Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
Nach wrote:
So we plan for many games to just duplicate publish the exact same thing because we can relabel it Wii? Unless there's some significant in-game distinction, I don't see the point in us allowing this.
It's explained in the rule I linked.
I wrote the rule you linked. I don't see how it covers allowing the emulated version being played on the Wii.
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: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
I guess it's more related to this rule then:
http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html#UseTheCorrectVersion
Version exclusive glitches or anything else that makes the VC release special, would be okay. Identical gameplay would obviously be too similar to have both versions.
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'd think the rule below the extracted games rule actually prohibits wii vc games:
Play games that are emulated well
Emulation of several platforms such as Nintendo 64, DOS, Arcades is still far from perfect, and some games work worse than others. This may be grey area on such systems, but we generally aim to publish videos that look like they could be played back on the original video game system. Movies of games that are not emulated well (have graphical or functional glitches that do not exist on the real console) should not be submitted.
To call a wii vc emulated game the "original video game system" is a hard sell, in my opinion.
Yes, and I also am thinking along the same lines as Chanoyu is.
feos wrote:
Identical gameplay would obviously be too similar to have both versions.
I'd say even very similar gameplay.
feos wrote:
Version exclusive glitches or anything else that makes the VC release special, would be okay.
If the glitches are the result of the VC's internal emulator and isn't present when extracted, placed on a flash cart, and ran on the original system, I'm not sure we should accept them.
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: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
If it's an extracted N64 image, we publish it as an N64. If it's a Wii image, we publish it as Wii. It remains consistent with what the game was meant for, there's no confusion and no false claims. If you run a VC release on Wii via some kind of a tasbot, it will look the same as in the TAS. Banning official releases is a much harder sell if you ask me. If it was released with glitches in its virtual machine, then that is the legitimate technique to abuse in speedruns, especially if it results in different gameplay. "We don't want unique gameplay because official release contains bugs" is the opposite of http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html#Why
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Yes, it's an official release. But it's an official derivative release in a buggier form. If we can extract and play it in its original platform, I think that's what we should do.
That same "unique gameplay" might even be possible in emulators that we non-Nintendo employees make, but we reject those because it's not true to the original. Sure these new Wii emulators are officially sanctioned by Nintendo's greed, but they're still not true to the original game. We're intelligent enough to differentiate a pure game release, and a game release that's really supposed to be for a different platform.
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.
[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
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Nach wrote:
Yes, it's an official release. But it's an official derivative release in a buggier form. If we can extract and play it in its original platform, I think that's what we should do.
That same "unique gameplay" might even be possible in emulators that we non-Nintendo employees make, but we reject those because it's not true to the original. Sure these new Wii emulators are officially sanctioned by Nintendo's greed, but they're still not true to the original game. We're intelligent enough to differentiate a pure game release, and a game release that's really supposed to be for a different platform.
Your point is that the new release is not a part of the game anymore. Which is quite arbitrary to decide for the publisher of that game, based on which of their publications we like or not.
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
Your point is that the new release is not a part of the game anymore. Which is quite arbitrary to decide for the publisher of that game, based on which of their publications we like or not.
It's not about whether we like it or not, it's about whether it's the original, or they did something to get it to run on something else.
Again, we're intelligent enough to know when this happens. It's not confusing and arbitrary.
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: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
I do not agree on limiting creativity on a legitimate environment the game has been officially released for. If they've introduced different bugs when preparing that release, why should we decide "no it's not a legitimate environment, don't trust the official publisher, we know better"? Why exactly banning one of the options (the one where the resulting gameplay looks different enough) makes things better?
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
If they've introduced different bugs when preparing that release, why should we decide "no it's not a legitimate environment, don't trust the official publisher, we know better"?
If they introduced the bug directly into the game itself, I'd say the bug is legitimate, go ahead and use it.
But if the bug is a result of the software used to run the game as part of that release, then I'd say it isn't legitimate.
It's not that we know better. I'm sure Nintendo is aware of most of these bugs as well, and they just don't care about preserving the original game play. It's about the fact we are able to differentiate between the game itself, and other software. We know when a bug is part of the game itself or not.
