adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
2009 was an epic year in the life of TASVideos. We were challenged with (and overcame) a shift in ownership that challenged the fate of the site and community itself. We saw an unprecedented increase in TASable platforms including Playstation, DS, PC engine, Arcade, and Sega Saturn. We saw some of our most popular and (thought to be) most unimprovable movies shattered. We saw an increase in publications, new TASers, and site staff. The site also underwent an unprecedented shift in user friendliness regarding the viewing of site content. We even saw an unprecedented increase in submission queue efficiency. Along with that goal of user friendliness we also had a big increase in site visibility with a new promotional video, video groups on major streaming sites, a twitter account, a mini-nova torrent account, big boosts to site inner working resulting in much better search engine visibility, and a push for better organized and intriguing site content. Since its birth in 2003 we have never seen such rapid and positive change to our site and community. So where do we go from here? 2009 signified the "year of the emulator" and a great expansion of TASable games. I want 2010 that TASVideos pushes into the realm of "current". What I mean by that is that I want TASVideos to be more interactive and more cutting-edge. This is the site to learn the latest tricks, see newest glitches, to see progress on new upcoming TASes and the development of advanced routes/tricks/strategies of new games. In summary, this is the site to interact with and to the "new" and "current" in advanced/competitive gaming. This is opposed to the past image that is more of "classic" gaming and "nostalgia". Currently I have 4 aspects that I want to prioritize to push towards this long term goal. 1) Better documentation of tricks! This is the one where I need the resources of all of you, the TAS community the most. Late 2004, word of Moriomoto's SMB3 TAS brought me to TASVideos. However one of the main things that kept me coming back were the tricks pages (such as SMB). I had a thirst for more advanced concept & strategies for the games I was familiar with, and I was tired of the tired and worn out "100 lives" and "-1" tricks that you would see at places like GameFAQs. I was amazed at the amount of ideas TASVideos (NESVideos back then) had that I would never even considered. And they even had animated GIFs demonstrating these ideas! I think these pages carry a lot of potential for interest in the general gaming community (at least the competitive gaming community) even if they aren't especially drawn to TASes initially. However, are pages are sorely outdated, too few in numbers, and too infrequently updated. I hope to rally support behind a push to update the content of existing pages and create pages for more games (especially newer platforms. We don't necessarily even need animated GIFs for these pages since we now have easy streaming embedding. I will be willing to work on additional site features too if anyone has ideas for increasing the effectiveness of these pages or the ease of maintaining them. (For instance, an animated GIF tool for emulators, ability to specify a time range of an embedded video, or any creative ideas I haven't considered). 2) More site "interactivity" with the act of TASing The tricks pages were about 50% of the reason I kept coming back. The other 50% was to see progress on specific TASes in the forum threads. In particular was Bisqwit's Megaman TAS back in early 2005. Every day I would go to that thread to see if a new WIP was posted. When there was, I would watch it in excitement, hoping to be blown away by new tricks and shortcuts! Since 2005 the forums have greatly decreased in activity, and many runs are now done "in secret" in order to be a big surprise on the submission queue. I hope to revive this spirit of "the latest TAS progress" in TASVideos. Currently I am really excited about the idea of "live" TASing via ustream (demonstrated by the Bubble Bobble commentary. I've done a few live TAS sessions this way as an experiment and I hope to make it a regular part of my week. I hope others might get into this idea as well; holding TASing sessions that the audience can see. I plan to write up a page about how to get set up for streaming emulator content on ustream. I also really hope this idea spawns a series of TAS tutorials & introductory videos. Imagine being able to regularly visit the site and actually see TASes in the making, right this second! The site could announce and promote these in a visible manner as well. The audience could visit regularly eagerly waiting to see the latest progress of various movies. 3) Younger consoles becoming rerecordable Morimoto's SMB3 run spawned the original generation of TASers. Super Mario 64 spawned the 2nd. Which TAS will spawn a 3rd generation of TASers? That answer lies in the next generation of consoles such as GameCube, Wii, and PS2. I plan to put work towards getting the rerecording emulators of dolphin and pscx2-rr ready for good TASing. Any help along these lines is greatly appreciated. 4) Better integration and attention towards the News feed. It is my intent that this feed has regular updates. This would include news about any of the events mentioned so far. I want this to be a page that is visited frequently by users to see the latest news on site events, live TASing, rerecording emulator news, latest discoveries in the TAS world, etc. I also want this page tied to an RSS feed and the TASVideos twitter account. Apologies for this long post, but I wanted to detail the priorities and goals I have for TASVideos in the upcoming year. I think these ideas could really increase the value of TASVideos, increase its viewership, grow the TAS community, and better spread knowledge about the art of TASing. However, to realize these goals fully will require effort from all of us in the TASVideos community. So let's get to work! Cheers to all on a great 2009 and to an even better 2010. (Also my apologies, I wanted to make this post about 6 weeks ago, but life and other TASVideos duties have pushed it back).
