Of course it's loaded. The OS handles task scheduling, memory allocation, plus it provides system services to the program such as access to the hardware (including things like the hard drive, graphics acceleration, the sound card and reading the gamepad). If I'm not mistaken, the xbox offers the full DirectX API to the games.
By saving (into memory) the state eg. each 100 frames, and when the back-one-frame key is pressed, the emulator internally replays from the last automatic savestate in memory up to the desired frame. (In other words, at most 99 frames would be internally replayed; it shouldn't take too long.)
Btw, some times (poor) image quality is not so much a question of opinion, as it is a question of the contents of the video being really pathological for mpeg4. There is certain type of content which mpeg4 just can't handle very well, and it will look bad no matter how large the bitrate is.
Wouldn't going back one frame at a time (ie. the opposite of frame advance) be an useful feature too?
The implementation of this is doable, and discussed in another (old) thread.
If it's just an opinion, then why did you start this whole topic to try to decide exactly how people should be voting on it?
Because people should know what is it that they should give an opinion about. The voting system is asking on the voter's opinion on something concrete, not just a random opinion on a vague and unprecise thing.
If the question is vague and misleading, the voting is useless. If the question is clear and precise, the votes become valuable.
Hibernate on a xbox ? Never saw this feature on my xbox. I might just have miss something, as I recall, if a game takes the entire memory, what would be executing the hibernation code ? Because on windows it's not built-in on the computer, it's the operating system (Read here, the game of the xbox) that would have to have the code.)
Xboxes have an OS too, and the game does not take the entire memory. We are not talking about a NES here.
How should a watcher know how close it is to optimal length?
A impressed one would think, "Wow, I didn't think you can do this glitch and I never thought of using this at that place! This HAS to be optimal!" or something.
Most of the watcher aren't familiar with the in-game mechanism, glitches, sequence breaking and whatever. How should such a person know if this is perfect?
And quite nobody does frame-per-frame analysis to find out, "Hey! This can be improved by 1 frame!".
That's why the vote is an opinion in the same way as the entertainment vote is.
Aren't those by popular agreement considered non-canon and more or less sacrilege? No serious zelda fan would even consider those as part of the zelda franchize.
its hard too see the possible imprecisions and improvements unless you're watching in frame advance.
Exactly, and why I think this category is pointless.
The technical rating is indeed pointless if we define "technical rating" = "is it frame-perfect?"
However, that is not what I understand as technical rating. I have tried to popularize a better and clearer definition (the one I more or less had in mind when I helped Bisqwit creating the rating code), but it hasn't got any popularity. Seems that people *want* it to mean "is it frame-perfect?" and don't want it to mean anything else. I don't understand why. As you say, it's pretty pointless with that meaning.
The rating would be more useful if it had a more meaningful meaning, but people just don't want that.
There are two possibilities, either it's a hoax, ie. an intentional fraud to get money, or it could also just be vaporware (in the same way as eg. Duke Nukem Forever).
As seen from DNF, even a big team of developers can have so many troubles in making a game that it becomes a hopeless vaporware. DNF has been in developement since 1997, and apparently the developement is still going on with full intentions of publication some day. If this is so for a professional team of developers, more the likely it can happen with just one amateur.
But of course it could also be an ebalorated hoax to get attention and money.
If you're going to split hours up into minutes, and minutes into seconds, why not seconds into frames? It is a used format of hh:mm:ss:ff, for example in movie
That would be really confusing. If someone sees "1:27:16" he will think it's one and a half hours long, not one and a half minutes.
asteron wrote:
Personally I dont much care for a time of 59:17.97
Maybe rounding to a tenth of a second is good enough? 59:17.9
59:18.0 would be more precise (less rounding error) than 59:17.9 in this case.
I don't notice any problem because I'm using the almighty mplayer, but if the videos use some odd audio codec which is not working for many people, then it should definitely be fixed.
