Posts for Samsara


Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Having put some TAS effort into this game a few years back, I knew it would be an excellent watch going in, and it still exceeded my expectations. Can't believe it never occurred to me to use Magnescope to cancel attack animations, those boss fights are insane, especially with all of the manipulation done as well. The movement tech ramps up flawlessly over the course of the run, too, always keeping things interesting even with the backtracking, since the revisited areas are cleared in different ways with the new tech. Endgame is insane with Jaguar Swipe and Homing Pendulum. Definite Yes from me, here, really fantastic work!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
DarkShamilKhan wrote:
I understand but that won't be accepted on tasvideos.org.
One, don't speak for the Judges. Two, you're wrong, any hack TAS has the possibility of being accepted. In fact, character hacks tend to be less well-received than hacks that actually drastically change the game, since for the most part "different character in the same levels" adds nothing of real value to the site. The character hacks we currently have were published at a time where our rules were much less defined than they are now, and should not be taken as precedents because of it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
No zips over zips, definitely. The appeal of using a different character is completely lost when the majority of the run is spent with the character offscreen and the camera scrolling incredibly quickly. Ideally, though, a level hack comes in the future and obsoletes the character hacks in general.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Publication encode candidates: https://mega.nz/folder/S98WnTgQ#yzRGTOhuq47JfqzuOgIoJw Preview: Link to video Screenshot (frame 78909):
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Publication encode candidates: https://mega.nz/folder/ixkDhAAC#KjIa6AsEe0Q6iUC4lciJCQ Preview: Link to video Screenshot choice (frame 6060):
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Publication encode candidates: https://mega.nz/folder/js0hQCiC#2uRtzehE4ULtWXQwlfaCQA Preview (outdated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhfT5iccEfQ EDIT (Jan 8th, 2021): This was for the original 09:14.42 submission. New encodes are provided in a later post.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: samsara posted in music thread again, cover ears in advance
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Vault rules have been clarified to reflect how we have historically treated submissions with speed/entertainment tradeoffs:
Opportunities to entertain the audience where it does affect time are discouraged, though not disallowed if the overall technical quality and optimization are up to par. A movie that does not have speed/entertainment tradeoffs will always be prioritized over one that does.
No actual rule changes have been made. This submission can be published as planned, though future submissions should take damage to save those 2-5 seconds.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
How much time could be saved by taking damage?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
I've been using Github for longterm image hosting on TASvideos (avatars, submission text images, etc) and haven't had a single problem with it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Getting into a ceiling looks like it's all about positioning as soon as you find one that's compatible: In theory it should be possible in every location like the above (this is in the first swimming section, around frame 3400 in the submission), though for an optimized TAS I would check every single ceiling along the route even if it doesn't look like you'd be able to get in. It might not work immediately: You'll probably have to adjust when you press A to swim upward alongside holding Up or Down to further fine tune the position. Once you're in the ceiling proper, you'll want to hold Up the entire time, and find the frame where pressing A zips you forward. If you can't find that frame, go back to adjusting your position: There may be a frame where you get zipped downward out of the ceiling entirely, repositioning a bit can fix that. Once you can zip, A can be pressed every 4 frames from there to continue zipping at top speed, it should look like this in TAS Editor when done optimally (hyperlinked to image because it's a bit tall). I've got so many other projects at the moment on top of the December submission rush, otherwise I'd look deeper into both that and the floor clip, but hopefully that should be a good start for an improvement! oops i broke it User movie #68199453342958203 Decided to look into the floor clip. I held Down + Left until going as far down as I could. Holding Right from there and then tapping A a few times will complete the clip and put you under the level... Which is essentially a giant ceiling. Zips all day. That userfile is a 1000 frame improvement by itself and it likely could be improved further, I was admittedly rushing it just to get the knowledge back to you. The slowdowns are to avoid swimming back up into the level (or into weirdly placed "holes" in the floor ceiling, that sure was a set of words I just typed and meant). Turns out you might not need to hold Up for ceiling zipping, though I'd imagine it never hurts to do it anyway.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Start with these, follow up with this, find yourself a game, mess around with it, and maybe watch some tutorials. TASing is much more of a hands-on learning experience than anything, you'll learn the most effective way for yourself by just jumping in and experimenting.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Were the swimming sections done in real time? The input looks noticeably less clean in comparison to the rest of the run, and taking a quick scan through the second one in particular (starting at 5:36 in the encode), I can see a lot of places that look a bit odd, particularly the 10 second stretch between 5:55 and 6:05 that starts with taking the long way around that shark (requiring more time spent swimming upward) and ending with what looks like an unnecessary slowdown right before exiting that little tunnel. I played around with the swimming section and found that the ceiling zipping used at 5:46 can be applied in many other places, anywhere you can get into the ceiling in fact. Using it effectively also means you don't have to switch to Diddy at all since you have more room to avoid enemies even with Donk's bigger donk. I made a quick test of what this would look like and saved over 90 frames (changed input starts around frame 21300): User movie #68190864367937085 I imagine much more careful usage of the zipping across all the swimming stages can save several seconds overall. There's a frame rule in effect, too: At one point I ended up with a file where the stage ended on the exact same frame even if I switched to Diddy, but even with that there's still a lot of potential time saves.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Watched the stream (highly recommend people watch the VOD by the way!), excellent work, gray Contra man is still best Contra man.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Evan0512 wrote:
I tried this in Mario Kart DS, but when I press the A, left/right, and R buttons, it works, but not L, A, and right buttons.
