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Strap in, this is going to be wild as I've been leading efforts on a number of fronts to introduce TAS content and concepts to new audiences in my position as Ambassador on staff here at TASVideos and most of it will probably be news to you. In reverse order, here are the events that the TASBot team has prepared content for in just the next 90 days:
TASBot in Europe at ESA July 19-28: This is the only event in this post that's unconfirmed but ESA Summer 2019 submissions are in! See the European Speedrunner Assembly submissions page and sort on TASBot to see the below submissions, with announcements of accepted content being made May 5th:
- TASBot plays SteamWorld Dig 2 (any% by keylie)
- TASBot plays Super Mario Bros. 3 (any% no wrong warp by Lord Tom, Maru, & Tompa)
- TASBot plays TAS Showcase (20 minutes of curated TAS content)
TASBot at SGDQ 2019 June 28th: We've been busy over at the Discord.TAS.Bot server and the team was able to submit 5 runs that were *fully complete* at the time of submission to avoid a repeat of the issues micro500 identified during AGDQ 2019. The following have been accepted:
- TASBot plays Tetris (Mode B, playaround, fastest 999999 by Baxter & Acmlm)
- TASBot plays Mario Kart Wii 8 Tracks (IGT: ~10 minutes)
- TASBot plays Celeste (All Red Berries by euni, fishmcmuffins & Kilaye as Bonus Game 5)
TASBot at RPG Limit Break 2019 on May 9th: In our first confirmed appearance at this great event benefiting the very neutral National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), TheAxeMan and I will be showing:
- TASBot Plays Final Fantasy (No Memory Corruption/No Reset by TheAxeMan)
Desert Tesla Charity Drive on May 4th: Watch TASBot, TheAxeMan and I melt or freeze as you use Crowd Control to hack the comfort features of my Tesla Model X 100D during a 14+ hour desert livestream from Petaluma, CA to Salt Lake City, UT in a (literal) charity drive benefiting NAMI. This is a major event presented by the TASBot team with sponsorships by various companies with Tool-Assisted elements throughout and while our (dis)comfort is free to watch it can be enhanced by your charitable meddling so please tune in May 4th at https://TAS.Bot.
Yes, this is a *lot*. Some of this may come as a surprise as I personally haven't made update posts here due to the TASVideos forums being slower than using the https://Discord.TAS.Bot server and there are fewer people here that seem to want to help as evidenced by the feedback in the last thread. Perhaps this thread will jumpstart more active engagement from here. :) Feedback is welcome, even moreso if you're willing to join us in the arena and help us with the crunch of things left to do. Thanks!
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Yup, totally pumped for my first live marathon appearance! Submitting Final Fantasy for RPG Limit Break was my idea. I have created a new white mage no resets TAS just for this event that is going to be really cool. At 77 minutes it is way too long for a GDQ TAS block but fits in really well at RPG limit break where the average run is something like 4 hours.
This reminds me, I need to actually see if gyre wants to be on the couch with us. That would put the TAS author and WR speedrunner together live which I am not sure has happened before. Actually it won't be the first time because right before we go on I'll be on the couch for Dragondarch's run on Crystalis which I also TASed.
Now the desert Tesla drive is going to be fun but it's clearly something that only dwangoAC could have imagined.
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.
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moozooh wrote:
Lmao, nice number plate.
Heh, yep. Best 7 BTC I ever spent. It's so wild I have the car at all, it was a brief window of prosperity that closed as quickly as it opened but I like that I'm able to use the assets I have for good.
moozooh wrote:
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).
I hadn't thought about that pun at all, and I don't think it will come up (nor do I think it should).
Huge credit goes to TheAxeMan for all things Final Fantasy.
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Desert Tesla Charity Drive is on Saturday and there's a *lot* done already, but more to do. If you're interested in volunteering please contact me, there are all kinds of small jobs that need done.
I overcame a major power draw concern and sound is now working but I'm concerned about the issue of bandwidth. I need to broadcast at 768 Kbps for video, 96 Kbps for audio on two different networks simultaneously if I can manage it. I had hoped to get a Verizon device but that doesn't look likely so we'll have to figure out how to come up with a creative solution with Project Fi. Not sure how that's going to work out...
Anyway, watch that video in the previous post. :)
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So there's a lot to update on but I'm going to keep this brief - while Desert Tesla Charity Drive was a huge success and Final Fantasy was a knockout the big news is that we've been officially accepted to ESA! More details to come, but we have a bit of flexibility on what we show. So, folks from Europe, what would *you* like to see?
