Since nobody protested, I have finished renaming all the files on the site. Here's the link:
http://depositfiles.com/files/6xmsbckgm
Notes:
You may notice that Gremlins 2 does not start on version 1. That is because all files before the version I started on are named "solstice." I'm pretty sure that the wrong files are in those spots.
As often as possible, I tried to preserve the obsoletion chain with my game name and categories. I figured that was one of the higher priority tasks.
I usually chose American titles for games when I had a choice.
Feel free to check if I made any mistakes, and if everything's kosher, someone with the power to do so can replace the files on the site with these.
EDIT: Also hacks are listed in their respective systems.
I still haven't found a good file hosting site (and a lot of the others I tried were being stupid.)
That's one thing which puzzles me. There are several websites which offer completely free video hosting services, no strings attached, no hoops to jump through, direct linking allowed (well, kind of, in the form of html embedding), and videos are certainly very large in size. However, try to find just a regular file hosting service with no hoops or other idiotic conditions... I wonder why is that.
It's not happening is it?
What has to be done to get something to change around here? I don't know why this site continues to inconvenience their users for so long. I don't know maybe there's a good reason that the movie files absolutely have to be author name first besides an aversion to the work involved or a resistance to change. I'd volunteer to do the work myself, but I can't. Heck I'll still volunteer. If someone gives me the ability, I'll zip all the files myself and put them all up on the site in the right place. Figure it'll take about a week to do so. It'll be the only thing I do and I'll relinquish the privilege after I've finished my task. The work will be done and we'll have file names that actually make a modicum of sense.
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When we took the site over, I made a TODO list. The naming convention was an item on this list. However, we have limited time and I consider it low priority. We've made huge improvements on the site, and fixed critical issues. And there are some more improvements on the way.
This issue will happen, trust me, I've wanted it to for a long time.
The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that 20 people have chimed in on 20 opinions as to how to name them. Nobody (including me, nach, truncated, and mmbossman) agrees on the specifics. And it isn't trivial to just go around renaming them. We need to get it right and do this change 1 time.
Well, let's start with the universals and work from there.
For example, does everyone agree that it should be game name first author name last? That's a good place to start.
Do we want to avoid spaces and capitals like in the current naming convention?
Should names with spaces have the underscore, or should we just go straight no spaces to keep the size of names smaller.
What do we want the files to be able to do?
I personally believe that the naming convention we eventually arrive at should do a few things.
- It should sort by game name so that files are easy to find when I want to find it.
- It should sort correctly through the obsoletion chain so people know which files to delete as well being able to track the progress on a certain game
- By that token movies on separate obsoletion chains need to sort in a different place than each other.
- The author should be mentioned because we do need to give credit to the people who are making these
- It should be user friendly as possible
- I think making it automatic might be a completely different headache, and in my mind it is unnecessary
Using this I sorted the different things by order of importance
- Game name first is the most important. The big discussion here is whether to use the U.S. name for all games, preserving the obsoletion chain even after version switches, or to use the rom name (for example: will we use "bioniccommando" for all of those games, or call some of them "hitlernofukkatsu"). I prefer preserving the obsoletion chain, but I can see the reasons for the other method. If we can't reach consensus put it to a vote.
- The second most important is what category the movie is in, since that means movies on different obsoletion chains won't be mixed together in the sort. Whether or not we need a separate category for the generic fastest at all costs movies is up for debate. Should we have a list of categories to choose from or should we go case by case? I think the second might be required because we have some character specific runs which throw a wrench in the works.
Some ideas for generic categories:
-glitched
-lowitems
-allitems
-nowarps
-alllevels
-allsecrets
-pacifist
I prefer "all___" to "100percent" because I think it looks better. "100percent" is applicable to more situations, though.
- Third most important is obsoletion order. There have been a few suggestions on the site
- version numbers: which is what I settled on. It had to be entered manually, but it allowed for proper sorting with minimal keystrokes.
- movie numbers: Allows people to know what the movie page for the movie is so they can go to it. However, there is the one problem of historical movie files, which have numbers in the 600s. If we feel this is not an issue, it's still very possible
- date of publication: yyyymmdd sorts properly, still has to be inputted manually, but is probably easier to automate. Makes file names slightly longer than movie number or version number does.
- time: hours.minutes.seconds.hundreths. In my opinion, the worst of the options. While the time does reveal new information about the movie, namely how long it lasts. There are many, many examples of slower movies that have obsoleted faster ones. Thus time is the least likely to sort properly.
-The author name is the last important bit of information here. My suggestion is that this should be listed as the username on the submission file. I've noticed that Inzult is sometimes listed as "philc" I wonder why?
