I just remembered those times when I was trying to do something really hard, loading and loading state, and when I finally did it, I loaded state instead of saving. XD
EDIT: There were also times that I was working in the movie file, and then after a while noticed that I was playing with read-only mode and movie was "Finished".
Do you remember another stupid and funny case?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I've had that exact experience multiple times.
I tried making this amazing clip of running through enemies in a very exciting fashion, spending 20 minutes on it, reloading constantly. Finally got the results I wanted on the first half, figured I'd save it, then come back later for the second, and hit load -_-.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
Throughout many years of TASing I've accumulated many silly ways of losing work. Fortunately modern emulators are better at avoiding some of these issues, but especially in the times of PCSX-rr, DeSmuME-rr, FBA-rr and so on I've had some funny things happen.
- Lose a bit of progress because I pressed the loadstate button instead of savestate
- Lose a bit of progress because I did savestate, but then overwrote the savestate with something else
- Lose progress because of a desync introduced by having a RAM cheat or RAM freeze enabled while recording
- Lose progress because of a desync introduced by a Lua script that poked in RAM to similar effect while recording
- Lose progress because while TASing I failed to realize that no movie file was loaded (for emulators that didn't give an obvious indication that a movie file was/wasn't loaded)
- Lose progress because I worked from a savestate of an unoptimized testrun instead of the actual run
- Lose progress because I worked from a savestate that belonged to a different movie file entirely (this could happen with some old DeSmuME-rr versions if I remember correctly)
- Lose progress because I accidentally changed some sync settings (intended for an other run) in the middle of a movie (DeSmuME-rr again)
- Lose a day of work because I didn't bother running the movie file to verify sync, and the movie desynced immediately near the start due to some obscure loadstate bug
- Lose a couple days of work because the emulator crashed and corrupted the movie file mid-crash (thanks PCSX-rr)
- Lose several days of work because the entire hard drive crashed and the movie file could not be recovered (make external backups often, people)
- Not make any progress at all for a day because FBA-rr decided it is Guru Meditation day (randomly crashed every minute)
Fun times.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Not sure it counts but during one of the resyncs of the PCSX resync project, I was just about done with syncing the entire movie, but right at the end I accidentally hit the power button to my computer because the keyboard I had plugged in has a power button right in the middle of the board for whatever reason. That made me angry.
Had to restart the whole resyncing process because of it.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
I just remembered those times when I was trying to do something really hard, loading and loading state, and when I finally did it, I loaded state instead of saving. XD
I wonder if emulators could have some kind of automatic backup system for precisely this kind of thing. In other words, it remembers the last n seconds/minutes of input no matter what, and offers a way to retrieve that input in case of accidental savestate loading.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3574)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Bloopiero wrote:
There are 'Undo Load State' hotkeys, which seems like a much more efficient solution
Yeah, I coded those into BizHawk and FCEUX many years ago for exactly that scenario.
And to add to the stories:
Spent all day working on a difficult section and finally got to the end. Found out I wasn’t even recording.
I like to imagine people like adelikat are glad they’re emulator coders since they can fix any inconvenience they might experience during tasing.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
Spent all day working on a difficult section and finally got to the end. Found out I wasn’t even recording.
Well, there's another idea: Perhaps some kind of "always record" persistent setting, which keeps some kind of buffer of the last hour or so of recording (configurable, of course).
A bit like how the PS4 is always recording your gameplay, and keeps the last 10 minutes of so. Thus if something particular happens you can save those last 10 minutes of video capture. (Nvidia, and probably AMD, also support this kind of thing on the PC side.)
Spent all day working on a difficult section and finally got to the end. Found out I wasn’t even recording.
Well, there's another idea: Perhaps some kind of "always record" persistent setting, which keeps some kind of buffer of the last hour or so of recording (configurable, of course).
A bit like how the PS4 is always recording your gameplay, and keeps the last 10 minutes of so. Thus if something particular happens you can save those last 10 minutes of video capture. (Nvidia, and probably AMD, also support this kind of thing on the PC side.)
openMSX records by default, allowing you to save your replay to file after the fact. I think that could be implemented in other emulators.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
scrimpeh wrote:
Warp wrote:
adelikat wrote:
Spent all day working on a difficult section and finally got to the end. Found out I wasn’t even recording.
Well, there's another idea: Perhaps some kind of "always record" persistent setting, which keeps some kind of buffer of the last hour or so of recording (configurable, of course).
A bit like how the PS4 is always recording your gameplay, and keeps the last 10 minutes of so. Thus if something particular happens you can save those last 10 minutes of video capture. (Nvidia, and probably AMD, also support this kind of thing on the PC side.)
openMSX records by default, allowing you to save your replay to file after the fact. I think that could be implemented in other emulators.
lsnes also does this.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 11/21/2019
Posts: 247
Location: Washington
This one isn't that devastating, but it has happened enough times to me now to have become really aggravating.
TAStudio open, at the end of my optimized inputs. Turn on recording mode so that I can pick up the controller and do some quick manual testing. Finish my testing, jump to a marker well before the end of the movie to make some changes. Unpause the emulator and watch as my movie seemingly desyncs. Realize later that recording mode was still on and it wiped out a bunch of input.
