SMS Community Todo (May 2021)

Reviewing the 2021 todo ahead of writing the 2022 one. This was from a time before questions of victim protection and archiving became front-and-centre. All is still my opinion! ✔️⌛❌

Overall Priorities

  1. Taking ownership of a community website. ❌
  2. Writing content to address basic FAQs. ❌
  3. Publishing draft teaching material that’s lying around. ❌
  4. Movement fundamentals tutorial. ❌
  5. Comprehensive modern tutorial coverage. ❌
  6. IL leaderboard-viewing + verification. ✔️
  7. Move the IL meta to a public discord. ✔️
  8. Practice codes: reloads into specific Delfino positions. ❌

The big goals around ILs were achieved but around resources, not at all. The community and moderators alike still lack a sense of collective ownership and responsibility for resources, and no major initiatives came towards them. #8 was a bottleneck for optimising the rta meta at the time, but the community has deprioritised that since late 2021 so it’s fallen out of the spotlight.

Website

  1. Articles for FAQs ❌
    1. Where do I start? (1) What to play, (2) setup, (3) learning strategies. ❌
      1. What to play? Any%, 120, ILs, Bingo, other cats.
      2. Setup: versions, cap cards, obs, livesplit, homebrew/emu.
      3. Strategy: how to learn movement, consistency, different cats-vs-skills.
    2. Homebrew + region unlocking guide. ❌
    3. Emulator setup guide. ❌
    4. Version differences. ⌛
  2. Collating useful links; top-down site structure. ✔️
  3. Migrate everything off Speedrun.com onto website. ❌
  4. A page for every shine with recommended learning material. ❌
  5. A collection of TASes. ❌

Progress was made towards consolidating links to disparate resources, but aside from a draft version difference doc, no new material was produced.

Tuition

  1. Movement fundamentals. ❌
  2. [redo] GBS and beginner EYG. ❌
  3. Example videos for every linear shine at various difficulties. ❌
  4. Sirena Whenever. ✔️
  5. Pianta 1 flowchart. ❌
  6. Detailed Pianta 5S. ❌
  7. Detailed Pinna 1. ❌

Two Sirena Whenever tutorials turned up but nothing for the other priorities.

IL Leaderboard

  1. [new tech] Introduce per-level leaderboard viewing. ✔️
  2. [new tech] Introduce systematic verification. ✔️
  3. Address the fairness and verification of emulator resetting. ✔️
  4. [new tech] Transition from spreadsheet to database/frontends program. ❌
  5. [new tech] Start doing retimes using frame timestamps rather than counts. ❌
  6. [new tech] Start tracking WR histories. ❌

Big advances were made towards the integrity of IL competition and the visibility of data, but ILs still remain limited by Google Sheets infrastructure and poor tracking of data and backups of videos (which notably resulted in the loss of the first-ever double–cycle-skip IL and the current wiggler WR). On the backups front, resilience to data loss due to abuse cases has been good, but not systematic.

Practice Codes

Long-Term

  1. [new tech] Timer that counts physics ticks for ILs (quarter-frames). ⌛
  2. Full source-code documentation (meaning prose!). ❌
  3. [new tech] SGT persistence thru IGT resets (like Ricco 2). ⌛

Big progress was made towards the long-term tech of future ILs and practice, but finalisation is yet to happen. Source-code documentation remains an obstacle to democratising contributions and legislator knowledge, but individual hacking efforts have been fruitful.

Short-Term [new tech]

  1. [new tech] Reloads into specific Delfino positions (spawns + shine-get states). ❌
  2. [new tech] Freeze SGT on blue-coin textboxes. ❌
  3. [new tech] Level auto-reset. ⌛
  4. [new tech] Togglable pos/ang display. ❌

Almost no progress on short-term goals, though the draft solution to #3 looks promising. Goals #1 and #2 have fallen in importance because of reduced energy to optimise rta and bingo metas.

R&D

  1. Statistical sample of loads (hence load timing). ❌
  2. [new tech] Automatic video-based IL/load timer. ❌

No progress on understanding loads or automatic retiming.

Community

  1. Move the IL meta into a public discord. ✔️
  2. Address the dominance of bingo on community Twitch channels. [N/A]
  3. Generate some initiative for non-bingo event planning, e.g. RTA leagues. ✔️

Great strides have been made to address community problems, and the community is much more open and balanced than it was this time last year; I put an N/A on #2 because of widespread disagreement with it haha.