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I am working on a possible new version of the submissions listing, which presently has the ability to handle everything the current queue handles in addition to being able to specify more than one filter reliably.
Here's a screenshot of what I have so far: http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd291/sgrunt/subs.png (don't worry - if this proves to be viable and useful it will appear in the site layout sooner or later rather than just a page by itself).
I am showing you this because I would like to know what else you would like to see in terms of available options on the submissions page.
(For that matter, sooner or later I may plan to do something similar with the movies list.)
---
UPDATE: The new submissions list is live! Go check it out!
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What are you trying to do, exactly?
If you are just recording your normal game play, you can start AVI dump at any time.
If you are recording an AVI of a movie file, pause the emulator, start playback of the movie, then start the AVI dump.
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Does the exact timing matter as long as the same code runs predictably and consistently with the console from frame to frame? The only impact that I can see from this is that the times posted on the site will become meaningless, which is why we are talking about doing away with the speed category.
As for accurate emulation, the trick, as I have been saying, is to figure out exactly how closely the games parallel what we are seeing on the console. By the sounds of what Nach has been saying, we can expect to see huge variability between what is possible between the two platforms, and we'll need to summarily reject anything that doesn't match up adequately; this could be done on a game-by-game, glitch-by-glitch basis and we can't accept a new run for a game until this has been done.
That sounds like an awful lot of work for the minimal audience and duplicate functionality that the site would have at the end of it all.
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Here is the thing: how many people will we have left if speed becomes a non-issue? By the sound of Nach's comment, we're looking at a very small percentage of people sticking around should that be the case.
Also, if it becomes known that this is in fact considered cheating, who will want to watch the remaining runs? Breaking the game loses a lot of its charm if it involves rampant cheating to do so; I for one enjoy seeing games broken using only the means available within the game itself. I suspect we will see a lot of people leaving for similar reasons should we take down the speed-oriented runs.
Will we have anyone left?
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Huh. I thought we'd spent years building up the image that TASing was not cheating (WhyAndHow, anyone?).
I guess it all comes crashing down if we have to admit to this...
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I think we can allow for some reasonable variance in the console's timing - the input sequence in emulators is tied to frames which themselves have variable timing, after all. More work would need to be done on emulators to implement this, of course.
What we should be aiming for is to set out that the results you see here are "close enough" to what is possible on the actual console. This should be (relatively) easy for many of the types of glitches that we see - just aim to reproduce them on the console using some means of feeding the controller 60Hz input (programmable controllers or something of that nature).
Where this gets trickier is luck manipulation or any other form of pseudo-randomness which obviously depends on the initial state. I am not really certain how we can prove that reaching the given result in the given amount of time is something which is doable on a real console, even if we allow for manipulation of the initial state and any timing variances.
In light of this, the "good enough" label might not be feasible. A "might not be actually possible" label doesn't really work either - it'll just turn more people to saying that we're "cheating". Having speed be eliminated from the mission statement also isn't acceptable, as it defeats the purpose of many of the runs of the site.
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How about this as an alternative: getting rid of the aforementioned rule, perhaps turning it into a guideline or something of the sort. Ideally this would be implemented in such a fashion as to allow judges to reject a run which does something obviously not possible from the console's initial state.
We could also perhaps mandate testing glitches on the console prior to them being implemented in the run?
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Oh dear. I'd seen bits and pieces of this discussion previously but I didn't think things would end up looking this bleak.
We do have a long-standing rule that our runs must be on games that are emulated well. Worst case, we stop accepting new runs until we can prove that our emulators have the capability of coming up with an initial memory state that matches something we see on the console (we'll need to come up with a method of testing this, of course). Being able to reproduce this on real hardware is a plus and may even be preferred.
Is there an alternative to this that anyone else can think of?
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As far as I am aware, most people in this situation have used auto-hold keys as you have discovered. Perhaps someone more familiar with the situation can recommend a solution which would work with emulators that do not have that capability?
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I, for one, didn't find this overly interesting to watch. About the only point of interest was developing such a large lead over the CPU players, after which it's just watching your car finish doing circles around the track - it gets very repetitive very quickly.
I give this a Meh.
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I've thought that a tracker system of some sort would be desirable if the number of TODOs is as significant as it seems to be (a lot of them aren't anywhere on the site). This would help with bug reporting as well.
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Aqfaq wrote:
sgrunt wrote:
Do you have any further ideas for the submissions list?
Separate the rejected list to two: "bad game choice" and "unoptimized gameplay". This way it is easy to find potentially good games that already have a run.
Edit: For old runs, it would require manually checking the submissions, though.
I can agree with the sentiment, but I don't think this is the approach to take - submissions can be rejected for more than those reasons, and maintaining a list of submission statuses with a variety of rejection reasons would become hard to maintain very quickly.
Somewhere else the idea of submission classes akin to movie classes was brought up, which I think would be more suited for this kind of sorting.
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Flygon wrote:
Unless you mean the confidence rating... in which case, I never really paid much attention to it unless it's a fairly extreme number, usually below 70%).
Look at the thread title... I do mean confidence rating. :-P
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The ability to specify a branch for a submission has been added. Currently this is only displayed on the submission page itself, though work is in progress to have it displayed on the submissions list (and elsewhere) as well.
EDIT: the submissions list now displays run branch as well. Praise be to adelikat.
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ventuz wrote:
creaothceann wrote:
That's... 8241 kbits/s. Are you sure you need that much?
I don't know, it seem if I try lower, quality get ruined.
What, precisely, are you trying to encode? 8Mbit/s is unnecessarily large for just about everything unless you have very large video resolutions.
Also, how are you encoding your video? Tuning some of the encoder's settings is a good way to reduce file size at the same quality (at the expense of encoding time).
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According to IRC earlier, mike89 asked Sonikkustar to implement the suggested improvement, which has been done. I received a copy of that input file and I'm in the process of encoding it, but I'm reluctant to pass it along until such a time as I can verify that it will replace the current submission file. Once the encode is done and I have verified that it is of the correct input I'll post the link here.
EDIT:
legoking831 wrote:
Weird, this movie just desyncs for me. I'll have to wait for an encode. >:(
