Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Monster Rancher 2
It is a PSX game that tells you to insert arbitrary CDs into your console's CD drive while the game is running. There is an internal prompt mode (the Shrine) when this works. The instructions tell to try as many as possible. And every CD spawns a new character.
Hires scans of the CD and the manual.
This game can be completed without extra CDs. Some of the characters you would be able to spawn this way can be obtained without extra CDs too. But the game itself was made to be so incredibly boring without this feature that no one who knows the game thinks it's meant to be played without extra CDs. Even the RTA community uses them in the speedruns.
Even with the extra CDs, the game is utterly boring to watch a movie of. So It's impossible to accept it to Moons. And there's been a lot of discussion among users and staff members about eligibility of such scenarios for the Vault tier.
Vault
The Vault tier requires clarity.
Vault rules wrote:
Goal choice criteria must be clear, non-controversial, and objectively verifiable. Vault requires clear cuts, so a movie with unclear goals that can not be agreed upon will be rejected.
Since day one, Vault is limited to 2 most clear and obvious movie goals, fastest completion and full completion. Game choice is also strictly limited to games that can provide for a meaningful tool-assisted record.
So the Vault rules are also clear and strict. They consist of clauses that can be objectively checked. And we don't make exceptions to the Vault rules. Because it'd violate the principle of clarity and blur out the borderlines, opening the Pandora box of unpredictable decisions.
Problem
If we allow arbitrary extra CDs for Vault, all sorts of crazy unresolvable problems appear. We can't afford trying every image in the world hoping that it results in optimal outcome. Also we can't make our movies depend on images that may be impossible to obtain. And we want to shut ourselves off dependency images that may cause copyright and legal problems.
If we disallow them, the community gets sad. Because I talked to lots of people, including judges and admins, and no one actually wants this feature to be banned from Vault.
On the other hand, when dealing with something that's arbitrary in nature, and trying to make it fit into a system with strict rules, you either have to throw the rules out of the window, or the arbitrariness. Or both. And since adding exceptions to Vault rules damages its main point, record keeping (you can't know if something in the Vault is even a record anymore nor whether it tries to be), we really have to sacrifice arbitrariness here if we want new non-standard content to be available.
Solution
When the game asks you to insert a certain specific image (in-game or through the instructions), it is considered a part of the game. And it can only be inserted when the game explicitly prompts for that. Inserting images that weren't asked by the game is not allowed.
When a game asks you to insert an arbitrary image,
1) you need to use an image that's been generated exactly for this movie,
2) you need to provide instructions how to recreate it,
3) this image has to serve the goals of your movie as optimally as reasonably practicable,
4) you need to provide insight on why you consider it optimal,
5) the method used to create it must be free and easily accessible.
Only such "arbitrary" images are allowed, and only when the game duly prompts for inserting them.
This rule is for all tiers.
This was approved by Nach and liked by judges. Opinions, suggestions, complaints? Also maybe I forgot something?
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.
We can't afford trying every image in the world hoping that it results in optimal outcome.
Of course we can. Just reverse-engineer the thing. It probably does something like this:
raw read some arbitrary sector(s) early on the disk
hash the data
use that hash to seed a prng
use that prng in a random character creation algorithm
If we knew that and how it works, then we could make custom CDs just for the job that contained a few garbage sectors of garbage, and distribute them.
Solution
When the game asks you to insert a certain specific image (in-game or through the manual), it is considered a part of the game. And it can only be inserted when the game explicitly prompts for that. Inserting disks that weren't asked by the game is not allowed.
When a game asks you to insert an arbitrary image, you need to have an image that's been generated exactly for this movie, you need to have instructions how to recreate it, and you need it to serve the goals of your movie as optimally as reasonably practicable. Only such "arbitrary" images are allowed, and only when the game duly prompts for inserting them.
This was approved by Nach and liked by judges. Opinions, suggestions, complaints? Also maybe I forgot something?
So am I'm reading this correctly...
The "arbitrary" disc image being generated specifically for the movie submitted, in effect, is being made non-arbitrary due to the nature of it's creation. Thus it's going to be allowed for vault?
Or is this just a site standard for any run of these types of game that utilize additional 'arbitrary' CD data, and they still aren't vault eligible?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
<Nach> requiring build instructions for an image which is reproducible, completely free, and no legal issues is a nice start
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.
Is that really a good criterion?
I'd say that if the run is boring to watch anyway, the most unambiguous rule is to not allow any extra data. This especially since allowing extra CDs would make the run non-console-verifiable.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
DrD2k9 wrote:
The "arbitrary" disc image being generated specifically for the movie submitted, in effect, is being made non-arbitrary due to the nature of it's creation. Thus it's going to be allowed for vault?
Or is this just a site standard for any run of these types of game that utilize additional 'arbitrary' CD data, and they still aren't vault eligible?
Extra CDs that aren't named by the game are not allowed to be literally arbitrary, have to be generated for the movie's goals specifically. Then movies utilizing them become vaultable. Arbitrary extra CDs aren't allowed even for Moons. But this rule doesn't differentiate between tiers. I'll add a note.
Warp wrote:
Is that really a good criterion?
I'd say that if the run is boring to watch anyway, the most unambiguous rule is to not allow any extra data. This especially since allowing extra CDs would make the run non-console-verifiable.
You don't have problems with the sentence that goes right after that one?
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.
This especially since allowing extra CDs would make the run non-console-verifiable.
