Would anyone be so kind as to put that zip file somewhere where I can actually download it without having to jump through a million hoops set up by a nazi-regime downloading site?
I think that the second image looks "uneven" only because of the way it's laid out and how the three color components are weighted according to their brightness.
The idea is that any given horizontal line of pixels in that image has the same perceived brightness. (Of course getting a perfect result for this is impossible, as it depends on a million things, including the physical properties of your display, the gamma correction your software is applying to the image, the gamma correction your hardware is applying to the image, your monitor settings and even the slight differences in perception of color and brightness the human eye has from individual to individual.)
When all the horizontal lines are grouped together like that, you will immediately see the diagonal patterns emerging from the color channel weighting. However, these patterns do not appear if you take one single horizontal line of pixels from that image. Instead, that line of pixels should have an (almost) even brightness throughout. Which is the idea.
The third image may look more "pleasing" as laid out, but if you examine it carefully you will notice that the brightness of individual horizontal pixel lines varies greatly (in this case being dimmest on the sides and brightest on the cyan and yellow spots).
I think the second image is the most correct for the intended usage.
You keep insisting that "technical rating" cannot be subjective. Who says that? I don't say that. I don't know anyone else saying that. Well, except you.
You say that newcomers will come to the site and see "technical quality" and immediately jump to the conclusion that this must be a mathematical formula with one single correct answer, and that the number represents this correct answer, and because the number is really not the mathematically correct answer, this misleads the newcomers. This is the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a long time.
What newcomers see when they watch the info for a movie is a number titled "rating", which additionally tells how many people have voted. They don't even see a "technical quality" anywhere, unless they go to the rating details page. And even there it says nothing about "perfection" or anything of the sorts. Rating, votes... how the heck could they get the impression that this number is somehow an objective absolute measure of perfection? You are seeing something which simply is not there.
I repeat: If you don't like the technical quality rating, just ignore it. It's that simple.
You can't expect to make such a provocative poll and not get any discussion about the subject whatsoever, especially given how strong and opposing opinions there are about this subject.
Btw, I notice now that my expression "one with the most revisions" does not actually mean what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that it's "one of the most revisioned (if not the most revisioned)", if "revisioned" would be a valid verb to express how many revisions have been made of it...
13 revisions gets pretty high in the list.
There's no "how close to perfection this movie is?" anywhere (not anymore, at least). And I don't really understand what else people can understand the technical rating to mean other than their opinion of the technical quality of the run. It's not a math question with one right answer. Why would anyone even think of it as that?
Besides, according to what several people have written in the past, they want the technical rating to be a measure of frame-perfection (regardless of my loud protests against that idea). Whatever floats their boats, I suppose. Well, it is an opinion as good as any. As I said, there are no right or wrong answers, not even in the technical rating.
If you don't like the technical rating, then ignore it. It has become optional, so you don't have to rate. You can also ignore what others have rated. Big deal.
Which is precisely what the rating system is asking: Opinions. Nothing more.
The table is not intended to be a measure of how good a movie is. It's intended to measure the average opinion of people about the movie. If you don't like it, ignore it.
Data in the clipboard is actually stored in the central power capacitors of your computer. Since these capacitors can hold their charge for a long time after the computer has been turned off, the contents of your clipboard can be retrieved even after a reboot or after you have turned off your computer. To completely wipe out the clipboard you have to keep your computer shut down long enough for these capacitors to lose all their charge. This should be something from a few days to several weeks, depending on your computer model.
Ratings are always subjective opinions. Who says that a movie is "good" and that it deserves high ratings? You? That's your opinion. Someone else might have a completely different opinion, and he is completely entitled to it. Who are you to say that someone gave the "wrong" ratings to some movie? There are no "correct" ratings. There are only opinions.
The whole idea of ratings is to show an average of the opinions people have. Even this average must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. After all, it's just that: Opinions. There are no wrong answers here.
Exactly when was "shaving frames" *not* the focus of TASes in this site?
As far as I can remember, and I have been here from the very beginning, maximal speed optimization has *always* been the focus. The very first attempts with an almost unusable Famtasia were focused on completing games as fast as possible, by using any means. When I submitted my first Rygar TAS like one million years ago, a few comments were already of the type "you could save a few frames by doing this and that". The goal has always been entertainment by speed, not at the cost of speed.
Why do some people talk as if this was a machinima video website in the past, and slowly converted to a TAS website?
