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MUGG wrote:
Ratings are subjective. Everyone has their own rules how they rate things and technical ratings sometimes seemed unfair (to me at least). I suggest a) you keep the current system and the current ratings instead of flushing all the rate data, or b) let people give a single rating, namely how much they liked the run.
Ratings are subjective, yes, but even if everyone has different opinions, when everything averages out the result is a clear indication of what the movie's rating should be. The more people rating a movie, the more clear the rating is going to suggest the movie's quality. 3 people giving an average rating of 5 could mean anything: It could be 3 votes of 5, 4-5-6, 3-5-7, 2-5-8, 1-5-9, 0-5-10 even, or some other weird mix of three numbers that average out to 5. 25 people giving an average rating of 5, on the other hand, means that the ratings in general are going to be more biased toward 5.
We need the rating system simplified in order to make ratings make more sense. Tech Quality in particular makes no sense, everyone rates it drastically differently and only a handful of people can really, truly determine a movie's technical quality. In my eyes, Tech is a horrible rating to have, since a movie is guaranteed to have high tech quality just on the virtue of it being accepted. Most people just rate it the same as they rate entertainment, because I guess they're unaware of the implication that the game being terrible must mean the quality of the TAS is terrible as well.
I'm not suggesting anything that would wipe away all the ratings of every movie on the site, I'm sure we could keep 12-13 years of ratings around for the redesign, but my intent is just to make them more visible and useful. We've had threads asking us to make rating movies easier, and that's what I want to happen at bare minimum, but overhauling the system in general and giving new factors to rate may also be beneficial in giving more weight to a movie's rating.
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
I have always been fine with the way it has been. I don't think we need an extra submission data entry "people that helped". Just put that info in a Thanks section in the submission text. Also, it seems very unreliable/inconsistent to measure how much someone helped and give points according to that. But then again, you could introduce a different point system next to the player points, called "assist points". I think I could see myself liking that, but I can't tell.
I wouldn't mind a separate point system for my idea. I feel like credit in general is a huge gray area, almost every time I've submitted a movie over the past year I've felt like I had to give some sort of credit to a user who, overall, had little to do with the actual TAS itself. The Umihara Kawase submissions are a perfect example of this, where I had no actual collaboration or contact with the Nico TASer whose routes were used and optimized and thus did not include them as a co-author, but without them the TAS wouldn't be nearly as optimized as it is.
The thing is, we already have published TASes where co-authors have no actual input in the file and only a minimal amount of contribution in general. We have published TASes where several co-authors were credited for minor timesaves without having any actual input in the file. We have published TASes where there are co-authors who did nothing but re-sync other peoples' improvements into current files, with those people not even being credited. We have published TASes where there are co-authors who literally did nothing for the movie. I'm not saying any of these are bad, I'm saying that this kind of stuff already means that player points are "diluted".
This is why I think my idea has some solid ground. Credit is dangerous territory. Some people will refuse credit for actual TASing work they've done, some people will expect credit for doing little to no work in general. Some people will argue that other people should get credit, to the point where they want credit forced upon those people. Some people should be getting credit for the things they provide to the site, even if they're not TASes.
So maybe we should go with something like "Assist Points"... or "Credit Points", since I've been using the word "credit" three times per sentence anyway. Offer these new points for doing things that may not have anything to do with actual TASing, but are still useful to the site. Make a yearly award out of it, even. "Contributor of the Year" or "User of the Year" has always been an award I'd like to see, just for the people that don't TAS but are extremely kind and helpful toward the community. This could be a great way to initiate that award and get people to start offering more contributions.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
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Samsara wrote:
That's why we have these threads in place, so we can actually deliver a redesign that everyone likes, both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. I sound like I'm making an announcement for a new "trendy" startup in Silicon Valley. TASVideos: Think Outside the Xbox (because we can't TAS it yet). Buzzwords. Web 2.0.