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Wow! Thats one post there adelikat! I hope to be of use with this big project. Whatever it takes. ;)
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Having news on the same RSS as submissions/publications is really useful; for instance, that's how I learn about ~90% of new TASes in the first place. Live TASing is an idea that needs to be taken out with great care, as it holds some very nice potential that is easy to tarnish with a thoughtless implementation.
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Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
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I applaud you, sir. This is exactly the kind of enthusiasm we need from our admins and our veteran runners. May this site never die!
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!) My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
Player (117)
Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny
This is a great post. Im looking foward to some new tricks pages. these are cool.
[19:16] <scrimpy> silly portuguese [19:16] <scrimpy> it's like spanish, only less cool
Former player
Joined: 11/13/2005
Posts: 1587
Hopefully adelikat's ideas will become reality, it would probably help the site become more popular and consistent. Good luck with everything! I also hope to be more active in the future, like I was in the past. Not sure if that's a good thing for the site or not, but I guess we'll see! PS. I'll try to get you that vodka this year adelikat, I promise!
Skilled player (1826)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Yeah, very well written post. I think 2010 will be a great year too. I'll try and write some of the game tricks pages I've been planning on for quite some time, I have quite a few on my mind, just NES games though (surprise). And as always, you can expect more TASers from me this year (don't worry, it won't be duck hunt again) :).
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
2010 shall also be a great year in encoding, hehehe. Those that have been paying attention will know exactly what I mean.
Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
Skilled player (1098)
Joined: 8/26/2006
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These are all fantastic ideas. At least we can always rely on adelikat to take initiative.
adelikat wrote:
1) Better documentation of tricks!
I share your lament that the internet is full of 100 lives this that and the other thing. We are really offering something novel here. What sort of scope are we aiming for with this? At the moment we only offer tricks pages for the most popular games. Would it be worth broadening this out to less popular games? Or to all games in general? We already contain most of the information for the latter scattered throughout the submission texts. It would require a monumental effort from the editors to codify this huge amount of information. A main problem with this is that the effort required far outstrips the number of active editors that we have. A possible solution could be to allow an editing privilege similar to that of User Homepages in relation to tricks pages associated with it. Another potential solution, but perhaps too much of a strain on the publishers, would be to adopt Bisqwit's idea of having every publication as an article that has the run in addition to a page full of information which can be added in a codified form from the submission text.
adelikat wrote:
2) More site "interactivity" with the act of TASing
I also think it is sad that no one posts WIPs anymore. However, I've noticed that it is only incredibly popular runs that get attention. If someone posts a WIP of a less popular game, and no one takes an interest, this is likely to seriously affect the motivation of the TASer. I have some projects that I like to keep secret because I don't want the pressure of disappointing people that were looking forward to it if I choose to abandon the project. However, I will make an effort to start posting WIPs of runs that I am likely to finish.
adelikat wrote:
Currently I am really excited about the idea of "live" TASing via ustream (demonstrated by the Bubble Bobble commentary.
