Diddy Kong Racing was completed in 50 minutes and a few seconds this weekend during SGDQ! Surely someone can beat that with a TAS ! This is so old! Someone has to update this to reflect today's discoveries of the game!
Um
http://tasvideos.org/3831S.html
The skip (and times) in the SGDQ record are only possible on a NG+ file for multiple reasons.
This comes back to when gia got all pissy about p4wn3r's re-creation of his run. The result may be the same, but the method to get there may have been different/not used the previous effort as a base.
that was different, the problem there was gia not wanting to submit his run here, so p4wn3r recreated it for TASV to have
And not providing anything but a Youtube video as 'verification,' not against a run already on the site.
Mostly referring to our authors' efforts in creating the TAS. In my mind, the TAS efforts that we present with our existing publications are undermined if one irreverently presents resyncing as a solution to a problem that really doesn't exist, in effect declaring existing publications as "problems" to be fixed no matter how much effort the authors put into the TAS. This is also where I feel the distrust comes in.
The problem does exist if the TAS can't be played back on a more accurate emulator.
Resyncing does not change the actual content (gameplay) of the TAS, it just adjusts it to a slightly different timing situation. Therefore I don't see why TAS authors should feel bothered about it at all. It's like saying "the author of a book misspelled a word, the editor fixed it, now there's distrust between them".
Statistically speaking a single person is always going to make errors no matter how much effort is put in; nobody should feel personally attacked if these errors are pointed out.
That's not the point he was making and your analogy is completely out of whack. If there ARE indeed errors, then fixing them is indeed improving the run. But treating existing runs as if they are problems themselves that have to be fixed is wrong and would wipe out most of the site.
It's not the content, it's the container. Not correcting an actual error, just presenting it in a different emulator. If you want to really stretch the book analogy, it's more like republishing from hardcover to pdf. Sure, it's a lot of work to type it all out again (ignoring scanning and OCR), but that's not the same as writing the book yourself.
The argument that it is easy to understand for majority isn't equal to being asked by majority of forum posters. We can't rely on silent people while making submission decisions, we account what posters say and weight their words to make the decision sane to the most people.
We also can not depend on people saying on youtube "tasing is cheating because I can't do that". If they want to know what happens, they read the info we make sure to provide. Otherwise, ignorance is their own fault
Sooo... What's wrong with the ten or so people that have said it then?
Very few people say "Publish the clean ending primarily", and even if they do, we can not rely on the minority, because then much more people would be annoyed.
Huh? Isn't the primary argument for the clean ending is that it's easy to understand and respect FOR the majority?
I'm on team "non-glitched ending" too. It's actually immediately recognizable as the ending credits instead of relying on familiarity with the game to be impressed. Someone here even though the game was still being played.
This is precisely what's in question as I would say that typically, replication is nowhere near as difficult as original creation. People have even written workflows here for how to do it, requiring very little human thought to follow. Good faith is the only way to tell the difference between a valid try that came up empty and someone just copy pasting the inputs with a few tweaks to sync it, and I don't see the argument for "You tried really hard to improve it, but couldn't, so here's a gold star anyway."
feos wrote:
Co-authorship may easily be unequal
This is a good point I hadn't really considered though, but I'd say the difference is that co-authorship as it currently exists is cooperative. Both are aware of the other's contributions and knowingly participated together.
Belated Edit: Or co-authorship is given BY the creator of a faster run long after the fact.
Resyncing, however, is not. And in the specific example that spawned this thread, the original author is antagonistic toward it. Although that is in part because it fails the very first test of "is this emulator really better in all ways," so perhaps may be less relevant, but I'm sure some people who put a lot of work into Snes9x 1.43 runs wouldn't be thrilled to have them supplanted by a resync.
It could also very well deter people from sharing their tools, processes, and workflow if those could then be used to trivially wipe out their credit simply from picking a different emulator. They have to at least do something different from the published tricks and tools to improve it and replace (or add) their names to the run. Removing the "do something different" requirement could very well dissuade people from sharing the code or tools they create.
adding the author of resync to the current movie author
What's the reasoning for this? "They did something and must be acknowledged for it."? While I'm sure it's not trivial to resync a movie, it's a lot easier than making an original one. Especially for short, extremely highly optimized movies made by the hard work of one person, it seems highly unfair for someone to simply reverse engineer their work and claim equal credit. Or even in some games where there's little randomness, to just look at the inputs and replicate them. A note within the submission I'd think would be fine, but not equal billing for replicating or verifying someone else's run.
Furthermore, comparison seems like an impossible standard without a specific change in the play somehow. If the original movie delays an action due to RNG or lag manipulation and the new movie does not, has to delay less, or just says "remove lag frames to compare," is that truly an improvement?
I actually preferred the non-garbled version in terms of entertainment, seeing Kirby fight and interact with the "Ending Credits" bosses and enemies that are only meant for show. I had no idea those on display during the credits sequence were actually programmed to be fightable.
The garbled version has its own WTF gamebreaking element to it, but the novelty of clearly seeing Kirby screw around with the end credits enemies is just unreal.
I'd like to see them both published, but I'm fine with whatever decision the judges make on this matter.
