It's all in your head

[blossom]

but if this forum/the non-Japanese community was going to come up with the answer for free it would have happened already

I don't understand, mikejmoffitt had been working on this for months before the bounty was placed. I assume Plasmo knew this, because zakk mentioned earlier today on Discord how mike has been at work on tearing apart DDP. In which case the motive of this thread is unclear to me, because as mike said, a bounty would have the effect of stifling teamwork, which would leave us exactly where we started.

[Plasmo]

Meanwhile in the speedrun community there's this $10k bounty for SM64: https://youtu.be/qBsmJVqpGIc

That was recently claimed by a player in a live setting no less: https://youtu.be/GOpwZW3E4Pc

Do we want to see something like that in the shmups community? Or is this really just a very bad, totally unexciting idea?

Do we really want to stay as niche as possible with full force? Do we want to complain about secret strategies and elitism on a daily basis or do we actually want to do something and speak up against this?

Quo vadis, shmups community?

[Bananamatic]

i'd rather play final fantasy

[Sumez]

What’s the problem with the reward???

This has already been discussed. It effectively discourages information sharing.

I do think though that it's a good point that the existence of this glitch has been known for a while, and nothing has come out of it, so something to push the effort could help. I'm guessing there might also be an ulterior motive to push one of the people who already knows the details into spilling the beans?

I'll also admit though that I never really thought too hard about this. I'm not a DDP player, but I had heard of this glitch before and I just figured that it would be shared eventually, or that people were already working on uncovering it, so I just didn't pay it any mind. At least this bounty could give the issue some attention.

and all this talk of elitism,if someone has figure out how to get a tactical advantage what’s the problem they have gone through the effort to find it and pull it off!.

I don't agree with Blossom's aggressive tone, but you can't really deny that there's some serious gatekeeping going on here.
Of course there's a problem, for several reasons. Most obviously, I see why getting a constant edge of x million points over all other players is something that you want to keep for yourself, but in the interest of sportsmanship and an actual competitive scene, it's objectively completely destructive.
We are looking at scores that are now landing outside the range of what is realistically achievable without using the glitch. This means that every person who does not know the details of the glitch (which is almost everyone) will never be able to actively compete in this game.
You could say that the ability to discover the glitch is a competitive factor in Dodonpachi (which would be comparable to the R&D in your motorsports example), but that's not really an element in this game. The game is about playing well, dodging enemy shots, and nailing those perfect combos. It's not about doing technical research into its programming or, even worse, just stumbling across the glitch by accident. You could easily be an even better DDP player than the person who set these records, yet still not be able to beat their scores. Of course that's an issue when you're looking at the competitive scene.

That also brings us to the (most likely irrelevant) issue that without knowing the nature of the glitch, it's hard to say if it should be allowed in the competition in the first place. A glitch in the scoring mechanics could easily break the game entirely, and completely bypass everything that's supposed to be a challenge. This is the same reason speedrunning communities often create entirely new categories when big glitches are discovered. For now though, let's just trust the claim that the glitch doesn't break the game in this manner.

I'm honestly surprised that they'd want to go on protecting this secret. What is there to gain now? They already got the world record, and they got the attention. Keeping the secret would allow them to slightly improve their own scores, but for everyone else the competition is stagnant. It would make sense to share the secret now to let more people back into the game. What's the fun in holding a record if no one is able to challenge it? The only realistic reason I could see for keeping it would be, well, to wait for this bounty to pop up. But god damn, that would be undeniably petty.

[Ako]

If it goes a few months without anyone claiming it I guess I could tell you shmupvirgins the chad glitch

[Bananamatic]

I bet multiple people triggered it here but no one else noticed due to most likely needing a full chain in order to notice something is off in the first place and if it happens at the beginning or the end which was deemed to be "too hard to chain" then the amount of players who could've noticed is 3 at most

[Prales]

.

[Sumez]

I bet multiple people triggered it here but no one else noticed due to most likely needing a full chain in order to notice something is off in the first place and if it happens at the beginning or the end which was deemed to be "too hard to chain" then the amount of players who could've noticed is 3 at most

This was my immediate thought. Could be a simple math error (which is very easy to make if you're doing manual on-the-fly BCD), but that would mean the glitch probably happens regularly in situations where it's not immediately noticeable. Like on lower digits that don't really affect the overall score.

Reproducing it would be something along the lines of getting a specific combo bonus with your score being aligned at specific digits while it happens.

[Bananamatic]

harvest thousands of .inps, create a script that triggers only for stage 6 that manually counts the chain value according to the dead enemies/laser hits, whenever a chain breaks compare it to the ingame number, investigate any stages that don't match

would still need hacking though

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I completely understand system11's reticence but

I'm not happy with fundraising being conducted on the forum for something that:
2) Might already be known and simply claimed by someone sitting on the knowledge:

This is a completely fine outcome.

This seems like it could backfire horribly by setting a really bad precedent. I'm not saying it's very likely, but what if skilled players of games started regularly withholding obscure high-scoring strategies and techniques in order to try and solicit cash rewards for their release from other fans of the game? "Want to see a strategy guide/video of how I got my high score? Then donate $100 to my Patreon!"

Do we want to see something like that in the shmups community?

Absolutely not. Playing video games together as a community is something that should be freely accessible to all and not tainted by becoming a competitive capitalist venture where the highest scoring players are openly fighting for cash bounties or begging people with lots of money to sponsor them to play a particular game. And that's not even getting into the massive potential for drama and resentment in the community when money is involved in being rewarded for doing well in a game.

[Bananamatic]

tbh it would be faster to find a japanese traitor and bribe him with half of the bounty

[Sumez]

I'm sure that was the plan from the beginning.

[iconoclast]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIscL-Bjsq4

[ebarrett]

I hope that Plasmo just decided to cash in the prize and scam everyone because that's still a better look for your community than being successfully bullied out of hosting the bounty by some uptight japanese nerds.

And complaints about this bounty meaning that shmups are being corrupted by capitalism are nonsensical; this particular glitch being out in the open in a WR but still essentially unknown after nearly four years, and the game being none other than DDP, clearly make this situation highly unusual, something of an unprecedented serious affair.

[blossom]

I've kinda jokingly wondered if the Yakuza is involved in keeping this glitch a secret, for whatever strange reason. After Plasmo nuking this thread and his Twitter, I'm still wondering.

[Prales]

.

[CStarFlare]

I've been picking apart DDP in the last month or two to try to find some information on this.

I have a good feeling that some enemy is erroneously adding itself a duplicate time to the chain value. The chain value (GP? is this the right term?) that an enemy object contributes when shot is hard-coded into each object's code, rather than being referenced from a table of values, so I think we can rule out some sort of index error or out of bound access of a pointer table.

Very interesting insight, thank you.

I've been assuming the glitch affects GP value instead of granting extra chain (for example via an invincible enemy that can be milked for contact chain or the enemies that shoot destructible missiles shooting them forever) because for the impact to be as big as it is the extra chain would have to show up in the high score table.

Is it also possible that the glitch could be spawning extra of a high value enemy (or spawning it early so the value is added to a bunch of popcorn kills)?

I assume that the score w/glitch at certain milestones which we know doesn't point to some sort of max bonus glitchiness?

(I'm not hunting for the bounty as I don't think I'm capable of finding it; I just find it fun to chatter about)

[el_rika]

So what's the WR atm, and what's the highest scoring video available?

[DDDP]

Well that sure is an interesting edit.

[ZPScissors]

So what's the WR atm, and what's the highest scoring video available?

World record is 862m, highest scoring video is 712m.

[zlk]

I think the world record is around 860m. The highest scoring replays are here: http://electricunderground.io/dodonpachi/

I wonder if the bug has to do with something similar to the DOJ scoring exploit of leaving a heavy (higher hit points) enemy partially off the screen where it becomes invulnerable and you can score a ton of points off of it. Some of the stationary enemies in the middle strips on 1-6/2-6 have a lot of hit points and these usually get killed early on. Maybe let one live and hover over it as it exits the bottom of the screen?

[Bananamatic]

I activated it without doing anything out of the ordinary, the only different thing was that I was derusting after months of not playing and my movement was a bit weird, nothing escaped through the bottom of the screen
didn't even notice until I got to the boss

[Some-Mist]

you're in my head, in my head ya ooooooooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zNHjdpJhcc

[mikejmoffitt]

.

[ZPScissors]

I activated it without doing anything out of the ordinary, the only different thing was that I was derusting after months of not playing and my movement was a bit weird, nothing escaped through the bottom of the screen
didn't even notice until I got to the boss

Did you notice any abnormalities with the GP?

[mikejmoffitt]

I am starting to think the honeycomb things are a red herring, and aren't it.

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

you're in my head, in my head ya ooooooooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zNHjdpJhcc

I had this in mind, actually

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkPcPqTq4M

[zlk]

https://youtu.be/UDPljnaNL5o

[avri62]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts

[Bananamatic]

I like how so many people care about the glitch yet only one person here is actively playing the game
hard to compare it to SM64 in this sad state