Perhaps the site should be distributing a simple encoding 'kit' that comes as a snapshot containing everything you need to encode from the codecs to subtitles and basic logo support? That would be more friendly then the wiki I think.
While the issue doesn't seem to be so much about lack of computing power, I still think that's an excellent idea. It would certainly make it a lot easier for people to donate computing power to the cause (ie. encoding movies).
Of course this kind of kit would most probably be feasible only for linux (as windows lacks most if not all the standard tools which would make this so easy in linux), but I don't think that matters. Many of the contributors probably use linux, and I would certainly donate computing power to this on my linux box if such an easy-to-use kit existed.
Of course optimal encoding parameters depend on the game, but the kit could come with some presets for each game console (as optimal parameters are probably very console dependant), and the user could try them before trying to fine-tune by hand. For example, the user could tell the encoding system to use "preset 1", and the system would then look what type of movie is being encoded (nes, snes, n64...) and choose the first preset for that console. After the encoding is done the user could watch the result, and if it looks like crap, he could start over with preset 2 and so on. Only if no preset gives a good result, additional manual fine-tuning could be performed.
Naturally it would require someone to make such a kit, which I don't see happening anytime soon. :(
Well, the average movie length is 25:29, which is 25.4889 minutes. The number of published movies is 371. Their total length is thus the product of those two numbers, ie. 9454.3 minutes = 157.57 hours = 6.56 days.
The Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Award goes to Warp for his amazing ability to sometimes eagerly discuss something no one else wants to talk about.
I don't think it fits the spirit of this thread to start being disrespectful towards other people. This kind of taunting is completely out of place.
I think it fits the spirit of this thread pretty well. Please explain to us why you disagree.
Because it makes fun of a person, completely unrelated to TAS-making and TAS achievements, and in a way which is out of line. In other words, it pokes fun in a mean way on someone because he has done something which has been seen as a very negative thing. I think the idea here is to award positive, funny achievements in TAS making, not to attack someone's behavioral history.
So the answer really is "yes, the submission engine would have to contain checks against possible cheating in the submission file"?
This is getting kind of repetitive.
Wouldn't the correct answer thus have been "yes" instead of "no"? If parsing the header is necessary to catch cheating attempts, then it *is* indeed necessary for the submission engine to contain additional code for this.
Adding in things like cheat codes, subtitles, and especially savestate checkpoints will make this a much larger problem. Personally I think movie files are a very nice size, especially compared to avi.
ZMV supports all that and is smaller than SMVs for the same movie in the tests I ran.
Does that mean that if a movie is submitted in the zmv format, the submission engine needs to perform checks in order to catch possible attempts at cheating?
No.
Then how it should be checked that a submission doesn't contain eg. cheatcodes in it?
Ok, Bisqwit gave the green light, so I added links to extended lists in some of the categories. I'm not sure the ones I left without an extended list really need them, but if you really, really want them, I can add them too... :)
Adding in things like cheat codes, subtitles, and especially savestate checkpoints will make this a much larger problem. Personally I think movie files are a very nice size, especially compared to avi.
ZMV supports all that and is smaller than SMVs for the same movie in the tests I ran.
Does that mean that if a movie is submitted in the zmv format, the submission engine needs to perform checks in order to catch possible attempts at cheating?
AFAIK that would actually be quite easy to implement (doesn't even require new code to be written). Only Bisqwit could estimate if it could be too heavy on the server (I guess not because the data is cached, but who knows...)
I think that the idea Bisqwit had when he suggested that term was that it's a list of really old movies which can most probably be improved by current knowledge and technology on TAS-making, and the list could be an incentive for someone to try. The name "longest time published" doesn't feel to convey that message, somehow.
After thinking about it, This idea is kind of a bad idea, since it is all a matter of opinion. Since the award will represent the forum and the site as a whole, it would be wrong if members disagreed.
The bad part is, is that the matter of opinion usually comes from Players previous experience with the game, and how much they know it.
OTOH stars are awarded based on pure opinions alone, and without polls, yet nobody is complaining about them (at least not too loudly)...
It possibly solves the problem if the console does not read controller states during the lag frame, like Myria explained. There could be 10 lag frames on one emulator and it would still only read the next input after the screen updated next time, like an emulator which didn't lag at all.
The lag is introduced precisely because the CPU is doing something. What it is doing during the lag may well affect subsequent frames. In other words, subsequent frames may be different depending on the lag. That is, lag frames are not necessarily (nor probably) no-ops, but they may well affect what happens next. Thus if what happens next is different, the input will be invalidated (ie. will desync) regardless.
I made two additions to the MovieStatistics page:
- Now only movies published over 2 weeks ago are listed in the least downloaded lists.
- A new top list (Bisqwit's idea): Longest stayed unchallenged
Greatest devotion to a single game by one user or a team of users
I would at least give a honorable mention to Exim for his dedication to the Solstice TAS (no less than 9 revisions) and Randil for continuing the legacy. (IMO Solstice has somewhat of a historical value because it was one of the very first TASes ever made and published here.)