I think you're confused. That's a scripted sequence that's just part of the ending.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq4HF4ELm4Q
Skip to about 3:30 to see where it starts.
This part's incorrect, or at least not fully accurate. VBA's deprecated, but it's still accepted, similar to Snes9x 1.51. The primary ways that VBA 'fails' to be accurate are in sound emulation though, which has little to do with this. Neither (as I understand it) are believed to be particularly accurate to the console due to difficulty emulating hardware limitations. Heck, there's been almost 10 more GB/GBC runs on VBA accepted this year than Bizhawk or LSNES ones.
TL;DR. pw4n3r's run would still be accepted under the current emulator standards.
The poll asks an irrelevant question when complicated decisions that would benefit most from seeing votes need to be taken. It may be sufficient if in the vast majority of runs you don't feel the need to ask people boring stuff like "is the run optimized well?", "do the goals make sense?", etc. However, I prefer to use it in the old and less dysfunctional way.
I've been a proponent of changing it to "Which tier should it be published into? (Moons/Vault/Reject)." Especially for things like frame wars of excrutiatingly boring games (Atari Spiderman comes to mind), people automatically vote Yes on if there's any improvement whatsoever (or claimed improvement), even if it's just a few frames, and even if the previous submission was massively weighted toward "no" in the entertainment. The question's been ignored in the other direction too, accepting at least one run for Moons that had predominantly negative feedback (why yes, I carry a grudge), so I'm not sure what purpose it really serves.
And here we have people who explicitly stated they were voting yes based on the assumptions of an improvement in strategy, so...
As was said, I think accepting this without any actual improvements would set a very poor precendent and you could see half the Gameboy runs immediately wiped out for resyncs.
But that also assumes that THIS emulator is more accurate in a meaningful way, which doesn't seem to be the case, nor did it seem to be the case for the Bizhawk run he submitted either. Why was that canceled then if the goal was "more accurate emulator?"
I just don't really understand how "I tried to improve this run, but couldn't" could possibly merit supplanting the original work, or even adding their name to it after the fact. Let alone just because it's on a different, also inaccurate emulator. I'm sure he probably did make a good faith effort to beat it, but dupicating someone else's work is also a lot easier than doing new or original. The current Super Mario World run is done on a deprecated emulator, would you think it acceptable if someone resynced it on Bizhawk or even Snes9X 1.51 and erased their names with his?
I personally wouldn't accept movies on new emulators that don't include any improvements to the runs themselves. That opens up a very nasty can of worms, and I've already seen posts from some users essentially stating they will exploit this, if a precedent like this is accepted.
Accepting runs like that are both disrespectful to the original authors, as well as negatively impacting the site's credibility as a record compendium. After all, if runs get obsoleted by slower runs time-wise that are not faster in any way, their records just stop making any sense at all.
So it seems academic anyway unless he's changed his mind. From comments though, and at least one direct claim, people seem to think this run is meaningfully different in some way besides a slight resyncing it to a different emulator, again, which I find irksome.
This run is actually faster (not just due to emulator differences), which Masterjun put a lot of work into in order to do.
Yes vote.
From his description, it sounds like all he did was resync it due to core differences, which happened to get to the desired RNG two frames faster. Which would mean that again, all that changed was the emulator.
The feedback will always be bad given that this is Hydlide, a game that everyone is told to hate, causing a bias in voting.
Where exactly is this paranoia coming from?
And you never answered my question about what makes this different from another password that gives you max stats or the like. That'd also remove some, if not all, of the grinding and would take significantly less time to set up.
And the question isn't which is more entertaining. It's already in the vault. Entertainment has nothing to do with it.
Your run needs to be entertaining enough, and by your own description, it's almost entirely just RNG manipulation and utterly trivial pathfinding with a cheat code for invincibility. Those are not things that traditionally do well in the 'entertainment' department.
http://u-xyz.cside7.com/syumi/HLS/hls-ura.htm
It's an invincibility code. Just because it makes you jump through a couple extra hoops before putting in a password doesn't NOT make it a cheat code. What makes it any different from using a password to start with max stats or most of the items?
I didn't look closely, but that there are so few, a couple appear incorrectly labeled, and most of the rest are things like "I played a bonus stage for points instead of sat in the corner so there'd be no score countdown," that doesn't really convince me of much since they were all under the old rules.
This one stands out like a sore thumb against the vault's stated rules though as speed was absolutely not the primary goal and could be fairly trivially improved in that department.
http://tasvideos.org/2237M.html
I haven't been able to watch this yet, but I'd like to point out that "highest score" is not a very good goal, because you can pause the game every 16 frames to stop the score counter from counting down, thus ending each level with highest possible score left. This doesn't make for a very interesting run, however. Perhaps a "highest score without pausing" could fit as a goal? I'll try to watch this sometime this week and give more detailed feedback.
There's some more info on this in my author's comments:
http://tasvideos.org/1834S.html
Here's a fcm showing the pause trick:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1783750656/circus-charlie-no-bonus-down.fcm
If you can stop the timer from counting down, then the highest score is just a test of patience for how long you want to jump back and forth over something.
