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Post subject: 2022 Awards - Nominations are now open!
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
A day late and a dollar short on the news post, sorry about that! At the end of a record-shattering year of submissions and publications, it is time to nominate those many, many, many options for site awards! Registered users may post their nominations in the threads linked in this post. Please keep in mind that multiple nominations are both allowed and encouraged, and that a movie or TASer must receive at least two nominations in order to qualify. Also, do not nominate your own movies!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: 2022 Awards - Voting is now open!
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
A day Right On Time and a dollar Right On Money on the news post, sorry about that! At the end of a completely normal week of nominations and nominations, it is time to vote for those many, many, many options for site awards! Registered users may vote for nominees in the threads linked in this post. Please keep in mind that multiple votes are both allowed and encouraged, and that a movie or TASer must receive at least a majority of votes in order to win. Also, maybe don't vote for your own movies, but honestly I don't really think I can stop you this time!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: 2022 Awards - Winners announced, and TAS of 2022 voting open!
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
You heard right, Person Who Almost Certainly Read The Title Of This Post! Voting for the TAS of 2022 is now open, and the winners of every other category have been announced! Here they are!
NES TAS of 2022: [4739] NES Darkwing Duck by DreamYao, J.Y & aiqiyou in 10:43.11 SNES TAS of 2022: [4685] SNES Super Mario World "glitchfest" by IgorOliveira666 in 2:54:33.62 Sega TAS of 2022: [4682] Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "100%" by Tee-N-Tee, DarkShamilKhan, ParadaxeTH, Aglar & Zurggriff in 32:25.82 Nintendo 3D TAS of 2022: [4925] Wii Donkey Kong Country Returns by TheRandomMaster, SpeedyTheHedgehog & Jaiden in 1:25:02.95 Gameboy TAS of 2022: [4929] GBC The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX "100%" by TwistedTammer in 51:47.70 GBA TASes of 2022: [4576] GBA Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga "all bosses" by Potato in 1:50:48.04 [4618] GBA Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time by GMP in 28:37.38 [4636] GBA Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance "Juste, Boss Rush, Hard" by Tarion in 05:01.34 DS/DSi/3DS TAS of 2022: [4602] DS N+ "all single player levels" by slamo in 40:35.01 PSX TASes of 2022: [4725] PSX Pac-Man World by SFan & lapogne36 in 19:56.03 [5021] PSX Spyro: Year of the Dragon "100 eggs" by wafflewizard1 & jeremythompson in 45:21.30 PC TAS of 2022: [4730] DOOM Doom II: Hell on Earth by almostmatt1 & Zero Master in 10:19.40 Flash TAS of 2022: [4633] Flash Portal: The Flash Version "no level skip" by rythin in 02:25.87 Atari TAS of 2022: [5007] A2600 Othello "maximum score" by negative seven in 01:37.84 Exotic TAS of 2022: [4585] PICO8 CELESTE Classic by FlyingPenguin223, RichConnerGMN, cominixo, ikuyo, Meep, Snoo23, gonengazit, Lord Snek, Akliant, Beeb, Warspyking & RoundUpGaming in 01:42.77 First Edition TAS of 2022: [4668] 3DS The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D by benstephens56 in 23:31.29 Glitchy TAS of 2022: [4685] SNES Super Mario World "glitchfest" by IgorOliveira666 in 2:54:33.62 Lucky TAS of 2022: [4717] A2600 Warlords by ShesChardcore in 00:00.28 Homebrew TAS of 2022: [4831] NES Alwa's Awakening: The 8-Bit Edition by aiqiyou & J.Y in 05:55.87 ROM Hack TAS of 2022: [4723] N64 Super Mario 74 Extreme Edition "157 Stars" by Frame, RSw, homerfunky, sm64expert, galoomba, Superdavo0001 & Somebro in 1:55:31.37 NES TASer of 2022: ShesChardcore SNES TASer of 2022: EZGames69 Sega TASers of 2022: Darkman425 and The8bitbeast Nintendo 3D TASer of 2022: Natetheman223 Gameboy TASer of 2022: Alyosha GBA TASer of 2022: Darkman425 DS/DSi/3DS TASer of 2022: benstephens56 PSX TASer of 2022: ThunderAxe31 PC TASer of 2022: rythin Flash TASer of 2022: Spikestuff Atari TASer of 2022: ShesChardcore Exotic TASer of 2022: ikuyo Rookie TASer of 2022: ShesChardcore TASer of 2022: ShesChardcore
Congratulations to all the winners, all the nominees, and to everyone in the community! This was an amazing year for TASvideos. Let's keep the positive vibes and incredibly momentum going into 2023!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
BizHawk 2.9 has been released! New cores
  • MAME (Arcade only)
  • Ares64
  • VirtualJaguar (with CD Support)
  • TIC-80
  • SubBSNESv115+
Lots of updates and fixes to existing cores and to EmuHawk. See the full release notes here: http://tasvideos.org/BizHawk/ReleaseHistory.html#Bizhawk29 Binaries: https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.9
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.
Post subject: Progress Report: New Admin, No More Limited Users, and Important Changes
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Hey, hi, hello. Welcome to a new occasional format for news posts! Over the past couple years, TASVideos has been making changes to itself. We rebuilt the site from the ground up, we overhauled how we showcase runs by rebranding Vault and Moons, and we've been gradually making a multitude of changes to our rules to both allow and accept more submissions. That last category is the most common, however a lot of the changes tend to be smaller ones that would end up spamming the news section if we announced all of them. They're still worth pointing out, though, so that's where these progress reports are going to come in, assuming that I remember to actually write them. In this report, I'll be talking about our brand new third Admin, finally announcing the TAS of 2022 after 3 months of forgetting, detailing important changes to submission moderation and playaround judgement, and finally asking for feedback on a much needed addition to the site in the form of live event showcases.
