Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Over the past month or so, our seniors Mothrayas, feos, fsvgm777, and some other staff discussed with me the ambiguity or non-clarity certain rules had.
Some points we covered:
What is considered obtaining something when aiming for collection completion criteria?
What is the criteria for completing an endless games? Or a game which eventually crashes or similar?
How are games within games viewed in terms of completion?
Can a game be extracted from another game and be played that way?
How does obsoletion work for some of these?
What should judges make notes of when judging these?
How is vault affected by this?
To this end we added language to our rules clarifying what the rules are for these various cases, according to how we've been handling them till now. If you weren't sure about some of these, please see these updates:
Wiki: MovieRules (changes)
Wiki: JudgeGuidelines (changes)
Wiki: Vault (changes)
It is important to note that none of these changes substantially alter any of the pre-existing rules. We have been handling the newly identified cases the same way as presently described till now. One exception is that the expanded endless game rules now covers some cases that we haven't actually received submissions for yet, but the elaboration is in line with how we intended to handle them based on similar rules elsewhere.
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.
I know that not everyone will agree, but I support the disallowing of memory corruption for vault purposes. That was probably a tough decision to come by. I think ACE has its place, but I never enjoyed the runs that took advantage of it. Also, although I know it's really tough to test and search for, it really feels like completely breaking the spirit of the game.
But really I support it mostly for entertainment purposes.
I know that not everyone will agree, but I support the disallowing of memory corruption for vault purposes.
Note that it's specifically for FULL completion and not fastest.
[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
Damn, my skimming skills have failed me..
So, if fastest completion involves memory corruption, does that mean a run without corruption would have to qualify for Moons?
Damn, my skimming skills have failed me..
So, if fastest completion involves memory corruption, does that mean a run without corruption would have to qualify for Moons?
Sure does.
[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
EDIT: I forgot to say thank you for the above clarifications. :END EDIT
The game reaches a point where difficulty stops increasing and no new content appears anymore.
The game consists of multiple rounds with new content appearing, and difficulty increases until it resets (overflows). For this the game must reach a point where new content no longer appears.
So for a game like Space Invaders or Galaxian where each level is identical aside from a difficulty curve that affects how quickly the enemies move or shoot back, at what point is it considered that no new content appears?
Does the run have to go all the way through the difficulty increase/overflow, or is one stage (or group of stages) sufficient?
The primary reason I ask is that for some games, the changes in difficulty curve may be barely perceptible visually; making it difficult to determine exactly where the difficulty stops increasing.
If it's barely or impossible to visually see when the difficulty stops changing (or whether it even does stop), is the onus on the TASer to decode the game in order to determine where the difficulty stops increasing (assuming it's not stated in the game documentation)?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
For most versions of Space Invaders to my knowledge, no level introduces new content.
As long as difficulty increases, it has to be played, unless one of the other completion criteria is possible and chosen. Do not confuse this with the case where difficulty resets at some point.
The TASer should do the necessary research to determine when difficulty stops increasing.
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.
The movie rules on completion now have clarified that a game with some kind of ending can be published upon reaching that ending, even if the game is otherwise still an endless game.
It seems that scenes like the one you get after level 100m in Donkey Kong can now be considered an ending. Is there any specification about whether a cutscene in an endless game is considered an ending?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
If it has an ending, then it's not an endless game.
Many games allow you to continue after the ending. Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Land...
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.
I know that not everyone will agree, but I support the disallowing of memory corruption for vault purposes. That was probably a tough decision to come by. I think ACE has its place, but I never enjoyed the runs that took advantage of it. Also, although I know it's really tough to test and search for, it really feels like completely breaking the spirit of the game.
I'm happy to see I'm not the only person in the world who thinks like this.
If it were up to me, ACE would be banned from Vault completely.
I know that not everyone will agree, but I support the disallowing of memory corruption for vault purposes. That was probably a tough decision to come by. I think ACE has its place, but I never enjoyed the runs that took advantage of it. Also, although I know it's really tough to test and search for, it really feels like completely breaking the spirit of the game.
Lots of things in a TAS are completely breaking the spirit of the game.
Memory corruption needs to be allowed in the Vault precisely because not everybody finds it enjoyable. Entertaining or not, it is still an achievement as a speed record.
If you think that something shouldn't be in the Vault because you don't enjoy it (which is basically what you're saying here) then you misunderstand the purpose of the Vault.
The game unavoidably reaches a point which prevents progression often referred to as a kill screen:
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.
Lots of things in a TAS are completely breaking the spirit of the game.
Memory corruption needs to be allowed in the Vault precisely because not everybody finds it enjoyable. Entertaining or not, it is still an achievement as a speed record.
This all comes down to the philosophical question of what exactly constitutes to "complete the game" as fast as possible.
Putting aside the recent discussion about what the purpose and meaning of a "TAS" is, quite arguably the Vault tier is about speedrunning at its purest form. But what is "speedrunning"? Here there can actually be different points of view and opinions.
Some could argue that it means simply reaching the end of the game as fast as possible, by whatever means possible (with some reasonable restrictions). Others could argue that it's playing the game through as fast as possible.
At first these two things might sound like the same thing, but they actually aren't. The former allows the run to just skip from the intro screen to the ending credits in a fraction of a second, and still consider it a "legit" completion. The only thing that matters is that the end credits appear on screen; it doesn't matter how they are made to appear. The latter wouldn't, because the game wasn't actually played through.
I would say that the former idea adheres to the letter of the definition of "game completion", while the latter adheres to its spirit.
Many people find heavy glitch abuse in speedrunning disappointing. Especially glitches that skip significant portions of the game. They feel like it's a bit like cheating: The game isn't actually being played through. I have said this in the past, and I'm going to repeat it again: Why are we dismissing that sentiment so lightly, even ridiculing it sometimes?
Of course for practical reasons we cannot ban all glitches. That would be an endless swamp of controversy, with endless lists of minutia dictating what is and isn't allowed. That's just not practical (and no better evidence of this is the fact that in the beginning unassisted speedrunning was like that, but the idea was abandoned mainly due to its impracticality.) However, I would argue that banning a technique that actually corrupts the game code, allowing significant portions of the game to be skipped via non-gameplay, could arguably be banned in pure speedrunning categories.
Of course I understand that's probably never going to happen, but I can still express my opinion about it.
Many people find heavy glitch abuse in speedrunning disappointing. Especially glitches that skip significant portions of the game. They feel like it's a bit like cheating: The game isn't actually being played through. I have said this in the past, and I'm going to repeat it again: Why are we dismissing that sentiment so lightly, even ridiculing it sometimes?
But we're not dismissing this sentiment at all. We've got all of Moon Tier for people who agree with this sentiment.
