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Pretty sure there's a minor mistake in Bubble Barrage level 9. When the in-game timer reaches 3:58, Toki Tori makes a seemingly-useless 360 degrees between placing the 2x2 box and transforming into a bubble. You can see it in the encode at 43:23.
Also, voted No. I played Toki Tori a lot on PC, including the Potato ARG and community levels (even made my own). This run just looks like a normal walkthrough of someone with a very good memory. Not that it's the author's fault: the game is designed with a fixed movement set preventing superhuman play, and the level design emphasizes tortuous fixed paths not leaving much room for route optimization.
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Hell yeah! As someone that was constantly grinding for best times in these games modes, I find the optimization level and techniques showcased here to be simply amazing! Great job!
I'd also really appreciate if the US TAS could be published in Vault for individual level record keeping purposes, or at least an abridged version of it that only contains the faster individual level times compared to the JP TAS.
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Voting No due to the PAL version being a bad port, and the run itself looking almost identical to the current publication to the untrained eye.
In my opinion, this submission is a Vault candidate due to the faster time, but certainly not Moon material.
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Not the most exciting of games, but this was surprisingly entertaining to watch for a while. Low Yes vote for me.
However, I'm not so sure it's optimal. For example, I noticed on shaft 12 that the yellow miner goes back and forth immediately before entering the processing center for seemingly no reason. There might be some possible luck manipulation and lag management too. I don't have the time to verify these however.
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I have to vote No here because the gameplay showcased is extremely repetitive: punch, wait, punch, wait, punch, wait, punch, wait, punch, wait, punch, wait, jump kick, wait, punch, wait, etc.
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Voting No for bad port and lots of waiting.
Also, I'm concerned that you're not sure about the fill order. A bot should be able to easily test all 120 combinations per round.
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Isn't it possible to avoid waiting for the last barrel through RNG manipulation here?
Also, voting No because the average-looking performance does not compensate for this bad port.
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Why does the temp encode show a NES controller instead of a SNES controller for the input? There's two jump buttons and two dash buttons in this game, so I was expecting some frame-perfect tricks that took advantage of that.
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Conjectures about the alternate dump issue:
- At least one of them is a bad dump, but which one could not be verified back then. The author mentioned a faster timer in his version and imperfect frame rule, which could be signs of that.
- There are different versions of the game with different ROMs. In particular, according to The International Arcade Museum, VS Super Mario Bros. has a dedicated arcade unit version and a conversion board version.
I wonder if someone more familiar with this game, or the internals of Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, could shed some light on the matter.
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Mothrayas wrote:
Mupen was banned for several reasons. Emulator accuracy is one of them, but other major issues were syncing issues and encoding issues. (These issues are mostly mitigated this time by the fact that there's a publisher ready who has already encoded the run in question). Plus poor tools in general, but that's the TASer's problem, not a judge or publisher's.
The Mupen64Plus core used in BizHawk is an improvement, but not a great improvement, and I don't think Ocarina of Time has any such major emulation inaccuracies that would be a deal-breaker between the two (that can't at least be worked around with the right plugin setup).
If the general state of N64 emulation accuracy for TAS-capable emulators was better, this would probably have been different, though.
Thank you very much for sharing the details! I understand the situation a lot better now. :)
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I don't know exactly why mupen64-rr got banned, but if it's due to emulation inaccuracies, my opinion is that no exception should be allowed, even though it's an objective improvement. I'll await final judging from people more knowledgeable with the matter before watching.
Also, I'm seeing on the allowed continuance page that homerfunky was allowed a continuance for a Super Mario the Green Stars run, but not for this game. What's up with that?
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BrunoVisnadi wrote:
SmashManiac wrote:
I'm not really seeing the point of this TAS if it's just a standard AI vs AI match. The PNG of the match would be just as valuable and more convenient to use. Speaking of which, the one in the description is invalid. 3) b5 ... is not a legal move.
Also, what do you mean by "Shepherd's train"? It's not a standard Chess term.
The term 'Scholar's mate' in other languages is actually Shepherd's mate. According to Wikipedia, that's the case for Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.
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I'm not really seeing the point of this TAS if it's just a standard AI vs AI match. The PNG of the match would be just as valuable and more convenient to use. Speaking of which, the one in the description is invalid. 3) b5 ... is not a legal move.
Also, what do you mean by "Shepherd's train"? It's not a standard Chess term.
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Yes, the extension port was never designed for human input, but it was still designed for input. In my opinion, the only reason it would make sense to ban such input, or at least some bits of it, would be if it would disrupt normal system operations regardless of the game. As far as I know, this is not the case here.
ais523 wrote:
I don't outright think this is cheating, but I think it's a different category from glitched-any% or any%-ACE, and also a less interesting one; and I'd recommend rejecting it on the basis that it isn't different enough from the glitched-any% for both categories to be worth having on the site.