And btw, is it really a good idea to publish in mkv format? Yes, it's better, but sadly still not popular. (Otoh, one could argue that x264 isn't still popular either, and if someone has it working, he probably has mkvs working too, but still... :) )
I can't believe some people think that a movie can be too short to be a "valid" TAS, and that it should instead be published as a concept demo.
I thought concept demos are those few videos which do not obey all the mandatory rules (eg. those starting from a savestate). This video certainly obeys all the rules and is a perfectly valid TAS. I don't see any problem with it.
As for it being boring, there are currently published long videos which are a thousand times more boring than this one. I agree with what someone said: How can you get bored in 10 seconds? You might get disappointed because nothing special seemed to happen, but that's different from boring.
In my case, there was actually a high entertainment value to this movie. And the entertainment was trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't understand at all what was going on when I first watched the video. After reading the submission text I understood it a lot better. Going through the video (the half second of gameplay) frame by frame was even more enlightening. This is much more than I can say from 90% of published videos.
A 100% completion of this game (ie. getting all the mosaic pieces) might be interesting too, unless it's a several-hours-long run.
There's a problem with "x% required to re-publish".
Think about SMB: To improve by a publishable margin, you'd have to have the requirement set to 0.15% (roughly), about 27 frames (for the 21 rule + some minor improvement I'd guess).
It should be done on a case-by-case basis, not just by a percentage. If it's obvious that it's just to get the name on the site, reject it or vote no. If it makes an honest attempt to obsolete a near-perfect movie, fine.
When I suggested that there's maybe an unwritten "should improve by x%" rule, I meant that it's a rule of thumb, ie. a generic guideline. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes a game (with a relatively short run, such as 5 minutes) may be the subject of a "competition" among several runners, each of them trying to surpass the others by squeezing out even the last possible frame from the run. Such exceptions are just fine, and do not nullify the rule of thumb for most other games.
Also, as I said, there are no specific numbers for the percentage. Just what the judges feel fit. It may even change depending on the popularity of the game. A 5-second improvement of the run of a certain game may be accepted, but of a completely unknown game it may well not be enough to bother (especially if the run is long).
As for "I wouldn't really care if someone obsoleted my 1-hour run by 1 frame right now", imagine that the other guy just takes your recording and simply redoes the last few seconds to get the 1 frame improvement, and submits that. Do you think it should be published?
Even if he did it all the way through from scratch, without doing anything really differently, I still am very dubious about accepting such an "improvement".
I think the "concept demo" category was created precisely to show "non-TASes", ie. videos which just demonstrate some concept (eg. glitches or such). It's hardly ever used.
But I don't blame the judges for this. They are overworked as they are (how long is the accepted movies queue right now? ;) ), so I don't blame them for not taking even more work, especially when it is about something which so hard to judge as "concept demos".
I actually happen to agree that a 30-minute movie should not lightly be obsoleted with a movie which is 2 frames faster. However, a movie which is 10 seconds long (such as the current record) may perfectly be obsoleted by one which is 0.5 seconds faster.
While speed is certainly a big goal (and the main one, basically), we should also think about the amount of hard work that people have put into making the videos. Nothing is more appalling and unrewarding that you spending 2 months making a 1-hour video and a week later someone else obsoleting it with another which is just 1 second faster. I agree that this should not be done unless there's a really good reason for it. Another purely practical thing is that publishing a new video which doesn't add anything relevant to the old one is only going to annoy people who downloaded the first one and would have to download it again just for a 1 second improvement.
I suppose that there's an unwritten rule like "a video should be x% faster than the previous one for it to be acceptable, except if it's from the same author, in which case a y% improvement is ok, with y < x". No exact percentages, but left to the judgement of the judges. I agree with this because it's practical.
This doesn't negate the goal of speed. It's just a question of practicality and resource management. Sometimes it's not practical nor interesting to accept a video which doesn't add anything to the previous one.
