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It's better to have actual gameplay improvements that work in both versions than to redo the entire movie for a skipped cutscene and potentially lose more time on something unskippable, especially on a completely different emulator that'd make it even harder to definitively compare.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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arukAdo wrote:
what I would hope is, the intro and fmv doesnt matter, but skipping the dialogue for shaft does really save time/valid for obsoletion (its at least 40 seconds compared to wait the cutscene to end).
So switching to a different version allows you to save time in one part of the game but lose it in another?
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The problem with actually using such a module (that I requested!) is that it has to hide empty links to be useful, but that makes it a nightmare to have on the site database access wise, so it just shows all links, empty or not.
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What about libTAS? Are you sure it's a release version and not some interim?
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HappyLee wrote:
Normally the goal of an any% TAS would be avoiding ACE. Check out the "warps" TAS of SMB3 and Super Mario World. ACE or "game end glitch" is usually a standalone category.
It usually is, because the time difference is huge between the fastest movie that uses a major skip glitch and the fastest one that avoids it.
HappyLee wrote:
The time difference is not that huge, so what?
Time is the key metric in the major skip glitch definition. The most straightforward way to define it is that "it's a single glitch allows skipping majority of the game". Of course it's not always that simple, for example sometimes such a glitch skips less than 50% of gameplay, which is when we have a community discussion and decide whether to count it as such. And if it is, then the 2 branches can co-exist in the standard class. If the decision is that it's not a major skip glitch, then there are 2 options: obsoletion and moving the movie that avoids it to the Alternative class if it meets the requirements.
The main requirement of Alternative branches is to be different in gameplay from the standard ones and from each other. A movie that is similar to fastest completion but skips a part of the final level instead of completing it, is unlikely to be considered different enough to go to Alternative. Well I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it'd be up to the audience. At the very least we removed the entertainment requirement from that class (formerly known as Moons), so that part of feedback is not involved.
HappyLee wrote:
The goal of touching the final axe and saving the princess is clearly not the same as using ACE to end this game in a glitch.
It's indeed not the same but we have some categorization system in place that attempts to organize all the endless variants of goals into something digestible, and we use certain guidelines when deciding how to branch things. For example it can also be argued that the goal here is beating the game as fast as possible, and the current publication's goal is the same, this movie just uses a new timesave technique, so it's technically an improvement.
Best we can do is assessing the nature of that improvement to see if we can turn it into a separate branch, but that is based on visible difference in gameplay and in overall duration.
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Awesome glitch, congrats!
Patashu wrote:
Is this the record for 'game end glitch closest to the intended game end'?
The closest one I've seen so far. Which is interesting, because most of the time a game end glitch skips at least half of the game, which is when we call it a major skip glitch and make it a separate branch in the standard class. But in this case it can't be considered a major skip glitch, so avoiding it can't be a separate standard branch. As a result this would simply obsolete [3348] FDS Super Mario Bros. 2 "warps, Mario" by HappyLee in 08:04.83 and share the same branch label.
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tigrou wrote:
I think you are going to enjoy this video that I made.
Awesome video, I linked it from the publication! I also recommend making it public.
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arukAdo wrote:
Cutscene are definitly not gameplay, does that mean theres no merit to avoid a cutscene in the end?
arukAdo wrote:
Yeah sorry, I did not mean a cutscene at the end of the movie, I meant in the middle of playtrough.
Please decide.
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arukAdo wrote:
Cutscene are definitly not gameplay, does that mean theres no merit to avoid a cutscene in the end?
Ending input sooner has merit as long as the game still ends properly eventually. Another traditional approach is making that proper game end happen as soon as possible even at the cost of longer input. Cutscenes or not, doesn't matter what exactly you optimize and how, it's just up to you which ending metric to use.
arukAdo wrote:
Taking this by the letter sound like just watching the cutscene would obsolete skipping it, which I suppose is not what you want for counting frames/differences.
If your new movie is shorter or it makes the ending happen sooner, then it's a legitimate improvement regardless of cutscenes. But taking someone else's movie that ends input early and switching it to fastest ending or vice versa is not an improvement. Improvement must apply using the same ending metric as before. Then if it's faster that way, you may change your ending metric on top of that legit improvement.
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IgorOliveira666 wrote:
Maybe creating a hack with this ACE code already inserted, as you said yourself, would be the best option. Regarding this one, do as you see fit.
That would open room for publishing all the same goals as SMW has but in this fast environment. In the hacks I linked Acmlm changed a few more things on top of Mario speed:
Superfast Mario Bros. description wrote:
The framerule was changed from 21 frames to 1 frame, instant acceleration to 0x7F speed, various delays cut out or speed values increased, nearly instant level clear.