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That's why we have these threads in place, so we can actually deliver a redesign that everyone likes, both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. I sound like I'm making an announcement for a new "trendy" startup in Silicon Valley. TASVideos: Think Outside the Xbox (because we can't TAS it yet). Buzzwords. Web 2.0.
I'm glad we have a small consensus for Django(AC) this early on, and even people willing to work with it, though I think it'd be lovely to see some good examples of it in use if we really want to be serious about it. Not that I'm helming this project or anything, but hey, it's something that would be useful when the people who actually matter hunker down and make a decision.
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The thing about C#, though, is that we have numerous trustworthy contributors to BizHawk who could make the jump into site coding if we choose to stick with it. It may not be a "proper" framework, but it's something we could potentially start doing very soon without having to look around for people versed in something else. That's the main appeal of it in my eyes, the other one being it would be easier for us to maintain and modify if it's a language we're already familiar with. Hell, I wouldn't mind learning C# just to be able to contribute in some way, since it would be useful to know outside of site architecture, whereas learning some site-specific framework would likely go to waste for me.
Of course, it's not the only idea out there, and I am more than happy to back some other idea if we actually have some manpower behind it. The issue is just that we need that manpower in the first place.
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feos wrote:
Mothrayas wrote:
I think this devalues the idea of "player points". If you did not actually participate in TASing a game, you should not be receiving player points.
That might sound solid, but there are cases when a researcher helped to move the TAS to an entirely new level of optimization. We want to encourage researchers, because research is mandatory for a really good run, but very few people have the skill to dive into game internals and develop scripts based on that.
This is what I was getting at. Contributions that were integral to the primary TASer's work, not just "Hey here's a strat that saves 5 frames". Under this system I'd probably list someone like Omnigamer as a contributor on Run Saber and the upcoming Majyuuou TASes just because of the insanely helpful hitbox viewer/memory watch Lua scripts, in terms of helping my efficiency with TASing those games and my overall level of optimization being far greater than it would've been without them.
The problem I have with the term "devaluing" player points is that they inherently don't have value in the first place. They're not an accurate measure of a TASer's skill or anything. The way they're distributed is enough proof of that. Points are divided evenly among teams, so if you do a lot of team work then you're going to need twice as many runs to rack up the same number of player points as someone who's doing things alone. Since player points are distributed on ratings, you can easily inflate your score by TASing entertaining games that people love, which will bring more ratings to the publication, which brings you more player points in turn. You could make 20 amazing, heavily optimized TASes and only get a few hundred points if no one's watching them.
By player points alone, I'm about 60 points below feos, with 4 more active runs than he has. I would not put myself on his level. On the higher end of the spectrum, people like Alyosha and MESHUGGAH, who have pumped out 30+ high quality runs each, are just barely at the Expert Player level, which some other people have hit with only 10-15 runs. If we really want to worry about devaluing player points, we need to remake the system in a way that actually gives them value. As it is right now, it's just a number that gives you a little title every now and then. Cute, but ultimately ignored in the grand scheme of things.
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I believe the official consensus regarding permabanned authors (which we've had to discuss in detail recently) is that they can be credited for their inputs in someone else's submission. The main thing we're preventing is a banned user actually submitting, not preventing credit for actual work they've done on a legitimate submission.
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We've been bandying about an idea to recode the site from the ground up, and after some of the more recent conversations about improving the site I think it's high time we make this idea a little more public.
Currently this is purely an idea: We don't have the coding manpower/spare time to actually pull this off at the moment, let alone do so in a reasonable amount of time, but for now we can definitely start accepting and discussing ideas (and perhaps this thread could help us bring on a dedicated, trustworthy team of site coders to make this a reality).
Anything goes in terms of site improvement ideas, from huge things such as tier restructuring to minor things such as wording and phrasing across the site. The sky's the limit, we could theoretically do anything if it makes sense and benefits the audience.
I suppose I'll start with some of my personal ideas:
1. More emphasis on publication ratings, for sure. Make it easier to rate movies, give people more of an incentive to rate, perhaps change what gets rated if we can find some things that work better than Entertainment/Tech Quality.