I think you understood my post a bit wrongly. I didn't say "entertainment is *not* a thing to aim for, only pure speed". Of course the SMB3 video gets 99 lives because it can do so without sacrificing any speed, and because it's more entertaining to do so. Gradius doesn't sacrifice any speed for entertainment either (boss fights are still done as fast as possible). There's nothing mutually exclusive in these two things. As I have said countless times, speed and entertainment are not contradictory goals.
Also having restrictions for the sake of entertainment is not contradictory with speed either. Just look at all the different Quake done Quick speedruns out there: They don't become less of a speedrun even though they may have some restrictions or different goals (such at getting all kills and secrets, or using the axe only).
However, what I was responding to was a post which, at least to me, sounded like speed was actually not a goal originally, and it has only become a main goal lately.
A machinima video is something where entertainment is the only goal. It might be eg. a music video made out of little sequences of a game with a music track added. Or it might be some story "filmed" using a game (such as the Red vs. Blue videos). In machinima videos there are no rules, no restrictions, no nothing. You can do whatever you want for the sake of entertainment.
That is quite far from TASes (and regular speedruns too), which have definite goals and strict rules, and where not obeying the rules may be seen as cheating. The concept of "cheating" would be just ridiculous when talking about purely entertainment-oriented videos (ie. machinima).
Perhaps one could say that this is one thing where TASes (and also regular speedruns) and entertainment contradict: The former has strict rules and the concept of cheating, concepts which would be ridiculous in the latter.
Movies here no longer aim to be "entertaining" when it conflicts with the goal of being "fast". Same reason it was changed from "Tool-assisted superplay movies" to "tool-assisted speedruns".
I think that's as silly as saying "movies at SDA no longer aim to be "entertaining" when it conflicts with the goal of being "fast"."
Speedruns have always had one goal: To complete the game as fast as possible. Tool-assisted speedruns (starting all the way back from Doom TASes in the end of the 90's) have always had the same goal. I have been following Bisqwit's work on this site from the very beginning, from his very first attempts at TASing supermario bros, from his very first site draft. The goal has always been the same: Complete games as fast as possible (by any means possible, including and even preferably abusing game bugs). You make it sound like the original purpose of the site was to make machinima videos, and somehow inexplicably it shifted to make speedrun videos. That just isn't so.
If what you want is a machinima video, then go ahead and do it. Heck, you might even succeed in having it accepted here. You will, however, probably have more success in a forum dedicated to machinima videos (try googling for some). Or youtube.
If you can't find speed for the sake of speed entertaining, then nobody forces you to watch the videos.
Ok, we discussed with Bisqwit quite extensively about a list of most downloaded movies compensated for time. Bisqwit wanted a list of the most popular movies in such way that the change in popularity (ie. amount of downloads per time unit) is taken out of the equation as well as possible. In other words, a formula which, in a downloads/time graph, makes download rates as close to a horizontal flat line as possible. The rationale behind this is that when the download rates are compensated like this, they will get a better figure on the popularity of the movies regardless of how long they have been published.
After much studying the data we ended up noticing that, in average, the download growth is directly proportional to the days the movie has been published to the power of 0.4 (this is just slightly slower than square root). When we divided download amounts during time by the number of days to the power of 0.4, we got almost horizontal flat lines for most movies (except in the first weeks after publication which, of course, behave rather differently before it stabilishes to the days^0.4 behaviour).
I added this list to the MovieStatistics page. Not surprisingly it resembles the Most Downloaded list, but there are some changes.
I don't know if this is what Nach wanted, but it's what Bisqwit wanted. :)
I think you should ask Bisqwit about getting that data. After all, it's his database and I wouldn't dare distributing anything without his permission. :)
Containing what?
I think your avatar fits this quite well... ;)
asteron wrote:
Y-axis is number of movies
X-axis is the the length or rerecords etc so you see the movie distribution of how many are what size. These are likely bargraphs.
If it's a bar chart then each bar would represent a value range of rerecords (or whatever)? For example the first bar would represent movies having 0-100 rerecords, the second 101-200 rerecords and so on?
