Maybe I'm being overly cynical here, but actually what it sounds to me like is laziness. It's much easier to just allow runners to create whatever they want, and see what kind of reception it gets, and publish it like that, and possibly have it obsolete a previous run in the same (pretty ill-defined) "branch", pretty much disregarding the efforts put into the previous run (especially if the new run uses a different set of requirements), than it would be to go through the process of defining what the branch category actually means, and come up with an unambiguous ruleset that could be used to determine if the run belongs to that branch or not.
Does it even make sense to define "branches", if their definitions are completely malleable and up to the whims of whoever wants to make run for that "branch"? If the public reception is warm enough, then out the window the previous exact definition of the branch goes.
Also, this brings up another question, related very closely to that: How exactly do you determine if a run belongs to a particular branch or not? Suppose that it's deemed "entertaining enough for Moons", but uses a rather different set of goals than the previous run. How many differences are too many, for it to be considered belonging to that particular branch category? Who makes this decision, and based on what? A judge, based on personal feelings?
This kind of goes to another point as well: If the list of requirements used by the runner is actually "too different" to be considered belonging to that branch, then what? Is a new branch created, or what? Is it rejected (even if it's deemed entertaining by the public)? If a new branch is created for it, doesn't this go against the principle of keeping the number of different branches reasonable?
As said, it works for regular speedrunning. Why wouldn't it work here?
Because
feos wrote:
It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
That doesn't answer my question. You are stating why it's done like this. You aren't answering why it wouldn't work.
Warp wrote:
It's not a question of whether the goals are sound and logical. It's a question of consistency and fairness.
We are consistent and fair about only publishing the most entertaining side goal branches.
That answer makes no sense. You are pretty much saying "we are consistently inconsistent", which may work as a joke, not as a serious answer.
I think you understand what I mean when I say that the current system doesn't feel fair for a runner, but you deliberately want to avoid answering that.
Are talking about the same completely arbitrary set of rules? Because when I say "arbitrary set of rules", it means it makes no sense to enforce them. When you say "arbitrary set of rules", you want us to enforce them. But you do not like it when we enforce entertainment requirements. Are you seriously expecting the site to stop asking for entertainment in Moons?
You aren't making any sense anymore. That paragraph is completely nonsensical, and has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
It's quite clear that you don't want to have a conversation with me about this. Does anybody else do?
Keep in mind that we're talking about cases when it's not even possible to be objective with things like full completion. Whenever something subjective, even if it is an opinion of the (currently active) majority, it doesn't make sense to enforce such opinions blindly. It's not a democracy, it's art, it involves being creative, overcoming expectations and surprising the viewers. We want innovative thinking!
As said, it works for regular speedrunning. Why wouldn't it work here?
Otherwise, you're underestimating effort players and judges invest into making sure the given goals are sound.
It's not a question of whether the goals are sound and logical. It's a question of consistency and fairness. I don't think it feels fair for a runner to do a lot of work on a run, just to have it become obsoleted by another run that's shorter or "better" because of choosing a different set of rules.
If the rules for a branch are agreed and fixed, it becomes fair for everybody, and ostensibly leads to healthy competition where everybody is on an equal playground.
sin(18°) is famous in that its precise value can be calculated geometrically. If somebody hasn't seen or done it before, perhaps they could give a try.
In his most recent video, blackpenredpen solves this by using algebra. He ends up with the equation
4sin2(18°) + 2sin(18°) - 1 = 0
This quadratic equation gives two solutions:
sin(18°) = (-1 ± sqrt(5)) / 4
He discards the - version because it would result in a negative number, which clearly can't be the value of sin(18°). However, this got me thinking: The equation, and its solution, is still mathematically correct. The - version is just discarded because "it can't be the correct value", but it still has to hold some mathematical meaning. What is this meaning?
If it's
1) more entertaining (check out how low entertainment rating the run we're talking about has),
2) similar enough, and
3) there's an agreement among viewers and judges,
it'd obsolete if by the Moons rules, regardless of internal rules of the run. We never allowed endless amount of esoteric branches, and if we need, we obsolete different branches by one another.
Well, my "perhaps we should start moving away from this" suggestion stands.
Rather than have one singular runner decide at a whim what the particular list of requirements is, and then have another runner decide on a different list at his own whim and have it obsolete the previous one, pretty much arbitrarily, perhaps it would be a better idea that if we create a non-conventional branch for a game, its rules ought to be decided by majority consensus (of runners acquainted with that particular game), and agreed to not be changed unless there is a very good reason for it (and most definitely not at a complete whim of one single person).
