Rabscuttle
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I thought I suggested this before, but I couldn't find it and Accelerated Flooding made me think of it again.

Add an option to the cut scene command so that the moves of the cut scene don't contribute to the final score.

It makes more sense to me that your score is the number of commands you input.

There are some other holds where scripting with cutscenes makes the scoring weird or boring.
e.g.
Beethro Budkin's Big Burrito Butt Blast - the cut scenes depend on the launch time - so you want to minimize roach flight time - two small blasts could be 'faster' than one big blast.
Chance for Paradise: Unstable Sewers - when you cut the tarstuff, it jumps to the next cycle. But it doesn't matter how much you do before you actually break the tarstuff - hitting it immediately vs hitting it one turn before spawn counts as the same.
I also get a little annoyed when there's a cutscene before a final boss fight that inflates the movecount by a couple of hundred moves.

There's probably some other interesting things you could script up with this, like "hit command to jump to next spawn cycle" which could make rooms where you have to wait for tarstuff to grow to hit a button more interesting.

averagemoe
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Forget making it a command. This should be the default.

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hyperme
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This is theoretically possible, as there's a special internal command for advancing a cutscene, but it would make determining the length of a demo more "expensive" since you'd need to do something more complicated that looking at how long the command vector is. (edit: actually I think there are other commands that don't count towards the scored length so that's one less concern)

There's also the spider-side implications where there's a need to recalculate every demo from 3.0 holds onwards in case they have cutscene commands. Given that a validation run of every #1 score takes a couple of hours, this would chew up a lot of resources. But it would have to be done in order to ensure the sudden change in scoring rules aren't completely unfair to people who have already optimised the rooms under the current rules.

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[Last edited by hyperme at 07-15-2024 10:34 AM]

Rabscuttle
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Yeah, I wouldn't want to change existing scores now. But it'd be nice if it were an option for the future.

averagemoe
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You wouldn't need to recalculate every single post 3.0 demo. We already have a system for determining whether a room is scorable, and most cutscenes don't happen in puzzle rooms. You could further narrow it down by getting the overlap between that list, and searching for the cutscene command in this tool.

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hyperme
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Hmm, the tool suggests a little under 900 rooms have cutscenes. Makes the situation much more viable, although I except some manual wrangling would be required for cutscene commands in default scripts. (Although that shouldn't add too many more rooms)

Technically this isn't of a concern if there's a new way to use the cutscene command that doesn't affect older rooms but that has it's own wacky wiring issues.

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Doom
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Pretty sure the above tool is missing a lot of rooms. Tried feeding it several specific ones and didn't get any matches. A couple from the latest hold (Accelerated Flooding), another few from an older hold (A Walk in the Park, Jan2023).

Rabscuttle wrote:
Yeah, I wouldn't want to change existing scores now. But it'd be nice if it were an option for the future.

On the other hand, I'd prefer a consistent scoring system. Having cutscenes scored in half the holds, unscored in the rest doesn't sound ideal. Imagine a second conquer-token that doesn't end scoring, just because a bunch of scores can be trivialized with decoys. If a change were to be made, changing all cutscenes feels preferable over a cutscene flag.

On the other hand, it's worth asking if this is even a problem. It affects a very small percentage of rooms and equally for all demos. Even if changed, it doesn't eliminate cutscene-gaming entirely. Any score with forced waiting could be improved if you can find ways to trigger cutscenes during such idle periods.

edit: One more thing, there's at least one existing hold that uses cutscenes as a deliberate score penalty for enabling easy-mode (Hold Title Mixup Contest Compilation: When You Wish Upon a Tar)

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[Last edited by Doom at 07-15-2024 11:40 PM]

Schik
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Doom wrote:
Pretty sure the above tool is missing a lot of rooms. Tried feeding it several specific ones and didn't get any matches. A couple from the latest hold (Accelerated Flooding), another few from an older hold (A Walk in the Park, Jan2023).

I ran the parser to include all current holds. That said, it's not the most fully tested code ever, I wouldn't use it as a 100% definitely correct in all cases kinda tool anyways.

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