First, let's talk about that new Admin. Hi! It's me! Samsara! In the ultimate act of narcissism, I'm announcing my own promotion! Ironically, I'm not good at talking myself up, so I'm also the worst person that could be doing this. I've historically been helping far outside of my role for a few years now, so staff got together and decided that they would make it impossible for me to do that from now on by giving me the highest role possible that isn't outright owning the site. I'm very happy to be here, I feel blessed to have had the opportunity at all, and I'm looking forward to doing the exact same things I was doing before but with more perceived authority! See, I told you I wasn't good at talking myself up. Despite my promotion, I am still acting as Senior Judge for now, and I remain the primary point of contact for matters related to judgements and submissions, but now you can also contact me about admin stuff too! Don't worry, I don't bite unless you ask nicely.
First, and most pressingly in my opinion, I finally remembered to announce the TAS of the Year winner in a news post! The TAS of 2022 is... [4685] SNES Super Mario World "glitchfest" by IgorOliveira666 in 2:54:33.62! A well-deserved win for a TAS that people have been wanting for over a decade! It's absolutely well worth your time. Bring some snacks, but don't let Yoshi eat them if you don't want to risk reality completely shattering around you. For a full Awards recap, see this forum thread. Thanks to everyone who participated! Winners, nominees, voters, watchers, thank you all!
Recently, we had a community discussion on the way we revoke a user's submission privileges, known here as "limiting" them. With our rules and regulations relaxing over the past few years, we felt it was necessary to revisit the way we've handled limits, and with the community's guidance we decided that we were going about it in an unnecessarily harsh way. Historically, we were limiting users mostly because they were submitting too many suboptimal runs. The intent was to encourage the submitter to hone their skills by working with us, and once they were able to prove themselves as TASers we would allow them to submit again. What actually happened was a lot of discouragement and driving people away, and honestly I apologize that it took this long for us to realize we were doing that. Prior to this discussion, we had 23 Limited Users. Over the course of the discussion, these users were re-evaluated, and I'm proud to say that we no longer have a single person with the Limited User role on the site. 16 users had their privileges restored. These were all users who had done nothing more than submit multiple suboptimal runs. As such, I've elected not to name them publicly in order to not put a metaphorical target on them. The other 7 users were banned outright, primarily for plagiarism or ban/limit evasion, and will also not be named. Going forward, limiting users will be a very rare occurrence. It will generally only happen in cases where a user is abusing the submission system in a way that would not result in them being banned from the site. Also, if we do end up limiting users, it will not be for an indefinite period. There will always be a strict time limit from now on. Hopefully, this will result not only in more submissions overall, but more improvement from those we would have otherwise turned away. Once again, I'd like to apologize to anyone who was limited, and I'd like to extend that apology to anyone in the community who was affected by the fear of "not being good enough" for us.
Speaking of relaxing things in relation to submissions, I'd like to bring up what I think is a long-awaited change in hopes that it will inspire people to create new TASes that take advantage of it. The change has to do with "playaround" runs, i.e runs that aim purely to entertain the viewer rather than speedrunning. For an example of one, scroll up a bit! Until recently, we were requiring game completion on these runs. This, in retrospect, really stacked the deck against them! Plenty of games have playaround potential, but not all of them are Super Mario World with its tight 3 hours of variety spanning the entirety of the game. On top of that, creativity in and of itself is not a limitless resource. Even the most creative people may have trouble keeping a TAS entertaining from title screen to end credits. We want to promote endings that feel natural, and that's why we've relaxed the rule. Playaround runs are no longer required to beat the game. They must still have a sort of "defined" endpoint, though in practice this just means the run has to visually finish in some way. Examples of this include game over screens, hard crashes, even something as simple as quitting to the title, just as long as there's an obvious signal that the run has ended. Make it feel intentional and not like you just gave up and you should be good to go.
The final thing I'd like to address is an important discussion that's currently in progress again after a long time of it... not... being in progress. Anyone who's looked at the workbench over the past 6 months or so has likely noticed that Delayed run sitting at the top of the list: Triforce%, the TAS block showcase run from Summer Games Done Quick 2022. There are several of these big showcase runs over the nearly 10 years that GDQs have had TAS blocks, and yet out of all of them we have only accepted one. There is kind of a good reason for this: That one run happens to be the only showcase run with an easily verifiable and reproducible input file. Every run past that has had increasingly complicated setups that are impossible to accurately reproduce. They rely on extra hardware at times and live input at others, and that's not something we're able to verify. It wasn't exactly unreasonable for us to declare these runs unacceptable. What IS unreasonable, though, is that we never tried to make them acceptable, and that's what we want to correct. I put together a proposal for a short term implementation of a system that can finally handle these showcase runs, and we want the community to weigh in on it. We do intend to discuss and possibly implement a much more in-depth overhaul in the future, but I feel it's necessary to have something concrete in place soon, as this has already been delayed for quite a while. If you're reading this and you have an opinion on it, let us know what that opinion is! I'm especially looking to hear from people in the TASBot community who may not interact with TASVideos much, as I feel this has been kind of a dividing line between our communities for a while and I absolutely want to mend it in any way I possibly can.
That's all I've got for now. If you have any questions or concerns, whether it be with anything in this news post or anything on the site in general, my PMs are always open! For those who prefer live, instant gratification, you can also find me and my spiffy new yellow name on our Discord server. Other admins are available as well!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: BizHawk 2.9.1 Released
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
BizHawk 2.9.1 has been released! Fixed crashes and other problems with MAME and other cores, and with EmuHawk. See the full release notes here: http://tasvideos.org/BizHawk/ReleaseHistory.html#Bizhawk291 Binaries: https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.9.1
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.
