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GMP wrote:
Thanks man, yeah I have learnt my lesson and will never do a arbitrary goal TAS again lol.
GMP wrote:
Yesterday in the RTA speedrunning community, we discussed about the sort of arbitrary nature of the ruleset and we decided its not very apt to call it "glitchless" and renamed the category to "No Major Glitches". So I decided to add that as the branch to this run. However if the judges feel that it is not necessary, feel free to remove the branch.
Arbitrary goal is not a problem if it's clearly defined and the community supports it, and if it's properly achieved.
The problem with this submission originally was that some of the techniques used do look like glitches to some viewers. The proper way to resolve this is by bringing up official information of some kind that proves it's an intended mechanic. For example, explicit checks in the code, or explicit mentions on the manual.
Then whatever the community had doubts about, but what has been proven to be intended, can stay in the future run. And what looks like a glitch and lacks explicit official support, should be avoided.
But why still care about the "true glitchless" branch now that we've ranamed this to "NMG"?
We don't officially use the term "major glitch" because it's too subjective. Instead we use heavy glitch abuse, and so far, looking at what glitches this run avoids and the other one uses, it's what makes them different branches on SRC.
Now here's what our thing looks like:
[2601] NES Mega Man "game end glitch" by pirohiko & finalfighter in 00:32.11
versus
[4131] NES Mega Man by Shinryuu, pirohiko, Maru & finalfighter in 09:45.35[3264] N64 Super Mario 64 "1 key" by Tyler Kehne, mkdasher, sonicpacker, snark, SilentSlayers, ToT, Plush, Gaehne D, Eru & sm64expert in 04:21.30
versus
[2062] N64 Super Mario 64 "70 stars, no Backwards Long Jump" by Jesus, Kyman, MICKEY_Vis11189, MoltovM, Nahoc, snark, sonicpacker, ToT, CeeSammerZ, coin2884, Eru, Goronem, Mokkori, Nekuran, Nothing693 & pasta in 42:58.52
Note the tremendous time difference, and how fundamentally different the resulting branches look. It's called a major skip glitch, because it's a glitch that skips majority of the game. So for games where such a glitch is possible, the run that avoids it is usually entertaining and different enough to be its own branch.
But there are also games where heavy glitch abuse doesn't skip most of the game, but some people find it questionable in terms of entertainment. So we allow to void it if it makes the movie more interesting, or equally interesting but different enough.
[3570] Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog by Aglar in 14:13.87
versus
[1937] Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog "no zips" by Aglar in 17:36.58[696] Genesis Pulseman by Twisted Eye in 25:16.02
versus
[862] Genesis Pulseman "no motion glitch" by IdeaMagnate in 33:57.15
In this game, it's a set of glitches that's avoided or used. It's not a set of major skip glitches, and their sum is not a major skip glitch, because each of them skips only a small portion of the game and is in itself not severe enough.
What do we call it then? I actually don't know. And on the first glance it may look like categorization is only a small and barely relevant problem. "Oh we can't come up with a proper branch label so we must reject the run." But the main question is why can't we come up with a proper branch label? From reading the thread, I think it's because the goal is not a clear cut.
Avoiding more glitches will make this branch more different from any%, and also more entertaining, because people won't feel that questionable glitches are spoiling the fun. When coming up with a new goal (new for our site), we want it to be as different from any% and 100% as possible, because that way we can feature as much content as possible through all the variety of branches that we can afford. Minor differences blend together, and it gets hard to expect unique content from branches that are published differently. So we encourage maximum difference.
Bottomline. The feedback regarding this run's goal was mixed not (just) because it wasn't labeled the way the RTA run is. It's because the borderline of a glitch definition is blurred. So I think that doing a properly glitches run will be received just as good in terms of votes (if not better), and will also not cause the questions about its category.
And the best way to resolve those questions is to draw the line where the developers draw it explicitly. And if they don't address something that causes questions, just avoid it.
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If they were started before it, then MMU was still on by default. Also it's not like we're banning anything, it's just to ensure sync (after it was disabled by default as seen in the commit I linked).
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.
Back when we introduced this movie class, we had these figures to incorporate into its meaning: SDA's notion of "major skips", our notion "game breaking glitches", and the amount of time that those categories use to save compared to the fastest movie without that technique. The latter introduced one Masterjun - one order of magnitude cut from the previous movie time.
Jokes aside, it was clear that we needed to address that the glitch is major and that it skips a lot. So the term is "major skip glitch", and as you can see, after all it doesn't have to corrupt too much - it just has to be an abused bug, and to result in a major skip. How much it corrupts is subjective, how much that damages entertainment is subjective. But when majority of the old route is skipped by a single glitch, it's clearly a major skip glitch. And most of the time it's published as a separate branch. That way with SM we have any% that uses the major skip glitch, and the branchless movie that avoids it, feeling closer to traditional idea of any%. The time difference between them is major, the gameplay difference is major, and the latter is very entertaining, so we can have both published.
