Well, of course, but I thought that I am most probably not the only person in this situation (having to argue with a few people who ask why they didn't pick short names), and this thread most likely will support the decision of those who, like me, choose default (long) names for their characters.
Also, this hadn't been discussed before and I thought now was a good time to bring this up. We had discussed speed vs entertainment, and most probably some other subjects which I am not aware of (didn't care about). Can't hurt to discuss default vs ABCD names, can it?
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
Nope, can't hurt at all. I guess to clarify my position on the subject: If the changing of the names saves some time at the beginning of the run, but no where else, it's ridiculous to say that it should obsolete a currently published movie. However, if changing the names of characters will cause a movie to be noticably faster, like on the scale of minutes or tens of minutes, I'd have a hard time not voting yes. However, if the changing of the names were the only thing a new submission added, I think the author would get an incredible amount of shit for not doing anything new or improved. I would consider frame shaving not related to character names an improvement, in case anyone was wondering.
I personally dont have a problem with obsoleting a run when the original author is the one to do the name changing. If, for example, Halamantariel decided to resubmit his earthbound tas with a one letter name earthbound, I dont have a problem with it. That goes to say i dont have a problem with it when absolutely nothing is changed but the names... i.e. authors, comments, ect would stay the same, just the file changes.
I say this with the assumption that there is nothing more that can be done to make the game faster. For example, right now there are no new tricks to make Super Mario Brothers faster, so a little name change in the file will only affect the perfect-ness of a movie (of course you cant change mario's name, but, you know, work with me). However, if your file did NOT include the flag glitch thing and you decided to simply change names and call it faster (aka, resubmit un-optomized) then i would have a problem with only renaming the characters.
[/ramble]
edit: Bisqwit: noted. Fixed punctuation (I think ^_^;) and also did some grammar and clearing up of points. Sleep = Betterer writing ;D
Rambling is good, just try to practice punctuation and typography so it becomes readable too :) Starting with capital letters in the beginnings of sentences.