I think I covered all the issues here. My suggestion on how to proceed is to take one issue at a time and reach consensus on each before proceeding to the next. It will focus the conversation, although it might take longer. If two options reach a stalemate, you can either decide that adminstrator's opinion is what we'll go with, which will get things done faster, or you can put up a poll for a set amount of time (I say no more than a few days) and the winner of the poll is what we do. I suggest the latter. Usually is two ideas have about equal support it means both options are viable.
I think that your suggestion for the naming and the ordering of the different fields in the name is quite sound.
One small thing, though: If we use obsoletion chain position as a version number, how many digits should be used? The problem arises if we want the file names to sort nicely. If we use "v1", "v2", ... "v10", "v11" and so on, that introduces the problem that most systems will then sort the files as:
somegame-category-v1-someauthor.ext
somegame-category-v10-someauthor.ext
somegame-category-v11-someauthor.ext
somegame-category-v2-someauthor.ext
somegame-category-v3-someauthor.ext
...
which always looks ugly.
Always using two digits solves that problem until some game gets obsoleted 100 times (yeah, not very likely to happen, but theoretically possible).
Well, if you look at my zip file, you'll notice I used two digits. That will hold for quite a while. The movie with the most obsoletions only goes up to v15 if I remember correctly.
(and I do now. I checked since I posted this message)
1.I prefer 100% than 100percent, for the obviousness of shorter name, now for one thing is launching the movie as an argument can be troublesome with symbols, yet, i still prefer symbols.
2.I dont think you forcably ever need to put the full game name, youll end with filename over 100 characters in runs with multiple authors ect...
"akumajouspecial-any-v02-adelikat,randil,arukado,darkkobold.fm2"
"castlevaniasymphonyofthenight-any-v02-arukado,piratesephiroth.pxm"
What about initials eventually, does castlevania need to be repeat for eatch, cv maybe instead?
3.The authors bit is kinda not usefull, you wont make it to the download without seeing the submission page first, also, theres a comment field reserved for this matter in (almost) all rerecording emulators, where generaly you put your name, upon replay, it show it in the dialog box
4.Use spacing between words in titles ?
The shortest the filename, the clearest it should appear to the viewier, 'version' is probably the very important bit in this
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Hi.
I was kindly alerted to checkout this thread the other day, so I will.
Note, I've made many changes to this site since adelikat and I took it over from Bisqwit, some obvious, yet others, and probably most of them are behind the scenes.
This here, is something I'd like to cover too, but many other things are much higher priority at the moment. However, we'll get to it eventually.
arkiandruski wrote:
Can we please make the standard naming format on input files game name first. It makes them much easier to find when I want to watch them.
Several users have sent me private messages on the forum or over IRC to point out several issues with the current system. Let me enumerate them.
1) Submissions are hard to sort through when having a bunch of them, because they're just numbers.
2) Published movie emulator formats are hard to sort through because naming of the game isn't always consistent.
3) Published movie torrent files are hard to sort through because the naming isn't always consistent.
4) For both types of formats, we don't include system information, which also makes it hard to know which system the run is for. Look at games such as Tetris, Battletoads, Lemmings, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and others for realizing this can be confusing when lacking system info. This will only get worse as people TAS more games on systems outside the main ones usually TAS'd (NES, SNES, Genesis). As well as when older classics will be ported further to the Nintendo DS, or we add support for more platforms to TAS.
5) For both types of formats, we don't list the movie publication number, so a user who got a movie has to search a bit, and possibly even get mixed up when trying to comment on the run he just saw or rate it. This is especially confusing when the same author TAS'd the same game multiple times, with obsoletions and multiple routes.
6) The two formats don't use a consistent naming scheme.
7) For emulator format, game name isn't first making it hard to sort.
8) Route labeling, and other run differentiation labeling isn't consistent.
9) Torrents include the video files but don't include the emulator, not making it truly open source.
Some of these issues are a tangent to the main one, but they're all related and should be fixed together. Fixing some of this will also requiring some site modification first to work, more on that later.
Warp wrote:
If we are going to rename the files to a consistent standardized format, maybe it would be a good idea to add the publication date as well.
I don't think we need to add a publication date once we have the movie number in it. The movie number is more important to include as per #5 above. Do you think in light of this we need the date as well.
Derakon wrote:
Do we need to rename the existing movies? Wouldn't that require resetting every single torrent on the site? Or would we just do the input files?
To full correct this we would have to reset every torrent, so ideally, we're going to get this right the first time.
arkiandruski wrote:
I'm working on renaming the movies on the site so far so we can have at least something.
Whatever we do decide on, please don't waste time doing things manually, we can pretty easily write a script to automate what we want.
Warp wrote:
arkiandruski wrote:
I still haven't found a good file hosting site (and a lot of the others I tried were being stupid.)
