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While syncing the movie for a more recent Ruffle build (0.6.0 stable) I found a one frame improvement. I will not request coauthorship for this one. Is it ok to replace?
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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Hello again and welcome to Load State, your third favorite TASVideos monthly writeup. I'm ikuyo, Tool Assisted Slasher, and I am here to do what I do most: yap about TASes I like for as long as I can get you to read. You are right on time to hear me ramble as I spread the word of playing slowly and then playing it back, so before I lose you, let's get to it!
Starting right away with a debut, let's give it up for IntangibleMatter and her debut movie, [7287] PC Psycholonials by IntangibleMatter in 23:46.050. I have to applaud diving into an Unity game as your first TAS because it is not easy, so give her a warm welcome!
[7293] GBC Ghosts 'n Goblins by Walgrey in 15:23.353 was quite the movie! Seeing Arthur determined to reach his girlfriend enough to learn levitation and take strategic hits to clip upwards was a fun sight. Walgrey shows a lot of nice tech in this movie, so read the author notes to get some of her insights.
[7295] NES Rockman 2 MIN by longbao in 27:17.320 is a significant improvement of 43 seconds over the previous publication thanks to several optimizations. longbao continues their dedicated work on Rockman hacks with clean and efficient boss fights and the zips we all know and love.
[7299] Genesis Dino Land by Twisted_Eye in 01:11.142 is an interesting case of finding just the right exploit in the design of a pinball table! Twisted_Eye finds a clever way to rack up points and finish this pinball game very quickly.
[7306] DOS Aro "100%" by Noxxa in 19:45.038 is a solid completionist run of this old DOS platformer I had not heard of before. While the camera work makes the game a bit hard to watch, Noxxa's diligent work in finding every possible tech to speed it up is nothing short of admirable.
Are you up for some 2 player action? Look no further than [7324] Arcade Joe & Mac Returns "2 players" by Pepper-Color in 14:27.655, where Pepper-Color delivers a really entertaining beating of this Arcade classic with efficient movement and some fun strategies that make a mockery of the game's hardest difficulty.
[7326] SMS ALF by TascoDLX in 04:45.684 is something else! A breezy and glitchy run of an infamous Master System... classic.TascoDLX shows us that there's more to ALF than meets the eye. With the readdition of Lucky the cat, a reroute of Alf's many deaths, and a bit of RNG manipulation, [7326] SMS ALF by TascoDLX in 04:45.684 demonstrates that bad games can have interesting TASes and improvement histories.
[7329] Amiga Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun by alexheights1 in 19:13.336 is a rather technical movei with more than meets the eye, as alexheights1 takes some very delbierate decisions to speed up the game, including losing on purpose in more than one ocassion, combined with some tight RNG manips to achieve the good ending as quickly as possible. Again, read the submission notes for a detailed explanation.
[7334] Flash ELEMENTS by Rxser in 04:41.821 is a latest in the long tradition of escape room Flash TASes delivered by authors like Rxser, who has made his mark in this specific niche with polished movies such as this one. It was a delight to watch and judge for sure.
[7338] GBC Rayman 2 by SuperSqank in 18:09.670 is a massive 7 and a half minute improvement over the previous publication, thanks to some new major skips brought to us by SuperSqank. As usual, the author notes are your friend to make sense of the routing and tech.
[7342] Genesis Misplaced by Cephla & Alyosha in 09:21.106 is nothing short of beautiful. The movie itself is quite clever, making great usage of every mechanic in fun and inventive ways that scratch my itch as a puzzle game afficionado. Thanks to Cephla and Alyosha for their work on this one, I enjoyed it a lot.
Fighting game fans know what to expect from KusogeMan at this point, so you know [7352] Genesis Fatal Fury by KusogeMan in 07:15.043 will be good. Enjoy as Andy Bogard elbows his way thru each battle with reckless abandon, catches every possible anti air and perfects Geese Howard for revenge.
Wow, what a month this was! With over 60 movies to go through, I had to make several cuts to keep this readable. If I missed anything, let me know in the dedicated thread, in Discord, or anywhere else. Let's see each other again next month, hopefully on time, to talk more TASing, and keep making things!
Special thanks to Darkman425, for contributing the SMS Alf writeup.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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What game, and in what circumstance? Is this your first time using TAStudio? Are frames that were not red before turning red without any changes to your input?