Why didn't you participate in the thread (in the General group) when this exact subject was under discussion (unless I missed something; I can't see any of your posts there)? Nobody raised any big objections about the addition of a decimal to the ratings. I interpreted this to mean that people silently agreed that it's acceptable. (I don't know about Bisqwit, but I assume he thought like that too.)
It feels a bit useless to not to participate in the discussion about the feature, but then later complain that the feature sucks.
Do we really need this "timeattack" discussion once again?
Well, here are the facts:
1) The term "timeattack" already existed before Morimoto made his infamous SMB3 movie. It meant (and still means) a race-against-the-clock mode in many racing games and similar. In other words, it's an *unassisted* speedrun of the game, as a game mode supported by the game itself. Using the term "timeattack" to refer to tool-assisted movies would not only be extremely confusing, but actually a lie: They are not timeattacks.
The *only* reason the term "timeattack" ever was associated with tool-assisted speedruns is *solely* because Morimoto used that term with his videos. There's no other reason. It was *not* an established term. (Well, it was an established term, but for a completely different thing, as I already wrote above).
Why should we use a confusing term just because Morimoto used that term with his videos?
2) The term "tool-assisted speedrun" already existed before Morimoto made his infamous SMB3 movie. It was used in the Doom speedrunning community, for the *exact* purpose as we use it today. It was an established term known in the speedrunning community (at least in the Doom one).
For some reason I cannot even begin to comprehend some people stuck with Morimoto's erroneous term rather than use the already established term for this exact thing, and didn't want to change it.
The term "timeattack" is completely detrimental. It's misleading, it's not descriptive, and it's already used for *unassisted* speedrunning. If Morimoto hadn't used the term, nobody would even talk about it.
There is a way to achieve the same effect with traditional HTML (and in fact, it's something which has always been recommended from the dawn of HTML): If the <img> tags specify the resolution of the image, the browser will be able to set up the final geometry of the page even before any image has been loaded.
(There's only one small annoyance about it, though: If the image is *not* of that size, the browser will *resize* it to that size. There's no way, in traditional html at least, to give a "hint" to the browser which says "this image is most probably of this size, but could be of some other size as well".)
That's a really obfuscated way of performing an insertion. It took me something like 5 minutes to understand what it's doing.
Anyways, the most efficient way of performing an insertion into an array is not to swap each element with something else. By performing swaps you are performing 2 useless assignments per iteration. This is a more efficient way of doing it:
template<typename RI, typename IntType>
void insert(IntType val, RI where, RI last)
{
for(; last != where; --last) *last = *(last-1);
*where = val;
}
It only performs (last-where+1) assignments rather than 3*(last-where+1).
(Btw, with the next C++ standard the elements should be *moved* to their places rather than assigned. That makes it more efficient for elements which are aware of move semantics. Your swapping solution already takes automatically care of the move semantics in the next standard, but it nevertheless performs too many of them.)
The quick reply box is handy to... well, exactly that: To quickly reply to someone without too much hassle.
It has a minor annoyance, though: Often it would be good to choose a different avatar to such a quick reply, but there's no way to do that in the quick reply box. Would it be hard to add the avatar selection radio buttons to the quick reply box? Or maybe a dropdown menu, so that it doesn't take too much space? (It doesn't even need to show the image, just the name.)
I don't think that the category factors are a statement on what is more important (speed or entertainment), but a result of people complaining that they don't have the means to properly judge the technical quality in the same way as the entertainment value. Thus it sounds logical that the entertainment vote is given a larger weight than the technical vote.
Solstice is one of the oldest games ever TASed in this site (it was probably one of the 3 first TASes ever published), and one with the most revisions (if not *the* one with the most). Interesting to see that even after all this time it can still be improved. Cool. :)
I really wonder why it doesn't cause any visual jerkiness if a sprite alternates between moving 1 pixel and 2 pixels at a time. The effect should be worse if it only moves 2 pixels sometimes but 1 pixel most of the time.
No evidence whatsoever? Then what do you call this:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
2) The FDA has not published *any* test results of such Chinese products imported to the US.
He is not even saying the products are tainted. He is simply demanding the issue #2 above to be corrected.
The results of the tests should be public domain, yet they haven't been published. Exactly how has the FDA proven that any tests have been made in the first place? Is it really idiocy to ask for some test results, which should be public domain anyways?
Let me see if I understand this correctly: *None* of the mentioned products have been tested for safety in the US, the same products have been banned in many other countries because of containing dangerous substances, and you think this guy is an *idiot* because he demands that the products be tested also in the US?
Well, I can only say that our definition of "idiot" is rather different.