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MMU must be explicitly enabled for all future TASes on Dolphin.
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Yeah I don't remember a single full completion run that was demanded to complete the game twice. So if there's a precedent for that, I haven't seen it.
A possible argument for several playthroughs would be if the game tracks things you unlock that way, and then you can access them all in a single run. But this game doesn't allow it, so there are incompatible dungeons and items.
I remember a similar situation in a mobile game I used to play a lot, Diamond Rush for Nokia. It has a room where you can only open one of the 2 chests, both containing purple diamonds (50 vs. 1).
https://youtu.be/WtOlUaN-HSY&t=273
Since collecting the purple diamonds is a nice way to show off more of the game, one would have to allow this "all but one" clause, at least until someone finds a way to collect them all. Technically that would be "maximum diamonds". The game tracks how many you have, but you can replay any level indefinitely, getting more and more. So it doesn't make sense to play the level and open the left chest, and then play again and open the right one.
Similarly, Valkyrie Profile doesn't let you play through "literally all dungeons" in one go. Since it doesn't seem to track how many you've visited overall, indeed it's better to maximize whatever we have available right away.
Because otherwise, it'd be similar to Steam's 100% achievements. We don't want full completion rules to demand that "literally everything possible is maxed out".
Also we don't have to call the branch "all X". If the definition is compound, just calling it 100% is much better, as long as it's what the community wants (the staff and the audience).
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I've ran a few lossless codecs on SM64 in bizhawk 2.6.1 at 4K, 10k frames of no input, GLideN64, all default settings. fps is from Mario's face.
UTVideo
(fastest setting + best compression)
-c:a pcm_s16le -c:v utvideo -pred median -pix_fmt gbrp -f avi
13-14fps
6.84GB
Lagarith
(multithreading and null frames on, RGB)
14-17fps
9.72GB
Camstudio
(LZO)
6-7fps
59.7GB
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GMP wrote:
There isn't one "Major skip glitch", as eien mentioned. there are a lot of major glitches that are not to be used in the NMG run.
How do you distinguish major glitches from non-major?
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Right now, DOOM movie replay system is the only exception to movie formats that we allow, which are normally based on emulation. Because when you're emulating the hardware the original game is meant to run on, it's a guarantee that no possible flaw or cheating is involved that may come from the in-game movie replay system. Some games provide too much freedom in their internal movies, like forcing your position to something arbitrary, which wouldn't be possible while playing normally.
So if we want to add support for some new in-game movie replay system, which is by definition game-specific, we need to make sure it doesn't allow illegitimate techniques, has proper savestate support, is deterministic, and is overall reliable enough for general TAS use.
Another option would be to use libTAS. Because it already guarantees legitimacy of the movie, even though it's not an emulator (but an API translation layer), and has reliable TAS tools. It only work on Linux and WSL2 though.
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How much time does the Overflow Glitch save overall?
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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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What would be the amount of necessary dungeons for Easy, and how many of them are Easy-only?
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This run needs some more feedback. Only 2 posts with definitive opinions on entertainment.
I personally think that there wasn't just enough crazy-fast-whole-screen movement: everything was dying so fast! So you don't have enough time to fully understand how ridiculously hard it gets near the end. So to a clueless viewer it may look like "just regular perfect play". Voted Meh.
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Acumenium wrote:
I gave an RPG scenario just above this quote. Look at it.
When the infamous "No Sphere Grid, No Summons, No Customization, No Overdrives" challenge of Final Fantasy X was finally beaten, many had done it with emulators, but those weren't entertaining runs. Everyone knew what it would look like to beat it, it's just that for many years, the RNG never lined up. Save state abuse wouldn't have led to anything entertaining, and even this video would probably be seen as uninteresting to those who aren't interested in low-level challenges or who might be but aren't aware how brutally hard this actually is and how low the chances to win even are.
Acumenium wrote:
If a low-level challenge of an RPG had you able to beat the first boss at level 3 at the earliest, or level 1 with the use of TAS tools like save/load states and so on, a TAS of it isn't very interesting for the purpose of watching someone try to beat it.
I'm looking right at it, and I still don't understand what you're tying to say.
Acumenium wrote:
This fails at being entertaining to anyone wishing to watch the challenge for the minimal A Button aspect due to not being possible to imitate
How do you know this exactly?
