We can't judge research behind a movie, because it's not verifiable and not reproducible.
That's not what I meant. What I meant was that you generally don't want to shy away contributors whose approach commands diligence. Why would you not want more quality-made TASes on the site? If a policy becomes a problem, maybe it makes more sense to change a policy. Especially considering it has to do with goal choice and not submission quality—it's not like anyone here suggests dropping standards.
feos wrote:
With pure fastest completion and full completion our definitions are simple and verifiable.
The allowed set of goals can't be painlessly narrowed down further, because those are the most popular speedrunning categories, they have the highest demand, and they are fairly competitive. And it can't be painlessly expanded either.
Competing for the highest score has been a thing since Space Invaders—some two decades before speedrunning even became recognized as a separate hobby, let alone a cybersport discipline. High-score superplay VHSs and DVDs have been made and distributed e.g. in Japan since the early 90s. For many games such as 2D shooters, puzzle games, etc. where manual progression of gameplay is either very limited or isn't even the point at all, it typically remains the most sensible metric of success. It's neither ambiguous nor arbitrary; it's literally a number that only goes up. If a game tracks score, it is typically shown right there on the screen at all times. Many games have elaborate scoring systems where getting an optimal result, or even figuring out the optimal strategy for reaching it, is far from trivial, which makes it interesting for anyone competing in that game.
feos wrote:
What we require for games that have no ending is already exhaustive, and playing the game farther just to get a certain score count won't add any unique content.
Games that loop indefinitely don't have a maximum score by definition, so it's not even a problem...
feos wrote:
When a score just overflows at some point, it may take hours of identical gameplay, which has little speedrun record or even superplay value.
...Yeah, I seriously doubt that ever becomes a problem. If the game has an infinite scoring pattern, it just means the game doesn't have a maximum score, so there's no point trying to reach it to begin with. The arcade score tracking authorities have delisted all games where an infinite scoring pattern was discovered, which is the right way to go about it. Also, I don't see droves of prospective TAS producers lining up to make multi-hour runs just because max score is accepted as a valid category for the Vault. If that problem ever emerges, it would only signify to me that the site is doing too well—which is not something I would say about it right now.
feos wrote:
But if it fails to entertain, it doesn't mean we should shove it in through the back door.
That's kind of the point: right now it looks like shoving though the back door, but it doesn't have to be. There is no liability to having runs like these—well-made, with natural and clearly defined goals—on the site, even if the game isn't popular. We are way past the point where having "too many runs on the site" was a legitimate concern (if it ever was, really). The first time there was a discussion about that, the site had only around 300 active publications, and now we have over 2000. None of the platforms serving gaming content—be it video streaming services, game stores, or something else—have been as picky as TASVideos when it comes to disqualifying content for goal choices that happened to be misaligned with its policies at the time of submission. It's like the site is continuously afraid to expand and is trying its hardest not to, treating any relaxation of its rules as some sort of a dangerous compromise that may hurt it one day (though it never actually has). Something to think about in any case.
I think I said everything I wanted on the matter; the rest is up to you.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
What an absolutely bizarre game choice. What an absolutely bizarre game to have a dedicated community around it. Boggles my mind!
The TAS itself is surprisingly watchable (disclaimer: as I keep running out of free time, I've ended up watching almost all videos—not only TASes—at the highest speed that still allows me to understand what's going on, in this case 1.75x), although you only really need to watch loops 1, 6, and 7 to get the full experience in my opinion. It felt rather basic at first but the constantly increasing speed of the dinosaur adds some intrigue: will the character be able to outrun it on the next screen? Will they have to change their route this time? Not that it made it very interesting, but at least I did watch it to the end.
Now to comment on the goals: this is an arcade game, and the vast majority of arcade games are made with scoring in mind (because having a scoreboard on the cab is one of the principal ways to get you to challenge them upon beating the game, so you keep spending coins), so going for score is definitely not a misguided choice in this case—and neither is looping the game until the kill screen. Moreover, what made me watch this TAS in the first place was the fact that it was presented as a bona fide research project rather than something picked up to get another publication on the site. It shows genuine care and intellectual insight into the subject matter—and, game choices aside, that is exactly the approach I think we cherish the most here, in principle. A person who is actively seeking the game's limits out of love for it is the person most likely to end up with a superior result.
