Well, there is a slight difference in that, in all the other examples people have given, the incomplete movies were not pretending to complete the game. Shouldn't the old Spiderman movie at least be labelled "first level" or something?
So... what happens to the old movie? Is it just obsoleted or should it be retroactively rejected? I know this breaks the site's rules but this really is an exceptional case.
Why spend all that time on a game and put up a shoddy encode? I mean seriously, any value to the run is greatly diminished. It's not like it was some bug that caused that... it was someone who felt the need to cut n' splice the video. This isn't some torrented tv show where they edit out the commercials... it's like taking a porn movie and anytime there''s anything sexual, it's spliced out, leaving 2 mins of dialogue in a 1h30m movie.
Preparing a cutsceneless encode is more like taking a porn movie and cutting out the dialogue. People do not watch TASes for the cutscenes, much like they do not watch porn for the dialogue, so I see no harm in leaving them out.
There's a neat 2D counterpart to this problem. The area of an annulus (a circle with a concentric circle removed from the middle) can be determined just knowing the length of a chord of the outer circle which is also a tangent to the inner circle - this one falls right out of Pythagoras' theorem iirc.
If the new route uses new glitches to the old route, then it could be considered for its own category. However, as I understand it it just uses new applications of old tricks (eg SM64 16-star versus SM64 0-star) and hence should just obsolete the old run.
Overall, a very nice run. Maybe you could have played around a bit more during the boss fights if I was being ultra-critical, but I guess Spyro doesn't have the widest range of movement for playing around with.
To address my above post that some people disagreed with, let me clarify: this particular TAS is measured by input length rather than completion time.
grassini wrote:
Very good TAS,yes vote,hope it goes to the vault at the very least!
That's the one place it won't end up, since it's not an any% or 100% run.
The TAS's length is judged by the end input. Thus if it is possible to make the score reach 999999 in less than 22 min 53 sec, but it requires more than 6.02 seconds of input, then sorry, that counts as a slower run.
However, this is boring regardless of whether you judge it on the six seconds of input or the full movie, so a no vote from me. And therefore reject, due to the unvaultable goal choice.
Btw, would this be a good occasion to, once again, advocate an old idea of mine? A "uses intended route" branch.
Many people would like to see a game played through (rather than glitched through) with perfect accuracy. Many games lack such a TAS because glitches that skip large portions of the game are the de-facto standard. While this is cool and all, it would still be nice to see the original intended route being played with perfect accuracy. Hence a "uses intended route" branch.
It really is a nice idea, but there are unfortunately big problems with the "intended route" branch.
1) Who's to say what the route intended by the developers is, particularly in RPGs/sandbox games where exploration is very much the focus? And how strictly does it have to be defined - how large do the shortcuts taken have to be before they are outlawed?
2) Runs in such a category would never get large improvements, since macro-optimisation is impossible once a route has been prescribed for all runs to follow. It is likely that interest in such categories would suffer as a result.
3) It runs contrary to the very philosophy of TASing: the game is just a game, a set of rules, and you must exploit those rules as efficiently as possible.
4) People can already watch real-time speedrunners. They're pretty good. Arbitrary code execution is one of the things that greatly highlights the potential of TASing, at least in the many examples where such tricks are impossible in real time, or if they are possible, require a considerably more tortuous setup.
Not much to say that hasn't already been said. It seems that traditional TASes which actually play the game with some semblance of sanity are becoming a dying breed.
Chamale wrote:
What an astonishing improvement! This run is 2.0375 masterjuns faster than the previous run. Yes vote.
(A masterjun is an order of magnitude of improvement. Masterjuns = log10 [previous/new])
Biggest improvement on the site? (Although I imagine that this would technically be a new category rather than an improvement.) Contrast the current Super Mario Bros movie, which features a improvement of 0.0000243 masterjuns.
So what, if I read the notes right, this trick is possible in real time?
How on earth are real-time runners meant to manipulate the enemy positions to execute the code?
As a general rule, if you have to explain to a layman how the game has just been completed, it's enough to warrant its own category. ACE falls under those criteria.
Not really Warp, because to a mathematician π is so much more than the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. In this case, the sum is linked to Taylor series of trigonometric functions, whose solutions involve π. Indeed the simplest proof of the identity involves expressing one such series as both an infinite sum and an infinite product. It turns out that one co-efficient of this series is given by the sum of the reciprocals of the squares on one side, and π^2/6 on the other. Since the expressions are equivalent, the result follows.
How about "researcher"? That, ultimately, seems to be what this role is about - glitch hunting, writing lua scripts, and other study of the game's mechanics could all be lumped under this title.
This discussion appears to happen every few months. Although it can be tedious it's not necessarily a bad thing because opinions change, the state of the website changes, etc etc.
The question is fine as it is, because publishability is not subjective and is better decided by an experienced judge than by the (relatively) ignorant masses. Entertainment, however, is not subjective, so it gets held up to a general vote.
I agree there is a problem with people answering a different question to the one that as asked. However, a judge is better off reading the comments as well, since commenters are not responding to questions and therefore there is no danger of them answering the wrong question. The comments may also raise technical points if the judge is unsure about these.
^ I've not seen it, but that's the most telling comment yet. Being noticeably suboptimal to a real-time runner is one thing. Being noticeably suboptimal to the average TASvideos member is quite another.
By the way, people, you can still vote that you found a submission entertaining, even if you don't think it should be published.