I'll make a post about what happened on the way to RPG Limit Break and things that were afoot there in time but there's some video editing we need to do first, so in the meantime here's a link to the Final Fantasy run we did that is quite possibly the best showing we've had to date:
Link to video
Yes, this is a *lot*. Some of this may come as a surprise as I personally haven't made update posts here due to the TASVideos forums being slower than using the https://Discord.TAS.Bot server and there are fewer people here that seem to want to help as evidenced by the feedback in the last thread.
- For me the surprise is what you wrote despite that multiple users expressed their intention to help as evidenced by the some good feedback feedback in the last thread
- Please use feos' format so people are aware of and be able to help rather than trying to figure out how to help. Post #480508
I mean, I think you misinterpret the situation. You are right that there aren't posts about "hello I'm going to help you, give me a task!!i". But there are people who would like to contribute to these events as well, regardless of intention. (edit: removed last sentence)
Quoting DrD2k9:DON'T stop asking for help!
Also looking forward the TAS Block.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
dwangoAC + Feasel Wii Punchout TAS demonstration: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/443965863?t=07h30m41s
I think this was a really cool demonstration.
- Done before the blindfolded run, which was already present in past GDQ's so viewers had an easy time figuring out what's up
- For whatever reason, maybe the clothes, or the body language, but it looked and sounded casual, easy to understand and somehow easy to relate (maybe the good examples shown in A/B test or lack of hard, technical words)
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
Reddit threads so far, mostly positive and neutral responses.
Thanks for the links - the last of the Reddit ones is a year old though. The podcast will likely be up within a week apparently.
Reddit seems to be relatively positive. I'm curious what this community thinks of the content that was shown at SGDQ 2019. I feel we've stepped back from the mistakes I made during AGDQ 2019 which were a repeat of AGDQ 2017 and I feel much better about this event's content. I did not know they were going to put a $175k incentive on Celeste and was surprised by it. It was amazing seeing how quickly the incentive was met.
A note to publishers: The Tetris segment contains TASVideos content and can be freely posted on the TASVideos YouTube channel at will. However, Mario Kart Wii and Celeste are unable to be represented on TASVideos as a result of current site policy and thus are not TASVideos content in any way. Posting those segments on YouTube under the TASVideos channel would be unwise unless we can say with a straight face that the content actually came from TASVideos, including future events until such time that we can fully represent event content.
However, Mario Kart Wii and Celeste are unable to be represented on TASVideos as a result of current site policy and thus are not TASVideos content in any way. Posting those segments on YouTube under the TASVideos channel would be unwise unless we can say with a straight face that the content actually came from TASVideos, including future events until such time that we can fully represent event content.
Did everything shown at past events as TASBlock come from TASVideos?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
^ Obviously not. Source: Wiki: TASBot
edit: "current site policy" is that anything else than Wiki: Nach/FairUse which only talks about video game speedrun encodes?
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MESHUGGAH wrote:
edit: "current site policy" is that anything else than Wiki: Nach/FairUse which only talks about video game speedrun encodes?
I'm personally very careful to always handle content coming *from* TASVideos appropriately, providing full attribution per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. I always attempt to be above reproach and fully abide by Fair Use when using site content anywhere else.
In the other direction, the issue is that the content creators have not placed their work on TASVideos because there is no vehicle available to do so and as such the site does not automatically have permission to use that content. The correct course of action to take is to find some way to resolve the years-long logjam that has prevented content like #4450: TheAxeMan's NES Final Fantasy "Console Verification" in 1:11:28.35 from being represented properly on the site under any category. As noted above in the thread, a White Mages variant of the above was shown at RPG Limit Break but also wasn't published on the site and wasn't even submitted in the first place due to the continued chilling effect of other past rejections like #4947: dwangoAC, Ilari & p4plus2's SGB Pokémon: Red/Green/Blue/Yellow Version "Pokemon Plays Twitch" in 08:11.42. I believe this situation will continue until some method is made for TAS content creators to showcase their event specific art.
It just happens that this particular event was made up almost entirely of content that was not from TASVideos. We did 6 separate things; two interview desk segments in the form of Punch Out Wii and Majora's Mask using Dolphin TAS creations made on site and not based on TASVideos content (or even admissible as anything other than userfiles under current site rules), an off-stream live panel talk that was recorded and discusses how to capture console verification attempts, and finally Tetris, Mario Kart Wii individual levels, and the Celeste All Red Berries TAS made with the custom-built tools. Out of 6 things shown promoting TAS content only one of them in the form of Tetris was from TASVideos content. No meaningful progress has been made in years to resolve this ongoing problem and I don't anticipate that changing until some new force comes in to shake things up with a different perspective on how to represent event content that isn't strictly fastest-to-the-finish content. Thoughts?
