Posts for Warp


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BrunoVisnadi wrote:
Everyone should see how serious it is to have a president with this kind of ideology
Then perhaps the regressive left (which seems to be what the Democratic Party in the United States has pretty much devolved into) should learn their lesson, because they made Trump happen. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. To better understand the regressive left mindset, let me tell a little anecdote: On Facebook somebody posted a link to a (Finnish) newspaper article talking about the reasons why Trump became elected, and it was pretty much on the line that it's because the people have become tired of being constantly called racists etc. I wrote a reply to that post discussing that point in more detail, and I linked examples of what kind of hideous things the modern social justice ideology causes, such as the BBC engaging in racial discrimination (which is illegal in the UK, yet somehow they don't get punished for it), and psychological abuse of children. A full-on social justice warrior responded to my comment. Can you guess what was the very first thing she did in that post? Did she have a rational discussion with me? Or did she perhaps strongly disagree with what I wrote? Did she maybe disbelieve or deny the veracity of those articles? Did she perhaps distance herself from that kind of extremism? Or, perhaps, did she even just outright agree with those things and support them? No. None of that. The very first thing she wrote in her response to me was mockery. And that's one of the key problems with the whole ideology. Social justice warriors have this strong iron-clad conviction that they have the moral high ground, and they will look down their noses to everybody who disagrees with them, and they will freely resort to mockery, insults and namecalling. And that is, ultimately, why Trump happened. Mockery has never persuaded anybody. Insults have never persuaded anybody. Calling people names has never persuaded anybody. Why would anybody think it would? Why does the regressive left think that if they keep mocking people, insulting them, and accusing them of all kinds of heinous things, that they will become popular and win elections? On the contrary, that's only going to drive people away, and that's exactly what happened. When people have been accused of all kinds of heinous things for years and years, when they are constantly being called racists, sexists, homophobes, nazis and "deplorables", and a candidate comes up who offers a better alternative, a candidate who actually listens to the people, who addresses their concerns and problems, rather than just looking down his nose at them and insulting them, that's who the people will choose. I think Trump's victory is important not only because it was a slap in the face of the regressive left, but also, even more importantly, it was a slap in the face of the American press. The American press is almost farcically biased and partisan, to the most ridiculous extent. It was a harsh wakeup call to them that they do not, after all, control the people nor elect presidents. Both the Democratic Party, and the American press, should learn from this. They should stop with their regressive leftist holier-than-thou looking-down-your-nose attitude, and start actually listening to the people. Else Trump will just be re-elected in four years. Not because most of his voters want to, but because the alternative is worse, and they are tired of being abused by the left. (And for the record, to avoid any confusion, I do not sympathize in the least with the Republican Party. I think many of their most important policies are in direct opposition to my views, and I oppose them vehemently and find them reprehensible. It's just that the Democratic Party seems to have been invaded in recent years with an even worse cancer.)
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Samsara wrote:
There's disagreeing with something and then there's beating people over the head with your disagreement until they agree just to shut you up. Take a moment to reflect on your actions and your experiences with the site and categorize yourself accordingly.
MOD EDIT: This sort of bickering is not helping anyone's case, so please drop this sub-conversation (this goes for each of you). Stick to the topic. -Mothrayas
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Spikestuff wrote:
You know. Just mainly because you completely avoided responding to a post that was especially made for you to respond to. Since, I don't want to repeat it word for word, with a quote and because it was actually dedicated to that discussion at that place, and you're bringing it up here once more, I'll just link my post here about the original discussion and wait for your response. Be sure to respond at the dedicated place which is where it all started, which is not this thread thanks.
You seem to have some kind of attitude problem. The original poster asked about changing the graphics of games, and I expressed my disapproval of it. I find those modified graphics ugly to the extreme, and I believe I'm entitled to express my opinion. What exactly do you want? Everybody to simply agree with it? Is disagreement not allowed here anymore? Who decides what is and isn't an appropriate topic to disagree with? You?
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Samsara wrote:
The real issue is that it has been proven that the Democrats were hacked, which lead to leaked information that completely damned Hillary Clinton, and someone could easily argue that these leaks persuaded a lot of voters over to Trump's side.
