Xindaris
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It comes up when trying to do a collaborative hold, or compile a contest compilation, that when the rooms were being tested originally they were in different levels, different locations in the same levels, or even in entirely different holds, but you still want to be able to get those demos so you can show the HA and everyone else that the rooms really are solvable. This is currently impossible, with the horrid workaround of trying to make videos of all the demos and then play back every single move from those demos yourself, which in a room with hundreds to thousands of turns in its solution can be a real pain to try and do, and nobody's really volunteering.

It would be very helpful to have some kind of tool that can "migrate" a demo (change what room its internal data says it's for) from any room in any hold to any other room in any other hold. Obviously if the rooms don't match it'll just produce a corrupted "do nothing" demo, and if the room in the new hold doesn't exist it'll just fail to import like normal, but if they do match it would be extremely convenient for anyone involved in the kind of work I'm talking about here. I seriously doubt there's any way to use this sort of tool to "cheat". (It could be fun to play around with though)

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 07-24-2017 05:08 PM]

Insoluble
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I definitely like this idea as this kind of thing does seem to come up a lot. We'd have to be careful with it though.

Xindaris wrote: I seriously doubt there's any way to use this sort of tool to "cheat". (It could be fun to play around with though)

One major way this could be used to cheat is to construct a demo that begins at a starting location that you wouldn't normally be able to start at. Similarly you could construct a demo with an alternate player role that wouldn't normally be possible. That could potentially be used to seriously cheese high scores. In theory, it's probably possible for someone with sufficient programming skills to do this already, but it's probably best to avoid making it easier since there's no way (that I'm aware of) for the spider to check for this.

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Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

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I hadn't thought of uploading demos to get high scores. You could put on some kind of "invalid for high scores" flag on any pasted-in demo, since the intended purpose of this is not high scores, after all.

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uncopy2002
Level: Smiter
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Schik obviously has a tool for this, because he opened it for public use during the Endless Puzzles contest.

Also, *cough* in case anyone doesn't remember, we already have people who have cheated on CNet by using impossible entrances quite a lot of times, so I'd say it's a kinda highly noticable thing.

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[Last edited by uncopy2002 at 07-25-2017 01:34 AM]