Personally I liked the entire so-called "sands of time trilogy" (ie. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and its two direct sequels), although I thought the third game (The Two Thrones) was the weakest of all.
The most amusing detail from the trilogy, IMO: In the second game, Warrior Within, you are often chased by the Dahaka, which is some kind of guardian of the timeline or something like that. This monster often utters something unintelligible. The detail: If immediately after it has uttered you start rewinding, ie. you reverse time, you will hear that what it uttered was normal speech reversed, and you will understand what it said.
I only found this by chance.
Rotating screenshots give a sense of change to me.
Random idea: When you hover a link on the main page, the screenshot changes (using javascript) to the screenshot for that video.
(If javascripts are not enabled, then it simply would work like currently.)
Personally I never grew fond of that one. It's an impressive show of tool-assistence, but entertainmentwise it's way too confusing and chaotic. The X1+X2 run is much, much better in this regard (although I still think that some other game combination could perhaps be more suited for a double run).
Sorry Hellfish, but she's looking for somebody to replace you with. Until she finds someone, she doesn't want to be alone, so she strings you along. This is completely standard behavior, especially for women, and while unfortunate, there's not much you can do about it now.
So to prove if the current SMB1 run was perfect you'd need to test 12221910998141693190735399218027+E43105 possibilties.
No. If a certain combination of buttons makes the game to go to the exact same state it was with another different combination of buttons, you don't have to test from that point forwards again.
Also if a certain combination of buttons causes the movie to be longer than the shortest completion known so far, you don't have to test that path any further.
For ideas about these concepts, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-beta_pruning
It's not like I made this request for selfish reasons.
Actually, you did, because the change would directly benefit you (and about two other people, judging from replies).
I don't think you understand. I'm keeping the entire collection of published videos in my hard drive, and I help seeding any of them when there is need. I remove obsoleted movies because there's no need to seed those anymore, and to free disk space. A small piece of information in the website would make the task of keeping the published movies and deleting the obsoleted ones much easier.
Exactly how is this a selfish reason? I certainly don't watch the over 500 avi files I have in my hard disk. I keep them there as a collection, but most importantly so that I can help seed them when necessary.
Clearly you don't appreciate my efforts to try to help the site seeding the videos. Given the enormous amounts of seeders for all the videos, including the oldest and least downloaded ones, I can really see why my help is not needed nor appreciated. Thus I should just do the unselfish thing and stop trying to help and get myself 35 GB more of disk space by removing all those avi files.
stickyman05 wrote:
Crying about it like a baby, which is the impression the text gave me, does not help your case, warp.
Fine. Since my help as a seeder is clearly not appreciated nor needed, I'll just stop doing it. Now you can go laugh to me with your buddies.
1) If I rename the files, I cannot seed them anymore.
You guys must have some really, really shitty torrent clients.
Fine, if the attitude is to make the life of people who want to help seeding as hard as possible, then maybe I should just remove all the videos I have and never help seeding again. Just f*ck it.
It's not like I made this request for selfish reasons.
For the sites we develop at work, all our code is stored in a version control system...
That is an immensely interesting idea. I have never heard of it before
Knowing your usage and expertise of versioning systems, including git, that comment rather surprises me. Clearly I didn't understand something here.
Or were you just being sarcastic?
That would be pointless for most people. Nobody cares about filenames except you.
And how much harm would it cause if the file name was mentioned somewhere (maybe hidden behind one of those tabs)? Why make things deliberately harder for some people just because some other people don't care?
In fact, I give you something that will make your job easier: Prefix every movie with "0000-moviename", where 0000 is the movie ID. Then you won't have to "guess" about anything.
Horrible solution for two reasons:
1) If I rename the files, I cannot seed them anymore.
2) Doing that automatically would be difficult.
Idea: In the submission forum polls, add a secondary "Should this movie be starred? Yes/No/Meh" poll to every new submission. This way people can easily express their opinion if they think a new movie should get a star.
I can only think of ONE case where this worked. In almost all other cases, people would post "vote yes and it should get a star!!!" and the movie would get published without it. In reality, saying "this should get a star" more often than not simply ended up as being "this person liked this movie a lot" because it was so commonplace and, in the end, Bisqwit's decision.
I don't see too much difference between that, and 10 people voting "yes" for the publication of a submission (with the old system) and 3 voting "no", and the submission not being published. The votes are, after all, opinions.
Btw, I don't see what's the problem with the same people who decide if a submission is published or not, also deciding whether it gets a star or not.
I like to keep an up-to-date collection of all the movies. I do this by deleting the obsoleted ones before I download the movie that obsoletes an older one.
I usually do this by looking if the current new video obsoletes an older one, and then try to guess by the name of the game and the author of the run the name of the avi file. Sometimes this task has been a bit difficult eg. if the obsoleting movie drastically changes its file name from the movie which it obsoletes. Then I have to perform more research to find out what exactly was the file name of the obsoleted video (a task which is made harder by the fact that movie pages for obsoleted videos don't show the name of the file).
It would be nice if rather than making this task even harder than it already was, it was made easier: How hard would it be for the movie page for a given movie to explicitly tell which movie it is obsoleting (including the exact file name of the obsoleted movie)? This way I wouldn't have to keep guessing the file names.
Idea: In the submission forum polls, add a secondary "Should this movie be starred? Yes/No/Meh" poll to every new submission. This way people can easily express their opinion if they think a new movie should get a star.