It’s about as fast as acmlm could make it go, and was meant mostly for a silly TAS, but turns out to be actually beatable too!
Such a hack would be a much more straightforward approach to such speed goals, without aiming at policy borderlines regarding ACE branches.
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Thanks.
So here's what I'm thinking about this movie. Since ACE gives the player absolute freedom, speed challenges become moot with that superpower. Normally for any kind of playaround the game is used as a canvas on which the author can draw anything that they're inspired to create, using in-game assets as brush and paint. But with ACE, there's no game anymore. In-game assets are arguably still there but they are meaningless because they can be arbitrarily changed or ignored. We're basically ROM-hacking live.
And with absolute freedom, the only challenge that makes sense IMO is to be as impressive as possible, however broadly we define being impressive. Classic ACEplayarounds use in-game assets to create a spectacle, and the result was very entertaining as well as technically stunning.
Then there's a submission that streams video from controller inputs, but it's an ACE playaround for a game that already has an ACE playaround that's impossible to one-up. Playarounds are by nature judged by entertainment, and it'd be impossible to obsolete the existing one, but there's some talk that ACE is such a cool thing that any game can have a "bad apple" movie published, it just never gets old.
So feedback here was mostly positive but people were also agreeing that with ACE any speed limitation is arbitrary. Intuitively, the only way to approach this submission is still treating it like a playaround, and any other potential speed goal using ACE may have a chance to obsolete this. But then we look at #4252: Masterjun's SNES Super Mario World "11 exits" in 08:07.53 and it's kinda the same concept there but taken to an extreme, except that run uses an arbitrary number of exists instead of all of them. But it reaches them much faster!
And there's also [6035] SNES Super Mario World "arbitrary code execution, glitchfest" by IgorOliveira666 in 42:49.44 where I said:
feos wrote:
What I'm unsure about is whether it makes sense to have several movies with the same payload type published separately, or is it better to split them only by payload type, or in some other way? Masterjun's ACE is an entirely-new type, and this submission is a hack of what is there. Or maybe we approach it from a different angle and just rename this movie to "ACE, glitchfest"?
This movie is "a hack of what is there", and on the surface it looks like it's neither a playaround nor a glitchfest. But as I said speed challenges are moot with ACE, so it kinda has to be either of those 2.
The only other point of view on this seems to be allowing all such variants freely, but they can't all live in the Alternative class, because there's infinite potential for different ACE sub-goals. There's one place for almost unlimited creative freedom tho - Wiki: Playground.
Thoughts?
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Staff discussion so far resulted in agreeing to allow this, just noting everywhere relevant that it's an impossible hack and should not be used unless it's needed. And when it's needed, it's best to be explicit about its usage (and reasons).
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In-game codes that don't add gameplay don't belong to standard branches (which glitchless is), but are allowed in Alternative.
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That's not what I mean. We don't need to try to guess whether the input code was deliberately or accidentally left in. Looking at executable code for this trick is the way to know if the trick is even there. If the game checks for that specific button and breaks the bridge explicitly, then it's a debug/cheat feature. If the game is not supposed to do it but it happens due to some mistake in the programmed logic, then it's a bug.
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arukAdo wrote:
Does debug left over unintentionally is considered a glitch in the context of glitchless?
More context:
Link to video
If you press triangle on the second controller the bridge breaks, saving quite some time over doing it the "leggit" way.
It's still just an in-game code. It's only a glitch if you access this functionality without entering that code but through a glitch. Or of someone looks at decompiled game code and explains why it's actually unintended.
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LOL
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You're not wrong. Although, those submissions also included completing the game as a goal. The first chose to complete the game in addition to the primary artistic goal. While the second was to minimize the number of A presses needed to complete the game.
Does it make more sense for them to include it, unlike for this movie? And more importantly, why?
EDIT:
A good example is pacifist movies. If one absolutizes the goal alone at the cost of game completion, a lot of pacifist movies would have do end by dying on the first boss, simply because they'd have to break its own goal of pacifism to complete the game. Instead the consensus seems to be allowing kills that make the game beatable.
With "all trees" tho, I can't even say that completing the game would defeat the purpose of this goal, it'd just expand it to include an essential part of a publishable TAS.