Post subject: New GBA emulator, GBAHawk, allowed for submissions
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
GBAHawk is a fork of BizHawk based entirely around a new GBA core, built from scratch for the purposes of GBA console verification and hardware research. Resources Page: Wiki: EmulatorResources/GBAHawk Releases: https://github.com/alyosha-tas/GBAHawk/releases Check out the first GBAHawk submission: #8428: Darkman425 & Alyosha's GBA Powerpig in 04:30.19
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Wiki Restructuring Now In Progress
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
TASVideos will be celebrating its 20th birthday soon, and like most 20 year olds it has seen its fair share of weird oddities and changes over those two decades. Unlike a living 20 year old, however, those oddities haven't actually gone away in that time, and as a result we've sort of just kept a bunch of them archived on the site wiki ready to confuse anyone who looks at them. I'm proud to announce, admittedly far later than it should've been but still better than not at all, that we're working on changing that with a full wiki restructure project! Old information will be updated, misplaced information will be moved to the correct places, weird old pages with nothing on them will be removed, and by the end of this hopefully the wiki will be less confusing and contradictory towards itself! Progress and discussion will mostly be happening in this thread, and everyone is encouraged to take a poke around the wiki and offer feedback on what changes should be made to provide a more accessible and easily understood site wiki. Feel free to bring up anything that stands out to you as strange or out-of-place: Chances are, it actually is strange or out of place, and those are precisely the things we want to fix most. Please note that this process will break offsite links to TASVideos if they link to any page that gets moved, renamed, or deleted, so be careful about linking to specific TASVideos pages offsite until the end of the restructuring is announced. We are accounting for and correcting onsite links and referrals as they come up during the restructuring process, so no need to worry there. Hopefully this won't happen too often, and it shouldn't be happening at all on the high traffic pages. There isn't much that can be done to prevent this at the moment, but if you're a developer and you're interested in helping us mitigate the damage, there is currently an open pull request for a redirect system that could use a lot more attention, even if it's just something like "hey this ain't it chief, let's draft a better one". Help is always appreciated, especially help that comes in the form of giving us very shiny and very useful things we can use to make the site better! Once we have a more concrete draft of the exact changes we want to make, it will be posted for everyone to see and discuss. I'm expecting this entire process to take a good couple months to allow for proper discussion time, further revision, preparation, and finally implementation. Some minor changes have already been made, mainly page deletions of pages that nobody even knew existed, and more of these minor changes will continue to happen in the background while bigger changes are being drafted and discussed. All in all, here's to things not going terribly wrong! Even if they do, those results are probably still better than having a donation page that only read "We are not accepting donations" for 11 straight years and only realizing just now in 2023 that there's no reason to keep it around.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Progress Report: New openMSX Release, Fun Site Stuff, and Addressing Username Changes
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
We've now hit two of these progress report posts, that means it's officially a recurring feature! There's actually a lot to talk about, so let's get right into it. In this post:
  • openMSX 19.1 released!
  • Site submission record broken for the second year in a row!!
  • New staff role: Senior Moderator!!!
  • Dream Team Contest 11!!!!
  • TASVideos' 20th anniversary!!!!!
  • Addressing the recent username changes!!!!!! Yay!!!!!!

We normally announce emulator releases in separate news posts, but given that there are so many other things to talk about, I felt that having two news posts coming one after another would split the attention too much between them. openMSX 19.1 has been released! This is a further bug fix release coming hot off the heels of openMSX 19.0, which was also a large bug fix release, but it was also one that we kinda sorta forgot to announce. Haha, oops, whoops, sorry! Furthermore, the site has been updated to account for changes made to the OMR input file format in recent versions. openMSX site: https://openmsx.org 19.1 download: https://github.com/openMSX/openMSX/releases/tag/RELEASE_19_1
Let's start with the fun and exciting site stuff, of which there is plenty! On November 20th, 2022, TASVideos officially broke its almost 19 year old record for most submissions received in a year, surpassing the 540 submissions we received in 2004, when submissions first opened. We went on to receive almost 100 more submissions over the rest of 2022, bringing the new record to 639 going into 2023. I'm proud to announce that we have broken the submission record for the second year in a row by receiving our 640th submission! There's a bit of a twist to this, though: Technically, two runs broke the record! We've started getting into the habit of deleting duplicate submissions, and with this year having had an unprecedented submission volume, that means there were more chances for things to go weird with accidental duplicates. 10 submissions were deleted this way, meaning that there is both a technical record breaker that counts these deleted submissions and an on-paper record breaker that doesn't. I think it's fair to showcase both! Counting the 10 deleted submissions toward the total, the record breaker is: #8562: EZGames69 & Randomno's Flash SHIFT in 02:45.92 Not counting the 10 deleted submissions, the record breaker according to the submissions list is: #8572: LoganTheTASer's NES The Void in 04:00.17 What makes this even more impressive is that we're still only in August. There's a very good chance we'll hit 900 submissions by the end of the year, which is absolutely insane given that we generally averaged around 300-400 most years. We literally couldn't have done this without you all. That... That's kinda how a user submission system works. Would be hard to break a user submission record without users. I'm being flippant as a bit, this really is amazing and I'm so proud of this community for contributing so much this year. Thank you all!
