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Please talk about the difficulty differences.
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We're currently working on making all pokemon branches fully compliant to the rules.
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Chamale, thanks for the explanation. If you disagree with leaving this TAS without branch label, feel free to argue with my post.
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Especially knowing how absurdly flawed automatic copyright infringement detection algorithms are.
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$ git push
...
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects.
remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright.
remote: If you believe this is a false positive (e.g., it's yours, open
remote: source, not copyrightable, subject to exceptions) contact us:
remote: https://github.com/contact
remote: We're sorry for interrupting your work, but automated copyright
remote: filters are mandated by the EU's Article 13.
To github.com/vollmera/atom.git
! [remote rejected] patch-1 -> patch-1 (push declined due to article 13 filters)
The EU is considering a copyright proposal that would require code-sharing platforms to monitor all content that users upload for potential copyright infringement (see the EU Commission’s proposed Article 13 of the Copyright Directive). The proposal is aimed at music and videos on streaming platforms, based on a theory of a “value gap” between the profits those platforms make from uploaded works and what copyright holders of some uploaded works receive. However, the way it’s written captures many other types of content, including code.
We’d like to make sure developers in the EU who understand that automated filtering of code would make software less reliable and more expensive—and can explain this to EU policymakers—participate in the conversation.
Full GitHub article here:
https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload-filters-code/
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happy_mario wrote:
Struggle for years, limit testing thousands of times, just for 1 frame which robots can exhaustive in few seconds, it's bad, indeed.
Now you understand what Kasparov felt when he lost to a computer for the first time.
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Please add the dev build link to the OP, yelling that it's where you get the latest dev build. This matter is always so confusing that it's the best to highlight it as hard as you can.
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First, the point about statistics doesn't mean that we need to use RTA statistics at all. If it's confusing, we need to clarify this, I just never thought it would be used that way. We might include RTA, we might not, neither is critical, because they're not using our branching rules.
Second, it was never the rule's intent to count how many runs each branch has. The key was counting branches themselves, because only that way you can determine what is unique and what is common. For example, if you take current Battletoads branches, it's clear that not using memory corruption is common, and using it is unique.
Since we don't need to prevent confusion with obsoleted branches, we don't give each of them unique label. Quite the opposite, we want runs within the same branch be considered the same thing, and only the current one we actually showcase, because it tells us what is the current situation with this game's TASing. 10 years ago we might have had a branch that was called X, but it was still obsoleted by branch Y. It's not confusing, as they only obsoleted one another because they were similar in a lot of ways.
Sure, you can count obsoleted branches as an additional way to figure something out, but we don't have categorization problems with them anymore, hence this info won't help us with the main problem: categorizing the current runs.
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Thanks, I see now that it was a dead-born idea :D
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There were questions on IRC about Dendy mode and its potential use for this game. I'll try to elaborate on every aspect of it.
Here is a map of countries and video signal standards used in them. Note how huge the PAL/SECAM zone is. Compare it to which countries the NES/Famicom console was sold in. You will notice that most of the world has never seen official NES/Famicom release. That led to pirated clones of this console being sold all over Eurasia in early 90's.
A Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, TXC Corporation, developed a device compatible with Famicom and with PAL/SECAM signal at the same time. They called it Micro Genius, and it was sold under different names all over Eurasia, where no PAL NES or Famicom was sold.
In Russia it was sold as Dendy, and by that name it was recognized by the emulation scene, because it was Russian enthusiasts who studied how Dendy operates and how it differs from official consoles, and they convinced several emulator authors to add Dendy mode, in addition to NTSC and PAL. In most emulators it's called Dendy mode, but in fact it was a Hybrid mode technically speaking: NTSC games working on a PAL console, and Dendy wasn't the console this mode originated from, Micro Genius was.
Most of the time pirates were simply ripping off NES and Famicom games, occasionally adding cheats to them, sometimes breaking them by this. Some games were developed for PAL Famiclones from scratch, but it's not easy to find them (TXC themselves developed some of them). And finally, there were ports of other consoles games to this platform.