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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Hey! You will have to provide some more info for people to figure anything out. What game and tool are you using? Was something happening in the game that could conceivably lead to a lag frame?
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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Alright so there's a problem here.
To make sure both Arcade Mode and Do or Die Mode were the same after all (which, if they are, would mean the slower one is not acceptable), I decided to watch them side by side. While doing so, I noticed that both movies contain rooms that are slower in one than in the other. Most notably, Do or Die mode gets ahead of Arcade Mode in the stretch between rooms 40 and 49.
This suggests that neither movie contains all optimal clears for each room, and, most confusingly to me, it suggests that you, the author, did not check these movies against each other before submitting them. Did you just make the movies in linear fashion, didn't compare with your previous work, and submit them both? Did you not notice, at any point, that you had cleared rooms in one faster than in the other?
I judged the Arcade Mode movie without watching Do or Die for the simple reason that well, I assumed they were different enough in content or gameplay conditions that they would not be directly comparable. After all, otherwise you would just be submitting the same movie twice, which is rather disrespectful to Staff at this moment in time given our workload. But now that I have in order to clear this up, I have to conclude that neither movie is well optimized, because each has at least one or two rooms where it beats the other.
Could you explain this issue to me?
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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as the person who led the implementation of the alternate timing method system, I would like to stress that not having it has historically only led to more confusion.
Remember back in 2012 when people thought Narcissa Wright had beaten the Ocarina of Time TAS because the RTA timing method was different and produced a smaller number? the confusion here is that when people see two speedruns, one real time and one tool assisted, they generally assume that for the same game, they would time with the same method because why would they not. They do not understand that TAS developed usually as a separate thing from a lot or RTA scenes.
Anyway, there's about 3 other topics here. The only other one I will touch on is that, historically, TASVideos used to be very opposed to the idea that it was... a community. A group of people with its own issues, and the ability to help each other. We frowned upon it, we saw it as beneath us, even when our own staff members were facing very difficult living situations. I am happy that is no longer the case, and that we can leverage the power of being a community to help others in need. We cannot change the past, but we can be better from now on.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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Yup, I get it now.
Just one more question, is there a reason you chose to not grab any powerups? I imagine getting either Flower or Cape could have helped in some levels.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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We've recently become aware of a website (toolassisted.run), heavily developed using GenAI, that has been mass-copying TAS content from TASVideos with dubious consent from authors. While it claims to require consent before importing any TASes, in practice it only requires the consent of a single co-author. Once a single author consents, the TAS movie, submission notes (minus the judge's comments), and related metadata are copied onto the site. Whether you create an account or not, this site also automatically creates profile-like pages for all co-authors of imported TASes.
While our content is hosted under the CC-BY 2.0 license, which legally permits reuse with proper credit, doing so in this manner at such a large scale without full consent, is unethical.
We want to make it clear that we are not, in any way, associated with that site and do not condone its actions.
If you choose to use that site, be wary of what private or sensitive information you share there (e.g. passwords, personal details, etc). There is no privacy policy and we have serious concerns towards the safety of anyone using that site.
Additionally, the site has been attempting to use our wiki pages in order to authenticate a person's identity. Since we are not associated with that site, we strongly discourage using TASVideos for this purpose. However, we will not ban users who choose to do this on their own homepages.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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ShgofcTAS wrote:
im planning on doing a puyo puyo TAS and i have a few questions
1: dr. robotinik's mean bean machine is a published game, but it is just a reskin of the game i'll TAS, sharing the same code for all of the levels, will my TAS obsolete it？
We would treat them as different games, and they would not obsolete one another. We already did this for Puyo Puyo 2 and Kirby's Avalanche.
3: i think the cutscenes of this game are kinda funny, can i make a input file that just doesnt skip them on my TAS？
We would treat this as a speed/entertainment tradeoff. Keep in mind that the game is Japanese only, so the humor may be lost on some viewers! It might be a good idea to include soft subtitles. Also, it is common for games of this genre to have the time of starting a match be part of the RNG variance for things like piece sequencing. Best of luck!
2: on the menu, i have 3 options and one of them starts me on level 4, do i have to choose the option for level 1 or can i just choose ”むずい” and start the TAS on level 4？
You can, but I would recommend against it. We would obsolete your movie by one that doesn't if you choose to do so, and also, would this not skip the cutscenes associated with those levels? This feels at odds with your goal of showing the game's humor.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
Admin Assistant, Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Experienced player
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Hello TASers, and welcome to another edition of your favorite TASVideos Monthly Recap, Load State! I'm ikuyo, the TASVideos town crier, and I am here once again to share with you all some personal highlights of the TAS work that shapes this site.