If you're willing to accept this strategy would make sense as a separate category, then it doesn't make sense to also argue about rejecting a faster submission on the basis of it being too similar to the current submission.
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I'm surprised this is the first real use of the extension port for a TAS. Pretty cool! This should be integrated into the emulator so Lua scripts aren't required, with an option to switch between arbitrary input and the Satellaview.
Masterjun wrote:
In this movie a jump to the expansion port is used to write a program into memory (all in the last frame, so that it doesn't make the movie longer).
Isn't this true only if the last controller input is read after the last extension port input? A more precise timing method may be required here since we're dealing with sub-frame inputs.
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I too feel that the category is arbitrary. I will refrain from voting since my opinion is biased for this reason.
Also, people that do vote should take into consideration that the temp encode given by the author has been edited to cut some of the music and should probably not be used as reference.
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Sharkey91 wrote:
SmashManiac wrote:
Does that 2nd key door skip work on regular Super Mario 64 too? It's the first time I see it happen without a rabbit.
On Super Mario 64, you can't trigger the zone if you don't enter it using the key, the system was safer. Plus, you can't go out of bounds over the void in SM64 because the failsafe mechanism would make you instantly die.
Weird that they changed this for the DS version. Thanks a lot for the clarification, and great work on the TAS! :)
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If it was a matter of common sense, then almost everyone would have shared the same opinion so far, and it's definitively not the case.
Besides, having potential flame wars on this matter for each individual submission really doesn't sound like a good idea to me. On this regard, the current rules allows this potential problem to occur for games not rated by the ESRB, and I believe it will become a big issue for DOS games if nothing is done in the near future.
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I was busy comparing code differences when I saw gifvex's explanation. Thank you very much! Am I to understand that all Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow TASes that uses RNG should be rejected due to emulator bugs until this matter is resolved?
I was considering suggesting a merge of BizHawk-psr's improvements into official BizHawk, but I noticed that some GBA-related code was disabled, and gifvex mentioned that some of the changes were inaccurate anyway, so I don't think it's a good idea after all.
I hope the Gambatte-Speedrun improvements will be validated soon!
For reference:
- BizHawk-psr compared to official BizHawk
- Gambatte-Speedrun compared to official Gambatte
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Nach wrote:
My day job involves supplying various services to educators who sometimes deal with various content filtering. I often hear from them details you would never guess unless you regularly used filtering of this sort yourself. Banning of complete domains over an offending image or video displayed somewhere on the site is unfortunately not an uncommon experience.
Even if a site isn't currently blocked, it just takes one parent to complain to their safe ISP or filter software, supplying a justification, and the company in question will take down an entire site just to be safe.
Anybody that would hear stories about people trying to block access to content on the Internet on a regular basis would definitively be concerned about their website suffering from the same fate. I'm wondering if your day job isn't biasing your point of view though, just like I am biased for not witnessing these ecosystems from my home.
For instance, you're talking about selling to educators, but TASVideos doesn't really offer much educational content in the first place. Should we really care about schools trying to block non-educational websites in the first place? I believe that's not something that we should care about at the site administration level.
Also, you pointed out that speedrun.com has a worse rating on WOT than TASVideos. While this is true, it's still very high, and if you look more closely, WOT gives its own rating confidence at 1/5 for child safety in this case. It probably doesn't have enough data to give it a proper rating. Just for fun, I put in a bunch of niche IT-related websites in, and they all have similar ratings to it. so it seems that speedrun.com is in the normal here.
If we take that away, what we're left with is either ignoring these filtering services and risk having more people potentially not being able to access TASVideos from one of their Internet access points, or block some TASes based on adult games to be shared to anyone regardless of quality, entertainment or Vault value. Neither case is good in my opinion, but at least in the former case there's always the possible workaround for users of accessing a non-filtered access point. The latter case requires TAS creators to host their movies on a separate website altogether, splitting the community in the process, which I believe is worse overall.
On a final note, I agree with Warp's previous comment. There's really no point in trying to bypass filters strict enough to block websites full of useful content to everyone like YouTube and Wikipedia.
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I just want to point out a kill screen exists in NES Donkey Kong. Unlike the arcade version, it occurs at level 133. Here's a video of it on real hardware.
I don't think this completion criterion was considered for previous publications, and #5325: £e_Nécroyeur's Arcade Donkey Kong in 01:29.94 was rejected for it. This should be taken into consideration during judging.
Reading the comments on that video, it appears that glitches may not be able to bypass it and that NES Donkey Kong Jr. also has a kill screen, but those would need to be verified..
As for the entertainment factor, I had the impression while watching that desyncing the player characters is too easy, since their physics and the games' level design differ too much. I don't think it adds much value compared to the existing publications, but that's just my personal opinion.
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Mothrayas wrote:
By allowing the default emulator state, no specific run is particularly advantaged or can specifically exploit it, so we can at least consider it a neutral state. If that is an invalid state, then that can be chalked up to just an emulator inaccuracy, and not a TAS exploit.