So in other words some good old investigative journalism was done, and the truth was revealed to the public. Is that bad, somehow?
Post subject: Re: Depixelizing emulators
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Ramzi wrote:
How hard would it be to pull the sprites from a ROM at startup, depixelize them, save them to a hashmap or something, and render them instead of the original sprites?
Uh... Thanks, but no thanks. The official Mario64 encode is hideously ugly enough. We really don't need the same for any other game!
Post subject: Re: The technological singularity
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Bobo the King wrote:
I believe Donald Trump has a decent chance of getting us all killed within just four years.
More likely the exact opposite. The relationship between the US and Russia has been getting worse and worse during the last years because of the economic sanctions that the former (and the United Nations in general) has been imposing onto the latter. There's a reason why Russia has been so brash during the last years, and making so much noise. They are not happy. Trump has indicated that he wants to mend fences with Russia, while Clinton apparently had no such intent (but the opposite). Keeping Russia happier is probably for the good of the entire world, but especially Europe. As a Finn, it doesn't exactly make me feel relaxed to see time and again how the Russians are talking about invading Finland. If Trump is able to placate Russia in any way, and make them a bit more content, I'm all for it. That in itself trumps (hah) the other things that I strongly disagree with about Trump's views (such as climate change, healthcare, separation of church and state, etc.)
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PikachuMan wrote:
The Netflix version of Where the Apple Lies, every instance of cider was replaced with juice. This was probably due to the episode not being aired in the UK. As cider being an alcoholic beverage in the UK.
It would be funny if they dubbed over that single word in the original lines using a completely different voice, to make it stand out like a sore thumb.
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c-square wrote:
XII on the other hand, ranks among my favourites in the series, below VI, on par with VII and above IX!
I suppose you convinced me to get the remastered version, when it's published. (I hope it's not exceedingly expensive.)
Post subject: Re: Medias that take movies from TASVideos
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Odongdong wrote:
I'm no expert at this kind of thing, so I can't tell if this is legal or not (though I remember the site claims all contents are under CC BY 2.0). Regardless, they don't seem to give a proper credit to ElectroSpecter
Firstly, as you note, TASes are published under a Creative Commons license, so other than crediting, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it, "for any purpose, even commercially". Crediting itself doesn't necessarily have to be an on-your-face plastered on screen. It can be a small text in the end credits, or somewhere where it can be found if needed. But even if no credits can be found anywhere at all, I'm dubious if this would be something worth fighting for. Secondly, and this is quite important, you have to be very, very careful about claiming ownership of anything done using somebody else's intellectual property without permission (which is what encoding a TAS and publishing it online is.) You can claim "fair use" and "derivative work" all day long, but courts do not care what you say. They care about the actual law, and which party makes a better case. The TAS itself, in other words the file containing timed keypresses and nothing else, is probably completely legal. Publishing the video footage of essentially the entire game may well be a breach of copyright. Sure, most IP owners do not care, but that doesn't make it any less of a copyright breach. You have to be very careful about these things (and not, for example, start making money out of these encodes). If anybody, the people in that concert using that video footage require permission from the IP owners (which is probably the publisher of the game, or possibly the developers, but most probably the publisher), unless they are 100% sure that it falls completely under fair use (which in this case it might). It's a very fuzzy topic. Better not get involved, unless you are a lawyer specialized in copyright law. (I'm not, so don't take any of this as legal advice.)
Post subject: Re: My external hard drive is broken...
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PikachuMan wrote:
My external hard drive is a Western Digital
I think that's the major problem. And I'm not making a joke here. Many people (including myself) have had bad experiences with WD hard drives.
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Banned User
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Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
natt wrote:
I personally liked FFX quite a bit, and FFXII is one of my favorite games of all time. I thought FFXIII was utter dogshit.