That's pretty much how it works in regular speedrunning, and I don't see why it shouldn't work here as well.
But it's a Moons era, and Moons were allowed to have esoteric branches from day 1, as long as they are entertaining.
Perhaps we should start moving away from this? After all, how much could the list of requirements be shortened and still be accepted under the same branch category? Who decides this? Wouldn't it be unfair to the author of the first run that someone else could just remove some requirement from the list and make a "better" run that way? When runners can freely decide what the branch category is supposed to mean, it makes no sense, as anybody can obsolete anybody else's run by coming up with a different list of requirements.
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Edit by moderator: This thread has been split from Branch for Saturn's Chrono Trigger.
After reading the submission thread I can say that this is the original goal:
Complete as much as possible, as long as it's entertaining.
It sounds to me like the exact definition for this branch, ie. its list of requirements, is pretty arbitrary.
That in itself isn't what bothers me. After all, lists of arbitrary (but arguably logical) requirements are a staple in speedrunning of many games (my all-time favorite example of Ocarina of Time being once again the posterboy for this.)
What does bother me is that I get the feeling that the list of requirements is not fixed, set in stone, but up to the author. "As long as it's entertaining."
"Up to the author" in this case meaning that if other runners wanted to obsolete this one, they could decide on a different list of requirements, at their own will, and they might actually have a shot at getting their runs accepted, obsoleting the existing one, in the same branch. Because the list of requirement is not agreed and fixed, but can be pretty much freely decided by each individual runner.
It's that kind of arbitrariness that bothers me slightly. It kind of makes the branch a bit meaningless.
(If I'm incorrect that this kind of run, with a slightly modified list of requirements, would be accepted as obsoleting this, please correct me.)
"max%" doesn't work, because there's no percentage in this game in any form.
"high%" doesn't work for the same reason, and also because it's not descriptive.
I don't think it's necessary for the game itself to show percentages for a "%" category to be completely logical and legit. As long as we can establish exactly what constitutes 100%, we can calculate the actual completion % ourselves, even if the game itself doesn't. (If an exact 100% definition cannot be made, then you may have a point.)
In a recent video the youtuber blackpenredpen tackles a double integral. A screenshot is the best way to show which:
This is essentially calculating the volume of an origin-centered half-cylinder that's capped by the surface x3+xy2.
The result is a rational number. Feel free to try to solve it. However, it baffles me a bit how it can be, given that a circle is involved.
We are more and more going into a direction where not only are big corporations and governments censoring people more and more (using all kinds of excuses to circumvent constitutional and universal human rights), but moreover, politically motivated mobs of people are given way too much censorial power through automation. Make a post or video expressing an opinion that a certain mob of people doesn't like? They'll just mass-flag it, and the automation will censor it for them, regardless of whether it was actually infringing content, or whether it was just something that upsets them.
At this point there is still, sometimes, the recourse to dispute the censorship. However, I fear that as this becomes more and more common, corporations will start paying less and less attention to these disputes (perhaps, if for no other reasons, due to lack of resources. But, I fear, in increasing manner because of the political bias of the employees and the corporations themselves.)
It seems so to me. Your comment said: "what exactly you think you own in TAS?" and then you proceeded to list things that you consider being parts of a TAS, which the TASer does not own, ie. images and music. "In tas there is nothing that could be considered yours LUL"
I cannot interpret your comment as anything else than you thinking that a TAS consists of the video recording and its audio, because that's quite literally what you are saying. You didn't even mention the keypress data file at all.
Said file is a work produced by the TAS author. It contains original material. It does not contain any data from the game (except if the file also contains a savestate). It's non-trivial, and it has a substantial amount of original unique data created by the author. You would have to give a quite good argument about how this data does not fall under copyright, owned by the author of the file. Or why said data would belong to somebody else.
That being said, and as I commented in my first post in this thread, this has probably never been determined in court. It could also be argued that this data file does not fall under copyright. But a good argument would have to be presented why.
The fact still remains that by publishing said data file on tasvideos.org, the author is granting a very liberal usage license for its use, and cannot legally retroactively take it back.
Also, the IP owner of the original game can bully the author, or the site, into removing said file, claiming ownership, but this is another issue altogether. It might or might not hold in court, but that's the power of corporations: They have an army of lawyers and an endless supply of money, neither of which is available to individual people. Large corporations get away with bullying people in this manner all the time, and claiming ownership of things they don't legally have the right to.
