on RNG), does tasvideos have a preference on which strategy is to be used?
If you're aiming for in-game time, in-game time takes precedence over real time, though real time should still be minimized wherever possible. If it's only a matter of frames, it's no trouble at all, so feel free to sacrifice those frames to get the optimal RNG. It shouldn't even be a problem at all unless the manipulation takes several seconds or more per stage.
4) Most individual levels do not have accurate re-record counts, as a) players improving on others' records do not iterate on the previous record holder's DTMs, and b) newer records are generally created on a hacked version of Melee with (among other things) debug mode access, then the final inputs are applied to a vanilla version of the game, and we have not kept records of re-record counts on the hacked version. Would the lack of an accurate re-record count negatively impact the submission?
Not at all. Just 0 out the count from the submission DTM and the parser will mark it as "unknown". Alternately, you can put in an estimation. Or don't bother doing either and just give that explanation upfront with an unedited final file, nobody's going to call you out on it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
The proper time should read as 04:31.04. I've delayed the submission until either a fixed file is provided or the site parser is updated to reflect the 50FPS that VectrexHawk runs at.
We'll also work on that if you work on not saying things like this in response to the Discord server adding pride avatars:
