Posted: 7/11/2021 12:35 PM
Post subject: TASSS - Tool-Assisted Speedrunning and Superplay Science
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MESHUGGAH
Other
Skilled player (1918)
Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯
NES TASer of 2013 NES TAS of 2013 NES TAS of 2012 NES TAS of 2011
TL;DR: I've spent the past 3 years with researching and covering every topic of Tool-Assisted speedrunning to create a knowledge base of verified facts. While my materials are in a very early stage, I require feedback and some discussion to make sure I'm on the right tracks. 1. What is this project? A public knowledge base to help everyone and anyone regarding tool-assisted speedrunning. Every information is written and verified by myself so far. 2. Why? - Tool-assisted speedrunning covers many scientific topics as well as an ever increasing materials that can not be fit inside the tasvideos Wiki. - I want to help newcomers as well as regular and veteran members to have a go-to page for their questions and problems rather than creating new discussions threads to already solved stuffs - I believe that with the right formatting and writing, we can make a central knowledge base that can be used by anyone - Internet and life itself will be always hard to understand. From simple information to their credibility throughout scientific researches, there are many things that currently paywalled, erroneous or just not elaborated enough to make these information available to everyone. 3. What is the situation? - I'm currently finished researching materials outside of scientific companies, corporations and university knowledge bases. - I need feedback as the primary audience will be TASers of the tasvideos.org community - I need to finalize design choices - I need to be sure every potential topic are under my radar, before I start expanding the currently started investigations - I've shared a link of google drive with all my currently written down materials of this project - I need to find a home for this project for future discussions and be sure to not conflict with any legal laws and rules 4. What will you do in the future? - Continue and focus with nearly 100% of my time and commitment on this knowledge base - Making a public apology and private for those I've offended in the past, most importantly my derail from the Doom TAS discussion thread as well as all my questionable actions from the start of joining this community to this day. - Join discord and catching up on tasvideos.org threads - Looking for potential contributors as I have hit some roofs of understanding different areas of science and technology as well as not enough time to investigate and being the sole person in charge to update these information over time - Staying in the community... :) 5. Note and link Note: - Do not discuss questionable materials that conflicts with the tasvideos.org rules, specifically anything with ROMs and copyrighted materials. Google drive link https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Fg5qlkMwex3kYCvippf5rP0zFsqLUlUu?usp=sharing edit: I've redacted every link regarding ROMs and copyrighted materials. 6. Discussion and availability Apart from a short trip to Spain, Valencia, I will be on discord and watch this thread for today (July 11st) and will come back on July 21st. After that, I will be actively research and be online on these two platforms.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Posted: 7/11/2021 1:06 PM
Post subject: Re: TASSS - Tool-Assisted Speedrunning and Superplay Science
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1254)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
NES TAS of 2011
MESHUGGAH wrote:
- Tool-assisted speedrunning covers many scientific topics as well as an ever increasing materials that can not be fit inside the tasvideos Wiki.
You can still put them on wiki in your personal subpages. If it ends up getting organized well, we could even move it toplevel.
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.
Posted: 7/11/2021 1:14 PM
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MESHUGGAH
Other
Skilled player (1918)
Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯
NES TASer of 2013 NES TAS of 2013 NES TAS of 2012 NES TAS of 2011
I have the following reasons for currently not trying to integrate with the tasvideos wiki: - These word and excel documents are easier to read (or after exporting as PDF) and the ability to format it to your style or how you would like to learn them. - Some materials will require tables with sorting and some materials not allowed to be share on the tasvideos site. - Some materials will be updated a lot and I don't think that many revisions are required what the wiki offers. Despite this, since all this information will be public and requires no copyright or any kind of credit, anyone will be allowed to use it and integrate it to the tasvideos wiki or create their own little knowledge base. I will revisit this "move to tasvideos wiki" once I can verify that the materials don't break any legal laws or rules of the United States. This also means that I don't know where will be the final location of this project. Thinking between github, google drive and tasvideos wiki.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Posted: 7/11/2021 3:31 PM
Post subject: Re: TASSS - Tool-Assisted Speedrunning and Superplay Science
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Alyosha
He/Him
Editor, Emulator Coder, Expert player (3822)
Joined: 11/30/2014
Posts: 2832
Location: US
GBA TASer of 2023 Homebrew TAS of 2023 Gameboy TASer of 2022 NES TASer of 2015
This is just my opinion, you can of course do what you want, but after browsing your repo. this seems too broad to be useful. In particular:
MESHUGGAH wrote:
- I need to be sure every potential topic are under my radar, before I start expanding the currently started investigations
This isn't practical. I'm seeing more recently that TASing of any modern'ish game is more attached to that game's community then to here (just look at how dead most threads are.) This makes sense with the advent of discord and how complicated newer games are. These communities are pretty independent and can be highly technically competent, ex. Paper Mario Stop and Swap was just performed live at SGDQ 2021 a few days ago, a feat rivaling any TAS ACE run. I don't think you can realistically capture even a substantial part of the TAS works that's happening out there and all the unique tools and ideas people are using. Just focusing on TASvideos, our knowledge base is mostly there for common topics (ex how to use TAStudo etc.) just a bit scattered about. Could use some organizing, but honestly very little has changed over the last few years with the exception of LibTAS, so I'm not sure you'd be adding much. Again just my opinion, but maybe something useful/interesting that can be done would be to organize a science style journal where you ask for / help develop articles from people doing technical / sciencey TAS work? For example there is a run on the workbench right now #7162: Jigwally's GB Daedalian Opus in 10:30.63 where an article describing the techniques used with maybe some links to real journal articles about the topic would be a good read.