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: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Nach wrote:
It's not that we know better. I'm sure Nintendo is aware of most of these bugs as well, and they just don't care about preserving the original game play. It's about the fact we are able to differentiate between the game itself, and other software. We know when a bug is part of the game itself or not.
Once again you're making it sound like publishing 2 different runs that look differently, on 2 different platforms, is completely impossible, unacceptable, bad for the site, and obviously wrong.
Also:
feos wrote:
Why exactly banning one of the options (the one where the resulting gameplay looks different enough) makes things better?
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
Nach wrote:
It's not that we know better. I'm sure Nintendo is aware of most of these bugs as well, and they just don't care about preserving the original game play. It's about the fact we are able to differentiate between the game itself, and other software. We know when a bug is part of the game itself or not.
Once again you're making it sound like publishing 2 different runs that look differently, on 2 different platforms, is completely impossible, unacceptable, bad for the site, and obviously wrong.
Why is it wrong when we publish a run which uses an emulator bug from one of our emulators?
And before you jump to answer that, bear in mind that some companies are reselling their old console games as PC games, making use of some of our emulators, bugs and all.
feos wrote:
Also:
feos wrote:
Why exactly banning one of the options (the one where the resulting gameplay looks different enough) makes things better?
Exact same as above. Should we be publishing the results of relying on emulator bugs?
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.
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 always understood that to mean different game versions, where later versions might tweak some weapons, move some enemies around, change the resolution, and so on.
If we're talking about the exact same game version, but played in different platforms that may somehow alter the way the exact same game is ran, that rule/guideline doesn't exactly cover it.
You can argue that we should extrapolate based on that to how it's ran as well, but I'm not certain we should, otherwise I think we also have to allow emulator bugs to be utilized, even in emulators we make and approve of.
Please ponder the situation, because I don't think it's anywhere near as clear cut to start allowing the newer platforms with the exact same game.
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.
It's slightly off topic, but I'm going to throw in some thoughts here regarding SGB.
There are literally NO games designed to be played on the SGB as the primary system for playing the game. Every game released with SGB enhancements was first and foremost intended to be a GB or CGB game. From the perspective of playing games on the systems for which they were originally designed, we really should question why SGB would ever be preferred over the same game in GB or CGB mode.
Further, SGB enhancements are almost entirely cosmetic (visual/auditory) variations; only a small percentage have gameplay impacted.
Of this list of games with SGB enhancements, only 31 out of 529 have multi-player support. I can find no other information on any game where the enhancements provided by the SGB offer anything new from a gameplay standpoint. So that leaves less than 6% of all SGB enhanced games having anything more than cosmetic variations when played on the SGB.
Of those 31 games with multiplayer support, I don't know if all are simultaneous multiplayer or if some are multiplayer via sequential turns. Many of those that could potentially have simultaneous multiplayer are fighting games; meaning that the additional multiplayer gameplay enhancement provided by the SGB would be effectively meaningless from a TASing perspective aiming for beating the game as rapidly as possible. It's also possible that the multiplayer aspects of these games that the SGB allows could be just as effectively played using link cables.
The SGB (at least the original version) itself also has faster CPU timing than the handheld systems for which the games were developed. It could be argued that (at least in some cases) this difference potentially alters gameplay from what was intended.
TL:DR
If we're going to be making the argument that games must be TASed by emulating the original intended hardware, we should never prefer SGB over GB; because SGB was never the primary intended hardware for any game regardless of whether SGB enhancements are present. If developers had wanted the SNES to be the primary system that their game was played, they would have created a SNES game, not a GB game.
The SGB was nothing more than a gimmick for Nintendo to sell more systems. There's nothing gained by TASing a game in SGB mode regarding any new game content that wouldn't be available TASing the game in standard GB or CGB mode.
TL:DR #2
None of this post suggests what should be done regarding allowing GB in CGB games or not, but it should cause us to question why we'd prefer SGB mode over standard handheld modes.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
DrD2k9 wrote:
There are literally NO games designed to be played on the SGB as the primary system for playing the game. Every game released with SGB enhancements was first and foremost intended to be a GB or CGB game. From the perspective of playing games on the systems for which they were originally designed, we really should question why SGB would ever be preferred over the same game in GB or CGB mode.