This raises an interesting question: whether we can accommodate high score completions into the Vault for the games that warrant them (read: mostly arcade games and their ports) the same way as regular any% runs if they don't meet requirements for a higher tier. It feels like it would open up some doors for fresh and high quality content brought as the result of such a research. Rejecting a run like this—and this one in particular—on a technicality would feel quite counterproductive to me because it's evident there is at least some audience for runs like this (I mean, even this game actually has its own community...), and considering the diligence involved, we would be very glad to have this run without having to ask extra questions if only the policy did account for the goals in question. So I'm with Memory on this matter.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I did not find it boring, but the constant interruption of movement did become notably irritating halfway through. I can see it becoming a much more pronounced problem over the course of a full run.
Would choosing a lower difficulty level (e.g. Hurt me plenty) help mitigate the problem? Could it possibly provide the right balance between the supposed challenge and smoothly flowing movement?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
That's semantics. "All items" is the Iji community shorthand for the set of items the run author had in mind: all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges. There is no "official" designation in the sense of the game showing a percentage of items collected, but these three types of items are special in the sense that 1) none of them are required for anything; 2) there is only one of each per sector; 3) the game tracks your progress with two of them (the posters and the ribbons). The goal of this run is getting all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges; how you choose to call it is not very important, but the community calls it "all items" because that's convenient. They've chosen not to include all the other items in "all items" because some of them are mutually exclusive (so technically it would be "most items" at best) and the others require idiotic amounts of backtracking and idle actions (like wasting ammo to pick up more ammo, or wasting armor/life to pick up more armor/life). It benefits no-one, hence no-one runs it.
In any case, the game's author has also speedrun it (and had the fastest any% time on version 1.5) and joined discussions on other sites. You can ask him what he thinks of this definition of "all items" and of the runs currently on the Workbench.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
However, according to the game's author, "all items" means all basic weapons, jump and armor upgrades, and the trapmine (in addition to all posters, ribbons, and supercharges).
That's not "according to the game's author" since the author does not define speedrun categories for the game anywhere on that page. The speedrun community does, which is reflected at Speedrun.com. The nomenclature is also addressed in the submission text. If you have a problem with an "all items" run technically not picking up all items, have it called "all ribbons, posters, and Supercharges".
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The game tracks several levels of player aggression which depend on their kill counts and some other plot-relevant choices. Aggression affects both gameplay (enemy AI, fights, itemization, and paths through levels change somewhat) and story progression (different sound effects, dialogue options, and endings). There are several possible endings in 1.6 and more are added in the currently unTASable version 1.7 which is superior for most intents and purposes. IIRC the overall breakdown goes as follows:
• Innocent/full pacifist: 0 kills, Iosa spared—only available on Normal through Extreme/Expert. This is what this run is aiming for; it is recognized by the game as such and presents Iji with a secret weapon before the final boss.
• Pacifist: 1–50 kills total. Similar to the above in most aspects but much easier to attain. No secret weapon at the end, different ending.
• Standard: 51+ kills. This is technically the "fastest bad ending".
• Full berserk: something like over 300 kills total (I don't remember which version had which number, but IIRC it was just over 50% of the total enemy count throughout the game), Tor executed.
Most of these endings are also altered by other gameplay choices (e.g. spare/kill a certain NPC). Going full berserk is infeasible in an any%—too many detours to take—but might be something to consider for an all-items run since more areas are visited.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Okay, so I've watched the run from the beginning, in its original form (that is, with non-fixed graphics). This was essentially my third time seeing it as I'd already known what almost every relevant room looked like from Sniq constantly supplying me with spoilers, and then there was the reveal stream.
Let's start with addressing the elephant in the room—the X-Ray glitches—which isn't exactly anything new: I'd already discussed it at length in the any% submission thread, on Discord, and probably someplace else, so I won't be drawing any fancy infographics this time. Unfortunately, the 100% items category makes the issue even more complicated.
For the uninitiated, the short version of the argument is that the legacy "no major glitches" categories were left for the audience that enjoys seeing the content that is skipped or otherwise bypassed in the more glitched categories; abusing the X-Ray results in glitches that are for most intents and purposes "major" and "game-breaking", but just a notch short of crossing the hard definition line, weaseling into the legacy categories basically on a technicality. I'm not the only one who's unhappy with this state of things.
The G-mode glitch (the one that allows backdoor access to Lower Norfair and Maridia by dematerializing one-way obstacles) is the less contentious of the two; it looks cheap and disappoints by doing everything offscreen, but there's no arguing it makes the routing far more convenient. I'm not a big fan of it, but I can accept it having a place in a run of a legacy category.
