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turska wrote:
The viewer doesn't need to know who made the encode.
If there's something wrong with the encode (which can and does happen), having that info available is useful for troubleshooting in case it's being caused by something that encoder specifically is doing (which, again, is something that's happened in the relatively recent past).
turska wrote:
Identifying the encoder can easily be done in a way that doesn't burden the viewer while still making the information available to interested parties.
Two seconds of viewing time isn't exactly a burden
turska wrote:
It's unnecessarily egocentric while allowing for ulterior motives and severe lack of taste
...which is why logo approval is now centralised instead of being at the discretion of individual publishers. I also think a token degree of recognition for our encoders is appropriate, so long as it isn't taken excessively far.
Remember, the point of a logo is threefold, with two of the reasons being decidedly more important than the third:
To present the run as a tool-assisted run;
To identify the run's association with this site; and
To identify who encoded the run, for the above reasons.
If someone passes to me a logo that ignores the first two points in favour of the third, I'm not going to approve it.
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Metal Gear!? It can't be!
I'm not quite done watching this yet, but since I know someone's going to ask about it:
Earlier in the development of this run, I verified that another save file with a completed game will also cause this run to sync; I suspect that any memory card with a completed game file will allow this run to sync.
(If it's really necessary, I suppose one could put a movie together to generate such a card.)
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Are there any significant differences between the games in the collection and [movie 1844]the[/movie] [movie 1589]original[/movie] [movie 1749]GBA[/movie] [movie 1287]games[/movie]? I'd think working on a run of those games would be preferable in most cases than working from a compilation ROM.
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ThatGugaWhoPlay wrote:
Why there is no tutorial for encode of TASes?
We have an [wiki EncodingGuide]encoding guide[/wiki]. If you don't want to use the techniques we outline there, you're welcome to come up with an alternate approach that meets the [wiki EncoderGuidelines]Encoder Guidelines[/wiki].
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If the sole difference in time is on account of text, then this should be rejected on the basis that the gameplay itself isn't any faster, particularly if (as indicated) it was copied from the previous run of the game.
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ThatGugaWhoPlay wrote:
Well, I sgrunt told me that Point.Resize is optional
That's twisting what I said. I said, quote,
sgrunt wrote:
It's not strictly required to use point resizing for HD encodes, but our viewers have indicated in the past that they prefer videos with point resizing, so I encourage its use.
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Daniel, Lord Bahamut wrote:
I attempted to submit a vote for submission #3442, and received a few errors. I took a screenshot.
http://imageshack.us/f/221/votingerror.jpg/
I was able to cast a vote afterward though.
I needed to restart a couple of things on the server that had stuck at about that time. That was probably a side effect of the process, and you shouldn't be worried.
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Dear Tompa,
Save more frames.
Sincerely, Grunt.
----
In all seriousness, I've long awaited a TAS of one of the Oracles games, and this did not disappoint. Well, actually, I was hoping to see glitchiness on the order of Link's Awakening / DX, but TASing of this game is still in its relative infancy, so I'll let that slide.
Good work! I'll be back for more once you're done with Oracle of Ages.
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As you may have noticed, many of our most recent publications have a secondary video available encoded with a 10-bit build of h.264 in the YUV444 colour space. This provides superior visual quality, which, in many cases, can also be accomplished in a smaller file size.
In order to play these videos back, you will need a fairly recent media player; Windows users can use recent builds of LAV Filters or ffdshow-tryout as a codec to play them back, and users on other platforms can use recent media players depending on ffmpeg such as mplayer/mplayer2.
In the near future (likely after the release of VLC 2.0, which will support playback of these encodes as well), the site's primary video files will be moving to this format as well, so I encourage all of our viewers to ensure they have up-to-date media players that can play back these videos.
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Even with the route maps up beside this run, it's nigh impossible to follow what's going on - it just moves too quickly!
In this case, that's a very good thing.
Yes vote.
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Nahoc wrote:
aswell as being able to see the date of their last login on their profile page?
This one's easy enough to do in the form of a 'last online' field, which now exists. This uses the same data as the 'currently online' tracker at the bottom of the page; you can disable being tracked through both through the 'Hide your online status' setting on your profile page.
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How can you tell if the second stream has proper audio if the video stream doesn't play for you?
The second encode for that movie (and quite a few others) is a 10-bit YUV444 encode, which current releases of VLC can't play back (though, supposedly, VLC 1.2.x will be able to handle them). If you're on Windows, you'd need to use a media player without built-in codecs as well as something like LAV Filters or a recent build of ffdshow-tryouts for codecs in order to be able to play back the video. If not, you might try a recent build of mplayer or mplayer2.
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agwawaf gets the nod from me here for demolishing several previously unassailable TASes (Solomon's Key in particular), though scrimpy also deserves a nomination for his remarkable MSX work and his hand in SCIV.
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franpa wrote:
Also what benefits does rescuing hostages provide aside from Rank Up? Rank Up provides better armor/more health, does it do anything else? Are you required to rescue a certain amount of hostages to beat the game? Can you lose a rank?
You need rank 4 in order to contact Jennifer, who a) provides you with the rocket launcher necessary to defeat the Arnolds and get card 7, and b) unlocks the room where the compass is located.
Killing a hostage causes you to lose a rank.
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I've changed the "uses easy difficulty" tag to read "uses easiest difficulty", to match "uses hardest difficulty".
If there are any serious problems with this, please let me know.
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Metal Gear!? It can't be!
...
I'm still in the midst of watching this, but I quickly realised this run wasn't done with the [!] ROM (it synced on an [f1] ROM). That said, it's easily adjustable to sync with the [!] ROM by inserting an extra blank frame at the beginning of the input.
Here's an .fm2 with the extra frame and a corrected ROM checksum.
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I can't even remember what I was thinking back when I made that comment, so let me try thinking about this again.
How much keyframing or not impacts playback would depend on whether you're being limited by decoding speed or by IO speed; if it's decoding speed, then more keyframes would indeed be desirable for the reason stated; if it's by IO speed, fewer keyframes would be desirable on account of reducing the incoming bitrate.
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Can we see an example of what you mean by 'mess of colors'? What are you using to check the results?
It's possible that your computer just isn't up to playing back the results, and that it would look fine when uploaded to YouTube...
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We normally only consider in-gameplay time to be relevant for the purposes of comparing lengths of runs, so I don't think that a shorter intro screen would make for a very good reason to use the (J) ROM.
