Rerecording emulators have been tracking rerecord numbers (how many times you loaded a movie savestate) for a long time, and they've become a standard stat for TASVideos publications. There were only a few exceptions:
- Movies where a brute-force kinda tool was used (usually called a bot), for which we used to exclude botted rerecords from the main count
- Movies where the real rerecord count is not known, and we set it to 0, which the site parses as "unknown"
- Movies where the rerecord count doesn't reflect the real picture, but was left as is
- Movies where the rerecord count was set to some arbitrary value
Over the years, some questions about how rerecords are tracked and used on the site have accumulated.
In an ideal scenario, no rerecords are lost or bloated, and a well done movie usually has a rerecord count that is bigger than the frame count. Which usually makes people who love statistics happy, because they can appreciate the work that went into the movie. But...
- Sometimes low rerecord count is used as a reason to question the movie, without actually looking into its optimality, and sometimes authors are even asked questions about why the number is so low.
- Rerecords cannot reflect research and development behind the scenes
- Some people work with several movies at once, and their rerecords don't even reflect their actual TAS work (unless they explicitly sum everything up)
- Regardless of research and development, rerecords can be set to an arbitrary number, which makes them a completely meaningless stat in those cases
- Even legitimately high rerecord counts won't tell a lot about actual movie quality, because to understand it one has to understand the underlying challenge, which in turn requires facing the same problems as the author did. And that may be impossible because the ground work has already been done, or if the author is good at writing, it can be described in the submission text
So we started wondering if it still makes a whole lot of sense to keep tracking rerecords on the site the way we've been doing it all along, or maybe something is worth updating. For example I wouldn't want low rerecord count to be used as an argument against the movie, or even authors anticipating it and explaining in advance why it's low. Movie quality should be assessed by actual gameplay. On the other hand, making rerecord display optional on the site (or even removing it entirely) would imply more dev work, and maybe some people actually want to show this stat about their movie.
So I'm asking for opinions, and I got an idea myself. What if we hide rerecords on the site and don't use it in publications, unless the author has provided it in the submission description?
Pressing it later gives 9.58 and disqualification.
If that's a much of an ending as we can get, it's what we should get. After all the goal of a movie is not to create a working save file, but to trigger the most reasonable ending. Sure some movies glitch the game so hard that including the entire ending becomes a problem, but they still have at least a part of it.
The submission as is syncs fine and has this SaveRAM:
CRC32: 72DDB7E7
MD5: CE060C1415F9C4A72376B3B155DFBC6E
SHA-1: D3F1C53E0D81A97D29045261599AA68C2AAD7571
Sync:
WarHippy, how exactly did you create the movie then?