[whateveracct]

You're wrong. There's wealths of information on gfycat. Maybe just not for things you know about.

For instance, smash melee used gfycat heavily. There is in depth analysis of the game using gfycat as visuals. There will be knowledge loss in that community in Sept 1.

[charcircuit]

>For instance, smash melee used gfycat heavily.

I can assure you melee uses Youtube much more heavily. Anything not currently hosted on YouTube can be reupload fairly easily.

[whateveracct]

There's definitely random small Reddit posts with mechanics or metagame insights that link to gfycat that are not on YT.

I agree rehosting isn't hard. But there will be information loss by the deadline without serious effort.

EDIT: This is reminding me to back up some niche twitter melee analysis given that whole situation.

[dragontamer]

The Smash community is technologically adept and will migrate and/or archive in time.

Honestly, I expected most of the information to be locally hosted on smashboards or their wiki. (And if not now, they will be soon).

I'm worried about other communities though.

[ilyt]

> The Smash community is technologically adept and will migrate and/or archive in time.

"technologically adept" and "uses gfycat instead of wiki or forum" is mutually exclusive

[swores]

Some of the most skilled tech people I know have had some of the most low-tech tech solutions in their non-professional lives (and sometimes similar on the professional side too), imo because they had the experience to spot ideas that were perfect for a simple use case despite seeming like a silly idea.

If gfycat provided them with an ideal - for what they and their users wanted - and free (I assume) way to host their clips that the community liked then apart from the eggs in one basket issue can you really say they made a bad decision? If (and sure it's a big 'if') they made sure everything was backed up and ready to easily move should something like this happen, then it could well have been an idea decision that worked well for years?

[dragontamer]

Those .gif animations were built by hacking a Gamecube emulator to display the hitboxes and hurtboxes of animations. Then playing those animations in the hacked emulator with the circles (red for hitbox, blue for hurtbox) overlaid with the characters and their animations.

At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.

---------

Yes. This is a very technically adept community. I'm not very much a part of them, but I can see the expert-level reverse engineering work needed to get this working.

And the knowledge won't be forever lost if it is lost. The importance of hitbox / hurtbox reverse-engineering is common in all fighting games (Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Super Smash Bros). The various communities always work on reverse-engineering all the frame-data and hitbox/hurtbox information ASAP whenever new fighting games come out, so that expert-level fighting game players know what their training routines should be.

[whateveracct]

> At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.

Actually this was possible before Dolphin existed. They did it on raw hardware. The devs left an extensive debug mode in with various displays like hitboxes. So a little Action Replay cheat was enough.

[whateveracct]

A lot of this niche stuff isn't hosted anywhere else. Smashboards doesn't have extensive content hosting and has always relied on other services. No way it's all archived by this deletion deadline.

[bagels]

How did the game depend on gfycat? Will the game break if Nintendo doesn't update for this?

[whateveracct]

The community relied on part on gfycat to host content about the game. There's a wealth of knowledge about the game outside of the game. As is standard for any competitive video game.