Pushed an update

- Added automatic checking for duplicate game processes. Secondary/background processes seem to cause odd behaviour in the primary game, so you'll want to close any of these duplicates. Warns you if this is detected.

This is perhaps an issue unique to VC, but is quite annoying. Somehow these background/dead processes spawn once in a while. If you get the warning, finish what you were doing (save game, replay etc), then open Task manager and check for a background gta- process. Close it, and perhaps restart your running game.

Nice video

Have almost no idea how hard these were, but looked sick.

- RepCopy -

Description:

This is a tool I've created that makes copying and backing up your replays a bit easier. In short, it uses keybinds to automatically backup the replay.rep in your user files, and places the new version in a safe location. The copied replays use Date+Time naming convention, and numerical increments after. This tool cannot overwrite backup replays.

The idea is to help a few annoyances:

Firstly - it means you don't have to tab out, or otherwise go into explorer and start renaming and copying reps, each time you F2. Can be useful for saving attempts without leaving the game.

Secondly - when landing a stunt, you can remain in game, and save multiple rep versions of the stunt with F2. Without ever having to leave the game.

Thirdly - combined with the above, it acts as a safeguard against tab in/out game crashes. VC in particular I've found quite crashy when tabbing in/out of the game. Which ofcourse you're doing if you're renaming replays and such. If your initial replay save of a stunt turns out to be bad, and your game crashes when you come back, you're fucked. With this you can take multiple reps, which adds an extra layer of safety.

Most of you are probably thinking "this sounds basically useless". Which for many, and in many situations, it probably is This is more meant as an extra layer of security for landing spots that take many, many hours. But, it can also make saving attempt replays easier, or help those dealing with particularly crashy reps, crashy games, or wanting multiple variations of the same stunt rep.

Binds:

F2 - Whenever you use this key to save a replay normally, RepCopy will wait a moment for the new replay to exist, then automatically backup the new replay.rep. Pressing F2 locks you out of using other RepCopy functions, for two seconds, to give the game ample time to create the new replay.rep.

F8 - Simply takes a manual backup of the replay.rep, whenever you want.

F9 (Toggle) - Deactivates RepCopy temporarily. This is so you can do things like use F2 for renaming purposes in explorer, without the program taking replay backups whenever you do so. Toggles lock/unlock. After two minutes of being locked, it will automatically reactivate again. This is to help ensure you haven't forgotten it's locked.

Additional Info:

- Backup replays are always placed in <User Files>/RepCopy/. If this directory does not exist when a backup replay is taken, the program will create this directory.

- RepCopy detects running instances of GTA-VC and GTA-SA. The shortcuts are only active when there is a running instance of one of these games.
   - If both games are running, a backup of both reps in each user files is taken (but wtf are you doing you psycho).

- I recommend keeping RepCopy running for any stunting sessions. You can even do things like creating shortcuts/batch files to automatically start it when you load into a GTA. Or launch it on startup.

- The sounds can be disabled via the Windows Volume Mixer. Or turned down.

- It does not interfere, or in any way interact with GTA itself, or the replay system. This is just file copies from within Windows.

- You should probably clear out the /RepCopy/ folder occasionally. It's not meant to be a permanent storage location, and it can fill quite quickly with clutter.

- Use with caution. I recommend still doing your own backups of replays, and in addition backing up reps in multiple locations (other drives, cloud services, etc).

- There's probably bugs. Let me know here if you find any.

Update 1.1:
- Added automatic checking for duplicate game processes. Secondary/background processes seem to cause odd behaviour in the primary game, so you'll want to close any of these duplicates. Warns you if this is detected.

30th April 2023 - Current Release (v1.1):

Windows Only (probably 7 onwards?)

Source:

My coding is bad pls no flame.

Future:

- It would be nice to detect whether GTA has focus, and only save replays if that is the case.

- It would be nice to speed up the lock/unlock time period. However for now I've been generous with the time window given, as I simply don't know how long the game will take to save a new replay, on old/slow drives.

Then go do them? What the fuck is this discussion 

You're allowed to do anything. Always have been.

What you'll get blasted for is trying to hide your TAS, your handling mods, your SACC binds, etc. And trying to pass these off as 'unmodded'. This is what Tack did, boxxx did, Tacojoe, Shadowsniper, and so on. Now Allbeast.

Discovered some new 'thing' that helps you land stuff? Should probably post it publicly and see what people think, especially when it's a major change. There's any number of methods you could use to manipulate the game into making stunts easier to land. Some will be considered legit. Some won't. If you're going to throw caution to the wind and start pumping out tons of reps and videos with this 'thing' whilst stating "I used a method" and trying to pass it as unmodded - sorry you're kind of a moron. That onus is on you for not understanding stunting, not caring, and not being upfront.

