Posts for Warp


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IdeaMagnate wrote:
Could we have an option to cancel ratings we've given.
I had that idea from very early on, but somehow it didn't get implemented. If you are unhappy with your ratings for a certain movie, you can always change them. Is there a good reason you want to *remove* them instead?
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moozooh wrote:
Not long ago, Diman submitted a Gradius movie that was faster than Morimoto's. "No, it's boring to watch, it's not entertainment!"
Oh, sure, giving *one* example (on a fixed-speed scroller game) surely is enough to prove me wrong, yeah. It doesn't matter that several hundreds of movies have been obsoleted by faster entries and many submissions have even been rejected because of not being fast enough. "Hey, there's this *one* entry which was not obsoleted by a faster entry, thus we don't aim for speed." Sure. Gradius is a rather clear exception to the rule. It's a fixed-speed scroller game where there is very little to optimize for speed and basically everything you *can* do is to show off. The aim for speed would be silly in this game.
At most, they are put in a separate category (doesn't use warps, doesn't aim for the fastest time, etc). Now how contradictory is that?
There's nothing contradictory in having different types of runs: A run of the type "as fast as possible, whatever it takes to do it" and runs which have some constraints or additional goals to them for entertainment value (but still are as fast as possible to achieve those goals). Just look at all the different Quake done Quick speedruns: There are several different ones with different goals. For example there are runs on easy level and runs on the most difficult level. There are runs where anything goes and runs where the runner has to get 100% kills and secrets. There are runs where the runner is allowed to use only the axe as weapon. There's even a run which runs through the levels in reverse order. And so on. However, and this is the important bit: Even with the constraints/goals, the main objective is still speed. The exact same thing goes with TAS videos.
The fact that sometimes speed can greatly reduce the entertainment factor
Can you give some examples where speed greatly reduces the entertainment factor? And what is it that you want? Supermario fooling around, the objective being... what? Who dances the funniest? Superhuman speed is exactly what makes these movies awesome, and achieving extreme tool-assisted speed requires in most games a huge amount of work and dedication. Anyone can easily make a movie where the character fools around and does "funny" things, but not everyone can beat the best (tool-assisted) completion time for the game. Ah, please don't tell me you are jealous. You would want to make videos yourself but you aren't able to beat people's times?
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moozooh wrote:
Edit: Sorting the movies by their rating would be very useful.
Well, one of the main points of the rating system is that it would be possible to list movies in order of best-rated. However, since the system is still in testing phase and there might still be some changes (depending on the feedback of users) there isn't much hurry right now.
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JXQ wrote:
Another suggestion would be to be able to look at your own votes together on a page?
Is this something different from what the link "rate other movies" in the rating page gives?
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Dan_ wrote:
My main beef with tasvideos.org is that TAS stands for tool assisted speedrun, and yet it's been said over and over again that the main goal of these movies isn't speed.
And it has been said over and over that that is pure bullshit. Just read the freaking guidelines. It says "be quick", and that entire section gives guidelines on how to make the run as fast as possible. Also the main principle for movie obsoletion is, surprise surprise, *speed*: The lesser the frames in the movie, the better. When a movie obsoletes another movie by being 10 frames faster, what else could possibly be the main judging principle than speed? From the 300+ movies published in the site how many can you point at where the main goal is not speed? The only ones I can think of are the various gradius videos, and that's only because they are fixed-speed scrollers (and even in them the goal in the boss fights is to kill them as fast as possible). What is true is that we do not aim *only* to speed but *also* to entertainment. However, the latter is just a *secondary* objective. There haven't been many videos which have obsoleted another video by being more entertaining but slower (there might have been one or two cases that I faintly recall of, but that's all). I think that you have a confusion about the expression "we don't want to compete with regular speedrunners, this is only for entertainment purposes" as if it meant something like "we don't aim for speed, only entertainment". It does not mean that.