If this were true, then why did HudsonSoft put out games that appear correctly with an SGB, but look squished on a DMG or CGB? They clearly designed some for the SNES resolution and not the DMG/CGB.
DrD2k9 wrote:
If developers had wanted the SNES to be the primary system that their game was played, they would have created a SNES game, not a GB game.
This is a good argument. However, there are reasons why a company might have done this, namely to get more sales for their game because it also runs on another platform.
I don't know if you know this, but later on in the SNES's life, Nintendo was selling SNESs with a bundled SGB and an additional game.
Making an SGB game at that time allowed you more market reach than just an SNES game which was restricted to that one console.
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: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Nach wrote:
Why is it wrong when we publish a run which uses an emulator bug from one of our emulators?
And before you jump to answer that, bear in mind that some companies are reselling their old console games as PC games, making use of some of our emulators, bugs and all.
Should we be publishing the results of relying on emulator bugs?
I don't see a problem with TASing the officially released bundle, with or without bugs within that bundle. It's how it's been released by the publisher, so people are playing it that way and experiencing those same bugs. They could've fixed those bugs, but they haven't. Exactly how we TAS original games with bugs that devs could've fixed.
Bugs in unofficial emulators are not okay, because those don't belong to the release people are meant to be playing, on the original system without any extra layers.
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
Nach wrote:
Why is it wrong when we publish a run which uses an emulator bug from one of our emulators?
And before you jump to answer that, bear in mind that some companies are reselling their old console games as PC games, making use of some of our emulators, bugs and all.
Should we be publishing the results of relying on emulator bugs?
I don't see a problem with TASing the officially released bundle, with or without bugs within that bundle.
You're opening up the door to quite a lot with this statement. Capcom has released their CPS-1 library multiple times with different versions of MAME. Their NES library with different NES emulators. I've seen Acclaim, Accolade, and Midway sell some of their SNES games bundled with Snes9x 1.43 - illegally at that, or Mednafen. I'm sure there's plenty more that I haven't seen.
feos wrote:
It's how it's been released by the publisher, so people are playing it that way and experiencing those same bugs. They could've fixed those bugs, but they haven't. Exactly how we TAS original games with bugs that devs could've fixed.
This also gets into a gray area. Who is the publisher in various areas? Many Asian countries don't respect copyright law of other countries. In Iran or China you can walk into a store and purchase a DVD or flash drive from a respectable Iranian or Chinese company loaded up with many video games and popular emulators, and it's legal there. They're using various versions of FBA, MAME, Snes9x, mGBA, DeSmuME, Mupen64, PCSX, and more. Billions of people have access to these, and between that and those importing off of AliExpress, quite probably most people on the planet that have experienced the most popular games have done so via these emulators.
I imagine that you've seen similar things in stores in Russia.
feos wrote:
Bugs in unofficial emulators are not okay, because those don't belong to the release people are meant to be playing, on the original system without any extra layers.
What's official or not, and meant to be playing really depends on where you live.
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.
Ambassador, Moderator, Site Developer, Player
(155)
Joined: 3/17/2018
Posts: 358
Location: Holland, MI
I want to make a point along the lines of what happened with the Pokemon Gold coin case run. In that TAS it was decided that the glitch wasn't interesting/unique enough for publication since the advent of much faster ACE exploits. It could similarly be argued that TASing on emulated GBA isn't unique enough to warrant separate publication from emulated GB, or even more extreme separate from Nintendo's VC releases. However, ultimately the TASer will always make the choice of which platform is the most important to TAS, all the judge can really do is say if it fits vault/moons/stars tier or none. If emulating non-release systems were flat banned all it could do is drive away people who have reasons to research other combinations of system+game.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Nach wrote:
You're opening up the door to quite a lot with this statement. Capcom has released their CPS-1 library multiple times with different versions of MAME. Their NES library with different NES emulators. I've seen Acclaim, Accolade, and Midway sell some of their SNES games bundled with Snes9x 1.43 - illegally at that, or Mednafen. I'm sure there's plenty more that I haven't seen.
We could also limit this to just VC, at least for now.
First of all, we can't even know if they used any of the emulators available on the internet, or made their own. Since randomly substituting games in the VC layer doesn't always result in a playable game, those could be either barebones emulators targeting only specific games, or not even emulators in the usual sense, but running some game programs on actual hardware. Nintendo said about VC SMB that “emulation program in question was created by Nintendo internally”, and I couldn't find evidence disproving that.
