Fix faulty entrance/exit captioning in Mega Man scenes?

[schrum2]

This is low priority, but I don't want it forgotten. Issue #164 made mention of incorrect captions on Mega Man scenes about where the entrance/exit directions are. Clearly, we should try to fix the captioning to be accurate. This is something that I thought Olivia did, so I wonder if she didn't get it right or if something we did broke it (run the code in the main branch to see if it also has the same mistakes).

In any case, we might not even want to maintain the concept of entrance/exit locations in the captions as we shift to working with larger levels (such as Mega Man Maker levels #147 ). That's why this is low priority and I don't necessarily want you working on this right now. In the long run, we either need to fix the entrance/exit details, or simply remove them entirely.

[fwilson12]

The current entrance/exit direction assignment actually happens during data creation and it works by detecting which way the sliding window used to traverse a given megaman level is moving; i.e., while the sliding window is moving left to right across a corridor, it assigns each sample resulting from that left-to-right movement the corresponding entrance and exit directions. Moving around corners/changing directions is also accounted for, but can still be inconsistent with the 16x14 scenes it was designed for. This is why the directionality assignment is so much worse for the larger scenes, as the larger scenes use the same 16x14 window to traverse the level, but simply capture a larger number of tiles around it. I had initially attempted having larger scenes snake through a level like how the 16x14 scenes did, but ran into a ton of issues with the way the original code was written.

With all that said, I agree that entrace/exit designation is not appropriate for sufficiently large scenes that contain multiple segments, so for now I think it's fine if we leave the issue be.

[schrum2]

From what I understand, the entrace/exit directions are added to the LevelsAndCaptions dataset automatically (taking data from the previous step). I don't want to lose this capability, even though it needed to be fixed, but I do want to disable it. Turn off the entrace/exit directions by default, but add a command line argument that allows entrance/exit directions to be turned back on.

We should not include this information in captions for larger sample sizes moving forward.

Once you make this change, I'll remove you from the issue (properly fixing the labels will remain an issue for a later time)

[schrum2]

I don't want the code to be assigning incorect entrance/exit directions to scenes. Currently, we don't really use this feature at all, and it is disabled by default. However, this issue will remain open until we either fix the entrance/exit assignment, or completely remove entrance/exit assignments from the code. Not sure yet which one I want.

[schrum2]

I'm opening up some issues for you to work on in the final days of SURF. All other issues (and the poster) take priority over this. However, if you have time:

The debate in this thread is whether we should remove entrance/exit information or properly fix it. I would like you to fix it, but also make the inclusion of these phrases in deterministic captions be optional (by command line parameter ... this may already exist). The goal here is to make sure entrance/exit definitions for the original VGLC data are all correct. Although there are thousands of samples in this data, I think you should be able to check every sample. The corners are the most important ones, but I think there are fewer than 100 corners in the entire dataset. Vertical segments are trickier. Most are horizontal. The fact that the data scans sequentially should help you check the correctness, because if you go through the data in order, you only need to notice when the value changes.