We've expanded our Senior Staff team with a new role and a person to fill said new role! Prior to today, overseeing moderation has fallen entirely on the administration team, which has had mixed results depending on which admin is overseeing it. Let's just say certain Samsaras aren't particularly great at it. As the site grows, our need for moderation grows as well, both in terms of actual moderator activity and actual moderator... having. Actually having moderators. With the Admins having so many other duties, it made sense to provide a new role that serves as the official head of moderation. moozooh has been with the site almost since the beginning and has served wonderfully as a Moderator since he was brought on. His active, balanced and level-headed approach to moderation combined with his seniority made him the perfect choice to fill the new Senior Moderator role! Congratulations, moozooh, and welcome to the administrative side! Show your love to moozooh by being fine and upstanding members of the community. The best way to appreciate a Moderator is to not make them work.
Like a bolt from the blue, it's time for Dream Team Contest 11! I've never been good at rhymes. For those of you who are unaware, the Dream Team Contest is a group TASing competition held whenever people feel like hosting one. Teams of TASers sign up and tackle a mystery game, aiming to make the best TAS of it within a certain time period. The contest is open to everyone, regardless of skill level, so if you've been wanting to get into TASing but felt overwhelmed doing it on your own, I'd highly recommend signing up, joining a team, and learning live! Signups close on September 16th, 2023, at 23:59 UTC, so you still have a little under two weeks to join!
Finally, the craziest news of all in my opinion: It's Sonic's 30th anniversary TASVideos' 20th anniversary... very soon! The site was founded in December 2003, and we want to celebrate 20 years of providing the best in tool-assisted speedruns and also Short Order. We've got a couple ideas in mind, but we'd love to hear what you think we should do as well! Fun events, site history things, re-adding spaces to usernames, there's a lot of things we could do for this. Apologies for this section being so short. I'll give further updates once we actually start having some set, public plans.
Alright, moving from fun and exciting news into one last thing that is less fun and exciting: We've removed spaces from everyone's usernames. Those who were affected by this change were informed through site PM, but there wasn't a formal site announcement until now, so I wanted to bring attention to it, explain why it happened, and most importantly apologize for the sudden nature of it. To put it simply, supporting spaces in usernames severely complicates the site code. The main complication is that we identify users in URLs with their usernames, a holdover from the old site that needed to be kept when making the new site so data could be migrated over properly. This presented a lot of problems, both visible and invisible. The most visible complication is simply how URLs are parsed: If you're linking to a user's profile or Homepage on Discord, for example, the link just breaks if the username has a space in it. If this doesn't sound so bad... Well, by itself, it isn't horrible, admittedly. Annoying as hell, but something that could reasonably be dealt with. The real problem comes from the maintenance and all of the less visible and much worse issues that needed to be found and fixed as soon as possible. One notable issue involved having a space at the end of a username. Such a profile was extremely difficult to get to from the site if there was a matching username without the space, as you would always be sent to that profile instead of the profile with the space. In other words, you could've not only impersonated a user, but explicitly pinned horrible behavior on them because your spaced profile would have led to their real profile. This particular bug also would've made ban evasion easier, as you could just drop a space down after any username and made it more cumbersome to access your actual profile. This actually did nearly let a ban evader go free, which is how the bug was caught in the first place. Thankfully, because of the changes, this is no longer possible. To put it even more simply, the laissez-faire attitude of the old site made feature parity and maintenance on the new site a hell of a lot more stressful, so if you had a spaced username and are lamenting its loss, blame the old site for not caring whether or not it was possible in the first place. Removing support for spaces was something we had intended to do for a while, though I will fully admit we dropped the ball on announcing it ahead of time, and we apologize for that. For anyone who was affected by the spaces-to-underscores replacement and would like to change their username to account for it, send me a PM on the site with the name you want and I'll get it done. Also, I'd like to state that it's not impossible for us to re-implement support in the future. Maintaining what we had was messy enough as it was and made dev work harder, and dropping support means cleaner code and more efficiency right now, but that doesn't mean we don't support the idea at all. That being said, a cleaner implementation is not something the current dev team will be focusing on any time soon. At the risk of unintentionally sounding like I'm saying "hey jerkweeds, if you're gonna complain, do it yourself", remember that TASVideos is open source now. We're open to contributions and definitely open to expanding the dev team, so feel free to jump in! Quick and minor final note: The login system shouldn't technically be affected by the space-to-underscore replacement, i.e affected users should still be able to log in with the space version of their username, though of course it won't work anywhere outside of that.
Well, that was a lot of news! I'll try not to let things pile up so much for the next site progress report, it just so happened to be that a lot of little-but-newsworthy things happened all around the same time. Tune in next time for more news, including things I don't know about yet because I can't predict the future!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: libTAS 1.4.5 Released
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
libTAS 1.4.5 released! Download link and changelog are here: https://github.com/clementgallet/libTAS/releases/tag/v1.4.5
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.
Post subject: Now accepting PCem for Windows XP games!
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
We allow libTAS to run PCem as a Windows XP machine emulator. Only TASVideos releases of PCem are allowed. Such releases are marked st to indicate single-threading - modification required for determinism, not available in the original PCem. libTAS is needed because PCem doesn't have any TAS tools. Huge thanks to people who helped making this possible: keylie, slamo, InputEvelution, YoshiRulz, fsvgm777, and all the testers!
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.
Post subject: 2023 Awards - Nominations are now open!
Memory
She/Her
Site Admin, Skilled player (1557)
Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1766
Location: Dumpster
2023 Award nominations are now open! Any registered user can post their nominations in the threads linked here. Please keep in mind that multiple nominations are both allowed and encouraged, and that a movie or TASer must receive at least two nominations in order to qualify. Self nominations are not allowed. ...hopefully I did all this right
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Post subject: 2023 Award voting is now open!