Second, I feel strongly against requiring people to fiddle with officially shipped game images. We've only ever allowed it in cases when the game would've been simply unTASable otherwise, and now outright require it unless the extracted image itself doesn't work? That breaks the authentic connection between the game image and the environment it was made for (using an existing game image as a foundation in this case, also belonging to that copyright holder). It's the same as requiring that the game gets patched. And most importantly, this "patch" may directly affect how the game was meant to be played on that platform.
Third, if we require extracting those games, we should ensure that it comes from the actual VC release, and that it was extracted cleanly, without additional edits. This will have to be verified by the judge, by reproducing the extraction process and comparing the results to what was used in the movie, or by comparing what was used in the movie to some "known good" database. Does such a database exist, like we have redump for example?
Finally, are we sure extracting games in this manner is perfectly legal?
Nach wrote:
This also gets into a gray area. Who is the publisher in various areas? Many Asian countries don't respect copyright law of other countries. In Iran or China you can walk into a store and purchase a DVD or flash drive from a respectable Iranian or Chinese company loaded up with many video games and popular emulators, and it's legal there. They're using various versions of FBA, MAME, Snes9x, mGBA, DeSmuME, Mupen64, PCSX, and more. Billions of people have access to these, and between that and those importing off of AliExpress, quite probably most people on the planet that have experienced the most popular games have done so via these emulators.
We don't want emulators to be illegally used in such bundles of course, and we don't want bootleg bundles. But we can't suspect VC releases in any of that so far.
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 it's also worth pointing out here that over the past couple of years, several of the examples of running GB games in GBC mode and making TASes of them, with the goal of console verification, has directly lead to significant advancement in emulation accuracy. Its been good for the site, good for the pokemon people, good for emulator devs. , and really helped advance the state of the art.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
So back to Gameboy.
I finally read the linked thread about problems in GBx games in later modes. They don't seem to even discuss all those "subtledifferences" only old DMG experts can spot. They talk about games that either don't run at all, or have obvious glitches in audio or graphics.
Some games weren't explicitly designed for GBC or GBA modes, even though those platforms try to enhance them explicitly, by having certain colors for certain games coded in the boot ROM. Previously, the rules didn't evenmean to stick to "platform the game was released for". And the latest revision doesn't address games with slightly enhanced graphics in GBC. But Mothrayas said that disallowing GB-in-GBC was an oversight, not an intention.
People that support GB-in-GBC are those who currently contribute to GBx emulator coding, to GBx console verification, and to GBx TASing. If that doesn't make the demand legitimate, I don't know what does. In addition to those, staff members also agreed (here and on discord) that unless there are obvious problems with newer modes, console verification is a good enough reason to allow those modes.
Suggested rule.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode hinder gameplay, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode are obvious to unarmed eye/ear in normal viewing conditions, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode can't be easily noticed and don't hinder gameplay, the newer mode is allowed for the sake of console verification.
If newer mode doesn't cause any glitches at all, it's allowed.
Categorization seems to need that publications of DMG games are labeled as GB, but how do we automate that in the parser?
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.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
feos wrote:
Suggested rule.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode hinder gameplay, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode are obvious to unarmed eye/ear in normal viewing conditions, we don't want that mode.
If glitches that are caused by newer mode can't be easily noticed and don't hinder gameplay, the newer mode is allowed for the sake of console verification.
If newer mode doesn't cause any glitches at all, it's allowed.
Looks good to me, though I think we need a little more clarification on "obvious" in that second bullet point. How much should be considered obvious here? If an enemy sprite is noticeably corrupted, but that enemy only appears a couple times over the course of a 15+ minute TAS, then would that be enough to warrant a rejection? Or would audio/visual glitches need to be everpresent and deeply hurt watchability for the run to reach that point?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
I think if a graphical glitch or a broken sound tone/tune is apparent for several seconds, or distributed around the run in an obvious way (say, you can't accidentally miss it if you're watching normally), and it generally sticks out, then a different, non-glitched mode is required, and console verification would need a resynced movie instead.
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.
