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I forgot to post at first, so I'll pop in now to say that you are awesome for this. I guess I'm in the limited audience.
Could you make an "avi" that is a dump to a text file?
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Eh, that happens to me too... a workaround to get it back is right click on it's panel on the taskbar (what the hell is that thing called?) and choose Move. Now push one of the arrow keys. Wiggle the mouse and the window should magically appear. (this is a good fix for anything that gets moved off the screen!)
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Looks pretty good so far... I played around a little with this game before. There are definitely some spots where it looks like you could go a bit faster. I bet if you did a revision after finishing this test run you'd have a publishable movie. Did you use memory watches at all? I'd be happy to help out with that if not. Keep up the good work and let's see some more SMS runs on the workbench ;) (not that I'm helping with that...)
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OK I hate posts like this but "I will check this out later"... It seems like a good looking and interesting (if unoriginal) game that could be great for a TAS if the LoZ movie is any indication.
I'm also going to hazard a guess that this will be very improvable, both from your comments and the nature of this game. But, I have no idea of course.
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I think even with just text the front page is pretty loaded with information; it doesn't scream simplicity to me. The images act as a sort of focal point... they're the first thing that draws the eye, and then from there you think "Why are they there?" "Oh, they're from this list of movies to the side" It's also a good way to give variety to the page, because no matter how much the lists of new movies/submissions/stars change they will always "look" the same. Rotating screenshots give a sense of change to me.
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I only watched your first WIP and was impressed at the time; this is a great improvement, especially the antics at the ends of levels and whatnot. Yet more proof that Sonic 1 was not designed with spindash in mind (not to mention not designed with a flying fox in mind). Rated near the already white hot part of the scale. Good job!
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Sorry to further derail, but if you have a pretty decent Windows box you can download the free VMWare Player: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
It lets you run virtual machines inside of windows. Unlike the full version, you can't arbitrarily install new OS'es, and you must rely on "playing" images others have made. Fortunately, there are a ton of them, for example: http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/
So far the easiest for me as a total newb was Ubuntu (not surprising since that's pretty much the point). Fun stuff!
On the topic of religion, Bisqwit's delineation of faith and religion is well put and mirrors my thoughts pretty closely. I'd rather deal with an open minded person of faith than a dogmatic atheist any day (I'm solidly in the refuses-to-have-a-solid-belief camp myself)
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#2 is fine as long as I'm on the committee :P
Seriously though, I like it and Comic's voting for voters idea... kind of like the US "electoral college" (and we all know how well that works... wait maybe it's not such a good idea.)
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What does publishing a submission mean?
--It gets encoded for mass consumption
--It is inserted into the site in a much more prominent location (easier to browse to, search for, stumble upon)
--It creates marginally more load the site/torrent seeders, and also "dilutes" current publications in terms of browsing
(Am I missing anything?)
From those I will say: Encoding makes a movie easier to watch, but it takes resources to encode and host, and a non-trivial number of users can/want to watch them as emulator movies. I would also argue that the site is already too "diluted", and naturally it will continue to grow. Fighting that by restricting movies doesn't really address it properly, and in fact introduces the threat of stagnation since as more movies are published there will be more and more resistance to introducing more. The right way to combat that is to create infrastructure to organize publications, and this is something that is happening especially with the new site layout.
My point is, more movies should be published, perhaps with encodes being an optional step. If people want a giant load of SM movies, great. Make a page devoted to them. Have the any and 100% in the SNES section. Publish movies that 2/3 of people like. If no one wants to encode, fine. If enough people want an encode, someone will take pity on them, or perhaps someone new will try to take it upon themselves.
Just my 2 cents, again ;)
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Yeah, again I enjoyed some of the antics that are not speed oriented -- I guess in that sense I liked the 16 star one better as it had more time. I still think it's too bad that most people feel that this sort of awesomeness should be relegated to the wastelands of youtube.
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But a way does in fact exist, if it's perhaps not too visible:
http://tasvideos.org/MovieStatistics/HighestTechnicalRating.html
I think if you read down the list that you will probably agree that most of these movies are going to be hard to improve upon timewise. It will certainly happen, but it will probably not be trivial. So I think that the tech rating is nice.
Also: if you look at the highest "entertainment" ratings:
http://tasvideos.org/MovieStatistics/HighestEntertainmentRating.html
Especially towards the high end, a large number of these movies are Mario, Sonic, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania or Metroid games. People naturally enjoy more familiar games, and popular games are more familiar to more people. That's fine -- I like all of these movies a lot. But it's nice to be able to collect the more obscure, yet highly optimized movies via the technical rating (King's Bounty!).
Oh, and having tech rating combine with entertainment to form the "real" rating is good because it skews the more optimized movies upwards.
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I'd give the new forum a 6.9 for entertainment, and 8.7 for tech.
Also I blame all the damn newbies for making stupid uninformed useless ego posts (hangs head in shame)
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I'd play it :D
To make it more realistic, maybe change the distribution of electoral votes so that there are some states with way more, and also make the minimum 3... easier to cope with if it's determined by a computer.
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I actually really like this feature... I have not had your problem with the ones I've had. One this that is cool in theory but doesn't work well for me are the mac mouses with essentially a tiny trackball in lieu of a scroll wheel. I can never get them to roll right though.
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I have a wired ms mouse AND a wireless logitech mouse ... the latter I use as a remote control since I use the computer as my "tv" for watching dvds etc... no cable tv since I'm not terribly fond of paying to be told what to think; I get that for free thank you very much! I've remapped the auxiliary buttons to work as play/pause, volume, window maximizing and closing. Batteries last forever and I have a backup pair recharging at all times. The wired one I keep so I don't have to lug the remote back and forth, plus I prefer the forward/back keys to remain for normal computer use.