Post subject: "Non-Published/Improvable Runs"
Joined: 1/30/2006
Posts: 10
Well, I'm just going to throw this out there since I receive a PM from someone asking me what my "Idea" was. It was in refference to a post I made in the Donkey Kong Land 2 topic (currently in the Workbench). So, here was the response I made in that PM that I thought I would go ahead and share with everyone. Somehow, I'm certain this has come up before though.
alden wrote:
What's your idea? I'm curious and impatient :D
Ah, I haven't started visiting this site often enough to respond quickly. The idea is simple, but problematic in terms of who would be willing to do it. If someone could create a seperate mirror/server/section for the rejected movies (given that no such game exists on the website already), it could be useful. The section could be called something like "Non-Published/improvable runs". It would obviously be seperate from the fully published runs or it would be a contradiction. It could also be open-source, where other users could contribute or try to improve on it. This section would make knowledge of it's existence more aparent, AND more aparent that SOME effort was made on it. Sadly, I can easily see how this could be argued down, but I'd rather not go into details just now. It's just a possibility I though about. So yeah, let me know what you think about this concept, or tell me if it has come up before somewhere else.
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
I like this idea. While the runs are available by digging in the gruefood section, it would be nice to have them available in organized form. Some published runs are very obsolete, with much less obsolete submissions being rejected. An example of this is Ocarina of Time. Having a list of all submissions, rejected or not, for each game, would make it much simpler to see what the current record is, and this list could also be linked to from the description of publications that are more obsolete than the best gruefood. The list could look something like this: A list of each game, organized like the list of published runs. For each game, have a list of categories, and sort the submissions for each category by completion time, with an icon beside each submission indicating its fate, which could be: Current published run, published but obsoleted, gruefood and pending judgement. Most of this could be constructed automatically, I think. The problem might be the category - which I'm not sure if is specified during submission, or decided upon during the judging process, so that gruefood runs wouldn't have a category available in the database.
sgrunt
He/Him
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Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
You've just described the concept behind alden's Gruefood Delight, for which speculation of a better-supported (both in terms of keeping it up to date and from a technical standpoint) version has long been a point of discussion here. One suggestion that has come up repeatedly is to move the page to be an actual site page instead of in alden's user space. The important point behind any such list is the selection of submissions therein, and I think such a discussion would be the natural starting point for any further-supported version of the list.
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
I thought Gruefood Delight was a hand-picked set of enjoyable gruefood runs, not an automatically updated list of all submissions sorted by game, category and completion time. I think both would be nice to have.
Experienced player (828)
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
If it's automated, how do we weed out the obvious shitty runs? There are probably 25 SMB runs which should be outright deleted, but would be included into an automatic list.
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adelikat
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Joined: 11/3/2004
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Does this not satisfy what you are looking for then? http://tasvideos.org/Subs-All.html Click the Status header and it will sort cancelled, then rejected, then published.
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Noxxa
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amaurea wrote:
I thought Gruefood Delight was a hand-picked set of enjoyable gruefood runs, not an automatically updated list of all submissions sorted by game, category and completion time. I think both would be nice to have.
You mean like this? EDIT: ****, ninja'd.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Former player
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 424
Location: UK
I thought sorting by completion time would put them in their correct place, without needing to prune them. That won't handle cases where the submission is artificially short for some reason, though. But I think a bigger problem is the category stuff. Is the category a submission belongs to available anywhere, or is that only decided during publication?
sgrunt
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
amaurea wrote:
Is the category a submission belongs to available anywhere, or is that only decided during publication?
This is only officially chosen at stored at the publication level; the database does not track categories for submissions.
Joined: 11/9/2008
Posts: 108
Location: New Orleans, LA U.S.A.
are you thinking of encoding these? i would be in support of that
__--N0ISE
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
djchilxxn wrote:
are you thinking of encoding these? i would be in support of that
I would be too :D Probably would just embed/link youtubes rather than providing avi's due to storage issues. The first step is a major overhaul of the page, and moving it. We'll see how fast that happens :\
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Joined: 1/30/2006
Posts: 10
Well, it's good to see that the idea is at least being considered in some form. I would be glad to help in some way, but it will require me to learn some more technical knowledge in terms of how encoding works.
Player (121)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
If you're on windows, everything I needed to know about encoding I learned here: http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/MakingAVI/Common/Windows.html Getting everything installed right can be a pain in the ass, but it's not really that difficult overall.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Joined: 1/2/2010
Posts: 29
Location: China
I for one have found some rather interesting stuff in the grue pile. I had an encode of the rejected Mario Kart Super Circuit TAS on my YouTube page (which has recently been intentionally nuked, so don't bother looking for it). I never got around to setting up the tools for proper encodes, but if that won't matter in doing rejected runs I can probably contribute some videos.
Limne
Any
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 153
You know, the very idea of a "Grue Delight" page for good bad submissions seems much more interesting than a lot of the published runs. It's really a shame that my setup is so bad at watching the actual files. God willing there'll be encodes someday...
Skilled player (1826)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
In order to make the list, I think the run should meet these criteria:
    1. The run should comply with all the rules except the "The movie must be good" section. 2. The game may not have a published run on the site. 3. If there are multiple runs of the same game that meet the two criteria above, only the fastest (or "best" in some sense) one is listed.
In some sense it might be a good idea to include all runs of a rejected game, not just the fastest one, since runs that are overall slower might include some trick that the others don't. However, if all runs are listed, the list would get very clustered. It might be possible to automate this by the following algorithm: Loop through all the submitted movies, and if a movie meets the three criteria above, add it to a list. Criteria 1 might be hard to check automatically, but 2 and 3 should be possible. Should we create a page for this list, and in that case, what should we call that page? How should this list be structured?
Limne
Any
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 153
Rules like that are a bit too descriptive for something like this; after-all, there's a lot of variety amongst the grue-feed... I know I'd like to see the playarounds and runs with completely bizarre goals. I dunno, what if it was something like, instead of voting for a special star, we voted for a can of worms of something? Or we could just encode everything on Alden's user page and put a link to it...
sgrunt
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
We don't vote for special stars - it's presently up to Baxter to maintain the list (though we do maintain a discussion thread for suggestions/discussion). We've discussed elsewhere the notion of submissions having categories - I guess a system like this would behave as the "special star" of gruefood, which would mean that someone would maintain that list in a similar fashion.