We got 51 movies released this month, almost two per day! As usual, I won't go thru them all, so feel free to reply in the Discussion Thread with your own favorites. Let's get going, there's a lot to cover!
Of all the classic puzzle games other than Tetris, Columns has always been the one I am least interested in, so I was pretty skeptical walking into [7236] Genesis Columns III: Revenge of Columns by Dimon12321 in 12:22.656. Thankfully, Dimon12321 absolutely made the most out of the game, with every level destroyed in less time than it probably took you to read this paragraph, thanks to a combination of manipulating both enemy behavior and column sequencing to combo off efficiently.
I had a lot of fun watching [7237] PSX Kyoro-chan no Purikura Daisakusen by Induviel in 24:07.051, a run of a rather unexpected sprite focused PSX platformer with more than a passing resemblance to some SNES classics. If you dig cute sound effects, running anf flutter jump action, Induviel got your covered!
[7240] GB Stop That Roach! by Walgrey in 25:39.291 was a pretty fun movie of a puzzle... strategy? game. With little room for improvement, Walgrey still finds ways to save time, such as aggressive path optimization.
[7244] DS Garfield's Fun Fest by ChesetheStickman & SuperSqank in 17:18.961 is the beautiful result of ChesetheStickman, our local Garfield game afficionado, crossing paths with SuperSqank, the licensed platformer specialist, to deliver a shockingly entertaining movie for what seems to be a rather middle of the road game. Seeing the silly autoscroller skips, movement tech almost on par with a modern Metroid game... mixed with the weird rhythm minigame is sure to give you some whiplash, but it is definitely worth the watch.
I think I loved every second of [7249] GC Wario World by EZGames69 & inconsistent in 30:57.267. The ridiculous movement. The combat. The command grab into OTG projectile infinites. The skips. Every frame of this run is worth its price on gold. A fantastic collaboration between EZGames69 and inconsistent!
[7254] NES Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship by ChucJo in 06:15.498 is a 34 seconds improvement over the author's original publication, thanks to better applications of the game's wall clip glitch. This is a rather novel physics based adventure game, and ChucJo mas made himself known as an specialist on it, having both the baseline and game end glitch publications for the game.
[7259] GBC Bomberman Quest "game end glitch" by McBobX & tutelarfiber7 in 00:31.152 is a wonderfully fun and short movie. Bomberman must have taken a queue from Link after realizing he was in a Zelda-like game, and decided that in any Zelda game worth its salt, walls are just a matter of opinion. A phenomenal 6 minutes improvement courtesy of McBobX and tutelarfiber7!
[7262] PC UFO 50: Rock On! Island "game over" by synabler in 01:14.100 was a fun and unexpected acceptance. synabler originally submitted it as an april fools joke, but it happened to coincide with a major change in our rules to accomodate movie goals that do not end the game. As such, this tower defense movie where the author deliberately conspires against his own goal and must deploy several speedrun tricks to even do it became out first UFO 50 publication, and it is a fun one at that.
If you ever need long form Super Mario World to do your dishes of study to, do I have the movie for you. [7264] SNES Six Pack: VLDC Compilation "all 622 exits" by Suru486 & Mischievous Marc in 14:56:40.662 is a massive movie which completes every exeit of this gigantic level compilation. Suru486 and Mischevious Mark collaborate on this frankly titanic work that, despite some minor flaws, is very much worth celebrating. Congrats on the second longest movie on site!
[7268] N64 Harvest Moon 64 "Marriage" by g0goTBC in 27:50.933 is an old movie that got recently reevaluated thanks to movie rules changes, as mentioned above for UFO 50. Te movie itself is quite fun, with some hidden technical details that make it rather interesting. Watch as our protagonists eats, sleeps, gambles, and eventually finds love at the end. I've never felt so seen...
Wow, would you look at the time! We have made it to the end of today's recap. Thanks as usual for reading, and above all, thanks for making TASes. Keep at it! This is ikuyo, signing out.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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I will request everyone to stop posting here, piling on to a new submitter who is probably a bit unaware of the TAS process is not going to help them feel welcome here. Let me handle this.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
This seems clear-cut, so I updated this metric. We should probably standardize whether commas are used as a separator for the numbers, as opposed to thin space, full stop, etc. in some countries our viewers might live in. Is there any one right answer?