This is a great idea and I'd love to see more of it. I think that everyone could benefit from this. Even an experienced TASer may learn something new by watching the technique of another TASer. Anyways, I'd like to help out in any way that I can
Mitjitsu
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Posts: 2997
Like Moozooh said, while live TASing has big potential. It could easilly be a huge disaster if done wrong. It would be greatly dependent on the game and whose TASing it. If a newbie is TASing, then veteran TASers would be able to provide helpful advice. If a veteran TASer is doing it, then it might provide a helpful and informative insight for others. A game like SMB1 can be TASed very quickly, and most likely hold the attention of everybody. A 2p, or complex 3D game could have much bigger delays between savestates being reloaded as inputs need to be carefully considered beforehand and the TASer could be spending hours for just a few seconds worth of input.
Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Mukki wrote:
What sort of scope are we aiming for with this? At the moment we only offer tricks pages for the most popular games. Would it be worth broadening this out to less popular games? Or to all games in general?
I would at the very least we should be documenting the known tricks about the published movies we have. We all have a lot of specialized knowledge about games (and emulators for that matters) that is not documented anywhere. We should document it. Would this be a monumental effort? Most certainly. But it is just a series of small productive steps. So let's start finally taking those overdue steps.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Player (117)
Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny
I will gladly create a Maui mallard, and a Rayman 2 page, regardless if Rayman 2 works or not( I'm still finding that out)
[19:16] <scrimpy> silly portuguese [19:16] <scrimpy> it's like spanish, only less cool
adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Good to hear :)
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
One thing I think would help keep the audience involved would be streamlining the do-it-yourself encoding process. The more people who can run a movie in their emulator and generate a file that can be uploaded to YouTube, the better. Obviously this doesn't make a difference in situations where the TASer isn't posting WIPs (for whatever reason) but when they are, it'd be nice if everyone could watch them easily. What'd be super-duper awesome would be if someone were willing to write up a system where you could upload a movie file to a server and it would automatically encode it (possibly starting from a specified savestate) and upload it somewhere. But that would require some serious computing power, which isn't cheap. Re: documentation of tricks. There's often a lot of documentation in the movie submission notes. It's worth thinking about ways to make it easier to find that documentation. For example, if every submission used the same section header for their "tricks and glitches" section, then we could easily automatically find that section in the submission, split it out into paragraphs, and insert the paragraphs into a wiki page for the game (making certain not to insert duplicate paragraphs in the not-uncommon situation that text has been copied from a previous submission).
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Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Derakon: adelikat and I have been discussing setting up an automated encoding machine. There's some issues we need to work out though, such as getting the emulators to accept all the encoding params via command line, possibly even running in window less mode, uploading to somewhere, and somehow working out the ROM images available on the system.
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.
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Along the lines of documentation of games would be that of having good ram addresses for as many games as possible. On the TASTools repository, I have space for ram watch (.wch) and memory watch (.txt) files: http://code.google.com/p/tastools/source/browse/#svn/trunk/FCEU-MemoryWatch I want people to send me their watch files! I can then upload them here. I'll add a link to our game resources to this once I have more than just mine and Randil's (though between the 2 of us we have an awful lot of files).
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Sen
Joined: 1/21/2010
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If you have some spare minutes while working on the news feed, could you add a <guid> tag to each <item>? You should be able to simply copy the contents of the <link> since those seem to be unique and permanent. It would really help out us lurkers whose feed readers need guids to track new items and changes.
Player (36)
Joined: 9/11/2004
Posts: 2630
adelikat wrote:
Along the lines of documentation of games would be that of having good ram addresses for as many games as possible. On the TASTools repository, I have space for ram watch (.wch) and memory watch (.txt) files: http://code.google.com/p/tastools/source/browse/#svn/trunk/FCEU-MemoryWatch I want people to send me their watch files! I can then upload them here. I'll add a link to our game resources to this once I have more than just mine and Randil's (though between the 2 of us we have an awful lot of files).
Why not contribute that list to http://www.datacrystal.org/wiki/Main_Page ?