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
Please vote for the choices in the polls linked in Thread #25051: 2023 Awards - Category List. If an eligible option is missing from this list, please let staff know and we will correct it as soon as possible. Voting will be open until, at earliest, 23:59 UTC on January 14th, 2024. Full list of rules and guidelines for nomination and voting.
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.
Post subject: TASVideos game choice update
Moderator, Senior Ambassador, Experienced player (907)
Joined: 9/14/2008
Posts: 1014
Recently, the site admin team took the unprecedented action of unpublishing a run; this news post talks about what happened and the changes we're making to the site movie rules as a result.
In brief, a user submitted a run for an unlicensed game containing a graphic corpse in the end credits. During the judging process, the focus was around determining if the game ran afoul of the existing adult game policy and the game was deemed to not fall into that category. After the run was published with the offending end credit censored, multiple TASVideos members spoke up to let site staff know that the game itself was explicitly focused on acts of genocide. We unpublished the run as soon as we became aware of the sensitive nature of the content. To say it upfront, the site staff would like to collectively apologize to the affected communities for not understanding the nature of the game. This run never should have been published in the first place and we've adjusted the movie rules page to clarify the site's policies around these types of games and content to note they are not permitted on the site in any form:
  • Games and content that break our site conduct policy are not permitted
    • Specifically, this includes games and content that promote targeted harassment, violence, and/or bigotry towards specific individuals
  • Games and content deemed adults-only are not permitted
There were multiple points where a lack of cultural knowledge and awareness led to the run being published and going forward we want to make sure we're diligently identifying runs like this in the judging process before they're published. We feel the rule changes adequately cover this case without being overly restrictive and hope the changes along with your feedback, even for published runs, helps prevent a situation like this happening again. We'd like to thank everyone who spoke up and helped us understand the situation better and we always welcome that same constructive feedback.
I was laid off in May 2023 and became too ill to work this year and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD is stalled. I'm dwangoAC, TASVideos Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; when healthy, I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
Post subject: Site downtime
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
The site is expected to be down in about 12 hours due to work being done at the hosting provider. Site staff will be working with said provider.
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.
Post subject: libTAS 1.4.6 Released
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
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.
Post subject: openMSX 20.0 released
Site Admin, Skilled player (1255)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11486
Location: Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg
openMSX 20.0—Autumn Spring—is a major release, in which we introduce the new Graphical User Interface, replacing the OSD menu. A faster and more powerful debugger is now included in openMSX itself. Configuration for MSX joystick/JoyMega has been improved drastically using the new GUI. If you still want to use Catapult, you can use the Catapult release that came with openMSX 19.0. Please read the release notes for details of the openMSX changes. Please note that as of now, a system with OpenGL 2 support is required to run openMSX.
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.
Post subject: Progress Report: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Well, hey, it's been a year since the last one of these, so at the very least it's still annual. Of course, that also means there's a lot to get through... In this post:
  • BizHawk 2.10 has a release candidate!
  • Windows 95 runs are now accepted!
  • Content and sensitivity warnings have been added!
  • A very important thread regarding the future of TASVideos!
  • New sync verification system and a call for new Reviewers!
  • Oh also other staff, a call for other staff as well ._.
  • Revamped Alternative and Playground classes!
  • New Events class!
  • And one last quick thing from your third favorite admin!
Major thanks to dwangoAC for helping with information and wording, particularly in the Events section! There's a whole lot of major site stuff to get into, but I'd like to start with some smaller things first so they don't get buried:
Wake up, babes. New BizHawk just pre-dropped: https://github.com/TASEmulators/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.10-rc1 This release candidate for BizHawk 2.10 contains a fully functional 3DS core (Encore), as well as new cores for the Fairchild Channel F (ChannelFHawk), the Commodore Amiga (PUAE), and the Atari 2600 (Stella). On top of these new cores, there were many updates to the current cores, most notably a major update and reimplementation of the Genesis Plus GX core. Note that this is not the official 2.10 release, but just the first release candidate, so please help us check for regressions, especially in TAStudio and the rest of the TASing workflow, and in Lua. Remember: if it's not reported then it won't be fixed! Report bugs on the BizHawk Github or on Discord, TASVideos, or Reddit. As this is not an official release, we are not currently accepting any submissions using it. The new cores are not supported by the site yet, and the updated cores will likely not sync on previous versions. We will be making a separate announcement post once 2.10 is officially released to formally announce support for the new cores.
As a notable update to last year's acceptance of Windows XP TASes using PCem and libTAS, we now have a setup for Windows 95 games, and as such they are now accepted! Like Windows XP, only TASVideos releases of PCem are allowed. These releases are marked st to indicate single-threading, a modification required for determinism that isn't available in the original PCem. Please see our movie rules for libTAS submissions, as well as our rules for PCem. For more information, including help on how to set up the environment, we have a Guide on TASing Windows games in PCem+libTAS.
I'd like to highlight a recently added quality of life feature to the site: Content and sensitivity warnings. Due to the nature of TASing and the devil may care attitude of older games, we've had a number of people point out that a good number of publications should have photo- and phono-sensitivity warnings on them, to alert users of the presence of flashing lights and sudden loud noises. Separate to that, with advancements in TASing starting to reach more platforms with less market regulation, we also have a number of runs that require content warnings, as they contain dark, disturbing, or otherwise potentially triggering content. We were, and still are, noting these in publication descriptions, but we've just added proper warning icons for these movies to make it more clear: - We use this yellow icon for photo- and phono-sensitivity warnings... - ...and this red icon for content warnings. We're still in the process of flagging movies, so if you see a run that should be tagged with a warning, let us know!