We need: Encoders
Encoders who can re-encode any published AVI/MKV file to generate a streamable FLV file with index, and upload it to the server farm and update some kind of index that tells which servers have the file.
What kind of work does this involve? How far can it be automatized?
I always thought the in-game time challenge was a bit silly to come up with, but in practice, I like that it (initially) showed a much different path than the realtime movies had. It was nice to see something new, even if the goal itself sounds silly.
I think that for sight-seeing purposes the 100% run is good enough.
There are 4 published runs now, and a fifth category in submission. If it were up to me, an any%, and a 100% run are enough (2 runs). The other runs are just more of the same, with minor tweaks, which aren't even noticed probably by most viewers. I am very much against adding yet another category for this game.
I think that the problem with Super Metroid in particular is that the fastest completion time (the 6% run) is quite boring, and the 100% run is quite long. Of the two, the latter is definitely less boring, but well over 1 hour is a bit too much for many.
I do agree, though, that most of the in-between categories could be dropped. I have always been of the opinion that minimizing the game's own timer (at the cost of real-time) is a ridiculous goal and doesn't add anything of value. I would not mind at all if that category was dropped.
Most submissions are rather straightforward, and can be roughly divided into three categories: Those which are accepted almost without question, those which require more discussion and voting, and those which get rejected for being just subpar.
But then there are a few games which seem to almost always draw controversy to them, when a submission is made. Maybe too many TAS categories have been created for that specific game, maybe it's not clear what it should obsolete if anything, maybe the submission just isn't up to the expectations for that game... Whatever the reason, it seems that some (if not all) of the submissions for these games just generate lots and lots of discussion, often heated one. They tend to stay in the queue for a very long time while people fight over whether it's good or not, whether it should be published or not, whether and what it should obsolete, what would be its category...
I suppose LoZ:OoT is the king of this type of game. (How many months has the newest submission been sitting on the submission queue now, and how many posts have been made to its submission thread?) Super Metroid also seems to frequently draw heated controversy onto itself.
What is it with some games that seem to generate this kind of controversy?
What I honestly don't understand is why release a beta for the next version of Windows *now*. People have still not migrated to Vista (if I'm not mistaken it's like 90% of Windows users still have XP). Now they will have even less motivation to do so, as an even newer version is coming soon.
Or maybe this is a silent admission by Microsoft that "yes, we screwed up a bit with Vista, so we will be fixing this mistake sooner than we really expected".
Actually, my first intention was precisely to have this as a "machinima" website.
In case I guessed the meaning of that weird word wrong, I mean that I originally intended the site to be a collection of all kinds of weird gameplay videos that have been created by utilizing tools, without changing the actual games.
This is still something I would love to see. Hiliarous or game-breaking bugs in games; it's an utter shame that a lot of the funny or weird tricks have to be left out in the name of speed. :\
It's not like I haven't suggested having parallel categories at tasvideos.org, including a category of freeform machinima videos, at least three times in the past. Guess how many times the idea has caught on and been implemented.
You must surely concede that the technical rating has no inherent bearing on entertainment for some subset of the population.
And tool-assistance is seen as cheating and a hoax for some subset of the population. So what? Should we remove everything that somebody might perhaps not like?
On a similar note: If you have two movies, one rated 3 for technical quality and another rated 9.8, which one do you think would more probably be more entertaining? (And please don't nitpick. Individual exceptions don't affect the answer to a question about what's the most probable situation.)
And I argue that newbies have less interest in technical perfection than veterans do, especially given the already high technical bar that must be passed for a video to get accepted at all.
You assume that the technical rating is about perfection. It isn't.
So if we accept that the ratings should be useful to newbies, and we accept that newbies in general are uninterested in technical perfection, then the ratings should not take technical perfection into account (or at the very least should split it out).
I for one don't accept the idea that newbies couldn't care less about the technical quality of tool-assisted speedruns. If anything, a low tech score would be indicative of sloppy play, which is not something you would expect in a tool-assisted run (regardless of whether you are a veteran or a noob).
I'm not trying to take your interest in technical perfection away from you. I'm just saying that you have a perspective that is not shared by newcomers to the art of TASing.
How do you know newcomers are not interested in the technical aspects of tool-assistance?
To be honest, I like the 14% run better than the 6% run because of the non-room glitching.
Agreed. I hate the X-Ray Beam Glitch.
I'll cast my agreeing vote on this as well. It's not as bad as the murder beam glitch, but definitely extremely boring.
I suppose the 6% run must stay because of the very nature of the website, but IMO it should not obsolete higher-% runs very lightly, but only if the higher-% run definitely does not provide any significant or relevant addition.
You keep using that expression over and over. Just drop it. It doesn't exist anymore anywhere. You seem to have some kind of compulsive obsession about it.
That's exactly the problem. They go the NES page and see this number and think "oh, cool, this Dragon's Lair movie must be more entertaining than Gone with the Wind". Little do they know that most people have given high ratings to that boring game only because they assumed the movie was almost frame-perfect.
By the same logic the entertainment rating should be dropped as well, because, after all, it makes two thirds of the average score visitors see in the movie info page.
Why visitors would interpret some semi-hidden (as in: it doesn't show explicitly in the movie info page) "technical quality rating" differently from the equally semi-hidden "entertainment rating" is beyond me.