That's one thing which puzzles me. There are several websites which offer completely free video hosting services, no strings attached, no hoops to jump through, direct linking allowed (well, kind of, in the form of html embedding), and videos are certainly very large in size. However, try to find just a regular file hosting service with no hoops or other idiotic conditions... I wonder why is that.
The videos can display advertisements. Even if they don't, while you're watching the video on their site, you see the ads surrounding it.
For downloading files, you download it and you're done. You're not kept on the site watching ads while watching the movie, nor does the file itself contain ads. If you can find a solution to these issues, let me know, and we'll start a file hosting service together.
arkiandruski wrote:
So, is there anyone with the ability who's willing to put those files on the site?
Not going to happen as per above.
arkiandruski wrote:
What has to be done to get something to change around here?
Solve all the issues as above, and it also has to wait on us improving the backend a bit.
To have a torrent file have the proper movie number, it has to be inserted by the site code as it publishes the movie, since only the site truly knows which number is next. Currently our publishers have to upload the torrents, which is a show stopper.
I'd like to change how we do things, so that encoders will FTP the movie files to our site (and also offer a private fast download area for judges and publishers), then a publisher only has to select which encode to use for a movie, and the rest becomes automatic. The site will make the torrent files with the appropriate movie numbers, and sideload the movie file to archive.org, and elsewhere as appropriate.
That's obviously not done yet, so this change will have to wait a bit.
arkiandruski wrote:
For example, does everyone agree that it should be game name first author name last? That's a good place to start.
Nope, I think system name has to be first. Followed by game name. Last should be movie number. With the author(s)'s name somewhere in the middle with which version of theirs it is.
arkiandruski wrote:
Do we want to avoid spaces and capitals like in the current naming convention?
Avoid spaces, yes.
arkiandruski wrote:
Game name first is the most important. The big discussion here is whether to use the U.S. name for all games, preserving the obsoletion chain even after version switches, or to use the rom name (for example: will we use "bioniccommando" for all of those games, or call some of them "hitlernofukkatsu").
No one has brought this problem directly to my attention, but I think it's a good point, and part of keeping game name consistent.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Nach, if I'm reading correctly, the system you propose seems needlessly complicated and has a lot of extraneous information.
Why do we need author version numbers, for example? I really can't think of any useful information they provide. If they are used to differentiate movie files, then movie number or whatever sorting mechanism we try to use on the movie files will cover that just fine.
To tell you the truth, I never had any problems finding the torrent I wanted to watch. They sort pretty well, although if there is a movie that's obsoleted, finding the one that comes later is a problem. I think that's really the only thing that needs to be addressed with torrents.
Why do you think movie numbers should be at the end? If we must use movie numbers, we should have them serve a double function and let them be used as a sorting mechanism. At the end of the filename, they don't serve that function and just feel like they are tacked on, not serving any real useful purpose.
The two most important things in my mind with input files and torrents is that they sort correctly and that users know which movies obsolete which. Anything that's added to the name should serve that function.
Putting system first, I have no problems with, except to say that it almost feels unnecessary, but I keep movie files for different systems in different folders. Also, on input files, the extension tells you what system they are from, and if you can play a movie file on an emulator, you know how to look for a proper extension (also, emulators won't let you try to play movie files they don't support). On torrents, from what I've seen, the naming has been pretty good about giving the system when it was needed. I almost feel that if we have to, the system name should come after the game name still.
Spaces in the filename still cause problems with *nix operating systems, and thus should be avoided. Use underscores instead?
Spaces in filenames cause problems basically only with badly-written shellscripts. Of course that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to avoid them anyways.
Nach wrote:
For both types of formats, we don't include system information, which also makes it hard to know which system the run is for.
That's actually a good point. I agree that the file names should contain the system name (nes, snes, genesis, etc). Else if we have the same game name with two different systems we end up with awkward hacks like "genesisgamename" and "snesgamename". Better to be consistent.
I don't think we need to add a publication date once we have the movie number in it.
I think I later redacted that suggestion in favor of the obsoletion chain version number.
I don't think the movie number should be the only thing distinguishing between different versions of the same run. Also author-specific version numbers won't cut either because they don't make the obsoletion chain clear at all. For example, if one movie is versioned as "someauthor-v3" and another as "anotherauthor-v1", which one obsoletes the other? It's impossible to say. (I also agree with the opinion that the author-specific version number is kind of obsolete information in the file name and doesn't really provide much useful information and could be left out completely.)
(One could argue that the movie number tells which movie obsoletes the other. But it tells that regardless of the author-specific version number, so it still remains kind of obsolete.)
The obsoletion chain number provides interesting information (for example it tells how many times the run has been obsoleted in total), so I think it should be included. The movie number is rather abstract and doesn't really tell much.