Yes. For score, commas are best. It avoids confusion with screen readers. People will likely be more confused with a period when reading the score. For time, the way we've been doing it is best. While it may seem like the best idea to use the format shown in game, screen reading programs only read the time correctly with a decimal point at the end: 2:16.73 is read as "2 16 point 7 3". This avoids confusion because I can tell where the minutes and seconds are separated. My screen reader reads 2'16"73 as "2 16 73", no real separation between the seconds and the decimal value.
This sounds sensible to me, thanks for the feedback!
Updated both existing Celeste publications after asking the Celeste TASing community directly.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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Well, it was a matter of time.
As of a couple days ago, our submission form officially allows the submitter to report an alternate timing method or optimization metric, such as in-game time or score! You can now see titles like #1312: ikuyo's PC Sayonara Wild Hearts "maximum score" (2,116,350) in 48:23.136 or #4444: (a lot of author)'s N64 Super Mario 64 "120 stars" in 1:14:04.444 (Console Timing)
Here's also an example of this information in the submission queue (image sourced from a development build of the site)
While we have officially allowed TASers to use whatever metric they want as an optimization target, this decision was not reflected in the way we display submissions and publications on the site, most notably in publication titles and YouTube encode titles. This has been a historical source of confusion, leading to several communities assuming we don't support in-game timers at all, or even causing casual audiences to assume TASes are slower than their real time counterparts.
You will find both a drop-down to select the metric or timing used in the movie, and a field to type how it should be displayed. This information will be used to fill the title data for the movie wherever needed.
If you plan to use this feature, we recommend you explain to us how to calculate or measure the reported metric if it is not obviously apparent, such as when using real time speedrun metrics. This will make it easier for judges or anyone unfamiliar with the game's speedruns to know what to look for.
By the way, if you have or know of a publication that you would like to use an alternate timing method, we have opened a thread for Publication timing/score update requests, as it can only be changed by people with editing permissions. Keep in mind that this could take us a while, as we are as usual working on a lot of things. Also, this feature is likely to get further revisions and changes in the future, as we find more cases that could use it. Thanks for your patience, and happy TASing!
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
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IntangibleMatter wrote:
Oh god, I somehow put down the wrong path. I'm so so sorry about that. It's actually the one in linux64_withgfx_nondevelopment_il2cpp
Entirely on me, I'm so incredibly sorry.
I can get the game to run with this, but after the first loading screen, nothing except the four icons in the GUI renders and the game appears completely black. Thus, I cannot check sync, let alone do any other judging.
Is there any other setup that needs to be done?
UPDATE: I figured it out... and we have a lot to explain.
IntangibleMatter, you followed the Unity guide setup pretty well.. but the Unity guide setup sync assumes you are using libTAS 1.4.8. As your submission shows, you are using libTAS 1.4.7, so it has on effect on your movie. I was trying to get it to work with 1.4.8 and kept running into issues, but I got the game to run with 1.4.7, and I'm currently verifying sync. I'll let you know how it goes, and I'm sorry this created a big ball of misunderstandings.
Update, happy to report the movie syns in libTAS 1.4.7 out of the box. I've verified sync and updated the file to trim the final blank frames. Expect a judgment soon.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
While we have officially allowed TASers to use whatever metric they want as an optimization target, this decision was not reflected in the way we display submissions and publications on the site, most notably in publication titles and YouTube encode titles. This has been a historical source of confusion, leading to several communities assuming we don't support in-game timers at all, or even causing casual audiences to assume TASes are slower than their real time counterparts.
You will find both a drop-down to select the metric or timing used in the movie, and a field to type how it should be displayed. This information will be used to fill the title data for the movie wherever needed.
If you plan to use this feature, we recommend you explain to us how to calculate or measure the reported metric if it is not obviously apparent, such as when using real time speedrun metrics. This will make it easier for judges or anyone unfamiliar with the game's speedruns to know what to look for.
By the way, if you have or know of a publication that you would like to use an alternate timing method, we have opened a thread for Publication timing/score update requests, as it can only be changed by people with editing permissions. Keep in mind that this could take us a while, as we are as usual working on a lot of things. Also, this feature is likely to get further revisions and changes in the future, as we find more cases that could use it. Thanks for your patience, and happy TASing!