And again we don't see any reasonable counter argument to "space and time are included within physics". We just see incoherent squealing about "I'M NOT MODDER", "ME NUMBER ONE". Nor will any of his sycophants offer any reasonable counter, just more of the same "HE'S THE BEST, BETTER THAN BARNEY!!!". No surprise these are the last remaining DSS dregs or overinvested randoms that edited his videos.

Save states brought up new discussion, new possibilities and keeps the scene active in one way or another. Who knows where this is going to lead. Either stunting dies because of this, or it evolves in new kind of ways that could be interesting. I hope it will be the second option.

The bad thing was how save states were introduced. If you were honest about it from the beginning, people probably would have reacted differently.

There's no progress here. The overwhelming majority don't want to use VM for a variety of reasons. Not least because it robs the soul of stunting, rendering it down to a joyless zero-sum game where anyone can land anything within the bounds of possibility. And furthermore because it's so crushingly tedious having to deal with slow VM save/reloads, pause/unpause and so on.

Even if you argue that "it could be used to prove possibility". Yeah, no, that's easily done with tools and knowledge we've had for more or less two decades. Want to find out if big air thing is possible? Find the max potential runup speed, mod the handling to give you that speed 100% of the time. Throw a few hours at it. Functionally the exact same as VMing a runup and recycling it for a few hours - in fact doing this without VM will be way more time efficient.

Want to know how to execute some grind combo? Segment it and admin console speed binds to execute parts in isolation. Then it's relatively straightforward to work out the likelyhood of the combo being doable. None of this is new or exciting.

How he 'introduced' this doesn't really matter. Public reaction, doesn't really matter. It falls quite neatly within the bounds of a cheat/TAS/mod/whatever terminology your coping mechanisms desire. Just as it has done in any other game where VM has been tried.

After Siasin, I'd be really surprised if there's any significant VM usage from this point onwards. Undoubtably allbeast will continue to use it and perhaps release stuff - wouldn't expect any less than that. At this point it's his one and only notable 'achievement' and core to his identity in this tiny scene. At one time it was dumb player and bike skins. Now it's VM. But for the rest - probably not gonna see much. Maybe the odd wannabe trying to release a 'holy grail' stunt or make a name for themselves. But it sure as fuck won't be endemic.

every stunt video is modded since "main.scm" is modified. messing with internal game files is modding i guess

Correct. Which is why the term "modding" has never been used to describe exclusely stunts which have been influenced by changing game files.

Instead, it refers to basically anything that is 'cheating'. Trainers, handling, cheat engine, collision editing, now VM.

Quote from: Airbrush on January 13, 2023, 06:28:47 PM

How did anyone not consider it modding?

It's not possible to open vanilla sa and do the stunts you did. You need savestates, a seperate tool from vanilla sa to do the spots you did. A modification. A mod.

savestates allow you to do only possible stunts, but save time

You can literally just change handling to give you optimal runups every attempt. So long as the stunt is possible naturally, it's just a 'time saver'.

Braindead argument.

In any case these idiots don't have any place here anymore. Banned from the discord, and from what I understand it's actually active with good discussion in their abscence. Now they're falling back to the forums to spam their nonsense. Time to get rid and move on.

Quote from: VaNilla on December 18, 2022, 10:07:54 PM

I usually save 5-10 replays whenever I land a VC/SA stunt, by saving one replay, alt tabbing to make a copy, and repeating the process until I have multiple replay backups - this helps sidestep the risk of corruption.

I'm a bit curious about this one, have you ever done this and had one of the replays been corrupted but not the others?
From the source code of the game (at least in VC, not super knowledgable about SA) the saving functionality is just writing data directly from a buffer in memory. Any corruption is likely to have happened in this buffer rather than during the writing itself (although not impossible I suppose), so saving multiple of what would ultimately be the same corrupted buffer likely wouldn't fix anything, at least in my head.

I've had a couple of cases where corruption seemed to occur when F3ing quickly after F2. Or just fat fingering the keys. I figured it was probably something to do with the game attempting to access the file whilst it's still being written, but not too sure.

The problem for me with the saving multiple reps option is in VC I get crashes fairly regularly when alt-tabbing or maximizing the game again. Seems to be common no matter the executable I use. Having said that, it's no added risk I guess since unless you have the file state viewable on a second screen, you wouldn't know if the rep is corrupted or not until you tab out anyway. Which I've considered doing. But it's kinda a pain in the ass.

Maybe at some point we could have a tool that verifies rep integrity without erasing the replay buffer (i.e. via F3). Would let you resave via F2 if something went wrong.

Would also say my corruption fears stem mostly from my SA days where I lost a handful of reps to it. In VC it doesn't seem as frequent.