Alright, time for the big things. If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I'd like to think you have if you're reading this news post, you've most likely seen the huge influx of new submissions and new submitters over the past couple years. We broke our nearly two decade old submission record in 2022, and then in 2023 we broke our nearly one year old submission record again. I've said it before, I'll say it again here, and I'm going to say it many times more in the future: This is fantastic, I love it, I'm so happy to see the resurgence and growth of the site and even happier to have participated in and facilitated it directly. This is exactly what we wanted to see while we were developing the new site! Of course, there is a slight catch... It's a lot more than we were expecting. Something that we've realized recently, and unfortunately later than we should have, is that our current submission and publication system might not be sustainable with our growth path. The system worked great when we were receiving 300-400 submissions per year and only publishing about 70% of them, but now we're not only receiving double the number of submissions as before, but we're also publishing them at a higher percentage due to all of our recent rule changes. To quickly put it into perspective, here's a fun stat: We've published as many movies since the release of the new site as we have in the last six years of the old site. 1544 publications since January 1, 2022 at the time of writing, compared to 1559 publications covering 2016 to 2021, meaning that by the end of the year we will have effectively more than doubled our previous publication rate by year. If you want a second fun stat, we published more runs in 2023 alone (721) than we did in the final three years of the old site (712). If you want a third fun stat, not only did we have more submissions in 2023 (885) than in any other year, but we also published more runs that year (721) than we've had submissions in any other year. Needless to say, that's a lot more work than we've ever had to do before, and we're doing it with effectively the same number of staff members. We've made a lot of changes to make things easier, of course, but we realized that we're most likely going to have to go deeper in order to stay afloat. Therefore... TASVideos must die. That provocative statement, as well as the next four words in this sentence, links to a thread posted by ikuyo, and I highly recommend reading through it and posting your thoughts. To clarify, the site itself isn't going anywhere. We just need to make much bigger changes than we've been making, even if it means "killing" parts of ourself that we've been carrying since inception. I'd like to think that we've spent the past few years systematically killing the negative parts of the site, correcting our previous wrongs and re-opening doors that we had violently slammed in peoples' faces, but some of those negative aspects are still built so deeply into the core of the site that we've honestly overlooked them for way too long. That's the TASVideos that must die. Not the site itself, but the underlying core we've ignored until now. We're already planning on making some changes to the site based on feedback and discussion in and inspired by that thread, and to prove it, I'll announce a couple of them right now!
If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I'd like to think you have if you're reading this news post, you've most likely seen a new tag in the Submission Status column: Sync Verified. This, of course, means that the submission was verified to sync on a machine other than the author's, which is quite useful for the entire way TASing works. Verification is arguably the most important part of judging, and as such Judges were almost always required to run the input files for their claims. This was not always possible: Tech knowledge, hardware requirements, and in rare (read: Linux) cases game availability have been barriers to verification many times in the past for us, which would result in us needing to reach out to other staff or the community at large for help. Waiting to reach out never really got us anywhere fast, though, and as speedrunners we do enjoy things being fast, so we decided to build verification directly into the site. What this means is that we want Reviewers, and a lot of them! I had originally envisioned Reviewers as filling this exact role, making judging more accessible to people who are qualified in every way except "being able to run the input file", so now that there's a proper system put into place it means we can really ramp up the number of Reviewers. The only requirements are being able to run and verify input files and having a professional attitude, so if you're interested, please reach out to myself or feos, or just talk about your interest publicly and someone will pick it up and bring it to us.
That being said, of course, we would love to have more staff in general. With the manifesto thread, and yes I am going to link to it every time I mention it thank you very much, it's clear that while we can change a bunch of systems to make things work with our current staff, having more staff is objectively still a great idea. Changing the machine can only do so much when we don't have enough minds to properly interface with it. Rest assured, though, that once we perfect the mind/machine interface, we're hard pivoting to copters and immediately aiming for Cloudbase Academy. I'm going to let you all in on a little secret: Being staff isn't hard! I've gotten the feeling over the years that people are a little afraid of becoming staff due to what they perceive as a lot of hard work. The reality is that it's easy work! Of course, I can't say it isn't a lot of work because the manifesto exists and outright says there's a lot of work, but the more people that sign on to help us, the less work it is for everyone involved. In particular, we are (and have always been) in desperate need of Publishers. While encoding to site standards sounds complicated, we've effectively automated the publication process to a point where even complete newbies like myself can do it, so there really isn't a barrier to entry outside of being able to spare some PC usage and hard drive space. If you're interested in encoding for us, even if you don't currently know how to do it, please reach out to fsvgm777, or do the time-honored tradition of randomly bringing it up on Discord and we'll see it.