Posted: 7/11/2021 3:56 PM
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MESHUGGAH
Other
Skilled player (1918)
Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯
NES TASer of 2013 NES TAS of 2013 NES TAS of 2012 NES TAS of 2011
Too broad to be useful: The project tries to aim at all audiences and there are many overlapping areas. Imagine the current state of my repository as pages of tasvideos wiki while there will be different books for different roles. For example, an Atari 7800 TASer will probably want the following things: - Information, research, time management (what to search and where to search) - Atari 7800 platform and games information (what's possible to do and what's been done) - 7800Hawk information (emulation and console verification states) - Mathematics (binary, hex, data types, probability, statistics, etc) - Resources (youtube channels, various sites with information of various games, script repos, gamefaqs, video game maps) - Techniques (disassembly, lua scripting, test strategies, documenting, teamworking, etc) - Games (meta game states, possibilities per platform per games, etc) - Computers (assembly, part of computers, 1s and 0s, etc) These kind of selection and organizing of materials can be done with a simple HTML page displaying the relevant parts for relevant readers. Press / Media only wants simple explanation, examples and events, maybe interviews. An encoder wants very different things. A TASer needs even more. So an Atari 7800 TASer would go to the repository and would ideally click on 7800 TASing, which would then have something similar to what I elaborated above. There are many informations that won't be duplicated but linked from external source. I understand that my repository seems very clunky and information overload as well as scattered. I will try to clean up and show some mock up page how it works out in reality.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Posted: 8/24/2021 12:55 PM
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MESHUGGAH
Other
Skilled player (1918)
Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯
NES TASer of 2013 NES TAS of 2013 NES TAS of 2012 NES TAS of 2011
After a lot of thinking and internal (me with myself) debates, I'm going to modify my original project goals and it's contents in the following ways. The main change comes from the following: - Avoid any possibility of potential cause of TASVideos.org site negative future (legal law cases leading to closing or financial punishment) - Avoid any possibility of potential cause of a member of TASVideos.org site negative future (anything and any kind of personal details with no exception, anything legal, anything illegal) This leads to the following changes: 1. Avoid direct linking to ROMs and copyrighted files - Since the point of my project is to ensure the common knowledge between TASers are on the same level, there will be either links or guide on possible sources of obtaining them - These kind of links should only exists outside of TASVideos site - These links will include already known links that TASVideos site uses (for the record I'm not going to disclose which is this site despite it's name and their project goal is well known) - There might be files that only I possess, have no idea how to include them without interfering with TASVideos' no linking to copyright stuffs rule. The possibility of this and the number of files are really really low, so this is just going to be revised after a complete version of the project materializes. 2. Avoid enclosing any kind of TAS related personal details - This means I will drop researches that tries to assume or find out what a TASer meant for example in forum threads. An extensive research could lead to TASers deleting posts to avoid representing themselves in historical events, which is definitely not a goal for anyone including myself. - This doesn't affects researches like developers own comments and facts about creation of video games and their bugs, but I'm going to omit / redact personal life details for example personal cases, anything that doesn't directly affected the potential causes in the viewpoint of developing and it's life path. For example Cyberpunk 2077, it should include every detail except the name of legitimate sources. It should include everything from death threats to lies and corruption. 3. Incorporate my researches to TASVideos Wiki - As suggested by feos, I believe this should be the right way. We have an incredible but very hard to navigate Wiki full of worthy information. Duplicating these would defeat the purpose of a central knowledge base. - I need to come up and check if it's possible to make a Wiki page with the ability to order tables or use google drive as a host. The main question is the balance between easy to read, easy to add or modify information, easy to check the authors. 4. Reducing my main project into an introductionary booklet - As of the above point, I want to make sure that the original contents of TASVideos pages remain intact while demonstrating different viewpoints on introducing different kind of users to the world of TASing - The introductionary means a gist of all stuffs related to TASing and TASVideos without elaborating them to atomic level. The point is gathering my viewpoints and applying the same guidelines for every topic that comes up in the community. - Depending on what comes out of this, they will be allowed to be copied or use words to be pasted to TASVideos pages, which I'm going to avoid. This is simply because I don't want to "spread" my own words and it should be done by others especially in the staff to ensure the historical texts of TASVideos while enriching them with my own findings or my conclusion of researches. Any kind of feedback is welcome as always!
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...