2. A more streamlined system for co-authorship and movie credit in general. Perhaps a system that allows users to be rewarded with player points for being involved in a movie, without having to be made co-authors? Examples: Someone who provides a helpful Lua script, or someone who helped route the game but didn't provide any actual input in the TAS.
3. Submission voting changes. An idea I came up with very recently involves changing the question back to "Should this be published?" and giving a Yes/No answer, but upon selecting Yes or No you get different sub-options that provide a reason for your vote, something like a dropdown menu. This seems like a more efficient way of gathering better feedback on movies without requiring everyone to post their thoughts in the thread... But it's still probably a terrible idea in some way.
4. I suppose it's high time we really discuss what we want to do with the tiering system. Do we really want to keep tiers in a literal sense, where Vault is under Moons and Moons is under Stars, or should we discard that in favor of a more categorized system, such as Speed and Entertainment? Should we loosen the rules on what goes into Vault, allowing more diversity in there, or should we loosen the rules on what we can and can't accept as new branches in Moons? There's a lot to discuss here, though I would personally like to move away from Vault and "tiers" in some way, shape or form.
If anyone else has any ideas of their own, feel free to post them. Or you can just call my ideas terrible or something, that's probably far more likely to happen. If you have any knowledge about proper site coding and a lot of spare time, definitely post here as well and we can talk with you about adding you to a Nice Site Team or something. There was some talk about building the new site in C#, perhaps we will still go with that.
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netwizard wrote:
Can anyone tell me why the encode was deleted?
The encode itself was deleted by the uploader, and the uploader is permabanned from the forums. As far as I can tell, "god of destruction" just took down his entire Youtube account once we banned him for being Felipe evading his permaban for the 6th or 7th time.
I just scrubbed it so we wouldn't have a deleted Youtube video sitting there.
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The thing is, we don't need a site-wide term. We don't need a standard, and even if we set a standard it's just going to be the exact same way as before. Some people are going to say "Movie File" and all of us are going to know what it means, some will say "Input File" and all of us will know what it means, maybe one person will say "Replay File" but still all of us will know what it means.
This is a poll dedicated to what is essentially a cosmetic choice that's going to affect precisely no one. Nearly every major re-recording emulator creates a "Movies" folder, which is where newly-created TASes go, so anyone who ever decides to pick up TASing will immediately know what "Movie File" would refer to. We've reached a point where a majority of people on the site don't even bother with the files anyway unless they're actually creating them or helping with them, and as I said they all know what "Movie File" refers to.
There's no need to deprecate or change a term that takes less than a minute to understand. So, basically, this discussion has been pointless from the very beginning.
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It's still the exact same process, you just have to watch out for different kinds of mistakes. The best I can say is get familiar with some of the other playaround TASes we have on the site and learn from them. You'll probably want to avoid the obvious things like missing attacks or having the CPU block more than anything else, but you'll want to work on things like keeping flow or making sure you're always in a good spot after each attack.
It's hard to give advice on playarounds but hopefully that helps a little.
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I, um... don't understand the question. You said you've used TAStudio before, but it sounds like you're asking how to use it. If you know how to use it for one game, the exact same process would apply to any other game of any genre.
If that's not it, then what exactly are you asking?
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The intent of the question was never meant to be "can we have a 1p run and a 2p run published at the same time", because obviously we can judging from the tens of times those same examples were brought up. It was supposed to be "Since this run is technically superior in every way to the 2p run, should we obsolete the 2p run until we get an optimized version". There were calls for the currently published 1p run to obsolete the 2p run when it was submitted, I'm just carrying it over here and making it more of an issue.
There just so happens to be another case for double obsoletion: 1p was originally published because it is the fastest any% for this game: Thus, it can be safely Vaulted, which it was. 2p was published to Moons, but since its publication the ratings haven't exactly reflected that of a Mooned submission. feos, even with all your arguing for it to remain published, you only gave it a 5 in entertainment, well under what a Mooned submission should be. As far as I can tell, we don't have any situations where there are both 1p and 2p any% runs in Vault, and as far as I know we can't allow that under Vault rules.