One of the developer teams doing such ports was Hummer Team. There is a HUGE article about its history, in Russian, called Hummer Team: все, что вы хотели знать о главных пиратах.
Right now I have no info on whether such bootleg games were sold outside Micro Genius area. Since they were perfectly compatible with Famicom, there is a high chance they were sold in Japan. But carts such games were released on are incompatible with NES, and PAL NES timings were incompatible with those of Micro Genius. Considering that even official PAL NES wasn't very popular in Europe, bootleg games had vanishingly little chance to ever exist on the PAL NES market.
This leaves us with a conclusion that bootleg games made by Asian developers for Micro Genius market were basically only spread within that market, with little possible exception of appearing in official NES/Famicom area.
On the other side, emulators don't store Dendy mode in movies: neither bizhawk nor fceux. And Dendy timings are different from both NTSC and PAL NES ones. It means even if we record on one of these modes and watch on another, it might desync.
But for cases when it works, I think it's sensible to allow Dendy mode for Asian bootlegs for PAL/SECAM area. That way they look and sound more authentic to how they played on actual consoles. Still, there should be no requirement about this. I think others would agree that neither banning not forcing Dendy mode helps with anything. And we already have a precedent: [3540] NES Super Aladdin by TASeditor in 05:36.25
Funnily, this particular submission was done on QuickNES core, which has no Dendy mode. But while we're at it, and since it was questioned on IRC, I thought I'd explain this situation.
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I went through our Yellow/Red/Blue branches. They seem to historically be interchangeable, as they use to obsolete one another, though Yellow is only obsoleted by Red in the SRAM glitch branch, it's ACE branch is active.
Blank branch of Red feels like a warp glitch to me, in any case it contains a major skip glitch, so despite of being "no ACE, no SRAM corruption", it's still substantially different from this submission, which at the first glance has the same restrictions.
What I'm getting at, this submission would be a blank branch by our standards. Note that blank branch not equal to our definition of any%. We do not explicitly highlight any% in any way, because it doesn't help with organizing the branches. So when labeling runs, we rely on statistics instead.
If a run sets unique goals that other runs don't, we put them in a label if such goals are actually rare overall. "ACE" is a rare category, hence we call it out. "No ACE" is not a rare category, it is overwhelmingly common through the whole speedrunning community. Hence in the case of this submission, we don't need to say "no ACE" in the branch: it's so common that it's implied. Same about SRAM or memory corruption. They are rare, avoiding them is common, no branch label needed.
But what about "glitchless". If we look at it stupidly, sure, overwhelming majority of all runs of all games uses glitches, avoiding glitches is rare. But as it was pointed out, the term "glitch" itself is undefined. Firstly, because it's unofficial, secondly, because there's barely any way to know the actual developer's intention: we can only speculate in most cases. Thirdly, because there can't be clear cut: despite of the very meaning of the word "glitchless", which means "no glitches", the actual runs under these RTA categories still allow some glitches. "No some glitches" - doesn't sound like a sensible category label anymore, does it?
RTA community is more lenient regarding having arbitrary amount of arbitrarily defined branches, it mostly serves as an archive storing all the categories that people speedrun. We can't operate in that way, because it'd cause a lot of clutter, confusion, and tons of extra work on behalf of the site staff, with little benefit. The only benefit would be satisfying people that want ALL branches to be published, regardless of how pointless they are. Doesn't look justifying.
For that reason, we limit the amount of branches published at the same time. We try to only have ones that are clearly defined and not redundant compared to others in terms of unique superplay they showcase. And in order to manage this, we've developed a set of rules that we follow.
JudgeGuidelines#SumUp wrote:
Quantity is not quality.
Keep the number of different branches per game minimal. A run for a proposed new branch for a game should offer compelling differences relative to previously published runs of that game.
Avoid making decisions that undermine this guideline (or other guidelines) now or in the future. For example, don't publish an arbitrarily rule-restricted movie just because there are too few movies for that game; doing so may lead to impossible-to-solve "why A but not B" debates later.
What I'm trying to say with this, we can't use the term "glitchless" if it's not objectively glitchless, even if RTA community thinks it's fine to have glitches in a glitchless branch.