How about something like this:
system-gamename-category-version-author-movienumber.ext
For example:
psx-saga_frontier-any-v01-knbnitkr-1453.mp4
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
arkiandruski wrote:
Why do we need author version numbers, for example? I really can't think of any useful information they provide.
So I know the difference between seeing:
SNES_Super_Metroid-100%-cpadolf-268.avi
SNES_Super_Metroid-100%-cpadolf-547.avi
SNES_Super_Metroid-100%-JXQ-380.avi
SNES_Super_Metroid-any%-cpadolf-537.avi
It's not strictly needed. But if we're going to put it there, it should be after the player name.
arkiandruski wrote:
To tell you the truth, I never had any problems finding the torrent I wanted to watch.
I would hope not, this site isn't so hard to navigate that you can't find the torrents.
I'm talking about videos on your hard drive here.
arkiandruski wrote:
Why do you think movie numbers should be at the end? If we must use movie numbers, we should have them serve a double function and let them be used as a sorting mechanism. At the end of the filename, they don't serve that function and just feel like they are tacked on, not serving any real useful purpose.
Well, where else would they be? Surely not at the beginning.
arkiandruski wrote:
Putting system first, I have no problems with, except to say that it almost feels unnecessary, but I keep movie files for different systems in different folders. Also, on input files, the extension tells you what system they are from, and if you can play a movie file on an emulator, you know how to look for a proper extension (also, emulators won't let you try to play movie files they don't support). On torrents, from what I've seen, the naming has been pretty good about giving the system when it was needed. I almost feel that if we have to, the system name should come after the game name still.
It is necessary for the reasons I described above. Maybe after the game name is better, but it doesn't feel as natural there.
As per above, also names should match between video files and input files, so no excuses of looking at the extension for input files.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp:
While I like the obsoletion chain idea in theory, that can be a bit hard to implement considering double obsoletions, and site administrators changing them on a whim. Just consider the recent suggestion to use a phantom movie to obsolete.
Given its shaky nature, I don't think it's a good idea to make use of it, and even then, it would be hard to always do right, and could mean renaming published movie files and forcing people to redownload torrents.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
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I would prefer names have the movie ID in them. And if not the movie ID, then a date. And if not a date, then I don't like this idea at all.
My proposal:
http://tasvideos.org/1279M.html
becomes:
doubledragon2-1279-adelikat.fm2
if a specific category is involved (such as if there was both a 1 player & 2 player versions of this game) then the category would be mentioned too:
doubledragon2-1279-2player-adelikat.fm2
I think this offers the best solution for finding a movie in a long list of movies. You find the game, then you can easily see which movie is the most recent and what categories might be available.
It also means that the user could easily determine the url of the publication and go there.
A date instead of movie ID accomplishes the same goal except with the drawback of not knowing the movie URL.
While I like the obsoletion chain idea in theory, that can be a bit hard to implement considering double obsoletions, and site administrators changing them on a whim. Just consider the recent suggestion to use a phantom movie to obsolete.
Given its shaky nature, I don't think it's a good idea to make use of it, and even then, it would be hard to always do right, and could mean renaming published movie files and forcing people to redownload torrents.
I see how it could, indeed, cause technical difficulties. It's a pitty because it would have been more descriptive.
adelikat wrote:
My proposal:
http://tasvideos.org/1279M.html
becomes:
doubledragon2-1279-adelikat.fm2
if a specific category is involved (such as if there was both a 1 player & 2 player versions of this game) then the category would be mentioned too:
doubledragon2-1279-2player-adelikat.fm2
What happens if two games for different systems have the same name? I think (hypothetical names) "nesdoubledragon2" and "genesisdoubledragon2" is a horrible naming scheme (if for nothing else, because it's confusing whether it's part of the game name or something else). Better to use something consistent, ie have the the system name in all the files rather than only in some of them.
The run category should be located before the id (or version) number and all file names should include this category (even if there's only one) so that the file names will be sorted by category and not get intermixed by order of publication.
Thus my suggestion would be:
nes-doubledragon2-any-1279-adelikat.fm2
nes-doubledragon2-2player-2345-adelikat.fm2
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I can't think of any reason against prefixing them all with the system ID like that. And if we do, we should certainly do it for all movies unlike now.
As of right now they are only prefixed when they clash, which the author may not even be aware of. And NES is never specified, only other systems when they clash with NES. So all or nothing is preferred to avoid that kind of mess.
I don't see why categories should precede the ID, but I don't prefer one or the other so that is fine I guess. My thoughts were that within a given game, I'd prefer to see them listed chronologically.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
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Xkeeper wrote:
prefixing the system name is stupid, especially given that it's, you know, at the end of the file anyway
No, it isn't. And, no, it isn't.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