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Omega wrote:
I do think, however, that it's a bad thing the name TASVideos doesn't exactly speak for itself. What is "TAS"? A lot of people don't know this. A lot of people do know what a "NES" is, though, and will get the idea that these are indeed probably videos of games being played, even if it turns out there's more than just NES videos.
Someone said this is a good point. I disagree. Does for example "youtube" tell to you "this is a site about funny videos" or does "google" tell you "this is an internet search engine"? A name does not have to be descriptive in order to be known. "TASvideos" is actually more descriptive than many of the most known sites.
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Zurreco wrote:
the term 'TAS' is still just a stand in until we can all finally agree on a term for the movies made here.
Says who? You? Why would we need anything else? "Tool-assisted speedrun" is a term established in the speedrunning community even before this site existed (it started with the Doom tool-assisted speedrunning community many years before this site was created) and the meaning of the term as used back then is exactly what these videos are. Why would we need to change it? Changing it now, after all these years, would only cause confusion with no benefit whatsoever. The original term "timeattack" used in this site was a mistake (afaik it was Morimoto who first used that term, quite confusingly, to name his SMB3 video, and then the term spread like a harmful virus until it was (mostly) eradicated and killed). "We don't do these videos for speed" is complete BS. When a video obsoletes another by being a dozen frames faster, that's nothing else than aiming for speed. From the 300+ videos in this site there are probably less than 5 where speed is not the goal (and that's only because speed can't be a goal in the game itself because it's a fixed-speed scroller game). Wikipedia has an article on tool-assisted speedruns. There are several articles about tool-assisted speedruns in other sites too, including interviews of Bisqwit and others. Tool-assisted speedruns have gained some popularity. Changing the term now would be completely foolish.
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There were some small differences between their live performance and the original commercial studio recording. The latter is actually quite good, IMO. When I first heard the song (many weeks before the actual Eurovision contest) I didn't think much of it either. However, after hearing it many times it's actually quite catchy. I like it.
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I wasn't talking about your planned site but about google videos, youtube etc.
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I wrote a short article about my views on why Lordi won, if anyone is interested: http://warp.povusers.org/lordi.html
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Suppose you have made a big bunch of pictures and you put them on your webpage at full resolution and carefully fine-tune jpeg settings in order to get the maximum quality/size ratio. Now suppose that someone wants to mirror those images in another site, but he thinks that the files are too big and thus reduces the sizes of the images and saves them as low-quality jpegs without bothering on the slightest to fine-tune the jpeg compression settings to get high quality. Then suppose that that mirror site is 100 times more popular than your original site. What happens? Thousands of people all over the world will see lousy jpeg-compressed versions of your images, full of artifacts which make them look really ugly. These thousands of people won't realize that that is not what the author intended and that much more high-quality versions of the images would be available. This happens all the time. With images and with videos. This is especially pronounced with videos: Someone will publish a high-resolution high-quality h264 video somewhere, and if the video is cool, someone else will take the video, rape it to a quarter size in pixels and rape it into a wmv with really lousy quality settings and publish it in a much more popular forum that way. The video will look like a postal-stamp-sized crap. Oh yeah, this happens all the time. I know, this problem is not so pronounced with nesvideos (people seldom feel the need to reduce the size in pixels), but I still feel a bit uneasy about it.
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It's funny how some people see something in these videos which "shouldn't be possible" and immediately get suspicions of something not being honestly made. Why don't they realize that games are made by humans and can have *bugs*, programming errors which under certain circumstances allow doing things which normally shouldn't be possible. Most often bugs just crash the program, but not always. Bugs come in all sizes and shapes and colors and although crashing bugs are the most common, they are not the only ones. In some cases the trick being (ab)used is not really a bug but a conscious design decision made by the programmers, usually to save resources (which is relevant especially in small machines like the NES). These are usually things you can't or is very difficult to exploit in normal playing but with the infinite accuracy of a TAS you can. Lazy collision detection is the most typical example. And sometimes it's not a bug nor a shortcut, but it just works as intended, the viewer just might not be aware of it. This tetris thing is probably if this type, as explained.