Acumenium wrote:
This run is entirely arbitrary. It assigns a "goal" at complete random. Another run for a game that is the first of its kind is going to be rejected on the basis that beating the game-assigned high scores is "arbitrary", but a player-assigned goal with no clear end ("62 A buttons") is somehow acceptable as the umpteenth branch of a game?
Stop repeating this like a mantra. I already explained why it's not arbitrary, you skipped it, I reminded you, you skipped again and now you're repeating it again.
feos wrote:
Acumenium wrote:
That's not the "minimum B presses", it's literally none.
This does press A though, and quite a lot. It is the definition of arbitrary.
It presses A as few times as known to be possible, which is what "minimum" means. If 0 is possible, 0 is minimum. When you try to complete a game in minimal time, you don't say "it's not 0 frames therefore it's arbitrary", do you? Because it wouldn't be "movie duration the author arbitrarily picked and decided to stick to", it'd be, once again, known minimum, of time. Same thing with A and B presses in this and in walkathon.
Acumenium wrote:
Board games are typically disallowed here no matter how technically impressive because they're boring.
Where are you even getting this from?
Acumenium wrote:
Does the poll really count when almost every thread features the Judges having to yell at people what the poll even means?
The poll plays a role, the posts play a role, existing precedents play a role, it's a complex task. There's no stat that would allow us to judge things blindly, because if it was possible to approach a creative hobby that way, it would just have been automated instead of getting "peer-reviewed".
Acumenium wrote:
The issue is that challenges are supposed to be relatable
Who told you that? You keep saying that being superhuman is a bad thing for a TAS, this is nonsense. It's the very point of TASing. TASing exists in the first place exactly because it was obviously superhuman and that was what entertained its audience.
Acumenium wrote:
Right now, it's not a challenge, because it's a TAS, there's no such thing as difficulty.
This is even more ridiculous. If it's not a difficult task to minimize the A presses, just go ahead and improve this movie. Either by time or by having less A presses. Of course there's a lot of difficulty involved in TASing. Just like there's a lot of difficulty involved in programming, chess, art, science, or any other job where you have the tools and the time, but you have to be very creative and precise.
Acumenium wrote:
"Superplay" also feels subjective.
It's meant to be subjective. It's why we have the voting system: people share their feelings.
Acumenium wrote:
Visually, nothing is impressive at all about this run. The player gets stuck in the ground for minutes at a time, waits for a turtle to waddle, hits it to go up a bit, repeat, so on. That's not visually impressive.
We've heard you. You didn't enjoy it. It's okay, everyone can't enjoy every movie. We publish to Moons what majority would (and did) enjoy. There's no point in fighting against this movie's existence, because no matter how far you go with that, it's still in the minority.
Acumenium wrote:
Is it technically impressive? Yes. So would a great many "boring" board games.
But 99% of people watching this are not going to be realizing why it is technically impressive.
Are you reading their minds or something? How do you know their opinions without them speaking up, and even with this precision?
Acumenium wrote:
My biggest problem with this movie was knowing it'd get published as it represents incredibly bad problems with the publication system here.
- Super Mario Bros. runs are frequently turned down due to being "hard to accept". This doesn't seem to be particularly true.
The issue is I've seen this as a rejection reason for additional runs of other games, or for "arbitrary goals" like not taking damage at all.
Examples?
Acumenium wrote:
It was recently said a new non-Kaizo ROM hack of Super Mario Bros. 3 would obsolete Mario Adventure if accepted---why? What would it even have in common with it?
Quote?
Acumenium wrote:
- Runs with very little original gameplay obsolete full game runs instead of existing concurrent as a different branch because "we have too many branches", said by Judges who accept the seventh Super Mario Bros. entry.
Quote?
Acumenium wrote:
Or Mega Man. There's no zipless runs of any of the games to feature zipping glitches, and I'm not really sure why.
- Categorizing runs is "too difficult" because glitches "are arbitrary", as a run is accepted with an arbitrary and non-definite goal like "don't press A very much".
You're completely making this up now, and you're repeating the point that has been disproved long ago, fighting a strawman for good measure.
Acumenium wrote:
I have unironically seen "zipless" runs be considered "arbitrary and will be rejected if submitted" here.
Quote?
Acumenium wrote:
tl;dr: In a vacuum, this run doesn't have an issue. It isn't very interesting to me but it doesn't have to be. It being accepted represents serious flaws in the publishing system as a whole. It should've been immediately rejected given what many other runs and branches have to put up with, but it wasn't. It was rather accepted for every reason those types of runs are rejected.
Yeah. It's impossible to discuss without links and quotes.
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There was a concern about skipping a ton of enjoyable content, with comparisons made to Sonic 3 & Knuckles. However, this did not seem to be a common sentiment and personally, I'm ok with how drastic the difference is between this TAS and previous ones. This TAS feels much more superhuman than previous efforts.