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That kinda implies that only a few other Alt goals should bother completing the game, because [2977] NES Super Mario Bros. "maximum coins" by TEHH_083, HappyLee & CuteQt in 26:10.25 could have just ended on collecting the last coin, and [4444] NES Super Mario Bros. "minimum A presses" by HappyLee, Kriller37, DaSmileKat, Kosmic & periwinkle in 10:24.39 could have ended right before the first required A press to truly minimize their count. Publication goals have always implied completion, even casual naming of some categories still has that implication in the form of the % sign slapped together with random words that actually define a given category (the most canonical example being "any%", meaning fastest completion).
I can see how "fastest crash" contradicts completion. There's also #9270: InputEvelution's Flash Papa's Donuteria "Rank 5" in 10:56.27 that uses the dominant RTA goal but not something intuitively acceptable on tasvideos, and it was allowed for Alt because otherwise the run would have to be several hours long at minimum and there was a bunch of negative implications from that. The goal of only a few cycles makes sense as a workaround.
But with this movie, I don't see what fundamental problem we're working around.
Bigbass wrote:
Game completion solely for the sake of game completion doesn't add any artistic value in my opinion. Especially for this game, simply completing the game isn't special or unique (and thus doesn't contribute toward entertainment or artistic values.) Perhaps if the completion was performed in an uncommon way, like how "game end glitch" movies complete a game through unconventional means, then it could further an artistic goal, but still not the artistic goal of this movie.
MovieRules wrote:
For non-standard goals, in addition to any of the above, the movie can also be ended at some logical or artistic stopping point that makes sense.
If the artistic intention of the non-standard goal is to grab all trees in the game, then it makes sense to me that the artistic stopping point is whenever that goal is complete.
IMO you're reading that rule backwards. Its point is not to allow game completion as an option if it makes sense as a part of the main goal. Its point is to require some closure, most traditionally game completion, but there are other options if their reasoning can be articulated and agreed upon.
If there was a poll about whether we should consider game completion fully optional and up to the author, even if only for Alternative, I'd vote No. It's already optional in Playground, which is fine for all kinds of wild experiments. The only problem with it is that it never got as much promotion on the site as regular publications, but every time I try to dedicate time to that, other site duties take over (or burnout). Even then it doesn't mean that PG should fully merge with Alt, because there are still technical rules that make publication problematic.
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The movie must be complete
Your submission must play the game from the beginning, and must finish the game, or reach the most suitable endpoint the game allows. Level selects, single-level movies, or otherwise incomplete movies are not allowed. Examples of suitable endpoints are:
A definitive ending, such as a credits sequence.
A kill screen, assuming it is impossible to complete even when TASed.
If there's no clear ending, [...]
For non-standard goals, in addition to any of the above, the movie can also be ended at some logical or artistic stopping point that makes sense.
If the movie doesn't complete the game, it may be ended according to the last point in that list, but it isn't automatically considered as valid. There needs to be some explanation why it's equally good as completing the game.
Playarounds are the primary example of when it's okay. Their goal is maximal entertainment, so when the author has accomplished everything creative they could think of, going out of their way to show an actual ending may damage entertainment, because it may only be a part of a story mode, while the movie uses tournament that has no ending. Or if the movie is a showcase of arbitrary code execution, game completion becomes kinda meaningless because it can artificially be triggered at any point, but even then it's better to have some kind of closure than to just end input mid-game.
At the first glance, I don't see why ending input mid-game is an essential (logical or artistic) part of the "all trees" goal and why game completion would make it worse in any way.
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McBobX wrote:
To me, pacifist goal should only have one variant that focuses mainly on beating the game in as minimal kills as possible. I think the fact that luck mode is used pretty much across most categories should not make pacifist different. Luck mode version still beats pacifist low level one, so my take is to make the Pacifist Luck Mode obsolete the Pacifist Low Level version, despite it using an SRAM, as both are Alternative categories. As for this one, I believe it should go to Playground as what arukAdo suggested because well, it is still slower than luck mode version and also just a pacifist variant.
For category naming, I think it should be now just "pacifist" with no mentioning which code it used. So far, I don't think there was any publication accident.
I'm unable to disagree here! Having less kills sounds like a legitimate improvement, and luck mode is de facto treated as just optimization technique or something.
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arukAdo wrote:
The wording with "normal mode" is only to distinct the use of "luck mode", the difference is the starting stats, luck mode start at 25hp and 1mp regardless what you do, normal is stats you get from how you beat prologue; time, damage taken, hearts and what subweapon you have produce slight differences on the stats results.
If the luck mode code is not used then "luck mode" would just not be used in the branch label. It doesn't make sense to add "normal mode" now to all branches that don't use the luck mode cheat. Axearmor is a code tho, so it needs to be indicated.
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I feel it overshoots it then, because I don't think many of those avoided glitches match our definition of a major skip glitch, which is usually singular per game.
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