As I mentioned before, the main problem with non-standard content is complete absence of consensus on what should be represented how. And as I've tried to come up with some regulations over the years, none managed to fly beyond free chats.
As for myself, my goal has always been to upload tasblocks as single segment videos with waiting times edited out. If uploading it in its entirety isn't feasible, I don't have the passion to be selecting segments that are already featured at tasvideos.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I liked the Mario Kart Wii TAS, Celeste was a little long for me so I skipped around but had some good stuff in it. Commentary was also really good this time around.
dwangoAC wrote:
No meaningful progress has been made in years to resolve this ongoing problem and I don't anticipate that changing until some new force comes in to shake things up with a different perspective on how to represent event content that isn't strictly fastest-to-the-finish content. Thoughts?
You TASBot folks are clearly the spearhead of TAS development at this point, why not make a TASBot site to have a centralized place to showcase stuff? I think this might also help bring in more innovation from people who aren't really interested in making traditional TAS content to begin with.
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Alyosha wrote:
You TASBot folks are clearly the spearhead of TAS development at this point, why not make a TASBot site to have a centralized place to showcase stuff? I think this might also help bring in more innovation from people who aren't really interested in making traditional TAS content to begin with.
I wouldn't say we're the spearhead of TAS development but we're certainly more willing than others to push the boundaries of what a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can be. We do have https://TAS.Bot and I intend to flesh it out but I have no interest in recreating all of the tools TASVideos provides there as it would, if anything, just shard off a community needlessly. I don't see a compelling reason to deliberately create distance between the two communities when it isn't necessary, on the contrary I'd like there to be a lot less "us and them" mentality if possible. The TAS content shown at events under the mascot of TASBot doesn't have to be distanced from TASVideos in my opinion.
In other words, I'd much rather have TAS.Bot focus on announcing what the next event(s) are (switching to a live streaming video mode during events we run ourselves like Bot Bash Charity Brawl and Desert Tesla Charity Drive) and providing resources on the process of using replay devices while promoting the individual that is TASBot at his appearances at events. One note on that, I am TASBot's keeper but I'm very open to others taking him to events I may not even be at and that could in fact happen for GDQx should we decide to submit content for it. I've been very consistent on that, see the SGDQ 2016 discussion thread for more.
On a side note, I'm unable to keep up with, well, everything that needs done. I'm going to have to rely on volunteers to keep the list at Wiki: TASBot up to date and in line with what's at the GDQVods TAS page and to make any event specific pages. Obviously it would make a lot more sense to have all of this if we could get more of the content we show represented on the site.
I believe this situation will continue until some method is made for TAS content creators to showcase their event specific art.
I think that the part I bolded is the crucial problem in all this.
Let's make a comparison to speedrun.com. It's a site dedicated to showing and maintaining top lists of fastest speedruns (often in several categories) for video games, usually with quite strict rules. Generally you need to achieve a specific goal (most often reach the end of the game, in some cases something else) as fast as possible, and you need to provide some kind of proof of your achievement, which is verified, after which your entry will get onto the top list of that game in that particular category, based on your time to reach the specified goal.
That site is not about, for example, showcasing glitch exhibitions, let's plays, playthroughs, tutorials, or gameplay in general (such as multiplayer tournaments, for instance). It is not a site for people to showcase any form of "art" that they might create with a video game (via gameplay or otherwise). Incidentally, it's also not a site to show segmented speedruns (which isn't really necessary with regards to this subject, but anyway.) If you want to publish some kind of exhibition, gameplay, tutorial, or any form of art, that site is not for that; you'll have to go somewhere else (the easiest way is to just publish your video on your own YouTube channel).
Now the question is: What should tasvideos.org be about? Is it a site to collect, maintain and present world records of tool-assisted speedruns of video games, or should it be just a generic website for people to showcase whatever they can come up with using a console emulator (no matter how technically impressive it might be)? Should we indiscriminately just publish whatever people care to submit, or should there be some kind of standards and requirements in order to have something published?
tasvideos.org has always been about game completions and, sometimes, with a few games, other goals. There are certain requirements for such a game completion to be considered legit. For one, like with speedrun.com, you need to provide proof of your run. In our case this proof requirement is much stricter. A simple video is not enough. We need to be able to corroborate the legitimacy of the run (to be able to check that, for example, the game hasn't been modified, or the video edited). The proof must be verifiable and the run replicable pretty much by anybody who so wishes. Luckily, there's a perfect way to provide such a proof: The timed keypress file created by the emulator.