The superjump, however, is the boon and the bane of this run at the same time. The sheer amount of times it's used in this run is astounding, and in several cases—notice this, Sniq!—I would actually call it the coolest way of traversing a given room (one example that particularly stands out is getting the two items in Maridia's main street). The ability to quasi-recharge the shinespark, holding the charge through several rooms at a time, is also something SM players have craved for since before the GBA Metroid games and the Redesign hack made it a reality last decade—albeit separately from SM. But in this case it also proves to be a Faustian bargain: in exchange for the near-uninhibited travel, it makes one unable to see where Samus is traveling (since the screen is dimmed and left mostly unupdated), and it also breaks graphics in a way that badly interferes with perception and compounds over time. Most of the run is thus spent with broken graphics. They become a nuisance in Norfair, start really getting on one's nerves around the return to Red Brinstar, and turn actively aggravating after the Plasma superjump. At that point I can no longer call the onscreen action entertaining. It's just Samus wildly zipping between the VRAM junk. It becomes incredibly hard to relate to what's going on. It begs the question, "can't you just zip to the end already?" This is not the sentiment I hope for when watching a Super Metroid TAS.
Now for the unequivocally good aspects of the run. I have followed its development very closely and was able to witness many cases of a given room gradually becoming more optimized. The level of outside-the-box thinking in this run makes even the current any% look trivial. New techniques have been found. Approaches that were already considered optimal have been improved further.1 Every room has been rethought from the ground up. Sniq's ability to keep in mind the dozens of strats, tricks and techs discovered over the past fifteen years of Super Metroid TASing is second to none. That's why some (most?) of my favorite parts of the run are those before the Speed Booster, such as the entire Pink Brinstar, the pre/post-X-Ray room, and the entire bubble section of Norfair. Albeit some of the later rooms that don't take advantage of the X-Ray glitches are similarly great, such as this room in Norfair or this room in Wrecked Ship. This is where Sniq's ingenuity shines the brightest; superjumping past the obstacles or traversing them offscreen makes me feel cheated out of tasting TASVideos's finest wine.
The latter problem is, of course, not specific to Super Metroid. I lamented it even in games that I normally don't care about much, such as the NES Megaman games where a whole bunch of amazingly inventive glitches would disappear overnight with one huge and comparatively boring level skip. Should I accept it as part of the inevitable road towards absolute optimization? Possibly. Do I consider it a loss in terms of entertainment? Definitely. Do I feel the run entertaining? If I go by the unadulterated emulator output, it's not as entertaining as cpadolf's, sadly. It's more entertaining in multiple places, but the overall experience is irrevocably marred by glitches evidently too powerful for a legacy category. Where the previous 100% is a 10 in entertainment for me, this one is a 6.5 at best. With a heavy heart, I vote meh. Please know that I cast this vote with utmost respect and dedication to your craft.
1 — It's also why it didn't sit too well with me that the run was submitted with a relatively large known improvement at MB2 that harkens back to the pre-TAStudio era. It felt to me like the run's integrity was compromised in more ways than one. I apologize before Dan for forcing his hand and before Sniq for my coercive tone. I shouldn't have held my opinion hostage considering it wouldn't have changed much in the end.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I am a little disappointed that you inserted me into this the way you did. This is Sniq's time to shine, and this thread should be about him.
I only did so because Sniq kept deferring to you when we discussed it, but I understand your sentiment. I've been thinking about it as well, and I will post my full comments later today.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Watched the fixed-graphics version on oatsngoats's stream yesterday.
Withholding my vote and further comments until the Mother Brain 2 situation is solved (dan?).
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Nice. I wonder if there are any other objects or platforms in the game that allow such kind of zipping as those treasure boxes. Some half-tile ledges, maybe?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Lmao, nice number plate.
Also, presenting a no-memory-corruption run for the benefit of a mental illness charity is a clever move (if a bit risky; I made a double take to ensure it had that "no" at the beginning).
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Drop it, ALAKTORN, I know how it feels like to vote No on a submission with many Yes. I'm certain that there are other people that dislike the extremely broken nature of this category, although this criticism didn't appear in previous submissions.
I'm not ALAKTORN, I'm DJ Incendration. Why did you need to call me ALAKTORN? Also, how do I manipulate the TID to 0x64d0 (in BizHawk 2.3.1)? I tried to do it with a bunch of inputs and frame delays, but I can't seem to get it. Thanks in advance, from DJ Incendration, not ALAKTORN!!
Am I missing something here?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
If only it was just animation... Pacing, framing, editing—every directorial aspect is a mess at best, failure most of the time. And the sound design is not much better; even voice acting feels lifeless. I don't blame them.