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Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
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adelikat wrote:
1) Better documentation of tricks! This is the one where I need the resources of all of you, the TAS community the most. Late 2004, word of Moriomoto's SMB3 TAS brought me to TASVideos. However one of the main things that kept me coming back were the tricks pages (such as SMB). I had a thirst for more advanced concept & strategies for the games I was familiar with, and I was tired of the tired and worn out "100 lives" and "-1" tricks that you would see at places like GameFAQs. I was amazed at the amount of ideas TASVideos (NESVideos back then) had that I would never even considered. And they even had animated GIFs demonstrating these ideas!
What adelikat said here is very true. The Super Mario Bros tricks page is one of our most popular pages. We need to have many more of these. In order to help with this, today I added the ability to our YouTube module to play just a subsection of a full video. See http://tasvideos.org/BossFightingGuide.html to see videos that when played show only the exact segment in question. If you're an editor please submit as much as you can, and make good use of videos. See documentation here: http://tasvideos.org/TextFormattingRules/ListOfModules.html#Youtube If you want to make a very specific video and upload that to YouTube, you can do that too, you do not need to limit yourself to TASs we published.
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.
Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Nach wrote:
If you want to make a very specific video and upload that to YouTube, you can do that too, you do not need to limit yourself to TASs we published.
Let me amend that. If you have a clip specifically for documentation and it is under 11 minutes, I would much prefer you let me upload it to our official account for linking.
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Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Nach wrote:
In order to help with this, today I added the ability to our YouTube module to play just a subsection of a full video. See http://tasvideos.org/BossFightingGuide.html to see videos that when played show only the exact segment in question.
I took a look at that page, and while the movie does start at the proper point*, they don't end after they finish the segment demonstrating the particular TAS trick/technique. Are they supposed to? * Exception: Metroid. The movie starts while Samus is climbing one of the Brinstar shafts, far away from any bossfight.
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Post subject: Re: 2010 - Looking ahead
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Derakon wrote:
Nach wrote:
In order to help with this, today I added the ability to our YouTube module to play just a subsection of a full video. See http://tasvideos.org/BossFightingGuide.html to see videos that when played show only the exact segment in question.
I took a look at that page, and while the movie does start at the proper point*, they don't end after they finish the segment demonstrating the particular TAS trick/technique. Are they supposed to?
It sounds like you have JavaScript disabled. It's supposed to loop after the trick is displayed.
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: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Hm. I shouldn't have Javascript disabled. I know I saw Luigi running around up top while on that same page. I just tried it again on my home computer (original post was from my laptop), and both the MM7 and Zelda 2 clips looped properly. *shrug*
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Derakon wrote:
I just tried it again on my home computer (original post was from my laptop), and both the MM7 and Zelda 2 clips looped properly. *shrug*
It's possible what you accessed before was an older cached version while I was still developing the feature. See if it works on your laptop now.
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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Excellent post adelikat, it's great to know the path that you are envisioning for the site to take. One of your points regarded the sharing of progress and tricks, etc. While I agree that there has been a gradual decrease in feedback and sharing in the forums, I believe that it is likely a function of the meteoric rise in accessibility to new platforms and new emulators. Everyone who once said "I would definitely do a TAS if there were an SMS/DS/PSX emulator" now has the opportunity. For a large population, I believe that the viewers have now become the TASers. Another problem that I believe has cropped up is lack of accessibility for a method to quickly and easily share WIPs. For years, DeHackEd's microstorage was the default for showing off tricks and progress, however as new emulators have cropped up, so have new file formats, some of which aren't supported, and some are supported with limited functionality (i.e. lack of .m64 embedded savestates). One possible way to increase sharing of files and WIPs is to make an official script for use on the site, where a user has X amount of hard drive space to upload files, and they are stored in an accessible manner for others to view. I don't know how much allotted hard drive space comes with the current site hosting contract that we have, but even if it's 20 GB, that allows for nearly 7 MB of space per user to utilize to share their collection of files. Or, limit uploading to those users who have posted within the past year, and the allotted amount would grow greatly. All in all, I would love to see this implemented. It would solve one of the biggest flaws in DeHackEd's system (the inability to search for a particular file, and risk losing a file forever if the link is lost), as well as make a convenient way to share and collaborate. Thoughts?
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