Three years ago, we completely revamped our old tier system. Instead of the old system of Vault for boring any% and 100% movies and Moons for everything deemed entertaining enough, we redefined Vault to become standard publications, where all "standard" categories go, and we redefined Moons into Alternative, which was for all non-standard categories that were deemed entertaining enough for publication. This, we thought, would remove the old entertainment bias from the site, since entertainment was no longer a factor for about 90% of the movies coming in. It did remove a lot of the bias, yes, but not as much as we thought. Perfectly good movies were still being rejected from Alternative. In response to that, we drafted and partially implemented Playground, a system designed to catch and showcase Alternative movies that slipped through the cracks due to low entertainment, lack of audience interest, or being a rule-breaking category to begin with. That way, we wouldn't have to discourage people from creating tech demos, things like "fastest crash" or "fastest game over" runs, as we could still put them on the site in some way. To be blunt, Playground didn't really work. We wanted to encourage creativity in TASing by giving creators room to do whatever they wanted, but what we ended up doing was inadvertently bringing back the entertainment bias and the old Vault/Moons divide. Entertaining non-standard runs were still published to Alternative, of course, but non-entertaining runs were just given a submission status and put into a different subforum. It took until last month, two and a half years after Playground was drafted, for us to show those runs on game pages. We completely dropped the ball on it. Part of that I think was due to lack of interest across... Everyone on the site, really. People weren't really interested in making runs specifically for PG, and as a result the staff weren't thinking much about it. We had plans and ambitions of course, but for the most part the runs that ended up there were just Alternative runs that didn't quite make the entertainment barrier, and the site infrastructure that would've needed to be added was just going to push dev work away from more critical site features and fixes. The manifesto got us talking about it, and we came to a fun conclusion: We should have talked about it WAY sooner. The answer to every perceived problem we had with PG was staring us in the face since the beginning, and we all somehow overlooked it: Why not just publish everything? It sounds insane, especially given my stats from earlier, so let me explain. The overarching problem a lot of people had with PG was that it didn't do a good job at showcasing runs on the site. We had the status, which was always meant to be a temporary implementation, but without a clear direction it ended up being permanent. Proper showcasing would involve PG runs being archived to the same degree as any other run. Easily accessible, searchable, manageable, award-eligible, able to be flipped to Alternative or even Standard if rules changed... We were hyperfocused on the idea that this needed to be a separate system, because they weren't meant to be publications, and that stopped us from realizing that literally everything we want is already in the publication system. We could have just done this with Alternative from the beginning. Instead of continuing to divide unique branches by entertainment, we could have just had all of them from the beginning without needing to do much different. After all, a lot of these unique branches still aim to finish a particular goal in the fastest possible time, right? While the actual goals may be more subjective than any% and 100%, there is still the objective underlying goal of "whatever you're doing, do it as fast as possible", and there really shouldn't be any barriers for that. Going forward, Alternative will expand to include many speed-based branches, regardless of their entertainment level. This is far more in line with our original vision for PG. Creativity no longer requires an audience, meaning you can create a run of the exact branch you want to see and we will showcase it the same as any other run. Naturally, this change leaves a couple roadblocks that needed to be discussed. First, notice that I said many speed-based branches, as opposed to all. This means there's still a degree of quality control on what is now accepted. While we will be much more lenient than before, there's still a difference between making a TAS of a niche challenge you've always wanted to see done and making a TAS where you put nine pieces of chewed up gum on your face and sing the "I'm Just Me" song and hop around on one foot. In other words, don't try and game the system by making up hyperspecific new branches to try and guarantee a publication. Count Longardeaux would not stand for that. Second, PG accounts for rule-breaking runs, so what happens to those? The simple answer is that... Well, we still have PG, don't we? We have a system that labels runs and places them on game pages, so we can still use that for runs that still don't end up making it to Alternative for technical reasons. For now, this will also include individual level (or IL) runs: We want to officially support these in some way, but they explicitly require new site infrastructure and a clear vision of implementation, and that will take some time. Third, I need to briefly discuss playarounds. Playarounds will not be affected by this expansion, as they are not speed-based runs. The entire concept of a playaround would be made redundant if we were to stop judging them on their entertainment level, so they must still be deemed entertaining by our audience to be accepted. Finally, and most importantly, encodes. This was the biggest PG roadblock for me, the fact that opening a new category that allowed effectively any reasonably optimized TAS of any kind to be submitted and showcased meant that there needed to be a way to control the potential impact on the publishing team. The solution here is as simple as it is groundbreaking for us: Publication encodes will not be immediately required. This means we can still publish the runs on TASVideos itself, giving them publication entries and allowing for all of the fun features attached, but we don't increase the load on the publication team by outright requiring them to encode every new Alternative run. Standard runs are prioritized as they are the vast majority of our submissions and publications, so there may be times where the publishing team is unable to spare the time for an official Alternative encode. In these cases, published Alternative runs will have temporary encodes attached so that they are still easily watchable. An official encode can still be made at any time. Because I feel as though that was a lot of explanation, and because I like summarizing, here's a brief summary of how the new system works by class:
  • Standard is staying the same, containing common objective branches such as any% and 100%. Runs will still be published and officially encoded as normal.
  • Alternative is now accepting any and all speed-based branches that aren't standard publications. Outside of playaround runs, entertainment is no longer considered a barrier to publication. Runs will receive publication entries, but official encodes may be deferred.
  • Playground will still catch all quality runs that are currently considered unsuitable for Alternative, usually for technical reasons. Runs will not be published, but they will be listed on game pages.
  • Events will...
Oh, right. I should talk about that last one, shouldn't I?
If you've looked at the workbench recently, and I can't believe the rule of three is still in effect for this bit, you've most likely seen Triforce% sitting at the very top, and also by "recently" I mean "two years, it's been two years, oh my god it's been two years". It has taken us quite a long time and more than a few conversations across both the community at large and internally as staff, but we've finally come up with a solution for it, and you're not gonna believe what it is. That's right: For the immediate second time in this post, we realized that we were hyperfocusing on implementing a new solution when we could have easily used what we currently have. We have implemented a new Events class that will contain submissions that were created for live events such as GDQ. You can probably tell this revelation came hot on the heels of Playground, as it is literally the exact same solution: We wanted live event runs to be treated the same as any other publication while not technically being official publications, and because of that we consistently overlooked the fact that we could have just published them anyway under different rules. Now, that being said, this is admittedly not a perfect solution, in that it's not quite everything we wanted or promised, but the important thing is that it's both something we can do immediately while also being big enough of a step forward to not feel like a half-measure. We made that mistake before with PG, and I'd like to avoid repeating that mistake in the future. Since Events will be using the standard submission system, a few rules will need to be followed:
  • Event runs are technical showcases or transformative displays of published runs that would otherwise be unpublishable as they are.