Another key component, a key concept, that has always existed at tasvideos.org is that of obsoletability: It should always be possible for a better TAS to obsolete an existing one (in the vast majority of cases this means that the new TAS completes the goal faster). This is one issue were tech demos, custom payloads, "art", starts to fall short. It's hard to obsolete something that cannot be measured objectively. You cannot objectively determine that one piece of "art" is better than another, because it's extremely subjective. You could put it to a community vote, but in the end it would make little sense (especially since most probably novelty will be considered "better", for the mere reason that it's new and previously unseen.)
Sure, we could have some kind of separate "tech demo" part of the site, and this has indeed been suggested many times over the years, even semi-officially. But even then, the whole question of what the requirements are for such a subjective topic, and whether there are obsoletions, or whether it's just a dumping ground for anything that's considered cool, remains. Maybe there should be no obsoletions in this category? Maybe if something is published there, it stays published for eternity. (There's also the practical problem that this whole thing would require a lot of work on the backend and frontend of the site.)
Technical showcases and demos fall into this weird niche where they aren't really speedruns, nor can they really be judged as such.
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To respond to feos' really important question that wasn't answered by the person who should answer it, I'll answer it for them.
No, there has been past events where TASVideos TASes weren't featured in a case nearly the entirety of it wasn't TASVideos content.
dwangoAC wrote:
It just happens that this particular event was made up almost entirely of content that was not from TASVideos.
Neither was AGDQ 2019 then (technically).
Neither was almost the entirety of SGDQ 2018.
Neither was AGDQ 2018 then (technically).
Neither was AGDQ 2017 then (technically).
Neither was AGDQ 2016 then (technically).
So what makes this different?
This makes no sense on any front whatsoever.
If this goes on your personal YouTube account. I'll bring these questions out:
What makes TASVideosChannel the hub that generates zero profit an outlier especially if this is the first time it's brought up?
Is it because your slowly gaining the success on your personal account that you can finally take care of yourself, by having people go to your channel to watch a fully archived version of what the ambassador?
Yes, I'm pulling strings from the air because seriously, this is the first time it's been brought up even though we do have accountability of previous events in that technical fault of what you're stating.
Also cause one of the three TASes featured was Celeste "red berries" I'll just point this out. Even though the final version won't be the same.
Celeste did get submitted 6 months after it was featured at SGDQ18 with some more optimizations to it. On a technical fault account Celeste can be ignored in not being content from TASVideos.
To simplify. On a "technical fault" most (2/3rds) of SGDQ19's content is TASVideos.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
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Spikestuff wrote:
So what makes this different?
This event is a bit different in that there's a bit more unease around the problem that the authors of the content don't have a way to even submit it to TASVideos. Yes, past events have used non-site content but in this case there's a bit more desire to try to resolve the problem. Treat everything as an attempt to allow the content we're showing to be better represented by TASVideos rather than trying to pull away from TASVideos.
Spikestuff wrote:
If this goes on your personal YouTube account. I'll bring these questions out:
What makes TASVideosChannel the hub that generates zero profit an outlier especially if this is the first time it's brought up?
Is it because your slowly gaining the success on your personal account that you can finally take care of yourself, by having people go to your channel to watch a fully archived version of what the ambassador?
I'm not quite sure what you meant as that last sentence was dangling a bit but I'll try to take a stab at this with a series of somewhat disconnected sentences. GDQ gives runners permission to post their runs. My specific channel contains content that in some cases has nothing at all to do even with TASBot, such as the chat hacking videos or Desert Tesla Charity Drive content. GDQ derived content is a piece of the content on my channel but isn't all of it by any stretch, and likewise with TASVideos content. One thing that happens with the content on my channel is we tend to make it have a consistent look and feel, or perhaps you could call it a value add that we contribute. At this time my expenses are way higher than my income so talking about profit isn't really relevant just yet but I understand why you mention it.
Spikestuff wrote:
Also cause one of the three TASes featured was Celeste "red berries" I'll just point this out. Even though the final version won't be the same.
Celeste did get submitted 6 months after it was featured at SGDQ18 with some more optimizations to it. On a technical fault account Celeste can be ignored in not being content from TASVideos.