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Btw, the ending music of this game is one of the best I have ever heard in a NES game (not technically, but by its melody).
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FODA wrote:
if the files are available for download why do we need torrent
Do you really think Bisqwit could have uploaded 47.6 terabytes worth of videos (well, actually a lot more since that number only takes into account the videos which are currently published) to people if he only had direct downloads? What makes his site different? Unless he has a T1 all for himself, which I doubt...
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How about a second nesvideos meeting at London? If lucky, you can get a flight from Finland to London with a mere 20 euros, which is laughably cheap. I bet other (European) countries have similar situations too.
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AngerFist wrote:
I would suggest some nice popular "summer countries" (no offense to Finland) like Spain, Greece, KINGSTON JAMAICA!
Finland is one of the most beautiful places in the world in summer. Someone has said that it would be a crime to travel abroad from Finland in summer, and I agree.
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Or perhaps it's just a troll.
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You are right in both counts. (And even if some people would realize they could seed the file, most of them would probably not bother.)
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So you want to contribute in the original nesvideos site having less seeds than it already has? What for? That can be a self-feeding problem. "I would download via bittorrent but there are no seeds, thus I download directly from this mirror site" thus making the problem of lack of seeds even worse.
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One movie which I would like to see improved is the no-death version of the rygar run. Besides being done in famtasia (with the pal/ntsc problem) it doesn't use all the newer glitches the death-version uses (other than the warp-by-death glitch, that is).
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This is due to how the two different versions of the movie (fmv and fcm) are stored in bisqwit's database. They appear as two separate and distinct movies and the simple top10 script does not see that they are actually the same. Making the script see that they are actually the same movie would require special coding. (Or perhaps the fmv version should just be removed?)
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Bisqwit wrote:
The problem is: the people who have published them there have stripped away the logo and the disclaimer that it is a tool-assisted movie. They are published there without any mention that they are tool-assisted movies.
That's really outrageous. I suppose that their mentality is a bit like of those who take one of those Nike (or whatever) commercials where something really incredible has been achieved by computer trickery, but which just looks *really* real, then they cut the ending of the ad where the Nike (or whatever) logo and tagline appear and then post it somewhere as a "real" video. Afterwards you can then check from snopes.com that it was indeed not a real video but just a commercial using computer trickery. I suppose that when people cut ad videos like that and then post them to the internet, they are seeking for the "WTF??? Is this real???" reaction of people for their own amusement. I bet those people at youtube are seeking for the same kind of amusement. They probably don't understand what kind of controversy they are stirring and how much damage they are doing by that. (Some of them probably wouldn't care even if they did.)
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Seriously: "We do not only/always aim for speed, but also for entertainment" is a rather poor argument for not using the word "speed". Regular speedruns aim for entertainment too. They are not purely dry and technical (though human) achievements of raw speed (as well as a human can do) without any emotion nor entertainment aim. Instead, whenever it is possible most speedruns try to do something funny and entertaining. This is especially true when there's a long wait in the game. A "purely speed-oriented" run would just boringly and technically wait the whole time in the most optimal position until it's possible to continue. However, speedrunners try to do something entertaining instead. A very good example happens in the QdQwav run in one of the episode final levels where the floor lowers for almost a minute. The runner writes through the msg system of the game "I have practiced this move", then makes a slow camera movement and then writes "Did you like it?". A rather dumb joke, but demonstrates my point. Yet they are still called "speedruns", not "entertainment runs" or whatever. I see no problem whatsoever in keeping the word "speed" in tool-assisted runs. Besides, 99.9% of tool-assisted runs *do* aim at speed as their main goal. From all the 300+ published movies, how many can you list which do not?
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It's a bit of a shame that the most downloaded movie of all time was dropped out of the top10 list by being obsoleted. I really hope this doesn't happen to the LoZ movie because it really deserves to be in the top10 most downloaded movies list.
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Don't get trolled. This is a clear case of: http://www.bash.org/?152037