  • Event runs can be submitted by anyone, but all parties involved with the presentation must be properly attributed and any objections raised at any time must be taken into account.
  • Events that showcase multiple runs must be split by run and submitted individually.
  • Videos of the event must be provided.
  • If a proper input file cannot be provided for technical reasons, a dummy input file must be provided that matches the game and console.
  • The event itself must have some degree of common sense notability.
For that first point, we are mainly looking to prevent publication redundancy. Published runs are often shown at live events as console verification demonstrations or for live commentary. In cases like these, since we already have flags for console verification and commentary, we would prefer to just add those flags to the current publications instead of going through the process of creating an effective duplicate Event entry. However, if a published run was shown in a transformative or unique way that we don't already account for, that would definitely warrant a separate Event class publication. That being said, we could definitely add an Event flag on top of the commentary/verification flags, just so all published runs shown at events can be easily categorized. For the second point, the main thing we're asking here is due diligence. Due to things like technical aspects and language barriers, it's not realistic for us to restrict event submissions to only those who are directly involved, so we will allow event submissions from anyone. Still, submitters must attempt to seek permission from those who are involved, must properly attribute everyone involved, and should not attempt to take credit if they are not directly involved themselves. The third point is just a site limitation for now, and is one of the reasons I said this wasn't a perfect solution: We currently can't catalog multiple games to a submission. Our current multi-game publications use a single game entry that covers all of the games simultaneously. If we were to accept full events that use multiple games, each event would need to have its own singular game entry, and that both adds redundancy and complicates organization. Separating multi-game events means we can properly catalog each game, allowing event runs to show up in their respective game's entry. The fourth point is a given, so to explain the fifth point: In cases where an event run's actual input file was strictly created for the event and cannot be reproduced outside of that environment, such as runs that rely on multiple pieces of hardware or runs that rely on live human input, a dummy input file must be provided as a way of complying with the submission system. This input file must match the game and console, but does not have to accurately reflect what was shown in the video, as this input file will not be judged. Finally, to explain "common sense notability": This is just a fancy way of saying "don't try and game the system by inventing events". TASing is a niche hobby, and events that showcase it are even more niche in turn. Because of this, requiring a certain objective level of notability would be wrong of us to do. However, it's still reasonable for us to have a small foundation based off of common sense, where we can "reject" events that were clearly made for the sole purpose of exploiting what looks like a loophole. We're still figuring out the logistics of showcasing events that do not contain any runs, such as talks or panels, but we intend to have a spot for those as well. Feel free to share ideas on how we can handle these!
Long as this update post already is, there is one last thing I need to talk about for my own sake, and I apologize in advance for ending this post on a down note. For the past year or so, I've been unable to keep up with the site as much as I'd like to, as I've had to spend more and more time taking care of a family member. The situation has worsened significantly over the past few months, often leaving me completely drained of energy and unable to put anything towards TASVideos, and as such I'd like to apologize for my recent long term absence as well as continuing to have a reduced presence on the site for the foreseeable future. I say this mainly in regards to all of the promises I've made and projects I've started over the past year that I haven't been around to progress or keep. My time away from the site has caused me to forget most of them in some form, whether it's forgetting what still needs to be done or completely forgetting what they are in the first place. Now, I still intend to keep those promises and finish those projects, but I do have to shamefully admit they will take time and motivation that I do not always, or even often, have. If I can defer them to other staff members, I will, but anything that directly involves me is likely going to have to wait a bit longer. I know I was spearheading wiki reorganization, and I know I was supposed to help out with CelesteTAS support and verification, but past that I can't bring anything to mind, so please feel free to message me reminders and/or resurrect one of my hundreds of unfinished discussion/proposal threads in order to get the balls rolling again on them. Other staff are also available to talk to if I'm not around, too, but given that I managed to find the time and energy to write this entire post, I'd like to think I should be around more often than before. In short, I'm not going anywhere. Eternity lies ahead of me, and I haven't drunk my fill.
Hopefully there won't be another full year before the next progress report. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions, or reach out on Discord for faster and much less easily findable answers!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Publications Currently on Hold
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2240)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
You may be aware there's been a lull in publications over the past few days, and unfortunately that's going to continue for the time being. We rely on the Internet Archive as our repository for publication encodes, and it's currently down after the recent data breach and DDoS attacks. As such, we're unable to publish anything until it's back up and stable again. The situation has also notably impacted judging as well, meaning it will also take longer to judge runs. Hopefully this should all be resolved soon. We'll give an update as soon as we're ready to start working normally again. Just so this post isn't all doom and gloom, here's a nice light note to end on: TASBot and TASVideos recently presented a block of TASes at Disaster Relief Done Quick 2024! The VOD, featuring brand new live commentary for our currently published runs of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Castlevania, and Donkey Kong Country, as well as premiering a brand new run of Gimmick!, is available to watch below: Link to video Also, if you want something to tide you over until publications resume, I'd highly recommend reading our previous news post, which is so long that we'll most likely be publishing again by the time you're done.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Publications no longer on hold
fsvgm777
She/Her
Senior Publisher, Player (226)
Joined: 5/28/2009
Posts: 1215
Location: Luxembourg
While Archive is still down, we have decided to resume publications. As a temporary measure, we will be publishing without a downloadable encode that's available on Archive until it's back up. As soon as Archive is back in full working condition, the downloadables will be uploaded there and linked post-publication.
Steam Community page - Bluesky profile Oh, I'm just a concerned observer.
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