And herein lies the rub. For various reasons libTAS doesn't play well with Celeste and I can tell you from my own experience that the only way to get a clean encode (or honestly, even get it to sync) is to hack the daylights out of it by inserting dozens of pause frames in libTAS. The Celeste community has overwhelmingly preferred the custom built and quite good tools developed for the game and has no interest in attempting to use libTAS again. The Celeste-specific framework was summarily rejected and as such that content will likely never be on TASVideos as the site stands today. This is, in essence, the core problem I'm attempting to address here. TASVideos doesn't have this content and won't in the foreseeable future based on the current trajectory of the site and my goal is to try to correct that. In the meantime it's undeniable that this is *not* TASVideos content, regardless of anything that happened at past events that also wasn't fully from the site; this specific content is simply a bit more sensitive to all involved.
Again, to say it until I'm blue in the face, my goal is to resolve this rift to allow this content to be represented on the site, not start arguments about what has and hasn't been site content in the past.
As Warp pointed out in his post we've had repeated discussions about what the site has had on it in the past. He's not wrong, we're a site based on obsolescence chains using vetted emulators with a rigorous structure. Where we get into trouble is the subjectivity of something that can't be obsoleted, at which point I'd say that it's like any other specialized content site with user-generated content. Some of it will be crap. Some of it will be great. Some of it will be mixed based on subjective factors in the eye of the beholder. Obsoletion makes no sense in that context. If we wanted to put an artificial bar on the kinds of content shown there are a variety of things, such as "must have been shown at an event" or somesuch, but to be honest everyone already knows I'm an inclusionist that would rather see better filtering and categorization tools to allow the cream of the crop content to be highlighted similar to how we have stars tier, curated style.
Ultimately, this comes down to a substantial shift that the site so far appears reticent to take on, one where user content that is Tool-Assisted art in and of itself can be submitted rather than limiting the focus of the site to just emulators. (The irony here is the goal of most every run on an emulator is to be as close as possible to the real hardware but when we do things on real hardware it suddenly becomes a bit too close to home and we find ourselves in this mess.) We need to either fix this by providing some way for this type of content to be represented on the site or site staff needs to make a decision that it will never be fixed with a statement of what that means but the status quo we're in now needs to be resolved.
At the risk of offering a 'too simplistic' suggestion:
Would it be possible/acceptable to simply add a page to the wiki (or a new tab on the Movie Page) that houses/publishes high quality videos of event content; even if that content doesn't go through the normal submission/judging/publication process?
This content could be kept separate from the standard obsoletion chains, while still having a presence on the site as 'official' TASvideos content. The necessary input files could still be hosted/linked for future reference, and the videos could be sorted by year/event instead of by system/tier/title.
As with our current publications, the videos could showcase just the TAS content, not a replay of the event VODs. Essentially making it a page for here's what we presented at X event in it's raw form.
This would satisfy the desire of the content creators to have their work published as part of our site instead of somewhere completely separate.
If this page was strictly limited to content actually shown at an event, we wouldn't have to worry about arbitrary stuff being submitted for that page.
Having this page would also do nothing to damage the current position of the site in regards to standard submissions/publications. Everything else could function as it currently is. If we wanted, we could even put notes with the videos on this page linking to any site content of the same games that have gone through the standard process.
The three biggest challenges I see with this suggestion are:
1) Having to describe the playback method/emulator/tools used, if not already standard on the site.
2) Actually creating the high quality videos (I'm assuming some of the input playback methods may not have video dumping capability)
3) It would likely require completely manual curation and not have anything automated.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
At the risk of offering a 'too simplistic' suggestion:
Would it be possible/acceptable to simply add a page to the wiki (or a new tab on the Movie Page) that houses/publishes high quality videos of event content; even if that content doesn't go through the normal submission/judging/publication process?
We've discussed that aspect at length and the problem that keeps coming up is that anything that's a forum thread or a Wiki page isn't handled like the rest of the site, there's no ####M page for it to live at, it doesn't show up in searches, it doesn't show up in by game lists, it can't be filtered, it isn't categorized, etc. In essence, what you described is effectively what we already have today. What we need is something akin to how many other sites handle works of art with curation - top-level, searchable content, dedicated pages, that can be filtered and tagged appropriately.
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DrD2k9 wrote:
how about a ####EM page for each bit of content? (EM meaning Event Movie)
Oh, I don't think it matters much whether it's a different page name type or is a normal ###M page, the real question is if it shows up under per-game lists and all other site discovery features. Shoving things in a Wiki? Not really discoverable.
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).
