Posts for Warp


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bzb95 wrote:
my personal thing is an artist paints a picture. He uses copyrighted paint.
Paint doesn't fall into the realm of copyright. (The method of fabrication of the paint could be patented, but that's a completely different thing.)
Same for TASes People are watching the TASes for the player input more than just to see the game.
Law isn't based on people's opinions.
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Is it just me, or is there an unusual amount of nudity in this game?-)
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AndyD wrote:
can't see the point of "Takes damage to save time" tag, seeing as nearly every run takes damage in some form or another to save time
I suppose that the idea is that normally one should aim to avoid taking damage because that can be seen as "sloppy" play (avoiding all damage is more impressive because it's very difficult to achieve when playing normally). However, an exception to this rule of thumb is applied when taking damage can be used to make the run faster. This is the case with many games, but there are also quite many other games where taking damage is not advantageous, so the tag distinguishes between the two. I think it's more of an informative tag than anything else.
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Raiscan wrote:
I would have thought that the file's timestamp for 'date created' or 'last modified' would have done that job.
I don't think bittorrent preserves that information (haven't checked, though).
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PikachuMan wrote:
You should have braked right after running over banana peels! (a la Mario Kart 64) A NO vote from me.
You do realize that the movie was submitted in 2005?
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Flygon wrote:
That's the problem, heavily manipulates luck is a very ambiguous and opinionated term. What is heavy to one person is a simple poke to another.
You can say the exact same thing from most tags, and even about most publications (ie. whether they are publish-worthy or not). That's why we have the guidelines and the people who have expertise on the subject making the decisions on which run gets a tag and which doesn't.
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rex4 wrote:
Btw, I'd like to know why you use the MKV encode too (should I make a new thread for that ?). The same: it's not very knowned, especially compared to avi, so why, is it better for side scrolling games because it use tricks to use less space for the same length ?
AVI and MKV are not video encoding formats. AVI and MKV are container formats which package multimedia streams inside them (video stream(s), audio stream(s), subtitle(s), etc). They don't (mostly) care what the actual video encoding format is. MPEG-4 Part 10 (better known as H.264) is the actual video encoding format used in the published TAS videos. (Another example of a video encoding format is MPEG-2 which is used eg. in DVD video and digital TV.)
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Flygon wrote:
I personally think the tag should not exist at all, it's pointless. I mean, movies generally manipulate luck if there is an RNG anyway, why categorize a movie based on if the game uses an RNG?
I don't think it's pointless. It gives interesting information about a certain type of luck manipulation. For example, a run may be interesting if every killed enemy drops an object, even though in the actual game this happens very rarely. I think you are confusing "manipulates luck" (which as a generic concept is rather pointless because every time there's an RNG there is "luck manipulation) and "heavy luck manipulation", which is something else completely. The latter is a very narrow subset of the former, and that is what makes it interesting.
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If we are going to rename the files to a consistent standardized format, maybe it would be a good idea to add the publication date as well. There are many reasons where seeing the date of publication could be useful. For example, if you have two random movie or video file of the same game laying around, you could see from the publication date which one is the newest, You can also quickly check if the currently published version on the website is newer than what you have. (Of course since there can be several categories of runs for the same game, this should be clearly and unambiguously distinguished in the file names as well, else it may get confusing whether a newer file obsoletes an older one or whether it's just a different category for the same game.)
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Beacon wrote:
I don't even know what a command line is.
Youth these days... sheesh. In my days we had nothing else than a command-line prompt, and it sufficed.
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AngerFist wrote:
Personally, I don't care if a file its 5 or 20% bigger than an "usual" encode. I think the quality (sound and picture) should be top notch, which means forget about compability.
Isn't that a bit contradictory? On one hand you don't care if the video file size grows moderately, but immediately in the next sentence you advocate using the latest experimental codecs, seemingly for maximum compression while preserving image quality. So which one is it? You want maximum quality/size ratio, or you don't care if the video file is a bit larger?
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Flygon wrote:
(So, rather then Sonic 1 having a bitrate of 370 that I used and in turn, made some rather noticeable compression artifacts, publish it with a bitrate of 700 and be on the line of 'lossless' looking and still not have an excessively high bitrate).
That suggestions makes a lot of sense now that we are offering the streamed versions of all new videos. In the past, before the video streaming, encoding was always a struggle between keeping the image quality as high as possible while minimizing file size, because the video file was the only way to watch the run for people who don't have (or don't want to hassle with) the proper emulator and roms. However, now that the size issue isn't such a huge problem anymore, the downloadable video files should aim more at the quality than the size (of course this should still be as optimal as possible, but quality tradeoffs can now be lessened, especially for runs which would require a higher bitrate).