I'm honestly curious why you think FFX is ok while FFXIII is garbage. As I see it, almost everything that FFXIII did wrong, FFX did it first. I have hard time thinking of something that FFX does better than FFXIII. Ok, maybe the story in FFX, while bland and not very engaging (and at points a bit cringeworthy) is a bit easier to follow and understand than the one of FFXIII (which was so confusing and so poorly told, in my experience, that I just couldn't follow it, and half the time I had no idea what the characters were referring to. It was full of confusing names and terms that were poorly explained, and I was constantly lost on what exactly they are talking about.) While the level design in FFX is really bad (for a JRPG in general, and a Final Fantasy game in particular), consisting almost solely of short ultra-linear levels (just like FFXIII), at least the scenery was somewhat less abstract and, maybe, slightly more connected to the story being told, than in XIII (although not by much). Not at all points in the story, but at many. Other than those, I can't really think of things that FFX did better than FFXIII, even if barely. Anyway, if FF XII is not of the same type of game as X and XIII, then I will probably give it a try. I hope I don't experience the same level of utter disappointment as with FFX. FF XV might also be on my buying list in the future, maybe if there's a sale or something. Hopefully it's better than XIII.
Post subject: FF XII and FF XV, are they any good?
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Thought this would be as good of a forum to ask this as anything else. The new Final Fantasy XV is out. Likewise the remastered version of Final Fantasy XII is upcoming. But are they worth buying? And before you answer, let me explain a bit: I love the Final Fantasy franchise up to FF IX (I have in fact played all of them). Even though they made a jump to 3D with FF VII, they all share the common trait of using "traditional" JRPG mechanics. The kind that make such games so enjoyable and addictive. FF X threw all that out of the window, and it's one of the worst video games I have ever played. (If you really want to read a wall-of-text rant about it, I have made a blog post about it. I won't blame you if you can't bother to read all that, though.) It ditched basically all traditional JRPG elements for a rather different kind of game genre, and slapped the "Final Fantasy" brand name onto it. FF XIII (and its sequels) followed suit, by being pretty much a clone of FF X, just with another setting, but with more abstract scenery and a significantly more confusing story. (At first I thought that FF XIII was the first game where Square/Enix changed the franchise completely to this new kind of game genre, but I was wrong. FF X was the first one where they did that.) When the remastered version of FF X appeared on the PlayStation store, I bought it thinking that I finally would get a chance to play a FF game that I had never had the opportunity to play before. I assumed that it was the same kind of game as all the previous ones (eg. FF IX, which was great.) I was completely wrong, and ended up regretting that purchase. Thus I'm a bit wary about the upcoming remastered version of FF XII. If I end up buying it, will the story just repeat itself? Is that game of the same genre as FF X and FF XIII? Does it lack basically all JRPG elements, instead replacing them with mind-bogglingly linear levels and a sheer overabundance of cutscenes? Does it compare more to pre-FFX games, or to FFX and FFXIII? The same question for the new FF XV, if anybody here has had the opportunity to play it. Since I hate spoilers, I have very little information about it. All I know is that, at least, it seemingly does not use traditional JRPG-style turn-based combat, although that's not a major deal if it's otherwise good. (In fact, the combat system in FF XIII was the best part of the game, and it was essentially the only thing that helped me play the game to the end.)
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
...which is also just a kid's cartoon.
True, but it's also smarter than that, in a manner that appeals to adults as well. Something that I don't see in the Equestria Girls movies. Those are just kids' cartoons period. Or at least that's how I feel about them.
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Samsara wrote:
Warp wrote:
The current official answer seems to be "this is just how it is, end of discussion", which doesn't feel quite satisfactory, to me at least.
I figured you'd be used to that by now, seeing as "This is just how it is, end of discussion" is how the site handles 95% of the complaints that pop up.
I don't really understand why you are saying that. Personally I have much more positive experiences from tasvideos. (For example, when I opened up a discussion on whether sport games, like mini-golf, should be accepted on Vault, that ended up causing a change to the rules to accept such games, which was awesome.) I really appreciate that the tasvideos staff is ready to listen to their visitors (something that seems very rare on the internet nowadays.)
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I just don't get Equestria Girls. I watched the first two movies, but haven't even bothered with the third and fourth. I found them uninteresting. Nothing special about them. Just some kids' cartoons. They just lack that something that the MLP:FiM series has.