I also agree with Bisqwit in nominating the LoZ TAS for most thoroughly worked (route) planning.
I also nominate the LoZ TAS as the one having had most impact in the regular speedrunner community. A sign of this is that the LoZ video is currently the most downloaded one: Over 15 thousands downloads so far.
(Nothing can beat Morimoto's original SMB3 video for overall impact, though. However, I would say the LoZ run was important because it didn't ride on the ignorance about tool-assistance, as the SMB3 video did, since TASes were already pretty known among speedrunners by the time of its publication.)
Least appreciated video for the amount of work spent into making it: NES Kid Niki 2 by Randil. Under 10 minutes, almost 10000 rerecords, only 176 downloads (least downloaded currently published video).
TAS with the longest submission novel: http://tasvideos.org/880S.html
My format would make the input data consistent for a given controller type on a given console. Ideally, ZSNES and SNES9x would be able to read and record the same movie format.
The problem I see with this is that, while they might be recording and reading the same format, the generated movie files won't be interchangeable. In other words, a movie created with zsnes will have a high probability of desyncing in snes9x (even though it will work in zsnes) and the other way around.
This is because, as far as I know, different emulators emulate the console differently. They will have lag frames here and there, and it will depend on the emulator exactly where. These don't make any difference when playing normally, but with a recording, where perfect frame-by-frame replication is necessary, it makes a big difference.
Thus we would have one format which is still emulator-specific. This can only add to the confusion because there's no external way of telling which emulator was used to create the recording. With the differently-named formats it's at least possible to differentiate. (Of course nothing would stop the emulator from naming the files differently, but then, what's the point? What would be the advantage?)
I mean the sorts of problems people have where someone's movie won't play back correctly because it's the wrong emulator version or whatever. I'm just guessing really, but I think timing changes to the emulator could be partly at fault for this. A situation where a game barely avoids missing a frame could turn into missing a frame if the emulator timing changes, and this is catastrophic for movie playback.
A movie format won't change this. It would require a change in all the emulators to make them emulate in an identical way.
A format that times the recorded controller to the controller port probe signal is easier to get correct.
I don't see how that would solve the problems. Usually desyncs happen because of changing lag frames: Keypresses have been recorded on a per-frame basis, and if a lag frame gets wrongly emulated the second time, the recording will obviously desync because it was created with a different (or lacking) lag frame position. I don't see how timing the keypresses in some other way could solve this problem: If a lag frame which was/wasn't there previously is introduced/removed during playback, the movie will desync. It doesn't matter how the keypresses have been timed.
I don't know what FCM does. My format is clearly not designed for direct editing; some tools would definitely be necessary. Perhaps a parallel XML-based format could be made that could be manually edited as required.
I thought your idea was to save space, not to bloat it. :P
This must be the most inefficient use of image format I have ever seen in my life: A 2-color 600x200 image in bmp format, taking a whopping 352 kB of space.
Converting it to png and optimizing reduced it to 2 kB.
I'm just wondering what happens if there's the most awesome submission published, then a new submission comes which is much less awesome and slower and such, but the movie is liked (and thus yes should be voted and gets most of the votes).
I think people always compare it to the previous submission. There have been actual cases of someone submitting a slower movie (but with all the same goals, without nothing innovative), perhaps by misunderstanding or error, and voters have dismissed it.
But anyways, I think that Bisqwit, as the owner of the site, has a kind-of veto right, and thus the ultimate decision. I don't know if he has ever used it, though... :P
Can it be seen as a technical merit that a bot was not used but all optimizations were done by hand? If yes, then a high technical score is justified. I suppose it's up to the voter to decide whether it's technically more praiseworthy or not.
Anyways, my proposition was for a generic guideline, not a strict rule. Well-justified exceptions are always acceptable.
Has anyone even considered making a TAS of this game? From the looks of it, I think it has potential. There seems to be lots of room for tactical optimization.
Granted, if all the 50 levels look the same, it might get boring, but...
I would rather like to accept PC Doom TASes than SNES Doom TASes, because of the big difference in visual and aural quality.
Sure, but why is snes doom completely out of question? I think it would be interesting to see. I have seen many Doom speedruns (none tool-assisted, though), but seeing a TAS of the snes version would be interesting.
I can say diretly that any submissions for SNES or other poor ports of Doom will be rejected, because there are already excellent TASes for the PC version.
I still think that it would be a better idea to have some kind of groups of "starred" movies instead of just listing them all as individual movies. The most representative movie of a group would be used in the list, and by clicking something in it the whole group could be expanded, or something along those lines. This way the list gets less cluttered.
I'm not only referring to movies of a specific game, but movies about a specific franchise. For example, I still think there are too many supermario movies in the starred list. Most if not all of them could be collapsed into this kind of (optionally expandable) group.
This would also allow more movies of the same game or franchise to get a "secondary star" of sorts. Ie. it's not in the main list, but it appears if a group is expanded. It would work as a kind of "see also" secondary list.
Just an idea.