I mean at first I thought it was only going to be worse than S1—which would be forgivable by itself—but it ended up being just bad. I have seen dumb otakubait comedies done with more love and effort, which is not the kind of competition you want for a franchise like this. Apparently the show is already so deep in production hell that episode 2 listed 5 chief animation directors, 3 animation directors, and 3 assistant animation directors in its credits (normally you have 2–4 people fulfilling these functions). The blame should be shared between both the production committee for poor organization and the studio for poor resource management (and agreeing to this job in the first place, seeing how their schedule was already swamped), and I sincerely hope it will receive a bad enough backlash for them to change their approach to S3 and beyond.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
For sure, it's just that AngerFist isn't normally into stuff like that. As far as I know he prefers gritty, visceral action series.
Katanagatari is kind of the opposite: it relies on building up to the fights—while the fights themselves are often short, spaced far apart from each other, and not necessarily violent. But it really becomes great once you get emotionally invested into the characters, because they're all wonderful and distinct personalities.
Btw, I felt like the final episode in particular took some inspiration from Bruce Lee's unfinished version of Game of Death, and possibly from the 2009 film Goemon (at least visually—I know the novels were released before the movie).
Also, holy shit the second episode of OPM S2 is a smoking turd. Not going to watch this travesty any longer.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Hello fellas! Was a long time ago I checked for new anime series. My preference hasn't changed a bit, looking particularly for a show like Shiguri: Death Frenzy, Kurozuka, Ninja Scroll etc. If you know any new series like those, please let me know.
Oops! Missed your post (actually both of them). :v
In terms of style, you might be interested in Devilman: Crybaby. Extremely gritty, violent, lots of nudity and shit. Rushed ending though. If you like it, check out Kemonozume from the same director; an unconventional and very underrated show. Actually, you know what? Scratch that—watch Kemonozume first.
The currently ongoing Dororo is on the tamer side, but is closer to your tastes thematically (feudal era Japan, swordfighting, demons, people dying and whatnot) and is extremely competently done. Also Onihei I suppose, but that's more like a very realistic episodic procedural cop drama set in the 18th century Japan.
Also check out Attack on Titan if you haven't yet. And JoJo. Can't go wrong with either: good gritty action, decent characters, well-written plot and excellent visuals. And if you've liked One-Punch Man... Well, I won't comment on the second season's quality—for now—but do yourself a favor and watch Mob Psycho 100 from the same author. It's every bit as good; arguably better. Similar themes but more interesting characters and more plot development compared to the season 1 of OPM.
On to the stuff I'm not sure about. Katanagatari is a contentious recommendation; it kind of fits the bill thematically (swordfighting, ninja...) but not at all stylistically (there's a fuckton of dialogue and not remotely as much action; the art style takes a while to get used to). But it's an amazing show for what it is, it's clever and has amazing soundtrack and animation, so it feels unfair not to mention it. People seem to really be divided about its ending, though! Golden Kamuy... I would certainly recommend it if it wasn't so inferior to the manga. The latter is a top read, one of the best stories I know—with amazing characters, too. The adaptation is... acceptable I guess? It follows the plot very closely, but you'd be losing out on a lot of expressiveness of the original.
And on to the stuff that hasn't aired yet. If you've liked Baki you're probably going to enjoy Kengan Ashura which will air next season. It's stylistically similar and the manga is one of the most fun martial arts stories I've read. Excellent character cast! Also you absolutely shouldn't miss Vinland Saga when it airs. It's going to be amazing on every level.
EDIT: There's a lot to say and show about JoJo, but if I were to pick a single non-spoilery scene to try selling you on the series, it'd probably be this one (it's uncensored on the blurays, obviously). Just the perfect mix of deadpan seriousness and whimsical absurdity. It was this exact scene that convinced me that the new JoJo adaptation was going to be quite the ride.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Well, this is a thing now.
Link to video
Most games still aren't playable, but this is pretty good, eh?
I've downloaded the current build and poked around on their Discord. The emulator is pretty bare-bones right now, missing almost all of the essential features such as controller configuration (which made me not want to continue any experiments for now). Some are coming in the UI overhaul, but there is no ETA on that. Savestates are "apparently possible but are not a priority atm". The devs have been busy lately so progress has slowed somewhat. So TASing is definitely out of the question for 2019, but 2020 is probably within the realm of possibility—at least as long as savestates and sync-stable input replay are possible.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Apparently this is still (once again?) actively developed. The current stable version is 1.8.0, and the latest git commit was made today. Versions released since the last post in this thread have some beefy changelogs, too.
I ran a coupledemos on it using default settings, and only saw what appeared to be minor emulation artifacts in either (the first had some issues with effect timing in a couple spots, and the other some issues with a glow effect). I'd consider it pretty good.
