My initial impression was that off-screen shooting only skips the waiting time, and the change is not visible to the viewer anyway. But there's also an argument that the wait is skipped by shooting, in a shooting game, so it's a direct part of normal gameplay.
So the main question is, do we make this a new branch or do we obsolete [4923] Flash Sniper Assassin 3 by Spikestuff in 02:37.50? If new branch, then what's the defining criterion? There's no visible difference so it can't go to Alternative, but maybe results of the off-screen shooting can be considered a major skip glitch, hence making both movies go to Standard alongside each other? If the argument is that glitchless can be a new standard branch, both movies abuse a glitch that skips some levels due to fast shooting (tho I'd personally be interested in a glitchless branch).
While not necessarily applicable to these two TASes, I feel that it's worth talking about the limitations of off-screen mouse input in the official Flash Player, as this seems to have been the main argument used for allowing it. While you can indeed click things before they appear within the regular bounds of the screen in Adobe's offline Flash Player, you can't really do so along diagonals. Expanding the window in two dimensions at once merely causes Flash to expand things up to fill in the gap. So while it's possible to click things that are off-screen in one dimension, it's not possible to do so for things off-screen in both at once. It's also not possible to see anything beyond the normal bounds, at least in the games I tested.
That being said, I am still not against the idea of having these as two separate branches. While I can't say I find its usage here to fall under the category of a "major skip glitch"...I would prefer it if TASers had the option to submit movies that specifically choose not to exploit this kind of thing. It feels...cheap? Unintended? Unentertaining? It's hard for me to pinpoint anything in my gut reaction that makes for a coherent point here, and it seems the few of those who have participated in discussions about this agree on accepting it, but I'd very much prefer to be able to keep making TASes that choose not to use it, without such things being treated as an "optimisation error" or "not in an entertaining enough movie". Frankly, the most I've been able to see myself using this is choosing a female worker in the Papa's games where a male worker would otherwise be faster to select. Perhaps L+R/U+D is worth considering in this discussion as well, if it's considered a rather similar issue to this.
Option B - The technique is used to save major amounts of time by directly interacting with gameplay in some way, either allowing for glitches that lead to major skips or significantly skipping intended waiting sections as happens here. [...] As for option B, it absolutely should be a separate branch. My initial thought would be to put both branches in Standard, with the one using off-screen clicks as the baseline, since I believe that's how it currently works with L+R input in older console games? Though doing it another way may be more practical, I'm rather new to the site and don't yet fully understand the decision-making behind how the branches and classes are structured.
I've always felt like Standard was missing a goal for something along the lines of "forgoes the use of one common glitch", where the movie can still feature many glitches of various severity, but omits one particular one that would otherwise be repeated throughout the movie. #7874: GMP's GC Prince of Persia: Warrior Within "zipless" in 24:56.15 is a great example of this in recent memory, though I'm sure there's many others that also fit the description.
I didn't initially ask the community about this movie becoming its own branch or not, so here it goes. Here's what off-screen shooting allows you to do. You have several missions where you have to wait for an object to appear on the screen so you can shoot it, skipping the forced wait. Or you can shoot it right away outside the screen.
#8110: Spikestuff's Flash Arsenal in 01:31.36 is in a pretty similar situation, barring glitch usage in the current publication: Post #521966
-s no-scale
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
I've always felt like Standard was missing a goal for something along the lines of "forgoes the use of one common glitch", where the movie can still feature many glitches of various severity, but omits one particular one that would otherwise be repeated throughout the movie.
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I've always felt like Standard was missing a goal for something along the lines of "forgoes the use of one common glitch", where the movie can still feature many glitches of various severity, but omits one particular one that would otherwise be repeated throughout the movie.
It could be as obvious as Zelda 2's L+R glitch or as subtle as this run shooting things outside of window bounds just as long as the core gameplay is noticeably and meaningfully changed.
I think a big problem here though is that we run the risk of overpopulating a game with similar branches, which as much as I tend to think "What's the issue with adding more branches?" these days, it wouldn't really make sense to have "any%", "any% that uses a movement glitch but foregoes major skips", "any% that uses major skips but foregoes a movement glitch", and "any% that doesn't use any glitches" all alongside each other. Even in the case of this game, I'm wondering whether or not it actually makes sense to have "any% that uses no window bounds and a level skip glitch" and "any% that uses the level skip glitch but stays within bounds" alongside each other. Were someone(stuff) to make a version that foregoes both, would that be a separate branch as well? I think we might have to make it a sort of nebulous thing where we can accept any of these kinds of branches as standard, but depending on the game and the glitches there may be cases where we have to figure out what branches are worth keeping published together and what branches might have to go to Alternative or Playground.