However, this doesn't mean that the actual goals of this movie are arbitrary. In no way they are. They are quite common, and they were what the overwhelming majority of the runs were for games where no memory or SRAM corruption techniques were known. But then they were discovered. Does that mean the whole branch that avoids them is effectively dead? Of course not. As long as people keep competing in it, and as long as it features unique TAS content, it's alive.
So yeah, we should publish this as just GBC Pokemon Yellow in 1:36:41.68 by TiKevin83, noting in the publication description that it avoids all those memory and SRAM corruption techniques. Whether it has sequence breaks at all, or glitches at all, is irrelevant, and the ambiguity of both is resolved by this.
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MrWint wrote:
There's a lot of talking in this thread about what to do now that this category is at its limits, I'm just not 100% convinced it actually is.
So what's your take on the "individual levels" idea, where SMB runs would ignore frame rules and get measured by reaching some "magically agreed upon" level end point optimally, if such point ever existed?
Maybe the definition could be "reaching ASAP the point in every level where the player no longer has control, while also not increasing the overall time of the run". That would resolve the fireworks issue, as well as deciding on the necessity of flagpole glitch and things like that.
The TAS of Dragster also set a specific goal of maximizing player's position, including subpixels. This all might sound arbitrary, but boils down to striving as far right as possible as soon as possible, and can indeed be an interesting challenge if new SMB runners join.
Maybe this is only worth having a single branch with such a goal.
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Thanks. I guess this resolves Weatherton's (and my) concern.
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HappyLee, what I actually want to ask you is this. Imagine there IS some definition for individual level times. Just imagine everyone magically happened to agree on what it should be. Do you think there will be any new challenge in speeding individual levels up, or everything is already 100% known, just not used because of the framerules?
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Their goal won't be "individual levels" anyway. So when it's submitted, it'll be checked against the current rules, which are "for Moons, compare entertainment". Which in turn means the new run will win if the majority of the audience prefers it.
I can say that I also don't like SMB as a game, so entertainment in it is secondary for my at most. This is why I'd be interested in what SMB people think of this IL goal. But I still expect that no one will like it, and they'd rather prefer sticking to unbeatable overall times.
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I'd go for "while the player has control", but I also agree that it's subjective and shaky.
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Weatherton wrote:
Clearly the line has to be drawn somewhere before entertainment should come in. To me, it's after the secondary goal of making the ILs as fast as possible. To me, entertainment should be considered no earlier than this point. But, again, that's me. What I saw with HappyLee's comments earlier is that he greatly values entertainment as a secondary goal. It seems based on the above comments that MrWint values entertainment as a tertiary goal. To me, that definition (entertainment as a tertiary goal, behind IL times and full game time) allows for on-going competition even as the primary goal remains stuck for some time.
I guess I agree.
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Ask Marzo personally, otherwise Gens is dead.
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When there's no chance to be actually faster, I don't think reaching the end and waiting out the remaining time will ever pay off.
In Sonic, you wait for the score count regardless of how long it takes, because it means the challenge will always be there: the result is measured by in-game time objectively. If Sonic runs preferred real time, competition would've been over years ago, after finding the cheapest compromise between optimization and having to wait.
In SMB, in-game time, while it exists and could be used, is traditionally ignored. I don't even know if it was ever considered as a category. Yet, even if it was, which would probably return some challenge and competition, I have no idea how many people would be interested in that.
Hmmm. Maybe for SMB the time has come when people have found the most optimal function between optimization and framerules, and it's finally killed the speed competition? Maybe it's the time that people prevented for Sonic by using in-game time? Maybe now it'd really make sense to use in-game time in SMB?
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I agree.
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Nach: do you think obsoletion by a run of the same length, but more entertaining, will work in this case?
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I don't know about any examples of more entertaining run obsoleting less entertaining ones with the same frame count.
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WarHippy wrote:
I remember reading somewhere that in the event of a tied time the more entertaining submission is the one that will be accepted. I think Happy Lee and Mars608 should submit their run if it looks all around more polished.
My thoughts too.
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.
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.