Because of this, it makes sense to obsolete the published 2p run at this moment just based on its current ratings alone. We can't drop it down to Vault because it doesn't qualify, since it's not the fastest any% it has to be treated as a separate category. Of course, if someone submits an optimized version later on down the road then we can definitely re-publish the category if it's well-received, which it should be.
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Link to video
Hey, might as well put up all of my progress so far, since I don't think I encoded the optimized Stage 2 yet anyway.
I shaved off a good 13-14 seconds from the comparison video, most of it was in Stage 5 though there are some scattered improvements in 3 and 4 as well. I'm debating on whether or not to optimize Red first as well just to see how much closer they are after optimization. I'll probably end up doing that at some point.
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So with this submission comes a new question: Should this obsolete both the published 1p run and the 2p any% run?
This has been getting much better entertainment votes, enough to make it to Moons (as you can see by my quickly-rescinded judgement), and as far as I can tell it is definitely much faster to use 1p for any% runs for several reasons. From the improvement table, the published 1p run is slower than the 2p run in about 19 levels, while this new run is only slower than 2p in 6 levels, so it's worth talking about whether or not we can consider this equal on the level of the 2p run.
Speaking personally, I would probably push for double-obsoletion right now while still allowing an optimized 2p any% run to have a shot at being re-published if the audience finds it entertaining. I just think that this run outshines 2p in terms of better routing and strategy, and it seems like the only reason it's slower in those 6 levels is because it gets speed shoes to save far more time in later levels.
So what do you all think?
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Omnigamer wrote:
So a couple things on that. I am almost certain Blue will be optimal for stage 3 once it tightens up a bit because the ending sequence (after you kill the train) varies a bit. I think it's based off of the background cycle, but I'm not exactly sure. Comparing the two, I think your stage 3 blue is pretty close to the threshold for an earlier ending cycle, which makes the difference of quite a few seconds.
I did some testing with this and, well, from my current input file (after saving about 3 seconds in Stage 3) I'd have to find a way to kill the train before it's even vulnerable to be able to make the earlier cycle. Unfortunate, but there's nothing I can do about it. At least all the time I saved still counts and isn't lost to a frame rule or anything.
Strictly from a gameplay standpoint, Blue first is definitely faster. Looking closer at my comparison video, I lose a good 7-8 seconds on the train cycle, which is more than the difference between the two runs by the end of the video. Blue first appears to be 6 in-game seconds faster: 21 seconds ahead in Stage 3, 4 seconds ahead in Stage 4, 19 seconds behind in Stage 5. It's just that train cycle that puts me so far behind. I have the feeling that the train cycle alone is going to make Red first the faster route for the TAS, no matter how tightly I optimize Blue first, but I'll keep going with Blue first anyway just to check.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KWlvbPUf_8
Not a huge fan of this new album, but at least this song kinda reminds me of Apocalyptic Feasting... Even if it does sound more like generic death metal rather than the kind of overcomplicated technical shit that got me into Brain Drill in the first place.
EDIT: Okay fuck this, I'm listening to Apocalyptic Feasting.
Link to videojesus fucking christ those blast beats at 1:48 though <3
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When you go to edit your submission (in the sidebar on the right side of the submission page), you should have an option to change the submission's status to "cancelled", right above the Preview/Save options.
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Check the submission thread for that cancelled submission: There's a post in there with an even faster time, and the other posts in there should give you some ideas/things to try out for your improvement.
In the meantime, I would recommend cancelling this run.
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
There are some things that could be improved, such as making the options Fast/Off/Shift, or changing them in-game, but I'm not going to do them, because of the RNG manipulation going on everywhere
That's not an excuse. They're known to be faster, they should have been used from the beginning.
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Any subsequent attempts to load a Genesis ROM:
