Currently i'm interested in finding out exactly how difficult it is to detect a cheaty replay.
There is no objective difficulty ranking in detecting cheated replays, it's something you tell by experience. It doesn't actually matter "how difficult" it is anyways.
I tried out savestates with hourglass - Replay
Nothing you did was out of the ordinary at all. Given people already know how good you are, showing up with a score like that isn't surprising. I figure you could probably do that run without savestates. You know you cheated so you'd be killing any actual sense of accomplishment, even if you won a Touhou Tournament week from it or something. And that's the thing with this sort of cheating: as you get better as a player you're going to want to get even better and accomplish things on your own terms, so naturally the better you get the less attracted you'll be to the idea of cheating. We know you're good, and we know you got there by not cheating. If you get a name for yourself for being good at something (which is what a cheater
would do), then naturally people are going to want to see more from you, so that would trap a chronic cheater anyways. Ergo, the more you play, the less likely anyone else will think you're cheating. Even if someone who is normally awesome did cheat, they're only hurting themselves. Shmups aren't games where people are awarded money or anything by winning, and the only trophy you'd get for winning a competition is recognition, which you could probably get on your own merit anyways.
Everything in the replay file can be modified. Replay file contains stuff like FPS, slowdown, date, user name, movement, character, replay type, shot on/off, bomb, dialogue advance, game version etc. Looks like EoSD replays are encoded, because i can't find the date or user name in the replay file using a text editor. A touhou replay encoder and decoder would be handy. Maybe someone knows where to get one?
Please stop suggesting methods to encourage cheating that can be passed off as legitimate, in any case. That is the exact opposite of what everyone wants.
Sprite modification could be tested using Touhou Toolkit. I haven't tried it out.
Sprite modification in a form significant enough to call cheating is going to be fairly obvious in how they dodge things. Especially if we're talking about things like "replace bullet graphics with an approximation of their actual hitboxes".
read again please people
The whole point of using tools would be to do something well beyond your capability to brag to other people about (well, this is the only tool use worth calling out). These kinds of things would be considered more personal accomplishments, in which case you're only cheating yourself out of the satisfaction of doing them. Hiding tool use only really becomes an issue if the person was doing something that mattered to the majority of the community; eg. competing in high score threads or anything that involves direct competition with another person. If you're not competing with somebody else then it really doesn't matter if the replay was tool assisted or not. Play the games however you want.
In addition, tool assisted replays are usually on really difficult things that also span a long amount of time (eg. high score runs) so there are more places for the player to screw up hiding their tools (or demonstrate that those two or three amazing dodges were flukes). So for replays of such minimal length, it really doesn't matter if they're using tools or not since the accomplishment probably doesn't matter to many people and it's something you could probably fluke through if it's beyond your ability anyway (DS 9-7).