We've told you multiple times now that this has nothing to do with BizHawk. You're experiencing keyboard ghosting. This is strictly a hardware issue on your end. Either rebind your keys to work around your keyboard's limitations or get a mechanical keyboard that allows for every button to be pressed simultaneously with no ghosting.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Memory wrote:
I don't disagree that it's natural that it's disjointed, in fact I have no problems with that. I think the frustration more comes from the fact that the ambassador of the site is one of the organizers. If TASBot is its own thing then imo we need to start looking into outreach events of our own and reconsider how we handle things. We need to stop relying on the TASBot crew to do that for us and reconsider how we treat the ambassador role. EDIT: To clarify, this isn't really directly a criticism of the TASBot community or the ambassadors in question. Life is a thing, people find their own groups etc. However, as a site tasvideos needs to revisit the role and how we want to handle outreach. I don't think this is a particularly appropriate topic for this particular thread though so I'll leave it there.
This is exactly the problem with it. If the burden of bridging the gap between the two communities lies on TASvideos, it would in theory fall to the ambassadors, but the ambassadors themselves are the ones running the subcommunity in the first place. The thing is, not reaching out more to TASvideos implies that something is driving a wedge between the two communities, and if we don't know what's doing that we don't know how to fix it. We set up the ambassador team in the first place because of the TAS showcases at GDQ, which did wonders for driving people over to the site and bringing TASing to a much wider audience, but if that entire ambassador team has branched off into their own thing to promote, to the point where even members of OUR community have completely acknowledged and accepted the divide and are defending them, then it makes it all the more clear to me that there is a massive problem here that needs to be fixed. It's obviously on our side, so I'd just like to know what it is. And I don't mean "it's obviously on our side" as "we hired bad ambassadors", because we clearly didn't (the event was a success after all). What I mean is that we're doing something to push them away to their own subcommunity. How TASGiving was handled was a major indicator of that in my eyes, and it's clearly something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible so that the TAS community as a whole can come together, grow and expand further.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
compucat wrote:
I thought I'd finally register here (hi!) and keep an eye on this thread
So this is actually my biggest concern about the whole event. As a whole, TASGiving felt almost entirely separated from TASvideos. I feel like the whole team should have been active here from the start, answering questions and providing information/updates. There was a long period of time where I actually forgot that TASGiving was even happening because of how little interaction there was over here. I'm aware that dwango had a hell of a lot going on in his life and wasn't able to provide our community with as many updates as he would have liked, but what was preventing the rest of the team from doing so in his stead? Why are members of the team only signing up to the forums now, long after the event ended? Why wasn't there any direct interaction via Discord? For a TAS-focused event, members of the primary TAS community shouldn't have to join a subcommunity in order to receive updates, especially when much smaller blocks of time have had incredibly active community participation threads devoted to them in the past. It's honestly worrying me how much of a growing disconnect there seems to be between TASvideos and the TASbot community, and being left in the dark like this did nothing to alleviate those worries.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Since we're so close to a sub 3 minute time, we need to find a couple of extra microoptimizations to shave off just those extra 6 seconds. My bets are the final guard kill in the last level. Since his shot frequency is so high, it's impossible to squeeze in a hyperjump between his arrows which means I have to kill him first. If maybe I can enter the level with two hearts instead of one, we could potentially use up that last heart there without killing the guard.
I looked into this, and as it turns out, you can hyperjump from the top of a ladder too! You still have to ignore damage earlier on since otherwise the crouch will send you into the guard and you'll die before you can jump, but it works if you take damage on the bat right before the final screen and squeeze by with invulnerability frames. I did a quick test of that here, still not sub-3:00 but much closer now: 68041630727897821 User movie #68042279538169436 Vhyrro, feel free to optimize that file and upload it to Userfiles. We can replace the file on this submission so you don't need to resubmit.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
"PROGRESSIVE POLICIES" ISN'T CONTROLLING THE WEATHER YOU FUCKING BIGOT
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Man, bigots get so mad when you call them bigots. It's almost like they're bigots or something!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Bigot! Bigot!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: itt some bigot blames california's weather on black people
Samsara
She/They
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Joined: 11/13/2006
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Someone lock the thread until the bigot goes away, thanks in advance.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Just pointing it out further toward the guy who basically said "in today's fucked up world, if you don't care about human rights, you get labelled as a bigot!":
IronSlayer wrote:
With Social Justice/Progressivism, there is no recognition whatsoever. Every single issue, even economics and tax rates, becomes "human rights, brah!" and if you disagree, that must naturally mean you're an evil bigot, an ignorant moron, or both.
The most depressing thing in the world is the idea that caring about people is "progressive" as opposed to "literally how humanity should have always been from the dawn of humankind". I'm truly sorry your worldview has been so corrupted by your bigotry.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
TiKevin83 wrote:
https://fee.org/articles/black-lives-matter-s-goal-to-disrupt-the-nuclear-family-fits-a-marxist-aim-that-goes-back-a-century-and-a-half/
literally the article you just linked wrote:
As Brad Polumbo has shown, there are effectively two Black Lives Matter phenomena: the Black Lives Matter™️ organization and “black lives matter” as an informal movement. The latter involves people fighting in good faith for police reform who believe African Americans suffer disproportionately from police violence.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Samsara
She/They
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.