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Btw, the "pacifist version" tag is, basically, the polar opposite of the "maximum kills" tag. Hence it would actually make sense to call it "minimum kills" instead. After all, making a minimum kills run doesn't necessarily mean that violence is minimized (only kills are)... Also "minimum kills" - "maximum kills" make a good pair of opposite tags.
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I can think of three possible reasons why someone would want to download the video file rather than watch in from a video sharing site: 1) To watch it full-screen at the highest possible quality. 2) To create a compilation, commentary or other type of derived work. 3) To collect all the videos locally (eg. burn them on a data DVD to share with friends or whatever). In all these cases maximum quality/size ratio is, indeed, the main desired feature.
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I think it might be a good idea to distinguish between the game's own warps (eg. in SMB1) and "warping" due to glitching. "Uses warps" has a whole different meaning in those cases.
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One should also consider the pragmatic point of view: It cannot be denied that MKV is more of a "hacker" container format (somewhat similarly to OGM), while MP4 is a more "officially standardized" container format, so it's natural that multimedia players will tend to gravitate towards supporting the latter instead of the former. Are there any modern multimedia players which would not support MP4 out-of-the box? Even youtube seems to accept MP4 files directly (which might be one advantage of MP4 to consider).
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Maybe: "Speed/entertainment tradeoff: Takes no damage." Or is that too long?
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
1,054 anti-white victims, 75.05% of the population. 3,966 all other victims of racial violence, 24.95% of the population. As a non-white you're about 16 times more likely to experience racial violence directed against you. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. I'm saying that it has no appreciable effect on the lives of most white people. Whereas racial violence and other forms of racism have a profound effect upon non-whites.
I'm not denying any of that. What I'm saying is that white people who are victims of racism are a discriminated minority who everybody ignores or outright ridicules, and receive little to no attention from authorities (at least of the same magnitude as other victim ethnicities get). It's a bit like men who are raped by women: They are a very small minority, but they get mostly ridicule and mockery rather than the same kind of help as raped women get. They are an "acceptable target".
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
I'm sure that white people have been victims of racism. But not in America, not in any real way.
There have been actual cases, in the US, of white people getting beaten up by black people for the sole reason of being white, which has been made clear by the attackers using racial slurs and other insults related to skin color and ethnicity. And the police did not consider them hate crimes even with witness testimony describing the racial insults. But of course white people being victims of racism is such a rare occurrence that it could just as well be a non-existent problem. Even if someone gets discriminated, he probably deserved it anyways.
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Wow, you really do believe that white males are oppressed... how quaint. :/
"Discrimination against white people" sounds like an oxymoron in the modern politically correct world, even though white people do get discriminated en masse. When was the last time that you heard someone non-white being accused of racism? When was the last time that you heard a white person being considered the victim of racism? Although not de-jure, the de-facto situation is that only white people can be racist and only non-white people can be victims of racism. But that's completely ok because white people are an acceptable target (nowadays the only one), and that is not discrimination.
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AQwertyZ wrote:
h = 21.748904599238375290967341
Correct.
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Geometry puzzle: 1) Calculate the area of the shaded part. 2) Take the integral part of the result, negate it, and use it as longitude coordinates, in degrees. Take the two first digits after the decimal point of the area and use them as latitude coordinates in degrees. (Mathematically speaking, if the area is A, then latitude = floor((A - floor(A))*100) degrees.) 3) These coordinates will point to a state in the US. Y = the year when the capital city of this state was founded. 4) Take Y modulo 100 (iow. the last two digits) and substitute the 60.3 in the picture with this value. 5) The answer to the problem is the height h using this modified value, with at least 5 decimals of accuracy (after the decimal point).
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Solon wrote:
Personally, I think the glitch categories should be "abuses minor glitches" and "abuses major glitches." For example, ISM and Mister's new SMW run is labeled with "Major glitch abuse," which is a bit misleading, because while there is a major glitch abused, it's only abused once.
Also I understand "heavy glitch abuse" to be related to the amount and frequency of glitches as much as their impact on the game. Also the total amount of time saved by abusing the glitches in relation to the whole movie length. But it is a difficult question whether it's "heavy glitch abuse" if a run uses one single gigantic glitch abuse which almost crashes the entire game and makes everything look corrupted... for a few seconds, but otherwise there is no significant glitch abuse in the rest of the run.
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moozooh wrote:
Sometimes it impairs entertainment value for a significant amount of vocal viewers. For instance, when avoiding damage constitutes a much more difficult/impressive goal.
I suppose this means (or should mean) that there should always be a very good reason for a run to not to take damage even though taking it would save time, and thus granting this tag is rare?