The problem I see in this is what that step should actually be. Given that the amount of published movies isn't really that large (less than 400) and the total range of rerecords is very large (smallest 215, largest 224441) the chart would probably get full of holes and bars with just 1 or two movies in them, almost regardless of what is the value range of each bar.
With movie lengths perhaps a more meaningful bar chart could be achieved given that most movies fall in the range of about 10-40 minutes. It's still a question what would the range of each bar be. The problem is that the longest movies are really long (4 hours 21 minutes) and if every movie is put into the chart, most movies will get compressed into its left side while the majority of the rest of the chart will, again, have 0-1 sized bars.
To illustrate this more concretely, let's assume that each bar represents a 1-minute range (ie. first bar is movies between 0 and 1 minute long, second bar is for movies between 1 and 2 minutes long, etc): To represent all the movies currently published the chart would need 261 bars. The majority of movies will be placed around bar 25 (which is the average movie lenght). This is one tenth of the whole chart width from its left side. I assume that over half of the chart (from the halfpoint widthwise to the right) will be mostly empty, with some 1-sized bars here and there.
Perhaps some kind of logarithmic scale could be used. Suggestions?
I really don't like the whole bumping thing. However I would like to mention that I really would like to see some of the stats I listed in the first reply to this thread. They seem to go hand in hand with some of the other stats there, and in some cases help clarify the statistics of the other ones.
I'm not exactly sure what "most downloaded / days since published" would actually tell if the "days since published" is the current amount of days. As time passes and movies get older, the order of that list would just be the same as the "most downloaded" list (because the differences between the divisors will get smaller and smaller during time). Only immensely popular videos which get downloaded a lot in the first weeks/months would disrupt that list for a while, but once again, as time would pass, it would finally fall back into its place (ie. the the same place as in the "most downloaded" lists). In other words, the list could be rather transient and most probably would mostly replicate the "most downloaded " list (I haven't tested this in any way, though, so I may well be quite wrong).
One interesting list could perhaps be "most downloaded in the first two weeks" (or first week/day/month or whatever), but I'm not sure if the bittorrent tracker logs that kind of statistics. Perhaps another interesting list would be "most downloaded movies during the past 7 days" (or whatever timeframe) which would in practice list the most popular newest publications, but again, I don't know if the tracker logs that.
If the tracker does not log times, then the only possibility to implement that latter list would be for bisqwit to make some cronjob which regularly saves somewhere the data needed for it. However, the other list would be impossible because that info has been lost for the currently published movies.
Edit: Thinking about it a bit more, perhaps "downloads/days_published" could maybe work as a "most popular recent movies" after all. As the days start increasing from 1 forward, it rapidly drops the item down the list, and publications of the day get a high boost (because they basically don't get a "penalty" on the publication day, which older ones get). If using days is way too coarse (ie. movies would drop too drastically at exactly 24 hours after publication instead of sinking gradually and more slowly), a smaller unit could be used, as hours, minutes or even seconds since publication. However, I fear that if the time unit is too small (eg. seconds) it would perhaps randomize the list too much (the list could get almost completely shuffled each 10 minutes, which is how often the page cache expires). Another thing is that if a direct fraction doesn't work very well, perhaps a factor would have to be used to make it better behaved (such as something like "downloads/(10*seconds)" or whatever). It may be worth trying, but finding good parameters might be hard.
asteron wrote:
How hard is it to show a histogram or a graph that gives the distribution of
Movie Length,
Re-records,
rerecord/length,
Age,
a few others?
Making histograms and graphs shouldn't be too difficult. I don't know if PHP has directly functions for creating this kind of images, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had. Even if it hadn't, it would be easy to use gnuplot for this.
However, that's not the main problem here. The problem is: What would be the units in the x and y axes be in that kind of graph?
Assuming that, for example, the y axis is the movie length (eg. in minutes) or the amount of rerecords, what would the x axis be?