Can somebody explain me in short what exactly you think you own in TAS?
Image and music of the game own by their respective owners. Like in let's play or something you can say that AT LEAST you own audio commentaries or something. In tas there is nothing that could be considered yours LUL
What exactly do you think a TAS is? You seem to think it's the video recording of the game being run.
Nintendo does have the right to take down a video of their game being played because they have the legal right to public performances of said games, as well as all the assets that are being used in the video (graphics and music). The video itself could be considered a derivative work, which they have rights to.
However, the idea that they have the right to take down the video because a pirated copy of their game was used to create it doesn't sound like it would hold any water. Public performance, using their assets? Yes. A pirated copy was used to create the video? No. If they can prove that the person pirated their game, they can sue that person, but I don't think that can be used as the reason to take down the video (at least not without winning such a lawsuit). It's like saying that Microsoft can take down a published paper that was written in a pirated copy of Microsoft Word. Sure, they can sue the person for pirating their software, but I highly doubt they could take down the document written in it because it was created with a pirated copy. I doubt copyright works like that. The ownership of the work does not somehow transfer to Microsoft just because Microsoft's software was used illegally to create the work. That would be just weird logic.
The point is, a lawyer could argue that it was impossible for us to generate the keypress files unless we had access to the ROM which contains their game. So, even if you could prove that the ROM was dumped completely legally, they could still argue the keypress file is a derivative work and you are not allowed to relicense it.
I don't think that's how it works.
Microsoft Word is proprietary software, and Microsoft owns the copyrights to it. However, Microsoft has zero rights to any work that you create using that program. Just because you use a program to create some data of your own doesn't mean that the IP owner of the program has any rights to your data.
It's only when the data of the program itself is being copied that it becomes a copyright issue.
Badly tuned monitors where light shades of gray are indistinguishable from white or dark shades of gray are indistinguishable from black are very common.
I doubt any monitor fails to distinguish between 33%, 66% and 100% grays...
In other words, if someone reuploads my TAS, can I take it down for copyright infringement, or is it technically Nintendo's property still?
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer!
That being said:
Copyright is a rather complex and difficult subject, especially when dealing with works whose copyright has never been tested on court. Needless to say, this often varies from country to country and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
(As an example of how much this can vary, if you publish a work under "public domain", meaning that it has no copyright, it depends a lot on the jurisdiction whether that's enforceable or not, and whether the work actually does have copyright or not. In many, perhaps most, jurisdictions all published works are automatically copyrighted, even if the author claims otherwise. However, if tested in court, the court might decide that publishing under "public domain", while not legally valid, can still be interpreted as a very liberal usage license, and thus the author cannot retroactively sue somebody for copyright infringement. The court might interpret the "this is under public domain" as an implicit permission to use the work for free. But AFAIK this has never been tested in court anywhere, probably.)
As far as I know, whether a data file containing information about timed key-presses used in an emulator software falls under copyright has never been determined.
Arguments could be made in both directions. For example, if you design a sudoku puzzle, it falls under copyright. If you play a game of chess, the transcript of the moves does not. If you write a short story about a fictional cook making food, it falls under copyright. If you publish a food recipe, it does not. The difference is fuzzy and often complicated. Which one of those two categories does a timed key-press file fall under? Who knows.
As Spikestuff commented above, if you publish a TAS at tasvideos.org, you will be publishing it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. If TASes do indeed fall under copyright, that license becomes enforceable, and gives freedom to anybody to do pretty much anything they want with your TAS, as long as they attribute the original work to you. (In this case, the only situation where you can do anything about it is if somebody re-publishes the TAS without mentioning the original was made by you.)
As for whether the copyright owner of the game that's being TASed has any say in any of this, the answer is probably no. The key-press file contains zero material from the game itself (with the possible exception if said file contains some kind of savestate, which usually means a memory dump of the console, in which case it will probably contain material from the original game. As long as the file contains no savestates, you are probably in the clear.)
Of course this has the caveat that many companies are unscrupulous and eager to shut down anything related to their property, even if that thing contains absolutely nothing of it. These corporations have an army of lawyers, and they will often bully individual people by threatening them with lawsuits, even if they have no case.