I mean theoretically if you time the disc swap frame perfectly it would still be console-verifiable. It's a problem with multi-disc games as well and I see no reason to restrict those.
[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
Joined: 4/17/2010
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Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
How many CD-based TASes have been console verified again?
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.
I think the rules written in feos's post are fair. The only thing that would be good to clarify is that an image may not just be a disc image - other unique games might use special peripherals for physical media such as barcodes, pictures, audio waveforms, and more. Assuming that the emulator was suitably developed to interact with this content, they seem like identical cases to CDs.
Part of a response I started preparing for the other thread is below; some points may not be relevant to the specific rule discussion, but they provide clarifying comments on the game:
I think I finally realized one way in which feos and I were talking past each other, although the details may not matter to the discussions at hand. He repeatedly refers to content unlocked elsewhere in the game, but in fact the generated monsters are extremely unlikely to have perfect parity with monsters obtained through other methods. For most casual players of the game, a monster is differentiated by its breed (type and subtype) alone. For example, the monster used in this submission is a Pixie/Dragon. Without using CDs, it would take probably 1-2 hours of effort to be able to create a monster of the same breed. However, the stats would be very different from most generated monsters due to differences in stat distributions from combining and generation. You could get to stat parity by training, but each week that passes decreases a monster's lifespan. Thus, it would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, to wind up with a monster through combination that perfectly matches a generated monster.
All that aside, I do agree there should be more discussion about what constitutes secret codes. Using feos's interpretation, games that feature procedural generation also constitute secret codes in that the user has no knowledge of how the input (even if it's just game state) affects the end content. Most such games require you to exercise that randomization to complete the game, so they get a pass under the current ruleset. One such example is Syvalion on SNES, where the gameplay progression is randomized. I do not think it is fair, however, to force a playstyle when the game gives an option to exercise such randomization content or not. MR2 is an example that gives the choice of either: you can use the generation, or you can select pre-formed. You must choose at least one of the two, but either is viewed by the game as equally valid. You are required to get a monster; the way you acquired the monster is not important.
Other points and musings relevant to posts in this thread:
-For the quoted game specifically, we do know what data it looks for on the disc, and it is possible to generate a disc with a specified outcome
-There are a few caveats about system architectures that should let you scope the rule better. At least for older systems, the size of a disc far outscales the size of memory. Any algorithm relying on data from a disc (or most any other secondary media) must only utilize a small subset of the data, or build a suitably small set of data by combining disc contents. In either case, the disc data used by the algorithm can be identified and specially crafted to create the desired outcome.
-It is reasonable to ask any submitter for their reasoning in using a particular image, if for nothing else than as supporting evidence of optimality. If an image was selected without adequate knowledge of what the game was pulling from it, I think that's a fair case to make that the play is non-optimal. You can go a step further and treat it exactly the same way as controller inputs - it's non-optimal if you can find an image that demonstrates a more optimal outcome - but that may be hard to prove, given the variety of different outcomes and strategies.
Joined: 4/17/2010
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Omnigamer wrote:
I think the rules written in feos's post are fair. The only thing that would be good to clarify is that an image may not just be a disc image - other unique games might use special peripherals for physical media such as barcodes, pictures, audio waveforms, and more. Assuming that the emulator was suitably developed to interact with this content, they seem like identical cases to CDs.
I generally agree, but I can't be so certain in a rule with unlimited scope. I'd prefer to limit it to game images for now, and when something different appears, use the spirit of the rule, clarifying it if needed. Otherwise, it'd be better to namely list things whose input can potentially be used in a similar way. But I can't say "X, Y, Z, and anything similar". In some cases we might never need this limitation probably.
Omnigamer wrote:
All that aside, I do agree there should be more discussion about what constitutes secret codes. Using feos's interpretation, games that feature procedural generation also constitute secret codes in that the user has no knowledge of how the input (even if it's just game state) affects the end content. Most such games require you to exercise that randomization to complete the game, so they get a pass under the current ruleset. One such example is Syvalion on SNES, where the gameplay progression is randomized. I do not think it is fair, however, to force a playstyle when the game gives an option to exercise such randomization content or not. MR2 is an example that gives the choice of either: you can use the generation, or you can select pre-formed. You must choose at least one of the two, but either is viewed by the game as equally valid. You are required to get a monster; the way you acquired the monster is not important.
If we switch back to the way I originally viewed this problem, none of the staff members I asked thought that when a game is all about entering arbitrary codes, it should still be banned. Nach considered this a cheat code only without it being the main feature of the game, but as long as it is the main feature - it was decided to allow it. Yet I'm not sure whether we want to extrapolate this to any code at all. Just like the above, we can get to this when we find another game that has such a feature.
Omnigamer wrote:
-There are a few caveats about system architectures that should let you scope the rule better. At least for older systems, the size of a disc far outscales the size of memory. Any algorithm relying on data from a disc (or most any other secondary media) must only utilize a small subset of the data, or build a suitably small set of data by combining disc contents. In either case, the disc data used by the algorithm can be identified and specially crafted to create the desired outcome.
You mean we need to require only ever writing the relevant bytes to our hand-crafted image?
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.
The last point was meant as a soft guarantee that a generated solution exists. Or for authors that attempt to use a copyrighted or otherwise unreasonable image, it is the justification that some reduced form of that image can be created that reaches the same outcome. I don't think you can require that it uses only the relevant bytes, as that can be difficult to prove or setup in some cases.