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I must admit I'm not completely happy about the discussion about this question having essentially died. Of course this is not the thread to have this discussion, but it isn't being held anywhere else either. The question is if the discussion should be opened again, on a proper thread on the proper sub-forum? The current official answer seems to be "this is just how it is, end of discussion", which doesn't feel quite satisfactory, to me at least.
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feos wrote:
And I don't know a single N64 encode that did use internal 320p resolution without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering for youtube. And if there are some, that wasn't intentional or purism-driven.
Rendering at a higher resolution than what the console does (and using rendering techniques not supported by the console, like antialiasing) is less bothersome than the texture filtering used by the author's encode. OTOH it personally wouldn't bother me if the official encode, used in the movie description, would used a rendering mode that most closely resembles what the console does. If that means 320 pixels vertically, then so be it. There would be a sense of retro purity there that I would like. All this trying-to-fix-the-original-console-graphics feels unneeded. We don't do that with the NES/SNES/Genesis/etc, so why should we be doing it for the N64? Higher-resolution rendering could be offered as alternatives, but not as the primary encode.
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A more interesting application of this would be to simply "travel" to a distant future on Earth ("traveling to the future" is, I think, a bit of a misnomer, because we are technically speaking constantly doing so; doing so in a different frame of reference is no more of "traveling to the future" as anything else.) In other words, accelerate at 1g away from Earth for a given time (like for a year) then decelerate and come back. Total travel time for the travelers is four years, but much longer will have passed on Earth. The travelers will be arriving to a relatively distant future Earth, being themselves only four years older. I'm pretty certain that many, many people would be completely willing to do this. (Although it would of course be a risk. They could just as well arrive at an Earth that has been completely devastated by a new world war or some other catastrophe. Something that would not have happened in their own lifetimes if they have stayed.)
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blahmoomoo wrote:
It's more obvious if you do a side-by-side comparison, but if it's not clear that something's different without that comparison...
I think it's quite clear even without a side-by-side comparison. I wouldn't be complaining otherwise. But here's a side-by-side comparison anyways. The most prominent difference is in the letters, but in fact the clouds are most prominently uglier because of the filter, IMO. What exactly is wrong with sticking with what the console outputs (or at least as close to it as practically possible)?
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Mothrayas wrote:
The author's encode conforms to publication standards, therefore we allow linking to it. It is as simple as that.
Then perhaps those standards could benefit from some revision, IMO. Since we are trying to emulate consoles as accurately as possible, I think that the video looking like what the console produces, with as little modification as possible and practical, would conform to that principle as well. That filter is just incomprehensible. It heavily modifies the output of the console, and is hideously ugly. So ugly that, at least in my case, it's actually distracting, and detracts from the enjoyment of the TAS. (I know that the better encode also exists, but we are, after all, talking about the official publication, linked from the TAS description.) I really can't understand why it's allowed.
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Fog wrote:
While not an official rule, it has been a longstanding option available to authors to have their encodes be the official encodes linked on TASVideos.
Shouldn't there be a reasonable limit to that? As a (deliberately) extreme example, suppose an author added profanities to the encode. Would it be accepted as the official encode? As a less extreme example, suppose the encode only showed half of the image. Would it be acceptable? I don't see why tasvideos should just accept a lower-quality encode as its official encode.
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Mothrayas wrote:
sonicpacker wants the YouTube link to his own encode for the publication link and that's that.
I'm sorry but I don't get it. But whatever. Be my protest noted.
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Koh1fds wrote:
It would be so cool if you put all that work into new game or romhack instead of making this things trough controller ports.
The whole idea of TASing is to play an existing unmodified game on an existing unmodified console, using its controller, and achieve superhuman feats by that alone. Just creating a custom cartridge that contains a custom game is a completely different realm, and has little to nothing to do with tool-assisted speedrunning. It's not really what this is about.
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Spikestuff wrote:
The encode provided when published will be sonicpacker's encode, since sonic wants it mained on his account.
Why? I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but that filter is just plain ugly beyond reason. It distracts from enjoying the TAS. Why that one has to be the official encode shown along the publication, rather than the better one, is beyond my comprehension. I know it doesn't have much weight, but please take my protest as noted.