If there's a lot of support for it being its own branch, we might tweak this.
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That sounds like a max score goal to me. Is there something that one could more objectively and clearly maximize without having to beat the same opponents (too much)? What percentage of "visible max skill" would it be in terms of time?
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Ah so you can send things to Valhalla without increasing it further if it's already full?
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InputEvelution wrote:
Say I wanted to make a "max skill level" TAS in a game where the player's skill level is displayed as an integer, but it's stored as a float in the game's data, meaning it can still technically be increased beyond what appears to be its "max" (with this approach adding considerably to the run's final time). In such a case, should the skill level be only increased up to the highest integer, or its highest total value?
Sounds like a perfect edge case. Please describe how it works with this game, maybe we'll come up with something.
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Maybe no benefit, but is it displayed anywhere, and is there a hard cap for it?
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How many potential full completion requirements will be met if you just maximize your evaluation rating? Does it have a known limit too?
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The way I see the available options.
I agree that it's too little content to call it "full", because the same metric can be applied way further, increasing the same kind of content as shown here. So there's no sense in stopping here if we want to maximize it.
Ideally this would just be sent to Moons, but it looks like it'd be non-trivial to achieve due to lack of interest. At the very least it's a borderline movie because there are good votes but almost no posts supporting it in terms of entertainment. Are there any RPGs on the site that are similar in gameplay to this one? If so, do they usually get Moons ratings?
Might feel like a dirty hack (or a neat workaround?), but there's an option to just push it to Moons as a blank branch, and if it ever gets definitively bad rating, obsolete it with a future full completion run. Why not? We couldn't get people to post here, so they shouldn't complain that we're solving this by making them rate instead :D
As for future full completion definition, simply playing all dungeons available in hard mode feels weird. Because how would you call it? "Most dungeons"? Playing all dungeons at least makes sure it really plays them all, even if it's 2 playthroughs. As for items and chars, I'd need more details on how they work, how you know you have some of them collected right now, and what sending to Valhalla means, and what the effect is.
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We can't even prove that we've completed everything we needed without going "just remember that there's X of these, now this is how they are being completed"?
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Is there any easy way to check whether some completion criterion has been satisfied? For example, for anything that's decided to be (or not to be) a part of full completion, if it's displayed somewhere in the game or acknowledged in-game in some other way, it's a more clear criterion than things you need to just know where they are, how many of them is there, and whether or not they have been completed, by comparing the movie with guides.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
However, despite that I just said, I think there is still a chance for this movie. The fact is... We can't talk about loss in entertaining, if the movie wasn't entertaining in first place. Yes, because the existing publication is already in Vault, so it shouldn't really matter if a new movie is made with a game version that makes it even less entertaining. At this point we need to focus just on the technical merits of the two movies. And since the game version used for this submission resulted objectively harder to play, it should by logic be considered preferred over the easier to play version.
On the other hand, I have to acknowledge that until now, version choice of any game was always made in order to pick the game that allowed to beat the game faster, doesn't matter how unfair the advantage looked. Some versions were picked because lagged less, some where picked because allowed more useful glitches... Historically, the slower version of a game was allowed only as an extra beside the faster one, and only if it resulted in more than 50% of gameplay differences. This may not look favorable for this submission, but we need to ask ourselves: why were the faster versions always preferred in the past? Was it for the sake of maximizing entertaining quality, or was it for the sake of maximizing technical quality? I think that in the end, the solution of this dispute just depends on answering this question. And if anyone doesn't agree that the core of the problem is in there, then I'd be curious to learn why.
First of all, the difficulty guideline isn't talking about game versions, only about explicit game modes. For game modes, here's the rule we have, but it doesn't mention difficulty. It talks about variety of factors to consider, and difficulty may or may not be among them.
Also to clarify the meaning of the difficulty guideline. The difficulty choice should make the movie more interesting and entertaining, even if it's in Vault. Harder to TAS does not necessarily mean more interesting and entertaining to watch. Even if the strategies are different, the main question is: do they look better now? And it doesn't mean "are they more optimized?" because that's already a requirement for obsoletion. It means "do they leave subjectively better impression than in the current movie?"
For this submission, we need to answer both of those questions though: "is it more optimal?" and "does this game version make the movie more interesting/entertaining?" Situation with lag may make it hard to compare, because an improvement means some trick has been found that could be applied to the old TAS and make it faster. Still doable of course. As for preferred game version, it's really up to the audience, and here's what audience preference looks like (the example there is also about difficulty of versions).
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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(1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11269
Location: RU
Whatever the best port is, subjectively.
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.