Judging by the multitude of YouTube videos, commercial games run fine...-ish? Anyway, that's it for now.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
What it usually means is that the game doesn't calculate a trajectory for a ball (that would require processing quite a bit of floating point math which NES is extremely bad at); instead it has a table that contains data like "for this angle and speed, move the ball X pixels to the right and Y pixels up next frame until a collision happens". That way it bypasses the need to do complex calculations by having the number of variations boiled down to a reasonable minimum and having immediate access to the result of those calculations.
It's the math equivalent of prerendered 3D sprites: instead of processing the entire geometry of a 3D model, store a 2D image of it at 4/8/16 different angles and replace them as needed.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I don't have an opinion on the TAS itself, nor its quality, but let me chime in real quick with regards to authorship attribution, because there is some visible discontent brewing between here and Discord, and it needs to be addressed.
Our attribution policy for modified input is notably lax to avoid situations where every new author would be required to include all past and present collaborators, so the entire body of work on a given game published on our site can be considered a collaborative effort where the content is published already with intent of further reusal—especially since it becomes inevitable as TASes become progressively more optimized and thus converging to a single optimal set of inputs. The contribution of every author is recorded in the site's history to comply with the CC BY 2.0 site license, which also allows building on others' work without asking for permission—this is something every movie author and editor agree upon when submitting any content to the site.
This moves the attribution of a heavily modified work strictly into the domain of community ethics. The author is encouraged to list every source of input that was directly copied into their work, and is discouraged from taking significant portions of input from other players without properly crediting them—within reasonable bounds, of course. But unless an overwhelming percentage of input is directly copied from elsewhere without any attribution, this is not something that the site can—nor should!—enforce one way or another, and it certainly shouldn't influence the judgment process or user rights.
And this also isn't something to admonish beginners for, considering they cannot be expected to be fully acquainted with intricacies of our etiquette in their first few months. It's not possible to tell at a glance that what's been done here can be frowned upon, since the borrowed input constitutes only a tiny portion of the TAS's overall runtime.
In my personal opinion, it would have been reasonable and of proper courtesy to mention in the submission message that inputs in 1-1 and 1-2 were taken from HappyLee [for any sensible reasons]. And that's really it.
Carry on!
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
As someone who once attempted a no-reboot true pacifist Extreme difficulty playthrough, I can confirm Extreme takes over twice as long to complete because 1) you actually need to explore every stage and kill most of the enemies in it for Nano pickups; 2) you still cannot kill directly, so in many cases you need to set enemies up to kill themselves by splash damage off of your body—but since you can take at most one heavy hit without dying, you have to constantly backtrack to heal yourself. Running this category on Normal is a wise decision in my opinion; Hard would just be slower and not necessarily more exciting because the no-damage Ultimortal run already exists.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Feos, thanks for the comparison encode! Very interesting seeing the two side by side. One trend I noticed was that Baxter's TAS often had to spend a lot of time clearing the last few silver blocks, whereas the bot-generated run tended to get these as it went.
It also spent a lot more time actually using the paddle instead of the wall and ceiling bounces, leading to e.g. less shallow angles—even more consistently so than I'd thought. You can clearly tell how Baxter was almost always going for a more human-intuitive strategy which nevertheless led to accumulation of time loss closer to the end of level: even when the balls spent more time closer to the blocks, they almost always spent less time actually hitting them.
For instance, in level 11 which is comprised entirely of silver blocks with no multiball power-up, the strategies used in both runs were largely similar, but Baxter opted to eliminate more blocks as soon as the opportunity arose instead of spreading them out like the bot did. His approach ended up concentrating unbroken blocks at the edges which required a lot of idle time to get in the end—whereas the bot solved the last dozen of blocks by cleverly ricocheting the ball between 3–4 at a time because they were conveniently spread out. It's almost magical.
Level 15 is an even better illustration of Baxter underusing of the paddle in favor of sending the balls to the ceiling gap. IMO this comparison video should be linked in the description to demonstrate the differences in optimized human and nonhuman approaches.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Also could you explain further by what you mean by expect more of this game?
I mean that for how fun it is to play—especially with a friend—it sure looks much more monotonous in a TAS (that tends to happen, yeah). I suppose bumping is to blame for that? But if you say there will be more variety down the line, that's good to know. I'll watch it in any case.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Lmao, nice number plate.
Also, presenting a no-memory-corruption run for the benefit of a mental illness charity is a clever move (if a bit risky; I made a double take to ensure it had that "no" at the beginning).