As for a video recording of the game being played in the emulator, the owners of the game will have much more rights to it. They own the soundtrack, the sounds, and the graphics. They also own the rights to any derived works. They usually also have a lot of trademarks related to the game. Fair use laws vary enormously between jurisdictions, but in general an entire playthrough of a game, with no significant amount of other original content, may well not fall under them. A corporation can shut down a "let's play" of a video game if they so choose, and they probably have the law behind them.
How about using shades of gray instead of colors? If the shades are distinct enough, it shouldn't cause a problem for anybody who is capable of reading text. (Some people have harder time distinguishing between subtle differences in contrast, and in fact it's common for this ability to become slightly worse with age, but we are talking about very subtle differences, not like differences between 100% black and 50% gray.)
I intuitively understand some people's disappointment, but I'm not sure how exactly to define a category that would make them happy other than banning glitches completely arbitrarily.
In a manner of speaking, all rules and agreements are subjective, and therefore "arbitrary" in a sense. However, that doesn't mean it's nonsensical to come up with a set of rules that at least approaches what the average person would consider as "no major glitches", by consensus.
I really like the Ocarina of Time speedrunning scene as a perfect example. There are like a dozen categories to it (even more if you count all the less-serious categories, which are nevertheless still tracked eg. at speedrun.com) Pretty much all of them have rulesets that one could argue are "arbitrary". However, they have been reached by community consensus, and most of those categories are very popular.
In particular, there are two sub-categories to the "glitchless" category. One would say that one of the categories is "glitchless by the letter of the law", and the other "glitchless by the spirit of the law". In other words, in the former some techniques are allowed that are technically not seen as glitches per se, but to the average viewer (at least one who is familiar with the game) they look pretty much like glitches. The second one follows the spirit of what people understand as "glitchless" and bans even more techniques, making the run actually look glitchless to the average viewer. Both categories are relatively popular.
For instance, some people are upset that you can superjump through locked doors. But keep in mind the Torizo door is locked kinda maybe sorta and speedruners never respect that, nevermind TASers.
I think that to the average viewer it looks like the runner reaches the door before it closes, so it doesn't look like any sort of glitch, and thus it's ok in a glitchless run. I don't think most people would consider being "too fast" to be any sort of glitch.
De Moivre's formula states that for any complex number x and integer n it holds that:
(cos(x) + i sin(x))n = cos(nx) + i sin(nx)
This can be derived using Euler's formula:
(cos(x) + i sin(x))n = (eix)n = einx = cos(nx) + i sin(nx)
However, why is it true only for integer values of n? I don't see the need for such a restriction in that derivation.
All the garbage you wrote after this line is just meaningless. I don't care about your trolling remarks.
I have no idea what either of you is saying, as it goes well above my head. However, I do know that if someone dismisses and completely skips reading somebody's arguments based solely on an off-hand remark, they tend to be avoiding responding to the actual argument being presented. In other words, it's a kind of a form of argumentum ad hominem (completely dismissing, and not responding to, someone's arguments because they said something you perceive as a personal attack, which smells like dodging the question, or the argument in this case).
Why does this sound to me like trying to introduce significant glitches into a "low-glitch" run, abusing definitional technicalities?
Yes because my ultimate goal is to ruin Super Metroid TASing forever, obviously.
Not really any sort of argument or response.
What your post sounded to me like is akin to this:
Suppose that in some game the end of the game is in a room immediately adjacent to the starting room. Normally you need to play for hours to get there. However, due to a glitch you can clip through the wall and reach the end in a couple of seconds. Would you call this a "low-glitch" category? I don't think many people would agree with that.
But then, you say, "in the low-glitch category you have to get this object, which is on the far end of the game". That doesn't change the nature or "severity" of the glitch in any way, shape or form. Putting additional requirements to the category doesn't somehow change the nature of the glitches being used. After all, if it's a "low-glitch" category, glitches that can be argued to be quite severe in nature ought to be banned, even if additional artificial goals somewhat limit how much the run can be shortened by those glitches.
The word you're looking for is clipping, not zipping. A zip would be like a warp from Brinstar to Tourian. In any other game, skipping a room or backtrack via a glitch wouldn't be considered very major. Moderate at best.
Why does this sound to me like trying to introduce significant glitches into a "low-glitch" run, abusing definitional technicalities?
In essence, a frame of reference is inertial when an accelerometer in that frame of reference would show an acceleration of zero (in all possible directions, including rotational acceleration).
This is essentially calculating the volume of an origin-centered half-cylinder that's capped by the surface x3+xy2.
The result is a rational number. Feel free to try to solve it. However, it baffles me a bit how it can be, given that a circle is involved.
